D. H. Lawrence's Bestiary: A Study of his Use of Animal Trope and Symbol [Reprint 2018 ed.] 9783110890730, 9789027919502

Citation preview

D E PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curai C. H. V A N S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana

University

Series Practica,

30

D. H. LAWRENCE'S BESTIARY A Study of His Use of Animal Trope and Symbol

by

KENNETH INNISS

1971

MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission the

print, from

publishers.

L I B R A R Y OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 70-165144

Printed in Hungary

for

Barbaraa

PREFACE

This study of D. H. Lawrence's animal rhetoric had its origin in a distraction from my linear progress through Lawrence's novels. With The Rainbow and Women in Love, a special world with its own axioms and thematic images of beasts came into view. Fascinated by this world I set aside my strictly chronological reading of the novels and began to note the way in which the key animal terms of his vision appear in poems, letters, travel-books, tales and speculative writings. There were, I soon discovered, vital lines of force between the symbolic worlds and their maker's existence; his animals moved easily back and forth in a constant process of transmutation and adaptation; patterns began to appear; an internal order seemed possible; a reading of Lawrence's public and private rhetoric suggested itself. Before I could proceed further, however, I had to involve myself in archetypal studies by Northrop Frye, Philip Wheelwright and others, carrying into these frontiers of speculation the indispensable biographical ballast which the scholarship of Harry T. Moore has made available. Among the many other critics of Lawrence I consulted, I found Graham Hough the most consistently useful, particularly so for his treatment of Lawrence's doctrine. Other important stimuli to my own thinking were the philosophers Eliseo Vivas (in his treatment of Lawrence's symbolism), and Leone Vivante, whose concept of potentiality clarified my intimations of Lawrence's "wild". In addition Harold Orel of the University of Kansas provided me with the right mixture of encouragement and Socratic opposition in directing the original project as a doc-

6

PREFACE

toral dissertation. Following no one method, either in original composition or in rewriting for publication, I have discovered after the fact that my approach does have certain affinities with a type of thematic explication practiced in France as one variety of the new criticism, though mine does not aspire to the philosophical rigor of t h a t school. I n making it possible to bring the present version of my study to print the Department of English and the Research Advisory Council of Western Washington State College have been liberal patrons. K . I. Western Washington State College Bellingham, Washington 1971

CONTENTS

Preface

5

Introduction

9

I. Toward the Definition of a Weltanschauung A. The Sacred Wild B. Emblems of Good and Evil II. The Animals in Poetry A. Look! We Have Come Through B. Birds, Beasts and Flowers C. Pansies and Last Poems D. Conclusion

16 16 30 57 57 65 90 105

III. The Animals in Fiction A. Pure Passionate Experience B. Fighting for the Crown: The Rainbow C. Dies Irae: Women in Love D. The Savage Pilgrimage E. The Serpent Power

108 108 118 137 158 174

IV. The Last Phase: Pure Animal Man

189

Selected Bibliography

198

Index

204

INTRODUCTION

That D. H. Lawrence's major contribution to literature was in the novel, and that it is as a novelist1 that he will continue to live, is now critical orthodoxy. Nevertheless, Lawrence is recognized as a novelist of a peculiar and disturbing sort: cosmological rather than exclusively social in his interests; driven, as a visionary, to preach strange metaphysical doctrines; concerned, like a lyric poet, with the expression of timeless states of being. A powerful mythopoetic element, charged with the "rapt bardlike quality" that E. M. Forster noted,2 is constantly at war in his fiction with the predictable world of common sense. Individual character, the central focus in the traditional novel, tends at moments of intensity to dissolve into its 1 D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York, 1956), the polemical work of the English critic F. R . Leavis, has insisted on the view of Lawrence as before all a great novelist. Yet even Leavis is driven to write of St. Mawr, Women in Love, and The Rainbow in terms of 'dramatic poem'. Horace Gregory in Pilgrim Of The Apocalypse (New York, 1933), had noted in The Rainbow and following the breakdown of narrative into symbolic exposition as in a lyric poem. W . H. Auden in "Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence", Nation, CLXIV (1947), 482, said that Lawrence, like Blake, was interested not in individuals but in 'states'. Eliseo Vivas in D. H. Lawrence: The Triumph And Failure of Art (Evanston, 1960), p. 238, sees Lawrence as one of the few novelists whose interest is in man's relation to the cosmos instead of purely human realities. And of course long ago E. M. Forster in Aspects Of The Novel (New York, 1927), pointed out, in his chapter "Prophecy", the "rapt bardic q u a l i t y " in Lawrence, who "sings" rather than says something about the universe, and whose prophetic vision seems to be irradiating nature from within.

* Aspects Of The Novel, p . 207.

10

INTRODUCTION

primal and impersonal elements; and man is seen in his connection with bird, beast and flower as part of the living mystery of the cosmos. Writing novels out of a poetic vision of life, Lawrence moves us to a sense of wonder by rhythmic incantation, image, metaphor and symbol. As E. L. Nicholes pointed out in 1949, an important aspect of his prose style is "his use of animal imagery and symbol, in brief metaphors or in t h e more extensive and complex images which characterize whole episodes and conflicts". 3 But in spite of some interesting studies of the imagery of individual works, 4 no one has yet shown how Lawrence's bestiary, in novel and poem alike, is intimately connected with central notions of his world-picture. To know the general typology of his animals, the central associations of tiger, swan, horse, rabbit and whale in the total Gestalt of Lawrence's discursive writings, is to bring deeper perspective to individual works and to perceive a special unity in his art. Such an investigation can also throw light on the manner in which his shaping imagination worked. Problems of organization and selection immediately present themselves. With Lawrence, as Herbert Lindenberger has said, "the interests, attitudes, methods, and also the mannerisms of one novel flow, not only into other novels, but also into the travel books,

3

"The Simile of t h e Sparrow in The Rainbow b y D . H . Lawrence", MLN L X I V (1949), reprinted in The Achievement of D.H.Lawrence, eds. Frederick J. H o f f m a n and Harry T. Moore (Norman, 1953), p. 159. 4 E.g., Robert Hogan, "The Amorous Whale: A Study in the Symbolism of D . H . Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies V (1959), 39-46; and w i t h Patricia Abel, "D. H . Lawrence's Singing Birds" in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale, 1959), pp. 204-214. Kingsley Widmer in three articles: "Our Demonic Heritage: D . H . Lawrence", Miscellany, pp. 13-27: "Birds of Passion and Birds of Marriage in D. H . Lawrence", University of Kansas City Review, X X V (1958), 73-79; and "The Primitivistic Aesthetic: D . H . Lawrence", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X V I I (1959), 344-353. Haruhide Mori, "Lawrence's Imagistic Development in The Rainbow and Women in Love", EHL, X X X I (1964), 460-481.

INTRODUCTION

11

poems, letters and essays". 5 And nowhere do we have, in one place, a metaphysic shaped with the geometric finality of Yeats' A Vision. Nevertheless, I believe t h a t we can find, within flux, mutation, and contradiction, generative ideas and animal tropes which, in essentials, do not vary. First, I establish the conceptual framework — a critical synopsis of Lawrence's notion of 'the wild', followed by the general history and morphology of his world-picture, with a concentration on the key animal figures involved. The sequence of his 'philosophical' writings begins with his first visit to Italy in 1912. That experience produced the essays finally gathered in Twilight in Italy (1916). Other key documents are "The Crown" (1915); Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922); Studies in Classic American Literature (1923); Apocalypse (1931); and Etruscan Places (1932). Dates of publication, however, do not represent the actual sequence of ideological developments. The poems, which I next examine, both illuminate the philosophy and are themselves further illuminated by concepts therein. 6 The volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) is, of course, of central importance to the whole study; but from Loolc! We Have Come Through! (1917),7 to the posthumous Last Poems (1932), Lawrence's poetry (and much of his best) is full of animals and animal imagery which, directly or otherwise, convey doctrine. 6 "Lawrence and the R o m a n t i c Tradition", Miscellany, p. 339. This "overflow principle", as Lindenberger points out, makes it difficult to approach a n y of his works, except perhaps for some tales, as self-contained entities. 6 A solitary attempt to read the central philosophic notions in Lawrence's poetry as a whole is that of George G. Williams: "D. H . Lawrence's Philosop h y as Expressed in H i s Poetry", Rice Institute Pamphlet, X X X V I I I (1951), 73-94. Williams finds (p. 74) that "Not one of his poems really develops any considerable part of his thought", and that the poems are like "highly colored fragments of some unassembled whole". My own study attempts to supply a coherent background and to draw needed connections. It also wishes to m o d i f y the idea that no one p o e m really develops a n y considerable part of his thought. 7 Williams notes (op. cit., p. 75) that up until 1917 and Look! We Have Come Through! prose fiction anticipates poetry in expressing doctrine. This volume also marks the real beginning of Lawrence as a symbolist poet.

12

INTRODUCTION

Turning to the major fiction, I keep the entire range in view and refer to this as needed; but I find that, from the perspective adopted for this study, certain works virtually select themselves for detailed examination: they have a higher proportion of the animal tropes and symbolism; and, in addition, their place in Lawrence's development as an artist is especially important. From 1912 onwards we find an unbroken development in poetry and in philosophical myth-making. 8 In the long fiction, where we often move uneasily between the poles of social realism and visionary metaphysics, the animal terms of Lawrence's world-picture break out irregularly and in varying degrees of intensity. This animal rhetoric and symbolism plays a minor role in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), though it permeates the Etruscan essays, Pansies and Last Poems, which also belong to the final phase of his art and life. Conscious theory begins to affect the novels only after 1912, but The White Peacock (1911), a maiden effort nearly innocent of doctrine, demands consideration both for reasons of contrast and because it holds the seeds of later development. There we find, for example, Lawrence's archetypal gamekeeper and the dark utterance "be a good animal". This first great commandment appears to me also to have been the last. For the rest of his life as an artist, Lawrence is engaged in working out and dramatizing the implications of his gamekeeper's wild metaphor. The Rainbow and Women in Love, now generally agreed to be Lawrence's largest achievements, get special attention. These triumphs of expressionism 9 clearly show his dualistic world-picture and related bestiary in action. 10 Kangaroo, "St. Mawr" and The 8

Max Wildi,' 'The Birth of Expressionism in the Work of D . H . Lawrence'', English Studies, X I X (1937), 241-259, first traced this development in detail. 9 Wildi's term Expressionism appears to m e a little more useful t h a n Symbolism, of which it is one type; but I recognize the looseness and instability of such descriptive terms. I n the largest sense, Lawrence's art represents a development of Romanticism, itself a battleground for those who would define it. 10 Sons and Lovers, his chief work in the realist mode, is important in this study principally in having the first notable appearance of the horse-figure. See discussion on p. 117.

INTRODUCTION

13

Plumed Serpent are the .significant products of Lawrence's "savage pilgrimage", 11 and these also receive extended treatment, along with the totemic novella "The F o x " which serves here as a species of transition from the European to the wilderness phase in which Lawrence had turned his back on Western Civilization. In each division of the study, I attempt some conclusions as to what Lawrence was and was not able to achieve as a writer as a result of his animal doctrines and mythology. Ultimately I focus on the modifications in tone, emphasis and iconography we find in the last phase of myth-making, placing Lady Chatterley's Lover in the context of Last Poems, Etruscan Places and "The Man Who Died" for these purposes. 'Sensitiveness' and 'tenderness', the two key notions of the period, do not mean t h a t Lawrence is now tame; 12 but he is there less one-sidedly identified with beasts of prey. Ending what was at once a pilgrimage and a flight from the spreading nightmare of mechanized society, Lawrence appears to have had a vision of the J u s t City — a place in touch with the creative wild, where the animal principles in man are recognized, tiger balanced against deer. But it is a cemetery populated by shadowy Etruscans outside of history, in the world of myth. Beyond this, his Last Poems are concerned with the adventure of individual consciousness facing the unknown dimension of death. What I offer is not an exhaustive catalogue of all of Lawrence's animals and animal images. The animals, loved by Lawrence for their own sake, do make many and incidental appearances without moral and cosmological implications worth mentioning. We can distinguish three categories within which they appear meaningful in his art: 1 3

11

The title of Catherine Carswell's biography The Savage Pilgrimage (Now York, 1932) describes a phase both of Lawrence's life and of his art. 12 'Tameness' remains first and last, a negative term, opposed to both 'wildness' and 'sensitiveness'. 13 In setting the following animal 'traps' I have been helped by the literary theory of Philip Wheelwright, Northrop Frye and Eliseo Vivas. Wheelwright's chapter "Four Ways of Imagination" in The Burning Fountain

14

INTRODLTTIOX

A. Animal as 'other'. 14 Here Lawrence confronts t h e creature directly in w h a t is virtually an I-Thou relationship. I n this response of wonder, he tries to express the essential fishness o f f i s h , horseness of horse, rabbitness of rabbit. B . Animal as emblem or archetype. 1 5 Here the animal, natural or supernatural, has a clear didactic a n d ethical function, carries suggestions of universal human behaviour; or a Active character, described in t h e animal terms of Lawrence's world-picture, is an example of ontological good and evil actualized in human life. Image and idea are united. A particular person is described in terms of an animal species; or a personalized animal, such as Bibbles the bullbitch, 1 6 is seen as example of a human species with a particular t y p e of behaviour.

(Bloomington, 1954), pp. 76-100, provides basic conceptions. Northrop Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), particularly in his study of Apocalyptic, Demonic and Analogical imagery (pp. 131-162), has provided invaluable clues to the recognition of literary archetypes. Eliseo Vivas' view of "The Constitutive Symbol", as noted, provides the third of my categories. Finally, I have read with respect what W. H. Auden wrote (with regard to Lawrence and Marianne Moore) in "Two Bestiaries", The Dyer's Hand, And Other Essays (New York, 1962), pp. 300-303. 14 This is 'sensual vision', the famous 'blood consciousness'. " I n the sensual vision there is always the pause of fear, dark wonder and glamour. The creature beheld is seen in its quality of otherness, a term of the vivid, imminent unknown"—Version one of his Crfevecoeur essay in The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Armin Arnold (London, 1962), p. 60. 15 At their best, as Richard Ellmann has noted, the animal poems "reveal Lawrence's attitude toward men, but without relinquishing their hold on the actual object". "Barbed Wire and Coming Through" in The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, p. 264. 16 "Bibbles" in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. All references to poems in this study are to The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 3 vols, (London, 1957). Quotations correspond with lines in the later attempt at a definitive edition: The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, collected and edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (New York, 1964).

INTRODUCTION

15

C. Animal as creative symbol. 17 This is comparatively rare. To adapt and paraphrase Eliseo Vivas, who prefers to say 'constitutive symbol', it is "a creative synthesis of empirical matter" in one commanding image which, irradiated from within, brings newness of perception and "manifests itself in dramatic and moral terms". Analysis does not exhaust the symbol's meaning since that to which it refers is, in some obscure way, itself identical with the object perceived and the experience of perceiving. In effect, the infinite is in the finite. Two powerful examples are Ursula's apocalyptic horses in The Rainbow and Bismarck the rabbit in Women in Love. Such, then, are the aims and perspectives of the present study. I t may be objected that an approach to the novels through expanding metaphor and nuclear episode does violence to the medium. This objection might be valid if Lawrence were a different type of artist to whom classical notions of plot, character, and closed form applied; 18 but absorption rather than detachment, ecstasis rather than catharsis, a vibrant sense of process and incompleteness, make his romantic art adaptable to a Longinian analysis of parts. This analysis, further, is here controlled by historical considerations and by a framework traced out from Lawrence's own literary cosmos, not imposed from outside. Out of respect for Lawrence's well known opinions on 'fixity' I try not to be purely mechanical and schematic, and to respect the individual work. 17 Vivas, p. 275. Whereas the phrases quoted are from Vivas, I have attempted a creative synthesis of my own. I have called Lawrence's kind of symbol 'creative' rather than 'constitutive' since creative both sounds more like normal English and conveys a greater sense of dynamic shaping. 18 In this respect we have to remember his letter to Edward Garnett concerning The Rainbow: "You must not look in my novel for the old stable ego of character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable and passes through, as it were certain allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover there are states of the same radically unchanged element . . . don't look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, as when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown".— The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore (London, 1962), I, 282.

I TOWARD T H E D E F I N I T I O N OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

A. T H E SACRED WILD

Civilization, as we normally imagine this condition in the West, is a City — a center of rational light surrounded by a formless wilderness of barbaric dark — in which man fulfills his human destiny as a social and political animal. This is, of course, a neo-classical idea; but in the 19th century's long dream of evolutionary progress and bourgeois humanism, a dream in which it seemed inevitable that secular light would eventually cover the face of the earth, we find an interesting confusion of our rational Rome with New Jerusalem. 1 Born in 1885, and passing through the nightmare experience of World War I, Lawrence, whom Horace Gregory rightly called Pilgrim of the Apocalypse,2 rejected the rational City and the version of Christianity which tended to go with it. 3 With all the marks of one fleeing from the wrath to come, he plunged into the rejected wilderness to find his salvation in a numinous dark where God was not yet dead — He h a d not even emerged in separate forms of gods. Let the City fall, let the machines run down, the robot men pass away. Better yet, help in the moral task of total slum clearance, confident 1

A major prophet of the bourgeois and scientific Utopia was H. G. Wells, of whose progressive view Lawrence once said "Hadn't someone better write Mr. Wells's history backwards, to show how we have degenerated into stupid visionlessness since the Altamire cave-men?" Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (Philadelphia, 1925), p. 141. 2 Op. cit. 3 The curious perversions of bourgeois, progressive Christianity are usefully summarized by W. H. Auden op. cit., p. 483. They include radical fear and contempt of flesh, general belief in the redemption of society by scientific method.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHA V UNO

17

t h a t beyond this nihilism a new heaven a n d e a r t h will be born, from darkness. In London, New York, Paris in the bursten cities the dead tread heavily through the muddy air through the mire of fumes heavily, stepping weary on our hearts. 4 The notion of t h e sacred wild receives its earliest a n d most direct exposition in Lawrence's " S t u d y of Thomas H a r d y " , begun during t h e war t h a t m a r k e d a great divide in modern E u r o p e a n history, sundering 20th century m a n f r o m t h e happier assumptions of the 19th. " W h a t a colossal idiocy this w a r " , Lawrence wrote his agent J . B. P i n k e r in September, 1914. " O u t of sheer rage I ' v e begun m y book a b o u t Thomas H a r d y . I t will be a b o u t a n y t h i n g b u t Thomas H a r d y , I am afraid — queer stuff — b u t n o t b a d " . 5 The "queer s t u f f " includes, amidst such circling metaphysical discussion of man, God and a r t , t h e following significant passages. This is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels: t h a t there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon i t . . . Upon the vast incomprehensible pattern of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp, is drawn the little, pathetic pattern of man's moral life and struggle, pathetic almost ridiculous. The little fold of law and order, the little walled city within which man has to defend himself from the waste enormity of nature, becomes always too small, and the pioneers, venturing out with the code of the walled city upon them, die in the bonds of that code, free and yet unfree, preaching the walled city and looking to the waste. This is the wonder of Hardy's novels, and gives them their beauty. The vast, unexplored morality of life itself, what we call the immorality of nature, surrounds us in its incomprehensibility, and in the midst goes the little human morality play, with its queer frame of morality and its mechanized movement, seriously portentously, till some one of the 4 5

"In the Cities", Last Letters, I, 290.

