Mr. Lawrence seems to have learned early that he could notfulfill his own nature passionately, and he has been struggling all his life to find the way in which fulfilment lies. It is generally believed that “Sons and Lovers” is largely autobiographical and that the writer is to be identified with Paul. In that book he gave ample testimony that he could not fulfill himself because of the conflict between mother-love and uxorial love; for we may venture to catalogue Paul's consortional experiences under that heading, even though he had no marriage lines. He has never been able to define just how he expected to fulfill his nature, but one may legitimately conclude from some of his recent publications that he believes, if the strings of the lyre of sensuality can be made taut enough and twanged savagely enough, the tone produced will constitute not only fulfilment and happiness, but an eternity of ecstasy, a timeless extension of that indescribable exaltation that Dostoievsky was wont to experience in moments preceding his epileptic seizures, which is so vividly described by him and which made such an impression upon his thoughts and so influenced his imagery. Mr. Lawrence apparently believes that fulfilment will be meditated by one “who will touch him at last on the root and quicken his darkness and perish on him as he has perished on her.” When this happens,
“We shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect”;
“We shall be free, freer than angels, ah, perfect”;
and,
“After that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become uniqueConditioned only by our pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.”
“After that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become uniqueConditioned only by our pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.”
Finally:
“Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.”“Ideas and ideals are the machine plan and the machine principles of an automatonised Psyche which has been so prejudicialto human progress and human welfare. We must get rid of them both.”
“Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.”
“Ideas and ideals are the machine plan and the machine principles of an automatonised Psyche which has been so prejudicialto human progress and human welfare. We must get rid of them both.”
In fact, it is a world without ideals for which Mr. Lawrence is clamouring and which he maintains he is in process of creating. It must be allowed that he is working industriously to do it, but most people, I fancy, will continue to believe that his world will not be a fit place to live in should he be able to finish his task. Meanwhile he is doing much to make the world less livable than it might otherwise be, particularly for those who are not competent to judge whether any of Mr. Lawrence's contentions are tenable or any of his statements in harmony with the evidence of science.
“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious” contains more misinformation in a small space than almost any recent book save the “Cruise of the Kawa.” It may reasonably be expected that anyone who writes upon psychoanalysis and the unconscious today and expects a hearing should know something about biology. But no biologist would accept such dogmatic statements as
“Life begins now, as always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and always. And life has no beginning apart from this.... There is no assignable and no logical reason for individuality.”
“Life begins now, as always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and always. And life has no beginning apart from this.... There is no assignable and no logical reason for individuality.”
To give such sentences the semblance of truth there should have been added, “so far as I know.” It is misleading to follow up such statements by saying, “having established so much,” etc. A poet may be permitted to say that “The young bull in the field has a wrinkled and sad face.” Indeed, he may abandon all morphology and animal behaviour and make the graceful serpent rest its head upon its shoulder! But the man who invades the field of science should, at least, practise some accuracy of expression, even though he give himself the latitude of poetic license.
“The White Peacock” was Mr. Lawrence's first novel. It was favourably received. Letty, the principal character, is the trial portrait of all his later heroines. Her creator, in his youth and inexperience, did not know how to make her “carry on,” but she is theanlagefor all his female characters, their immoralities and bestialities. Her story is a simple one. Her mother, a lady of fine character, has been put to the acid test by the moral defalcation of her father, a drunkard and wastrel with charm. Leslie, a young man with money and social position, commonplace, emotionally shallow, spiritually inelastic, unimaginative, but intelligent and straightforward, wooes the temperamental, volatile, romantic Letty. The appeal which Leslie did not make to her is made by George, a young farmer “stoutly built, brown-eyed and fair-skinned,” whom Letty finds “ruddy, dark and with greatly thrilling eyes” and whom she calls her bull. Meanwhile George and Letty's brother form a friendship which is in dimmest outline the prototype of that extraordinary relationship existing between Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin in “Women in Love.”
The book shows the influence of Thomas Hardy, after whom Lawrence in his early youth sedulously patterned himself. In those days he was concerned with the photographic description of rustic scenes and particularly the lives of farmers and miners—which he knew from experience—and showed a sensitive appreciation of natural beauty. But the interest of the book is in the fact that it contains trial pictures of most of his later characters. George is Tom Brangwen of “The Rainbow”; Leslie, grown up and more arrogant, is Gerald in “Women in Love” and Gerald Barlow in “Touch and Go”; Cyril, more experienced and daring, is called Rupert Birkin when he is introduced again. In all of Lawrence's books the same characters appear. They vary only in having different standards and different degrees of immorality. The environment is always the same—a mining town; a countryside pitted with collieries; farms teeming with evidence of vegetable and animal life whichis described with such intensity that the reader feels he is witnessing a new era of creation; mean drab houses; and squalid pubs. Into these and the schoolhouses and churches he puts his sex-tortured men and hyper-sexed women and surges them with chaotic vehemence of invitation and embrace and with the aches, groans, and shrieks of amorous love.
