Genius as Critic

BY F. R.

LEAVIS

SINCE, in 1936, the year of its original publica- tion, I first read Phoenix* through, it has seemed to me immeasurably the finest body of criticism in existence (and Lawrence left a good deal more critical writing than is included here). I am not, of course, claiming to speak out of a knowledge of all the criticism there is, but expressing my conviction that no collection as valuable can be found. The interest and profit it yields seem to me inexhaustible. I still find, every time I open it, new things to remember and to use. What a difference it would have made to me as an undergraduate, l tell myself! And I have done my best to promote its currency: a best that has not been as good as it might have been, since the volume has been for years out of print. Now at last it is obtainable again, and every undergraduate reading English can properly be urged to buy it: he needs his own copy.

Nor does its use start there. It can, in its astonishing variety, have an invaluable educa- tional function at an earlier stage. For Law- rence's criticism, subtle, penetrating and indi- vidual as it is, has qualities that make it a peculiarly good initiation. These are suggested in the account of criticism and the critic that opens the essay on Galsworthy:

We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form . . . is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

A critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all its complexity and its force. To do so, he must be a man of com- plexity and force himself. A man with a paltry, impudent nature will never write anything but paltry, impudent criticism. And a man who is emotionally educated is as rare as a phoenix. . . .

More than this, even an artistically and emo- tionally educated man must be a man of good faith. . . . A critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest.

That, in its un-Eliotic freedom of utterance, may sound a little naïve. But plainly, what we

* PHOENIX: THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE. (Heinemann, 35s.) in fact have is the vital and sure intelligence of the actual phoenix, the rare being who is alive in every fibre and has the centrality and easy swiftness of genius. The naiveté is that habit of complete honesty which it has never occurred to him to suspect that he can't afford. To be intro- duced so potently to this conception of intel- ligence is of the utmost value to the young. It is inseparable, of course, from a conception of art—a conception' the antithesis of that repre- sented by Mallarmes dictum: 'Au fond, voyez- vous, le monde est fait pour aboutir a un beau liyre.' The Laurentian conception is more properly to be called one in that it is wholly coherent, and capable of being held—and lived— with complete consistency. It is invoked quotably in many places in Phoenix, and is stated with some insistence in the essay called 'Why the Novel Matters,' the burden of which can be represented by the brief sentence: 'Nothing matters but life.'

Life, it may be commented, is a large term— too large to be of much use in criticism. Actually, of course, it is a term that we cannot do without. And to have it brought home to one how essen- tial a term may be that cannot be defined is a major part of an education. That is what is done for us in Phoenix. It ceases to be a mere large term: impossible as definition may be, we need a word suggesting something analogous to defini- tion to denote the giving to 'life' of the force of significance it gets in Lawrence's criticism. 'Alive in every fibre' (to read him is to have that phrase charged with meaning), he has an incom- parable sensitiveness and penetration of respon- sive percipience over a seemingly limitless range: his response to art is a response to life.

This way of putting it must not be taken as suggesting that he was not strictly a literary critic, with the sureness of judgment of poetry (for instance) that only a trained literary intel- ligence can have. There is endless evidence of this in Phoenix, but for the sake of economy in enforcing the point I will quote a convenient illustration from the Letters (p. 152). Writing to Eddie Marsh on Ralph Hodgson's Song of Honour he says:

There's the emotion in the rhythm, but it's loose emotion, inarticulate, common. It's exactly like a man who feels very strongly for a beggar, and gives him a sovereign. The feeling is at either end, for the moment, but the sovereign is a dead bit of metal. And this poem is the sovereign. 'Oh, I do want to give you this emotion,' cries Hodgson, 'I do.' And so he takes out his poetic purse, and gives you a handful of cash, and feels very strongly, even a bit senti- mentally over it.

