INTRODUCTION
The presence of writers writing literature and criticism is traceable in the
English Critical Tradition ever since the birth of English literature. In the preElizabethan Age, Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet-critic. He is regarded as the first
critic in English literature. Though his The Canterbury Tales is poetry, it
discuses tragedy to some extent which exemplifies literary criticism. In the
Elizabethan Age, Philip Sidney had written prose, poetry and criticism
simultaneously. Sidney’s The Arcadia is one of the foremost prose romances in
English literature. Astrophel and Stella is Sidney’s anthology of one hundred
and eight sonnets and eight songs. Besides, he has written A Defence of Poetry
which is the earliest piece of criticism in which the chief aim of Sidney is to
write an English vindication of literature to match the many recently written on
the Continent in Italian, French, and Latin.
In the Neo Classical age, Alexander Pope, John Dryden and Dr. Samual
Johnson had followed suit. Pope’s poetry includes The Rape of the Lock, Essay
on Criticism, Essay on Nature and Essay on Man. Essay on Criticism is
criticism in the form of poetry. He describes poetry and criticism and then
defends poet and poetry by stating that the critics are also partial to their wit. In
the Romantic Age, William Wordsworth, S.T.Coleridge, B.P.Shelly, John
Keats are the examples of this tradition. In addition to numerous poems,
Wordsworth’s Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, is an outstanding piece of
literary criticism. Besides poems like The Rime of Ancient Mariner, Kubla
Khan and Christabel Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria remains a distinct
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literary criticism till date. B.P. Shelly has also written both poetry and
criticism. While his poetry includes Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Promotheus
Unbound, Adonais, A Defence of Poetry is a remarkable piece of literary
criticism In the Victorian age, Mathew Arnold represents this cult. He has
written many fine pastoral elegiac poems like Dover Beach, Thyrsis, Rugby
Chapel and Heine’s Grave and a wonderful essay of criticism called The Study
of Poetry.
Yet in the modern age, it is observed that the number of such writers is
observed in an unprecedented scale. W.B. Yeats, Lascelles Abercrombie,
Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, T.S.Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and many more
writers belong to the cult of writers writing both literature and literary
criticism. D.H. Lawrence has written Poetry, Novels, Travelogue, Letters,
Prefaces, Introductions and criticism. It is significant to note that his works of
literature also contain the aspects of literary criticism. D.H. Lawrence is a giant
in the field of literature and criticism. He presented a unique vision of human
life and literature in his writings. Besides his works of criticism, the tendency
of his literary outputs is characterized by a sort of criticism. However, his
critical views are spontaneous, impulsive and original owing to which he
emerges as a critic. To confirm this assumption, the whole corpus of his writing
needs to be viewed from the perspective of the English Critical Tradition.
In general, literary criticism is governed by two principles. While one
principle is based on the learned scholarship on the earlier classics, the other is
based on the faculty of genius. They are called classical and romantic
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respectively. Later the tendency moved towards the author and the work. The
criticism which was based on the author and considered literature as an
expression of the personality of the author was called romantic. But the
criticism which was based on the work and considered the work independent of
the author was called classical. Then the movement of criticism was directed
towards the theme and the form. The criticism which gave priority to the theme
was essentially romantic and the criticism which gave priority to the form was
essentially classical. While the romantic criticism is creative the classical
criticism is imitative in nature. D.H. Lawrence is a creative critic because his
criticism belongs to the tradition of romantic criticism.
The thesis “D.H. Lawrence as a Creative Critic: A Study” deals with
D.H. Lawrence’s creative criticism as explicit in his works, except novel,
because, a substantial body of research has been done in that area. (As J. M.
Murrey, D.H. Lawrence’s friend thinks, D.H. Lawrence is a giant writer, wellknown for his novels, short stories, poetry, travelogue and criticism.) He was
truly well-read in classical criticism, as we notice such reflections often in his
works. In this regard, an attempt is made to review critical theories from Plato
to Frye so that it will help us to understand and appreciate D.H. Lawrence’s
criticism.
Chapter-I is a survey of Critical Theories from Plato to the most
moderns. Plato, we all know spoke against imitative writings. His disciple
Aristotle however, cleared Plato’s doubts about the use of literature as a factor
for man’s culturization. Aristotle thinks that a work of art is a thing of beauty
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and that which affords appropriate pleasure. Mimesis or imitation is essential in
art. Aristotle’s views on tragedy, and then on plot and action and refinement
are important. Horace speaks of aesthetics, as the important factor in literature.
Longinus speaks on the sublime. Dante, the so called medieval writer is very
important for us, because, for the first time he insists on the use of the
vernacular in creative writing. Chaucer and many continental writers also did
this. Dante’s biographer Boccaccio speaks of religion as a vital part of
literature.
The Renaissance criticism is equally vast and serious. Again, the major
issue in literature was about the use of language. Vernon Hall observes,
“In England and France the problem of the language was less
difficult. Both were unified monarchies, and there was no
question of strongly competing dialects. Both countries
however, had the Latin tradition to overcome and the writers
in both countries made good use of the arguments of their
Italian predecessors. The fighters for French and English had,
as their Italian fellows had not, the support of strong
Protestant movements. The publication of the scriptures in
translation was probably the greatest single force in
establishing the victory of the vernacular.”1
In both England and France, growing nationalism helped forward the
victory. The English were if possible, even more patriotic.
