LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
55
(even the best of them) to transcend themselves infinitely. Lawrence
mistrusted what Mark Schorer has called (writing of Blake) the
politics of vision. His respect for human limitations counteracted
somewhat the anarchic Dionysian tendency of his imagination. His
work at moments seems a balance of opposing tendencies, and this
balance gives the impression of health and normality, which critics
like F. R. Leavis make so much of. Even in Lawrence's fierce
repudiations and self-affirmations, the imagination of distinction,
relation, balance and hierarchic order often appears. Nevertheless,
Lawrence is essentially like Blake and Nietzsche in his address to the
untapped powers of man and his hatred of the rules and forms that
curb those powers.
Lawrence is neither a "normative" writer, judging from some
conventional standard of health or vitality, nor is he, for that
matter, a perverse writer, revelling in a fantasy that defies or
deviates from the norms of civilization. Like Blake and Nietzsche
before him, Lawrence has managed to see and judge the quality
of life (its norms and its perversities) from a vantage point outside
of civilization. Such a statement is, of course, meaningless to those
who deny the existence of such a vantage point. Denis de Rouge–
mont, for instance, remarks in
Love in the Western World:
"To
plunge down below our moral rules is . . . not to abolish their re–
straints, but merely to indulge in more than animal insanity. The
mistake lies in supposing that 'the real thing,' the longing for which
has now become an obsession is there to be found."
As
a
caveat
against the glorification of instinct, this statement is valuable, but
as a theoretical statement about human possibility it seems to me
presumptuous and unacceptable. To regard the moral rules as ab–
solutes against which there is no radical appeal is both to indulge
in the humanistic presumption that this is the best of all possible
worlds and to invalidate
a priori
any radical criticism of the norms
of a civilization. It is to reject as valueless the visionary genius.
Lawrence's mistake was to confuse the visionary and the ethical.
His vision of life finally should not be taken as a guide to conduct,
the hortatory, preacherish manner of much of his work notwith–
standing. The urging to follow "one's deepest impulse" is either
nonsensical or dangerous, for given the human condition impulsive–
ness would sooner issue in horror than in vitality. Only those
in
a
