naar SESH bWiant MEER TAO EN } i ; i 5 5 : RUSE ENE ASLAN EEmM VIL Sage . Ht He Hg a pa if et} ee ia i : : ante { i { i ‘ i 24, i 5 A, i MN i ‘ : d ; : "| ; i Rae ny a : ie Me a F i ae ae Ht if ies: 34 re aa. v Pl | db 3 anes oe i uy i] file i i i Ae i y Hi a : / he i i i i i T ii Ni} 4 i i Hi “4 ig isgeecgaeays & tees r rane: Rae | | | ie See aei a ash em a MAL cha oe aba seb epab apannannnteione Gistends SotnaAte® | { ved a | | | | | | | | | J fe Bd LSE PORET PDN sti wretrenaeet rele tr ear eee es D. H. Lawrence @ An Indiscretion By RicHarp ALDINGTON SAU: a en NUMBER SIX UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON CHAPBOOKS Edited by Glenn Hughes jie SCTE ARO Ge ane GeesPrice 65cparrene” Tee eR:nn i aaa WN as ae \ i st bau ai llez \ eee a eeUNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON CHAPBOOKS No.1. A Short View of Menckenism—In Menckenese By Joseru B. Harrison No.2. The Painter Looks at Nature By Watrer F. Isaacs No. 3. Four and Twenty Block-Prints for Four and Twenty Rhymes Old Nursery Rhymes Illustrated by Students at the Univer- sity of Washington, under the Direction of Herren Ruopes No.4. Gdipus or Pollyanna, With a Note on Dramatic Censorship By Barrett H. Crarx No. 5. Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes By Vernon Louis ParrinGTon No. 6. D. H. Lawrence. An Indiscretion By Ricyarp ALDINGTON In Preparation Lillian Gish: An Interpretation By Epwarp WaGENKNECHTRR ee— % 5 eo NG E NUMBER SIX UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON CHAPBOOKS Edited by Glenn Hughes D. H. LAWRENCE An IndiscretionD. H. Lawrence An Indiscretion By RicHarp ALDINGTON 1927 University or WasHincron Boox StrorE Seattle PPE, ee — ~e ie — a espe NS. 055 eGCopyright, 1927, by Ricuarp ALDINGTON Bi Ly Printed in the United States of AmericaD. H. LAWRENCE An Indiscretion EE a MOOI ELE GED RI LON " Sine cere Ain. i cette TN ee TIT TRIE rr ales De RR te EITM OE ee a ae PER) he PERT eat a f seowtatj SIGE SS ET i | [ You tell me I am wrong. | Who are you, who is anybody to tell me al I am wrong? I am not wrong. ‘ —D. H. LawrenceD. H. LAWRENCE An Indiscretion H. Lawrence is a great living example 1) of the English Heretic. Continental J nations follow a doctrine—that is called e f being Catholic; the English follow a man—that is called being Heretical. The Christians began by following a man, but the Roman Empire soon saw to it that they trans- formed the man into a doctrine, a good many doc- trines. The same principles are at work in our modern intellectual life. In France they found a movement, Symbolisme, or Cubisme, or Thom- isme; everybody joins it, except a small opposi- tion necessary for mutual advertisement, and in ten years Ja gloire is conquered. In England it is just the opposite; we hang onto our independence with morose determination. Our great men, and our little men, are always looking for opportuni- ties to abandon the movement or the majority. In France, royal favour and a pension, or nowa- days a red button rosette and a seat in the Acad- emy, are the marks of literary glory. In gu ‘ i8 D. H. LAWRENCE England, contumely, persecution, exile, fierce solitariness show the man of genius. Think of Shakespeare, throwing up a social career in Lon- don, leaving his plays unpublished and going contemptuously home to Stratford to breed bul- locks. Think of Swift exiled to Dublin and shaking the Government with his pamphlets, Pope at Twitnam (“Men who do not fear God, fear me.”), Shelley a public scandal, Byron the world’s exile, Blake playing Adam and Eve with Mrs. Blake in the greenhouse, Tennyson hiding behind the juniper bush. Not Ja gloire, not the triumph of a doctrine or a party, but the vindica- tion, the assertion of a man’s own soul in the man’s own way—that is the English heresy. And if you want a tradition for Lawrence, there it 1s. Let the heavens fall, let Rome in Tiber melt, but the Lawrenceness of Lawrence must be asserted. “You tell me I am wrong,” says Lawrence indig- nantly, “I am not wrong.” Of course he is not wrong; he is Lawrence. It is not a question of being right or wrong (i. e., by reference to some outside standard, some body of doctrine, some Absolute) but of being oneself, a person, a man. The English love their Heretics, for with all their deep conservatism, all their hatred of whatAN INDISCRETION 9 is incorrect and of what makes them think, some- where deep down they know that their Heretics are the life of the race, the salt of the earth. In their life-time the Heretics are spewed forth, driven into defeat by the shock-troops of Philistia. If