But Aaron is an unusual person. "It is remarkable," says his creator, "how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England." Mr. Lawrence has always been interested in slightly eccentric characters, and so he stands apart from his contemporaries who call themselves realists or naturalists because they deal with the commonplace or the recognizably normal.
After all, extraordinary persons in fiction, as in life, are better worth knowing than ordinary persons. Mr. Lawrence does not make his people so widely different from the general run of human beings as to put a strain on credulity, and he studies them with a subtle and firm understanding. Their talk sounds real. Their emotions are alive in his bold and delicate prose. He has made amateurish excursions into psychoanalysis, which may or may not be a fruitful subject for a novelist to study. The real novelist has always been a psychologist in an untechnical sense.
Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import into his art the dubious lingo of psycho-analysis; he remains the poet, the dramatist, his symbols and images uncorrupted by pseudo-science. Aaron's dream in the last chapter—no modern novel is complete without at least one dream—is easily "freuded" (cave, corridor, and water symbols), but Mr. Lawrence refrains from analysis.
Aaron's whole life, or as much as the author gives us of it, is a dream, a dream unfulfilled in love or friendship or music. To what he wakes, if he wakes at all, the conclusion leaves us guessing. That will puzzle readers who demand that a story shall finish with a bang or come to a definite point of rest. But life does not conclude; it persists.
When Aaron related his history and experiences to some friends, he "told all his tale as if it was a comedy. A comedy it seemed, too, at that hour. And a comedy no doubt it was. But mixed, like most things in this life. Mixed." Though Aaron is a strange man, an individual, yet the conflict that goes on in him, between his rebellion and his indecision, his desire and his impotence, is not freakish; it is so much like the struggle that every man knows, with special variations, that it is true to universal human nature. Behind the symbolism are the plain facts, solidly conceived.
The other characters in the book are well drawn, notably Aaron's odd, philosophic friend, Lilly, whose ideas are at once clear and cryptic. There is a pitifully accurate portrait of a captain whose soul and nerves had not recovered from the war. In a single chapter through one man Mr. Lawrence suggests the disillusionment, the mental disaster, that followed the armistice. "None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war … the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved."
In "The Lost Girl" and "Women in Love" the men are subordinate to the women. In "Aaron's Rod" the women are of secondary interest; Aaron's wife is rather indistinct and shadowy, and the Marchesa, the Cleopatra whom he tried to love and couldn't, never quite comes alive, either for Aaron or for the reader. Probably these women are just what Mr. Lawrence intended them to be, as seen through Aaron's temperament. But I do not feel that Mr. Lawrence has here made a very striking contribution to the history of the everlasting warfare between the sexes. Did Aaron miss because he happened not to meet the right woman? Or was he the sort of man whom no woman could capture and satisfy? Evidently Mr. Lawrence means to leave the eternal question unsettled even for the man whom he has created.
Like many other English poets, Mr. Lawrence is a lover of Italy, and he takes his hero there, one suspects, for the sheer joy of the scene and the atmosphere, which he realizes with vivid beauty. He is a master of description, a master of words. His command ranges from the baldest sort of every day conversation to prose harmonies that are as near to verse as prose can go without breaking over. This is not merely a command of style; it is more than that—it is a command of ideas. Mr. Lawrence can pass with equal sureness from colliery to cathedral and find the right word for every thing and person met on the way, the right word, though often a perplexed and perplexing word. Because life is like that. It is "mixed."