Poems.

18

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

protagonists chances to look out of the charmed circle . . . into the wilderness raging round. Then he is lost, his little drama falls to pieces, or becomes mere repetition, but the stupendous theatre outside goes on enacting its own incomprehensible drama, untouched. 6 Of t r a g e d y in relation to this Lawrence wrote: Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth set themselves up against, or find themselves set up against, the unfathomed moral forces of nature, and out of this unfathomed force comes their death. Whereas Anna Karenina, Eustacia, Tess, Sue and Jude find themselves up against the established system of human government and morality, they cannot detach themselves, and are brought down. Their real tragedy is that they are unfaithful to the greater unwritten morality. 7 H e r e is a religiously based objection to the 19th century city a n d its conventional bourgeois ethics which remains constant. W h a t is i m p o r t a n t is t h a t t h e wild, the undefined, t h e dark is seen as t h e source of value. 8 The h u m a n city and its laws are secondary. All t h r o u g h his writing, as the Italian philosopher Leone Vivante says, "Lawrence bears witness to t h e nonpragmatical, nonsocial, a n d not exclusively h u m a n , origin and n a t u r e of value". 9 He is God-centered r a t h e r t h a n man-centered (if we m a y use t h e t e r m God in a n a t u r a listic, pantheistic sense which rules out a n y notion of His presence c

Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited and with an introduction by Edward D. McDonald (New York, 1936), p. 419. ' Ibid., p. 420. 8 Just how radical this archetypal turnabout is may be appreciated by what Mircea Eliade says of city and wild generally in The Sacred and the Profane (New York, 1959), pp. 48-49 in the Harper Torchbook edition: ". . . the dragon is the paradigmatic figure of the marine monster, of the primordial snake, symbol of the cosmic waters, of darkness, night and death — in short of the amorphous and virtual, of everything that has not acquired a "form" . . . victory of the gods over the dragon must be symbolically repeated each year; for eachl year the world must be created anew. Similarly the victory of the gods over the forces of darkness, death and chaos is repeated with each victory of the city over its invaders". Lawrence attempts a startling transvaluation, is on the side of potentiality, the "good" dragon against the now evil city. He accepts chaos as divine. 9 "Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's Insight Into the Concept of Potentiality", in A Philosophy of Potentiality (London, 1955), p. 119.

TOWAHD T H E DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

19

as in any sense personal.) The divine is conceived as a dark, living potentiality extended beyond any known limit. 10 The human city of post-Cartesian reason, cut off from this creative mystery, is a city of the damned. The condemnation was implicit in Lawrence's first novel The White Peacock, but he does not take responsibility for it there. I t is put in the mouth of his raisowwewr-gamekeeper Annable, a mordant misanthrope, who is fundamentally unhappy, comes to a bad end, and whose tale-within-a-tale is, in any case, far from the center of the book. Of Annable we remember the famous dictum, "When a man's more than nature he's a devil. Be a good animal, says I, whether it's man or woman". He had known what is normally taken as the desirable world of culture and intellect, but had left it. He was a man of one idea — "that all civilization was the painted fungus of rottenness". 1 1 In The Rainbow, begun in Italy before the world conflict , but completed in March 1915,12 the city-wilderness contrast of the Hardy study appears again. His heroine Ursula meditates upon the worldpicture of the ego-bound, mechanical citizens of Nottingham who deny that there is anything in the irrational dark worth knowing. Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow shapes of wild beasts, and also with the dark shadow shapes of angels, whom the light fenced out, as it fenced out the more familiar beasts of darkness. And some having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyaena and the wolf; and some, having given up their vanity of the light, having died in their own conceit, saw the gleam in the eyes of the wolf and the hyaena, that it was the flash of the swords of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be denied, like the flash of fangs.13 We may note here the demonic inversion 14 in this apocalyptic glimpse: the animals, identified with dark angels, seem agents of 10

Vivante, op. cit., passim. "A Shadow in Spring", Pt. II, Chapter II. 12 Letters, I, 519. 13 "The Bitterness of Ecstasy", Chapter XV. 14 Cf. Kingsley Widmer "Our Demonic Heritage: D. H. Lawrence", Miscellany, pp. 13-27. 11

20

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A WELT ANSCHAUUNG

divine destruction whose entry into the 'city' is not to be denied. In his essay on Benjamin Franklin in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) Lawrence further clarifies matters in his satire of Franklin's deadly rational virtues. Franklin "tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom". 1 5 For how can man, put in the utilitarian "barbed-wire paddock" of production ethics, be free "without an illimitable background?" 1 6 Man is a 'moral animal' 17 not a moral machine, and as against the enlightened self-interest and social benevolence of the Philadelphian, 18 Lawrence sets his own asocial creed in comic defiance. "That I am /." "That my soul is a dark forest." "That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest." "That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest of my known self, and then go back''' "That I must have the courage to let them come and go." "That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women."19 We must connect this notion of the soul as a dark, god-haunted forest with Lawrence's root ideas of 'blood' and 'phallic consciousness'. His credo was first announced from Gargnano by the lake in 1913 when Lawrence, in that important Italian phase of doctrine, was writing (along with sketches later published in Twilight in Italy), the first d r a f t of what became The Rainbow and Women in Love. My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong with our minds, but what our blood feels and believes and says is always true. 20 ]s

Doubleday Anchor edition (Garden City, N e w York, 1955), p. 28. Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 26. 18 Lawrence, of course, is a priest of eros rather than agape. On the whole he seems far more benevolent towards m o s t t y p e s of wild animal than toward man. 19 Studies, p. 26. 20 Letters, I, 180. 16

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

21

Here we are faced immediately with a radical problem of semantics into which Lawrence, t h e n a t u r a l poet, leads us through the inadequacy of his language when he speaks discursively as a philosopher. W h a t is this blood of which his novels speak incessantly, this other mode of consciousness superior to t h a t of mere mind ? Must we take it, as Lawrence himself seems to be urging, as the actual blood ? or is the actual blood of man to be conceived as mystically consubstantial with the 'real' invisible blood which is life and consciousness? To take Lawrence at his deepest level of seriousness, to make sense of his art, we have to free ourselves from the temptation (which the author constantly finds irresistible) to make poetic insight and literal t r u t h identical, or to translate metaphors of prophetic vision into a definite program of social and political action. As Dallas Kenmare suggests in his study of Lawrence the poet, Poetry is concerned with the realm of reality and truth; and actuality, the surface life of every day, belongs to a different dimension of experience. This is due to the problems presented by Lawrence's work . . . in both his life and his work he made the calamitous mistake of confusing the "planes" of reality and actuality. 21 Nevertheless, Lawrence does mean something important by 'blood', and we must not be deceived by the praise of 'mindlessness' which he flaunts in the face of a society self-fixed in the categories of scientific positivism. 'Consciousness', the philosopher Leone Vivante concludes, "remains for him t h e deepest and most general term for subjectivity". 2 2 And he conceives of life and consciousness as inseparable. 23 Sense merges harmoniously into the expression of the highest values, because these are already in principle, in any sensuous reaction . . . He knows spirit in sense, which he sometimes calls the flesh. Often it is only the "flesh" which shrinks from horrors planned by the intellect and puts a limit to its excess . . . The seed or kernel of harmonious truth, 21 22 23

Fire-Bird: A Study Op. cit., p. 93. Ibid.

of D. H. Lawrence

( L o n d o n , 1951), p p . 2 - 3 .

22

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

that 'centrality' (again Lawrence's word) which we find in creative spontaneity if found in sensibility rather than the abstract" intellect.24 This is 'blood', 'flesh', given something like the discursive expression they deserve. In his article "The Two Principles" in the June issue of The English Review (1919) Lawrence wrote There certainly does exist a subtle and complex sympathy, correspondence, between the plasm of the human body, which is identical with the primary human psyche, and the material elements outside. Our plasmic psyche is radio-active, connecting with all things, and having first knowledge of all things.25 Eliseo Vivas has observed t h a t Lawrence, writing before the age of Sartre and Heidegger, did not have the terminology of existentialism and put his vision into terms of blood and solar plexus. Irritating though this may be to philosopher and common reader, we need to t r y to read beneath and around the odd language t h a t gets into his art. Vivas is surely correct when he says t h a t Lawrence's novels, at best, dramatize the truth t h a t "a life lived mainly for the sake of thought, ideas, reason, logic, is an inadequate life". 26 The drama, of course, is part of a polemic against the tradition and the City identified at the start of this chapter. Lawrence's 'blood' is metaphorically to be identified with darkness, wilderness, beasts, and salvation. Two late articles, distillations of what he had already worked out in art and major philosophical writing, state the matter quite casually, even humorously, though with an underlying seriousness. In "The Novel and the Feelings" (1926)27 he develops the notion of the interior of man as a dark continent, a pristine 'Africa' of which a modern man is afraid, but in which lies salvation. Man has tamed himself, but "Tameness is not civilization". 28 Tame man, with domesticated emotions, is a degenerate. The novel can play a part in moral regeneration by helping to re-connect man imagina"Ibid.,

p. 90.

25

The Symbolic

88

D. H. Lawrence, pp. 106-113.

" Phoenix, ««Ibid.,

Meaning,

pp. 755 — 760.

p . 759.

ed. A r n i m Arnold, p. 176.

TOWABD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

23

tively with the wild old Adam who is consubstantial with t h e honorable beasts of impulse within us. If we can't hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny. 29 H a d Lawrence n o t written The Rainbow a n d Women in Love we might well wonder w h a t novels he h a d in mind. And if we are yet timid a b o u t how f a r t h e metaphoric identification of beast with god of the interior wilderness should go, the following passage f r o m "On Being Religious" (1924) 30 should remove lingering inhibitions. I t is Lawrence's vision as journalism: God, t h e Great God, has shifted his position, climbed down f r o m the heavens and left a vacancy which men continue t o worship. H o w are we t o find H i m , t o get into relation once more ? The F a t h e r is gone, and t h e Son is no longer t h e way. Only the Holy Ghost within you can scent the new tracks of the Great God across the Cosmos of Creation. The Holy Ghost is the dark hound of heaven whose baying we ought to listen to, as he runs ahead into the unknown, tracking the mysterious everlasting departing of the Lord God, who is forever departing from us. 31 The 'animal' kingdom, then, is within us. 'Africa' or 'Mexico' are objective correlatives, correspondences, for a level of consciousness, for states of soul. Since, however, this soul is n o t a Platonic abstraction distinct f r o m sense, b u t identified with it, t h e effort to find the great good place "in t o u c h " with the wild is n o t only a m a t t e r of interior exploration. W e are confronted, again, with a stubborn problem in dealing with Lawrence's metaphors, a n d m a y wish t h a t his dark gods had said clearly to him what Yeats's spirits did: " W e have come t o give you metaphors for poetry".32 29

Ibid,., pp. 759-760. Ibid., pp. 724-730. 31 Ibid., p. 728. 30

32

W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London, 1938), p. 8 in Macmillan paperback edition (New York, 1956). My emphasis.

24

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

In the article the ghostly hound is a rhetorical trope, paper thin. Elsewhere, in symbolic art, the beast has the only kind of mimetic existence he can have — manifestation by a complex of dramatic image and analogy, a wordless Dionysian intuition of reality breaking momentarily into Apollonian vision. The demonic red horse St. Mawr, in the novella which takes his name, sometimes gives a sense of this when the author is not talking didactically about him. If we understand the sainted beast as god of the wild (metaphorically identifiable with the wild itself and leading the heroine there on a savage pilgrimage), we can make better sense, in that story, of what seems to be a Lou Witt's perverse statement : "But then men always do leave off thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them". What Lawrence means by thinking is best stated in "Thought", one of his "Pansies" (1929). Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness, Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending. The literal plunge into the actual wild then, the pursuit of savage life, is ambiguous. Examining his 'primitivistic aesthetic' Kingsley Widmer noted the double rejection of both civilized and uncivilized squalor pinpointed in one of the many striking passages of "St. Mawr". 33 And every civilization, when it loses its inward vision, and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth. Metallic filth forms, as it were, a species of cage in which domestic, fallen man is cut off even from that last form of wildness — sex. Wildness, darkness, blood ('non-mental' consciousness, 'touch'), demonic animals, and sex, form a single metaphoric cluster of the

33

"The Primitivistic Aesthetic of D. H. Lawrence", p. 352.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

25

holy. We may use "Wild Things in Captivity", another of his bitter Pansies to illustrate, somewhat abstractly, a sex, animal, wildness connection. Darkness, blood and anarchic demonism are also there by implication. Wild things in captivity while they keep their own wild purity won't breed, they mope, they die Today: All men are in captivity, active with captive activity, and the best won't breed, though they don't know why. The problem: Sex is a state of grace. In a cage it can't take place Break the cage then, start in and try. The cage is another image of the rejected City; but, happily, the night of the beast was coming. Perhaps the best prophetic image of this is in "The Border Line", a late short story, where the Strasbourg Cathedral, "built of reddish stone, t h a t had a flush in the night, like dark flesh" makes the heroine dimly realize that behind all the ashy pallor and sulphur of our civilization, lurks the great blood-creature waiting, implacable and eternal, ready at last to crush our white bitterness and let the shadowy blood move once more, in a new implacable pride and strength. Even out of the lower heavens looms the great blood dusky Thing, blotting out the Cross it was supposed to exalt.34 We can hardly miss the metaphorical identification of the red beast with St. Mawr, and both with what used to be called 'the old serpent', here an apocalyptic restorer of primal or blood consciousness. 34

Comparison with Yeat's apocalyptic image in "The Second Coming" is inevitable, but the 'rough beast' slouching towards Bethlehem t o be born through anarchy and a 'blood-dimmed' flood troubled Yeats. Lawrence rejoiced.

26

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

In rehabilitating t h e formless wild then, Lawrence t h e romantic ultimately has t o rehabilitate Satan who (as P a n ) himself becomes the source of the 'greater morality' which H a r d y ' s characters, faithful t o t h e legalism of t h e walled city, 3 5 were said to deny. I t needs t o be said here t h a t Lawrence remained always under t h e impression t h a t Christ denied the flesh b y being born into it, t h a t His followers are obligated to despise God's material creation as u n w o r t h y of their minds, a n d t h a t Christianity represents a rootless, abstract ethic of sentimentality used b y t h e weak t o pull down the strong. 3 6 The ideal white devil behind this can be seen as Mrs. Lawrence a n d her B a n d of Hope. The phallic black devil, t h r o w n off balance b y her selfrighteous assault on his spontaneous animality, is Mr. Lawrence, t h a t underground m a n with t h e coal d u s t of u n t h i n k a b l e trees on his skin. " I see V a n Gogh so s a d l y " Lawrence wrote t o L a d y Ottoline Morrell during t h e war. If he could only have set the angel in himself clear in relation to the animal of himself, clear and distinct, but always related in harmony and union, he need not have gone mad or cut o£F his ear . . . He should either have resigned himself and lived his 'animal other horses' — and have seen if his art would come out of that — or he should have resisted, like Fra Angelico. But best of all, he could have known a great humanity where to live one's animal would be to create oneself, in fact be the artist creating a man in living fact (not like Christ as he wrongly said) — and where the art was the final expression of the created animal or man — not the be-all and being of man — but the end, the climax. 37 35 N o m a d in the desert of unmitigated life-experience, and antipathetic dweller of decayed cities under a fixed legalism, appear as valid categories for the majority of Western men t o d a y according to Melville ChanningPearce. Writing on Lawrence from a position of Barthian existentialism in The Terrible Crystal: Studies in Kierkegaard and Modern Christianity (New York, 1941), he has m a n y penetrating observations (pp. 179-189). I n his chapter "The Gentile and the Jew", (pp. 201-211) he is essentially in agreem e n t with Lawrence on dead codes and walled cities. B u t of course he does not imagine t h a t the solution lies in unmitigated life-experience. 36 This is the conception which runs through his Apocalypse. Lawrence is very like Nietzsche both in t h e object of hia hatred and in his negative insights. 37 Letters, I, 327.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

27

What this may mean we will understanding in dealing with the beasts of the wild in relation to Lawrence's developed doctrine. Here we need note only two things: (a) the bias in favor of living one's animal and (b) the attempt to place animal and angel in a horizontal relationship: angels do not belong to a transcendent order of being 'higher' than the natural; the darkness is as 'good' as the light. We have seen, in fact, that Lawrence has his thumb on the cosmic scales in attempting to associate darkness with wildness, sex, and salvation for caged modern man. And in attempting to ignore the ethical dimension of religion, to worship an aesthetic order of things where what is unsuccessful is condemned, he appears at times seduced by his own passionate metaphors into a cheerfully irresponsible confusion of religion with compulsive magic.38 It may be vain to speculate where Lawrence's quest for the holy may have carried him had he lived longer; if we observe the final design in Last Poems, however, we see the absorption of his wild into tranquil death imagery, and realize just where we have been heading down the seemingly endless path through the wilderness. By inevitable coincidence of opposites, Satan is the dark side of the Laurentian sky-God who had climbed down into nature, leaving a void in the heavens. This archetypal pattern is much clearer in Indian iconography where, as Heinrich Zimmer has explained, savior and serpent , two basic manifestations of the one, all-containing substance, cannot ultimately be at variance. 39 Jung, too, has reminded Westerners of the mysterious Biblical identification of Christ and His shadow-self, the serpent. 40 As fearful Pan, the ithvphallic devil, the Laurentian Godhead in the flesh becomes identified 38 The dividing line between magic and revealed religion is perhaps a treacherous one, but the characteristic approach to power - spell and mimetic ritual in the first case, a conversion of the heart and will in the other - are clearly different. For a good discussion of the problem cf. Channing-Pearce, op. cit., pp. 165-178. 39 Myths and Symbols in Indian Art And Civilization, ed. .Joseph Campbell (Washington, 1946), pp. 89-90. 40 C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Harper Torchbooks (New York, 1962), II, 368.

