Civilisation in decline

Thought, words and creativity

Leavis

L'intelligence is not the same as intelligence: how often have I found myself telling students that! Of course, I may be said to take a liberty, when I commit myself to such a statement, not being able to point to any authority for it in the dictionaries. But the English language permits — even encourages — the user to take these liberties, as the French language doesn't. The force and justice of my opening would be brought out in any intelligent study of D. H. Lawrence. What "intelligent" means here is what Lawrence compels the perceptive reader to recognise. To say this is to pay his genius a due tribute, and to insist on his importance to us in the present human crisis.

Yet Eliot in the 'thirties, intending pretty obviously a severe adverse judgment on anything offered as Laurentian thought, wrote somewhere (I think it was in the Criterion), that Lawrence was "incapable of what is ordinarily called thinking." It is true that Eliot in his latter life, after he had abandoned poetry for the series of theatre-plays that opens so disconcertingly with The Cocktail Party, said that of course he had changed his mind about Lawrence since those days. But he said nothing, so far as I know, to suggest that he recognised astonishing powers, so profound and compelling, of original thought in Lawrence — powers that belonged with his creativity. Compelling? — Eliot was not alone in not being compelled: our civilisation breeds blankness to the wonder and significance of the creativity.

Eliot himself was a distinguished creative writer, but there is striking paradox in that: the fact that the genius appears only in a very limited way in the criticism is a manifestation, of the paradox. Lawrence's criticism has had practically no attention at all, but Eliot as critic has a very high conventional standing. The nature of the convention is suggested by this, which I find in a review by Professor W. W, Robson of which a cutting (from The Times Higher Educational Supplement) has just been sent me:

Leavis's originality is harder to specify than Empson's. Perhaps it may be said that his best discussions combine an Empsonian attention to verbal detail with Eliot's capacity to see the wood for the trees.

I'll not comment on the assimilation of me to Empson; my concern is with the manner and implication of the reference, which isn't after all very neat, to Eliot. What the formulation implicitly does, or intends to do, is to lay the emphasis on his critical intelligence. And indeed his accepted standing is that of a great critic. Actually his good criticism is virtually confined to places immediately relevant to the work of the "practitioner" (significantly Eliot's word) who, as the 1914 war drew to a close, "altered expression" (his own phrase), and proved that something could happen in English poetry after Swinburne. His range of real firsthand judgment was extremely limited, and the highly esteemed and characteristic 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is only speciously distinguished, not merely marked stylistically as it is by affectation, but pretentiously null as thought.

It represents the Francophilia he had contracted at Harvard. A striking manifestation of this is to be seen in the confident pronouncement that France had a "mature" prose before England. Though commonly believed, it's simply not true — if "mature" means "modern" in the sense defined by what Sprat records of the Royal Society's requirement regarding the prose in which communications were to be written. But the essential retort runs: "The important thing surely is that we had our Shakespeare half-a-dozen decades before France had her Racine — by when the great change in civilisation had been consummated."

One sees that Eliot had an uncritical admiration for Valery's "brilliant" prose: the French exhibitionistic aplomb that constitutes Valery's brilliance clearly influenced him. I myself admired `Le Cimetiere Mann' (in too unqualified a way, I now realise) in the 'twenties, but I found I had no use for Valery's prose — unless to examine paragraphs of it with my pupils as exemplifying the confusions, vacuities, and non-sequiturs that a training in la clarte and la logique didn't exclude. I used a good deal, I remember, a Valerian piece that appeared first in La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise: -Preface a un Commentaire,' the commentary being an interpretive offer that Alain had written on 'Le Cimetiere Mann', in front of which it was to be printed in a special edition. I still have, bought in 1924 when it came out, tirage restreint, published by Cobden-Sandersone for the Criterion, a little book containing `Le Serpent' (Valery's 'Ebauche d'un Serpent' — the French text with a translation en regard) together with an introductory essay by Eliot. The essay exemplifies Eliot's exasperating Francophil mannerisms: exhibitionism, false aplomb and fallacious suggestion; in sum, the intellectual feebleness that has commonly, passed for brilliance. This is representative: To English amateurs, rather inclined to dismiss poetry which appears reticent, and to peer lasciviously between the lines for biographical confession, such an activity may appear no better than a jeu de quilles. But Boileau was a fine poet, and he spoke in seriousness. To reduce one's disorderly and mostly silly personality to the gravity of a jeu de quilles would be to do an excellent thing: yet for this a great poet, Landor, has been condemned to obloquy. . . . One is prepared for art when one has ceased to be interested in one's own emotions and experiences except as material . . . .

