10
PARTISAN REVIEW
and a somewhat sinister emissary of Avernus. In fact, there is some-
thing rather sinister about all the little black heroes, and Dionys is
selected only because he is the blackest and smallest and most obvious-
ly sinister of the lot. A German army officer imprisoned in England,
he renews his friendship with a childhood acquaintance, the pale and
virginal Lady Daphne, whose husband is away at the war. Through
a series of distinctly cruel conversations he manages to persuade her
that she is a "whited sepulchre" and that her husband is probably no
better. Upon the latter's return, he induces her, through the spell of
his singing, to come to his room at night. There he is "seated in flame,
in flame unconscious, like an Egyptian King-god in the statues." At
first he hesitates but then decides: "Take her into the underworld.
Take her into the dark Hades with him, like Francesca and Paolo.
And in hell hold her fast, queen of the underworld, himself master
of the underworld." He informs her, "In the dark you are mine.
And when you die you are mine. But in the day you are not mine,
because I have no power in the day. In the night, in the dark, and in
death, you are mine."
This talk of intermingled love and night and death-we have
heard it all before. Nineteenth century romanticism had been a death·
ward movement, as Mann shows in his Wagner essay, and through
the Nietzsche influence it is simple enough to relate Lawrence back
to the sources of Poe, Wagner, Baudelaire, and the other great cele-
brants of the tomb. Despite the superficial exaltation of birds and
beasts and flowers, despite the eloquent stressing of the natural beauty
and power in man, his life and work are rooted in an irrepressible
yearning for the grave. For to what can this extinction of the daylight
world, this abandonment of reason, lead but to a surrender of the
finite human self to the infinite nothingness of the flux? For the ro-
mantic there is always the moment when Life, with a capital L, must
be equated with death; it is the moment when the expanding sense
of nature in him causes him to break irrevocably the limitations which
alone guarantee his identity. "Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-
knot called life," cries Whitman. "Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death."
If this loosening was indeed what had been desired all along, it was
of course foolish to talk so big on the subject of life. For if life, hu-
man life, is a knot, reason is one of the two controlling cords. To
discard reason is to throw over the only thing that can give life defi·
nition. Lawrence's program is, in' the last analysis, a program for a
mystery god-but hardly for a man. And Dionysius in every age can
terminate his agony only by dissolving into his native element.
These considerations are so obvious that they would not be