they live to be eighty and harmless, they are made peers of the realm. When they die, they are solemnly interred in the National Pantheon and a new paragraph or even chapter is added to the Cambridge History of English Literature. Lawrence is now in the “spewed forth” stage, and is correspondingly sore; but this ts the way to treat the great Heretic—if he is not in a state of con- tinuous exacerbation and moral indignation, he cannot put forth all his powers. Unless he is a scandal, he cannot be a force. Unless he is in a minority of one, he cannot fulfill his task of shat- tering standards of values and asserting the strength of at least one man to think for himself and to be himself. This is far less common than is usually supposed. Most people have no per- sonality to assert, and there is nothing so comic as to see the amateur supermen strutting in their borrowed plumes. Lawrence borrows no plumes; in fact he plucks himself naked and exhibits him- self thus with devilish glee to the shocked repro-10 D. H. LAWRENCE bation of a very dull world. He is good for England, he is still better for America, the home of the smug and the moral ostrich. Lawrence will not flatter any person or any mob, however powerful and immediately successful. He 1s no Dr. Pangloss Crane, patting stupidly on the back and handing bouquets to commercial efficiency. Do not apply to him for assurance that all is for the best in this best of all possible Republics. Far from shaking Babbitt and John Bull by the hand, Lawrence indignantly, savagely and exultingly kicks them in the backside. A puritan somewhere at heart—he treats lust as a serious passion—he is scandalised by the assertion that we ought to love everybody. He scorns a peak quotation, he hates a Rotarian like the devil (I err, he respects the devil, for the devil was the first English Here- tic—see Paradise Lost), he has the fullest, most scornful, most petulant and most justifiable con- tempt for a civilization which accumulates masses of apparatus and more or less useless possessions at the expense of violent labour and at a loss of all or nearly all that makes life interesting and valu- able. Safety last is his motto. Live, live, live, he cries, you have only a few years to do it in; don’t waste time making dollars and becoming a veldAN INDISCRETION 11 public character. What matters to men and women is not owning things or bossing other peo- ple or being praised by the newspapers or forming leagues to stop cigarette-smoking or to advance the practice of contraception, but being them- selves and seizing all the great, primitive, com- mon joys of consciousness which most people neglect for meaner aims. Lawrence despises Socialism, it is too conservative and organized. He is a true Anarchist,* living outside human society, rejecting all its values, fiercely concen- trated on his own values. Those who think him a danger to social order would be right if there were the slightest chance of any considerable num- ber of people being made to think by a set of unpopular novels and free verse poems. Law- rence is the champion of the individual in his age- long struggle against collective tyrannies. He is rude, cantankerous, vain, presumptuous, pig- headed, satirical, but he is a man, a savage defender of his own liberty; and I love him for it. Put the old test to him: “If every man lived as Law- rence lives, if every man did as he teaches, what would happen to the world?” Well, society would *T his Lawrence denies, but it 1s true.12 D. H. LAWRENCE collapse. And a good thing too, he would say. I confess I am more cynical; if this society col- lapsed, we should only get a worse one, for in times of confusion the scum always rises to the top. But the main trend of our social life is for a vast mediocre majority, with mean aims and paltry ideas, with limited capacities and inane ideals, to impose its views on every human activ- ity and to crush the individual. Lawrence is a living protest against this great flopping tyranny. He sees with piercing contempt that the daily chant which rises from the progressive world: “Day by day in every way we grow richer and richer, and we thank Thee, O Lord, that we are not as other men were,” is the merest humbug and delusion. Have you ever seen a modern suc- cessful man after he was successful? Tear down his veil of self-complacency and behold a pitiable spectacle of boredom and bewilderment. He is free to live as he chooses, but he has thrown away life in order to succeed; he cannot live, he can only kill time. He denied the gods, and now