Part 3 (1/2)

Lawrence is one of the youngest. Mr Lawrence is certainly one of the young men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, and can have none if they are of any value, but a partner in their tendencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unruliness of the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, its rules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual to do much more than live--namely, to live splendidly.

It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, like them, he is so very much of his time, so hot, controversial, uneasy; that, like them, he has the sudden fury of the bird that beats against the bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at the family, at every inst.i.tution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things; he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to trans.m.u.te the world into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop his individuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system which tortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.

This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in his mind no organisations; he is mainly pa.s.sionate aspiration and pa.s.sionate protest. And that is not wonderful when we consider who he is.

Surprising to think, this prominent young novelist is only thirty-four.

Son of a Nottinghams.h.i.+re coal-miner, a Board-school boy, his early career seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholars.h.i.+p made of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst of old-fas.h.i.+oned chaos in a room containing several cla.s.ses. Then another scholars.h.i.+p, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon to teach for less than 2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extract from his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizes for history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English cla.s.s.

(This is rather embarra.s.sing for those who believe in the public endowment of genius.)

I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already at twenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun _The White Peac.o.c.k_, of which, year by year, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying the foundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter the literary life at a given moment: literature grew in him and with him, was always with him, even in the worst years of his delicate health. If literature was not his pa.s.sion, it was to his pa.s.sion what the tongue is to speech: the essential medium of his expression.

Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrence has not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a painter he ought to have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of the heron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints the countryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, but more often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicated with its wines. All through his novels runs this pa.s.sionate streak, this vision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in _The White Peac.o.c.k_ that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a story which one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presents to us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotional tone.

Mr Lawrence himself, who figures in it, is effaced; Lettice, wayward and beautiful, is the fragrance of s.e.x, but not more so than the honeysuckle in the hedges; George, muscles rippling under his skin, insensitive to cruelty, yet curiously moved by delicacy, is the brother of the bulls he herds; and all the others, the fine gentlemen, the laughing girls, farmers, school teachers, making hay, making music, making jokes, walking in the spangled meadows, and living, and wedding, and dying, all of them come to no resolution. Their lives have no beginning and no end. Mr Lawrence looks: Pippa pa.s.ses. It is almost impossible to criticise _The White Peac.o.c.k_, and the danger in an appreciation is that one should say too much good of it, for the book yields just the quality of illusion that a novel should give us, which does not of itself justify the critic in saying that it is a great book. For the novel, equally with the picture, can never reproduce life; it can only suggest it, and when it does suggest it, however peculiarly or partially, one is inclined to exaggerate the impression one has received and to refrain from considering whether it is a true impression. It is the vividness of Mr Lawrence's nature-vision carries us away; such phrases as these deceive us: 'The earth was red and warm, p.r.i.c.ked with the dark, succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with gray-green cl.u.s.ters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above the light tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below in the first shadows drooped hosts of little white flowers, so silent and sad, it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless, frail and folded meekly in the evening light.' They deceive us because Mr Lawrence's realisation of man is less a.s.sured than his realisation of nature. I doubt the quality of his people's culture, the spontaneity of their att.i.tude towards the fields in which they breathe; their spontaneity seems almost artificial.

That impression Mr Lawrence always gives; he sees the world through a magnifying-gla.s.s, and perhaps more so in _Sons and Lovers_ than in _The White Peac.o.c.k_. In that book he gives us unabashed autobiography--the story of his early youth, of his relation to his mother, a creature of fitful, delicate charm. Mrs Morel is very Northern; she has, with the harshness of her lat.i.tude, its fine courage and its ambition; Paul Morel, the hero, is Mr Lawrence himself, the little blue flower on the clinker heap. And those other folk about him, dark Miriam, slowly brooding over him; her rival, that conquering captive of s.e.x; the brothers, the sisters, and the friends; this intense society is vital and yet undefinably exaggerated. Perhaps not so undefinably, for I am oppressed by unbelief when I find this grouping of agriculturists and colliers responding to the verse of Swinburne and Verlaine, to Italian, to Wagner, to Bach. I cannot believe in the spinet at the pit's mouth.

And yet all this, Mr Lawrence tells us, is true! Well, it is true, but it is not general, and that is what impairs the value of Mr Lawrence's visions. Because a thing is, he believes that it is; when a thing is, it may only be accidental; it may be particular. Now one might discuss at length whether a novelist should concentrate on the general or on the particular, whether he should use the microscope or the aplanetic lense, and many champions will be found in the field. I will not attempt to decide whether he should wish, as Mr Wells, to figure all the world, or as Mr Bennett, to take a section; probably the ideal is the mean. But doubtless the novelist should select among the particular that which has an application to the general, and it may safely be said that, if Mr Lawrence errs at all, it is in selecting such particular as has not invariably a universal application.

Mr Lawrence lays himself open to this criticism in a work such as _Sons and Lovers_, because it has a conscious general scope, but in _The Trespa.s.ser_ his conception is of a lesser compa.s.s. The book holds a more minute psychological intention. That Sigmund should leave his wife for another love and find himself driven to his death by an intolerable conflict between his desire, the love he bears his children, and the consciousness of his outlawry, should have made a great book. But this one of Mr Lawrence's novels fails because the author needs a wide sphere within which the particular can evolve; he is clamouring within the narrow limits of his incident; Sigmund appears small and weak; unredeemed by even a flash of heroism; his discontented wife, her self-righteous child hold their own views, and not enough those of the world which contains them. An amazing charge to make against a novelist, that his persons are too much persons! But persons must partly be types, or else they become monsters.

