Eugene Goodheart
LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
In
recent years Lawrence has been made to serve causes
not of his own choosing, notably the moral tradition of the English
novel ancl more recently Christianity. The impetus for the remaking
of Lawrence was initially provided by T. S. Eliot's attack on
Lawrence in
After Strange Gods
in which Eliot found the son of
a Welsh coal miner heretical and sinister, the inevitable result of a
deficiency in the kind of tradition that a good education gives.
F. R. Leavis, coming to Lawrence's defense, argued insistently
(sometimes impressively, often extravagantly) for Lawrence's place
in
"the great tradition" of the English novel. Lawrence has been
seen
in
relation to other worthy traditions. For instance, in one
view, he is the last great writer who embodies the attack on ma–
chinery which began in England with Wordsworth and become so
pervasive a theme in Victorian literature that Pater, surveying the
whole of poetry, could define "all great poetry" as "a continual
protest" against "the predominance of machinery." There are real
provocations for seeing Lawrence as traditional and moral.
If
one
reads
The Rainbow
for its depiction of English country life, one
is impressed with Lawrence's resemblance to the George Eliot of
Adam Bede.
The essay "Democracy," read without reference to
his other works, yields a social and morally earnest Lawrence not
unlike the Carlyle of "Signs of the Times." These views, however,
have the unfortunate effect of domesticating Lawrence by neutral–
izing his subversiveness.
A particularly interesting instance of this is a recent tendency
in
the criticism of Lawrence to stress his kinship with Christianity.
There is, to be sure, some evidence for
this
view. Toward the end
