PARTISAN REVIEW
is a kind of pointer to what is outside literature, and therefore outside
the individual's cerebral life. This outsideness of reality is for Law–
rence the waters of baptism in which man can be reborn: and there–
fore to make it an inside symbol is a kind of blasphemy to
him,
which
sets him against nearly all modem writers who share in common a
passion for turning all the exterior world into symbols of their interior
philosophies. This
is,
indeed, the essence of the philosophizing passion,
the metaphysical anxiety of modem literature.
Lawrence's "dark gods" are symbols of an inescapable mystery:
the point of comprehension where the senses are aware of an other–
ness in objects which extends beyond the senses, and the possibility
of a relationship between the human individual and the forces outside
himself, which
is
capable of creating in
him
a new state of mind.
Lawrence is the most hopeful modem writer, because he looks beyond
the human to the non-human, which can be discovered within the
human. He does not, like T. S. Eliot, like Proust or like other writers
who discover something absolute in the condition of civilization, leave
the individual like a child with the scattered achievements of civiliza–
tion fallen down in his mind like a child's bricks. For these writers the
world seems to consist of a civilization, once great, but which now
hypnotizes humanity with its fall, involving his spiritual and physical
life in that fall, and offering within this world, no way out. But for
Lawrence the world is not just man alone with his civilization. There
are men, there are women, there
is
a rotten civilization falling into
ruins, hypnotized with its own politics as the writers are hypnotized
by past culture, and there is the whole geographical world which
contains a great many civilizations besides the West, and enormous
areas of comparatively uncrowded and undeveloped country. Now
at the back of Lawrence's mind there is always the idea that if your
civilization, your culture betrays you, you can take up your bed
and walk, you can build a new house out of the ruins of the old,
you can go to the untamed jungle.
So Lawrence
is
a great releaser, a great dehypnotizer from the
enslavement of mental worlds. This is not just a conclusion which
I draw from his theories, it is an effect which I am in contact with
when I read a page of his descriptive prose-almost any page, which
is so much part of his world that it will pour itself out onto the pages
of a letter to a friend:
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