There is no more to Eliot's famous doctrine of Impersonality than this. But he was of course himself a poet of genius, and in 1924 he could hardly, had he been as capable of thought as he supposed, have offered his critical doctrine as throwing much light on the genesis, nature and distinction of his own poetry. As for his most impressive work, which, from Ash-Wednesday on, enacts a religious quest, Eliot could hardly have said in response to the challenge: yes, he was offering this as poetry fairly describable as a jeu de gullies. But, though those early "theoretical" utterances have become "classical," he wrote, or at any rate published, nothingto correct or question the doctrine they asserted. This, however, is not the main point,, which is that, while his magnum opus, Four Quartets, is devoted to sustained exploratory: thought, the thought frustrates itself by reason of the contradiction at its heart: seeking to establish an apprehension of the supremely, Real, source of "spiritual" values, by the use of his gifts as a poet — by (that is) his creative art in using the English language, he denies human creativity. It is reasonable to say that our all-conquering civilisation has killed the very idea of creativity — and not in the interest of spiritual values. Its ethos at any rate is an implicit denial of the vitally creative.

In its sudden loss of confidence, its glimpse cif 'newly imaginable disaster, it — in politicians i# all parties, Times leaders, the voices of the ,eminent wise, (Sir Keith Joseph brackets with Mr Cecil King as the kind of exception we have to expect) — talks merely of how to restore a ;steady rate of economic growth and a constantly rising standard of living (a matter of money to buy things with and a sure and growing supply of things to buy). It can't really believe in the menace hanging over it; it is incapable of grasping the patent diagnostic truth, so rapid has progress been, so stupefying the effect on human life of the continuous industrial revolution, which is constantly accelerating, and of the science that breeds the progress.

For Eliot, of course, this civilisation is the Waste Land, and if we still had an influential educated public he, as the impressive witness he is, would be — would so far be — a power to be invoked by defenders of humanity. But there is the paradox: in offering to expose and transcend with his creative "logic" the neoBenthamite world's spiritual philistinism, he explicitly, as an indisputable premise, himself denies human creativity. The denial entails the self-contradiction that emasculates his thought, depriving it of all the cogency -intended. The inner personal pressures behind the supremely difficult enterprise of thought' defeat it — this is the irony of the "case" Eliot never ceases to be. He doesn't himself recognise the defeat; it is a defeat of intelligence.

Eliot matters in a major way because he is impressive enough as a creative writer to bring out by contrast the greatness and rarity of the genius who was not defeated — who demonstrates so marvellously what intelligence is. No one of course who has read him would suggest that Lawrence doesn't bring home to us that it is an essential condition of life-as-intelligence to know itself faced — ultimately, but not remotely — with the unknown, and with the unknowable. Lawrence's awareness of the unknown and the unknowable, however, unlike Eliot's, is at the same time an exaltation of creative life, and inseparable from an acceptance of responsibility as inhering, necessarily, in the human individual's selfgathered, delicately intent and unanalysably intuitive wholeness.