the gods deny him. He has much; he és nothing. It is against that sort of folly that Lawrence rages, for there is something of the Hebrew prophet in him. In a sense he is profoundly right. InAN INDISCRETION 13 adapting ourselves to the imperious needs of the great social machine, we sacrifice too much, we lose all direct contact with realities, we live like machines in a small set of runs and borrows. In seeking earnestly the means of life, we forget to live. In adapting ourselves to the great mediocre mass, we cease to be ourselves; and when we grow uneasy, when we meditate rebellion, we are brought up sharply by the social fetters while legions of evangelists assure us that all is for the best in this best of all possible lives. Now, D. H. Lawrence is a free man, thinking his own thoughts, living his own life, going his own way, not seek- ing recognition or money or disciples or influence, but determined to get directly in contact with realities and passionately interested in his own perception of the world. II Among all the writers I have met (and some of them are very paltry fellows) Lawrence possesses the most vivid and uncompromising personality. He has a wounding capacity for not adapting him- self to others. His psychological insight enables14 D. H. LAWRENCE him to flatter women into bubbling sympathy and to irritate men into sharp hostility. Like most geniuses, he prefers women because they have been trained not to contradict and will not punc- ture his assertions with argument and fact. Few things enrage him more than to be convicted of an error in fact. Need I add that his assertions are sometimes more daring than true, more picturesque than accurate? But a great personality is not at the mercy of an Encyclopedia. Not that Law- rence is ignorant; he has picked up several modern languages which he talks with fluency and gram- matical incorrectness, and he has read omnivor- ously though he pretends not to, and sedulously avoids possessing books. But the amount of formal or general knowledge possessed by a poet (a “creator”) is comparatively unimportant; it 1s only a means of illustrating his perceptions and intuitions. The strength, the profundity, the range, the acuity of Lawrence’s perceptions and intuitions make him so interesting. One goes to him, I repeat, not for a doctrine but a personality. Lawrence’s face has been moulded by his per- sonality, just as his prose has been made to carry the very tones of his voice. When I first saw him (in 1914) I was rather disappointed. It was atAN INDISCRETION 15 an inane dinner—in a private suite at the Berkeley Hotel, of all places! At that time he was success- ful and the débacle of The Rainbow and the war had not driven him into the wilderness so unpleasantly necessary to the Heretic. He was clean-shaved except for a small ginger moustache and he came into the room looking rather like a competent private soldier in evening dress. But you were immediately impressed by his fiery blue eye and the pleasing malice of his talk. Now his face has grown harder and finer, all vulgarity has been purged away in Heaven knows what agon- ised communings; the head looks moulded of some queer-coloured stone, the beard gives the right touch of Mohammedan “touch-me-not-ye-un- clean,” and the blue eyes are more assertive than ever and seem to exist méilepehdently of their owner. And his voice—such a pleasant devil’s voice, with its shrill little titters and sharp mock- eries and even more insulting flatteries. At any moment one expects to see him sprout horns and a tail and cloven hoofs and to run trotting about poking his dull or resentful guests with a neat little pitchfork. He adores playing the game of smashing peoples’ values. He will collect some respectable old women of both sexes and demoral- eee cas Me ea Re)16 D. H. LAWRENCE iii capa nota ca eaten esreuremmmne coma ise them by proving that prostitution is a religious rite (as indeed it was) and vowing that the pros- titute should be honoured above all women as the priestess of a glorious ceremony. If he suspects you of any social snobbery he will plunge into stories of his childhood as a miner’s son and drop into Derbyshire dialect. He invites worshippers at the Great Man’s Shrine to assist him with the washing-up. He loathes a scholar, and titters and tee-hees and too-hoos at all the monuments of literary research. He is more restless than a legion of devils, and yet he can live perfectly happily in remote places, so long as the weather is fine, the prospect beautiful, the peasants or Indians or other aborigines