The Cult of D. H. Lawrence
!'Bon of Woman : The Story of D. H. Lawrence. By John
D. H. LAWRENCE made trouble wherever he went. He was lovable and -could be- absolutely -charming, but he was quarrel- ,some, and his life was a series of storms in which all his friends :were involved, and many of his friendships perished. It was .no use turning' the other cheek to him when he was angry. He smacked that also, and was so .adroit that he appeared to be -acting on the defensive. His friends quarrelled with one 'another too ; he even possessed that uncanny power. He could not be -discus- sed without over-emphasis and irritation. Voices rose. or were- unduly lowered. And-if his unquiet genius ;leas attained to Olympus its place will be between Eris and Eros, gods differing only by a letter, and it will look down with -amusement upon the appropriate gestures of men. For the .,quarrelling still continues. The world cannot make up its mind about him. Was he divine ? " Certainly not, he will -survive only in a few descriptive passages," say some. " Cer- tainly he was," retort others, " you are shallow fools to deny him." But though they denounce unbelief they do not agree upon orthodoxy.. Bittei' words - pass" between -them, semi- _ theological words. They cannot decide how he ought to be worshipped, and if he retains • anything of his old sense of humour this ought to entertain hith.
• Mr. Middleton Murry, who knew him well atone time and has - followed his career with care, here indicates the foundations of -la cult. It is a cult on modern lines, where the deity comes in for some shrewd knocks, and• only attains apotheosis under a running fire of criticism. Reverence, evenness, dignity, imper- sonality, all that constitute traditional religion, are absent, nevertheless the writer's attitude throughout is that of a priest. He desires to mediate rather than to interpret, he is slightly scared at what he is doing, and he attempts to communicate his alarm to the congregation. The ultimate incoherence, the ultimate agony. We feel that we have. no-right to be watching. But watch we must and listen we must. This is the agony of a great nian Mr. Murry's hook contains sentences such as these. He even doubts whether he ought to have written it. But he pleads—very convincingly—that we can only find relief from certain painful emotions by writing them down, and to one of his temperament there is no barrier between writing a thing down and offering it to the general public.
In Son of Woman he attempts, among other things, to analyse Lawrence's character. He is not concerned with his art-indeed he 'praises him for not being an artist, on -the ' ground that genuine artists cannot exist in the present age. lie even goes so far as. to complain, when his imagination "puts -a momentary spell upon us." Most of us are thankful when it does. We read " Elephants "—the superb poem to which he is here referring—not because it expresses some .particUlar4 struggle or announces some particular doctrine, but because the poet's struggles and doctrines caused him to write magi .tally. They were the liberating force. Without them his._ genius could never have flowered, and Mr. Murry rightly -condemns the shallOw " anthology " view Of him, which admires him as the creator of a few beautiful descriptions, and refuses to recognize the force below. Whether he is equally right in ignoring the descriptions may be doubted. But Lawrence is an extraordinarily difficult writer. No one has yet succeeded in defining the relation between the flowers in him and the roots, and perhaps no one ever will succeed who has known him ipersonally.
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In analysing his character Mr. Murry makes two most
interesting suggestions. The firit, is that his passionate love for his mother unfitted him for intercourse with other women, and indeed for human relationships generally. The second is that he built up a dream image 'Of himself,-where his desires could be vicariously fulfilled. Plenty of evidence is offered on both points. We see how, in $ons and Lovers,,he glorifies the mother, yet attempts to escape from her to the wife, and how in the later books the attempt to escape to a woman continues, and always fails. The bragging and bullying that So often repel -us in his work,--they are only confessions of his- failure to 1* intimate either-with woman or man. Which leads us on to the second point—the creation of a dream-iinage. Characters like Annabel in The While Peacock, Aaron in Aaron's Rod, Jack Grant in The Boy in the Bush, and Mellors in Lady Chatterly'ir Lover are, according to Mr: Murry, portraits of Lawrence as he would have liked to be--the -ruthless indomitable 'male. And Cyril in The White Peacock, Paul in Sons and Lovers, Lilly in Aaron's Rod and Somers in Kangaroo, represent Lawrence' as he actually was—shrinking, sensitive, and exasperated. It is the -type of analysis which Lawrence himself applied, with much less success, to the novels of Fenimore Cooper ; applied. to his own novels it gives good results, and Mr. Murry convines us that his male characters can be reduced to two types, while the female characters tend towards a single type, of which Miriam, in Sons and Lovers, is an early example.
But he hopes to convince us of much more, and it is at this point that all except the faithful must part company with hiM. Analysis is only one step in a grandiose drama of atonement, wheie love and hate contend or combine, and sins against the Holy Ghost can be committed with facility. Lawrence sinned. He denied Spirit, denied Love, shrank from the truth revealed to him in Fantasia of the .Unconscions—which is, according to Mr. Murry, his greatest book—played traitor to himself. Therefore he " died " some time before writing The Plumed Serpent, and all his latest work is the utterance of a corpse. He died, he is doomed, yet centuries hence he will be understood and loved, and his only counterpart in the whole of creation is his opposite—Jesus. " It was your destiny to fail us, as it was your destiny to -fail yourself." The words flow on in a menacing spate, and the mind of the unbeliever is carried away by them for a little. Then it withdraws, and tries to take stock. What underlies these lavish comminations and absolutions ? Does Mr. Murry feel that he himself and all of us are in a state of peril too ? Yes, he feels this, and perhaps he is right. But he also feels—and here one dissents--a pro, found complacency in his plight. He relishes being scared- and tries to infect others with his malaise. So might an adept, emerging from the shrine, hint that he has seen mysteries too terrible to mention, proceed just to mention them, and so send his disciples trembling away. And the love for Lawremie which he evidently felt but so emphatically announces only increases one's mistrust, for it enables him to daily with the most frightening of all riles, the role of Judas. " In this book have I betrayed you ? Was it this, that I have done, of which you were afraid ? There was -nothing- to . fear. This ' betrayal' was the one-thing you lacked; the one thing I had to give, that you might sh,ine forth among mcn_as the thing of wonder that you were."- One wonders how Lawrence would respond to such al gift. :A. little coldly ? Certainly he cannot complain of mystical_ threats and promises—he was prodigal in them himself. But he may now realize that they cut no ice either way, and that the desire to be disquieting may in the lmVri-ucimpair not only the critical faculty but the capacity fOr
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