The Critical Game Part 12

Mr. Lawrence is a poet in prose and in verse. No writer of his generation is more singular, more unmistakably individual, and no other that I know is endowed with his great variety of gifts. He is as dangerous to public morals as Meredith or Hardy. Readers who cannot understand the tragedy of "Richard Feverel" or of "Jude the Obscure,"

will not understand Mr. Lawrence or be interested to read a third of the way through one of his books. The stupidity of the mult.i.tude is sure protection against his insidious loveliness and essential sadness. He and his admirers will, I hope, regard it as honorable to him that he reminds this critic oftener of Meredith and Hardy than of any of his contemporaries. I am not so fatuous as to suggest that his independent and original work is in any unfavorable sense derivative.

It must be true that every young novelist learns his lessons from the older novelists; but I cannot see that Mr. Lawrence is clearly the disciple of any one master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder stature of Meredith and Hardy, and I will suggest, in praise of him, some resemblances that have struck me, without trying to a.n.a.lyze or quote chapter and verse in tedious parallels.

Mr. Lawrence is a lyric as well as a tragic poet. In this he is like Meredith and Hardy, and I can think of no other young novelist who is quite worthy of the company. Young people in love, or some other difficulty, become entangled with stars and mountains and seas; they are baffled and lost, seldom consoled, in cosmic immensities.

Novelists who happen also to be poets are enamoured of those immensities.

This is the end of "Sons and Lovers":

"Where was he?--one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct.

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the darkness that outpa.s.sed them all, and left them tiny and daunted.

So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core nothingness, and yet not nothing."

The concluding scenes of "Women in Love" are the Alps, "a silence of dim, unrealized snow, of the invisible intervening between her and the visible, between her and the flas.h.i.+ng stars." I am reminded, by the beauty of the phrasing and by the sense of the pathetic little human being adrift in s.p.a.ce, of the flight of the two young people through the Alps, in "The Amazing Marriage," and of farmer Gabriel Oak watching the westward flow of the stars.

Sometimes, like Meredith, rather than like Hardy, whose style is colder and more austere, Mr. Lawrence is almost too lyric and his phrases threaten to overflow the rigid dikes of prose. I could pick out a dozen rhapsodical pa.s.sages which with little change might well appear in his books of verse.

But young people in love do not spend all their days and nights in ecstatic flights to the clouds. And their flights are followed by pathetic Icarian disasters. From luminous moments they plunge into what Mr. Lawrence calls "the bitterness of ecstacy," and their pain outweighs their joy many times over, as in Hardy, and as in the more genial Meredith, whose rapturous digression played on a penny whistle is a cruelly beautiful preparation for the agonies that ensue. It may be that the emotional transports of Mr. Lawrence's young people are more frequent and violent than the ordinary human soul can enjoy and endure. The nervous tension is high and would break into hysteria if Mr. Lawrence were not a philosopher as well as a poet, if he did not know so accurately what goes on inside the human head, if he had not an artist's ability to keep his balance at the very moment when a less certain workman would lose it.

There is firm ground under his feet and under the feet of his lovers; it is the everyday life which consists of keeping shop and keeping school and other commonplace activities in street, kitchen, and coal mine. These diurnal details he studies with a fidelity not surpa.s.sed by Mr. Bennett or any other of his contemporaries. The talk of his people is always alive, both the dialect of the villagers and the discussions of the more intellectual. Sometimes he puts into the speech of his characters a little more of his own poetic fancy than they might reasonably be supposed to be capable of. But if this is a fault, from a realistic point of view, it is a merit from the point of view of readability, and it makes for vivacity. At times--and is not this like Meredith?--he seems to be less interested in the sheer dramatic value of a situation he has created than in the opportunity it offers of writing beautiful things around it. Not that his situations fail to carry themselves or have not their proper place and proportion. Mr. Lawrence knows how to handle his narrative and he has an abundant invention and dramatic ingenuity. But he is above those elementary things that any competent novelist knows. He has the something else that makes the story teller the first rate literary artist--style may be the word for it, but poetic imagination seems to be the better and more inclusive term. Open "The Lost Girl" at page 57 and read two pages. Without knowing what has preceded or whither the story is bound, anybody who knows what literature is will feel at once that that is it.

"Women in Love" is a sequel to "The Rainbow," in that it carries on the story of Ursula of the family of Brangwen. "The Rainbow" is the stronger book; it has more of the tragic power, the deep social implications of Mr. Lawrence's masterpiece, "Sons and Lovers". In "Women in Love" are four young people, two men and two women, whose chief interest, for them and for us, is in amatory relations. This is indicated by the t.i.tle of the story, one of those obvious t.i.tles which only a man of imagination could hit upon, so simple that you wonder why no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the erotic relations of people, though a tremendous part of life, as all the great tragic romances prove, are still only part of life. n.o.body knows this better than Mr. Lawrence. The first story of the Brangwen family is richer than the second, not because of the proverbial falling off of sequels, not because Mr. Lawrence's power declined--far from it!--but because the first novel embraces a larger number of the manifold interests that compose the fever called living. In it are not only young lovers, but old people, old failures, the land, the town, the succession of the generations rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges from immemorial centuries of English life, touched with foreign blood out of Poland (when an English novelist wishes to introduce variety and strangeness into the dull solidity of an English town he imports a Pole, or an Italian, or a Frenchman, somebody not English).

Ursula's background is thus richer than all her emotional experience.