However, many of these medieval writers were greatly aristocratic,
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against which the Romantic literature reacted later. Petrarch declared that the
praise of the mob is odious to the learned. Men like Ariosto and Tasso were
condemned because they were widely read and sung. Plato and Aristotle
thought the so called imitation is imitation of persons and things in nature,
while later writers, including the Renaissance writers, took it for imitation of
other writers. The writers imitated the Roman writers more than the Greek
because Rome provided them with sophistication. They studied form in
literature as in life. Genres and styles were used according to the classes of
people in society. Even the Greeks had told the functions of tragedy and
comedy are of different social classes.
Ultimately, the renaissance critics achieved two things – one they
established writings in vernaculars; and two – they established criticism as a
discipline in itself.
Milton was also a critic. He was yet a puritan in taste, and supported the
closure of theatres. William Davenant and Thomas Hobbes wrote criticism
from French perspective. Literary historians think that their criticism marks a
transition from Renaissance to Neoclassicism.
The age of Neo-classicism (1660-1700) is slightly different. Some of
these critics were Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson, Goldsmith and
Burke. Neo-classicists exhibited a strong traditionalism. Boileau was a fine
critic of the time. Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) in dialogue form,
presents various critical perspectives of the time. Likewise Pope spoke of taste
and genius, and judgement in literary studies. The rules of literature are to
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Pope, as to Boileou, natural and reasonable. The following may be observed
about these three – Dryden, Pope and Johnson:
“English neoclassical criticism has Dryden at the beginning,
Pope in the middle, and Samuel Johnson at the end. Of the
three, Pope is the strictest. Dryden at the beginning and
Johnson at the end of the period are subject to influences
which make the dogmatism of Pope’s Essay on Criticism less
essay for them to embrace.”2
Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765) expresses his most liberal
critical utterances.
We enter the so called Romantic age with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
These two poet-critics established Romanticism with their experimental poetry
as explicit in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The romantic writers, it may be
Wordsworth or Scott, or Austen, reacted against the neo-classical writings.
Wordsworth defined poetry in a new and lay manner. He writes,
“The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to
choose incidents and situations from common life, and to
relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a
selection of language really used by men, and, at the same
time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in
an unusual aspect, and, further, and above all, to make these
incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly
though no ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature….”3
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George Saintsbury thinks Wordsworth democratized literature by
employing the factors of the “rustic and humble.”4
Dante insisted on the use of polished language, but Wordsworth used the
common man’s language. He does not believe in the ways of the city folk. Man
in nature is better than man in the city. Wordsworth puts stress on the
individualism of the poet. His friend and collaborator Coleridge (1770-1856)
takes the trouble to examine and correct Wordsworth’s views on language and
meter. He does it seventeen years later in his Biographia Literaria. Coleridge
acutely remarks that Wordsworth’s own theory of language is based on a
selection of the language of rustics. Now, Coleridge says, if you remove the
provincial terms of speech from a peasant’s language you no longer have rustic
language at all. You have the language that any man speaks. Coleridge’s ideas
about fancy and imagination are quite useful for the later writers.
Victor Hugo and Goethe were Romantic critics. Goethe’s Conversations
speaks of the universal values to be explicit in poetry. Goethe calls classic
literature strong, fresh, joyous and healthy, while Romantic literature as weak,
morbid and sickly. Yet he feels that the Romantic literature opened the way for
the variety of later literature.
Whitman’s (1819-1892) Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) is the
American equivalent of Hugo’s preface to Cromwell. The same energy, the
same sense of newness and freedom animate both. If the poet is a worldshaking genius to Hugo, he is a god, or better than a god to Whitman. Both
Whitman’s poetry and his criticism are filled with his sense of uniqueness. He
is an American and a democrat- a new species of bard.
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Just like Whitman, Sainte Beuve insists that a writer should have liberty.
These critics seem to say that peace more than war produces great literature.
Beuve demands that the critic make the author come to life. He defines
literature as comprising
“all literature in a healthy and happily flourishing condition,
literatures in full accord and in harmony with their period,
with their social surroundings, with the principles and powers
which direct society, satisfied with themselves…these
literatures which are and feel themselves to be at home, in
their proper road, not out of their proper class, not agitating,
not having for their principle discomfort, which has never
been a principle of beauty. Romantic literature on the other
hand springs from ages which are in a perpetual instability of
public affairs.”5
Hippolyte Adophe Taine, (1828-1893) unlike St. Beuve desired a sort of
fixed conditions for cultivating literature. In his introduction to his History of
English Literature (1864), Taine explains his new, scientific approach to
literature.
Scott James thinks the function of Arnold’s critic in the broadest sense
of the term is to promote ‘culture’ ; his function as literary critic is to promote
that part of culture which depends upon knowledge of letters. Wimsatt Jr and
Cleanth Brooks believe that Arnold was not only a cultural critic but also a poet
and an educator. Arnold defined poetry (in fact, all literature) as a criticism of
life.
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No greater contrast to Arnold could be imagined than the American
William Dean Howells (1837-1920). Arnold loves the past, is a student of the
classics; Howells is the encourager of the new, the defender of Hamlin
Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris. Reality takes away from art,
according to Arnold; reality is the test of art, according to Howells. Howells
joins hands with his fellow countryman; Whitman in rejecting much of the old
literature because it lacks a democratic spirit.
