254
ever really care about positlon or money or even immediate
preservation. They are all struggling for that most passionate
most unself-conscious of relationships-love. They thus "explode
of convention"5 and are destroyed, while those who remain safely
pallidly within the pale are saved. Critics of Hardy complained
his
characters were always behaving in unexpected fashion and
unexpected things, but that was just the point, according to
rence: they were acting instinctively in a world where the u·lStlnctnl
was no longer allowable. In Hardy, as in Butler, the burden of
sciousness and the legacy of St. Paul have become intolerable,
in Jude's terrible death and in Ernest Pontifex's final isolation,
see two prophecies as to its ultimate end-point: either it will
people to their death or it will drive them into outlawry,
polite and genteel, as was Ernest's.
But Hardy and Butler, while in some respects they point
in
same direction, are in other respects radically divergent. Butler
clearly looks forward to E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence,
their instinctive ethic, their dynamic, purposive concepts of life,
disdain for and lack of concern with the minutiae of individual
sciousness, and their sense of comedy. Hardy, on the other hand,
he has deep affinities with Lawrence, especially as the poet of
and the apostle of the instincts, looks toward the stasis and
the entrapment of the individual in the hell of
his
consciousness,
is the province of the later James, of Conrad, of Woolf, of
The one tradition looks forward to
The Man Who Died;
the
to
Finnegans Wake.
Thus Lawrence and Joyce, the two
~'J
.JUJ"'j.JIH4I..,
great English novelists of the twentieth century, in whose
the novel still wallows, are not so much the unique children of
twentieth century as they are the grandchildren of the nineteenth,
twin inheritors and summarizers of the great Victorian novel,
broke, split, and diverged in two directions in the late
century.
It all began with George Eliot; at least this is what D. H.
rence thought.
As
young readers, he and "E.T." were both
hearted admirers of George Eliot, especially of
The Mill on the
Yet Lawrence has some reservations as to the direction, namely,
psychological, to which George Eliot's novels first pointed. "You
it was really George Eliot who started it all," Lawrence was
