THE LAWRENCE MYTH
power, is to be achieved, as we have seen, through identification with
nature; he is against the intellectual will expressing itself in any sort
of active dogma. But this power would seem to be considerably vari-
able between individual and individual. In such a situation the in-
ferior men must bow down in homage before their acknowledged
lords and masters; only in this way will a continuous "stream of life"
be maintained. In other words, it is the old medieval hierarchy, with
grace (sex) once again thrown in as a safeguard. In
Kangaroo
the
fascistlabor leader wins the support of his followers only to renounce
it because he is still not on good enough terms with "the dark gods."
The same notion is repeated in the diffuse and hysterical
Plumed
Serpent.
Led into confirmation of a political religion with whose only
practical expression he would have been the first to quarrel, Lawrence
illustrates the dangerous foolishness of his logic once it is applied.
Only by courtesy of course is it to be called logic at all; here
surely it is the blood and not the intellect that is doing the thinking.
For sex is not the equivalent of medieval grace, in the sense of being
a mode of communication between two absolute orders of being, but
something common to both man and nature;- Grace was invented by
the theologians because it was necessary to establish some bridge be-
tween the human and the divine by which man could receive some
assistancein controlling the forces of his nature; but in Lawrence sex
is indistinguishable from these forces themselves. To attempt to im-
prove human relationships through sex is therefore like attempting to
improvenature by lifting it on its own bootstraps. It is an attempt for
whichLawrence could have found a discouraging precedent in a much
earlier representative of the tortured Anglo-Saxon Protestant mind,
who sought "the perfection of nature" only to end his days with a
Yahoo babble in his brain. Swift belied human nature by projecting
it too purely on its Houyhnhnm side, Lawrence by giving too much
scopeto its Yahoo side; but both pictures equalize in their common
injustice to the reality.
In his remarkable essay on Poe, Lawrence demonstrates how the
Westernwill, become converted into the "will-to-know," turns in on
itself and becomes an instrument that ends by destroying its own
object, as the hero of
Ligeia
wills the death of his beautiful young
wife.It never seems to have occurred to him that his own version of
the Schopenhaurian "will-to-live," despite its up-to-date anthropolog-
ical trappings, could also turn in on itself and blight the very sourceS
of its energy. Yet in a story like
The Ladybird
there is an odd am-
biguityin the manner in which the hero, Count Dionys Psanek, vacil-
latesbetween being a sympathetic avatar of his mythological namesake
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