Howells propounded a realistic
approach to literature. According to him, the best art is the art which is
realistic. Henry James was also a realist and globalist.
Emily Zola’s case is slightly different. Zola introduced naturalism which
inspired naturalist writers like Crane and Dreiser. He thinks literature is
something like science. Anatole France, on the contrary, looked at everything
with skepticism. Ferdinand Brunetiere supported feudal values. Brunetière’s
use of the catchword ‘evolution’ reminds us that various theories of evolution
influenced most thinkers of the 19th century, literary critics included. Yet, no
literary critic quite dared to become a complete neo-Darwinist since to become
one, would have meant supporting the proposition that literature became better
as the race progressed. Still Darwin influenced the 19th century literature.
Tennyson felt dejected of Darwinism.
Arnold thought Darwinism destroyed
religion. Whereas Swinburne found a promise in this.
The moral objection to art, or at least some art, which Plato began and
which was continued by censors in and out of the churches found its most
persuasive spokesman in Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). When he published What is
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Art? in 1898, he not only turned his back on most of modern art but even
repudiated his own great novels. For this, a modern lady novelist has called
him the greatest betrayer since Judas. Yet Tolstoy himself felt that he was
giving art a greater and truer importance than others were willing to grant it.
Like Kant, Hegel sees art and beauty as a realm that belongs to ‘sense,
feeling intuition, imagination.’ Its sphere is essentially different from that of
thought, and it is “precisely the freedom of production and configurations that
we enjoy in the beauty of art…it seems as if we escape from every fetter of rule
and regularity…the source of works of art is the free activity of fancy which in
its imaginations is itself more free than nature is. The concept of the beautiful
“must contain, reconciled within itself, both the extremes
which have been mentioned, because it unites metaphysical
universality with the precision of real particularity. What is
the aim of art? This is the question to which Hegel now
proceeds. He rejects the centuries-old notion that the aim of
art is imitation, that art awakens or purifies one’s feelings and
passions.”6
The world-shaking economic and social theories of Karl Marx could not
help but influence literary criticism. Marx insisted that literature, like every
other cultural phenomenon, was a reflection of the basic economic structure of
society. An epic, a poem, and a play are produced by the same forces that
produce social classes and cannot be fully understood without reference to
these forces.
10
If Bergson says the true reality is the élan vital of evolution, Croce
insists on the esthetics. Art that way, is a form of self-expression. It is an ideal
activity. Around 1907 Freud’s interests in the implications of psychoanalysis
began to exert over the entire domain of culture. He sought to apply
psychoanalytic principles to study of art, religion, and primitive cultures. In his
studies of religion, Freud viewed obsessional neurosis as a distorted private
religion and religion itself as a universal obsessional neurosis. In studies such
as Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud explored taboos or prohibitions in primitive
cultures, and analogized the various postulates of primitive beliefs with
neurosis. In works such as Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud
suggested the extension of the analysis of neurosis in individuals to the
examination of the imaginative and cultural creations of social groups and
peoples. Some of Freud’s disciples, such as Ernest Jones and Otto Rank,
followed through the implications of psychoanalytic theory in the realms of
literary analysis, mythology, and symbol. Freud hoped that psychoanalysis,
while yet underdeveloped, might offer valuable contributions in the most
varied regions of knowledge. As might be imagined, the various schools of
psychoanalysis that come after Freud have, in changing his doctrines, changed
psychoanalytic literary criticism.
I. A. Richards, in his Principles of Literary Criticism comes to the
conclusion that it is possible on the basis of modern knowledge to construct a
psychological theory of value that will enable us to compare the worth of
experiences, literary or otherwise. T. S. Eliot has described himself as a
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classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.
Equalitarianism, progress, and liberalism are detested by him. He is, in more
than the theological sense of the word, dogmatic. He understands that his
beliefs in politics, religion and literature form a whole. Hulmes’s training as a
student of philosophy enabled him to provide a rather systematic account of the
new classic reaction. By contrast, Ezra Pound’s most vigorous and most
influential criticism is ad hoc and occasional. It has often taken the form of
practical advice to other writers.
As a descriptive term, ‘New Criticism’ is completely meaningless, since
all criticism is ‘new’ when it first appears. Further, if one takes it as applying to
all modern critics one soon discovers that they differ so much among
themselves that any simple definition of the school will exclude a number of
important critics. One critic will emphasize close reading, another symbols,
another morality, another psychology, another sociology, and till another the
mythical. New critics think that literature is the most important of human
activities. They speak of text as autonomous for appreciation. No vulgar
biography is allowed there.
Chapter-II is a brief yet useful analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s life and
works.
D.H. Lawrence’s brief history speaks of his restlessness in life which led
him to travel. David Herbert D.H. Lawrence was born into a miner’s family in
Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885, the fourth of five children. He attended
Beauvale Board School and Nottingham High School, and trained as an
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elementary schoolteacher at Nottingham University College. He taught in
Croydon from 1908. His first novel The White Peacock, was published in 1911,
just a few weeks after the death of his mother, to whom he had been
extraordinarily close. His career as a schoolteacher came to an end a serious
illness at the end of 1911.
In 1912 D.H. Lawrence went to Germany with Frieda Weekley, the
German wife of the Professor of Modern Languages at the University College
of Nottingham. They were married on their return to England in 1914. D.H.
