Critical Woodcuts/D. H. Lawrence Cultivates His Beard
D. H. LAWRENCE has been rushing through an evolution. When he first faced the public, he was open-faced, clean-shaven and looked at one squarely from big glowing eyes. Now he resembles a moujik, now he makes himself up to resemble a moujik as much as the heir of all the ages can—a shag of hair across the forehead, eyes alert, defiant, glinting like a squirrel's, snubby nose sniffing the air, and a big bush of a beard.
The beard is sacred. It is worn out of respect for the impulses from our "lower" natures, out of reverence for the Dark Gods which inhabit the Dark Forest of one's own being. As Mr. Lawrence wears the beard, it is intended also to suggest and symbolize his isolate and inviolable "otherness," "separateness," "maleness." He does not insist upon an exclusively male aristocracy. He respects also the isolate "otherness" of women who attain that form of self-realization. But for himself, he is a conscientious barbarian, a revolutionist in favor of a cultivated, individualistic, aristocratic barbarism. He wants to bring back the beard, and to rebuild the ancient barriers between the naturally and the artificially smooth-faced sexes. I am not sure when he first restored the beard to fiction, but there is a sacred beard in "Kangaroo" and a still more sacred beard in "St. Mawr"—a rather
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fascinating book, which can be read easily enough but can hardly be taken in, with its full import, unless one has in mind everything that led up to it.
"Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me?" So, sitting on the lid of cultivated English fiction, wrote Henry James to that able lookout for young talents, Mr. Hugh Walpole, in 1913, on the appearance of Mr. Lawrence's third novel, "Sons and Lovers." "Send him and his book along," he continued, "by which I simply mean inoculate me, at your convenience . . . so far as I can be inoculated." Next year, in his much-quoted essay on "The New Novel," James warily circled around Mr. Lawrence three or four times, without actually boarding him, with, I suspect, a dim septuagenarian presentiment that Mr. Lawrence was a power, and, potentially, an intensely hostile power. As he was. As he is. Mr. Lawrence admired William James: he wore a beard. Henry James was a smooth master of bien-séances—smooth-faced and bland as a Roman prelate.
In 1922 Mr. John Macy, who, with characteristic generous enthusiasm, had flung up his cap for "Sons and Lovers," ranked Mr. Lawrence with Meredith and Hardy, and declared that he knew of no other writer of his generation "endowed with his great variety of gifts." In 1923 Dr. Joseph Collins, psychologist and alienist, allured to the task by Mr. Lawrence's obvious interest for the psychoanalyst, avowed that he once had had high hopes of this man, but he added sternly that Lawrence had "sown in glory and raised in corruption," that his instincts were perverted and that it was a pity the British did not "annihilate every trace of him."
In 1924, Mr. Herbert Seligman carried on the defense in a little monograph, "D. H. Lawrence, an American Interpretation," of which the main contention, couched in very mixed metaphors, is that Mr. Lawrence is a great genius who is striving to do our Western world good. Mr. Seligman's expression of this thought is memorable: "D. H. Lawrence, like a well tempered chisel or some sharp boring instrument, goes to America's vitals, not to destroy but to strip off the lies and duality and subterfuges that prevent its voice singing out." One doesn't ordinarily use a "boring instrument" as a stripping instrument, but when by such an operation one can get "singing" out of a nation's "vitals" one shouldn't be too particular.
Something there is discussable and even exciting in Mr. Lawrence. There is much of England and Europe in him, and quite a bit now of Australia and the United States. The World War is in him and a violent individualistic reaction against war and the pressure of mobs and the crush of democracies upon the "isolate" self; see "Kangaroo." There is much current emotion and contemporary psychological interpretation of it in him. He appears to possess abundant energy and drive and more and more definiteness of purpose and direction. It is surmised in some quarters that the future is going his way and that he is close at its heels. Of the little group with the "bloom" on them, which James discussed a dozen years ago, he seems still as well worth watching as any. If what he will do next cannot be surely predicted, that is a considerable element in our interest.