docile, and the callers infrequent. He has his vanities, little. and big, but never was there a man who more hatéd humbug, pedantry and all the apparatus of the “literary.” Where Lawrence is, there talk—his talk— abounds. I think I have never heard better, nor have I read of any in the past more alert and inter- esting and amusing. But suffer him not to inveigh upon mysticism, metaphysics or politics—there he can be, and often is, a crashing bore. He needs space and no competitors for his talk, though he can be witty enough in ordinary chatter. At his17 AN INDISCRETION best, he talks novels—almost better than he writes —and needs only an attentive and moderately intelligent audience, murmuring interjections at the right moments. Get him after a meal and start him on his proper line—character, human relations and the penetration of the human person- ality by savage life and strange countries, the mag- ical effect of landscapes on the mind, his mind— and you will not say that talking is a lost art. It is a great spectacle to see Lawrence building up a “situation,” starting from the merest silly gossip and rising, like a sharp-tongued hawk, in sweep after sweep of words to a literary display of the : first order. i Of course, this wandering in distant places of the world, these prolonged spells of comparative solitude, this absence from the intellectual centres, inevitably result in a slight provincialism. In |. some respects Lawrence has never got beyond 1912 and at odd times startles one by some echo of » London life in those distant days. His objection % to any form of serious literary culture dates from » that period, when it was fashionable and perhaps » necessary as a revolt against a tediously erudite 4 Romanticism. But that is the price the Heretic \. pays; in trying to be for all time he is inevitably18 D. H. LAWRENCE and always a little behind the times. This even when admirably stage-managed makes the role of prophet a little ridiculous. And Lawrence dis- dains any sort of stage-management. When he threatens us with Revolutions and blood he has simply omitted to notice that the great bloc plays only for safety first and that its motto is “piano, pianissimo,” in all matters of change. Nor can I share his passionate and bloody hatred of coal- owners; for since it is clear that robbers we must have, it is better to keep satiated and slightly con- science-stricken robbers than to make prodigious efforts in order to install a set of hungry new ones whose “idealism” will excuse any rapacity. All this in Lawrence is a survival of class-hatred (sedulously fostered in England, I am bound to admit, by the imbecile provocation of the “uppers”) but a man like Lawrence ought to be above the feuds of gutter Guelfs and club Ghib- ellines. After all, the lower classes (if one must use the odious term) are just as tedious as every- one else; platitude is not a monopoly of the white- collar men. Yet Lawrence is as magnanimous as is convenient for a narrow-minded poet of intui- tive genius. And he has never lacked great exper- ience. His mind has always been alert, has never =o |AN INDISCRETION 19 subsided in the placid or cowardly acquiescence of the middle age which chronologically threatens him. He has not gone round the world as a tour- ist. Of all the men who missed the actual exper- ience of European warfare, Lawrence least shows it. He neither apologizes nor pacifically blusters. He knows how tragically imbecile it all was as well as any soldier and, without the soldier’s experience, he has learned the true horror of the world. In fact, he is almost too acutely conscious of it, a little hysterical about it, a little subject to frissons Phorreur at memories of Mexico, and not suffici- ently aware that if we continue to live we must accept the horror as one of the conditions. The fact that the bloc never perceives the horror, thinks that God is a good man, (possibly a fat man), that it will all come right on Monday, that the huge implacable forces can be dodged or placated or intimidated by little fetishes like bath-tubs and Bible-meetings and skyscrapers e tutti guanti—this exasperates Lawrence. Why it should, Heaven knows. But that is where the 1912 comes in; he is not disillusioned enough. As I proceed to paint the portrait of this respect- able man, the memories of his virtues crowd thickly upon me. Might it not be well to recast20 D. H. LAWRENCE these haphazard notes into a formal éloge? Or into a funeral oration beginning: Mes fréres, Dieu seul est grand? Yet I must praise him because he possesses a