Lawrence had published Sons and Lovers in 1913; but The Rainbow, completed
in 1915, was suppressed, and for three years he could not find a publisher for
Women in Love (1917).
After the war D.H. Lawrence lived abroad, and sought a more fulfilling
mode of life than he had so far experienced. With Frieda, he lived in Sicily, Sri
Lanka, Australia, New Mexico, and Mexico. They returned to Europe in 1925.
His last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was published in 1928 but was banned
in England and America. In 1930 he died in Vence, in the south of France, at
the age of forty-four.
D.H. Lawrence’s life may have been short, but he lived it intensely. He
also produced an amazing body of work: novels, stories, poems, plays, essays,
travel books, translations, paintings, and letters. After his death Frieda wrote,
“What he had seen and felt and known he gave in writing to his fellow men, the
splendour of living, the hope of more and more life... a heroic and
immeasurable gift.”7
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Chapter-III entitled “D.H. Lawrence’s Contribution to Criticism”
speaks about D.H. Lawrence’s creative criticism as explicit in his theories of
novel, his criticism of Hardy and other contemporaries, continental writers,
American writers, and his numerous introductions and prefaces. The chapter
also analyses D.H. Lawrence’s special books Pornography and Obscenity,
Psychoanalysis and the Unconsciousness, and Fantasia of the Unconscious as
well as Apocalypse.
D.H. Lawrences criticism began with his friend J. M. Murrey, and it was
supported by E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and even T. S. Eliot. W. T.
Andrews thinks it began with D.H. Lawrence’s novel The White Peacock in
1811. Mark Spilka’s D.H. Lawrence (1963) is a fundamental work of details in
this regard. Andrew’s edition Critics on D.H. Lawrence (1994) appears like a
sequel to it. Andrews thinks, “D.H. Lawrence’s emotional and intellectual
horizons were obviously far wider and remain wider today, despite jet-travel
facilities.”8 He is truly an international writer. In fact, best critical work on him
is coming from the USA and Australia. D.H. Lawrence’s home criticism of his
life-time is rather prejudiced.
Richard Foster thinks D.H. Lawrence is a different kind of critic. He is a
radical/violent critic like Dante, Voltaire, Thoreau, Dr. Johnson, Gide, Shaw
and Pound. These critics are original, intellectual and radical. They possess
compulsively responsive moral natures. For example, D.H. Lawrence said,
“The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not
pastime, or recreative.”9 One thing about these critics is that they are not
disciplined, not specialists, but amateurs.
14
Literature was to D.H. Lawrence a vast expressive record of the
intellectual and emotional. Perhaps the place to begin with D.H. Lawrence as
critic, then, is with the essential D.H. Lawrence-- those raw, uncut, and
unspoiled responses to literature that take the form of sudden and fierce moral
assaults upon it.
Classic figures, old or modern, were not sacred to D.H. Lawrence
because of their status: Blake was to him one of those ‘ghastly, obscene
knowers’; Richardson ‘with his calico purity and his underclothing excitement
sweeps all before him’; The Scarlet Letter was a ‘masterpiece, but in duplicity
and half-false excitement.’ He called Dostoevsky ‘a lily-mouthed missionary
rumbling with ventral howls of derision and dementia’; Chekhov, a ‘secondrate writer and a willy wet-leg’; and Proust, ‘too much water-jelly.’ Many of
D.H. Lawrence’s nearer contemporaries received the same kind of sudden
vitriol. Wells’s work showed ‘a peevish, ashy indifference to everything,
except himself, himself as the center of the universe’; Galsworthy’s novels,
read together, ‘just nauseated me up to the nose’; Huxley was only ‘half a man’
as a writer, ‘a sort of precious adolescent’; and Thomas Mann ‘is old and we
are so young ... the man is sick, body and soul.’ Such are the characteristic
moments of frank rage, many of them yielded to in the privacy of personal
letters. And some of these same writers Huxley, for example occupied more
favorable positions in the longer run of D.H. Lawrence’s judgment. D.H.
Lawrence seconded the greatness that tradition had conferred upon
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Greek tragedians.
15
D.H. Lawrence necessarily had a view of criticism which prescribed that
critics be ‘alive’ in much the same sense as artists. This was a difficult affair,
for it required in the critic both an intense moralism of purpose and a total
freedom and openness of sensibility. D.H. Lawrence did find much good
literature. What he saw was the expression of the bourgeois society. All forms
of society-worship, from Galsworthy’s middle-class conscience to Shaw’s
polemic socialism to Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s evangelical Christianity to
Whitman’s metaphysical impulse to merge his identity with that of others, were
to D.H. Lawrence disease symptoms of the bourgeois spirit, and were thus
heresies against the life-force and the sacredness of man alive.
D.H. Lawrence has written many perceptive essays on fiction like “Why
the Novel Matters?”, “Morality and the Novel,” “Surgery for the Novel—or a
Bomb” and “The Novel and the Feelings.” D.H. Lawrence believes that novel
as a work of art must bear morals. He writes,
“The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the
changing rainbow of our living relationships. It can help us to
live, as nothing else can: no didactic scripture, anyhow.”10
D.H. Lawrence wrote many essays and he published them in several
journals and magazines, even newspapers and in different countries and under
different circumstances. Two prominent volumes that contain D.H. Lawrence’s
essays are Assorted Articles (1930) and Phoenix (1936).
