THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
Between the ilex tree and the bare, purplish elms, a gleaming seg–
ment of all England, the dark plough-land and wan grass, and the
blue, hazy heap of the distance, under the accomplished morning.
So the day has taken place, all the visionary business of the day.
The young cattle stand in the straw of the stack-yard, the sun gleams on
their white fleece, the eyes of Io, and the man with the side-whiskers
carries more yellow straw into the compound. The sun comes in all down
one side, and above, in the sky, all the gables and grey-stone chimney
stacks are floating in pure dreams.
There is threshed wheat smouldering in the great barn, the fire of
life; and the sound of the threshing machine, running, drumming.
The threshing-machine, running, drumming, waving its steam in
a corner of a great field, the rapid nucleus. of darkness beside the yellow
ricks; and the rich plough-land comes up, ripples. up in endless grape–
colored ripples, like a tide of procreant desire : the machine sighs and
drums, wind blows the chaff in little eddies, blows the clothes of the
men on the ricks against their limbs: the men on the stacks in the wind
against a bare blue heaven, their limbs blown clean in contour naked
shapely animated fragments of earth active in heaven.
Lawrence's thought has much in common with that of Blake:
Blake in
The Marriage of H ear;en and Hell
accuses the priests and
authorities of the established religions of his time of having robbed the
trees and streams in nature of their nymphs and fauns, robbed them
that
is
to say of their externality, their otherness and of their local
genius whereby through direct contact with them men could come in
touch through their senses with that "otherness" of what is outside
themselves; and turned them into the generalized abstractions of
official religion which is really the disguised will of the priests to
impose their order in the name of the gods whom they have robbed
of their immediate authenticity. In our time it is the high priests of
a religion of
art,
Henry James, Proust, James Joyce, the symbolists,
right down to our contemporaries, who have robbed the local deities
of their outsideness and turned the external into the symbols of an
interior shrine of
.art.
Like Blake, Lawrence praised a relationship
between men and women which created "the lineaments of satisfied
desire," a relationship of fulfilment rather than possession, in which
two human beings are brought together in awareness of the difference
which separates them.
What I am saying here has nothing to do with what is called
"literary criticism." Lawrence is a good writer, but the enormous
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