VICTORIAN MORALS
263
vorite text, which motivates her whole life, is Genesis VI, 2-4, which
begins: "The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were
fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose." This pas–
sage stirs her like a call. There must be, she thinks, offspring of God,
Sons
of God, other than Jesus and Adam, men who had neither given
up
the life of the body nor been driven ignominiously from Paradise,
and who "came on free feet to the daughters of men, and took them
to wife, so that the women conceived and brought forth men of re–
nown." Her whole instinctual life then is centered on finding for a
mate a "Son of God." When she first sees Skrebensky, she imagines
him
as "one such as those Sons of God who saw the daughters of
men, that they were fair"; she soon sees that he is Adamic and
fallen. But in the sequel to
The Rainbow,
in
Women in Love,
Ursula
fmally finds, after much turmoil and struggle, her "Son of God" in
Birkin.
Mter they finally capitulate to one another, she thinks: "This
was release at last. She had had lovers, she had known passion. But
this
was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming
back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are
in
the beginning."
For the Bible, said Lawrence, was "in my bones."lo He thought
it
was "a great confused novel" and that the novel itself was "the
book
of life." The Bible was not about God, but about "man alive."
"Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath–
sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul,
Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish."ll
The "man alive" that Mayhew, with disapproval, and Butler,
with
approval, saw in the upper and lower classes and that Lawrence
saw
in
his own lower class had already been prefigured in the open–
ing
pages of the earliest and greatest of Western "novels," the Bible.
IV
The saturation in the Bible, the feeling for the natural world,
the
passionate surge of impulse from the "lower orders" up into the
world of educated-intellectualized consciousness, the opposition of
"life" to "literature"-"storytelling" to "artifice," "speech" to "style"
-the anarchist-instinctual rebellion against codes and restrictions and
rationality and rules are obviously not unique with Lawrence. One
cr
more or all of these characteristics calls up memories of Langland,