This much can be said with assurance: His novels do not leave you where they found you. They have designs upon you. They quicken your consciousness, enlarge your capacity for feeling. They invade you, pluck at you, pervade you, stir the centers of emotion, as Mr. Seligman suggests—or else they produce a reaction of repugnance and send you out slamming the door after you, as Dr. Collins has done. Mr. Lawrence has this token of genius, that he affects readers as Whitman, Hardy and Dostoievsky affect them: He makes flaming disciples, on the one hand, and on the other hand he allures a certain number of temporary devotees, who subsequently shudder away from him as from the brink of a precipice and the roar of chaos.
I suspect this second group is composed of those who were first charmed by the luxuriance of natural beauty in his earlier novels and then shocked by the frank insistent association of beauty in his poetry and elsewhere—in "Amores," "Tortoises," and "Birds, Beasts and Flowers"—with Alma Venus, the generative and reproductive forces in nature.
For my own part, I came to him in his strenuous and somewhat yeasty middle period, between "Rainbow," 1915, and "Kangaroo," 1923, when he was troubling our censors with things which they were probably incapable of understanding, such as "Women in Love" and "Aaron's Rod." Though I felt immediately the power and the seriousness of intention in these books and their unfitness for children and censors, I was—by reason of an antecedent inoculation—nearly immune to them, very little stimulated by them till "Studies in Classic American Literature" struck me by its original critical force and interested me in the course of Mr. Lawrence's development. The two books in which I felt most his captivating charm and his substantial power as a novelist were "The White Peacock" and "Sons and Lovers."
The undebatably potent and enthralling virtue in Mr. Lawrence and the central source, I think, of his power as a writer is his marvelous awareness of life in nature. To a limited extent he responds to the life in people, particularly in deep, vital, inarticulate people. The articulate life of people in society he regards as mainly tedious. But he responds as if there were no barrier between him and the life which pulses in beasts, birds, flowers, clouds, the sea and the spumy star clusters of the Milky Way. Arnold called Wordsworth "a priest of the wonder and bloom of the world." It is a beautiful phrase, but it should have been reserved for D. H. Lawrence. Wordsworth was an interpreter of the contemplative mind. Wordsworth saturated nature with purely human emotion, he filled the woods with the "still sad music of humanity," he tinted the skies with a divine benevolence not their own. Mr. Lawrence does not taint the air with human preconceptions or "pathetic fallacies." And to reward him for his disinterested adoration of the multitudinous spirit of life, the "thing in itself," it seems as if life had let him penetrate into intimacies unknown even to those who have made most boast of her confidences.
One might illustrate the point by quoting innumerable lovely things from his record of the bright intoxicating passage of the seasons over the English land. But our question here is not primarily a question of beauty, and not at all a question of conventionally recognized beauties. It is a question of life and the adorableness of life. It is a question of life discovered afresh by a sixth sense—life magically rendered, rippling and quivering under the impulse of the élan vital. To illustrate Mr. Lawrence's incessant captures of moving life I could ask nothing more conclusive than this: I met George tramping across the yard with a couple of buckets of swill, and eleven young pigs rushing squealing about his legs, shrieking in an agony of suspense. He poured the stuff into a trough with a luscious gurgle, and instantly ten noses were dipped in, and ten little mouths began to slobber. Though there was plenty of room for ten, yet they shouldered and shoved and struggled to capture a larger space, and many little trotters dabbled and spilled the stuff, and the ten sucking, clapping snouts twitched fiercely and twenty little eyes glared askance, like so many points of wrath. They gave uneasy gasping grunts in their haste. The unhappy eleventh rushed from point to point trying to push in his snout, but for his pains he got rough squeezing and sharp grabs on his ears. Then he lifted up his face and screamed screams of grief and wrath into the evening sky.
If the reader will pause now and thoughtfully consider the point of view at which the phrase "with a luscious gurgle" was written he will be close to one secret of Mr. Lawrence's incomparably vital interpretations of nature. He sees nature with a vision more intuitive than was possessed by even those "clear Greek eyes" which Heine envied Goethe for possessing. He looks at nature for nature's sake, acknowledging nothing superior, nothing equal. Nature through the eyes of the old god Pan—fecund, fair and flecked with blood, without sentiment, but passionately urgent. Nature, with humanity standing back, fearful of interruption, holding its breath, not to stir the down, not to hurry the drifting mist, not to mar the pale bloom on blue plums, not to drown the whisper of the grass, not to alarm the thrush molding the mud of her nest with her breast, not to quicken the little heart of the rabbit palpitating under the brown fur, not to lose the faint tinkle of stubble, not to dim the light in the moth's eye.