It would be very surprising if Mr Lawrence were not a poet in verse as well as in prose, if he did not sing when addressing his love:--

'Coiffing up your auburn hair In a Puritan fillet, a chaste white snare To catch and keep me with you there So far away.'

But a poet he is much more than a rebel, and that distinguishes him from the realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, and not at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from the world, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has to give, flower, beast, woman, he begs more:--

'You, Helen, who see the stars As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree, You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses, Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me,'

'Helen, you let my kisses steam Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink Me up, I pray; oh, you who are Night's Bacchante, How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!'

I cannot, having no faith in my power to judge poetry, proclaim Mr Lawrence to Parna.s.sus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where an urgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and pain together coupled, can remain unheard.

And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien a little to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also an authoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prose drama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always as remote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams.

For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future if he cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not only the dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so far he has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation with himself, for that every writer must do a little; but he has followed his life so very closely, so often photographed his own emotions, that unless life holds for him many more adventures, and unless he can retain the power to give minor incident individual quality, he may find himself written out. For Mr Lawrence has not what is called ideas. He is stimulated by the eternal rather than by the fugitive; the fact of the day has little significance for him; thus, if he does not renew himself he may become monotonous, or he may cede to his more dangerous tendency to emphasise overmuch. He may develop his illusion of culture among the vulgar until it is incredible; he may be seduced by the love he bears nature and its throbbings into allowing his art to dominate him. Already his form is often turgid, amenable to no discipline, tends to lead him astray. He sees too much, feels significances greater than the actual; with arms that are too short, because only human, he strives to embrace the soul of man. This is exemplified in his last novel, _The Rainbow_, of which little need be said, partly because it has been suppressed, and mainly because it is a bad book. It is the story of several generations of people so excessive s.e.xually as to seem repulsive. With dreadful monotony the women exhibit riotous desire, the men slow cruelty, ugly sensuality; they come together in the illusion of love and clasp hatred within their joined arms. As in _Sons and Lovers_, but with greater exaggeration, Mr Lawrence detects hate in love, which is not his invention, but he magnifies it into untruth. His intensity of feeling has run away with him, caused him to make particular people into monsters that mean as little to us, so sensually crude, so flimsily philosophical are they, as any Medusa, Medea, or Klytemnestra. _The Rainbow_, as also some of Mr Lawrence's verse, is the fruit of personal angers and hatreds; it was born in one of his bad periods from which he must soon rescue himself. If he cannot, then the early hopes he aroused cannot endure and he must sink into literary neurasthenia.

2. AMBER REEVES

'I don't agree with you at all.' As she spoke I felt that Miss Amber Reeves would have greeted as defiantly the converse of my proposition.

She stood in a large garden on Campden Hill, where an at-home was proceeding, her effect heightened by Mr Ford Madox Hueffer's weary polish, and the burning twilight of Miss May Sinclair. Not far off Mr Wyndham Lewis was languid and Mr Gilbert Cannan eloquently silent. Miss Violet Hunt, rather mischievous, talked to Mr Edgar Jepson, who obviously lay in ambush, preparing to slay an idealist, presumably Sir Rabindrahath Tagore. I felt very mild near this young lady, so dark in the white frock of simplicity or artifice, with broad cheeks that recalled the rattlesnake, soft cheeks tinted rather like a tea rose, with long, dark eyes, wicked, aggressive, and yet laughing. I felt very old--well over thirty. For Miss Reeves had just come down from Newnham, and, indeed, that afternoon she was still coming down ... on a toboggan.

When I met her the other day she said: 'Well, perhaps you are right.'

It's queer how one changes!

She was about twenty-three, and that is not so long ago; she was still the child who has been 'brought up pious,' attended Sunday School and felt a peculiar property in G.o.d. Daughter of a New Zealand Cabinet Minister and of a mother so rich in energy that she turned to suffrage the scholarly Mr Pember Reeves, Miss Amber Reeves was a spoilt child.

She was also the child of a principle, had been sent to Kensington High School to learn to be democratic and meet the butcher's daughter. She had been to Newnham too, taken up socialism, climbed a drain pipe and been occasionally sought in marriage. At ten she had written poems and plays, then fortunately gave up literature and, as a sponge flung into the river of life, took in people as they were, arrived at the maxim that things do not matter but only the people who do them. A last attempt to organise her took place in the London School of Economics, where she was to write a thesis; one sometimes suspects that she never got over it.

This is not quite just, for she is changed. Not hostile now, but understanding, interested in peculiarities as a magpie collecting spoons. Without much illusion, though; her novels are the work of a faintly cynical Mark Tapley.

She is driven to mimic the ordinary people whom she cannot help loving, who are not as herself, yet whom she forgives because they amuse her.

She is still the rattlesnake of gold and rose, but (zoological originality) one thinks also of an Italian greyhound with folded paws, or a furred creature of the bush that lurks and watches with eyes mischievous rather than cruel.