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dependent. Both Forster and Lawrence were admirers of Butler and
his intellectual unconventionality. Forster once contemplated a book
on Butler, and his own novels are filled with Butlerian echoes and
attitudes.
The Longest Journey
is a repetition of the Butlerian thesis
that the intellect is not supreme and that only common sense and in–
stinct can make existence bearable, indeed liveable. Lawrence and
Forster, of course, knew each other, and although Lawrence, as was
his custom, was sparing in his praise of Forster's work, the tie between
the two writers is manifest. Forster's admiration for Lawrence's work
and
his
recognition of Lawrence's genius are specifically documented
in
Aspects of the Novel,
where Lawrence is called the one indisputable
"prophet" among modern writers. And the "natural man" who
figures in Forster's early work, either an Italian like Gino or an
Englishman like Stephen Wonham, anticipate Lawrence's "dark
gamekeeper."
The Butler-Forster-Lawrence tradition likewise has its own form
and content. Formally, it prides itself on being non-literary, without
involved manipulation of structure or scrupulously maintained "points
of view" and without agonies over the
mot juste.
Forster thought that
the sanctity of the device of the point of view, made into a holy of
holies by James and Percy Lubbock, was an artificial shibboleth and
very consciously in his own novels he violated it. Lawrence's disdain
for the artifices of art was notorious. Whereas Joyce's method of re–
writing was to complicate and complicate further, ever adding to a
formal and precise structure, Lawrence's was to throwaway the
existing document and rewrite the original idea all over again.
In matters of content the Lawrencian tradition is equally di–
vergent from the Joyce tradition. Stasis is replaced by dynamics,
tragedy by comedy, and pessimism by hope. Space becomes freedom,
time becomes growth, and history can be shed as the snake sheds its
skin.
Thus against the ending of
Ulysses
and its static entrapment,
with Mr. Bloom accepting this entrapment, one can contrast the end–
ing of
The Rainbow
where amid the thunder of the dark horses on
the ground and under the splendor of the great rainbow in the sky,
Ursula Brangwen sheds her own past and, by proxy, the past of her
fellow human beings. This is a world which is organic and purposive;
it
is
expressive of the anti-Darwinian argument that Butler had
ini–
tiated, and Shaw had furthered. Studying botany
Ur~ula
rejects, solely