It may be suggested that to arrive at this judgment on Hodgson's poem was no very remarkable feat. But the letter was written in 1913. To take this line with the creator of the Georgian vogue—and Marsh was also Law- rence's own generous patron—Lawrence re- quired a complete conviction (one he would have got no help towards forming), and the formula- tion is still very strikingly that of a rarely gifted critic. The relevant criteria, it will be noted, are implicitly invoked in the judgment: what we have is, unmistakably, literary criticism of a compelling and very exceptional quality.

Where Lawrence is criticising novels he may be thought of as the observer of life and civilisa- tion who has a marvellous insight into the human psyche in all its varieties. He is, we know, that. And in being that he is at the same time a literary critic—the supreme literary critic: a truth (it is. of course, no paradox) that can be effectively insisted on by pointing to his review of Mann's Der Tod in Venedig. He writes an admirable critique of that book, and in the course of it he deals with the author's case as man and artist, and relates him (a locus classicus, it should be) to Flaubert. His versatility as a critic is very remarkable. He was ready, it seems, to take on any book that might be sent to him—novel, memoir, psychology, poetry, H. G. Wells, Baron Corvo. Cunningham Graham, Rozanov, Eric Gill—and he always justifies his readiness: he exhibits everywhere the same directness, subtlety and penetration. That is, the astonishing versa- tility presented in Phoenix is far from exemplify- ing what one thinks of as the almost inevitable limitations of brilliant and wide-ranging oppor- tunism: he always writes from a deep centre (how utterly different from our versatile pundits of the 'Sunday papers!). From this centre he does all his thinking: for, though he disclaimed any bent for the thinking of the philosopher, he was a most powerful original thinker, preoccu- pied alWays with fundamentals, and it is this depth and this coherence of preoccupation that tell so impressively in his occasional work.

We see them (to insist on the value of the book as initiation for the literary student) in his use of the word 'moral' when there is question of the critic's basic criteria.

For the bourgeois is supposed to be the fount of morality. Myself, I have found artists far more morally finicky.

This will be found in the opening of the essay called 'Art and Morality.' Conveniently in view just opposite on the previous page (520) we find the passage indicating the criteria he brings to novels:

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-industrial- lovey-dovey-darling-take-me-to-mamma state of things is bust?

These passages are sufficient intimation that though the term 'moral' has a special context and force in his use of it, his use is both legiti- mate and inevitable, and in full continuity with the normal uses. When he uses it most insistently, the term 'religious' is very close. ('At the maxi-

mum of our imagination we are religious'—p. 519.) In the Hardy study he speaks of the 'vast unexplored morality of nature.' Of Clym Yco- bright he says : 'He did not know that the greater part of life is underground.' That is, his critical thought is immensely more subtle and deep-going than Arnold's, the other great critic who chal- lenges a basic critical function for the word 'moral.'

The 'Study of Thomas Hardy' is Lawrence's most sustained piece of constructive exploratory thinking. It is difficult, but will amply repay the young student's trouble—not primarily as a critique of Hardy, but as an emancipating and vitalising exemplification of the nature of crea- tive thought (which, of course, it could hardly be if the ideas were not themselves of high value). It is not Nietzschean, but in method it may, I think, be fairly taken to register an indebtedness to Nietzsche.

And this is an opportunity to remark on the extraordinary range and comprehensiveness of Lawrence's culture and intellectual equipment. Not only was he at home in English literature, and could read (and speak) French, German, Italian and Spanish. He was inward with all the intellectual forces—Nietzsche, Tyler, Fraser, Bergson, Freud and so on—that were active in the contemporary European mind. He was most emphatically an Englishman, but if any great writer of this century may be said to have written out of Europe—as of Europe—it was Lawrence.

Phoenix contains the long 'Introduction to these Paintings.' 1 don't know what art critics and art historians may say about it (it discusses the history of painting in Europe), but the genius, the marvellous intelligence, is most cer- tainly there too. And those who still believe (having perhaps read it in the accounts of the expert evidence given recently in court) that Lawrence had no sense of humour will do well to look at the passage on Significant Form.