Matters of taste
ANN WORDSWORTH
D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage edited by R. P. Draper (Routledge 63s) Swinburne: The Critical Heritage edited by Clyde K. Hyder (Routledge 60s) Mrs Grundy, 'that raddled old Columbine Cant' as Swinburne called her, is the real author of many of the contemporary reviews of Swinburne and Lawrence. Obviously she presents a severe editorial problem. In her time, she alienated the writer from his readers, depressed sales, fostered scandal and kept things nice for people's daughters and servants and the `wives of country in- cumbents'. Preserve her words, and after the giggle and the antiquarian relish, little but dullness remains. And one must accept this because, as the general editor of the 'Critical Heritage' series points out, all evidence 'helps us to understand the writer's historical situa- tion, the nature of his immediate reading- public, and his response to these pressures' Because of the amount of canting and commonplace material, much depends on the individual editor's ability to make it all matter. Unless the volume is to be merely antiquarian, a neutral record of taste, the writer's sense of conflict and urgency has to be felt as clearly as the critic's: the reader must know from the writer's point of view how outrageous or malevolent or, conceiv- ably, encouraging the criticism is. Preserving the critical reaction per se may actually be less important than showing how it pressures creativity and what strategies the writer uses to deflect it. Statements of intent or justifica- tions from letters or other writings are needed therefore to give this sense of inter- action.
Too little use of these sources accounts for an imbalance in the Lawrence volume. Inevitably, 'the sanitary inspectors of litera- ture' mobilise themselves to investigate `the monotonous wilderness of phallicism', 'the fog of eloquent lubricity', and no doubt their reports are unavoidable. They are bad critics though, and so are the writers of the para- phrasing and mostly unsigned reviews with which the book opens. Surely better to have begun with Ford Madox Ford's account of his discovery of Lawrence, mentioned in the introduction and warmly praised but not quoted? It needs Ford's own caveat, 'the accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions', but it is worth printing both for its description of Lawrence, 'an earnest jeune homme pauvre with a fox-coloured poll' crooning over coltsfoot in Kensington Gardens, and for its sensitive and acute criticism of the short story 'The Odour of Chrysanthemums' and more interestingly of the rejected first draft of The Trespasser: 'much, oh, but much more phallic than is the book as it stands and much more moral in the inverted-puritanic sense . . so that the whole effect was the rather dreary one of a schoolboy lurking among the placket- holes, dialoguing with a Wesleyan minister who has been converted to Ibsen'.
Presumably the editor was submerged in material and for this reason chose to quote very little from Lawrence himself. Yet the critics' irritation over Lawrence's free verse would be more interesting to the general reader and more useful to students if it were shown in the context of the letter to Eddie Marsh, 19 November 1913: 'I think I read
my poetry more by length than by stress—
as a matter of movements in space than foot- steps hitting the earth'. The same for the novels. Mr Draper quotes the interesting series of letters about The Rainbow, but not those to Edward Garnett, 14 November 1912, about Sons and Lovers -or to Ottoline Morrell, 28 December 1928, about Lady Chatterley's Lover. And despite one of the worst inadequacies of contemporary criticism being its inability to use biographical material, the editor decided not to use Jessie Chambers's criticism of Sons and Lovers though it gives Miriam's point of view and raises interesting questions about Lawrence's evasiveness and suppression of feeling.
To satisfy everyone, the collection should have filled two volumes. As it is, some very interesting material has been amassed: the 1915 essay by Alfred Kuttner on the Freudian aspects of Sons and Lovers, Edwin Muir's fine criticism, particularly on The Boy in the Bush, a' very cool piece by Andre Malraux on Lady Chatterley. One would have liked more.
The Swinburne volume leaves one just as dissatisfied with the actual quality of much of the criticism preserved, but with a better sense of the interactions. Swinburne's exuberant truculence was a match for the `anonyms' and 'coprophagi', his critics, and Professor Hyder prints examples of his polemic, Notes on Poems and Reviews, and the answer to Robert Buchanan who assailed both Swinburne and Rossetti in his 'Fleshly School of Poetry' review. It might have been interesting to have had also extracts from the essay on George Chapman and more
from Under the Microscope where, Swin-
burne analyses the mutually damaging rela- tionship between rejected poet and philistine audience, and from William Blake where he challenges Arnold's and Ruskin's accepted theories on morality and art.
Professor Hyder's introduction opens with a discouraging revelation of the settled routines of academic thought. . . When asked to edit this volume . . . I wondered whether in my Swinburne's Literary Career and Fame (1933) I had not already said nearly all I could say on the subject' It is clear and useful nevertheless, despite a bias against 'the whimsies . . . of certain arche- typal or psychoanalytic points of view' which allows him to 'assume that good poetry im- plies that its author possesses beauties of personality, if not of character, that are hidden rather than obvious.' Moralisms aside, one might prefer to think that the best of Swinburne's beautiful, stoical, desolate poetry rose out of his experience of the relationship with Mary Gordon, both its complicities and its unassuaged love, the mixture of recognition and loss.
P. N. Furbank's book 'Reflections on the Word "Image",' reviewed by Martin Sey- mour-Smith in last week's issue, is published by Seeker and Warburg and not, as stated, by Macmillan.
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