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PARTISAN
on the basis of her own intuition, the mechanistic
explanation of natural phenomenon that her professors give
her,
she believes, against all reason and science, that everything
"soul," even objects of nature, such as flowers.
In
her mind
thing in the universe is potentially living and eternal, and time
is no longer tyrannous. The earthly institution that most fully
bolized the victory over time of this Butlerian or Lamarckian
was the medieval cathedral. Lincoln Cathedral in
The
described as:
Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and
between dawn and sunset, the Church lay like a seed in silence,
before germination, silenced after death ... potential with all the
and transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great .
seed.... Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom
music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death....
Other institutions, such as the great country house of Breadalby,
symbolize the dead and finished past but that still, anomalously,
vive in the present are described as snares and delusions:
"What
snare and a delusion, this beauty of static things."
Finally the Lawrencian tradition is avowedly, one might say
tically, kinetic; it has a "message," and the burden of this
from Butler to Lawrence, is that the middle-class consciousness
become thin and neurotic, divorced from primal needs and .
According to Lawrence the middle class is "broad and shallow
passionless. Quite passionless. At best they substitute affection,
is the great middle-class positive emotion."g A corollary of this
taste for middle-class consciousness, which had been developed by
restrictive and absolutistic morality, was a distaste for all
Everything in the world is relative to everything else, and
had any value except insofar as it is related to the'
"grace" and Lawrence's "dark power."
What Lawrence
rep~esents,
then, is the culmination in the
of that upsurge from below which the "ethic" of the London
tariat had prefigured and which Butler had first embodied in
novel. Without getting into the argument between T. S. Eliot
and
F. R. Leavis about the "cultural resources" of Lawrence, it can
cer–
tainly be said that he was, definitively and defiantly, of the
