56
EUGENE GOODHEART
state of grace can be trusted in following their deepest impulses.
And these aristocrats of the spirit (artists, heroes, saints) need no
exhortation, for they must follow these impulses by virtue of what
they are. When Lawrence converts his vision into doctrine and
turns prophesy into moral prescription, he is confused about his
achievement. The visionary habit is alien to the moral life, because
it refuses to accommodate itself to anything different from
it.
To
confuse the visionary and the ethical is to hold out a false promise
to the
demos
(everyone can have a vision if he would only care),
a temptation that even the visionary artist finds hard to resist in a
democratic society. To be a "Laurentian" is not a simple matter
of cherishing "the warm life" and valuing spontaneity. (The cult
of the Laurentian is a foolish reductive appropriation of Lawrence.)
The power of the visionary artist for us is in his autonomy, in
his exclusive love of the mysterious and the inchoate, in what
Lawrence called his ·otherness. He does not have the spirit of com–
munity. He may regret this on occasion and long for it as Lawrence
did, but it is a futile longing, for the spirit of community is foreign
to his character. And because of this the visionary artist has within
him an extraordinary power of judgment.
If
we listen to him, we
may be kept from the
hubris
of complacency and self-congratulation,
of a facile faith
in
humanity and civilization. To write him off as a
dangerous fellow then is to do a disservice not only to "life," but
to the human community as well-indeed, it is to make intolerable
the very idea of human life. But he
is
a dangerous fellow, and it is
difficult not to sympathize with de Rougemont at the same time
that we value Lawrence especially since the spirit of the age has
come to be in many ways a horrible parody of that same Dionysian
element that is supposed to inspire the artist.
Of course, Lawrence did not at all conceive of an opposition
between the visionary and the ethical. Lawrence's refusal to tolerate
a dualism between the visionary and the ethical--or in other terms,
the passional and the social-is the basis of his attack on Freud
in
Fantasia of the Unconscious.
For Freud, in his characteristic
view a natural harmony between impulse and civilization is impos–
sible to achieve. Civilization, an Apollonian product, depends on
the repression or the sublimation of the passional energies.