28

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

with dying and reviving chthonic deities — Persephone, Dionysus, Attis, Osiris — whose home and starting place is in the fecund dark below, the realm of the mothers. This womb is our infinite point, the final holy dark of potentiality, of possibility not yet actualized and therefore 'free'. Wildness passes into gentleness: the great god Pan has not yet been born. We can trace the conversion of Satan into a tender death by way of sequence of fragments in Last Poems. The story begins "When Satan Fell".« When Satan fell, he only fell because the Lord Almighty rose a bit too high, a bit beyond himself. So Satan only fell to keep a balance. "Are you so lofty, 0 my God ? Are you so pure and lofty, up aloft ? Then I will fall, and plant the paths to hell with vines and poppies and fig-trees so that lost souls may eat grapes and the moist fig and put scarlet buds in their hair on the way to hell, This is followed by "Doors" where we are told But evil is a third thing No, not the ithyphallic demons not even the double Phallus of the devil himself with his key to the two dark doors is evil. "Evil Is Homeless", the title and the text of the next poem declare, and Lawrence's "Hell" is a substantial place of positive good, not evil. 41

The historical order is problematical. As their editor Richard Aldington explains in a head note to the last volume of the Complete Poems, Lawrence left behind two manuscripts which he does not appear to have polished and revised, far less arranged in any symmetrical pattern.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A WELTAXSCHA

V U\G

29

Evil has no home, only evil has no home not even the home of demoniacal hell. Hell is the home of souls lost in darkness, even as heaven is the home of souls lost in light. And like Persephone or Attis there are souls that are at home in both homes Not like grey Dante, colour blind To the scarlet and purple flowers at the doors of hell. Between this 'hell' and heaven is a null, grey void of " D e a t h is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical". There robot men sit in machines "fixed upon t h e h u b of t h e ego", "absolved f r o m kissing and strife", "sinless and stainless going round and r o u n d " . B y rejection of their h u m a n i t y , t h e y are in a real hell of non-being, cut off f r o m t h e creative mystery. This, of course, is t h e perfection of the evil City which t h e poet has abandoned. I n t h e famous " B a v a r i a n Gentians", written in the shadow of a d e a t h now gently accepted, there is, on the m y t h i c level, merging and marriage r a t h e r t h a n separation into pure self. I t is not too much to say t h a t t h e dying poet is now identified a t least as much with feminine, accepting Persephone as with the Plutonic m a j e s t y to which she is bride and n a t u r a l sacrifice. H e does not sing of t h e forever isolated pilgrim soul questing heroically in t h e seething wild, b u t of a species of homecoming — the equivalent of t h e Christian metaphor " A b r a h a m ' s B o s o m " .

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch let me guide myself with the blue forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness, even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark and Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark

30

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom. T h e city of false light and social problems disappears; the howling wilderness of demon passions is transmuted into a darkness at once tender and majestic. By an acceptance of death, darkest of angels, we come out (or down) into a world of m y t h and innocence in which one's animal and angel are no longer locked in battle. Modern man, denying individual death, mystery, and the living god in nature, had built the sterile City against which our evangelist cried and fled, ultimately to the City of Dis. There in the hushed darkness, where eras a n d thanatos are folded together, the self might find a new beginning. B. EMBLEMS OF GOOD A N D EVIL

If few have a t t e m p t e d seriously to come to terms with Lawrence's fluid metaphysic, there are certainly many things about it to discourage study: the language is often turgid to the point of incoherence; much of it is depressingly wordy and circular; the manner m a y be hysterical, or insulting, or frankly comic, rarely straightforward; the 'pollyanalytic' content defies classification — a vast fantasia of comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, metabiology and social programs, contemptuous of science and syllogism. There is a n a t u r a l skepticism t h a t an extraordinarily intelligent man of our age, formally well-educated, could really believe such nonsense; 42 and there is Lawrence's own disarming statement t h a t novels and poems came first, the urge to theorize later. 43 Let us, therefore, r e a d only the novels and poems. 48

It may be distressing to have to believe that he could, but not to do so involves disbelief of what he states over and over, and what his whole creative output testifies to. 43 Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York, 1922), p. 57 in Viking paperback edition. Even if completely true it could apply only to what he had written to 1922. My thesis is that everything emerging from the time he

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WBLTAXSCBAVUNQ

31

We have, however, to qualify the view that the urge to theorize inevitably comes after the vision has taken flesh in art. It can fairly easily be shown that the novels beyond Sons and Lovers all point to, and depend, to some extent, on theory and doctrine already established. The same applies at least to the volumes of poetry from Look! We Have Come Through! It appears to me that Lawrence's best insights and most successful works of art — The Rainbow, Women in Love, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Last Poems, Studies in Classic American Literature — are virtually inseparable from his wildest, most unscientific, or most deplorable beliefs. Nor should we assume that slangy comic extravagance in part disqualifies the whole from serious consideration. The clowning rhetoric may be seen as part of a defensive mask held up to an infidel world Lawrence clearly enjoyed shocking as well as trying to convert. Claiming only the authority of his 'blood' for the discredited beliefs in magical science,44 he could not point, like Yeats, to his omniscient spirits and let readers argue whether they did or did not exist. We ought to forget neither the sly, foxlike side of Lawrence the Shaman, nor his distinct taste for low comedy as well as moral reform. Sometimes in his 'philosophy' then, he speaks with a Hebrew prophet's impersonal grandeur, but more often with the hysteria of a dissenting evangelist expounding his own devout heresy.45 Sometimes we seem to hear a muddled professor of German metaphysics in a very ecstasy of jargon; at other times we hear what seems to be a music-hall comedian taking off on this same professor's act. In blessed passages, or even a whole book like Etruscan Places, Lorenzo

started composing the sketches for Twilight in Italy is suspect. H. M. Daleski, "The Duality of Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (1969), 4, suggests that it is wise to regard the expository writings "not as laboratory reports on experiments successfully concluded, but as signposts to a road only finally traveled in the art". The present study assumes such is view. " The 'secret doctrine* which he claimed that the old pagan world possessed. Cf. Fantasia, p. 54. 45 This seems particularly true of parts of Fantasia and the American essays included in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine.

32

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

the magnificant, artist in love with life, celebrates the mystery of the visible. Max Wildi's "The Birth of Expressionism in the Work of D. H . Lawrence", an important early study of the development of Lawrence's doctrine in relation to his art, noted in 193746 t h a t the turning point in Lawrence's development is 1912. Wildi showed the centrality of the essay "The Crown", which derives from Lawrence's first Italian phase of doctrine. He noted the symbolic animals in the essay and how Lawrence's metaphysical writings read like drafts for mystical epics like Blake's. The abstract 'non-representational quality' in his fiction, Wildi saw, has affinities with Expressionist techniques, of which Futurism is one aspect. Taking for granted the importance of Lawrence's art, Wildi attempted to define its peculiar qupities, to see its connection with his doctrine, and to place it in thg; ^ l e v a n t tradition of literature. y^illjstm York Tindall's D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow47 next shpy^edjjfs a wild prophet formidably — if eclectically — read in a n ^ f j p p l p g y , early Greek philosophy, theosophy, yoga and other hermet . ,tradition. Apparently designed to dissolve an addled R o n ^ ^ ^ q ' s , reputation, to laugh 'mindlessness' out of existence, the book j a p p e a r s less memorable for its clever turns of phrase thaj^ ,|(}p. its indication of how much Lawrence had read and attempt^^p.ifpspiffi 1 !^ 8 art. 48 Tindall stressed Lawrence's knowledge of p r i ^ i ^ v ^ . a f l i n ^ p i and occult philosophy, his attempt to render intoj flesh world-view of Indian religion as this is filtered th^pi^gh,'jr^eoislQpljyr He showed t h a t yoga and Theosophy influenced Lawrence's work from 1915 onwards, while serious reading in anthropology apparently began in 1913. 241-259. 48 ^ q u p ^ t , ^foic^fluifi6^,ijO"Lawrence can certainly be extended. At this poiz^, (i| ^yweyeiT,i tflp type of reading that influenced him well enough — and .pffpjything which went into the creative process emei^edj ^vj^h ^ e ^ p ^ . ^ f u j j inpj^int of Lawrence's personality. While some puzzles remain — e.g., exactly what Jung did he read, and where? — it app^r^(l^hfioi^ ^qy jji^ily, ai^iotated text will turn up with a key to the whole Laurentian worl(J-pi(;t.ure\ v \,

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

33

Later repenting his hyper-rational satire, Tindall greatly admired the ritual pattern and archetypal symbolism which an initiate may discover in the later Lawrence. 49 Lawrence seems to be, for Tindall, a poor thinker but a great symbolist. William Jarrett-Kerr, by contrast, did not directly concern himself with myth and symbol; regarding Lawrence's thought from the perspectives of Christian existentialism, he found him a highly significant writer. In D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (1951), this Anglican priest 50 stressed Lawrence's religious perception of 'otherness', and saw in Lawrence's insistence that the physical must be accepted gratefully, as an ontological good, a lesson Christians had forgotten. A pioneer attempt to read the theological dimensions of Lawrence's art, the book indicated a permanent problem inherent in the pantheistic world-view — the impossibility of making a distinction between God and nature, creature and Creator. The most complete analysis and summary of Lawrence's doctrines is Graham Hough's valuable final chapter in The Dark Sun (1957).51 Hough's account of Lawrence's leading ideas, which I must here repeat with some qualifications, represents the sum of what is now agreed. Lawrence's Weltanschauung is naturalistic and pantheistic. There may be some unresolved elements of theism and misleading connotations which reside in his use of Biblical language, but his mighty Living God is in nature, a numinous species of primitive mana. This fundamental conception was first clearly expressed in the essay "The Two Principles" in the 1919 issue of the English Review. When we postulate a beginning we only do so to fix a starting point for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an end to the universe. The creative mystery which is life itself, always was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures. 49

Of. Tindall's Introduction to The Plumed Serpent (New York, 1959). Father William Tiverton [William Robert Jarret-Kerr], D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (London, 1951). 51 The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1957). 50

34

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

Following the absolute language we repeat, in the beginning was the creative reality, substantial, although apparently void and dark. 52 This created universe is radically dualistic. The primordial division is Heaven and E a r t h , the first duality of t h e cosmos. Between the great valves of the primordial universe moved the "Spirit of God", one unbroken and invisible heart of creative being. So that as two great wings are spread, the living cosmos stretched out the first Heaven and the first Earth, terms of the inexplicable primordial reality. 53 The division of t h e sexes is parallel t o t h e mystery of t h e first division in chaos, a n d with t h e two cosmic elements of fire a n d water. This is not to say that one sex is identical with fire, the other with water. And yet there is some indefinable connection. Aphrodite, born of the waters, and Apollo the sun god, these give some indication of the sex distinction. 54 The mystic E a r t h of t h e first division is identified with d a r k cosmic waters, a n d t h e mystic H e a v e n with t h e d a r k cosmic Fire. Out of t h e creative opposition of these two first principles, in primordial darkness, Light is born. All things are born in this Heraclitean m a n n e r out of a similar attraction a n d repulsion of opposites in mystical embrace. 5 5 H o u g h denies t h a t Lawrence's world was constructed on t h e model of sexual duality, and points t o a chart on which t h e F a t h e r principle on the same side as Female, Blood a n d Flesh is arrayed against Male, Will and Intellect. Clarifying t h e issues in " T h e D u a l i t y of Lawrence", 5 6 H . M. Daleski draws a more detailed chart,

62

The Symbolic Meaning, Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 185. 55 Ibid., p. 176-177. 60 Op. cit., p. 6. 53

p. 176.

TOW'AKD T H E D E F I N I T I O N OF A WELT A NSC HA U UNO

35

shows Lawrence's esoteric reading of Father, 57 and argues persuasively t h a t the male-female division is at the heart of Lawrence's dualistic beliefs, as indeed the resurrected essay I have quoted makes explicit. One could go further and say that a sky-father earth-mother dualism is as fundamental a mode of symbolic thought as it is possible for a cosmologist to have, and that Lawrence was reaching back to primary categories. 58 W h a t makes Lawrence especially interesting is his first model of the cosmic paradigm. As Daleski acutely notes: the dark father is identified with intuition, 'bloodconsciousness', the white mother with abstracting intellect, mentalconsciousness. 59 Translating from personal psychology to cosmology, we find in Lawrence's world-picture the reverse of the usual archetype. In rejecting mother's values he also rejects God the transcendent sky-Father. He affirms an earthly father identified with the great earth-Mother who disapproves of nothing that lives. Not the mystic's way of annihilation of sense, the unitive vision beyond antinomies, but a 'balance', 'polarity' is what Lawrence recommends. Our 'transcendence', in Laurentian terms, is in the flesh as we move back and forth between the two principles, affirming both, forever isolate. Lawrence may border on mysticism, but he turns violently away from it in his discursive writing, endeavoring to anchor his religious vision in empirical psychology. And it must here be emphasized again that his ideas of good and evil are really ontological, prior to ethics and personal choice.

67 Ibid., p. 9. Father, God-in-the-Flesh, is in effect a Female notion, c f . "The study of Thomas Hardy", Phoenix, p. 451. 58 Gj. Eliade, op. cit., pp. 116-117. For religious man, nature is never only 'natural'. "The sky directly, 'naturally', reveals the infinite distance, the transcendence of the deity. The earth, too, is transparent; it presents itself as universal mother and nurse . . . The cosmos as a whole is an organism at once real, living, and sacred; it simultaneously reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality. Ontophany and hierophany meet." A profoundly religious man, Lawrence insisted that the universe was alive in some more than figurative sense. 59 Op. cit., p. 13.

36

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

This, t h e n , is t h e dualistie L a u r e n t i a n universe w i t h i n which t h e e m b l e m a t i c birds a n d beasts t a k e t h e i r place. So t h a t t h e y m a y s t a n d o u t in high relief in his prose, I will here a d o p t t h e practice of s e t t i n g d o w n t h e significant ones in italics where t h e y a p p e a r in q u o t e d passages. Twilight in Italy, w r i t t e n in 1912-13 b u t n o t r e p r i n t e d in book f o r m u n t i l 1916, first brings t h e animals t o light in a philosophic excursus called " T h e L e m o n G a r d e n s " which explained I n the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of a strong animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and abstraction of Christ. . . Michael Angelo suddenly turned back on the whole Christian movement, back to the flesh. The flesh was supreme and godlike, in the oneness of our, physical being, we are one with God, with the Father. God t h e Father created man in the flesh, in His own image. Michael Angelo swung right back to the old Mosaic position. Christ did not e x i s t . . . This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, t h a t is the Light; the senses they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the senses, she, born of the sea foam, is the luminousness of t h e gleaming senses become a conscious aim unto themselves; . . . 60 A n d t h e I t a l i a n soul since t h e R e n a i s s a n c e h a s t a k e n t h e w a y of t h e tiger: The Tiger is the supreme manifestation of the senses made absolute. This is the Tiger, tiger burning bright, In the forests of the night of Blake. I t does indeed burn within the darkness. But the essential fire of the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy. I t is seen in the white eyes of the blazing cat. This is the supremacy of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed. 61 60

61

London, 1916, pp. 58-60. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

37

I f we place this passage alongside the behaviour of various catlike personae in the novels f r o m The Rainbow onwards, their actions and character are thereby illuminated. The willful tiger's fulfillment is also seen as t h a t of the soldier's. This is the spirit of the soldier. He, too, walks with his consciousness concentrated at the base of his spine, his mind subjugated, submerged. The will of the soldier is the will of the great cats, the will to ecstasy in destruction, in absorbing life into his own life . . ,62 The Laurentian reading of Christian humility and agape accounts, in large measure, for his hostility to t h a t religion. Christ is the lamb which the eagle swoops down upon, the dove taken by the hawk, the deer which the tiger devours. What then, if a man come to me with a sword to kill me, and I do not resist him . . . B y my non-resistance I have robbed him of his consummation. For a tiger knows no consummation unless he kill a violated and struggling prey. There is no consummation merely for the butcher, nor for a hyena . . . The Word of the Tiger is: my senses are supremely Me, and my senses are God in me. But Christ said: God is in the others, who are not-me.63 B y this interpretation it follows t h a t the whole d u t y of a Christian is to submit himself t o w h a t others w a n t of him since he himself is nothing and God is in them; the salvation of his individual soul is t o be achieved only b y giving consent of his will to their collective wish, w h a t e v e r it m a y be. W h a t Lawrence does see clearly, however, is the possibility of a subtle perversion of tigerish, self-deceiving egotism disguised as selfless love of mankind: " o u t of love for other people, out of selfless service to t h a t which is not me, I will even become a tiger". 8 4 A s Lawrence might have p u t it: at least Achilles, the aesthetic hero, did not pretend he was at T r o y for the good of Trojans. I n Kangaroo,

62 Ibid,., 63

p. 63.

Ibid., pp. 6 6 - 6 7 .

64 Ibid.,

p. 72.

38

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

as we shall see, the character who gives the novel its n a m e wishes to pervert power in the n a m e of love. A t no point does Lawrence a d m i t t h e possibility of a personal God who is a t once power, law, a n d love. For him power a n d love are in perpetual opposition; a n d law, judgment, hardly enters t h e picture, except in t h e disguise of n a t u r a l 'balance', fluid 'polarity'. H e sees a passage f r o m God the mighty Eagle of the Old T e s t a m e n t to the cooing Dove of t h e New, 6 5 b u t these are separate principles, not different aspects of one creative mystery t h a t is threefold. The primordial duality, though i t m a y have sprung f r o m unity, is somehow t a k e n as final; a n d t h e t h i r d p a r t y in Lawrence's Trinity, t h e relationship born of polar opposition, does n o t itself appear t o be t h e original cosmic cell which divides a n d creates. Lawrence will not have monism. I t is past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to eliminate the other. The infinite is twofold, the Father and the Son, the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind, the Soul and the Spirit, the self and the non-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the self and in selflessness. By great retrogression to the source of darkness in me the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at the Original Creative Infinite. By projection forth from myself, by the elimination of my absolute sensual self, I arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the Spirit. They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man must know them both. But he must never confuse them . . . The Lion shall never lie down with the Lamb.69 Lawrence's dualistic world-picture, as it is first sketched out in "The Lemon G a r d e n s " is in no way altered radically in later expansions, a n d hence I have given t h e original a relatively full exposition. One final notion should be kept in mind, since it helps explain w h a t he t h o u g h t was modern Christianity N o r t h of t h e Alps, primarily among P r o t e s t a n t s . H e tends t o align it with abstract analysis, w i t h Science a n d t h e machine.