negative virtue dear to me. He has no social, moral or intellectual affections. He 1s neither Oxford nor Chelsea, neither Cambridge nor Bloomsbury (“My dear fellow, they’re quite too marvellous”), neither red nor primrose, inno- cent alike of simple faith and Norman blood, spit- ting with equal contempt on kind hearts and coronets. Never have I known a man so free from every kind of snobbery. He has not even the inverted snobbery of the drawing-room revolu- tionary. He is even free from the snobbery of the working-man who is too proud to speak to a gen- tleman. As for intellectual snobbery, there | welcome his “tee-hees” and “too-hoos,” which puff away a deal of silly cant and affectation. I draw a distinction between artifice and affectation. The gentleman is an artifice, invented largely by Castiglione, and brought to its highest pitch by Louis XIV, a very great gentleman. Lawrence is not a gentleman. For one thing, he realises the artifice 1s out-worn; and then he is struggling with the newer and more fascinating problem of being Lawrence. Affectation is the outward sign of an wl AtAN INDISCRETION 21 inner self-consciousness, an uneasy and vain emo- tion, the mark of the inferior man. You see it in certain Americans in Europe, picking up some cheap Wardour Street pose or blustering about the glories of their state and power in order to hide their only too obvious sense of inferiority. And you see it abominably in England, where people strive to hide their vacuity and to palliate their nullity under the disguise of any one of half a hundred “manners.” ‘The Oxford manner, the legal manner, the professional manner, the sport- ing manner, the Mayfair manner, the born-idiot manner, the weary highbrow manner, the suburban manner, the tradesman-out-of-business-hours manner, the “Dear Sir and Bro.” manner of the modest Labour place-hunter, the bloody-bones and bugaboo manner of the Comrades—leagues and oceans of affectation. Lawrence scorns them all. Again he wins my approval by his total indiffer- ence to sports of all sorts. Since he lives intensely, since his mind is perpetually active and his senses acutely employed, he has no need to kill time by killing animals or birds or by propelling balls in competitive feats or by glowering over indoor games. Superior even to the great Gibbon, he never feels it necessary to relax over a game of eth iar Cnet A REI I AI a en im Ce Merete: eR. tim, emetic anSORE ta a a rT wr re en ee ren em 5 fi Sr eas 22 D. H. LAWRENCE cards. Is life so long, is the mind so dull, is there so little to see and do and feel and know, that we must waste the unique (if diabolical) gift of consciousness in silly games? If anyone presented Lawrence with a golf-club or a cricket-bat he would (at least I hope he would) crack him over the head with it. The nadir of imbecility to which the sporting Englishman descends can only be faintly indicated by reference to the golfing articles in the Times—O Pécuchet, Pécuchet!— and to the habit of wearing plus fours. A man who wears plus fours is capable of admiring the Prince of Wales—that well-scrubbed compendium of nullities. Lawrence, being a man of independ- ent mind, looks and laughs at all that. Better still, he pays no attention to it. He lives in a world different from that of these hordes of easily- amused cretins. He craves for the realities; noth- ing less will satisfy him. For these and many other reasons, which I do not wait to set down, I see Lawrence as a great character. And a great Englishman. Ill This character of Lawrence which I discover (or invent) has found expression in a series of novels = asp manAN INDISCRETION 23 and poems, travel books and stories, which have appeared with startling rapidity in the past fifteen years. [here are people who deprecate Lawrence’s fertility. I think they are wrong. An intense fertility is one of the signs of genius. Nearly all great writers are fertile, and the notion of a small highly-wrought output—one or’ two volumes— representing the lifework of a great artist is the apology of sterile pedants. One of the element- ary requisites of a great writer is a ceaseless indus- try. Lawrence, I admit, works too carelessly and his lack of form is sometimes an exasperation. But unpremeditated and spontaneous creation is the very essence of the Romantic and the Heretic. All this regrettable splurging is a condition of Law- rence’s genius. It must be accepted and the reader must bump over the rough and arid and silly spots as best he can. And this fundamental principle of criticism must never be forgotten when