Her father, her grandfather, the family, the muddled tragicomedy of little affairs and ambitions, the grim, gray colliery district, the entire social situation, are the foundations and walls of the story, and she is the slender spire that surmounts it all--and is struck by lightning. In "The Rainbow" she goes to ashes, and in "Women in Love"

she revives, burns again, and finds in her new love new dissatisfaction.

It is impossible to write of Mr. Lawrence without discoursing in symbols and reflecting, somewhat pallidly, his metaphors. For like all genuine poets he is a symbolist. In "Aaron's Rod" he redoubles and compounds symbolism in a manner baffling to readers and to critics who like to have their prose prosaic and their poetry in lines and whose sound stomachs refuse a mixed drink. I enjoy the mixture--in the Bible, in Meredith, in Ruskin, in James, in Lawrence.

It is stupid to explain symbols. Yet after all that is the dull function of criticism, to explain something--as if the creator of a work of art had not given all the necessary explanation in the very act of creation. Whoever does not understand Lawrence on immediate contact will not understand him better after the intervention of a critic. But it is the pleasure and the privilege of a critic to have his secondary imagination set on fire by the primary imagination of a man of genius, to spread the fire if he can by the cold fluid of critical exposition--as water carries burning oil.

Well, then, Aaron's rod is doubly symbolic. His rod which, in the Biblical phrase, bloomed, blossomed and yielded almonds, is a flute.

And the symbol is also phallic, as, indeed, it is in the Bible.

Aaron's flute, the musical instrument, is smashed in an accident which is as irrational as life itself. The instrument in its other aspect is broken by the supreme and only rationality--that of human character.

In all his books, beginning with "Sons and Lovers," Mr. Lawrence has shown relatively little interest in those mere sequences of external events which novelists artificially pattern into plots. He throws some matter-of-fact probabilities to the winds, as in "Aaron's Rod," when he makes a man from the English collieries a master flautist and alleges that he got a hearing in Italy, where there are more good flautists to the square inch than in England to the square mile.

But Aaron is an unusual person. "It is remarkable," says his creator, "how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England." Mr.

Lawrence has always been interested in slightly eccentric characters, and so he stands apart from his contemporaries who call themselves realists or naturalists because they deal with the commonplace or the recognizably normal.

After all, extraordinary persons in fiction, as in life, are better worth knowing than ordinary persons. Mr. Lawrence does not make his people so widely different from the general run of human beings as to put a strain on credulity, and he studies them with a subtle and firm understanding. Their talk sounds real. Their emotions are alive in his bold and delicate prose. He has made amateurish excursions into psychoa.n.a.lysis, which may or may not be a fruitful subject for a novelist to study. The real novelist has always been a psychologist in an untechnical sense.

Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import into his art the dubious lingo of psycho-a.n.a.lysis; he remains the poet, the dramatist, his symbols and images uncorrupted by pseudo-science. Aaron's dream in the last chapter--no modern novel is complete without at least one dream--is easily "freuded" (cave, corridor, and water symbols), but Mr. Lawrence refrains from a.n.a.lysis.

Aaron's whole life, or as much as the author gives us of it, is a dream, a dream unfulfilled in love or friends.h.i.+p or music. To what he wakes, if he wakes at all, the conclusion leaves us guessing. That will puzzle readers who demand that a story shall finish with a bang or come to a definite point of rest. But life does not conclude; it persists.

When Aaron related his history and experiences to some friends, he "told all his tale as if it was a comedy. A comedy it seemed, too, at that hour. And a comedy no doubt it was. But mixed, like most things in this life. Mixed." Though Aaron is a strange man, an individual, yet the conflict that goes on in him, between his rebellion and his indecision, his desire and his impotence, is not freakish; it is so much like the struggle that every man knows, with special variations, that it is true to universal human nature. Behind the symbolism are the plain facts, solidly conceived.

The other characters in the book are well drawn, notably Aaron's odd, philosophic friend, Lilly, whose ideas are at once clear and cryptic.

There is a pitifully accurate portrait of a captain whose soul and nerves had not recovered from the war. In a single chapter through one man Mr. Lawrence suggests the disillusionment, the mental disaster, that followed the armistice. "None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war ... the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved."

In "The Lost Girl" and "Women in Love" the men are subordinate to the women. In "Aaron's Rod" the women are of secondary interest; Aaron's wife is rather indistinct and shadowy, and the Marchesa, the Cleopatra whom he tried to love and couldn't, never quite comes alive, either for Aaron or for the reader. Probably these women are just what Mr.

Lawrence intended them to be, as seen through Aaron's temperament. But I do not feel that Mr. Lawrence has here made a very striking contribution to the history of the everlasting warfare between the s.e.xes. Did Aaron miss because he happened not to meet the right woman?

Or was he the sort of man whom no woman could capture and satisfy?

Evidently Mr. Lawrence means to leave the eternal question unsettled even for the man whom he has created.

Like many other English poets, Mr. Lawrence is a lover of Italy, and he takes his hero there, one suspects, for the sheer joy of the scene and the atmosphere, which he realizes with vivid beauty. He is a master of description, a master of words. His command ranges from the baldest sort of every day conversation to prose harmonies that are as near to verse as prose can go without breaking over. This is not merely a command of style; it is more than that--it is a command of ideas. Mr. Lawrence can pa.s.s with equal sureness from colliery to cathedral and find the right word for every thing and person met on the way, the right word, though often a perplexed and perplexing word.

Because life is like that. It is "mixed."