65 66

Cf. " T h e Spinner a n d t h e M o n k s " , Ibid,., p . 29. " T h e L e m o n G a r d e n s " , Ibid., p p . 80-81.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

39

When I am all that is not-me, then I have perfect liberty, I know no limitation. Only I must eliminate the Self. It was this religious belief that expressed itself in science. Science was the analysis of the outer self, the elementary substance of the self, the outer world. And the machine is the great reconstructed selfless power. Hence the active worship to which we were given at the end of the last century, the worship of mechanized force.67 The ideas and the emblematic beasts of Twilight in Italy recur in his curious metaphysical essay "The Crown" published in 1915.68 Within this now expended m y t h tiger and lamb are subsumed under the sovereign principles, lion and unicorn, who enact a cosmic m y t h here synopsized: Lion and Unicorn, manifestations of the two eternities, are perpetually fighting for the Crown, which rainbow emblem of harmony is born of and supported by their creative opposition. Neither beast must either perish or be driven out of town else mankind loses, destroyed by the t y r a n n y of a single principle. Either beast triumphant becomes a sheer beast of prey. Lawrence sets up an elaborate series of dual correspondences, analogues, for the two principles. Abstracted and schematized, the following selection will suffice for present purposes. Interpolations in brackets are footnoted, associations already made plain in this study, or, in the case of animals, emblems more important in Lawrence's work as a whole b u t subsumed in "The Crown" under another form of its type.

67

Ibid., p. 70. Reprinted 1925 in Befiections on the Death of a Porcupine pp. 193-219. Examination of the three issues of Signatures, the short-lived little magazine in which the essay originally appeared (London, 1915), reveals that Lawrence did in fact alter the t e x t very little. I t was, he maintained, "what I still believe" (unnumbered; page). The six sections of the republished essay bear the headings: 1. The Lion and the Unicorn/Were Fighting For t h e Crown; 2. The Lion B e a t the Unicorn/And Drove H i m Out of Town; 3. The F l u x of Corruption; 4. Within the Sepulchre; 5. The Nuptials of D e a t h and the/Attendant Vulture; 6. To Be, and t o be Different. 68

40

TOWABD THE DEFINITION OF A

Lion [animal self] Tiger Weasel [fox] Eagle or H a w k Flesh, 'blood consciousness' Power, personal authority [Italians] Darkness God the F a t h e r , Jehovah, Beginning Fire death [desert] 7 0

WELTANSCHAUUNG

Unicorn ['angel' self] Lamb, Deer 68 or Calf H a r e [rabbit] Dove Spirit, 'mental consciousness' Love, submission t o t h e 'others' [Northern Protestants] Light God t h e Son, Christ, E n d Water death [snow peak]

Above the battle, neither hunter nor hunted, is Lawrence's personal emblem the phoenix, the immortal bird t h a t renews itself in fire and transcends, by affirming in self-sacrifice, the two contesting principles. The Lion, then, is the most royal emblem of our divinity in t h e flesh. The Tiger, more sinister on second thought, 7 1 is disapproved as a sheer killer, a sterile spirit. The chaste Unicorn, protector of lambs and peaceful creatures of increase, is seen in his traditional association with Christ. When Lawrence translates this principle into terms of the n a t u r a l world, as in the poem " S t . L u k e " in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, or in the lyrical disquisition on the horned animals of "The P a i n t e d Tombs of Tarquinia", we see the Unicorn principle as noble protective stag, r a m or bull; 72 but Lawrence's naturalistic world-picture cannot very well permit a creature so 69

Deer, as we shall see, is the favorable aspect of mildness, lamb is the unfavorable. 70 The geographical and psychic implications of these two types of death are explored in my discussion of Women in Love, pp. 138-139. 71 Signatures, II, p. 10. "They devour the gentlest creatures, the creatures of the spirit. Foes they have none, only prey". This conclusion does not appear in the revised essay. 72 Etruscan Places, pp. 94-95 in Viking paperback edition.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

41

much associated with Christ to have free, or indeed fair, play. In his fiction, 'Unicorn' imagery is normally present as detested dove or sheep analogue. Virtually without exception, they have a negative value as descriptive simile. Predatory cats, by contrast, leonine or tigerish characters, are valued positively. So are aristocratic hawks and eagles, though these last are sometimes seen negatively as a sign of excessive Spirit and fixed will.73 Protective Unicorn and analogues of peace and increase — lamb, calf, deer and dove — are formally good when balanced against the Lion principle. Another class of animals, the carrion eaters, constitute a Laurentian vocabulary of sheer abuse — vulture, dog, hyena, baboon, louse. The state of being which produces such creatures is imaged by two recurring metaphors of corruption — the cabbage rotting within the rind, and the chicken rotting within the egg, both affirming permanency rather than creative flux and conflict. Once we fall into the state of egoism we cannot change. The ego, the selfconscious ego, remains fixed, a final envelope around us. And we are then safe inside the mundane shell of our self-consciousness and self esteem . . . Like chickens that cannot break the shell of the ego . . . we can't be born, we can only rot.74 The cocky chicken breaking through to newness of being from its sealed, prison state is a popular Laurentian trope. 75 Failing in this escape, the individual or society falls into decay and calls forth the carrion eaters. Of these: The Vulture was once, perhaps, an eagle. " I t becomes a supremely strong bird, almost like the phoenix. But at a certain point, it said 'I am I t ' ", and proceeded to preserve its own static form "absolute as crystal about the seethe of corruption". Lawrence identified the 73

Cf. commentary on Melville's Moby Dick in the present study, pp. 47-49. Reflections, pp. 62-63. 76 The m o s t notable example is, of course, the young gamecock in "The Man W h o Died", originally "The Escaped Cock". 74

42

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

German military power with the vulture and false aristocracy (millionaires and bankers). The Dog, through cowardice, "arrested itself at a certain point and became domestic or a Hyaena, preserving a glassy, fixed form above a voracious seethe of corruption". The British and their Allies, fighting against the Germans for a false democracy, are identified with these two carrion eaters. The Baboon, who is "almost a man, or almost a high beast, arrested himself and became obscene, a grey hoary rind closed about an activity as strong corruption". Here, as with the hyaena, Lawrence stresses the creatures' cringing 'unthinkable loins'. The Louse, "in its glassy little envelope, brings everything into the pot of its little belly". 76 To this bestiary of abuse, all fairly conventional emblems except (in Anglo-Saxon perspectives) for the dog,77 we must add another notable egotist — the porcupine. Lawrence met this beast in the flesh at his New Mexico mountain ranch in 1925. After much heart-probing, revulsion, and metaphysical musing (described at length in "Reflections On The Death of a Porcupine") he performed what he considered a moral duty: he killed the creature. The porcupine, with its "lumbering, beetle's squalid motion", 7 8 killed the young pine trees by eating their bark, and maimed dogs (here for once regarded sympathetically). As an emblem we find this unattractive representative of the democratic mass, capitalist and proletariat . . . stuck solid inside an achieved form, and bristling with a myriad spines, to protect its hulking body as it feeds: gnawing the bark of the young Tree of Life, and killing it from the top downwards.79 76

Reflections, p. 79. A n Englishman who cheers for the hunted fox is comprehensible, but Lawrence's dislike of domestic dogs, his expressed preference for unspoiled wolves, is not a taste likely to endear h i m to his countrymen, or even to that part of the h u m a n race not particularly fond of dogs. For an affectionate, if contemptuous, view of the domestic dog see "Rex", Phoenix, pp. 14-21. 78 Reflections, p. 193. 79 Ibid., p. 240. 77

TOWARD T H E D E F I N I T I O N OK A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

43

Although seen through metaphysical spectacles, the porcupine, in the essay named for him, is made to project that strange sense of 'otherness' normal in Laurentian encounters with animal life. As emblem he may seem less than inevitable, but the essay's narrative has a powerful sense of immediacy. Reading it we are there with Lawrence in the moonlight before an uncanny presence. Before abstract generalization, which may seem arbitrary to someone unacquainted with Lawrence's mode of thinking, comes the dramatic experience superior to it. At any rate the creature falls neatly into place in Lawrence's bestiary - an image of anti-life, corruption within an achieved form, actually one of the carrion-eaters. Its squalor and beetle-like appearance make it easy to identify. Here it is well to point out the recurring personal conflict involved in Lawrence's identification with lordly killers, a contradiction we also find in his glorification of the wild and the demonic. His boyhood sweetheart Jessie Chambers reports t h a t the young Lawrence attempted to believe in the popular post-Darwinian picture of nature: He would tell me with vehemence that nature is red in tooth and claw, with the implication that "nature" included human nature. Yet when he heard the cry of a rabbit tracked by a weasel he would shiver in pain. His dominant feeling seemed to be a sense of helplessness.80 This is the Lawrence who reveals, in the porcupine essay, a reluctance to kill any living creature, even in obedience to the laws of life. This is the same Lawrence who recoiled in rage from a Mexican bullfight. 81 He did not see, as his myth might have predisposed him to, a ritual sacrifice of a Mithraic animal by lordly men in yellow imitating the action of the tiger. This is the same Lawrence who, taking up for small birds, satirizes Italian Nimrods in "Man Is A Hunter", 8 2 the Lawrence who tenderly describes the emerging 80 SI 82

A Personal Record, p. 112. See description in The Plumed Phoenix, pp. 32-34.

Serpent,

chap. I.

44

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

p h e a s a n t chicks in Lady Chatterley's Lover, a n d celebrates t h e n i g h t ingales of Tuscany: 8 3 L a w r e n c e t h e U n i c o r n . T h e o t h e r L a w r e n c e can s a y in a l e t t e r t o his A m e r i c a n B u d d h i s t friends, t h e B r e w s t e r s Leave me m y tigers, leave me spangled leopards, leave me bright cobra snakes, and I wish I had poison fangs as good. I believe in wrath and gnashing of teeth and crunching of cowards' bones. I believe in fair and pain and oh, such a lot of sorrow. 84 T h e final i m p o r t a n t category of animals which " T h e C r o w n " establishes can be called " T h e Gods of C o r r u p t i o n " — Swan, S n a k e a n d N e w t . T h e last p l a y s n o noticeable p a r t in L a w r e n c e ' s fiction a n d p o e t r y , b u t t h e s n a k e a n d swan are i m p o r t a n t c r e a t u r e s in his bestiary. C o r r u p t i o n as a n a c t i v e process, a disintegrating flow b a c k t o t h e source in darkness, is seen b y L a w r e n c e as a good, preferable t o s t a g n a t i o n a n d r o t within an achieved f o r m . . . . the process is t h a t of the serpent lying prone in the cold, watery fire of corruption, flickering with t h e flowing apart of the two streams. His belly is white with the light flowing forth from him, his back is dark and brindled where the darkness returns to the Source. He is the ridge where the two worlds flow apart. So in the orange-speckled belly of the newt, the light is taking leave of darkness and returning to the light, the imperious demon-like crest is the flowing home of the darkness. He is the god within the flux of corruption, and from him proceeds the great retrogression back to the Beginning and back to the End. 8 5 a3

Jbid., pp. 45-58. Earl and Ashsah Brewster; D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and, Correspondence (London, 1934), pp. 32-33. The interaction of personal experience and metaphysical lenses produces the following tirade on lambs in a 1917 letter from Cornwall where the creatures were reported to have been destroying the vegetable garden cultivated by the embattled prophet: "I loathe lambs, these symbols of Christian meekness. They are the stupidest, most persistent, greediest little beasts in the whole animal kingdom. I suspect Jesus of having had very little to do with sheep, that he would call himself the Lamb of God." Letters, I, 512. 85 Reflections, p. 47. 84

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

45

The spirit of destruction "is divine, when it breaks the ego a n d opens the soul to the wide heavens . . . I n the soft a n d shiny voluptuousness of decay, in the marshy chill heat of reptiles, there is t h e sign of t h e Godhead". 8 6 The Swan is one of the symbols of divine corruption with its reptile feet buried in the ooze and mud and its voluptuous form yielding and embracing the ooze of water, its beauty white and cold and terrifying, like the water lily, tlife sacred lotus, its neck and head like the snake, it is for us a flame of the cold white fire of flux, the phosphoresence of corruption, the salt, cold burning of the sea which corrodes all it touches . . . This is the beauty of the sioan, the lotus, the snake, this cold white salty fire of infinite reduction. And there was some suggestion of this in the Christ of the early Christians, the Christ who was the Fish. So that when Leonardo and Michael Angelo represent Leda in the embrace of the swan they were painting mankind in the clasp of the divine flux of corruption, the singing death. 87 Singing death and acceptance of the serpent are the general theme of the long violent essay "The Reality of Peace", in 1917. 88 The whole of this constitutes a hymn to death, the way of the serpent. 89 Familiar emblems of Lawrence's hatred appear in this essay, along with his basic polarity of animal and principles. Democratic nullity, the security-minded herd, is seen in terms of proliferating 'sheep', cringing'jackals' and 'hyaenas', 'ants', 'bugs' and scavenging insects, against whom Lawrence cries to 'sweet, beautiful death' 9 0 for salvation. A significant shift from "The Crown" is the association of the lamb with carrion eaters, and the absence of any protective Unicorn. There is nothing to meet the aesthetic Lion principle on equal terms, no animal champion of peace and increase. Christianity, 86 87

Ibid,., p. 74.

Ibid., pp. 75-76. 88 Phoenix, pp. 669-694. 89

"I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within

me", Ibid., p. 678. 90

Ibid., pp. 686-687.

46

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

in effect, has disappeared as a vital impulse; what remains, the democracy which its notions of human equality has fostered, is corruption within a closed form of 'benevolence'. Additional emblems, drawn principally from Lawrence's experience of 'America' — for him the world of classic Anglo-American literature plus actual residence in New and Old Mexico — fall into place within the general world-picture already described. Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) relates certain animals to a four-fold theory of perception and 'plexuses'. His imaginative recovery of the archaic Mediterranean world-view on his final return to Europe, supplies more notes on his emblems and to a metaphysic now so happily confirmed for him by visual evidence in Etruscan tombs. But expansions and modifications, varying emotional tones in his essays, do not radically alter the general typology established 1912-1919. What we need to examine more closely here is his commentary on four additional creatures important in his general iconography — whale, horse, dragon and singing bird. The whale first appears in Lawrence's Melville essay in Studies In Classic American Literature, and the book itself provides his primary context, although such an archetypal figure naturally has wider dimensions. Studies is concerned with the effects of the 'spirit of place', the demonic reality of physical, aboriginal America, 91 upon the consciousness of intensely spiritual Northerns escaping from European history and growing new selves. Rejecting Kingship and authority (two concepts we may identify with the Lion), the old Americans affirmed ideal equality in abstract; but democracy is a false infinite (Lamb or Dove a dangerous half-truth). Meanwhile, real, whole Americans are evolving. What is Lawrence's American, this new man? He is a Tiger. Lawrence's Crevecoeur essay notes the progress from the defender 91

I n the Crevecoeur essay in particular, Lawrence rejoices that "Birds are evidently no angels in America". The tiny humming birds are "Lions no bigger than ink-spots !" ". . . flash their wings like little devils, and stab each other with egoistic sharp bills". The shy tender quails also described b y Crevecoeur are but briefly noted, pp. 37-38.

TOWAKD THE DEFINITION OK A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

47

of property from animals to the solitary hunter. " E a t i n g wild meat whatever you may think, tends to alter their temper". 9 2 Hunter and husbandman are opposed types. Feral, American man, Lawrence said most plainly in version 1 of his Cooper essay (March 1919), no longer manifests the Unicorn principle. He [Natty Bumpo],the last exponent of the Christian race in the West, whose God is symbolized as the Lamb, has the name of Deerslayer — Slayer of the Lamb . . ,93 though he remains true (ostensibly) to Christian tenets of "humility, mercy, selflessness". 94 Another hunter, the maniacal Captain Ahab, commands the ship of the American soul. This maddened idealist, an end-product of Laurentian Christianity it would seem, opposes his absolute ego to the implacable power of the White Whale — a creature equated in version 2 with the sea, "material home of sacral-sexual consciousness" 9 5 and, in the final version, with the "last phallic being of the white man hunted into death of upper consciousness and the ideal will". 98 I t is fair to read him by analogy as an oceanic equivalent to aboriginal America itself, a metaphor for untamed, instinctual life under its ideal white appearance. 97 Lawrence's whale-figure is a warm-blooded and essentially lovable creature, his Moby Dick, a lonely Leviathan who is not wicked if left alone. Ahab is wicked. The affection Lawrence held for t h e whale, an amorous beast living in rich blood-consciousness among his kind, may be seen in the poem "Whales Weep N o t ! " in Birds, Beasts and Flowers inspired by Melville's chapter " T h e Great Armada". 9 8 92

Op. cit., pp. 41-42.

