262
tracted him it was the militant aspect of Protestantism. In
in a Man's Life" he said that even deeper woven into
his
COIJISOO.
ness than such early literary influences as Wordsworth or
'-'u......
<;;>~
or Keats were the banal Nonconformist hymns that dominated
childhood memories. He was proud of the fact that he was a
gationalist, the oldest of the Nonconformist sects, because, in his
hood anyway, it had escaped the ghastly sentimentalism
that
come in with Methodism and because it was vigorous and joyful.
So too it was the rapturously and rigorously physical
of life in the early parts of the Old Testament that fired his
tion and animated his novels, both in their content and
in
their
The incantatory prose of Lawrence, at its best and at its
purely Biblical, and a page of it could be put side by side with,
"The Song of Solomon," and there would be no essential difj'erel]G
there is the concreteness of everything, the short, rapt, bardic
ance, and the oracular repetitiousness. Characters likewise have
whole instinctual life motivated by Biblical imagery and
particularly, generation by generation, in
The Rainbow-Worn,.
Love
series. When Lydia and Tom Brangwen after two years
rather tense married life, finally come together
in
a deep sense,
renee describes it thus: "When at last they had joined hands,
house was finished, and the Lord took up his abode. And they
glad." And Anna, Lydia's daughter by her first marriage, at
feels confident in her parents: "She played between the pillar of
and the pillar of cloud
in
confidence, having the assurance on
right hand and the assurance on her left. She was no longer
upon to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the
Her father and her mother now met to the span of the heavens,
she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath, between."
Anna herself, as she grows up, the Biblical sense and utterance
come more pronounced, and, at times, embarrassing. When
after her marriage to Will, she takes off her clothes and dances,
"She liked the story of David, who danced before the Lord, and
covered himself exultingly." With Ursula, their child, the
sense becomes even more emphatic. Although she hates sermons,
loves Sundays; by day she sees in a vision the white-robed
Christ passing between the olive trees and by night she hears a
calling "Samuel, Samuel!" Her favorite book is Genesis and