But I mustn't be trapped into developing further the contrast between the two differently distinguished writers. I have said enough for my purpose, which is focused on Lawrence. I can only, with any brevity, suggest the nature of my focal concern by saying that it regards thought, art and language. I have reminded you of Eliot's unfavourable view of Lawrence's capacity for thought. I have told you of my own adversely critical judgment on Eliot's own intellectual prose, and have associated its fallacious "brilliance" with his Francophilia. Certainly no one who admired Valery, the critic as well as the poet, in so unreserved a way could be expected to conceive it an urgent matter to achieve some currency for a more intelligent conception of intelligence than that actually prevailing in Bloomsbury. I have made it plain, I hope, that in predicating "brilliance" of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and the like Eliotic performances I mean shallowness; and I think I justified the charge when, at the University of Bristol some time ago, I quoted from one of his more valuable critiques the passage in which he laments that Blake insisted on creating (Eliot's word) his own philosophy instead of taking over — as Dante did — one ready-made, and concentrating on what really concerned the poet: the poetry. It is characteristic of Eliot in his criticism to use the word "poetry" in that quasi-absolute way — a way that is implied in his habit of calling himself a "practitioner." Actually his art never was for him a mere craft-skill, an art of playing skittles, and in Four Quartets it is very apparent that he is not only dealing without disguise with the pressure of intense personal need, but consciously and unequivocally identifies the art with the yery process of thought thought that the pressure generates in order to clarify itself. That clarification doesn't ensue is due to the pressure's being pathological and causing blindness that intelligence in Eliot can't overcome. No creative writer of the greatest kind is a "case," but Eliot remained one to the end.

Lawrence, . like Dickens (pace the late Edmund Wilson, who made him a "case") was a creative writer of the greatest kind, and though he died in 1930, he is essentially of our time: the civilisation he diagnosed is ours. The changes of the last half-century have unnervingly borne out the diagnosis. Since we have him (though we ignore him) my theme is the less merely theoretical. I will indicate its nature, virtually quoting from my most recent book, as yet unpublished it has been some time with the publishers.

Three propositions, or constatations, serve to Convey what the theme is: (1) There could be no developed thought of the Most important kind without language. (2) Our language is English, which has a great literature, so that one had better say: the completest use of the English language is to be found in major creative works.

(3) A major creative writer knows that in composing and writing a major Creative work his concern is to refine and develop his profounder thought about life (the concluding three-word phrase unambiguously eliminates mathematics).

Eliot in his paradoxical way is a highly distinguished poet, and should be seen as being of decided importance to us today; but Lawrence is a far greater creative power. There is in him no basic contradiction. In his varied, voluminous and wide-ranging oeuvre, his Concern is always with developing a sense of What vital intelligence is, and this entails a conception of art and of the relation of art to thought very different from that implied (if anything to be called a conception is) in Eliot's relevant utterances. To Lawrence the notion of. thought as something apart from the creative writer's creativity in the way suggested by Eliot's censure on Blake would have been absurd. His thought wasn't separable from his art, which it could never occur to him to call a game of skittles. True, we have to distinguish, with his oeuvre in front of us, between what 'challenges us to read it as completely achieved art (Women in Love, -The Fox, The Captain's boll) and What unmistakably offers us something else (The Crown, Study of Thomas Hardy: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious). These last three, which I have grouped together for the immediate purpose, differ Markedly among themselves in mode and method, but the Laurentian creative writer is essentially present in them all. The last, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, is the one of the three to invoke in exposing the absurdity of Eliot's privative judgment on Lawrence that denies him all capacity for developed thought. The book, which starts off as a refutation of 'Freud's incest-doctrine, never, though it deals with the profoundest and most difficult of Problems, ceases to hold the reader as a sustained piece of cogent exposition. One can quote passage after passage so firm and supple in its logic that it makes Eliot's rash pronouncement look distinctly questionable. Two Or three pages read on end dispose of Eliot's wisdom as the prejudiced irresponsibility it is. The purpose of the book isn't negative; Lawrence's aim is to enforce his criticism of our civilisation and culture by showing what the human individual in his wholeness, his living integrity as the actual presence of life, must be realised to be. And to succeed in thatis to exemplify what vital intelligence is the intelligence needed for valid thought about life.

undertaking is difficult and delicate in

he the mental consciousness plays, and must play, an essential part in it the mental consciousness from its disastrous misconceived

trust in which Lawrence would like to rescue civilized humanity. "The mind," he says, "as author and director of life is anathema." But he also says:

True, we must alldevelop into mental consciousness. But mental consciousness is not a goal; it is a cul-de-sac. It provides us only with endless appliances for the all-too-difficult business of coming to our 'spontaneous-creative fulness of being.

