To find a similar blending of minute diurnal detail and wide imaginative vision we must go back to two older novelists, Hardy and Meredith. I do not mean that Mr. Lawrence derives immediately from them or, indeed, that he is clearly the disciple of any master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder stature of Hardy and Meredith, and I know of no other young novelist who is quite worthy of their company. When I first tried to express this comparison, this kinship, I was roundly contradicted by a fellow-critic, who pointed out that Meredith and Hardy are utterly unlike each other and that therefore Mr. Lawrence cannot resemble both. To be sure, nothing is more odious than forced comparisons, nothing more tedious than to discover parallels between one work of art and another. An artist's mastery consists in his difference from other masters. But to refer a young man of genius to an older one, at the same time proclaiming his independence and originality, is a fair, if not very subtle, method of praising him.
Mr. Lawrence possesses supremely in his way a sense which Meredith and Hardy possess supremely in theirs, a sense of the earth, of nature, of the soil in which human nature is rooted. His landscapes are not painted cloth; they are the living land and sky, inseparable from the characters of the people who move upon the land, are pathetically adrift under the splendid inscrutable heavens. The beauty of the scene, for all its splendour, is usually sad; nature is baffling and tragic in its loveliness. Young people in love make ecstatic flights to the clouds and meet with Icarian disasters. From luminous moments they plunge into what Mr. Lawrence calls "the bitterness of ecstasy." Their pain outweighs their joy many times over, as in Hardy, and as in the more genial Meredith, whose rapturous digression played on a penny whistle in Richard Feverel is a heart-breaking preparation for the agonies that ensue.
Does not the phrase, "bitterness of ecstasy," sound, with all honour to Mr. Lawrence, as if Hardy might have made it? And would you be surprised if you found in Hardy the following sentence, which you will find on page 165 of this book?—"Annie's candle flickered, and she whimpered as the first men appeared, and the limbs and bowed heads of six men struggled to climb into the room bearing the coffin that rode like sorrow on their living flesh."
Mr. Lawrence's tragic sense and the prevalent indifference to magnificent writing probably account for the fact that this fine novel did not instantly win a large audience. And, by the way, that tragic sense and that indifference of the multitude to great work render grotesquely absurd the unsuccessful attempt of the vicious anti-vice snoopers of New York to suppress Mr. Lawrence's Women in Love. The weak and the ignorant are quite safe from this austere artist, for they will not read a third of the way through any of his novels.
Though with this book Mr. Lawrence took his place at once among the established veterans, nevertheless he belongs to our time, to this century, not to the age of Victoria. He is solid and mature, but he shows his youth in an inquisitive restlessness, and he betrays his modernity, if in no other way, by his interest in psychoanalysis. He has made amateurish excursions into that subject, which may or may not be a fruitful subject for a novelist to study. What he has brought back in the form of exposition interests me very little, but there is no doubt that his investigations have influenced his fiction, even this book which was written before everybody went a-freuding. The true novelist, the analyst of human character, has always been a psychologist in an untechnical sense. Before Henry James was Balzac; before Balzac was Goethe; before Goethe was the author of Hamlet. Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import into his art the dubious lingo of psychoanalysis. I doubt, however, if without that muddled pseudo-science (muddled because the facts are muddled) Mr. Lawrence's later fiction would be just what it is. And the main theme of Sons and Lovers is the relation of Paul to his mother. No, it is not an Œdipus-Jocasta "complex" nor a Hamlet-Gertrude "complex," though you may assimilate this touching story to those complexes if you enjoy translating human life in such terms. The important thing is that Mr. Lawrence has created a new version of the old son-mother story which is more ancient than Sophocles and which shall be a modern instance as long as there are poets and novelists. In its lowest form it is the sentimental home-and-mother theme so dear, and rightly dear, to the hearts of the people. In its highest form it is tragic poetry. And only a little below that poetry is the tremendous pathos of Paul's last whimper in this book.
Let whoever cares to try analyse or psychoanalyse. I doubt if Mr. Lawrence himself could make clear work of explaining his book. It is not necessary. It is enough that he has made his characters understandable through and through, even their perplexities understandable as perplexities. That is all the artist, the interpreter of life in fiction, can do or ought to do. And to do it with clearness and fidelity and with magical command of words, the mysterious thing called "style," is to be a great artist.
Out with my candle? There is light on the next page.
John Macy