D.H. Lawrence as an essayist was a rationalist. He writes of things and
issues insightfully. For example, in his essay “Sex versus Loveliness,” we have
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his views as this. Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness.
The great disaster of our civilization is the morbid hatred of sex. There is a
whole world of life that we might know and enjoy by intuition, and by intuition
alone. D.H. Lawrence in his essay “Love” published in Phoenix in 1936 writes
this:
“Love is the happiness of the world. But happiness is not the
whole of fulfillment. Love is a coming together. But there can
be no coming together without an equivalent going asunder.
In love, all things unite in a oneness of joy and praise.”11
In his essay, D.H. Lawrence criticizes industrialism as well as
materialism. Raymond Williams thinks D.H. Lawrence has studied Thomas
Carlyle closely, and the two writers sailed in the same boat. On the other hand,
F. R. Leavis in his influential work D.H. Lawrence: Novelist compares D.H.
Lawrence with Desmond MaCarthy. Williams thinks both Carlyle and D.H.
Lawrence were the harsh critics of industrialism. For example, D.H. Lawrence
said, “The industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy
into a competition of mere acquisition.”12
D.H. Lawrence has written many critical essays and they are published
in books like Phoenix Vol I and II and later in Assorted Articles.
Anthony Beal in his critical study of D.H. Lawrence’s criticism, divides
D.H. Lawrence’s critical crops into six divisions: Autobiographical, Puritanism
and the arts, verse, contemporaries and the importance of the novel,
continentals and Americans. In a way, this is a good categorization.
17
D.H. Lawrence’s work on Hardy has many interesting, yet abstract
matters. He speaks of many things there, though such things are unrelated to
Hardy. D.H. Lawrence admits that his study of Hardy’s fiction is the study of
Hardy’s characters who struggle for love and completeness.
As D.H. Lawrence, like Hardy, was a great novelist primarily, he has
written much on his contemporaries whether of England, (about John
Galsworthy, Maughan, and Hardy), America (Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville,
Doss Passos and Hemingway) or the continent (Thomas Mann, Rozanov and
Shestov).
In his essay on John Galsworthy D.H. Lawrence thinks criticism cannot
be a science, as it is personal and as it advocates different values that science
does not. A work of art is a matter of its effect. A critic must feel the impact of
a work in its complexity and force. Such a man must be of good faith. D.H.
Lawrence examples Sainte Beuve as a fine critic as per these standards. D.H.
Lawrence’s another great contemporary was H. G. Wells, a great journalist,
and science fiction writer. D.H. Lawrence had a chance to review Wells’ novel
The World of William Clissold in Calendar of Modern Letters in 1926. The
critical essay is witty and enlightening.
D.H. Lawrence was a globe-trotter. Once he shook the dust of England
at the start of World War I, he travelled to various European countries, and
wrote of continental life and art. He studied the literatures in France, Germany
and Russia and wrote of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Mann, and many others. D.H.
Lawrence reviews Dostoievsky’s book The Grand Inquisitor which his friend
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S. S. Koteliansky translated into English. D.H. Lawrence read Dostoievsky’s
Brothers Karamazov in 1913, and he could not understand it. D.H. Lawrence
reviewed Leo Shestov’s All Things are Possible. His reviews of V. V.
Rozanov’s Solitaria is insightful. Solitaria is a philosophical book. D.H.
Lawrence reviewed Thomas Mann’s Der Todinvenedi. D.H. Lawrence thinks
Mann is a literary artist, and he is known for individualism. D.H. Lawrence’s
view of E. D. Dekker’s Max Havalnar shows that ‘it is a book with a purpose.
D.H. Lawrence reviewed Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-Don Desualdo. D.H.
Lawrence wrote many introductions both to his works and to others’ works.
D.H. Lawrence wrote an introduction to his paintings in 1929 and this
piece of criticism first appeared in Mandrake Press in 1929 and finally in
Phoenix (1936). D.H. Lawrence’s Preface to the American edition of his poems
was written in 1920 and it appeared in Phoenix in 1936. D.H. Lawrence writes,
“The poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end must
have that exquisite finality, perfection which belongs to all
that is far off. It is in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the
nature of all that is complete and consummate. This
completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the
perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect
symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance
where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme
moment of the end. Perfected bygone moments, perfected
moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured
gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.”13
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D.H. Lawrence’s review of Deledda’s The Mother appeared as preface
to the text in English in 1928. This lady Grazia though not as great as
Fogazzaro and d’Annunzio, her work is more effective than theirs.
D.H. Lawrence loved America, its democracy, people, art and literature.
He stayed in Mexico for years, and visited America often. The New York
Evening Post described him as ‘Americano.’ He has a messianic purpose in his
attitude to that country. His Studies in Classic American Literature has a thesis.
Stuart Sherman in his review of D.H. Lawrence’s present book calls him a
cave-man. He writes, “In book before us Mr. D.H. Lawrence attempts to justify
his instincts by demonstrating the presence of a latent, suppressed, and
disguised cave philosophy in all the vital part of American literature.”14 This
book of criticism covers D.H. Lawrence’s analysis of American writers
Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Dana, Melville, Whitman and Hemingway. It is not
clear why D.H. Lawrence did not write anything on Irving and Bryant and he
developed a kind of hatredness against the Transcendentalists.
D.H. Lawrence’s criticism of the American writers is perceptive,
receptive, inquisitive, sincere, violent, and vengeful.
