THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
more evident than in any other modern writer. Lawrence could never
have compared the "evening spread out against the sky" to "a patient
etherized upon a table." He could not have done so because such an
image is too complete a triumph of the vision of the poet who sees
nature in terms of his own spiritual condition to have satisfied Law–
rence. The element of tension between the reality of the evening and
the poet is absent, the evening is swallowed up as it were within the
poet's sensitivity, and the respect for the external nature of the even–
ing has disappeared. Really it is the poet who is like a patient etherized
upon a table, who, when he looks at the evening sees himself spread
out on the sky. Nor could Lawrence ever have written:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form of any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake
Or set upon a golden bough to sing.
....
An
exquisite wish, exquisitely expressed, but the expression of a de–
fiant artificiality against the reality of flesh and blood and nature.
Lawrence, despite
his
great psychological insight, is too impa–
tient ever to have constructed a character who is wholly convincing
and complete psychologically, in fact his psychology is an instrument
for criticizing contemporary society through the medium of charac–
ters whom he invents for this purpose. His philosophy of sexuality is
imperfectly developed and often leads him into taking up unchar–
itable attitudes such as his contempt for one of his characters (Lord
Chatterley)
be~ause
he happens to
be
a cripple. Yet all his faults
can be counted as self-imposed limitations is order to narrow his
focus onto one aim: awareness of the "otherness," the externality of
nature and people. For Lawrence the outside world is not a mental
experience taking place inside the heads of observers and capable of
being realized creatively by artists as part of the mental order of
an old tradition adapting itself to living in modern conditions. He
does not want to make nature into a human spiritual possession, a
philosophy, a consolation, as Wordsworth does, nor into a field of
symbols which present man with opportunities of identifying his own
mental states with them, as the symbolists do. For him literature
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