lOOKS
313
justice, that all too often Lawrence tried and failed to repeat the
formula which worked so brilliantly in
Women in Love.
Regardless
of whether we agree with them, Ursula and Birkin are an
interest–
ing
couple in a way that Kate and Cipriano are not-though this
last pair is still to be preferred to Lou Witt and her horse.
The last hundred pages of
The Failure and the Triumph of
Art
are devoted to an examination of the three novels which are
Lawrence's acknowledged masterpieces:
Sons and Lovers, The
Rainbow,
and
Women In Love.
The reason for their success lies,
according to Vivas, in Lawrence's obedience to the Jamesian dic–
tum: "Don't state-render." It is the ability to "render" rather
than
to "state" which makes Lawrence a great writer, and it is in
these novels that he shows this power most strongly. In an effort
to account for these triumphs, Mr. Vivas introduces a new critical
term, "the constitutive symbol," the presence of which, he claims,
enhances a work of fiction . In so far as I understand the term, it
means that no given number of "interpretations" will exhaust the
THE COMMONWEALTH PEN
An Introduction to the Literature
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Edited
by
A. L. McLEOD,
State University
of New York College of Education, Fredonia
HERE
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literature of 11 Commonwealth countries-an account
which shows the course of the older literature compared
to the beginnings of West African, Malayan, Caribbean,
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Recognized authorities from the several countries out–
line the history of their literatures, discuss the principal
writers and their works, and evaluate them in terms of
the wider body of English literature.
254
pages, $3.50
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, Ithaca, New York
