SONS,
LOVERS, MOTHERS
381
concern to represent the "shimmer" of life, the "wholeness"-these
could have been mere romantic slogans-that made possible his
brilliance as a novelist. He was to say, in a remarkable essay called
"Why The Novel Matters," that "Only in the novel are
all
things
given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we
realize that life itself, and not inert safety,
is
the reason for living.
For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that
is
anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man
alive, and live woman."
It
was
relationship
that was sacred to him,
as it was the relationships
with
his mother, her continuing presence
in his mind and life, that gave him the sense of authority on which all
his power rested. And as a novelist in
Sons and Lovers
he was able
to rise above every conventional pitfall in an autobiographical novel
by centering his whole vision on character as the focus of a relation–
ship, not as an absolute.
After
Sons and Lovers,
which was his attempt to close up the
past, Lawrence was to move on to novels like
The Rainbow
(1915)
and
Women In Love
(1920), where the "non-human in humanity"
was to be more important to him than "the old-fashioned human
element." The First World War was to make impossible for Law–
rence his belief in the old "stable ego" of character. Relationships, as
the continuing interest of life, became in these more "problematical,"
less "conventional" novels, a version of man's general relationship,
as an unknown in himself, to his unexplained universe. But the
emphasis on growth and change in
Sons and Lovers,
the great book
that closes Lawrence's first period, is from the known to the unknown;
as Frank O'Connor has said, the book begins as a nineteenth century
novel and turns into a twentieth century one. Where autobiographical
novels with a "sensitive" artist or novelist as hero tend to emphasize
the hero's growth to self-knowledge, the history of his "development,"
the striking thing about
Sons and Lovers,
and an instance of the
creative mind behind it, is that it does not hand the "laurels of
victory" to the hero.
It
does not allow him any self-sufficient victory
over his circumstances. With the greatest possible vividness it shows
Paul Morel engulfed in relationships-with the mother he loves all too
sufficiently, with the "spiritual" Miriam and Clara, neither of whom
he can love whole-heartedly-relationships that are difficult and pain-
