It is not a very long time ago since Professor Osler startled America
and England by proclaiming that a man was too old at forty. This is not
generally held, though, I suppose, most of us will accept that one is
too old to begin at forty. But that is not the end: very soon, in
literature at least, it may be too late to begin at thirty, if we are to
take into account the achievements of the young men, of whom Mr D. H.
Lawrence is one of the youngest. Mr Lawrence is certainly one of the
young men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, and
can have none if they are of any value, but a partner in their
tendencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unruliness
of the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, its
rules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual to
do much more than live--namely, to live splendidly.
It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, like
them, he is so very much of his time, so hot, controversial, uneasy;
that, like them, he has the sudden fury of the bird that beats against
the bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at the
family, at every institution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things;
he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to transmute the
world into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop his
individuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system which
tortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.
This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in his
mind no organisations; he is mainly passionate aspiration and passionate
protest. And that is not wonderful when we consider who he is.
Surprising to think, this prominent young novelist is only thirty-four.
Son of a Nottinghamshire coal-miner, a Board-school boy, his early
career seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholarship
made of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst of
old-fashioned chaos in a room containing several classes. Then another
scholarship, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon to
teach for less than L2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extract
from his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizes
for history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English class.
(This is rather embarrassing for those who believe in the public
endowment of genius.)
I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already at
twenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun _The White Peacock_, of which, year by
year, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying the
foundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter the
literary life at a given moment: literature grew in him and with him,
was always with him, even in the worst years of his delicate health. If
literature was not his passion, it was to his passion what the tongue is
to speech: the essential medium of his expression.
Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrence
has not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a painter he ought
to have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of the
heron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints the
countryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, but
more often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicated
with its wines. All through his novels runs this passionate streak, this
vision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in _The
White Peacock_ that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a story
which one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presents
to us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotional
tone.
Mr Lawrence himself, who figures in it, is effaced; Lettice, wayward and
beautiful, is the fragrance of sex, but not more so than the honeysuckle
in the hedges; George, muscles rippling under his skin, insensitive to
cruelty, yet curiously moved by delicacy, is the brother of the bulls he
herds; and all the others, the fine gentlemen, the laughing girls,
farmers, school teachers, making hay, making music, making jokes,
walking in the spangled meadows, and living, and wedding, and dying, all
of them come to no resolution. Their lives have no beginning and no
end. Mr Lawrence looks: Pippa passes. It is almost impossible to
criticise _The White Peacock_, and the danger in an appreciation is that
one should say too much good of it, for the book yields just the quality
of illusion that a novel should give us, which does not of itself
justify the critic in saying that it is a great book. For the novel,
equally with the picture, can never reproduce life; it can only suggest
it, and when it does suggest it, however peculiarly or partially, one is
inclined to exaggerate the impression one has received and to refrain
from considering whether it is a true impression. It is the vividness of
Mr Lawrence's nature-vision carries us away; such phrases as these
deceive us: 'The earth was red and warm, pricked with the dark,
succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with gray-green
clusters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above the
light tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below in
the first shadows drooped hosts of little white flowers, so silent and
sad, it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless,
frail and folded meekly in the evening light.' They deceive us because
Mr Lawrence's realisation of man is less assured than his realisation of
nature. I doubt the quality of his people's culture, the spontaneity of
their attitude towards the fields in which they breathe; their
spontaneity seems almost artificial.
That impression Mr Lawrence always gives; he sees the world through a
magnifying-glass, and perhaps more so in _Sons and Lovers_ than in _The
White Peacock_. In that book he gives us unabashed autobiography--the
story of his early youth, of his relation to his mother, a creature of
fitful, delicate charm. Mrs Morel is very Northern; she has, with the
harshness of her latitude, its fine courage and its ambition; Paul
Morel, the hero, is Mr Lawrence himself, the little blue flower on the
clinker heap. And those other folk about him, dark Miriam, slowly
brooding over him; her rival, that conquering captive of sex; the
brothers, the sisters, and the friends; this intense society is vital
and yet undefinably exaggerated. Perhaps not so undefinably, for I am
oppressed by unbelief when I find this grouping of agriculturists and
colliers responding to the verse of Swinburne and Verlaine, to Italian,
to Wagner, to Bach. I cannot believe in the spinet at the pit's mouth.
