VICTORIAN MORALS
255
in
that deliberate way he had of speaking when he was trying to work
IOmething out in his own mind. "And how wild they were with her
for doing it. It was she who started putting all the action inside. Be–
fore, you know, with Fielding and the others, it had been outside.
Now I wonder which is right?"e "E.T." promptly replied that of
course George Eliot was right, but Lawrence demurred,
if
ever so
slightly, "You know I can't help thinking there ought to be a bit of
both."7
For he faintly suspected then what he was to assert so vehe–
mently later, namely, that the exploration of the minutiae of con–
sciousness was finally, magnificent a subject though it might
be,
a
cul-de-sac, as it has since proved to
be.
This is what he meant by
his
later and more famous statement that he was no longer interested
in
individuals and what he meant when he emitted one of his char–
acteristic screeches at most modern novels: "They're all little Jesuses
in
their own eyes, and their 'purpose' is to prove it. Oh Lord!
Lord
Jim! Sylvestre Bonnard! If Winter Comes! Main Street! Ulysses!
Pan!
They are all pathetic or sympathetic or antipathetic little Jesuses
tJCcomplis
or
manques.
JJ8
It is a rebellion against the intolerable "I,"
"I," "I," which is the signature of so many twentieth-century novels.
This subjective line that began with George Eliot and led to
Henry
James, to Conrad, to Virginia Woolf, to culminate in Joyce
bas
certain marked characteristics both in content and form. Its con–
tent
is
the data of middle-class consciousness, usually described di–
rectly by the so-called stream of consciousness, or a variant thereof,
with
the exception of Conrad where narration is objection. Life is
nceived of as statis-nothing can change and nothing can really
ppen-and, with the exception of Joyce, tragic. But even in Joyce
e major assumption is that we all are trapped in our own solitary
, endlessly chewing the cud of moment-by-moment experience,
wly and sadly in James, abruptly and ironically in Conrad,
po–
'cally and wistfully in Virginia Woolf, rapidly and humorously in
oyce. The stasis, or entrapment, tragic in James and Conrad and
ardy, becomes wistful in Woolf and funny in Joyce.
Ulysses
leaves
hero in a perfect equilibrium-nothing ventured, nothing gained.
en Leopold Bloom finally kisses the adulterous rump of which
is
the adorer and falls off to sleep, dreaming of Sinbad the Sailor,
is
certainly one of the most equanimous protagonists in all fiction,
ply because he has accepted utterly the fact that life
is
what it
