VICTORIAN MORALS
259
class rather than of the middle class. There can be no doubt that if
the bawdy, bearded, dying Lawrence of the later years were to re–
write
Sons and Lovers,
the scale of values would have been con–
siderably altered, if not actually reversed, with the drunken, vulgar–
ian, dominated father emerging as superior to the prim, powerfully–
willed mother, and Paul becoming explicitly the priggish soulmongerer,
the "little Jesus," that he implicitly is in the novel itself. By the time
he hit upon his true province, the world of
Women in Love
and
The
Rainbow,
Lawrence had come to realize this himself. Completely un–
satisfied with Skrebensky, the pre-eminent incarnation of the middle–
class consciousness, Ursula Brangwen imagines that there must be
another kind of consciousness, analogous to that of the workingman:
"It doesn't matter. But a sort of strong understanding, in some men,
and then a dignity, a directness, something unquestioned that there
is in working men, and then a jolly, reckless passionateness that you
see--a man who could really let go--. "
III
Joyce, then, represents the novel of middle-class consciousness in
culmination ,and
in extremis,
and Lawrence represents the counter–
attack from below. The question remains: where does the novel go
from here? For certainly it has remained substantially in the doldrums
since the deaths of Lawrence and Joyce. Good second-rank practi–
tioners are of course abundant, but major talents, such as came in
profusion from the 1830's to the 1920's, are indubitably lacking.
It is possible, of course, that the big novel is a thing of the past,
a child of the special conditions of the nineteenth century. Even the
writers whom one would tend to regard as the products of twentieth
century, if only for chronological reasons, such as Proust, Mann, and
Joyce, tend to look more and more, what with their preoccupation
with ideas, their minute psychologizing, their grandiose architecture,
like legacies of the nineteenth century and culminators of its par–
ticular ethos rather than new starts for the twentieth-century outlook,
of which the early Hemmingway is probably more representative.
The Sun Also Rises
is a functional twentieth-century house, while
Ulysses
or
Remembrance of Things Past
are Victorian mansions.
On the other hand, there is no reason
per
se
for assuming that
the novel is doomed. The very special conditions upon which the