Mental consciousness is inevitably involved in Lawrence's thought, which is so intimately preoccupied with that "all-too-difficult business." The thought itself (which is thought) of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, therefore, is in a sense difficult in its delicacy, which is extreme, seeing how readily mind falls into aberrations, into illusions about itself, its function, its authority and its powers how ego and wilt take it over and cut it off from the source of spontaneity. Lawrence finds that Freud of the incest-theory has fallen victim to a subtly besqtting danger of mental-consciousness. The Laurentian "hunting down" of the pristine, the primal unconscious was impelled by the need to expose unanswerably the error of that Freddian doctrine. Lawrence has to use thought in:enforcing his criticism, which is basic, of Freud's thought, and the enforcement entails an account of the nature and conditions of the vital intelligence out of which all valid ,thought must issue.

The clear expository efficiency of the argument means that you are conscious all the while of D. H. Lawrence expounding. And this is so of all the pieces that don't claim to be what. you wouldn't take them to be: the art that has the fully impersonal and complete createdness implied by the word "art" when used in that sense. The prose in which they are written is felt to be, as between the inclusive extremes represented by Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and The Crown, in varying degrees expository even when evocative and horta: tory as well. What varies with the different modes is the reader's sense of a gap between the verbal presentation of the directed thought and that on which the thought is directed. In the art the felt separation between the creatively used words and the piece of living they have the function of evoking is at a minimum. One is not kept conscious of Lawrence not kept actively aware of him as a personal voice expounding or aiming to evoke. And he, when he feels that he has got his art right, is hardly conscious of any gap. He is realising in imagination a completely (or purely) "significant" piece of living: yet he is himself, in his integrity as an individual being, present in the work. This is the true impersonality; it is of supreme importance to any conception of what the essential, fully imagined, spiritual status or stance or human reality (perhaps all three nouns are needed) might achieve. The impersonality that Eliot credits Landor or Valery with is idea and emptiness in the one case, and mere. French brilliance and aplomb on the other.

But Lawrence was so fully conscious that there could be no originative priority as thought ascribable either to Women in Love on the one hand or to Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious on the other they derive in perfect directness from the one vital intelligence and the one achieved wholeness of individual being that he played with the notion expressed here: Olato's Dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me that it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again -in the novel.

What is at issue is the nature of thinking:, Lawrence is expressing his distaste for the kind of intellectuality that starts, as so much philosophical writing does, from a mathem,atico-logical assumption about the criteria of valid thought, and can't escape from them. It remains blankly unaware that they certainly don't apply frustratingly don't in fields where a full vital intelligence, with its suppleness and delicacy, is essential. And it is not only philosophy, and not only French thought thought about life, that suffer from the Cartesian heritage. I've noted in my last book. the one now with the publishers, how Stan Islas Andreski in Social Sciences as Sorcery had incurred serious disabling weaknesses by his naivety about the nature of language, and so about the nature of intelligence and thought, and how he assumed with innocent confidence that he might cite Russell's logic as final on "fact and value."

What accounts for such confidence is not, I think, any close study of Russell, but a routine conception of sound thought as controlled by la clarte and la logique by criteria not essentially at odds with what those French words suggest.

"Logic," says Lawrence, "is far too coarse to make the subtle distinction life demands." That is not a specious plea for licentious irresponsibility. In Fantasia of the Unconscious we read: 'Only by fine delicate knowledge can we recognise and release our impulses." Lawrence is insisting that thought, which necessarily involves mental consciousness, is indispensable. But he insists at the same time that the thought demanded by life is not an affair of mental consciousness alone or rather . that vital mental consciousness is neither apart in the individual human being, separated off, nor dominating, initiating and controlling. I must revert here to the criticism Lawrence brings in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious against Freud's incest-theory. He finds himself challenged to "hunt down" the -pristine unconscious":

We have actually to go back to our own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted reflection, of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the true unconscious where our life bubbles up in us, prior to our mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behoves us to live. What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast by the mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it begin? It begins where life begins. But that is too vague. It is no use talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about electricity, because electricity is a .homogeneous force, conceivable apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general thing. It exists only in living creatures. So that 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.

