264
PARTISAN
Bunyan, Blake, Wordsworth, George Orwell-the whole
tradition in English literature, a tradition that accounts for
the strength of the greatest of the Western literatures which,
of this tradition, is forever renewing itself in the Bible, in
the
stinctual life and in the plangent organisms of its native soil.
not to say that the anarchist tradition constitutes the primary
of English literature; on the contrary, it is the Chaucers,
uHd.JI.C;~!Jt'
..
and Miltons who are its towering geniuses. But considered as
forces, as influences, the supreme writers are positively
Shakespeare helped to ruin the English verse drama just as
as Milton helped to kill off the English verse epic, and just as
did Joyce finish off the "psychological" and "literary" novel.
is no emulation of a genius and, historically, he serves only to
a moribund tradition.
On the other hand, the immense creative powers and
plishments of the anarchist tradition must not be
either. Its two most fierce and greatest representatives are Blake
Lawrence, and they must be accounted in the first rank of
poets and novelists. But good or bad, the anarchists are always
ers and shakers, who constantly renew and revitalize literature
open doors to the future. And their existence is a constant
that every Milton needs his Bunyan, every Pope his Blake and
worth, every Joyce his Lawrence.
1 Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor
I,
43.
2
The Letters of Charles Dickens
[Bloomsbury, 1939], II, 767.
3 See Kathleen Tillotson's excellent
Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (
1954),
pp.
54-58.
4 D. H. Lawrence,
The Letters of
...,
ed. by Aldous Huxley (New
1932),
p.
441.
5 D. H. Lawrence,
Phoenix
(New York, 1936),
p.
410.
6 HE.T."
D. H . Lawrence
(London, 1935), p. 105.
7
Ibid.,
p .
105.
8
The Later D.
H.
Lawrence,
ed. by W. Y. Tindall (New York,
p. 192.
9 D. H. Lawrence,
Selected Literary Criticism
(New York, 1956),
p.
10
Ibid.,
p. 164.
11
Ibid.,
p. 105.