The second conspicuous interest of Mr. Lawrence's work he believes is intimately and profoundly related to the first. I refer, in general, to the erotic interest and, in particular, to his searching, exhaustive and exhausting exploration of certain phases of sexual attraction and sexual repulsion, and the bearings of these violent and excessive emotions upon human conduct. Where and how he acquired the psychopathic lore which fills the pages of "The Rainbow," "Women in Love," "The Lost Girl," "Aaron's Rod" and "The Captain's Doll" I shall not inquire. It is clear that for a dozen years he has been a "specialist" in that form of violent "love," which, as he says, is to be regarded rather as a "duel" than as a "duet," as a bitter and shattering clash of contending egotisms—"wildcats in a red-hot iron cage."
This tract of Mr. Lawrence's labors is before us. It is just as well to take an intelligent attitude toward it. Whether we wish it or not, Mr. Lawrence's remorseless studies in sex psychology will no more be annihilated by wishing than sex will be annihilated by wishing. These studies are dangerous to the young; sex is dangerous to the young. The men and women in these novels, exclaims Dr. Collins, can be referred to definite abnormal types, easily recognized and named by the psychopathologist. But that supplies no principle for annihilating Mr. Lawrence's novels. Doubtless Dr. Collins has often seen in hospitals or insane asylums men easily recognizable as of the type of Orestes or King Lear or Othello. We don't dispose of Othello by saying "epilepsy," or of King Lear by saying "senile dementia," or of Orestes by murmuring "paranoia." The critical attitude, commendable for young and old, is to recognize Mr. Lawrence's studies of excessive and perverse passion for what they are. Classify them, name them, see them clearly, and then these books may be as safe and useful on the shelf as a labeled bottle of carbolic acid.
To adult readers moderately acquainted with European literature, with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with Zola and Flaubert and the Goncourts, with Ibsen and Strindberg and with D'Annunzio, there is little that is novel in Mr. Lawrence's representation of the various erotic furies. In "The Triumph of Death," for example, D'Annunzio worked out for readers of a generation ago, the entire course of exactly such passions as rage through "Rainbow" and "Women in Love." D'Annunzio's sophisticated and megalomaniac poet-hero aspires through sexual excess to a state of the "soul" which shall "surpass carnal sensibility and communicate itself to an ultra-sensible element of the inner being." He is an aristocrat, his mistress is of the peasantry, and, through her lower animal nature, he hopes to enter into communication with every form of natural life. In a short time, however, he discovers that the central ingredient of his relation to his mistress is hatred—"the mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love." He recites to himself the words of the Preacher: Non des muliert potestatem animae tuae—Give not power over thy soul into the hands of a woman. He begins to frame for himself a "male" ideal of physical force, robust health and savage joy. He struggles to assert himself against the woman, and has a premonition that he will never attain complete "self-realization" except by killing her. And the book ends with the appropriate mortal consummation of sex-antagonism: the two of them, locked in a last embrace, roll fighting over a precipice.
Mr. Lawrence's "Women in Love" is, psychologically, identical in most important respects. He introduces this variation of his Alpine scene: Gerald Crich releases the throat of Gudrun, when he has her nearly choked, with this reflection: "As if he cared about her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands."
The story of violent and egotistical loves faithfully, remorselessly told is always, I am inclined to believe, as "moral" as hell fire or Holy Writ—"Her guests are in the depths of hell." And Mr. Lawrence impresses me as a far more austere "moralist" than D'Annunzio. As I have said elsewhere, my abiding impression from these books of his middle period is a sense of his "studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear, and with cold, probing curiosity, and with murderous hatred. . . . He is coming to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is not the greatest thing in the world . . . and that the romanticists have all been on the wrong track in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and to resist the dissolution of union. 'When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul,' says Mr. Lawrence in his 'Fantasia of the Unconscious,' 'he falls into the beginnings of despair.'"