ILawrence is making, for his purpose, the point that I for mine ,make when I say that "life" is a necessary word but life is "there" only in the individual being. His insistence runs:

Where the individual begins, life begins. The two are inseparable, life and individuality. And also, where the individual begins, the unconscious, which is the specific life-motive, also begins.

The emphasis falls for ray own purpose on what I call the Third Realm (neither private nor, for science, public), which both my purpose and my firm certitude represent by language, in which, having created it, individuals meet, and in meeting (they meet in meaning) carry on the creative collaboration that maintains and renews what we think of as a life i.e. the language. But this -life" (inverted commas now though it's a reality and a key one) couldn't exist but for the life that's "there" only in individuals (and human !individuals couldn't live without that non-computerable reality).

Lawrence in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious traces the development that starts with conception to the arrival at completed individuality in the mature human being: "At the moment of conception, when a procreative male nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the female germ, at that moment does a new unit of life arise in the universe." There would be no: point in my trying to write a précis of the account Lawrence gives in terms of a growing complexity of polarities between centres within the new individual, accompanied first by essential polarities between the foetus and the mother who carries it in her womb; accompanied and complicated later by a play of polarities involving not only the mother, but other individuals external to the individual child: the thing is done so lucidly and convincingly by Lawrence in his quite short book.

It will be plain to any reader that Lawrence owes in an essential way to specialists he has read; but it will be plain also that he has read with an intelligence creatively quick to take hints in the way it judges them worth taking, and that its judgment is supremely responsible. That astonishing power of thought in acquiring and using knowledge got from hooks is an aspect of his living genius.

I have dwelt deliberately on the word "thought," so essential to my undertaking used it again and again in characterising Lawrence's creativity. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious is unmistakably a remarkable product of thought_ This emphasis, repeated challengingly in these last sentences, might seem to be at odds with what he writes in (for example) the opening of chapter III of Fantasia of the Unconscious: The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animalsAnd this pre-mental consciousness remains, as long as we live, the powerful root and body of our consciousness The mind is but the last flower, the cr.d de sac. . Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the. soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centres of dynamic consciousness, The solar plexus, the greatest and most important centre of our dynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic centre. At this great centre of our first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily w e know, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly and satisfactorily and without question, that I am I. This root of all knowledge and being is established at the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do not ask me to transfer the pre-mental thnamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done. The knowledge that lam I can never be thought: only known This being the very first term of our Life-knowledge, a knowledge established physically and psychically. .

Some comment is needed. Thought serves the soul so well asks finest instrument because it can be so much more, its relation to living from "the root and body of our consciousness" so other, than what the word "instrument" suggests. Lawrence knows this, haying exemplified in his oeuvre the inescapable truth of it. What he warns us against are the insidious dangers that attend on tieing mentally conscious; what he inveighs against is the misuse of the mind that makes it art enemy of life. He exposes and inveighs a great dealt because that misuse is the distinctive mark of our seientifico-industrial civilisation_ '16 themalady that results he applies diagnostically the triad, "will, ego and idea." The will is -that of the closed ego Blake's "'selfhood"' as distin guished from the "identity,.the triad of terms together means the mind„ the mental consciousness, offering to work Fife according to its ideas, which,, with the mental consciousness they belong toy have-been cut off from the well-head and from the centres of living power..

It is with thought„ 'hied and living thought for there is nothing elkse to resort to„ that Lawrence sets about rescuing fee

—m 'this inner mechanisation.. Not merely of Psyekomorvalysis and the Uncorriscious„ butlt of any one of his novels we can say that it is a seanc.cno experience in the concrete "knowledge,not only of the desired individual wholenessN. but of what -spontaneity" means andl„ with it„ "responsibility." "The knowledge that lam I can never be thought: only known" that is a separable statement of Lawrence's. We needn't question it; but it doesn't mean that such knowledge can't tell appropriately in living thought: it does so that is, is effectively present in the thought that Lawrencecommunicates (expression and making communicable are one).