judg- ing Lawrence: That a writer is to be judged by his positive and not by his negative qualities. Any laborious fool can be correct, any plodding pedant can avoid many of Lawrence’s faults, but only a man of genius could equal his positive achieve- ments. There is a type of literary man—we all know him—who lives and thinks and writes in invisible SI en ti ea TOOT EE LOR © Rea eee SR Col ORC ire aeectnae: is ‘Meo: OR TORTI. ie ie ee ae ie Vay24 D. H. LAWRENCE inverted commas. He drinks port because Tenny- son did; he lives in London because Johnson did, or in the country because Rousseau did; he is care- ful not to split an infinitive because the grammar books condemn the practise, or he is careful to split it because Browning did; he is a vegetarian because Shelley was, or he ostentatiously devours slabs of meat because he wants to show how differ- ent he is from the Eustace Milesians; he writes without punctuation because James Joyce does, or he labours over his style with imbecile minuteness because Flaubert did; he is a Socialist because his tutor was a Tory, or a Tory because he is endeav- ouring to apologise for his Middle Western origins; in short, as I say, he lives, thinks and writes in inverted commas. Not so Lawrence. He lives his own life, thinks his own thoughts, and writes in his own way. He has a superb disre- gard for form, a truculent carelessness that baffles the pedants. He writes as he talks, you can hear his voice. I could write a slashing attack on Law- rence’s prose; I could show its faults, its abysmal drops, its vain repetitions (he uses the word “curious” ninety times in seventy pages), its silli- ness, its crudities which a single careful revision would have eradicated; I leave the task to theAN INDISCRETION 25 grave-diggers of literary reputations. I am con- tent to look for the positive qualities which make Lawrence’s books a genuine contribution to liter- ature. Tabulating the qualities of authors is a little like making a list of female perfections: Item, a nose indifferent straight, item, a pair of comely legs, item, she shingles and should bob. I leave to nobler hands the task of deciding what Law- rence’s philosophy is and exactly what is its value; for every philosophy, even that of a poet, can be reduced to insignificance by the criticism of rival philosophers. The utmost of my ambition here is to add a few quotations illustrating the gifts of a great, but careless and unequal, artist. The phil- osophy of an artist is of no importance except to himself; it is his skeleton, his framework, his drawing-board, while we are concerned with the body, the building and the picture. As each fash- ionable philosophy flutters the inhabitants of the literary Corioli, all the accepted authors in turn are shown to be embodiments of that philosophy. Lawrence’s philosophy may be Bergsonian or Russelite, it may be the greatest nonsense for all I care; Dieu merci, an artist is not to be judged by such trifles. I bequeath this “line of research” to bine eee. Aree mae te tiem nett anettex ct cs 26 D. H. LAWRENCE my solemn friends, the Thomists. Let them make what they can of it. Therefore I say that these are the qualities I think I discern in Lawrence’s books: A remarkable intuitive insight into character, a subtle sense of complicated human relations, an exquisite sense of beauty, a sense of the mystery of things, a power of using countries and landscapes and animals to interpret the human mind and its moods and trage- dies, a great gift of description and evocation, and lastly the “gift of interest” which is very hard to analyze but which one feels almost unconsciously —I mean that Lawrence will make you interested in almost anything he writes whereas other authors with all kinds of negative virtues are merely bor- ing. His personality, at once so forcibly interesting and so annoying, is faithfully mirrored in his books. Another virtue of Lawrence’s books is that the good portions are unforgettable. For instance, in The Lost Girl there is a lot of balderdash about people playing at Red Indians, puerile stuff; yet who can forget the characters of Alvina and the Italian, and the magnificent description of the journey into the lonely Italian mountain village in winter? Similarly, there are execrable patches in Lawrence’s poems, and unforgettably striking SS ||AN INDISCRETION 27 beauties. No doubt, when time has cast a halo over these books, when they become part of the English course, these defects and lapses will be discovered to be characteristic beauties. Mean- while, one can but say