His second novel, “The Trespassers,” shows the author to have, in addition to a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of nature, great capacity for describing the feelings of commonplace people. Helena, headstrong, determined, emancipated, self-sufficient, falls in love with her music teacher, Sigmund, a man of forty who had married when seventeen a matter-of-fact young woman who gave him many children which he ill-supported while she slaved and became sour and slatternly. Helena notices that Sigmund is tired and suggests that they spend a few days together in the Isle of Wight. She makes the plans, finds a nice motherly person who will take them into her cottage more for company than money, and, though this seems to be her first adventure, she acts with the certainty which attends experience. The scenery and tools that Mr. Lawrence uses so skilfully are all here: moonlight and its effect to produce ecstasy; bathing and lying naked on the sand or the grass and gazing approvingly at the body; lovely flowers and plants; and above all, a knowledge of the effects of baffled eroticism, of collision between primitive simple passion and artificial fantasying aberrant passion. Like Hermione Roddice of “Women in Love,” Helena's genetic instincts are abnormal. She has her Louisa, ten years her senior, whom she treats with indifference, cruelty, or affection, as it pleases her. Early in the history of man the prototype of Helena and Hermione was known. Shuah's second son, it is alleged, was the first example. The Lord slew Onan as soon as he deliberately violated the first and most essential principle of nature, but this drastic measure did not eradicate the biologic aberration, for it has displayed itself in the humanspecies from that day to this, and even today gives more concern to parents and pedagogues than any other instinct deviation. Fortunately novelists, until the advent of Mr. Lawrence, have not featured this infirmity.
Even in these juvenile days, Mr. Lawrence left very little to the imagination. Helena and Sigmund, lying on the cold wet beach in the twilight, enveloped in the Scotch mist (parenthetically it may be said that his heroes and heroines are wholly insensitive to bodily discomfort when they are in the throes of concupiscence) were practising the “Overture to Love,”
“and when Helena drew her lips away she was much exhausted. She belonged to that class of dreaming women with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss. She then wanted to go to sleep. She sank away from his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from him.”
“and when Helena drew her lips away she was much exhausted. She belonged to that class of dreaming women with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss. She then wanted to go to sleep. She sank away from his caresses, passively, subtly drew back from him.”
The next morning Sigmund goes into the sea, and this gives the author opportunity to display the burning passion which the sight and contemplation of the male human body seems to cause in him.
“He glanced at his wholesome maturity, the firm plaiting of his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves, and said 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not. She rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.'”
“He glanced at his wholesome maturity, the firm plaiting of his breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves, and said 'She ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not. She rejects me as if I were a baboon under my clothing.'”
When Mr. Lawrence convinced himself that he could write a more panoplied description of erotic ecstasy than that with which he afflicted Helena, he wrote the description of Ursula's encounter with the moon in “The Rainbow.” Indeed the real motive of “The Trespassers” is a trial portrait of Ursula; and while making up his mind as to the size of the canvas and the colours that he would use in painting that modern Messalina, Mr. Lawrence gave the world “Sons and Lovers,” which more than any other of his books, gave him a reputation for anunderstanding of the strange blood bonds that unite families and human beings, and for having an unusual, almost exquisite discrimination in the use of language.
From boyhood Mr. Lawrence seems to have been possessed of a demon who whispered to him by day and shrieked to him by night, “Be articulate, say it with words,” and the agony of his impotence is heartrending, as frustration after frustration attends his efforts. He tries it in prose, then in verse. Gradually, from taking thought, from sex experience and from hasty perusal of scientific and mystic literature, there formulated in his mind a concrete thought, which in time engendered a conviction, finally an obsession. A brief exposition of the mental elaboration and the Laocoon grip that it took on him follows:
The Greeks, fanning the embers of Egyptian civilisation and getting no fire for their torch, said,
“Let there be an ideal to which all mankind shall bow the knee. Let consciousness and all its manifestations be expressed in terms of ideals and ideas or in conduct that expresses them, and finally let everything that tends to hinder such expression, such as the sensual and animal in man be subdued and repressed.”
“Let there be an ideal to which all mankind shall bow the knee. Let consciousness and all its manifestations be expressed in terms of ideals and ideas or in conduct that expresses them, and finally let everything that tends to hinder such expression, such as the sensual and animal in man be subdued and repressed.”
Christianity went a step further and said,
“Not only shall ideals be exalted, but pure spirituality and perfection—man's goal—can only be obtained by the annihilation of what are called Animal Instincts.”
“Not only shall ideals be exalted, but pure spirituality and perfection—man's goal—can only be obtained by the annihilation of what are called Animal Instincts.”