“After that, there will only remain that all men detach themselves and become unique
Conditioned only by our pure single being, having no laws but the laws of our own being.”
Finally:
“Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled.”
“Ideas and ideals are the machine plan and the machine principles of an automatonised Psyche which has been so prejudicial to human progress and human welfare. We must get rid of them both.”
In fact, it is a world without ideals for which Mr. Lawrence is clamouring and which he maintains he is in process of creating. It must be allowed that he is working industriously to do it, but most people, I fancy, will continue to believe that his world will not be a fit place to live in should he be able to finish his task. Meanwhile he is doing much to make the world less livable than it might otherwise be, particularly for those who are not competent to judge whether any of Mr. Lawrence's contentions are tenable or any of his statements in harmony with the evidence of science.
“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious” contains more misinformation in a small space than almost any recent book save the “Cruise of the Kawa.” It may reasonably be expected that anyone who writes upon psychoanalysis and the unconscious today and expects a hearing should know something about biology. But no biologist would accept such dogmatic statements as
“Life begins now, as always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and always. And life has no beginning apart from this.... There is no assignable and no logical reason for individuality.”
To give such sentences the semblance of truth there should have been added, “so far as I know.” It is misleading to follow up such statements by saying, “having established so much,” etc. A poet may be permitted to say that “The young bull in the field has a wrinkled and sad face.” Indeed, he may abandon all morphology and animal behaviour and make the graceful serpent rest its head upon its shoulder! But the man who invades the field of science should, at least, practise some accuracy of expression, even though he give himself the latitude of poetic license.
“The White Peacock” was Mr. Lawrence's first novel. It was favourably received. Letty, the principal character, is the trial portrait of all his later heroines. Her creator, in his youth and inexperience, did not know how to make her “carry on,” but she is the anlage for all his female characters, their immoralities and bestialities. Her story is a simple one. Her mother, a lady of fine character, has been put to the acid test by the moral defalcation of her father, a drunkard and wastrel with charm. Leslie, a young man with money and social position, commonplace, emotionally shallow, spiritually inelastic, unimaginative, but intelligent and straightforward, wooes the temperamental, volatile, romantic Letty. The appeal which Leslie did not make to her is made by George, a young farmer “stoutly built, brown-eyed and fair-skinned,” whom Letty finds “ruddy, dark and with greatly thrilling eyes” and whom she calls her bull. Meanwhile George and Letty's brother form a friendship which is in dimmest outline the prototype of that extraordinary relationship existing between Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin in “Women in Love.”
The book shows the influence of Thomas Hardy, after whom Lawrence in his early youth sedulously patterned himself. In those days he was concerned with the photographic description of rustic scenes and particularly the lives of farmers and miners—which he knew from experience—and showed a sensitive appreciation of natural beauty. But the interest of the book is in the fact that it contains trial pictures of most of his later characters. George is Tom Brangwen of “The Rainbow”; Leslie, grown up and more arrogant, is Gerald in “Women in Love” and Gerald Barlow in “Touch and Go”; Cyril, more experienced and daring, is called Rupert Birkin when he is introduced again. In all of Lawrence's books the same characters appear. They vary only in having different standards and different degrees of immorality. The environment is always the same—a mining town; a countryside pitted with collieries; farms teeming with evidence of vegetable and animal life which is described with such intensity that the reader feels he is witnessing a new era of creation; mean drab houses; and squalid pubs. Into these and the schoolhouses and churches he puts his sex-tortured men and hyper-sexed women and surges them with chaotic vehemence of invitation and embrace and with the aches, groans, and shrieks of amorous love.