THE LAWRENCE MYTH
raisedif they had not been ignored by Lawrence right up to the end.
Toward the last the strain is quite evident in the paintings, poems, and
tales,so that as the affinnative note became more emphatic the under-
lying despair rose more and more to the surface. Like Melville's
whale,"life dies sunwards full of faith." Sometimes the longing comes
through as clearly as this:
Life is for kissing and for horrid strife,
The angels and the Sunderers,
And perhaps in unknown Death we perhaps shall know
Oneness and poised immunity.
But Lawrence's importance is that of a cult-leader, a kind of
latter-day mystery god, as we have said, and to disinfect his ideas is
not to reduce the objective importance of his myth as a whole. It is
perhaps an empty characterization to say that he was, in any case,
oneof the great personalities of his generation. For the isolated qual-
itiesof honesty, courage and intensity there was perhaps not a man in
Englandworthy to touch the hem of his much battered garments. To
say that he possessed integrity is to strain the meaning of that term;
but we can say that he kept to his role with an irreproachable consist-
ency.Even as an artist his least successful organ notes proved more
penetrating than the tinny whistles of the Shaws, the Wellses, and
the Huxleys. He was a necessary antidote, for the parched young
of two continents, to the salty fare of a superior artist like T. S. Eliot
bothin the latter's wasteland and holy water phases. "Man seeks the
perfectionof the life or the work," as Yeats has said, and Lawrence's
lifewas very nearly perfect of its kind. It was a perfect example of
whatit is to be a mystery god in our time.
What then is the value of the Lawrence myth to a generation
that is now perhaps far enough removed from it not to fall into the
dangerof a facile self-identification? It is the value, in the first place,
of
any
myth: the vicarious exhaustion of possibilities that are in-
herentin the human being in every time and place. Lawrence over-
playedone impulse of human nature on a scale and in a fashion to
stand as a highly moral experience to anyone willing to follow him
throughto the end. Although he never achieved real tragedy in any
of his works, he was himself a tragic figure in a drama that lacks a
chorus.To appreciate him, we must try to supply this chorus and the
properlanguage for it. In the second place, his story includes elements
that should contribute to a deeper realization both of ourselves and
oursurrounding world. If we distinguish between its positive and its
negativeaspects, we must admit that the latter constitute an impres-
sionof the contemporary world which no honest and sensitive person
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