LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
45
idiotic footrule" that "man is the measure of the universe" is
often a kind of misanthropy. In
The Man Who Died
the repudia–
tion of Christ's mission to convert men to the God of Love ("to lay
the compulsion of love on all men") is accompanied by an intense
hatred of the City of Man.
So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the
world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of
passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but al–
ways the dread insomnia of compulsion.
It
was fear, the ultimate
fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move
on, for if he stayed, his neighbors wound the strangling of
their fear and bullying around him. There was nothing he
could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of ego, wanted to put
a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was
the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion
upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike are
mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness.
We are reminded
in
the above passage of Lawrence's kinship with
other misanthropes: Swift and Nietzsche, for example. The mis–
anthropy is connected with Lawrence's attraction to the "inhuman"
and the "impersonal": Lawrence's characters seek to transcend the
human world of circumstance and compulsion in order to enter
the other world of cosmic energy, what Lawrence calls in
The Man
Who Died
"the greater life of the body." At the end of
Apocalypse
Lawrence unmistakably indicates the cosmic character of the greater
life of the body.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive
and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I
am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of
the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the
sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my
soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit
is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my
family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute
except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no
existence by itself, it
is
only the glitter of the sun ,on the
surface of the waters.
