362
STEPHEN SPENDER
Of course I do not mean that Lawrence had no political sym–
pathies: still less that he had views in common with the liberal
ones of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. In his novels those char–
acters like Birkin and Aaron who are representative of the politically
searching Lawrence shop around in the contemporary w.orld of action
looking for lords of life who are passional, violent and antidemocratic.
Bertrand Russell, after some dealings with him during a few months
toward the end of the First World War- when Lawrence toyed with
the idea of founding some kind of brain (Bertrand Russell) - and–
blood (D. H. Lawrence) political movement-came to the conclusion
(stated thirty years afterward) that Lawrence's blood-and-soil view of
life was later realized in the horr.ors of Nazism. My point is though that,
apart from this one disastrous attempt to get together with Russell
and the Cambridge intelligentsia, and apart from his general sympathy
l'
with what might be termed bloody-bodiedness (in Germany, Italy or
Mexico), Lawrence found the world of public affairs, business and
any kind of social cooperation, utterly antipathetic. He even went so
I
far as to write a letter to Forster (in September, 1922) charging
him
with "a nearly deadly mistake [in] glorifying those
business
people
in
Howards End,"
and adding that "business is no good"-a conclusion
with which he might have found his correspondent concurred, had he
bothered to read Forster's novel.
Different as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence
were, they all agreed that the novel should be concerned with aware–
ness of life deeper than the conscious mind of the "old novelistic char–
acter" and the computable human social unit. Lawrence in his essay
on Galsworthy, and Virginia Woolf in her lecture on Arnold Bennett
("Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown") attack Galsworthy and Bennett on
similar grounds: that the characters in their books are "social
units."
Thus, although the 1910 generation (I call them this to make them
immediately distinguishable) sympathized with the anti-Fascism of Julian
Bell and John Cornford, they were also horrified at the idea of litera-
ture being compromised by politics. Virginia Woolf's
Letter to a Young
Poet
(1935) is a subdued but troubled protest at the spectacle of sensi-
tive and talented young Oxford and Cambridge poets echoing public
matters with a public voice and not writing out of a Wordsworthian
isolation, solitary among the solitary reapers. And E. M. Forster, with
politeness and forbearance, indicated the underlying grief of Cambridge
friends, when he
wrote
that the future probably lay with Communism
but that he did not want to belong to it.