The Symbolic Meaning, pp. 109-110. 94 Ibid. 95 The Symbolic Meaning, p. 235. 96 Studies, p. 173. 97 We may perhaps hazard that in Lawrence's mind the whiteness would be associated with corrosive salt, but he does not state so. 98 See Robert Hogan, "The Amorous Whale: A Study in the Symbolism of D. H. Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (1959), 39-46. 93

48

TOWARD THE D E F I N I T I O N OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

Though he has tender and social instincts, however, this defected land animal has "the icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish", as Lawrence p u t it in KangarooEssentially a creature of peace and increase (though no mass breeder) 100 the whale can be moved to monstrous rages of destruction when annoyed or threatened. H e charges his hunters, smashes ships with his massive head, and retires to unknown depths. Whether or not Lawrence would admit it, do we not recognize in the unique, snow-white sea beast, fierce avenger of his kind, an action of the Unicorn ? Blood consciousness, awesome power, selfsufficiency, are united with tender protective instincts in the bull whale. That Moby Dick can be externally white and yet a metaphor for blood-consciousness, a phallic, non-ideal, unicorn of the waters, is not, after all, quite as staggering a transvaluation as the suggestion on which Lawrence ends his Melville study. . . . in the first centuries Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.101 At any rate, it is as the aroused force of blood-consciousness that the ambiguous, Leviathan-god from the depths rises to sink white American idealism, a divine triumph of Being over Knowing, 102 the 99

Op. cit., p. 45. A point obviously in his favor with Lawrence, who opposed unlimited fertility. 101 Studies, p. 174. I n Etruscan Places Lawrence says "The fish is the anima, the animate life the very clue to the vast sea. For this reason Jesus was represented in the first Christian centuries as a fish . . . the anima of the vast, moist ever yielding element which was the opposite and the counterpart of the red flame of the Pharoahs and the Kings of the E a s t had sought t o invest themselves with", p. 89. The warm, red blooded whale is evidently beyond antinomies, an excellent figure for the creative godhead. 102 I n an excursus on Hawthrone (Studies, p. 95) Lawrence provides an axiom which w e m a y use to describe w h a t happens. "Blood consciousness overwhelms, obliterates and annuls mind consciousness" (The h a p p y reverse of "Mind consciousness extinguishes blood consciousness, and consumes the blood"). 100

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

49

shattering of Ahab's Faustian ambition to strike through the veil of appearances to the Absolute. Another significant animal outside the hunter-victim dichotomy is the horse. In Lawrence's philosophical writings, two statements, one in Fantasia of the Unconscious and another in Apocalypse, throw special light on how we are to regard him. Lawrence's four-fold scheme of perception and plexuses, which he explains most fully in Fantasia but does not insist on throughout his work, may be drawn as follows: 103 Upper Consciousness: Eye perception, spiritual, objective knowledge. Sympathetic center: cardiac plexus; outward yearning in wonder. Negative center: upper back and shoulders; cold willful rejection. Lower Consciousness: Touch perception, sensual, subjective knowledge. Sympathetic center: solar plexus; a centrifugal center of delight. Negative center: lumbar ganglion; instinctual rages. With the horse "The root of his vision is in his belly, in the solar plexus. And he fights with his teeth, and with his heels, the sensual weapons". 104 In Apocalypse Lawrence expressed his sense of awe regarding this animal as follows. The terms are now mythic. Horses, always horses! How the horse dominated the mind of the early races, especially of the Mediterranean! You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back in our dark soul the horse prances. He is a dominant symbol: he gives us lordship; he links us, the first palpable and throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potence. He is the beginning even of our god-head in the flesh. And as a symbol he roams the dark under-world meadows of the soul. He stamps and threshes in the dark fields of your soul and of mine. The sons of God who came down and begot the great Titans, they had "the members of horses" says Enoch. 103

A summary of Chapter V "The Five Senses". Like the bull, he is established in the sympathetic mode. But the Laurentian bull's weight of passion, his strength, is in his breast and shoulders. Yearning outward he is, strangely enough, a spiritual type. Ibid. His horns "symbol of this vast power in the upper self" are not phallic., p. 200. 104

50

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

Within the last fifty years man has lost the horse. Now man is lost. Man is lost to life and power. While horses thrushed the streets of London, London lived.105 Raised to this level of symbolism, the horse and every Lawrence reader will immediately picture St. Mawr — becomes a metaphor of the sacred, potent wild, out of contact with which the City perishes. And as godhead in the flesh he has his analogies with t h a t great body of blood, the whale — a phallic creature modern civilization seems determined to wipe out. They are both manifestations of the same power. To find the ultimate, the total metaphor for the power expressed in human microcosm and the universe at large, we must reflect on dragons and their life cycle as Lawrence explains this in Apocalypse.109 The dragon and serpent symbol goes so deep in every human consciousness, that every rustle in the grass can startle the toughest "modern" to depths he has no control over. First and foremost, the dragon is the symbol of the fluid, rapid startling movement of life within us. That started life which runs through us like a serpent, or coils within us potent and waiting, like a serpent, this is the dragon. And the same with the cosmos.107 The mimetic and philosophical problem with Lawrence's dragon, however, is that this serpentine figure remains essentially earthbound, a better representation of blood than of spirit . Given the way in which Lawrence tries to cut off the transcendent dimension, to keep his two eternal opposites on the same plane, this is not surprising. Maud Bodkin's study of archetypes in The Plumed Serpent108 shows that a down-pressing serpent power rather than aspiring bird flight dominates t h a t book; and there is, of course, an ambiguity in the way Lawrence saw birds. 105

P p . 9 2 - 9 8 Viking edition (New York, 1932). i«6 Y o u n g (gold and green) they are benevolent. With age they become malevolent in other hues. 107 Op. cit., p. 16. 108 Archetypal Patterns in \Poetry (Oxford, 1934), pp. 280-288 in Vintage paperback edition (New York, 1958).

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

51

When Melville's Leviathan (metaphorically identifiable with both salt, devouring sea and blood-consciousness) sank the Peqttod, Lawrence was totally on the side of the sea-monster (though he chose, on a technicality, to deny any archetypal association of whale and sea-dragon). 109 He rejoiced to note that The bird of heaven, the eagle, St. John's bird, the Red Indian bird, the American, goes down with the ship, nailed by Tastego's hammer, the hammer of the American Indian. The eagle of the spirit. Sunk !110 In doctrinal terms, Eagle and Dove, contrary manifestations of spirit, upper consciousness, appear to have had their day. The proper bird emblem for our time of corruption, explicated in "The Crown" and recurrent in later poetry, is the corrosive, salty Swan. This cleansing god of the festering marsh, whose deathly way is that of the serpent, manifests the divine flux of corruption back to the mysterious source of life. Sinister as the general picture is, pure joy in being keeps breaking out, and this is associated with birds. "The singing of birds" Lawrence pronounced in Fantasia "acts almost entirely upon the sympathetic centers of the breast. Birds, which live by flight, have become for us symbols of the spirit, the upper mode of consciousness". 111 Two brief essays "Whistling of Birds" 112 in the spring of 1914 and "The Nightingale", 113 a product of his final period in Italy, give Lawrence's response to actual song-birds. They also give a clue to where we might look in his art for analogues of the Phoenix,

109 The whale is warm blooded, not a dragon, a Leviathan. Studies, p. 157. But Lawrence cannot wish away so ancient an association as Leviathandragon by choosing to be naturalistic in a mythic context. 110 Studies, p. 172. This appears to be, typologically, the same disaster for which Western Civilization is headed in the Lawrence myth. W e recall the demonic, dragonish vision of the Strasbourg cathedral already quoted. 1,1 Op. cit., p. 103. 112 Phoenix, pp. 3 — 6. 113 Ibid., p p . 40-44.

52

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

a creature no more to be f o u n d in n a t u r e t h a n t h e elusive Unicorn a n d therefore difficult to represent directly in concrete terms. 1 1 4 Celebrating t h e r e t u r n of spring a n d peace a f t e r a h a r d winter a n d a particularly devastating war, Lawrence heard in t h e voices of the wild birds a summons t o new life beyond death, b e y o n d mourning. These birds, themselves decimated b y frost, became joyous symbols of spring, rebirth, a n d innocence. All the mortification was . . . like bats in our hair, driving us mad. But it was never really our innermost self. Within, we were . . . this limpid fountain of silver . . . rising and breaking into the flowering. The blackbird cannot stop his song, neither can the pigeon. I t takes place in him, even though all his race was yesterday destroyed. He cannot mourn or be silent or adhere to the dead . . . Life has taken hold of him and tossed him into the new ether of a new firmament, where he burst into song as if he were combustible. 115 As inexhaustible, innermost self, rising beyond death into a flame of life, he is a phoenix, typologically related to the chicken breaking out of an egg-tomb, or t h e vivid young gamecock which Lawrence makes an emblem t h e resurrected Lord. I n Tuscany, in his last phase, t h e j a u n t y nightingale sang for Lawrence with a "wild, rich sound, richer t h a n the eyes in a peacock's tail". 1 1 6 Unlike K e a t s , Lawrence f o u n d nothing in t h e least sad a b o u t t h e bird with his "bright flame of positive, pure selfaliveness". 1 1 7 . . . in sober fact, the nightingale sings with a ringing, pinching vividness that makes a mere man stand still. A kind of brilliant calling and interweaving of glittering exclamation such as must have been heard on the first day of creation, when the angels suddenly found themselves created and shouted aloud before they knew it. 118 114

The flaming poppy of excess, Lawrence's Hardy study makes plain, is a vegetable sign of the phoenix. Phoenix, pp. 398-404. Red — for blood, flame and courage — is Lawrence's favorite color, standing out in the surrounding holy dark. 115 Phoenix, pp. 5-6. 116 Ibid., p. 40. 117 Ibid., p. 43. 118 Ibid., p. 41.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

53

Here again, we note the association of bird with newness, vividness, excess, and celebration of life. In Etruscan Places, Lawrence said . . . before Budda or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Budda spoke the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup. Because a fool kills a nightingale with a stone, is he therefore greater than the Etruscan ? Because the Roman took the life out of the Etruscan, was he therefore greater than the Etruscan ? Not he !119 This makes a strange contrast with Lawrence's earlier identification with raging potencies, beasts of prey, and singing death. Here the phoenix-nightingale, artist rather t h a n preacher, is singing life in the flesh. If we descend with Lawrence into "The P a i n t e d Tombs of Tar quinia" for a last reading of his dual metaphysic and animal emblems, we recognize familiar motifs of a cosmic polarity. Heraldic beasts face each other across the altar, or the tree, or the vase. The deer or lamb or goat or cow is the gentle creature with udder of overflowing milk and fertility; or is it the stag or ram or bull, the great father of the herd, with horns of power set obvious on the brow, and indicating the dangerous aspect of the beasts of fertility. [The Unicorn] These are the creatures of prolific, boundless procreation, the beasts of peace and increase. So even Jesus is the lamb. And the endless, endless gendering of these creatures will fill all the earth with cattle till herds [Democratic] rub flanks all over the world [the nightmare vision of "The Reality of Peace"]. But this must not be . . . Balance must be kept. And this is the altar we are all sacrificed upon: it is even death; just as it is our soul and purest treasure. So, on the other hand from the deer, we have lionesses and leopards. These, too, are male and female. These, too, have udders of milk and nourish young; as the wolf nourished the first Romans: prophetically, as the destroyers of many deer including Etruscans. 120 119 120

Op. tit., p. 53. Ibid., pp. 94-95.

54

TOWARD T H E DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

The pretence of being impartially interested only in ontological good, t h e impossible a t t e m p t t o cut out t h e ethical as well as t h e transcendental, will n o t do. Lawrence openly hates R o m a n s a n d loves Etruscans. 1 2 1 The R o m a n s represent for him brute force and mechanism as opposed t o the sensitiveness a n d gaiety of the E t r u s cans he imaged forth as nightingale and deer, delicate expressions of vivid life. Lawrence's animals, as I have indicated in m y introduction, cann o t be enclosed within a neatly consistent world picture and studied only as flat, archetypal p a t t e r n s . We have t o see t h e artist's sense of life as often in conflict with his metaphysic, a pitfall which Lawrence himself warned against in his H a r d y study. Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, some metaphysic. But the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic purpose behind the artist's conscious aim. Otherwise the novel becomes a treatise. And the danger is, that a man shall make himself a metaphysic to excuse or cover his own faults or failure. 122 Where, in poem or fiction, t h e o r y a n d sense of life are harmonized in a r t , we m a y say of Lawrence's m e t h o d a n d achievement w h a t he said of t h e E t r u s c a n . The subtlety lies . . . in the wonderfully suggestive edge of the figures. I t is not outlined . . . It is the flowing contour where the body suddenly leaves off, upon the atmosphere. The . . . artist seems to have seen living things surging from their own center to their own surface. 123 B u t he does paint certain animals in certain p a t t e r n s over a n d over. F r o m my analysis of Lawrence's emblems, as seen in his philosophy, t h e following m a j o r tropes emerge: 121 I n Etruscan Places he conducts a running polemic against the neoR o m a n Fascists. Grave Romanitas had little appeal. 122 Phoenix, p. 479. 123 Etruscan Places, p. 112.

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

55

The The The The

Lion figure leaping at the Father of the Herd. Unclean Herd endlessly proliferating in security. Carrion Eaters enjoying the rotting social corpse. corrosive serpent-Swan of the marshes arriving as "singing death." The Dragon force of blood consciousness arising to smash our white civilization. The new born Phoenix rising in flames. The Lion includes tiger, wolf, fox and all the fierce hunters. Although not identical with, he is on the same side of the cosmic division as his analogue the Eagle. Their invisible adversary is the Unicorn. The herd, hated as stupid lamb or reeking goat, is regarded more sympathetically in the image of deer — wild if gentle creatures —- or fatherly fighting bull. Toward the rabbit there is a curious ambivalence. 124 The Carrion Eaters, cases of self-arrested development all, constitute a rich vocabulary of abuse •- scavenging ants, bugs and insects generally; jackal, hyaena, dog (a failed wolf), vulture (a failed eagle); the porcupine in one conspicuous appearance is connected via his beetle-like squalor. The cold Swan, with his serpent's neck, manifests himself as a reductive flow back to origins or as the embrace of 'singing death'. The dragon force of blood consciousness takes curious forms. We have seen it even in the image of the Strasbourg cathedral and in Lawrence's image of the Leviathan Moby Dick. Apocalyptic "St. Mawr", half essay, half myth, also suggests the dragon's power, although on the natural plane neither horse nor whale is essentially destructive. The amorous whale, in particular, has his joyous sea nuptials celebrated in a poem. 124 This fertile and cowardly creature is something of a masochist who enjoys the ecstasy of flight. See "Adolf", Phoenix, pp. 7-13. Lawrence, however, is fascinated by the creature, and seems to approve of its quick, vivid life. H e said remarkably little about this important animal in his discursive writings, but cf. m y discussion of "Rabbit" poem and of Bismark's role in Women in Love, pp. 141-151.

56

TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF A

WELTANSCHAUUNG

The Phoenix, new-born f r o m death, draws unto himself the image of singing bird (nightingale par excellence), escaped cock, self-assertive glory of quetzel or peacock. Having the aristocratic power of the Eagle, he is as mild as a turtle Dove, utterly beyond sex and duality. I n Lawrence's naturalistic terms, however, such a transcendence is momentary. Beyond, or rather previous to, good and evil is the cloudy dragon, Lawrence's largest metaphor for the energies in man a n d t h e universe. A "vast, dark protoplasmic s u n " as he was once called, 125 this ambivalent figure seems as much a chaos as a cosmos. As the sacred wild of potentiality he virtually contains all of the other animal emblems, although there appears to be an unreconciled opposition between the bird and t h e dragon principles. When this general typology I have described is placed against particular poems and works of fiction studied in historical context, we may hope to grasp the universal and t h e particular at once. Where a r t contradicts doctrine this, too, can reveal the essential shape of Lawrence's thought. I n what follows shall be concerned with Lawrence's animals not only as emblem or archetype, b u t as 'wonder' and as 'creative symbol', within the loose framework of his metaphysic, beginning with the poems which emerge from his first Italian and Continental period in which we first hear doctrine.

126

"The Hopi Snake Dance", Mornings

in Mexico

(New York, 1927), p. 172.

II T H E ANIMALS IN P O E T R Y

A. LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH! After 1912 Lawrence's art moved into its symboliste phase. The Rainbow (1916), and Women in Love (1921) had their origin in a single novel apparently started at Gargnano, Italy in 1912. 1 He also began, in 1912, to compose the philosophic travel-sketches later revised and printed as Twilight In Italy (1916). These sketches included the metaphysical speculations of "The Lemon Gardens" in which we first hear of the duality of tiger and lamb, light and darkness. From Gargnano, too, Lawrence first proclaimed his belief in the final authority of 'blood', his 'great religion';2 and during this first sojourn in Italy the poems he was composing for what was eventually Look! We Have Come Through,! (1917), became more consistently happy. 3 Look! We Have Come Through!, in which we find both a new symboliste manner4 and first traces of a developing metaphysic, is 1 Harry, T . Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1954), p. 130. - Letters, I., 180. 3 Moore, op. cit., 130. 4 " T h e symbols the poet uses in this process are his own mystical and metaphysical response to life; the symbols are private rather than public — they are not usually comprehensible at once without a special study of the poet, and some of them remain inscrutable . . . the method is an intuitional one, representing an intuitional way of knowing: the poet seeks to express his inner experience in new and exact metaphors and symbols, and when one of these is a dominant element in a work of art, that work is truly symboliste". Harry T. Moore, The Life And Works of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1951), p. 153. This applies in particular to the period of Look!, The Rainbow and Women in Love. Beyond this period Lawrence's symbolism is apt to be more traditional.

