And from the Fantasia the critic is driven onwards to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Lawrence returned to the form of fiction without ever allowing it to interfere with the propaganda.
Consider one of the typical passages in which the imaginative mind of Lawrence endeavours to describe the supreme act of sex. One is inevitably rather appalled at the writer’s courage in trying to describe such a thing at all. Even the vocabulary of description is missing and he must make his own. It is all curiously unrealistic. For Lawrence had the fastidious man’s natural dislike of real flesh, no matter how much he worshipped it in his imagination. And it is all strangely unconvincing, like the prose description of a piece of music.
But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We know that in the act of coition the blood of the individual man, acutely surcharged, with intense vital electricity—we know no word, so say “electricity,” by analogy—rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, prolonged magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each—and then the tension passes.
Such was Lawrence’s method of recollecting emotion, not in tranquillity but in a mood of remembered ecstasy. He was like a man taking a stiff whisky-and-soda to bring himself to the point of remembering exactly how it feels to be drunk.
Exactly what Lawrence’s real lesson was in all this has never become quite clear. At least it became as clear as daylight. But like the daylight it was constantly changing. At the time of writing Women in Love, it was that the sexual act had been performed perfectly only when there had been “mingling and intimacy.” But by the time he wrote Kangaroo he was searching for something that could not come by nakedness alone.
All through his life Lawrence had not liked the flesh. He had merely been educating it to become a worthy servant of the soul. He had coached and instructed it in its athletics so that it might run level with the mind. And by the end of his life when, in writing The Man Who Died, he took the body of Christ down from the cross and put it into a woman’s warm arms, he was still trying to make the body as rich in experience as the mind.
It made Lawrence furious to see anyone so startlingly and intelligently alive as Christ having developed so naturally without the assistance of Woman. Christ was the supreme example in history that exploded Lawrence’s theory. That was why Lawrence hated him.
The Man Who Died contains a lot of Lawrence that was his best. The description of the resurrection of Christ within the tomb is the writing of a man to whom sorrow and pain do not come as strangers to the mind:
Slowly, slowly he crept down from the cell of rock with the caution of the bitterly wounded. Bandages and linen and perfume fell away, and he crouched on the ground against the wall of rock to recover oblivion. But he saw his hurt feet touching the earth again, the earth they had meant to touch no more, and he saw his thin legs that had died, and pain unknowable, pain like utter bodily disillusion, filled him so full that he stood up, with one torn hand on the ledge of the tomb.
To be back! To be back again, after all that! He saw the linen swathing bands fallen round dead feet, and stooping, he picked them up, folded them, and laid them back in the rocky cavity from which he had emerged. Then he took the perfumed linen sheet, wrapped it round him as a mantle, and turned away to the wanness of the chill dawn.
He was alone; and having died, was even beyond loneliness.
Lawrence at times could write prose that bleeds with compassion, as the last extract does, when the experience seems to have been drawn into him. And at times, especially when angry, he could write prose that simply explodes along the printed line. This kind of thing:
I would like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge primeval enemies, but now they are only shelter and strength. I lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree.
There we have that powerful impulsive prose corroded with sexual images. For Lawrence, despite his contempt for the Freudians, who find a sexual origin for all things as easily as a Bolshevik finds a capitalistic one, saw enough sex in ordinary life to make a Freudian gape.
Whether he was looking at a cat or at catkins he divided them, male and female, according to their kind. There is that passage in Women in Love in which Birkin trespasses into a class-room during a nature-study lesson and says to the teacher:
“Give me some crayons, won’t you … so that they can make the gynæcious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I’d chalk them in plain, chalk and nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasise …”
that makes Lawrence appear to have the image of sex printed on the inside of his eyelids: whenever he closed his eyes to think, he saw it.
There are those horrid darknesses which over-cloud his mind from time to time, when Lawrence, like a war-horse, grows stamping and impatient at the smell of blood. As in The Woman Who Rode Away, he worships at red, stained altars.
There was also the mounting hatred of the world that would not attend to him, a hatred that changed the great teacher with the words of salvation in his mouth, to the nihilist with a bomb in his pocket. In the words of Birkin:
Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and the trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost … let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as soon as possible.
Lawrence’s contempt for the world accumulated within his mind until finally he could announce it only in thin, strident shrieks. His later poems are simply declarations of anger, often inarticulate in their rage. He had ceased to be a novelist; and unless something could have restored sympathy to his heart he would never have become a novelist again. And to recover his sympathy he would have needed to recover his sanity. His early books may seem terribly wrong to us. But they contain the tremendous errors of a man, fully articulate and finely intelligent; and so are in urgent need of correction. The later work is not so much in need of correction as of cure.
With all things one must draw a line somewhere. And the object of a line through Lawrence—if, indeed, the line is flexible enough not to exclude him altogether—must be to divide the sane from the insane. Probably it should be drawn at the point at which Kangaroo appears. Possibly it should be drawn to include The Fantasia of the Unconscious on the debit side. And the position of the line is not only a matter of prejudice but of period. We shall draw the dividing line of reason nearer to those last, mad monodies, Nettles, than any age before us would have drawn it.