When he brings out the pronouncement about the knowledge that I am I he is insisting on the fact basically indisputable, but not readily graspable in a world of mass-democracy, statistical truths, and computers that can write poem § that life is not a force like electricity: it is in the concrete actuality always an individual, and if treated as if it could be made general, ceases to be there. My own formulation of that truth invokes the nature of language: individuals alone can mean, but they mean in order to meet and commune meaning. Not only does the individual need relations with others, but the vital relations are creative and creative of a reality that transcends language.

Without the English language waiting quick and ready for him, Lawrence couldn't have communicated his thought: that is obvious enough. But it is also the case that he couldn't have thought it. English as he found it was a product of an immemorial sui generis collaboration on the part of its speakers and writers. It is, alive with prompting§ and potentialities, and the great creative writer shows his genius in the way he responds. Any writer of the language must depend on what his readers know already (though they may not know that they know) must evoke it with the required degree of sharpness or latency. Lawrence, doing that, faces the problem of evoking the appropriate stir or glimmer of the kind of knowledge of which he himself has said that it can't be thought, but only known faces it triumphantly. He can establish a specificity of imagined experience out of which the apprehension flashes on the reader, or makes its presence felt as an implicit intuition: in any' case appropriately.

A specificity of imagined experience -imagination," like all important words, has a number of values: Lawrence's thought, which is inseparable from his major creativity, gives it one that has a profoundly Laurentian potency and resonance. I mustn't try to say more about it now. I will at the moment merely, by way of enforcing my point, quote this: -At the maximum of our imagination we are religious." I can't think of anyone but Lawrence from whom that could have come.

"Imagination" isn't, in Lawrence's thought and expository -logic," the only term of major importance that doesn't, as it stands alone, sufficiently explain itself doesn't define or reveal its value in a brief quoted passage. It might, for instance, be said that, in the Laurentian sentence I have just separated from all the context it actually implies, -religious" needs even more than -imagination" to have its value defined or specified. But it is the word "life" that faces Laurentian thought with its most formidable problem or rather, troubles most the expositor of Laurentian thought. -The knowledge that I am l" necessarily carries with it the knowledge that I am alive. The predicate here imputes life, but the implied word "life" isn't charged With the value it has in the Laurentian dictum: -Nothing is important but life."

This dictum, pondered, will perhaps be felt to be a complex or telescoping proposition. Nevertheless, those who have really read him read him with responsive intelligence know that it certainly isn't the merely and vaguely inclusive value it might evoke that answers to the essential intention, for with equal certainty this last excludes the value the word carries when Lawrence evokes a person of whom, though he is certainly not a corpse, it is conveyed to us that his distinctive characteristic is to be not alive. Lawrence, had he commented on George

Eliot's Grandcourt, might have said that of him.

In the lucidly expository Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he necessarily uses "alive," "living" and "lives" in the ordinary variety of forces inhering in the verb as commonly employed. Yet that doesn't in the least take from his power to charge "life' with the special, Laurentian value that gives the word what, for him, is its supreme-use a use in which it is intimately associated with -wonder", the "unknown", "imagination," "religious" and "responsible." His power to do this is his major-writer's mastery of the English language: the creativity is one with the thought. He actually says somewhere: "Art-speech is the only speech." And when, after reading Psychoanalysis arid the Unconscious and the Fantasia, we re-read the novels and the tales. we see with a new realisation that the vitality of Lawrence's thought is one with his extraordinary power of living the gift of being receptively open and unafraid in the multifarious human world, and of spontaneously (always with penetrating insight) taking a delicate, truly delicate interest in an immense variety of human beings; of individuals as such, and that is, of life.