58

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

an intensely personal document in the life of Lawrence a n d his wife Frieda. I t celebrates the pain and ecstasy of their elopement a n d subsequent wanderings, both emotional a n d geographical. After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion.5 The first few poems in the volume belong to E n g l a n d a n d t o Lawrence's life before Frieda. The love-cycle really begins with Bei Hennef, written in May 1912 in t h e Rhineland. 6 Thence follows a poetic progress t o I t a l y via Bavaria a n d Austria. The last poems were "written in Cornwall at t h e end of t h e b i t t e r winter of 191617" 7 when poverty, the banning of The Rainbow, and harassment b y war-time authorities, were making life extremely difficult for t h e Lawrences. A decade later, in t h e winter of 1927-28, Lawrence drastically altered m a n y of his early poems, b u t left Look! We Have Come Through! untouched. 8 I t is, therefore,particularly valuable in showing t h e first effects in a r t of a metaphysical theory t h e n being formed. Animals, t h o u g h relatively scarce, appear as emblems of doctrine, as 'otherness' and, in one case, as something t h a t approaches t h e species of creative m e t a p h o r explained in the Introduction to this study. " A Doe At E v e n i n g " seems to derive f r o m Lawrence's s t a y a t Irschenhausen, Bavaria. A letter p o s t m a r k e d 26 April 1913 says The place is a little summer-house belonging to her [Frieda's] brotherin-law, which he has lent us for a month or two. I t is lonely. The deer feed sometime in the corner among the flowers. But they fly with great 5

Lawrence, "Argument", Complete Poems, 1, 178. Lawrence, "Note", Complete Poems, 1, x x x v i . ' Ibid,., x x x v i i . 8 Phyllis Bartlett, "Lawrence's Collected Poems: The D e m o n Takes Over", PMLA, L X V I (1951), 583-598. 6

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

59

bounds when I go out. And when I whistle to a hare among the grass, he dances round in wild bewilderment. 9 I n the poem Lawrence confronts the doe as a fellow creature with whom he shares common passions; b u t the response of 'wonder' is not particularly strong, and he does not project the species of I-Thou relationship which is to be found in later poems. Nor is he here concerned with trying to express the essential quality of deer, though he does t r y to communicate, b y direct statement, something of the strangeness of the encounter. I looked at her and felt her watching; I became a strange being. Ah yes, being male, is not my head hardbalanced, antlered? Are not my haunches light ? Has she not fled on the same wind with me ? Does not my fear cover her fear ? The poem's filial stanza, quoted above, suggests animal principles implicit in the human psyche. B y December 1915 Lawrence would write to Bertrand Russell, a f t e r having read Frazer's The Golden Bough and Totemism And Exogamy: All living things, even plants, have a blood being. If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood being of the foetus . . . do you know what science says about these things? I t is very important; the whole of our future life depends on it. 10 From Cornwall in the summer of 1917 he wrote to another acquaintance t h a t "there are animal principles in man, which totemism recognizes, b u t nothing evolutionary". 1 1 And the theoretician of blood consciousness, polarity, and animal types who emerged openly 9 10 11

Moore, The Intelligent Letters, I, 394. Ibid., p. 518.

Heart, p. 202.

60

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

after 1912 was implicit in the young Lawrence, who wrote to a woman friend after seeing the "Divine Sarah" in a provincial performance of La Dame Aux Camélias in 1908. Sarah Bernhardt was wonderful and terrible . . . a wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther's fascination . . . the incarnation of wild emotion which we share with all live things, but which is gathered in us in all complexity and inscrutable fury. She represents the primeval passions of women.12 Panther and gazelle look forward to the recurring polarity of tiger and lamb (or deer) principles. Lawrence does not introduce such considerations into his encounter with the doe at evening, but we will perhaps understand the last stanza better for knowing his poetic thesis of the "wild emotion which we share with all live things". Animal types of Lawrence's philosophy appear significantly in "She Said As Well To Me", and "Manifesto", both written after Lawrence and Frieda had returned to England in 1914. The first was composed at Greatham, Sussex, the second at Zennor, Cornwall. In this the male protagonist, rejecting the praise and possessiveness of the woman, appears to want the respect due to a potentially dangerous animal. Don't touch me and appreciate me. It is an infamy. You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat. Your hand would not be so flig and easy. Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the sunshine like a princess ; When she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity. And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, You are afraid if he rises to his feet, Though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a monolith, arrested, static 12

Ibid., p. 17.

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

61

The bull, as one type of arrested development, appears later in Birds, Beasts and Flowers ("St. Luke"). 1 3 Wistful and pathetic, the exemplum of the early poem may point to the future doctrine enunciated in Fantasia of the Unconscious. The same massive weight of passion as the cow's is in a bull's breast. His strength is in his breast, his weapons are on his head. The wonder is always outside him.14 The poem's adder, humanly accepted, looks forward to the Sicilian encounter in "Snake", and appears to have originated in an actual experience recounted by letter in 1916. I saw a most beautiful brindled adder, in the spring, coiled up asleep with her head on her shoulder. She did not hear me tül I was very near. Then she must have felt my motion, for she lifted her head like a queen to look, then turned and moved slowly and with delicate pride into the bushes. She often comes into my mind again, and I think of her asleep in the sun like a Princess of the fairy world. It is queer, the intimations of other worlds, which one catches.15 In "The Reality of Peace", the long socio-metaphysical essay published in the English Review in 1917, Lawrence remembered The brindled slim adder, as she lifts her delicate head attentively in the spring sunshine — for they say she is deaf — suddenly throws open the world of unchanging, pure perfection to our startled breast.16 This same essay, as noted in the previous chapter, is concerned in part with the need of making one's peace with the 'serpent of abhorrence' within, with accepting the deathward flux which is, metaphorically, the way of the serpent. But the particular adder in the poem is given as an example of dangerous if admirable beauty. 13 It appears to be the unenterprising 'tameness' of the domestic animal, like that of the dog (a wolf that failed), that makes Lawrence think of the creature as undeveloped. In The White Peacock George Saxton, a clear case of refusal to develop, is tormented with the name "Taurus". He resembles his totemic sign in his strength and dull-wittedness. He is certainly pathetic. 14 P. 101. 16 Letters, I, 486. 16 Phoenix, p. 680.

62

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

We recall Lawrence's letter t o t h e Brewsters f r o m Germany in 1921: " L e a v e me m y tigers, leave me spangled leopards, leave me bright cobra snakes, a n d I wish I had poison fangs as good". 1 7 W h a t t h e poem says in effect is " I a m a dangerous creature. Respect m e " . "Manifesto" provides a clearer case of t h e influence of doctrine. This long rhetorical poem proclaims strength through joy in sexual fulfillment, the semi-mystical achievement t h e r e b y of single being beyond all polarities of love a n d hate, life a n d death. I t ends with the following message for the unredeemed. Every man himself, and therefore, a surpassing singleness of mankind. The blazing tiger with spring upon the deer, undimmed, the hen will nestle over her chickens, We shall love, we shall hate, but it will be like music, sheer utterance, issuing straight from the unknown, the lightning and the rainbow appearing to us unbidden, unchecked, like ambassadors. We shall not look before and after. We shall be now. We shall know in full. We, the mystic Now. For commentary on the tiger-deer (lamb) relationship we m a y t u r n t o the essays already examined — " T h e Lemon Gardens", of Italian origin, a n d " T h e Crown", 1915. The Rainbow, written a n d n a m e d in I t a l y , b u t revised September-October 1914, 18 derives f r o m t h e same vision of polarity. "Manifesto" came out of Lawrence's s t a y in Zennor, Cornwall (from F e b r u a r y 1916 t o October 1917), during which time t h e now standardized emblems of his metaphysic also appeared in the essay "The Reality of P e a c e " . More interesting in its suggestivity t h a n a n y direct s t a t e m e n t of doctrine might be, is t h e d a r k insight dramatized in " R a b b i t Snared I n The N i g h t " . There the animal is a t once a mysterious 17 18

Reminiscences, p. 22-23. Letters, I, 514.

THE ANIMALS IN POETKY

63

presence and, by implication, an emblem. The ritual of murder celebrated shows a secret choice of pain and death in which the demonic victim forces his wish upon his destroyer. The reader is involved in perverse emotions (arising out of what seems a substitute for sexual gratification) as the convulsive bunny achieves its desire to be strangled. Yes, bunch yourself between my knees and lie still. Lie on me with a hot plumb, live weight, heavy as a stone, passive, yet hot, waiting. Come, you shall have your desire, Since already I am implicated in you in your strange lust. Typologically, the rabbit has a natural connection with the lambfigure and the pacific principles of increase, but what Lawrence vividly and concretely presents in the poem is an image of aggression inwardly directed against self, a strange lust for destruction by which the meek can implicate the strong in their taste for disaster. The poem attempts to transmute horror into aesthetic satisfaction. Here (and on a larger scale in Women in Love), Lawrence tries to give us ecstasy in pain, delight in dread; but for all the persuasive power of the poem's incantations, the feeling its Black Mass arouses in a reader is more than likely to be ambivalent we may not fully consent to become absorbed, with the poet, in an experience of evil which, apparently, we are not to judge. I t may be too difficult to make our peace with the serpent of abhorrence within, to accept the poem's 'hideous passion' on the persona's own terms of pleasure. Anticipating the destructive insights of Women In Love,19 "Rabbit Snared In The Night" appears to be derived in some centrally im19 Mark Schorer's "Women in Love and Death", Hudson Review, V I (1953), 34-47, a landmark in Lawrence criticism, has shown how, in the person of Gerald Crich, the novel dramatizes a secret choice of pain and death. For a full discussion of this, and of the symbolic role of the rabbit Bismarck in the story, see pp. 144-150 in the present study.

64

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

portant ways from an incident in Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911). Chapter Y of p a r t I is called "The Scent of Blood". I n this Cyril, the somewhat girlish narrator in whom we can hardly miss seeing an aspect of young Lawrence's personality, reluctantly takes p a r t in a rabbit hunt. Infected with the exhilaration of pain, he switches emotionally from identification with hunted to hunter. There was a sharp cry which sent a hot pain through me, as if I had been cut, and instantly I forgot the cry and gave pursuit, feeling my fingers stiffen to choke it. The bunny throttled in the poem is prefigured in the first novel, and "Love on the F a r m " , f r o m Lawrence's first collection of poems (1913), 20 provides a sexual analogy to the recurring incident of the rabbit's death. I n t h a t poem a sensitive young farm-woman identifies herself with a t r a p p e d rabbit. Her husband's love, which she both dreads and desires is (as in older poetic metaphor), a species of 'death'. Repelled by his brutality and the smell of blood in his caresses, she submits sexually with something of a rabbit's ambivalence . . . God, I am caught in a snare! I know not what fine wire is round my throat. I only know I let him finger there My pulse of life, and let him nose like a stoat Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood. I n Look! We Have Come Through! five poems of erotic triumph lead u p to " R a b b i t Snared I n The N i g h t " . All are night poems: "December Night", "New Year's E v e " , "New Year's Night", "Valentine's Night", and " B i r t h Night". One of them, "New Year's N i g h t " is also the triumph of death; b u t there it is apparently a 20

Originally entitled "Cruelty In Love"; revised in The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1928). Some poems in Love Poems And Others, in which "Cruelty In Love" appeared, were first written during Lawrence's period as a teacher at Croydon, 1908-11; but others may have been written not long before publication in 1913. See E. W. Tedlock, Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of Manuscripts: A Descriptive Bibliography (Alburquerque, 1958), pp. 82-85.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

65

sacrifice of the old self that precedes spiritual rebirth in sex, something different from the murder of the rabbit. The myth is hardly clear, the 'love ethic' 21 obscure; but the poem does prepare a reader, to some extent, for the impact of "Rabbit Snared In The Night". This, in its starkness and emotional intensity, stands out from what is placed immediately before and after. Its position in the collection indicates that it was written before Lawrence returned from Italy to England in 1914; but it seems closer to the later destructive vision of Women In Love (where Bismarck the rabbit presides over obscene rites) than to the love-cycle's developing theme of winning through to new life and hope. B. BIRDS, BEASTS

AND

FLOWERS

Prevented by war-time conditions from leaving England any earlier, Lawrence and his wife returned to Italy in 1919. Thence they eventually made their way (via Ceylon and Australia) to Taos, New Mexico, in 1922. They did not permanently return to Europe until 1925, and thereafter lived largely in Italy and the Mediterranean by reason both of Lawrence's hostility to English life and his quest for sunshine and health. The poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which compose Lawrence's fullest bestiary, were mostly completed in 1921 cxcept for a few added later in New Mexico.22 For two years, beginning in March 1920, Lawrence lived at Fontana Vecchia, an old farmhouse, in Taormina, Sicily, with side-trips to Malta, Sardinia and the Continent. During this relatively happy and productive period, as Harry T. Moore has noted, Lawrence "completed The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod, wrote his two books on the unconscious, some of his finest short novels and stories as well as most of the Birds, Beasts and Flowers poems". These last "glow with the hot, rich colors cf Sicily". 23 21

Mark Spilka's The Love-Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomington, 1956), stresses the positive side of Lawrence's sexual polarity. 22 Letters, I, 638. 23 The Intelligent Heart, pp. 264-265.

66

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

America is another presence, even in Sicily. Studies In Classic American Literature, first composed during the war-years and given final form after Lawrence arrived in Taos, was written a second time at Taormina. 24 Lawrence had originally called the metaphysic therein "the result of five years of persistent work . . . a whole Weltanschauung — new, if old — even a new science of psychology — pure science". 25 Largely removed from the final version of Studies, the metaphysical theory reappears in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) and shows through in places in the poems. 26 Actual American experience in New Mexico also supplies matter for poetry and emblems of doctrine. The Evangelistic Beasts come first in the volume. In "Notes for Birds, Beasts and Flowers", of the 1930 London edition, 27 Lawrence supplied their Apocalyptic background. Oh, put them back, put them back in the four corners of the heavens, where they belong, the Apocalyptic beasts. For with their wings full of stars they rule the night, and man that watches through the night lives four lives, and man that sleeps through the night sleeps four sleeps, the sleep of the lion, the sleep of the bull, the sleep of the man, and the eagle's sleep. After which the lion wakes and it is day. Then from the four quarters the four winds blow, and life has its changes. But when the heavens are empty, empty of the four great Beasts, the four Natures, the four Winds, the four Quarters, then sleep is empty, too, man sleeps no more like the lion and the bull, nor wakes from the light-eyed eagle sleep. Further clarification is provided in Apocalypse (1930),28 in which Lawrence revealed secret pagan doctrine transmitted in the Bible. By this it appears t h a t the four elemental or cosmic natures of man, 24

For a detailed account of this re-writing see Arnold Armin's D. H. Lawrence and America (New York, 1959), pp. 33-125. 25 Letters, I, 595-596. 26 The key item removed from the American essays was "The Two Principles", printed in The English Review, 1919 (reprinted Arnold Armin, The Symbolic Meaning, pp. 175-189). 27 Phoenix, p. 66. 28 P. 55.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

67

lion, bull and eagle were degraded in Judeo-Christian tradition to Cherubim, then to Archangels, finally to four Evangelists. The great muddled source of so much medieval iconography is Ezekiel with his four man-faced creatures. 29 As Lawrence explained "The F o u r " in Last Poems (1930), these mystical ones are ultimately fire, water, earth and air: "To find the other m a n y elements you must go to the laboratory/and h u n t them down. /But t h e four we have always with us, they are our world/or rather, they have us with t h e m " . The immediate cause of the Evangelic Beasts in Lawrence's poetry was Venice, which northern Italian city he visited, among others, in 1920. 30 There, under the influence of the winged lion of St. Mark on his column, of the fabulous stone creatures everywhere in the city, and, in particular, the symbolic figures of the F o u r E v a n gelists borne on the pendentives of the cathedral (which he must have seen) 31 his imagination dwelt on t h e Christian symbolism which, f r o m childhood, h a d fascinated him. 32 As his discursive writings f r o m Twilight In Italy onwards testify, he had, by 1920, come to some definite conclusions about symbolism and doctrine. St. Matthew, the first of the "Beasts", is traditionally represented as a man, a fact which Lawrence uses for mocking, anti-Christian dialectic, a repudiation of spirituality as a single goal superior t o n a t u r a l life in the flesh. There are two ways, two infinites, light and

" Cf. Ezekiel 4-14. 30 Moore, op. cit., pp. 273-274, gives an account of hie summer movements in central and northern Italy and hie visit to Venice. The Evangelistic poems were actually composed at Villa Canovaia San Gervasio, in the hills above Florence. 31 The famous cathedral of St. Mark, richly decorated with fabulous beasts is itself derived in style from the former Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople, now the mosque of Mohammed VI. Its pendentives "bear symbolic figures of the Four Evangelists, that of the Lion of St. Mark with a strangely human face . . ." Thomas Okey, The Story of Venice (London, 1931), p. 297. 32 Apocalypse, pp. 9-10, describes the effects of having the Bible "poured every day into my helpless consciousness". The book describes the fascination of Biblical symbolism before it is reduced to single, doctrinal meaning.

68

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

dark. Man must know t h e m both. The poem is entirely orthodox Lawrence doctrine of t h e two infinites. Matthew I am, the man. And I take the wings of the morning, to Thee Crucified But while flowers club their petals at evening And rabbits make pills among the short grass And long snakes quickly glide into the dark hole in the wall hearing man approach, I must be put down, Lord, . . . And I must resume my nakedness like a fish, sinking down the dark reversion of night Like a fish seeking the bottom, Jesus, IX&YZ

Face downwards Veering slowly Down between the steep slopes of darkness, fucus-dark seaweed-fringed valleys of waters under the sea. Over the edge of the soundless cataract Into the fathomless, bottomless pit Where my soul falls in the last throes of bottomless convulsion, and is fallen Utterly beyond Thee, Dove of the Spirit; Beyond everything, except itself. B y alluding t o Jesus as the Fish, 3 3 as well as t h e more orthodox Dove, Lawrence makes t h e Son of Man himself an ironic represent a t i v e of t h e two days. The way down a n d t h e w a y u p are of equal value. The poem also gives us polarity in t e r m s of b a t and bird. 33

Cf. Studies, p. 174: ". . . in t h e first centuries Jesus was Cetus t h e whale. And t h e Christians were t h e little fishes. Jesus, t h e Redeemer, was Cetus, L e v i a t h a n " . This is a Laurentian tradition since t h e Leviathan, in apocalyptic vision, is always the antagonist of Christ. Ironically enough, and despite a persistent tradition in early iconography, there is no agreement among scholars as to which particular instance in t h e New Testament gave t h e fathers of t h e Church any authority to symbolize Christ as t h e Fish. For a good discussion of this symbolism, and of t h e Greek acrostic Ichthys by which early Christians recognized each other, see Peter Fingesten, "The Six-Fold Law of Symbolism", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X X I (1963), 387-397.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

69

Bat winged heart of man Reversed flame Shuddering a strange way down the bottomless pit To the great depths of its reversed zenith Afterwards, afterwards Morning comes, and I shake the dews of night from the wings of my spirit And mount like a lark, Beloved. But remember, Saviour, That my heart which like a lark at heaven's gate singing, hovers morning-bright to Thee, Throws still the dark blood back and forth In the avenues where the bat hangs sleeping, upside down And to me undeniable, Jesus. While "St. Matthew" does not connect its doctrine with sexuality and the problems of modern civilization, it does develop a considerable part of Lawrence's dualistic thought. "St. Mark", the winged lion of Venice, has close connections with the visionary philosophy of "The Crown" (1915) and its prologue "The Lemon Gardens". The lion of St. Mark has wings, according to Lawrence's poem, because he has been converted from the old lion of J u d a h (a figure of godhead as fleshly power) into a Christian creature of love and spiritual consciousness. Now worshipping the Lamb, his natural prey, he has become " . . . a curly sheep-dog with dangerous propensities", Ramping round, guarding the flock of mankind Sharpening his teeth on the wolves, Ramping through the air like a kestrel And lashing his tail above the world And enjoying the sensation of heaven and righteousness and voluptuous wrath. There is a new sweetness in his voluptuously licking his paw Now that it is a weapon of heaven There is a new ecstasy in his roar of desirous love. As champion of God's justice, of peace and increase, the lion is more bloody and destructive than ever, a perverted evil confusion of the two principles.

