WORLDS OF STYLE
641
window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they
are for what they are; they exist' with God to-day. There is no
time to them. There is simply the rose. . . .
In declaring the freedom of words from the significances which history
has imposed on them even a writer as notoriously original as Miss
Stein finds herself an imitator.
One struggle in American literature is to assert against con–
ventional styles another kind of style that has been defined, out of
Emerson and Whitman, by Louis Sullivan when he referred to style
as "a consistent and definite expansion of pronounced personality."
This struggle cannot wholly
be
explained simply by reference to
some particular historical phenomenon, even one as staggering as
the offering to men's imagination of a new world. All we can say
is that American literature does offer the most persistent, the most
poignantly heroic example of a recurrent literary compulsion, not at
all confined to our literature, to believe in the possibilities of a
new style. The new American style was meant to release hitherto
unexpressed dimensions of the self into space where it would encounter
none of the antagonistic social systems which stifle it in the more
enclosed and cultivated spaces of England and of English books, the
spaces from which Lawrence escaped to the American West.
Paradoxically, I know of no deeper penetration of this central
core of American literature than D. H. Lawrence's
St. Mawr.
It
might seem merely ingenious to expand a critical proposition about
American writing, most of it of the nineteenth century, by analysis
of a novella, an English novella at that, published in 1925. But
in fact, criticism, including Lawrence's
Studies,
has nowhere con–
fronted the problem I have been describing with anything like the
comprehensive genius exhibited in
St. Mawr.
The story not only gives
life to these problems;
it
also shows us, with a subtlety possible only,
perhaps, in a fictional dramatization, their enormous literary con–
sequences. Once again the struggles going on in American writing
of the last century become the fictional subject of later, so-called
modem literature: Lawrence demonstrates the difficulty, in environ–
ments conventionalized by social and literary formulations, of trying
to find a voice, a personal style appropriate to what he calls in the