"St. Mawr" carries on, from there, Mr. Lawrence's "criticism of life." It carries on his moving representation of the soul's fiery struggle for independent self-hood, for individuality. In this case, the chief protagonists are women. From the first Mr. Lawrence has been a feminist—of a sort. In "The White Peacock," he speaks with profound insight of Lettie's determination to ignore her own self and to empty her potentialities into the vessel of another:
This peculiar abnegation of self is the resource of a woman for the escaping of the responsibilities of her own development. Like a nun, she puts over her living face a veil, as a sign that the woman no longer exists for herself: she is the servant of God, of some man, of her children, or may be of some good cause. As a servant she is no longer responsible for herself, which should make her terrified and lonely. . . . To be responsible for the good progress of one's life is terrifying.
"St. Mawr" is a shorter novel than Mr. Lawrence is accustomed to write—only 222 pages, unencumbered by dissertations or digressions. Its tempo is much brisker. The narrative moves at a swift canter. The characters are sharply and brilliantly drawn, so far as needful for their function, and only so far. The novel is not a contribution to contemporary "realism," and should not be so approached. It is a piece of symbolism, which is, however, so well written that, if you are a child, you are at liberty to read it as if it were the story of a horse, of a superb golden stallion, who rears and throws his rider.
But St. Mawr is a symbolical horse as Melville's Moby Dick is a symbolical whale. It is Mr. Lawrence's hobbyhorse. Readers of his "Studies in Classic American Literature" will remember that he interpreted the whale as the subconscious seven-eighths of man's life, what goes on beneath the twinkling surface of intelligence, "the deepest blood-being of the white race." The golden stallion has exactly the same significance: he is the deepest instinctive "blood-consciousness." It may be noted in passing that the big bay stallion in "Sons and Lovers," the red Arab mare in "Women in Love," and the horses which thunder ominously through two or three pages of "Rainbow" are steeds of the same stable. See also Plato's horses.
The characters arrange themselves in a scale beginning with the horse, and descending, according to their degrees of "blood-potency," to Flora, who is an ordinary woman of the social world. Next to the horse is his own groom, Lewis, who is a dark, silent, shaggy mystical Welshman with a sacred beard; he understands the horse, speaks to him in Welsh and is in perfect sympathy with him. There is a second groom of mixed Mexican and Indian blood; he is almost as sympathetic. Then comes the mother, Mrs. Witt, from Louisiana, inheriting a strain of dark Welsh blood through her grandmother: having exhausted society, despising most of the human animals, including her son-in-law, she admires the horse and shares his spirit. Next comes Lou, the daughter, an American girl, much Europeanized, very sophisticated. At twenty-five she marries an artist, the best thing in sight, handsome, healthy, with a desire for a fashionable success in London. Lou buys St. Mawr for her husband, hoping that he will ride the splendid creature with effect. The husband, Rico, has outgrown horses, doesn't like St. Mawr, and the golden stallion has an instinctive repugnance for him. Ill managed, St. Mawr throws his rider and breaks several of his bones. The lowest character in Mr. Lawrence's scale is Flora, who after the accident seizes upon Rico for a lover, and proposes to buy, castrate, and tame the horse. The immediate upshot of the affair is that mother and daughter fall in love with the horse and with the grooms and carry them off to America.
A superb creature, St. Mawr, if one knows how to ride him.
If one has but the merest rudiments of symbol-reading, the main meanings of all this and subsequent developments will be clear enough. The story is excitingly told, independently of its meanings. But it is obvious that this symbolical novel is intended to be mordantly satirical, as well. Mr. Lawrence's first theme is the emancipation of the two American women from the perfunctory type of men, and their adventure in quest of an independent self-hood. His second theme, pervading his entire conception of the tale, is his own profound revulsion from polite tea table literature, his sense that the English scene is exhausted, his quest for a newer, younger land in which, as George Moore would say, to "enwomb" a vital art.
The concluding chapter, in a slackened tempo, pictures the last refuge of Lou and her mother: an abandoned, rat-pestered, goat-ruined ranch in the mountains of the American Southwest. I know what Mr. Lawrence means by that, but I believe in leaving something to the imagination of readers. To mine, I recommend reading "St. Mawr," and thinking it over for some time before deciding whether or not it is a deeply suggestive piece of symbolism.