70

THE ANIMALS IN POEIRY

" S t . L u k e " the fatherly bull, ought, in Lawrence's metaphysic, to be t h e manifestation of the Unicorn principle in creative combat with t h e Lion as outlined in " T h e Crown". U n f o r t u n a t e l y Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag His fortress is dismantled His fires of wrath are banked down His horns turn away from the enemy. Serving t h e Son of Man only b y procreation Is he not over-charged by the dammed-up pressure of his owti massive black blood Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, the Providence Bull, after two thousand years ? The recipe is for the bull to remember his horns Let him charge like a might catapult on the red-cross flag, let him roar out a challenge on the world And throwing himself upon it, throw off the madness of his blood. Let it be war The bull of the proletariat has got his head down. We should remember, with regard t o Lawrence's bolshevik bull, t h a t t h e lion-tiger principle is aristocratic a n d solitary, while t h e bull, manifesting t h e 'Unicorn' principle, is t h e protector of t h e herd upon whom t h e royal feline springs in accordance with t h e m y t h of " T h e Crown". "St. J o h n " , t h e sun-peering eagle of t h e spirit, emblem of highsoaring Mind, t h a t tries to rise above t h e d a r k creative m y s t e r y on which it depends, is t h e object of Lawrence's detestation. Of t h e Evangelists Lawrence liked him least, as t h e poem a n d all of Apocalypse make plain. God as abstract Logos is a b o m i n a t i o n in Lawrence's theology. In the beginning was the Word, of course And the word was the first offspring of the almighty Johannine mind, Chick of the intellectual eagle.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

71

The poem sees the bird nowadays as "rather shabby", "Moulting, and rather naked about the rump", willing at last "For the fire to burn it up, feathers and all, /So that a new conception of the beginning and the end/ Can rise from the ashes". I t is time, in short, for John's Eagle to pass into Phoenix. The fabulous Evangelistic Beasts are all types in Lawrence's controlling myth. Creatures of the natural world are more varied. They appear as 'other', as person, and as emblem, sometimes in combinations. The European animals he includes in the volume are the mosquito, the bat, the fish, the snake, the tortoise, the ass, and the goat. The Mosquito and the bat are the subjects of relatively lighthearted poems innocent of metaphysical speculation. "The Mosquito" treats blood-drinking with a certain gaiety and registers the human comedy of man versus beast in this case. " B a t " and "Man and B a t " express Lawrence's instinctive recoil from and fascination with the creature. The second poem describes the difficulties in getting the reluctant bat out of his hotel room in Florence into the sunlight. I t contains characteristically Laurentian flashes of vivid description which seem to bring out the essential nature of a bat. . . . he fell in a corner, palpitating, spent And there, a clot, he squatted and looked at me With sticking out, bead-berry eyes, black, And improper derisive eyes, And shut wings, And brown, furry body. Brown, nut brown, fine fur ! But it might as well have been hair on a spider; thing With long black-paper ears. In his dilemma and repulsion Lawrence struggles to a basic acceptance of the creature's right to be. "St. Matthew" as I have shown, makes plain that for Lawrence the night bat as well as the morning lark can stand for part of man's sense of life. "Snake", the most famous of Lawrence's animal poems, describes an encounter on a hot Sicilian day in July with an unrecognized

72

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

king of the underworld, vividly realized as a wonder, a n d then t u r n e d to emblem of t h e 'other' way of life. Essentially this black snake is the same 'serpent of abhorrence' of t h e "Reality of Peace", consort of t h e princess-adder who, encountered in Cornwall in 1915, h a d already served as emblem in "She Said As Well To Me" of t h e Look! volume. This time, however, the intimations of 'snakehood' are so concretely realized t h a t we need neither personal history nor doctrine. He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently. He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black; Seeming to lick his lips, And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, Betrayed by the voice of his human education, the poet loses his sense of wonder, hurls a log at t h e creature and is immediately sorry for this irreligious act. H e recalls the sin of t h e ancient Mariner and his forgiveness when he blessed the water snakes unaware. While Lawrence in this poem is clearly viewing reality through categories of thought he had devised, he contrives to project for us an u n c a n n y personal intuition of snakehood. The slow, fluid movements of the lines themselves give the illusion of imitating t h e essence of snake. 34 34

See Archibald M. Young, " R h y t h m and Meaning in Poetry: D . H . Lawrence's 'Snake'", English, X V I I (1968), 41-47.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

73

The inhumanly alien nature of fish also finds notable expression in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. The scene is Zell-am-See, near Salzburg. Fishing on the lake the poet reflects, between awe and guilt, on the divine otherness of the creature he has hooked. The fish and his way are beyond the reach of man's imagination: "To be a fish/In the waters ./Loveless and so lively!/ Born before God was love,/Or life knew loving". Unhooked his gorping, water-honey mouth, And seen his horror-tilted eye, His red-gold, water precious, mirror flat bright eye; And felt him throb in my hand, with his mucuous, leaping life-throb. And my heart accused itself Thinking: I am not the measure of creation. This is beyond me, this fish. His Ood stands outside my God. Apparently although man, in his dual nature, moves toward fire as well as water (as described in "St. Matthew"), he cannot move as far in either direction as creatures of one element, who know with their senses what man cannot. Diet appears to help balance the elements. Cats and Neapolitans, Sulphur sun-beasts, Thirst for fish as for more-than-water; Water-alive To quench their over-sulphureous lusts While it might seem at first that Neapolitans, Italians, should desire lamb — "The Lemon Gardens" had earlier made the identification of Italian and blazing tiger or cat principle — Fish, like lamb, is a figure of Christ, the sacrificed.35 Mystically In the beginning Jesus was called The Fish . . . And in the end. 35 " T h e Crown" puts lamb, dove, moon and water on one side of the primordial duality, under the sign of unicorn, and in contrast with lion, eagle, sun and fire.

74

THE ANIMALS I N POBTRV

Lawrence's " F i s h " a n d " S n a k e " are primarily n a t u r a l wonders. His tortoises, by contrast, are more explicitly natural emblems, although he projects attitudes toward human sexuality without losing a sense of actual creatures. The tortoises, unlike the fish and the snake, are given human psychology, and our sense of wonder is qualified b y sympathetic comedy. W r i t t e n in or around Florence at the same period as the "Evangelistic Beasts", 3 6 the tortoise poems may well have had their origin among the farm and country lanes above Fiesole which gave inspiration for "Turkey Cock", "Cypresses", "Medlars and Sorbapples", "Grapes" and others in the volume. 37 " B a b y Tortoise", the first in sequence, stresses the indomitable pride of the creature in its singleness. "Tortoise Shell" next introduces t h e main motif of division and crucifixion, the falling away from oneness. The Cross, the Cross Goes deeper in than we know, Deeper into life; Right into the marrow And through the bone. The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate Of the baby tortoise. Outward and visible indication of the plan within, The complex, manifold involvedness of an individual creature . . . The poem sustains itself as a work of imagination, b u t if we are curious about the cross and t h e four-fold n a t u r e of cosmos and h u m a n i t y , as Lawrence read it out of ancient symbolism, we can t u r n to "The Two Principles" (1919) as his first statement. Lawrence's posthumous Apocalypse (1930) reiterated this same fourfold doctrine. "Tortoise Family Connections" stresses again the stoic indifference of t h e creature in his aloneness. 36

Moore, op. cit., p. 274. Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: 1957-1959), 3 vols., II, 49. 37

A Composite

Biography

(Madison,

THE ANIMALS IN POETllY

75

It is no use my saying to him in an emotional voice: "This is your Mother, she laid you when you were an egg." He does not even trouble to answer: "Woman, what have I to do with thee ?" He wearily looks the other way, . . . With all the over-compensation of a highly sensitive nature Lawrence, here, and elsewhere, preaches against sentimentality, particularly that of mothers. Since he tended to associate Christianity with his own mother's self-adoring expectation of 'love' for her virtue, "Love", for Lawrence, is the invention of women, the means of emotional blackmail. Sympathy rather than hatred, however, informs "Lui and Elle" and "Tortoise Gallantry" which emphasize the absurdity and pathos of sex. The difficulties of the male (who is smaller) make him tragiccomic. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell Alas, the. spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, Passionate duality of male and female, power and love, darkness and light, describes the essential nature of the Laurentian universe wherein the whole purpose of life is achievement of single, complete being, the recovery, through right relationship of opposites, of the 'phoenix' condition. This condition of wholeness however is not easily to be achieved. I f sex is the way, it leads to paradise through Calvary, as the last poem "Tortoise Shout" testifies in its striking conclusion.

76

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence, Tearing a cry from us. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe. The poem projects the sense of the sacred terror of sex which, in his fiction, is inextricably mingled with its ecstasy. What we also find in the tortoise poems is a dramatization, more direct than elsewhere, of a male resentment of primordial duality. "Tortoise Shout" asks Why were we crucified into sex ? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves As we began As he certainly began, so perfectly alone ? Remarkable though these poems may be, the tortoise — unlike the rabbit, the snake, the fish and other animals to which poems are devoted — does not appear as a recurrent emblem in Lawrence's work. Apparently Lawrence responded deeply to the creature whose almost inaudible scream, the poem tells us, he seemed to feel "on the plasm direct", "half music, half terror". B u t his imagination did not appear constantly to dwell on the tragic side of the question of duality. The tortoise as emblem remains isolated in his work, not easily related typologically to other figures within Lawrence's world-view. "The Ass", who also bears the Christian stigmata (a black cross on his shoulders), provides a less complex case. Musing on "The longdrawn bray of the ass/In the Sicilian twilight" Lawrence hears both satyriasis and lament for lost freedom. The ass regrets the Steppes of Tartary.

T H E ANIMAIS IN POETRY

77

An then, when he tore the wind with his teeth, And trod wolves underfoot, And over-rode his mares as if he were savagely leaping on obstacle, to set his teeth in the sun . . . Somehow, alas, he fell in love, And was sold into slavery. Poor ass, like man, always in rut, The pair of them are alike in that. Temporarily forgetting his usual identification of the horse with male power and glory, Lawrence contrasts the two animals in their present domestic state. The horse, being nothing but a nag, will forget. And men, being mostly geldings and knacker-boned hacks, have almost all'forgot. But the ass is a primal creature, and never forgets. The Steppes of Tartary, And Jesus on a meek ass-colt: mares: Mary escaping to Egypt: Joseph's cudgel. For Lawrence the ass is less an emblem of humility than of humiliation in sexual love and service to mankind. The primal wildness he admired, however, found its ultimate incarnation in St. Mawr, a horse who is no mere 'nag'. Related both to the bull of " S t . Luke" and to "The Ass", the rancid "He-Goat" is another case of frustrated development. This old "Egotist", reeking with lust, does nothing in his domestic state but pursue females in the vain hope of satisfaction. Things of iron are beaten on the anvil And he-goat is anvil to she-goat, and hammer to he-goat In the business of beating the mettle of goats to a god-head. But they have taken his enemy from him And left him only his libidinousness, . . . Salvation for the "old Satan", "Black procreant male of the selfish will", is to "Forget the female herd for a bit,/And fight to be boss of the world".

78

THE ANIMAIS IN POETRY

Purely traditional in identifying the goat with Satan and with lust, Lawrence disapproves only of lust. As I explained earlier in treating his concept of 'wildness', 'devil' is a positive term for Lawrence. What condemns the goat is his libidinous egotism, not his demonic energy. "She Goat" is not much of an emblem but very much a character in Lawrence's Sicilian menage. In her female contrariness she most resembles Susan, the cow whose complex relations with Lawrence in New Mexico have become part of literary history. 38 Like " H e Goat", the poem is identified in the volume with Taormina. She (unnamed) is the Lawrence's goat who, every morning, is taken to graze with others of the town herd. Her egotism, libidinous and obstinate ways, teasing habits, are described with the tolerance which Lawrence often seems more willing to grant to animals than to persons. The poem's mood is playful. Queer it is, suddenly, in the garden To catch sight of her standing like some huge, ghoulish grey bird in the air, on the bough of the leaning almond tree, Straight as a board, looking down like some hairy horrid God the Father in a William Blake imagination. But humor is touched with respect for the goatness of goat, the strangeness of the creature. Beyond praise and blame, she offers no lesson, nor is she preached at. Almost a person, she brings to us some of t h a t sense of otherness which Lawrence conveys even when he is most familiar with a particular animal. Reading the poem we may feel we have never really seen a goat before. "Elephant" and "Kangaroo" represent two encounters on the circuitous route to New Mexico. Lawrence's letter to Lady Cynthia 38

See William York Tindall, op. cit. I n "A Little Moonshine and Lemon", Mornings in Mexico (New York, 1927) Lawrence, returned t o Italy, remembers with nostalgia the black cow t h a t supplied him with milk and intimations of the animal world.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

79

Asquith describes his reaction to the tropics, a Perahera ceremony for the Prince of Wales, and the elephants therein We saw The Prince of Wales at the Kandy Perahera, a lonely little glum fish . . . gazing blankly down on all the swirl of the east. . . The Perahera wonderful — midnight — huge elephants, great flares of coconut torches, princes like peg tops swathed round and round with muslim — and then tom-toms and savage music and devil dances . . . and the black eyes and black bright sweating bodies of the naked dancers under the torches and the clanging of great mud-born elephants rearing past — made an enormous impression on me — a glimpse into the world before the flood. I can't quite get back into history. The soft, moist, elephantine prehistoric has sort of swamped over my known world . . ,39 In the poem "Elephant", of which the letter is a fair prose description, Lawrence's attention is on the significance of the total ceremony rather than the animals themselves and their effect on him. He contrasts the ironic royal motto Ich Dien and modern notions of prince as public drudge with what he takes to be instinctive Oriental demand for real majesty. The great beasts, "vast mountainous blood", are concretely realized, but function as analogues for the blood mystery of the throng on which the white nonentity of the Prince is borne. In the elephants and the east, in all men maybe. The mystery of the dark mountain of blood, reeking in homage, in lust, in rage And passive with everlasting patience Then the little, cunning pig-devil of the elephant's lurking eyes, the unbeliever. Recoiling from blood, the pale prince disappoints the instinct for splendor. Underneath the pretence of homage, subjects and elephants jeer. Elephants leave as if in haste to get away. Their bells sound "frustrate and sinister". Whatever his own first reactions to the antidiluvium quality in elephants may have been, Lawrence makes them awesome presences in his poem. Later, in Pansies, the elephant was to become exem39

Letters,

II, 701.

80

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

plary. Analogically, the huge beast can be seen as one more manifestation of the blood-force we have found variously in the form of horse, whale and Strasbourg cathedral. "Kangaroo", a momento of Lawrence's call at Australia, catches the strangeness, for a European, of beast and continent. Delicate mother Kangaroo Sitting up there rabbit-wise, but huge, plumbweighted, And lifting her beautiful slender face, oh ! so much more gently and finely lined than a rabbit's, or a hare's, She watches with insatiable wistfulness Untold centuries of watching for something to come For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the South. Where nothing bites but insects and snakes and the sun, small life. Where no bull roared, no cow ever lowed, no stag cried, no leopard screeched, no lion couched, no dog barked, But all was silent save for parrots occasionally, in the haunted blue bush. Setting aside the existence of dingos and Tasmanian devils who are perhaps a little more than small biters (even if relatively silent), we can sense the alien quality of the land t h a t Lawrence tries to suggest. What most impresses his imagination is that, in contrast to animals in the northern hemisphere, where so much wild life "seems to leap at the air, or skim under the wind", the yellow antipodal Kangaroo is curiously earth-bound, gives a feel of pressing heavily downwards in her morphology. And not only are the young held close to mother, the adults themselves seem attached to "the earth's deep heavy center" by a species of umbilical cord. Lawrence, in the poem, does not philosophize from this imaginative leap. I n his Australian novel Kangaroo, however, the 'mother' quality of the animal, associated with a political leader who takes that name, is part of the appeal which Somers, the Lawrence-figure, must resist. In the novel Lawrence assimilates man to Kangaroo

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

81

and turns Kangaroo into an archetypal figure in his myth; in the poem the creature, while remaining 'other', moves toward human personality. Primarily a natural 'wonder', she serves, at one remove, as an emblem of motherhood incarnate, allied with the rabbit, the lamb and other figures of peace and increase. New Mexico, Lawrence said in retrospect, was "the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever". 40 While it would be foolish to deny the powerful effect of New Mexico's remarkable landscape, and his discovery that ancient wisdom still survived in the Pueblo religion, it is clear that Lawrence imported his own spirit of place with him in the American essays which he was to rewrite a second time while in Taos. And the creatures he found there were fitted into an old Laurentian world-picture. The first American emblem, "Turkey-Cock", which seemed to Lawrence as perhaps "the bird of the next dawn", was actually encountered in the Italian countryside above Fiesole before the pilgrimage to America. Admiring, Lawrence sees Your aboriginality Deep, unexplained, Like a Red Indian darkly unfinished and aloof, Seems like the black and glossy seeds of countless centuries. The poem stresses the "raw American will" in the bird, its "demonic dauntlessness". In the turkey's prance Lawrence reads Indian ritual and sacrifice. For most natives of the United States, the Indian America Lawrence sees in the bird is not part of their history. But Lawrence's myth in Studies in Classic American Literature is that the dead aboriginals haunt the Anglo-American psyche and that the real American, the new man developing, will have to make his peace with the spirit of place, an undying aboriginal presence in the continent. In Lawrence's prophetic geography New Mexico is more important than Massachusetts. 40

Phoenix, p. 142.