His general pronouncements about the novel make plain his sense that the fictively imaginative achieved art and the expository modes, springing from the one root, are vitalised by the one sap, and that there is no suggestion of a priority to be assigned to either of them. Nevertheless it is plain that he sees himself primarily as a novelist as the Laurentian novelist. In the essay containing the paragraph that deplores the split between philosophy and the novel, the previous paragraph runs:

Supposing a bomb were put under the whole scheme of things, what would we be after? What feelings do we want to carry through into the next epoch? What feelings will carry us through: What is the underlying impulse in us that will provide the motive power-for a

new state of things, when this democratic-lovey-dovey-darling-take-me-to-mama state of things is bust?

This certainly describes thought, but hardly what the word "philosophy" suggests. "The Novel," he says in the essay that Phoenix 'prints next, -is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered." It is by "subtle interrelatedness" that Lawrence does with current words what dictionary definition can never do. Take the Word "life"; to the theme it presents us with the Laurentian approach is essentially not philosophical but how could a real approach be that? In the same essay he says: "When the man in Crime and Punishment murders the old woman for sixpence, although it is actual enough, it is never quite real. The balance between the murderer and the old woman is gone entirely; it is only a mess. It is actuality, but it is not life', in the living sense." In another essay (a much longer one 'The Reality of Peace') he says: -For we must all die. But we need not all live."

Those familiar with Lawrence's novels and tales will not assume that in such utterances there is any irresponsibility; the thought depends upon the indefinables that explain them. Only a major creative writer can give concrete specificity to such values and establish them; he does it in communicating them: the communicating, or the making communicable, is essential to the thought. In a Lawrence novel or tale it is done, you can say, by the subtle interrelatednesses that form the web of imagined and evoked experience. But it all goes back to words words used to form and establish thought; thought which, being neither merely private nor in the ordinary sense public, belongs, as the words do, to the Third Realm (the contents or constituents of which can't be brought into a laboratory, tripped over or even pointed to).

Eliot's Four Quartets forgoes the kinds of human interrelatedness that are entailed by the novel in its aspect of a representative and intimate human history a history concretely evoked to be purely significant in relation to certain inner questionings and intuitions that profoundly solicit the novelist. Eliot has to forgo any possible afforded advantage and 1 think there are many: he is without the essential powers of a novelist, and such comments as he makes on novels suggest, in their helplessness or plain fatuity, that he hasn't begun to be intelligently interested. Here we have again the basic contradiction that frustrates the poet's effort of thought. His genius lies in his "musical" invention, which has some striking local impressiveness. He has to rely without the resources of a novelist, on his masterful daring with the English language to build up his "music," which is a music of constructive thought. But still in the late 1930s he seems to have retained something of the incapacity for any but an extraordinarily defective sense of the nature of language that had gone with his Francophilia.

He says in that Introduction of 1924 to "Le Serpent" which I have referred to:

And at the same time he is a continuator of the experiment, the enquiry, pursued by MaHarm& As M. Thibaudet rightly says: 'Tout MaIlarme consiste en CeCt: une experience desinteressee sur les confins de Ia poesie a une limite 00 lair respirable manquerait d'autres poitrines. Valery a pris conscience de cette experience, l'a controlee, en a tente la theorie, a contribue pour sa part A lui donner un commencement d'institution.

This (endorsed by Eliot) is fatuous in its meaninglessness; la poesie-"sur les confins de la poesie" is the posited blankly pure "poetry" of the rebuke that Eliot administers to Blake for not taking over from a professional ,what of philosophy he needed, and confining his own creative efforts to the poetry. It is not, revealingly not, thought that posits "poetry" as something that can have "confines"; and such creative thought as Eliot commits himself to in Four Quartets (the "music" of this actually entails self-commitment to creative battle) must take place not on any confines, but on frontiers the frontiers of language, which major creativity advances. When he had become an unambiguously religious poet he wouldn't, no doubt, have volunteered again the more naive formulations of his Impersonality. But he didn't withdraw them, and seems (with academic encouragement) to have thought that they do him credit. And The Waste Land (1922) is so decidedly on the way to the frankly religious poetry that such a quotation from F. H. Bradley as still appears on the last page of the notes must seem as ominous: My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case 111,3' experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, !very sphere is opaque to the others which surround IL • • . In brief, regarded as an existence which. aPPears in a soul, the whole world is peculiar and Private to that soul.