what one feels. There is one character Lawrence always draws admirably—himself. And he has a weird, rather fanciful intuition into women’s minds and feelings. He interprets wonderfully the rich, warm, wine- like quality of sexual desire, nuzzling between great milky breasts of sensation; and then he flies out with something hard and sharp and cruel— puts out his devil’s horns, and titters. When he is mystic he is disgusting, like a Revivalist meeting with Quetzalcoatl instead of whatever dim dingy deity they worship at revivals. For no man escapes his birth-heritage and upbringing, and in Lawrence there lurks the hard Derbyshire miner and the queer mystical noncomformist and the spasms of rage which sometimes sweep over these people. Perhaps his rich sensuality comes to him from them too. But in him all this is sublimated and, in addition, he has the sense of vivid life and the poignant love of beauty which must have died in these people’s ancestors with the puritan war. It is a fancy of mine that the war between the King eee RUM ee Bact ale eben) Coat Ca a alt SR ON Pr NY ¢ é § t ' - € t28 D. H. LAWRENCE and the Parliament is still waged in the minds of some of us, that the issue was not really settled that cold January morning on the scaffold at Whitehall. There could be no other end and the Parliament were right and by their victory we gained many valuable things; but the sweep of that axe killed more than the King, it killed the gaiety and the music and the rich sensuality of the English people. And all the Restoration carous- ing could not bring back the something that was killed. Here and there, very occasionally, among Englishmen you will find some traces of the real English spirit; never in the trading classes, some- times in the gentry, more often in the people. I like to pretend to myself at any rate that Lawrence is one of these almost extinct real Englishmen; which explains why he both loves and hates England. It is customary to deplore Lawrence’s sensuality and his books have been mutilated by lawyers, those admirable hypocrites; I think he should be praised for it. Sensuality is never obscene; it is the nice frigid people who are really dirty-minded. I think Lawrence ought to publish a special expurgated edition of his works, entitled: “Expurgated edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, with all sensuality and beauty MWYAN INDISCRETION 29 removed. May be placed in all hands, female, legal, medical and moral. With an appendix con- taining the interesting passages from Ulysses.” It is not possible to illustrate the major gifts of a novelist by quotation. The slow building up of character, the development of “situations,” the play and relations of minds and bodies, the dramatic intensity, cannot be scooped out in selected passages. I shall not pretend to do more than turn over some of his books and to tear out some passages I like. Almost at once I find some- thing very characteristic, his love of flowers and subtle ability to make them interpretative of human emotion: “After a spell of hot, intensely dry weather she felt she would die in this valley, wither and go to powder as some exposed April roses withered and dried into dust against a hot wall. Then the cool wind came in a storm, the next day there was grey sky and soft air. The rose-coloured wild gladioli among the young green corn were a dream of beauty, the morning of the world. The lovely, pristine morning of the world, before our epoch began. Rose-red gladioli among corn, in among the rocks, and small irises, black-purple and yellow blotched with brown, like a wasp, standing low in er Te i a ade la BEL) baat30 D. H. LAWRENCE little desert places, that would seem forlorn but for this weird, dark-lustrous magnificence. Then there were the tiny irises, only one finger tall, eprowing in dirty places, frail as crocuses, and much tinier, and blue, blue as the eye of the morning heaven, which was a morning earlier, more pristine than ours. The lovely translucent pale irises, tiny and morning-blue, they lasted only a few hours. But nothing could be more exquisite, like gods on earth. It was the flowers that brought back to Alvina the passionate nostalgia for the place. The human influence was a bit horrible to her. But the flowers that came out and uttered the earth im magical expression, they cast a spell on her, bewitched her and stole her own soul away from her.” Perhaps it would not be impossible to pick flaws in that as a piece of writing. Let us sample him in another mood, so keen, so profound, so strangely tragic and