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ALFRED KAZIN
had not its origin but its
setting,
in the fierce love of Mrs. Arthur
Lawrence for "Bert," of Mrs. Morel for her Paul.
Lawrence, who was so full of his own gift, so fully engaged
in working it out that he would not acknowledge his gifted con–
temporaries, certainly did feel that the "essential soul" of him as he
would have said, his special demon, his particular gift of vision,
his
particular claim on immortality, was bound up with his mother. Not
"love" in the psychological sense of conscious consideration, but love in
the mythological sense of a sacred connection, was what Lawrence
associated with
his
mother and Paul with Mrs. Morel. Lawrence's
power over others is directly traceable to
his
own sense of the sacred–
ness still possible to life, arising from the powers hidden in ordinary
human relationships. The influence he had- if only temporarily–
even on a rationalist like Bertrand Russell reminds one of the hold he
kept on socialist working-class people he had grown up with and
who certainly did not share Lawrence's exalted individualism. Law–
rence's "authority," which made him seem unbearably full of him–
self to those who disliked him, was certainly of a very singular kind.
He had an implicit confidence in his views on many questions–
on politics as on sex and love; he was able to pontificate in later life
about the Etruscans, of whom he knew nothing, as well as to
talk
dangerous nonsense about "knowing through the blood" and the
leader principle. Yet it
is
Lawrence's struggle to retain all the moral
authority that he identified with
his
mother's love that explains the
intensity of
Sons and Lovers,
as it does the particular intensity of
Lawrence's style in this book, which he later criticized as too violent.
Yet behind this style lies Lawrence's lifelong belief in what he called
"quickness,"
his
need to see the "shimmer," the life force in everything,
as opposed to the "dead crust" of its external form. Destiny for
Lawrence meant
his
privileged and constant sense of the holiness
implicit in this recognition of the life force. Destiny also meant his
recognition, as a delicate boy who had already seen his older brother
Ernest (the "William" of
Sons and Lovers)
sicken and die of the
struggle to attach himself to another woman, that
his
survival was
somehow bound up with fidelity to his mother. Lawrence had absolute
faith in his gift, but it was bound up with his physical existence, which
was always on trial. He felt that it was in his mother's hands. The
gift of life, so particularly precious to him after
his
near-fatal pneu-
