Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

THE BERMONDSEY BOOK
unexpected wills, and so on, not forgetting the device of making a third
party interrupt the lovers when embracing—(a thing which never
happens in real life because lovers just see that it doesn't!)
Then H. G. Wells came and enormously broadened the novel.
But he too was not primarily interested in his characters. He was
primarily interested in ideas. He brought in the novel of ideas. The
creative artist within him assumes a secondary role while the Questioner
looks out upon modern civilisation asking: What is to be done?
and pours out an orgy of ideas and ideals with the same high spirits
as lesser men pour out wine. If he introduces an incident occasionally
it is solely in order to give the reader a rest from the main business
of ideas.
And now we have D. H. Lawrence who has brought in the novel
of anti-ideas. He concentrates his attention upon the individual before
anything else—before the ideas and ideals which rose from him, before
the institutions he frames, the society he forms.
And not less are events subordinate to the individual. A reader
of Lawrence knows that no event will be for the sake of another event
—thus making an exciting story. He knows that when Gerald visits
Gudrun in her family's house at night, that as he tiptoes along the
passage he will not be caught, that there will be no heroics, nor an
angry guilty scene. The attention is never excited that way: it is always
the event itself that is important and thrilling. It is otherwise in the
Victorian novels. Durbeville violates Tess: the event is passed over
delicately and guiltily and the consequences that follow make the story.
In Adam Bede it is the leading up to and the leading away from
the same event that interests the reader. It is not sex but the consequences
of sex that are emphasised in the Victorian novels. In Lawrence
it is not the consequences but the fact itself that is centralised. There
is no indecent delicacy about his treatment of it. He deals with the
internal feelings and intricate, complexities that go to make up that
event, instead of just using it as the hinge for the story. You feel
as you read that these things are and that the writer is only an announcer
of the mighty process of the world.
He concentrates upon the internal things. He sees what others do
not see and try not to be bothered with. His terrible eye penetrates
right into his creations and with malign honesty he betrays their last
secrets. The unsaid thoughts, the hidden flashes of hatred that pass