MODERN AS VISION
363
written by the best writers who were privileged to belong to a place
and time when the tradition flourished as actual living.
These lines of thought have disrupted, in literature, what was
essentially modern: the vision of the present confronted by the past
as a whole state of being. The vision of a whole modern world-a
whole fatality-related to a past which is also whole,
if
only
in
not
being modern, is, let me emphasize again, essentially the characteristic
of the modern.
As
Rilke writes in the letter .already cited: "We let
it be emphasized again, in the sense of the Elegies WE are the
transmuters of the earth; our whole existence here, the flights and
falls of our love, all strengthen us for this task (besides which there
is really no other)."
The connection of the idea of wholeness (the past as a whole,
the task of the artist to interpret it into the wholeness of the present
fatality) with freedom of choice to select any part of the past as
tradition, should be apparent. The attitude of most recent critics to
the traditional in the work of D. H. Lawrence, demonstrates the
way in which a partial interpretation can be super-imposed on what,
in the life and work of the writer himself, was the search for wholeness.
F. R. Leavis, Richard Hoggart and others acclaim Lawrence as the
great exemplar of the alternative tradition: the chapel-going, Bun–
yanesque, proletarian. In doing this they make him the champion of
what is hopefully looked forward to as a new socialist puritan
revolution, with roots in Cromwellian England, against the upper
class public school Oxford and Cambridge and Bloomsbury culture.
It is of course quite possible to quote from
Fantasia of the
Unconscious
and several of his essays to make him fit such a role.
On the whole, Lawrence was probably more of a socialist than a
Fascist or the blood-and-soil race-conscious Nazi whom Bertrand
Russell saw in him. But even though the socialist and puritan work–
ing-class sentiments he sometimes expressed may prove that he was
capable of playing the kind of part that is now being written out
of his own books for him, in fact he refused it, even though he wrote
some of its speeches. His actions and the greater part of his writing
show that he was largely concerned with getting away from the very
tradition which he is now being written (or analyzed) into. And
those who put him back in this tradition have somehow to ignore
the fact that he left Nottingham and England and wandered over
