SONS, LOVERS, MOTHERS
375
as a human being. His sense of his own powers, of himself as a
"medium" through which the real life in things could be discovered
for other people, was so strong that his personal vividness stayed with
his earliest friends as a reminder of the best hopes of their youth;
it was instantly recognized by literary people in London when they
read his work. You can easily dislike Lawrence for this air of authority,
just as many people dislike him for the influence that he exerted
during his lifetime and that has grown steadily since his death in
1930. There is already an unmistakeable priggish conceit about Paul
Morel in this novel. Here is a miner's son who is asked by his mother
if
his is a "divine discontent" and replies in this style : "Yes, I don't
care about its divinity. But damn your happiness! So long as life's
full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your
happiness would bore me." But even this contains Lawrence's sense of
his
own authority. He saw his talent as a sacred possession-he was
almost too proud to think of his career as a
literary
one. This sense of
having a power that makes for righteousness-this was so strong in
Lawrence, and so intimately associated with his mother's influence,
that the struggle he describes in
Sons and Lovers,
the struggle to love
another woman as he had loved his mother, must be seen as the
connection he made between his magic "demon," his gift, and his
relationship to his mother.
Freud once wrote that he who is a favorite of the mother becomes
a "conqueror." This was certainly Freud's own feeling about himself.
The discoverer of the Oedipus complex never doubted that the at–
tachment which, abnormally protracted, makes a son feel that loving
any woman but his mother is a "desecration," nevertheless, in its
early prime features, gives a particular kind of strength to the son.
It is a spiritual strength, not the masculine "wildness" that Lawrence
was to miss in contemporary life. Lawrence's own feeling that he
was certainly somebody, the pride that was to sustain him despite
horribly damaged lungs through so many years of tuberculosis until
his death at forty-five; the pride that carried him so far from a
miner's cottage; the pride that enabled him, a penniless schoolteacher,
to run off with a German baronness married to his old teacher and
to make her give up her three children; the pride that thirty years
after
his
death still makes him so vivid to us as we read-this pride