poetic: “They were the old-world peasants still about the monastery, with the hard, small bony heads and deep-lined faces and utterly blank minds, crying their speech as crows cry, and living their lives as lizards among the rocks, blindly going on with the little job in hand, the present moment,AN INDISCRETION 31 cut off from all past and future, and having no idea and no sustained emotion, only that eternal will-to-live which makes a tortoise wake up once more in spring, and makes a grasshopper whistle on in moonlight nights even of November. Only these peasants don’t whistle much. The whistlers go to America. It is the hard, static, unhoping souls that persist in the old life. And still they stand back, as one passes them in the corridors of the great monastery, they press themselves back against the whitewashed walls of the still place, and drop their heads, as if some mystery were passing by, some God-mystery, the higher beings, which they must not look closely upon. So also this old peasant—he was not old, but deep-lined like a gnarled bough. He stood with his hat down in his hands, as we spoke to him and answered the short, hard, insentient answers, as a tree might speak.” Then, two pages further on: “We went slowly back. The peaks of those Italian mountains in the sunset, the extinguishing twinkle of the plain away below, as the sun declined and grew yellow; the intensely powerful medizval spirit lingering on this wild hill summit, all the wonder of the medieval past; and then the Seeks ale hdl NS Yor i te Sa Se le IN Si NS a aeaici 32 D. H. LAWRENCE ia a H H huge mossy stones in the wintry wood, that was once a sacred grove; the ancient path through the wood, that led from temple to temple on the hill summit, before Christ was born; and then the great Cyclopean wall one passes at the bend of the road, built even before the pagan temples; all this overcame me so powerfully this afternoon, that I was almost speechless. That hill-top must have been one of man’s intense sacred places for three thousand years. And men die generation after generation, races die, but the new cult finds root in the old sacred place, and the quick spot of earth dies very slowly. Yet at last it too dies. But this quick spot is still not quite dead. The great monastery couchant there, half empty, but also not quite dead. And M and I walking across as the sun set yellow and the cold of the snow came into the air, back home to the monastery! And I feeling as if my heart had once more broken: I don’t know why.” I am not sure of many things, hardly of any- thing really, but I am sure that this is the work of a great artist. And there are scores and scores of such perfect pages in Lawrence’s books. People are so strangely unwilling to admit the genius of a living artist. They feel so meanly of themselves Wyy i AN INDISCRETION 33 that they cannot believe that one of the gods is moving among them, that genius lives in their time. They are insulted by superiority and try to ignore it or to crush it. They are afraid they might have to do something about it, pay some money or get up a vote of thanks. They are only inter- ested in authors when there is a chance of getting some reflected glory, as when their friend Bilge issues his original imitation of an imitation of an imitation. But Lawrence gives you direct contact with his own mind and with the earth and with human life; and so—to our eternal shame—we call in the police-spies and the military and the lawyers and see to it that he is exasperated and hounded into exile and bitter rage. But then, of course, our moral indignation must be allowed to subside a little, for after all the Heretics always ask for what they get. Lawrence did go out of his way to dare the great British Bull, prodding it and snarling at it and flourishing little bits of red in its eyes; and he was more than a little surprised and scared when it charged him. So now he has to pretend that the Bull is about to expire of internal convulsions. I fear Lawrence will expire first. Yet such an old and haughty Bull so proud in arms ought to apologize because it was frightened by a ii la SN eS ‘ Biase as we ase ica get ON oc alt Cas We ed a AG)has “ b | 4 ra | 4 . 34. D. H. LAWRENCE poet. I think England owes Lawrence an apology. I apply to him what he says of the man (himself) in Kangaroo: “One of the most intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for his country, even if it were often a passion of hatred. But no, they persisted he was a foreigner. Pah!”Tae PE TEST ; i i |} | | | | | 2a Rater ba a ea eee