Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence [the little red hen read aloud .txt] 📗

An introduction to this book is as superfluous as a candle in front of a searchlight. But a convention of publishing seems to require that the candle should be there, and I am proud to be the one to hold it. About ten years ago I picked up from the pile of new books on my desk a copy of Sons and Lovers by a man of whom I had never heard, and I started to race through it with the immoral speed of the professional reviewer. But after a page or two I found myself reading, really reading. Here was—here is—a masterpiece in which every sentence counts, a book crammed with significant thought and beautiful, arresting phrases, the work of a singular genius whose gifts are more richly various than those of any other young English novelist.

To appreciate the rich variety of Mr. Lawrence we must read his later novels and his volumes of poetry. But Sons and Lovers reveals the range of his power. Here are combined and fused the hardest sort of "realism" and almost lyric imagery and rhythm. The speech of the people is that of daily life and the things that happen to them are normal adventures and accidents; they fall in love, marry, work, fail, succeed, die. But of their deeper emotions and of the relations of these little human beings to the earth and to the stars Mr. Lawrence makes something as near to poetry as prose dare be without violating its proper "other harmony."

Take the marvellous paragraph on next to the last page (Mr. Lawrence depends so little on plot in the ordinary sense of the word that it is perfectly fair to read the end of his book first):

"Where was he? One tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun, stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing."

Such glorious writing (and this lovely passage is matched by many others) lifts the book far above a novel which is merely a story. I beg the reader to attend to every line of it and not to miss a single one of the many sentences that haunt, startle, and waylay. Some are rhapsodical and cosmic, like the foregoing; others are shrewd, "realistic" observations of things and people. In one of his books Mr. Lawrence makes a character say, or think, that life is "mixed." That indicates his philosophy and his method. He blends the accurately literal and trivial with the immensely poetic.

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

"The Bottoms" succeeded to "Hell Row." Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brook-side on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder-trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of