His appreciation of the
fine wild things in the American genius is perhaps unequalled by any American
writers except Whitman. His book will doubtless stimulate other explorers to a
fresh psychoanalysis of the national spirit.
D.H. Lawrence published a pamphlet called Pornography and Obscenity
in 1929. It studies the problem related to pornography and obscenity. It is said,
“It is a real masterpiece of fundamental analysis written by a man of genius
from the very bottom of his heart.”15
20
D.H. Lawrence was concerned with the human mind. He would say
consciousness is life as the Hindu rishis talked of chit as life. He knew Freud
and Jung, and critics read his novel Sons and Lovers as a Freudian text. Of
course, he did not like it.
D.H. Lawrence published two books in 1922 titled Psychoanalysis and
the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. John Middleton Murry rated
Fantasia more highly than Psychoanalysis. It is said, “These two books stand
in intimate relationship to the thinking which informs D.H. Lawrence’s major
novels.”16
Psychoanalysis
and
the
Unconscious
contains
six
essays:
Psychoanalysis vs. Morality, The Incest Motive and Idealism, The Birth of
Consciousness, The Child and his Mother, The Lover and the Beloved and
Human
Relations
and
the
Unconscious.
J.I.M.
Stewart
observes,
“Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious pursue
important speculative interests – the first with lucidity and the second with a
kind of cloudy pungency equally difficult either to describe or to forget.”17
D.H. Lawrence was a fine creative critic. His book Apocalypse is
something like release of the imagination, strength and vitality. For the
ordinary biblical student, it means a prophetic vision of the martyrdom of the
Christian church, the second Advent, the destruction of worldly power, the
institution of the Millennium, the last judgment, and souls in heaven.
Apocalypse wakes us up, wakes our imagination and provides us moments for
true life. Anthony Beal writes, “No, for me the Apocalypse is altogether too full
21
of fierce feeling, fierce and moral, to be a grand disguised star myth.”18
Apocalypse is D.H. Lawrence’s last blast against materialism and intellectual
modern man.
D.H. Lawrence was a gentleman. He was a noble savage. His life was a
savage pilgrimage, as he had to face harsh critics in his time. People did not
like him, because he was primitive yet clean, harsh but truthful. D.H. Lawrence
detested the modern, industrialized, corrupt civilization. He loved the primitive
like the Etruscan or Mexican. Perhaps it is only poet’s dream, a transference to
the remote past of an ideal he despaired of finding in the present. J.I.M. Stewart
thinks Apocalypse, his last prose work contains his final witness to the
naturalism and vitalism by which he lived. T. S. Eliot liked this book, after
reading J. Middleton Murry’s work Son of Woman on D.H. Lawrence.
Chapter-IV is entitled “D.H. Lawrence’s Travel Accounts and Creative
Criticism.” D.H. Lawrence was a great genius. Like any other original and at
the same time, revolutionary writer, he was restless. This could be spoken of
his contemporary Samuel Becket and James Joyce, both Irish writers in exile.
D.H. Lawrence picked up a quarrel with his country and people, and therefore,
he had to wander from land to land the rest of his life. Probably his elopement
with Frieda Weekeley is symbolic of it. We know, he was not happy with his
Midland country known for its coalfields. He eloped with Mrs. Weekley,
apparently a German, which factor forced him to frequent Germany every year.
The incident of a police enquiry of him at Cornwall during the World War I
hurt him. Then as a ‘self-excommunicated’ man he had to travel. Travel was
22
not only an urge for change with him. D.H. Lawrence as a writer, as Bacon
says, finds travel as part of education. Probably travel, as P. B. Pinion thinks,
provided him fulfiment. So D.H. Lawrence visited Germany, France, Italy,
America, Australia, Sri Lanka and others.
D.H. Lawrence’s brief history speaks of his restlessness in life which led
him to travel. D.H. Lawrence is known both for his world-wide travels, and for
his travel accounts. But there are points of differences with his travelogues. If a
writer like Dickens, or Huxley wrote of accounts of travels, describing the
places, persons and circumstances of travel more so of the physical, D.H.
Lawrence describes of the philosophical, of the psychological, and of the
aesthetic. Often his travel sketches are spoken of as essays. This is markedly a
difficult and different trend in English literature. Philip Hobsbanm observes,
“One cannot classify the non-fictional prose of D.H.
Lawrence onto neat compartments; not even the compartment
called non-fiction. There is literary criticism in his travel
sketches and philosophy in his criticism. The popular
journalism of his later career often intensified into prophecy;
the prophecy that characterizes the last stage of his life is
criticism of a very high order indeed.”19
D.H. Lawrence traveled to Germany, France, Italy America, Mexico,
Australia, Srilanka and other countries. He has written four travel accounts
namely Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Morning in Mexico and Etruscan
Places. D.H. Lawrence liked travel. He found some yearning to land on the
23
coast of illusion. Novelty of life and scene was a gratification from the very
start of his Odyssey. Travel was a literary stimulus as his letters and essays
testify it abruptly.
