FICTION.
AARON'S ROD.*
MR. D. H. LAWRENCE'S new navel, Aaron's Rod, is an extra- ordinarily full book with a somewhat difficult beginning and a certain technical incoherence. It is, perhaps, as a phenomenon in Mr. Lawrence's mental career that it is, first of all, interesting. Most of his readers know Mr. Lawrence as a poet and a novelist who writes almost exclusively on the subject of love, carrying his investigations to a point beyond that at which most other English writers stop. His disciples admire him not only as a fine expressive artist, but also as an investi- gator and psychologist. Most of his readers regarded Sons and Lovers as a work of genius, but in the later Women in Love most of them saw a book crazy and pathological. Though he has a true northern seriousness and mysticism, which never deserts him, it was the generally-held opinion that in Women in Love Mr. Lawrence had written under the influence of a tiresome sex obsession. In Aaron's Rod we have the reaction. The hero, a half-educated, half-sophisticated miner—a " self-made man "—turns with a kind of loathing from love, first from the love of his wife, who tries to dominate him and make him an adjunct to her and her children, and finally from love itself, to a sort of mystical conception of the inviolability of the human soul. The book has more than a touch of genius in it. It is written in a tense, nervous style, and all of it, except the rather dull first quarter, is either beautiful, or amusing, or intensely emotional. Let us shrive the book of its faults and have done with it. There is the heavy opening before alluded to, and there is also the incoherence of construction. For instance, one group of people who are described minutely pass away out of the book altogether, but not before the same unmarried female character has had two surnames. Last of all, just as there was a febrile lack of proportion in Mr. Lawrence's love poetry and love novels, so there is a lack of proportion in his reaction. We see him horrified at the dominance of women, at their power of arousing the emotions of men, at their hard, instinctive use of this power. He feels that this horror not only is his own discovery, but fills the world. He forgets that his contention is what many of the Eastern races and most intellectual feminists have " known all along," and for which they have propounded l'sduron,' s Rod. By D. H. Lawrence. London : Martin Becker. [713. 8d. net.] their cures—one of segregating, the other of intellectualizing women. Again, has Mr. Lawrence never read Man and Superman and You Never Can Tell But all these are really minor objections, and though we muse pronounce Aaron's Rod a faulty book, it is unquestionably a great book. For instance, it can be imagined that a reader quite out of sympathy and understanding with Mr. Lawrence's psychological views might enjoy it immensely for its beautiful descriptions of Florence, its account of a miner's household, of a performance of Aida, of a picnic in the train, of Anglo- Italian society and so forth. Or, again, a reader insensitive to the emotional intensity might like it because Mr. Lawrence has the trick of inspiring commonplace, everyday events with significance. He makes the reader see what interesting guides to character such and such qualities are in a human being. He performs what many of us still believe to be the prime function of the novelist, that of letting a little window into the heads of the kind of people a reader may be expected to meet. What is remarkable about Mr. Lawrence's windows, however, is that they " give " not only into the heads and hearts of his characters, but into their deep, instinctive, emotional processes. The very core of a personality is, in case of one or two of the characters, slowly laid bare to us. There is no doubt in the present writer's mind that there is just as much place for such books in the life of the reader who lives his life in a community as there is for a book on " Fauna " and a book on arboriculture for a man who lives in a forest. Not alone will a man notice the rare or the seldom-flowering tree, or will he understand the moves in the squirrel's game. In forest or community it is only through the extended field of observation which such books give that the reader is able to see something of the pattern of the life that is going on around him. Perhaps to those with a preconceived hearsay notion of Mr. Lawrence's work the following descriptive passages may be startling. We must explain that the rather dour hero has just arrived in Florence and has fallen in with two young English exquisites :- " Ho went straight out of the hotel door, across the road, and leaned on the river parapet. There ran the Arno : not such a flood after all, but a green stream with shoals of pebbles in its course. Across, and in the delicate shadow of the early sun, stood the opposite Lungarno, the old flat houses, pink, or white, or grey stone, with their green shutters, some closed, some opened. It had a flowery effect, the skyline irregular against the morning light. To the right the delicate Trinita bridge, to the left the old bridge with its little shops over the river. Beyond, towards the sun, glimpses of green, sky- bloomed country : Tuscany. There was a noise and clatter of traffic : boys pushing handbarrows over the cobble-stones, slow bullocks, stepping side by side, and shouldering one another affectionately, drawing a load of country produce, then horses in great brilliant scarlet cloths, like vivid palls, slowly pulling tho long narrow carts of the district and men hu-huing !—and people calling : all the sharp, clattering morning noise of Florence. ' Oh Angus ! Do come and look I Oh so lovely ! ' Glancing up, he saw the elegant figure of Francis, in fine coloured- silk pyjamas, perched on a small upper balcony, turning away from the river towards the bedroom again, his hand lifted to his lips, as if to catch there his ory of delight. The whole pose was classic and effective : and very amusing. How the Italians would love it 1" But, so far, we have, of course, only contemplated the fringes of the book. Of its main argument, the question whose should be the dominating, initiating element in love, the man's or the woman's, of how far love ought to encroach upon personality, and when the stage is reached of morbidity or affection, and of the mystical conclusion to which the reader is induced to come, it is impossible to speak here. The three hundred odd pages of this remarkable book are none too long for their setting-out. We should, by the way, warn our readers that Aaron's Rod is not an agreeable book for young adolescents of either sex.
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