Mr. George Moore
Mr. George Moore belongs to no class in fiction. During most of his long and varied career he has generally been disowned and in the corner.
He has made two large distinct reputations as well as several smaller blurred ones. Back in the ’eighties—Mr. George Moore’s seventy-eight years take him back into a world of fiction that was gaslit—he established hims
elf with A Mummer’s Wife as a realist of startling and defiant frankness.
Now, even his Esther Waters, which so notoriously shocked 1894, has been left somewhere in the rear of the race for frankness; and Mr. George Moore has very wisely not attempted to produce another book that will regain him the first place. Instead of following the French realists—who were his early models—any longer, he adopted the method of the French philosophical novelists. He was a man who, after sampling all France, preferred the manner of Anatole, even though he despised the man. So it was that at the age of sixty-nine he wrote The Brook Kerith, on which his reputation, as a writer of some of the most melodious and placid prose in the language, now rests.
As there is the thick, morocco-leather odour of the library about Henry James, so is there the smell of scent and turpentine, of concert hall and studio, about Mr. George Moore. In his liberal understanding of the arts he is unique among the English novelists. It is, I know, usual to say that Mr. George Moore writes in the manner of a painter, that his scenes in fiction have the shape that a graphic artist would have given them. I am doubtful, however, whether long study of painting or music ever contributed anything to a prose writer more tangible than a capacity for taking pains.
The two disciplines of perspective and diatonics if once obeyed may leave some sort of orderly impression in the mind. But if they do, examples of that impression are few. And much of the talk about Mr. George Moore’s painting in prose is no more than being wise after the event.
Mr. George Moore’s mind, one must remember, is not one mind but a multitude. There is the little Irish Catholic boy who attended confession; and there is the Irish Catholic Apostate who mocked the confessional. There is the Irish Protestant convert; and there is the Irishman who guyed English Protestantism. There is the sparklingly independent mind that used religion as an Aunt-Sally at which to throw epigrams; and there is the mind so sensitive to beauty in any form that it was irresistibly drawn back to the mysteriously beautiful story that Protestants and Catholics rather uncomfortably share. There is the disciple of Manet; and there is the man who gave up painting for writing. There is the scholarly musician; and there is the man who has had no real connection with music. There is the author of Parnell and His Island who spat on his native land until his spittle became exhausted; and there is the author of The Untilled Field, which was adopted as a class-work by the members of the Gaelic League. There is the Parisian art student who kept a pet python, chained to a Louis XV stool and fed on guinea pigs; and there is the independent Fenian who painted his front door Nationalist colours in the most Unionist quarter of Dublin. There is the author of Ave, Salve and Vale, who published details about his friends, like an unscrupulous blackmailer who in some unaccountable way failed to call to collect the money; and there is the author of The Brook Kerith, in whose drowsed ears nothing more modern than a Syrian sheepbell seems ever to have sounded. There is the humorist; and there is the author of Esther Waters.
Of course, as the experiences and changes came to him, the mind of George Moore grew complex and compound, until no one thread of thought could be followed and extracted without one’s getting tangled up in the whole skein, like a kitten playing with a ball of knitting-wool.
Susan L. Mitchell, the author of a provocatively independent study of George Moore, gives us a description of Moore’s being received into the Protestant Church. Before the event, “Æ ” gave Moore the sane and salutary advice not to be an ass, and warned him that he would be called upon to “kneel and pray,” an exercise which he would find extremely awkward and doubtless extremely silly.
After a week had elapsed, “Æ.” met Mr. Moore and asked him about the initiation. “Well,” said Moore, “what you said nearly burst up the whole thing. When the clergyman came I did not wish to appear to be taken in too easily and I worked up a few remaining scruples, fenced for a while and finally announced my scruples as conquered, and myself ready to be received into the fold. Then the clergyman said, ‘ Let us have a prayer,’ and I remembered your words and saw your face looking at me, and I burst out laughing. When I saw the horrified look in the clergyman’s face I realised it was all up unless I could convince him that it was hysteria; and I clasped my hands together and said, ‘ Oh, you don’t realise how strange all this appears to me to be. I feel like a little child that has lost its way on a long road and at last sees its father,’ and I, folding my hands anew, began ‘ Our Father.’ I took the wind out of his sails that way, for he had to join in, but he got in two little prayers on his own account afterwards and very nice little prayers they were too.”
It may be objected that such behaviour was not so much that of a man who was a Protestant and a humorist, as that of a man who was a Catholic and a clown. At least, it is typical of the confusion of character that is George Moore’s.