Twilight in Italy is rather a hybrid, including D.H. Lawrence’s first
outlines of his basic philosophy. The sketches were written from the end of
1912, after D.H. Lawrence had settled at Gargnano, to October 1913, and
revised in 1915 for publication in book form. This book should not be packed
by intending tourists to the Mediterranean as a convenient guide to Italy, Sicily,
and Sardinia-with a bit of Bavaria, the Tyrol, and Switzerland for good
measure; as D.H. Lawrence says, ‘I am not Baedeker.’ But it is an
indispensable guide to the sensibility of one of the most astonishing writers of
the 20th century. D.H. Lawrence’s next travel account of the same land Italy is
Sea and Sardinia. It is said, “In Sea and Sardinia, D.H. Lawrence brings the
life the vigorous spontaneity of a society as yet untouched by the deadening
effect of industrialization.”20
Philip Hobsbaum thinks in Etruscan Places D.H. Lawrence sketches
the life of the people who flourished before the mechanistic Romans and the
idealistic Christians. He sees the Etruscans as a people who developed neither
gods nor nationhood; who kept life fluid and changing; whose pictures on the
walls were an evocation of all we have lost. Richard Aldington in his
Introduction to D.H. Lawrence’s last travel account Mornings in Mexico in
1950, observes, “It often happens that in producing a book an author finds he
has spare material left over or has written minor things related to his main
theme; and thus Mornings in Mexico should be read always in conjunction with
The Plumed Serpent.”21
24
D.H. Lawrence also wrote poetry. Chapter-V of the thesis deals with
D.H. Lawrence’s poetry and creative criticism. D.H.
Lawrence
in
his
Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious speaks of poetry as ‘pure passionate
experience.’ This he calls as ‘demon.’ This demon is timeless. Blake calls this
the fourfold vision the poet needs to write down.
D.H. Lawrence thinks ‘skilled verse is dead in fifty years.’ He means
that skilled mechanical imitation of traditional verse-forms’ cannot last long.
D.H. Lawrence’s introduction to the American edition of his New Poems has
mature statements of his poetic theory. In this introduction, D.H. Lawrence
distinguishes between two kinds of poetry. The first kind he describes as ‘the
poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end.’ ‘It is,’ he writes,
“‘of the nature of all that is complete and consummate. This
completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the
perfection are conveyed in exquisite from the perfect
symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself the perfect
symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance
where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme
moment of the end. Perfected bygone moments, perfected
moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured
gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.’”22
D.H. Lawrence distinguishes between traditional poetry on the one hand
and expressive or organic form of poetry (modern) on the other. ‘Expressive
form’ is what Coleridge called ‘organic form.’ Coleridge contrasted ‘organic
25
form’ with ‘mechanical regularity’ and wrote that it ‘is innate; it shapes, as it
develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the
same with the perfection of its outward form.’ According to D.H. Lawrence the
new poetry attempts to reproduce ‘the unspeakable vibrations of the living
plasm.’
D.H. Lawrence began to write poetry when he was 19. Some of his
earlier poems are “To Guilder-Roses” and “To Campions.” He had his real
demon activated after he reached 20. He writes, “I have tried to establish a
chronological order, because many of the poems are so personal that, in their
fragmentary fashion, they make up a biography of an emotional and inner
life.”23 Some of the early poems like “The Wild Common” and “Virgin Youth”
were re-written, for completing the fiction. Many poems are changed too.
D.H. Lawrence’s early books of poetry are Love Poems and Others
(1913), Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through (1917), New Poems
(1918), Bay (1919), Tortoises (1921) and Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).
The poems of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers were begun in Tuscany, in the
autumn of 1920, and finished in New Mexico in 1923, in D.H. Lawrence’s
thirty-eighth year. So that from first to last these poems cover twenty years.
Poetry was part of D.H. Lawrence’s life from his very earliest years.
Nonconformist hymns, as we have seen, were an important influence in
shaping his consciousness –more so, he confesses, even than those “‘poems
which have meant most to me, like Wrodsworth’s “Ode to Immortality” and
Keat’s odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s
26
Dream, and Goethe’s lyrics…- all these lovely poems which after all give the
ultimate shape to one’s life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man’s
consciousness.”24 Much of his early reading, too, had been of poetryShakespeare, Blake, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Palgrave’s Golden
Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. He also taught poetry as part of his duty in
Croydon.
Critics think Birds, Beasts and Flowers is an extremely varied and
uneven collection. There are poems in it that may fairly be described as
representing tortured states of mind, and passages that, perhaps, deserve the
epithet ‘hysterical.’ Too often D.H. Lawrence succumbs to the worst part of
Whitman’s influence and mistakes strident statement for poetic expression.
Similarly, D.H. Lawrence’s snake which D.H. Lawrence saw one hot
morning drinking in his water-trough at Taormina (in Mexico) remains, in the
poem, an ordinary ‘earth-brown, earth-golden’ Sicilian snake, but at the same
time becomes a mythical, godlike lord of the underworld, an embodiment of all
those dark mysterious forces of nature which man fears and neglects. Look at
it:
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honored?
I felt so honored.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
27
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honored still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black;
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face… 25
There is no empty rhetoric here. The style is very simple, the diction
colloquial, and the word order that of common speech. But the effect is grand
and dignified. D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” is a triumph of style and idiom, one of
the very few English poems in free verse where perception is embodied in
rhythms that are an essential part of the poem’s meaning.
D.H. Lawrence wrote many books of poetry after the volume Birds,
Beasts and Flowers. He published books like Pansies (1928), Nettle and More
Pansies (1929), and Last Poems (1929).