Eliot clearly felt that the distinguished Philosopher in whom he had so long ago invested gave the authority of profound thought to the Eliotic attitude towards life and humanity which persists in Four Quartets.' The note is to this passage in V of The Waste Land: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Rtat for more than one reason it was ill-advised of Eliot to .quote that Bradleian passage as lending impressiveness to a conception (and a valuation) he too cherished of his own personal s!nse of inner -isolation. No creative writer aiming at a major achievement should be able not to realise that in using the English language for his purpose he is most essentially and intimately a collaborating member of -an immemorial community, the changing lan

guage being a product of a continuous collaborative creativity. But Eliot, whose argument in Four Quartets starts from a belief in utter human abjectness, cannot help implicitly denying that human creativity exists. Here we have the basic self-contradiction of that poem in which he offers to establish the nature of the supremely Real by means of his own poetic art. It is skilled and daring art; and illustrates Eliot's brilliant but limited gift for "thought, words and creativity": it is the totality and spirit and purpose of the "musical logic" that the self-contradiction disables. , He owes little or nothing in his major poetry to the French poets of the later nineteenth century. Accidentally, so to speak, they helped him to escape from the world of Tennyson and Swinburne; but the poet to whom he owed his great debt though he never said so directly (modesty, let us say) was the supreme poet of the English language. The Symbolistes, to whom, half-a-century ago, he introduced me, were very different from one another, but had most, if not all of them, an acquaintance with English, and I have sometimes thought that, though none of them is Shakespearian, the liberties they took with la clarte and la logique were inspired by liberties that come, or should come, more naturally to Shakespeare's fellow-countrymen.

Lawrence was neither a Frenchman nor a Francophil, and he was a far greater genius than Eliot. The great novelists of the nineteenth ;Century were the successors of Shakespeare,' and for being a great novelist Lawrence had all the qualifications. How naturally and inevitably he was a novelist is plain from the early non-novel, Twilight in Italy, which is about an Italian sojourn with Frieda before that first German war. Chapter III, "The Theatre," shows how the gifts that made him a great novelist made him also as great a critic as there has ever been. It shows what penetration he had turned on Shakespeare. But what I want to stress at the moment is the ease with which he got on with all kinds of casually encountered people. He got on with them so easily because he was spontaneously interested in them, and in a way that was not only inoffensive but irresistible: they were humanity and life, and he was obviously without pretensions or designs. This characteristic was the secret of his dramatic power, which made him so different from all other psychologists. Eliot had no dramatic power and no ease. You can reduce his limitations to those two lacks which themselves are closely associated. Lawrence the great novelist and critic is the great psychologist.

There seems point in closing with the two brief references to E. M. Forster which he made by the way in letters to Martin Secker, his publisher.

Am reading A Passage to India. It's good, but makes one wish a bomb would fall and end it all. Life is more interesting in its undercurrents than in its obvious and E. M. does see people, people and nothing but people ad nauseam.

This is dated 13 July, 1926. A year later he writes:

St Mawr a bit disappointing. The Bloomsbury highbrows hated it. Glad they did. Don't send any more of my books to E. M. Forster done with him as with most people. Vogue la galere.

But Lawrence couldn't but go on manifesting the creativity of Laurentian genius till the day of his death in 1930 the historic year when Kingsley Martin became the first editor of the combined New Statesman and Nation. The co-incidence has a certain felicity; for the journalistic development that culminated in the launch of Martin's career has a crucial bearing on my theme. He was portentously successful; he multiplied again and again the sales of the new New Statesman. At a cost, of course but to him and the supporting elite what I call "cost" was a triumph of enlightened virtue.

This essay by Dr Leavis was originally given as a Winston Churchill lecture at Bristol University