But our chief concern must be with the two books Esther Waters and The Brook Kerith—two books that might more easily have been written by different men than by the same man—on which his reputation rests. Now is not the moment to deal either with him or with his other works, such as Evelyn Innes, in which he spilt his musical and æsthetic knowledge about like a clumsy workman carrying a whitewash pail, or with Aphrodite in Aulis in which he wrote of love as a woman thinks of it.
That unfortunate girl, Esther Waters, like Tess, seems to have had Fate slamming doors in her face all through life. Esther Waters lacks entirely those moments of exalted emotion which transformed Tess’s sordid affair into epic tragedy. But against that loss there is the gain of that observant, and sometimes peeping, naturalism that Balzac practised. In short Tess moves, and Esther Waters depresses.
George Moore’s novels were always getting swamped by those things in which his mind was interested at the moment. In Evelyn Innes it was musical criticism; in Esther Waters in was wet-nursing; in The Brook Kerith it was theology. Evelyn Innes died to the sound of music; Esther Waters and The Brook Kerith survived because the mechanics of motherhood and the Bible were more nearly their subjects.
Esther Waters is a novel of magnificent intention. Its subject is the love of a mother for her child. Unfortunately, the fulfilment of the intention is marred by the wretchedness of the writing. It is of that kind of half naturalism that is about as much like life as it is known to-day as the faded photographs, full of big hats and bell-sleeves, that fill old albums.
“I’m your father,” said William.
“No, you ain’t. I ain’t got no father.”
“How do you know, Jackie? ”
“Father died before I was born; mother told me.”
“But mother may have been mistaken.”
“If my father hadn’t died before I was born he’d’ve been to see us before this. Come, mother, come to tea. Mrs. Lewis ’as got hot cakes, and they’ll be burnt if we stand talking.”
“Yes, dear, but what the gentleman says is quite true; he is your father.”
Jackie made no answer, and Esther said: “I told you your father was dead, but I was mistaken.”
“Won’t you come and walk with me? ” said William.
“No, thank you; I like to walk with mother.”
And it is not only the quality of the writing that is poor. Mr. George Moore’s mind never, as Hardy’s does in Tess, gives the impression of rising an inch above the scenes he describes; it simply drifts about in the slums on flat feet like a charity-worker. And the proportion of things in the mind occasionally seems to be wrong; in the first half of the book, for instance, the parturient is considerably larger than the whole. Esther Waters herself, the loyal, loving, illiterate savage, is one of the noble figures of fiction; far finer, in fact, than the novel in which she lives.
Any coldness that we may feel towards Esther may be due to the fact that Jackie was not the only child of sin she bore, and that from her time onwards, fiction has been considerably overcrowded with women to whom the wages of sin has been publicity. Esther Waters, in fact, despite the lavish praise that has been paid to it, pro
ves that it was as something larger than an outspoken Gissing that Mr. George Moore was to make a name.
He made that name with The Brook Kerith. The subject was one that had to face unnatural competition, and was bound to meet its readers with as heavy a handicap as any story ever carried. The Christian story has been a trap in which faithful and heretics have fallen in hideous confusion. But somehow the perfection of the Gospel version has had a fatal fascination for the courageous of all creeds. If the Gospel version has been done less well already, that is, if it had exercised a less powerful appeal, there would have been fewer competitors. As it is, the sheer hopelessness of the task has released some silly catch in men’s minds and set them off. It is bad enough in the public Christian mind when the writer fails clumsily and reverently. But the embarrassment is proportionately greater when a writer, who succeeds exquisitely, suggests that the Gospel version is not so much a masterpiece as a mistake.
The Brook Kerith is really not so astonishing a thing in Mr. Moore’s life as it might at first seem. It was written at a moment when a kind of Catholic mushroom left over from childhood broke the adult, sceptical soil. Like Rénan’s Life of Jesus it is the work of a man to whom the Christian story is a thing of beautiful associations. Mr. Moore was never more nearly Catholic than he was in writing this story of the crucified Saviour who was taken down from the cross and nursed back to health and obscurity. True, from the orthodox point of view Mr. Moore has got the story all wrong. But the important fact remains that he had got it at all.
The deep reverence of the narrative is far more impressive to the unreligious mind than the quick genuflexion of a busy priest. Mr. George Moore’s journey to gather local colour for the book was far more in the nature of a pilgrimage, even though it was a pagan pilgrimage, than a pleasure-trip.
Susan Mitchell describes The Brook Kerith as “an epilogue to a beautiful story written by a man tired of the theme, yet who cannot invent anything more beautiful than the story he wrecks.” That was written by a Protestant. Mr. Moore had been a Catholic; and Catholics do not regard the Bible—possibly because theirs is a poor one—with the respect shown by Protestants. I do not understand how a man could be called tired of it who was drawn back to a story of his nursery days as dramatically as if a stockbroker had suddenly got down on all fours on the floor and asked his mother to tell him the story of Red Riding Hood. And the fact that Mr. Moore changed the tale as fundamentally as though Red Riding Hood had eaten the wolf, was not because he was tired of it, so much as because he was George Moore.
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