The poems that D.H. Lawrence wrote at the end of his life have a
peculiar quality of freshness and directness. The Whitmanseque rhetoric and
28
the ‘ritual frenzy’ that some critics condemn have now disappeared. There is
the voice of a very wise man who loves life, but is saddened and embittered at
the way in which it is being fouled and violated by mass civilization.
Chapter- VI “D.H. Lawrence’s Letters and Creative Criticism” is a
succinct analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s insightful views in his letters.
Beautiful and absorbingly interesting in themselves, D.H. Lawrence’s
letters are also of the highest importance as biographical documents. In them,
D.H. Lawrence has written his life and painted his own portrait. Few men have
given more of themselves in their letters. D.H. Lawrence is there almost in his
entirety.
The Collected Letters creates a distinct persona. Rarely do his letters
provide us with the sort of immediate, unfiltered reactions to experience that
we find in other letters. His are more mediative and reasoned in tone. That fact
might imply distortion. Nevertheless, the D.H. Lawrence we get is clearly a
genuine D.H. Lawrence, one who persists below the surface of daily events.
This D.H. Lawrence possesses the serene face of the man who has the capacity
and the courage simply to be, who has discovered his own center of existence
and refuses to be disturbed too much by the trivia and the peevishness of
others, who is concerned that others learn, not certain rules and regulations, but
how to live, and who is, therefore, fiercely against anything he considers a
denial of life. Oddly, for the comparison would be shunned by the earlier
author, he reminds one in these pages of an earlier idealist, Thoreau, who
asserted:
29
“I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts
of life. And that if one advances confidently in the direction
of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has
imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in
common hours.”26
D.H. Lawrence was a fine letter writer. His friend Aldous Huxley edited
his letters in the 1960s. A scholarly edition of his letters edited by J. T. Boulton
was published in eight volumes from 1979 to 2000. D.H. Lawrence’s life and
thoughts as a creative critic are explicit in his letters. It is observed:
“One’s understanding of D.H. Lawrence cannot be considered
complete without a careful perusal of The Collected Letters.
For there is a side of D.H. Lawrence that, while it is found
elsewhere, receives its fullest expression only in the letters-a
side that, beneath all the tensions of his life, is cheerful,
optimistic, affirmative. D.H. Lawrence’s belief in the ultimate
sanctity of physical being finds its embodiment not only in
formal essays and narratives, but in these informal
meditations that reflect his day-to-day existence.”27
The thesis has a conclusion where the arguments of the previous
chapters are summed up. Then there is a select bibliography.
30
References:
1. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, London : The
Modern Press, 1970, p. 33.
2. Vernon Hall, A Short History of Literary Criticism, p. 74.
3. William Wordsworth, qt by M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary
Criticism and Theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008, p. 434.
4. George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism, Blackwood, London,
1911, p. 313.
5. St Beuve, A Literary Tradition, 1858, qt by Vernon Hall, A Short
History of Literary Criticism, pp. 104-5.
6. Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics, qt by Habib, A History of Literary
Criticism and Theory, p. 400.
7. Frieda D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence and Italy, Penguin, London,
1972, printed on the over page.
8. W. T. Andrews, Critics on D.H. Lawrence, Universal Book Stall, New
Delhi, 1994, Introduction, p. 1.
9. D.H. Lawrence, qt by Richard Foster, “Criticism as Rage: D.H.
Lawrence,” D.H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed by Mark
Spilka, Prentice-Hall, N.J., 1963, p. 151.
10. D.H. Lawrence, “Morality and the Novel,” Selected Literary Criticism,
ed by Anthony Beal, Heinemann, London, 1955, p. 113.
11. D.H. Lawrence, “Love,” Selected Essays, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1950, p. 24.
31
12. D.H. Lawrence, “Nottingham and the Mining Country,” Selected
Essays, p. 163.
13. D.H. Lawrence’s Preface to the American Edition of New Poems,
Selected Essays, p. 287.
14. S. P. Sherman’s Review of Studies in Classic American Literature, New
York Evening Post Literary Review, 20 Oct, 1923, p. 142.
15. An unsigned review of Pornography and Obscenity in New Statesman,
23, No 1929, p. 219.
16. The Cambridge Companion to Literature in English, ed by Dominic
Head, CUP, Cambridge, 2006, p. 632.
17. J. I. M. Stewart, “D.H. Lawrence,” Eight Modern Writers, Dent and
Sons, London, 1978, p. 498.
18. Anthony Beal, Selected Literary Criticism, p. 165.
19. Philip Hobsbaum, A Reader’s Guide to D.H. Lawrence, Thames and
Hudson, London, 1988, p. 87.
20. D.H. Lawrence and Italy, Penguin, London, 1972, cover page.
21. Richard Aldington, Introduction to Mornings in Mexico, Heinemann,
London, 1950, p. v.
22. D.H. Lawrence, qt by V. de. S. Pinto, Introduction to D.H. Lawrence:
Complete Poems, Penguin, London, 1928, p. 3.
23. D.H. Lawrence, Preface to Collected Poems, p. 27.
24. D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix II, Viking, London, 1936, p. 597.
25. D.H. Lawrence, Collected Poems, p. 137.
32
26. Henry David Thoreau, qt by Robert Spiller, American Literature, A
mentor Book, New York, 1956, p. 58.
27. Masterplot on D.H. Lawrence’s Letter, ed by Frank Magill, Salem Press,
New York, 1971, p. 62.
33