And yet all this, Mr Lawrence tells us, is true! Well, it is true, but
it is not general, and that is what impairs the value of Mr Lawrence's
visions. Because a thing is, he believes that it is; when a thing is, it
may only be accidental; it may be particular. Now one might discuss at
length whether a novelist should concentrate on the general or on the
particular, whether he should use the microscope or the aplanetic lense,
and many champions will be found in the field. I will not attempt to
decide whether he should wish, as Mr Wells, to figure all the world, or
as Mr Bennett, to take a section; probably the ideal is the mean. But
doubtless the novelist should select among the particular that which has
an application to the general, and it may safely be said that, if Mr
Lawrence errs at all, it is in selecting such particular as has not
invariably a universal application.
Mr Lawrence lays himself open to this criticism in a work such as _Sons
and Lovers_, because it has a conscious general scope, but in _The
Trespasser_ his conception is of a lesser compass. The book holds a more
minute psychological intention. That Sigmund should leave his wife for
another love and find himself driven to his death by an intolerable
conflict between his desire, the love he bears his children, and the
consciousness of his outlawry, should have made a great book. But this
one of Mr Lawrence's novels fails because the author needs a wide sphere
within which the particular can evolve; he is clamouring within the
narrow limits of his incident; Sigmund appears small and weak;
unredeemed by even a flash of heroism; his discontented wife, her
self-righteous child hold their own views, and not enough those of the
world which contains them. An amazing charge to make against a novelist,
that his persons are too much persons! But persons must partly be types,
or else they become monsters.
It would be very surprising if Mr Lawrence were not a poet in verse as
well as in prose, if he did not sing when addressing his love:--
'Coiffing up your auburn hair
In a Puritan fillet, a chaste white snare
To catch and keep me with you there
So far away.'
But a poet he is much more than a rebel, and that distinguishes him from
the realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, and
not at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from the
world, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has to
give, flower, beast, woman, he begs more:--
'You, Helen, who see the stars
As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree,
You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses,
Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me,'
'Helen, you let my kisses steam
Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink
Me up, I pray; oh, you who are Night's Bacchante,
How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!'
I cannot, having no faith in my power to judge poetry, proclaim Mr
Lawrence to Parnassus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where an
urgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and pain
together coupled, can remain unheard.
And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien a
little to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also an
authoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prose
drama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always as
remote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams.
For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future if
he cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not only
the dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so far
he has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation with
himself, for that every writer must do a little; but he has followed his
life so very closely, so often photographed his own emotions, that
unless life holds for him many more adventures, and unless he can retain
the power to give minor incident individual quality, he may find himself
written out. For Mr Lawrence has not what is called ideas. He is
stimulated by the eternal rather than by the fugitive; the fact of the
day has little significance for him; thus, if he does not renew himself
he may become monotonous, or he may cede to his more dangerous tendency
to emphasise overmuch. He may develop his illusion of culture among the
vulgar until it is incredible; he may be seduced by the love he bears
nature and its throbbings into allowing his art to dominate him. Already
his form is often turgid, amenable to no discipline, tends to lead him
astray. He sees too much, feels significances greater than the actual;
with arms that are too short, because only human, he strives to embrace
the soul of man. This is exemplified in his last novel, _The Rainbow_,
of which little need be said, partly because it has been suppressed, and
mainly because it is a bad book. It is the story of several generations
of people so excessive sexually as to seem repulsive. With dreadful
monotony the women exhibit riotous desire, the men slow cruelty, ugly
sensuality; they come together in the illusion of love and clasp hatred
within their joined arms. As in _Sons and Lovers_, but with greater
exaggeration, Mr Lawrence detects hate in love, which is not his
invention, but he magnifies it into untruth. His intensity of feeling
has run away with him, caused him to make particular people into
monsters that mean as little to us, so sensually crude, so flimsily
philosophical are they, as any Medusa, Medea, or Klytemnestra. _The
Rainbow_, as also some of Mr Lawrence's verse, is the fruit of personal
angers and hatreds; it was born in one of his bad periods from which he
must soon rescue himself. If he cannot, then the early hopes he aroused
cannot endure and he must sink into literary neurasthenia.