Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE: AN APPRECIATION
we assume that he is putting something across. It is significant that
he has an enormous following of women. Further, it is a definite
fact that real Lawrence women do exist off paper. Most of us have
met one.
But I would be wrong if I emphasised only the individualistic side
of Lawrence and his physiological mysticism. His power lies even
deeper than that. As the reader gets into his work he begins to feel
that after all perhaps the individual is not the chief thing. He begins
to feel that which lies behind the characters—the tremendous background.
It is very difficult to give an account of the peculiar feeling
one gets when his characters come together. It is not ideas coming
together, it is not the exchange of opinions of several persons, nor even
the conflict of two hearts. Rather, we are just shown living souls
coming into contact, striking against each other, reacting from and
reaching out to one another.
You seem to feel the universe at work while you read. There is
the sense of an immense background behind these souls, an Unknown
from which they have emerged, to which they shall return. Frequently
one of the characters sinks into silence, becomes oblivious of the other's
presence—and the reader feels aware of further powers in which he
too is implicated, he knows that far more is concerned than just the
particular persons in question, that the world is not what it seems, and
that everywhere there is more at work than meets the eye. The hand
of destiny is upon these men, nay upon the reader too: we are doomed:
fate drives us on.
What great work it is! I remember how when I first took up
Twilight in Italy it seemed to me only the old, old pretentious travel
talk, precious, humiliating to the reader, making him feel a fool. It
seemed to me that here was a man again "noticing" things just because
he was abroad, pausing to talk about some old woman by the wayside
whom if he had seen at home he wouldn't look at—the same old infuriating
travel talk. But how wrong I was! I Was soon to find that
it was no mere traveller noticing things for publication, but a seer who
could listen for the whisper of destiny and see further realities. I
was deeply moved. And when I came to John of the Lago di Garda
who was going to America though he knew not why, I was troubled in
my spirit as one who should ask Who then is free? And as I read on
I saw that it does not take this novelist a whole book to give a vision