VICTORIAN MORALS
261
linguistic experimentation as far as they can be carried, and
Finne–
gans Wake
is the point of no return. But Lawrence, for all his re–
semblances and indebtednesses to Butler and Forster, represents a
fresh start, or, better, a renewal.
Sociologically, he is a rebel against the individualism and the
inhibitions of the middle class; artistically, he is the apostle of "na–
turalne~,"
as opposed to "artifice"; psychologically, he is interested
in instincts rather than the data of consciousness; ontologically, he
stands for the idea of growth as against the idea of stasis; and, above
all,
he is perhaps the most striking representative of that late nine–
teenth and early twentieth century phenomenon: the re-entry of the
Bible into the main stream of European culture from which it had
been excluded during most of the eighteenth century and most of the
nineteenth century. Allover the late nineteenth century, the Bible,
supposedly permanently crippled by mid-nineteenth century science
and rationalism, begins to reappear, as vigorous as ever. The major
impulse behind Dostoevski, as he himself said, was the Book of Job;
for Tolstoi it was the New Testament; for Matthew Arnold the Bible
as
a whole; for Thomas Hardy the pessimistic parts of the Old Testa–
ment. Old Testament pessimism was likewise stamped into Melville's
consciousness, and lies at the heart of
Mob
y
Dick.
Lawrence's interest in the Bible, however, and its force in
his
DOvels, lay in a different realm from any of these others, all of whom
went to the Bible for philosophical or moral sustenance. In the first
place, Lawrence did not like the climax of the Bible-the ending of
the Four Gospels-and his last creative act was to rewrite Matthew,
Mark,
Luke, and John in
The Man Who Died.
The Bible that he
loved was contained in the early books of the Old Testament, in
Genesis,
Exodus, Samuel, and Kings. Furthermore, it was not the
didacticism of the Bible that attracted
him,
and he always insisted
that, despite the fact that he was a "prophet,"
his
own novels were
non-didactic and simply represented life as fully and as deeply as
possible.
Rather it was the
spirit
of the earlier parts of the Old Testament
that attracted
him
and which he tried to inject into his own novels–
tit
vigor, the fierceness, the elemental passions, and the closeness to
earth,
from which the first Father and Mother had arisen in the
apening chapters of Genesis.
If
any part of Christianity genuinely at-
