D. H. LAWRENCE.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19918, 3 May 1930, Page 13

D. H. LAWRENCE.

[By R. Elms Roberts in the "New Statesman."]

[Several of th« English roviewi to hand by the latest matt have articles on D. H. Lawrence, who died on March 3rd.' One of the best is this essay by Mr R. Ellis Roberts.]

D. H. Lawrence's first novel was published in 1911, when he was twentysix years old. In it there is a gamekeeper, Annable, of whom the heroauthor says:

He was a man of on# idea: that all civilisation was the parasitic fungus o£ rottenness. He hated any sign of culture. I won nis respect one afternoon when he found me trespassing in the woods because I was watching some maggots at work in » dead That led us to a discussion of life- *** . a thorough materialist —he Fcorned religion and all mysticism. . . . When ho ' ho reflected on. the decay of mankind tne decline of the human race into follyana weakness and rottenness. 4 'Be a good arum , true to your animal instinct," was his roott ♦ With all this he was fundamentally very unhappy—and he mado mo also wretched.

So in his youth Lawrence projects rather too simply one aspoct of himself which was, as he grew older, to become more and more prominent. Thore is no radical change in his mind or spirit from the early poems to "Pansies," or from "Tho White Peacoclc" and "Sons and Lovers" to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." His anger, mounting at times to a chattering insanity, against the intellect and its works, had in it always tho impotent despair of a man who found himself unable ultimately to give Itfs ideas tho intellectual expression which he knew they needed: and his incapacity bred in liiin a strange and insolent disgust. Yet Lawrence, at his best, bad an intellectual genius second to no English author's of his time; and he had beside an original fire, a spiritual force far greater than any other novelist's. It is the measure of his ambition and his pride in his work that, having so much, he was so grievously dissatisfied. Or was he, in the end, plagued by the impossible disloyalty of his prophetic task, tho task of discrediting reason by reason, of abusing tho intellect and its works by the weapon of tho intellect, and of using the splendour and force of the spiritual imagination to enthrone the usurping figure of tho human animal! He never resolved the conflict. In his gospel sex—which is for him in its positive qualities almost always masculine—remains neither an animal quality simply nor a means of spiritual expression, but a power separato from man, and in strange antagonism with him. His was the distressed, frustrated boy's view of sex, celebrated by him in the poem "Virgin Youth." It is an auto-erotic view, and has nothing of the coarse and easy companionship of the phalliclsm of the ancients. ... In all this side of his work Lawrence was the victim and the symbol of his age. Terribly in neod of a religion, ho could neither accept nor invent one; in his mystical life, except for a few flashes caught from alien luminaries in skies that his philosophy compelled him to regard as painted fancies, he progressed from darkness to darkness. If one would realiso how great a less to Lawrence was this absence of a uni- j verse, the insensate pressure on him of a contradictory, incoherent mass of desperato lifo, one has only to compare him and his career with that of Jonathan Swift. Swift, too, had a grave unease for life; Swift, in a different way, was monstrously preoccupied with the facts of sox; Swift, again very differently, took refuge from the life of tho mina—but ho believed in a universe, and Mb defiance, his denial, his tormented and frustrated irony will always be a hundred times moro effective than Lawrence's, since he believed in the existence of the things he lacked, sought them In himself, and when he found them was capable of mental self-discipline. While the prophetic in Lawrence is doomed at first to dismay and soon to weary the reader, the poetic in him is to some of us the finest, most precious, most flamingly real thing in modern English fiction. ( One book, neglected rather, "Tho Trespasser," has not a little o£ tho intense quality of Web-\ Bter's plays; there iB a similar spiritual quality in its terror, a similar unearthly dread in its suspense, and in stibtlety and delicacy it far exceeds the Elizabethan dramatist. When ho writes of the country, of trees, of the bleak landscape of his own north, of animals, he controls a range of colours that is unequalled. In the mines which surrounded his boyhood, the thick gross darkness may be suddenly split by tho light of tho firedamp; so on Lawrence's gloomy 60ul and dark, obscure mind there will Buddonly blaze some glorious light, bo brilliant that one forgets its dangerous origin. It is as if he, the child of the mineß, was born with an Insatiable lust for the sunlight there imprisoned, and would riot or could not find it except by creeping, half naked, shameless, exposed, in the dreadful inwards of the earth. He Bees the light, he sees the green and the blue of nature with a keenness, a vital onergy that make the Latin vision of sueh authors as Gautier or d'Annunzio appear of the studio or the salon. Here is one passage from "The White Peacock":

The wood was high and warm. Along the ridings the forget-me-nots ware knee deep, stretching,. glimmering into the distance HVo the Mi'ky Way through the night. They left the tall, flower-tangled paths to go in among the bluebells, breaking through the closepressed flowers and ferns till they came to an oak which had fallen across the hazels, where thoy sat, half screened. The hyacinths •drooped magnificently with an overweight of purple, or they stood pale and erect, like unrips ears of purple corn. Heavy bees swung down in a blunder of oxtravagance among the purpls flowers. They were intoxicated even with the sight of so much blue. The sound of their hearty, wanton humming came clear upon the solemn boom of the wind overhead. The sight of their clinging, clambering riot gave satisfaction to the soul. A rosy campion flower caught the sun and Bhone out. An elm sent down a shower of flesh-tinted sheaths upon them.

And here is another quotation, less ecstatic, from "Aaron's Bod":

They cams to o little inn near a bridge, where a broad stream rustled bright and shallow. It was a sunny, warm day, and Aaron and Lilly had a table outside under the'thin trees at the top of the bank above the river. The yellow leaves were falling—tho Tuscan sky was turquoise blue. Jn the stream below three naked boyß still adventurously bathed, and lay flat on the in the sun. A waggon-with two pale, loving, velvety oxen drew slowly aowh the nill, lookIng at each step as if they were going to come to rest, to move no more. But still tney stepped forward. Till they cftme to the inn, and there they stood at rest. Two old women were picking the last acorns under three scrubhy oak trees, whilst a girl with bare feet drove her two goats and a sh#»ep up from the water-side towards the women. The girl wore a dress that had been blue, perhaps Indigo, but which had faded to the beautiful lavender-purple colour which is so common, and which always reminded Lilly of purple anemones in the south.

Of his rendering of men and women it is more difficult to speak. Save for his he cannot let them alone. He, the great champion of solitariness, of independence, teases, torments, perplexes his poor creatures until they cry out in his accents and mouth his shibboleths. In one book —"The Lost Girl" —he attempted a more objective kind of novel, and in a way succeeded, but in his Success he lost something, and the book does not pulsate with that angry life which is at the core of nearly all his others. For strangely as he derided life, confusing it with its easiest) most instinctive expressions, Lawrence always desired life: he crept,

in and out through tho coal, blinded by sweat, irked by his awkward posture, bating the peopled loneliness, ana the strange intimacy which was no intimacy, and then, suddenly would, come the blaze, in which he, though scorched, could survive, and he hailed that false splendour as if it were the sun's self. He hailed in the false . fire the sullied splendour, of the true, and because hp caught at love and life from the edge of decay and desolation, ho could not believe that, anywhere, there was any peace, any safety. So all his life he worked, taking his mines ataout with him; the one thing he might have done, and by doing, found a place he could accept, that he never did. He never abandoned those deep and tortuous passages. He never left the mines.