PAST AND PRESENT IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Studies in Classical American Literature. By D. H. Lawrence. (Martin Seeker. 10s. 6d.) IN the playground of love there is an adage, " Say it with

flowers." Mr. Lawrence says it with iron filings and a magnet. From the first, therefore, we are pricked to a nervous state of wakefulness ; and politeness and gentleness are banished, as he would desire, from the combat of elemental humanity.

What compels our author to his extraordinary style, in

Which the English language is chopped up as fine as shrapnel by a superhuman machine?. We can only conclude that he is a spiritual drunkard, a Dmitri Karamazov registering as loudly as possible the rapid panorama that floods through his over- ctimulated mind. The terrible thing is that there is so much truth furtively lurking in this brain-storming incoherence ; but truth with her garments torn to shreds, her hair unbound, and the breath beaten out of her bosom. Mr. Lawrence is the subtlest analyst of that sinister mood, cousin of love and hate, which haunts us all, at strange moments, taking the mildest by-the hand and inciting to a little deed of cold page that seems a diabolic equilibrium of the brain.' Yet how irresponsible Mr. Lawrence so often becomes, - merely by over-stating a very honestly conceived deduction. He is admirable in his hatred of smugness, religiosity and cushions. His blade of assault turned against the upholders of this trinity is almost as swift as is Mr. Shaw's. But there the resemblance ends, for the sight of the blood he has drawn

throws him into a frenzy of exaggeration. Here is an example :—

" The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."

No doubt he means that the artist can never be aware of those particular qualities which make his work unique, just as we can never see ourselves as others see us—through our lovable or repugnant little habits of gesture, speech, caress or thought. While, therefore, the artist thinks and claims that his work points the moral he intended, actually it points a much more interesting moral of its own, one born

not in the acquired, second-Jutnd intelligence of the author but in his sub-conscious self, his real and new being. But why is the critic " to save the tale " ? How can the artist spoil his own work once it has left him and become public property ? The critic, too, is hampered by his own intelli- gence—a dustbin, or at best a museum, of information. He, surely, is as treacherous, both to himself and to the public, as is the artist. Mr. Lawrence is altogether too slapdash

in his statements. They are too short. If his sentences were longer and more continuous, the effort would perhaps stimulate his logical powers to link up his evidence, so that instead of enunciating a hundred meteoric half-truths that throw no steady light, he could collect them up, retain their heads, and weld them into a minor sun by which those who fly could read. The brilliant but ineffectual tails he could distil, to provide a tonic for hack critics who suffer from mental anaemia. He has sufficient " virtue " not to miss that gift from his treasury. No doubt Mr. Lawrence would stamp and rage at the suggestion that unity of idea is a goal to be sought ; and he might strike inspired, flashlight utterances about the present reviewer's mental, sexual and other forms of sterility. But there is a sterility of adolescence more common than that of senescence, the sterility of dissipation, of self-squandering. We know that this is an age of petty caution, in which critics write like Civil Servants, with one eye on precedents and the other on contingencies—usually personal. But it does not serve the science of life any more to fly to the other extreme, pouring out picturesque incon- - sistencies as a ;cinema operator rolls out film.

Mr. Lawrence states his creed, the first tenet of which is " That I ant I." But in another place he says :—

" There are other men in me, besides this patient, ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing . . . who am I talking to ? Who are you, at the other end of this patience ? "

If he is so bewildered by his many and complex selves, his first statement rather loses its punch. He might as well say, " That X, the unknown, is X, the unknown." This is no statement of an equation ; it is mere raving. We begin to look for straws in his hair. There is something Nietzschean about this mad asseveration of his ; but he is a Nietzsche living in Swift's equine country, and aspiring to a breed of super-stallions. He has the superstitions of a witch, with his incantations over ganglia ; and the philosophic broth which he brews is the most unpleasant production of his over-fecund brain. He so befuddles himself with the

stench of viscera in an atavistic effort to find his own religious symbolism, that he is unable to drink in the

sweet air of common-sense, the life-breath of normal human relationships :-

" The ideal self ! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark ? This is the self who is coming into his own."

If that is so, Mr. Lawrence will not complain if his vulpine self is hounded out of human society by the dogs of morality and the terriers of reason.

Leaving Mr. Lawrence we can return to a world of pleasant formalities, and good manners, where prejudices arc debated - with reason, and likes and dislikes are clothed in robes of a neutral colour that almost hides the antagonisms of the flesh beneath. Professor Boynton is not to be dismissed, however, as a pedagogue, for he writes, clearly and unlearnedly, as a human being interested principally in life, a moral life in which pity and human sweetness put up a brave fight against the horrors of social and natural circumstances. His sympathies, therefore, are with the poets who face the world simply and sincerely, fighting doggedly for the power to express the beauty to be found in human character in its

gesture of resistance. He gives a high place to Edwin Arlington Robinson and to Robert Frost. To our mind the latter is a poet to be enjoyed and loved. Mr. Boynton is obviously not so sympathetic to writers who voice the rich and super- civilized—as Mrs. Wharton, of whom he says : " Her charac- ters would be puzzled to know why the Lord's Prayer should

include st:oh a homely clause as Give us this day our daily bread.' " As for the pretentious, who, particularly to-day, infest the arts, he reserves for them a charming politeness that is very pretty in its lethal skill—as in his essay on Miss '