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ALFRED KAZIN
too much his mother's son. We see the common round of life among
the miners' families very much as the young Lawrence must have
seen it, with the same peculiar directness. His mental world was
startlingly without superfluities and wasted motions. What he wrote,
he wrote. The striking sense of authority, of inner conviction, that he
associated with his mother's love gave him a cutting briskness with
things he disapproved. But
this
same immediacy of response, when it
touched what he loved, could reach the greatest emotional depths.
The description of William Morel's coffin being carried into the house
is a particular example of this. "The coffin swayed, the men began to
mount the three steps with their load. Annie's candle flickered, and
she whimpered as the first men appeared, and the limbs and bowed
heads of six men struggled to climb into the room, bearing the
coffin that rode like sorrow on their living flesh." Lawrence's power
to move the reader lies in this ability to summon up all the physical
attributes associated with an object; he puts you into direct contact
with
all
its properties
as
an object. Rarely has the realistic novelist's
need to
present,
to present vividly, continually, and at the highest
pitch of pictorial concentration-the gift which has made the novel
the supreme literary form of modern times-rarely has this reached
such intense clarity of representation as it does in
Sons and Lovers.
There are passages, as in Tolstoy, that make you realize what a
loss to directness of vision our increasing self-consciousness in literature
represents. Lawrence is still face to face with life, and he can describe
the smallest things with the most attentive love and respect.
Lawrence does not describe, he would not attempt to describe,
the object as in
itself
it
really is. The effect of his prose is always
to heighten our consciousness of something, to relate it to ourselves.
He is a romantic-and in this book is concerned with the most
romantic possible subject for a novelist, the growth of the writer's
own consciousness. Yet he succeeded as a novelist, he succeeded
brilliandy, because he was convinced that the novel is the great
literary form, for no other could reproduce so much of the actual
motion or "shimmer" of life, especially as expressed in the relation–
ships between people. Since for Lawrence the great subject of litera–
ture was not the writer's own consciousness but consciousness between
people, the living felt relationship between them, it was
his
very