82

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

Even before going to Mexico in 1923 to begin The Plumed Serpent Lawrence, in Italy, wrote Turkey-cock, turkey-cock, Are you the bird of the next dawn ? Has the peacock had his day, does he call in vain, screecher, for the sun to rise ? The eagle, the dove, and the barnyard rooster, do they call in vain, trying to wake the morrow ? And do you await us, wattled father, Westward ? Will your yell do it ? Take up the trail of the vanished American Where it disappeared at the foot of the crucifix. The U.S.A., he wrote from his New Mexico ranch in 1923 . . . is a vast unreal, intermediary thing intervening between the real thing which was Europe and the next real thing, which will probably be in America, but which isn't yet, at all. Seems to me a vast death-happening must come first. But probably it is here, in America (I don't say just U.S.A.), that the quick will keep alive and come through.41 The "vast death-happening", in America before the new day is suggested in the end of the poem "Turkey Cock". Perhaps the "halfgodly, half-demon" figures awaiting the cry of the turkey cock must wait until that slag-wattled "unfinished" bird has been "through the fire once more" and been "smelted pure". Behind, or within the turkey-cock, we may glimpse the fiery phoenix, ultimate type of resurrection. In "Eagle in New Mexico" and "The American Eagle", written in New Mexico, Lawrence used a more conventional bird to show the spirit of place. The first is a meditation on an actual eagle ". . . at the top of a low cedar-bush/On the sage-ash desert/Reflecting the scorch of the sun on his breast". Lawrence, quite conventionally, identifies the great bird with the sun itself and resists both.

11

Letters,

I,

140.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

83

Does the sun in Mexico sail like a fiery bird of prey in the sky Hovering ? I don't yield to you, big jowl-faced eagle. Nor you nor your blood-thirsty sun That sucks up blood Leaving a nervous people. In this poem the eagle stands for negative will and upper consciousness, the imperious, driving quality in Anglo-American life which drains the sensual self of vitality. In all versions of his Melville study Lawrence rejoiced that this American bird, also the bird of St. John, went down with the Pequod. What is especially interesting is that in the poem Lawrence sees the eagle-sun in his malevolent aspect, not as the source of life, but as consumer. 42 This is not the dark, creative sun within the sun which Lawrence worships. "The American Eagle", an editorial filled with barbaric Yawps43 and jeers, contrasts the imperial strength of the United States, an eagle by nature, with the dovelike protestations of love and liberty by which Americans seek to deny the motive of power. Columbia 42

I n L a w r e n c e , as i n ' m y t h o l o g y generally except in frigid zones, t h e sun m a y be conceived as m a n i f e s t i n g a t t i m e s a force which needs t o b e balanced b y t h e influence of t h e m o o n . (Cf. " T h e H o s t i l e S u n " a n d " P r a y e r " in More Pansies). T h a t t h e m o o n , associated w i t h w o m e n , d a r k n e s s a n d w a t e r , c a n be salt a n d d e s t r u c t i v e follows f r o m L a w r e n c e ' s persistent d u a l i s m a n d h i s refusal t o simplify good a n d evil. 43 In style t h e p o e m closely resembles p a r t s of L a w r e n c e ' s final version of t h e W h i t m a n essay in Studies. T h e r e is t h e s a m e capitalization f o r e m p h a s i s a n d exaggerated satire. P o e m a n d book b e a r t h e place-label L o b o , N e w Mexico (a T a o s m o u n t a i n slope) w i t h which n a m e " M o u n t a i n L i o n " , " T h e Blue J a y " , a n d " B i b b l e s " a r e also connected. L a w r e n c e (Letters, I I , 729) retired u p t h e L o b o in t h e fall of 1922 t o avoid t h e d i s t r a c t i o n s of M a b e l D o d g e a n d t h e T a o s a r t colony. " M o u n t a i n L i o n " finds h i m initially "climbing t h r o u g h t h e J a n u a r y snow, i n t o t h e L o b o c a n y o n " a c q u i r i n g legal title in 1924 t o a small r a n c h in t h e s a m e region (Letters, n., I I , 769). L a w r e n c e first, w i t h wolfish, insistence called it L o b o . Motive for t h i s is suggested in t h e poem "The Red Wolf".

84

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

(dove of Liberty) 44 sat on an egg " A n d hatched another eagle". The American dove, opposed to eagles and royal power, cherishes a "startling big b i r d " who cannot learn to coo properly. Evidently an imperial spirit haunts America although other eagles have fallen dead. I n this poem, and in contrast to "Eagle in New Mexico", Lawrence looks with greater favor on blood sacrifice. W i t h prophetic eye he can see (if the b i r d w o u l d s t o p "trying to look like a pelican") The new Proud Republic Based on the mystery of pride, Overweening men, full of power of life, commanding a teeming obedience Eagle of the Rockies, bird of men that are masters, Lifting the rabbit-blood of the myriads up into something splendid, Leaving a few bones; Opening great wings in the face of the sheep-faced ewe Who is losing her lamb, Drinking a little blood, and loosing another royalty unto the world. The right association for the abstracted eagle, here remote f r o m any sense of wonder, is simply power, not spirit a n d upper consciousness. 'Eagle' is an expression of lordly principle whose other zoomorphic terms are stoat, fox, wolf, tiger and (supremely) lion, just as t h e "rabbit-blood of the myriads" is typologically the same as t h a t of the kangaroo, the lamb, the deer and the dove. I t is at this stage of his career (1919-25) t h a t Lawrence is most obsessed by power and tries to give expression to his metaphysical vision in political novels. Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923) a n d The Plumed Serpent (1925) testify to the confusion of his instincts and t h e difficulties of transposing m y t h into historical terms. I n principle this Lawrence identifies with the powerful, 45 and c a n n o t 44

Lawrence's etymology in his "Epilogue" to Fantasia of the Unconscious. From Italy, he hailed columba (Italian: 'dove') in the word Columbia. 45 "Blessed Are the Powerful" is title and theme of one essay in the anthology entitled Reflections on the Death of A Porcupine (1925).

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

85

abide " l a m b " . Confronted with gentleness in an actual kangaroo or a wild deer, however, he sees a neighbor. The lamb's abstract sin is t h a t he is t a m e and an emblem for Christ, the great antagonist. " H u m m i n g B i r d " and "The Blue J a y " raise no doctrinal problems. The first, a pre-historic fancy, envisions the humming-birds as a "jabbing terrifying monster" in a world of giant forms piercing "the slow vegetable veins" with his long beak. I n Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence congratulates Crevecoeur on catching the fierce, primal n a t u r e of this small American. 46 I n t h e poem the crested blue jay who comes around Lawrence's cabin in t h e snow to laugh stridently at poet and Bibbles — the "little black bitch" celebrated in a poem of her own — appears vividly both as "acidblue metallic b i r d " and, without underlining, as an emblem of self assertion, a small god speaking from a cloudy pillar of pines. "Mountain Lion", "The Red W o l f " and "Bibbles", provide other American emblems. "Bibbles", perceived both in intimate 'blood relationship' and through spectacles of doctrine, is a personality as well as an abstraction. The other two, appropriately, are listed under "Ghosts". I n "Mountain L i o n " the poet, in one of his recurring moments of misanthrophy, regrets the death of a beautiful yellow p u m a shot by two Hispanos. " A n d I think in this empty world the Sangre de Cristo mountain region there was room for me and a mountain lion. /And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans and never miss t h e m " . We would be mistaken in seeking for causes in the tensions of life in Taos county. 47 The invocation to singing death in "The Reality of Peace", 1919, expressed a similar hostility. "The Red Wolf", who "has trotted east and east", drawn by the sun, is homeless, redheaded D. H . Lawrence. He is so identified by an Indian demon with whom, now " D a y has gone to dust on the 46

P. 37. Allowing for all possible exaggerations and inaccuracies, Mabcs Dodge Luhan's Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932) still shows, in speech and action, a different figure from the one who, at this same period (1922-23), composed sane reflective letters. 47

86

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

sage-grey desert/Like a white Christus fallen to dust from a cross", Lawrence exchanges a few unsociable words. The dark demon, whose name may be "Old H a r r y " or "Old Nick", is addressed as "Father". 4 8 Although this surly ancestor says that his clan takes no godless strays from the white world, Red Wolf announces that he is here and will remain, awaiting a new revelation from the sun that brought him. The poem may embarrass a reader by the naked wish-fulfillment it reveals. Its interest, in the perspectives of Lawrence's animal typology, is in the figure of the red wolf (fox) which Lawrence accepts as his totem. Red fox, and related wolf, are canine tropes which constantly exemplify, in Lawrence's bestiary, the virtues of demonic wildness as opposed to the vices of domestic dog. "A Fragment of Stained Glass", one of Lawrence's earliest stories, has an outlaw stallion, and an iconoclast serf, with a redheaded sweetheart called "the fox". 49 In the novella "The Fox", written in the war period and revised in Sicily,50 the story, as Kingsley Widmer puts it, is "dominated by the sly animal totem that is consubstantial with the hero", and "draws upon the usual tropes ("demon", "serpent", and "devil"). 51 The red-headed author himself resembles the wild intruder. He once said to a friend during the war " I feel myself awfully like a fox that is cornered by a pack of boors and hounds . . .", 52 and this common enough figure of speech may represent, in Lawrence's case, a figure of thought. In the final version of his Hawthorne study, a personal digression tells of once 48 " T h e devil a n d a n a t h e m a of o u r f o r e f a t h e r s hides t h e G o d h e a d which we s e e k " (Phoenix, p. 90). I n his a r t i c l e " A m e r i c a , Listen t o Y o u r O w n " , originally in The New Republic, 1920, L a w r e n c e e q u a t e d t h e aboriginal spirit w i t h t h e P i l g r i m ' s Devil. F r o m E u r o p e , h e advised A m e r i c a n s t o " s t a r t f r o m M o n t e z u m a , n o t f r o m S t . F r a n c i s or St. B e r n a r d " (p. 91). On h i s second visit t o Taos in 1924, h e w r o t e a n essay " P a n in A m e r i c a " (Phoenix, p p . 22-31), in which h e saw t h e G r e a t God P a n , t h e sacred wild, still lingering in A m e r i c a as t h e aboriginal spirit of place. 19 See W i d m e r , Miscellany, p p . 15-16. 50 The Intelligent Heart, p. 271. 51 Miscellany, p. 16. 52 Letters, I, 497.

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

87

meeting a look of recognition in the eye of an English gypsy apparently belonging to Lawrence's animal clan. In the look there was the same . . . fathomless hate of this spiritual-conscious society in which the outcast woman and I both roamed like meek-looking wolves. Tame wolves waiting to shake off their tameness. Never able to.53 Whether Lawrence ever met such a gypsy is hardly relevant (in version l 54 of the incident he did not know what was recognized). The story, however, illustrates the essential identity in his feeling for outcast wolf and hunted fox. I t explains what the alien red wolf is doing in Taos pueblo trying to take up the trail of the vanished American. 55 "Bibbles", "Little black dog in New Mexico/Little black snubnosed bitch with a shoved-out jaw/And a wrinkled reproachful look", lives on in Lawrence's poem and as a center of literary controversy. Reading Knud Merrild's exegesis of the poem in his memoir, A Poet and Two Painters,56 we may question how well Lawrence understood the historic dog57 and whether, in his highstrung state that winter of 1922, he was a man to be trusted with a pet. But historical accuracy as to how often Lawrence may have used the juniper switch on Bibbles or kicked her may be less significant than knowledge of how Lawrence saw her in terms of his doctrine. 53

Studies, p. 106. D. H. Lawrence and America, p. 72. 55 W e m a y contrast this with the conclusion of "Indians And A n Englishm a n " (Phoenix, p. 99): "My way is m y own, old red father. I can't cluster at the drum any more". This was a first reaction to Indian culture and religion as seen at an Apache ceremonial dance. Later, Pueblo, ceremonies were more impressive, as essays in Mornings in Mexico testify. 56 (London, 1938), pp. 160-177. 57 Fundamental innocence of the nature of dogs seems to be involved. Moderate experience and reflection would allow one to conclude that m a n y small dogs are like Bibbles, that females in heat present complications, that the best of dogs is hardly as clean and fastidious as a Siamese cat, and that an Airedale or bull-terrier, to name but two breeds, would manage not to love everyone. 54

88

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

As a personality Bibbles is vivid enough So quick, like a little black dragon. So fierce, when the coyotes howl, barking like a whole little lion, and rumbling, And in the morning, when the bedroom door is opened, Rushing in like a little black whirlwind, leaping straight as an arrow on the bed at the pillow And turning the day suddenly into a black tornado of joie de vivre, Chinese dragon. The problem is t h a t t h e "little W a l t - W h i t m a n e s q u e b i t c h " is really a carrion "love-bird". She loves everyone without discrimination, a n d has really appropriated Lawrence just as t h e smug Franklin 5 8 appropriated Providence to his purposes". Heartless, self-conscious a n d conceited, she really does n o t love persons a t all, only t h e general sensation of wallowing in affection. "All h u m a n i t y is j a m t o y o u . " Rejecting nothing, it is therefore inevitable t h a t t h e creature should go out and eat filth, leaving vomit for t h e poet t o clean u p . B u t her Nemesis comes in the sexual form of the two great Airedales f r o m t h e neighboring ranch who, in a different fashion f r o m herself, "are a f t e r w h a t t h e y can g e t " . Mercilessly, Lawrence promises protection only if Bibbles will "learn loyalty rather t h a n loving". Lawrence had n o t owned a dog since his childhood. I n an essay, published in 1921, he said t h a t this high-spirited terrier h a d been spoiled b y excessive love f r o m t h e Lawrence children. I t is a strange thing love. Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man. And this very servility or completeness of love makes him a term of deepest contempt — "You dog !"59 The paradoxical relationship which a jealous Lawrence w a n t e d f r o m Bibbles, and apparently f r o m disciples as well, was a species of impersonal loyalty in which obedience is not servile since it is not 58 Benevolent villain in both existing versions of the Studies essay. Gf. The Symbolic Meaning, p. 35. 69 Phoenix, p. 21.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

89

to the man but to some principle of divine power experienced through him. The relationship must not be personal, of the upper consciousness, but instinctive sympathy rcoted in 'blood'. 60 I t must not include what is normally felt to be love, and it certainly does not allow for any connection with those others who embraced mankind at large with amorous longing for a transcendental merging. Balance and measure must be kept, judgments and exclusions made. In Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent Lawrence both argued for such a leader-follower relationship and tried to imagine it. In his essay on Whitman, apparently revised for final publication in the same period t h a t he composed "Bibbles", 61 he intensified his attack on democratic love and merging. 62 Whitman, at once a great forerunner and "fearfully mistaken", 6 3 is the real object of Lawrence's attack on the morality of Bibbles. He believed t h a t he saw in the dog's behaviour an example of a powerful tendency in American character which he hated and which Whitman's poetry expressed. Consequently, delight in the dog's aliveness turns to fury, humor to snarling satire, unique creature to emblem. Cursed as a 'lovebird', Bibbles then belongs with the jackal, the hyena, the beetle, and other carrion-eaters in Lawrence's vocabulary of abuse. But he hates her as a person who has badly disappointed him. In the wealth and variety of animals featured in Birds, Beasts and Flowers we may be surprised t h a t we do not find the horse, an important creature in Lawrence's iconography. I t was in New Mexico that Lawrence became a horseman (an experience which increased his respect for horses and ultimately produced "St. 60

J o h n Middleton Murry, an ambivalent disciple, confessed in his memoirs t h a t he failed to understand during the war years: "I resisted . . . the overcoming of the personal in a bond of elementary solidarity with m e n . . . I did not even understand it . . . I repeat, the only bond I knew or recognized was personal." Nehls, II, 278. 61 A s I h a v e noted, he composed at Lobo, N e w Mexico, in effect under the Laurentian sign of the wolf. 62 Cf. "Whitman", The Symbolic Meaning, pp. 253-264. 63 Studies, p. 183.

90

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

Mawr"); but in his poetry the horse is strangely inconspicuous. In Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence, lordly on horseback, makes one fleeting appearance. In "Autumn At Taos" When I trot my little pony through the aspen-trees of the canyon, Behold me trotting at ease betwixt the slopes of the golden Great and glistening-feathered legs of the hawk of Horus; The golden hawk of Horus Astride above me. A largely decorative poem, "Autumn At Taos" gives us an autumn, sunset, and landscape in animal metaphor. The aspens of autumn "are like the yellow hair of a tigress brindled with pines", the high Rockies "Jaguar-splashed, puma-yellow, leopard-livid slopes of America", the desert sage "An ash-grey pelt/Of wolf all hairy and level . . .", the mottled foothills a "fish-fanged, fierce-faced" otter. Under the pines Lawrence rides slowly "As under the hairy belly of a great black bear". At home in this symbolic landscape of fangs, claws and beaks, Lawrence reassures his pony that it is nerveless at this moment of evening. The golden sun-hawk of Horus, imported from Egypt, functions as an emblem of lordship. I t does appear symptomatic of Lawrence's ambivalence toward America, and his longing for ancient hierarchy, that he should substitute an Egyptian symbol for the native eagle. As we have seen however, the American sun-bird has some associations which Lawrence resists. The Egyptians are conveniently dead.

C. PANSIES

AND LAST

POEMS

Lawrence's remaining poetry — Pansies and the posthumous Last Poems — was composed in the final two years of his remarkably productive life. During most of his time he was at Bandol, a small French Riviera town near Toulon, fighting for the health which had

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

91

decisively been broken in his collapse in Mexico in 1925 after he had completed The Plumed Serpent. Dying painfully of consumption at Bandol, he continued to the end to write poems and to work on the study of religious symbolism which he left incomplete in Apocalypse. Of The Plumed Serpent he had written to Witter Bynner from Italy in March 1928 The hero is obsolete and the leader of men a back number . . . the new relationship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men and men and women, and not the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort of business. So you see I am becoming a lamb at last . . ,64 It is tempting to accept this as the definitive statement of Lawrence's final position, a shift in emphasis from tiger to lamb; and the last phase, taken as a whole, does allow such an interpretation; but the picture is more complex in detail. There are ferocious, antidemocratic elements both in Pansies and in Apocalypse (the latter, in fact, returns to Lawrence's old pre-occupation with power and lordship). On the other hand Last Poems, which overlaps with Apocalypse and some belated pansies 65 recalls, both in its tenderness and its mythic perspective, his Etruscan Places and The Man Who Died, those evocations of an archaic Mediterranean world. Tenderness predominates the work Lawrence produced in the pleasant woods of Tuscany when living at Villa Mirenda 19261928 — Lady Chatterley's Lover, Etruscan Places and The Escaped Cock (original title of The Man Who Died). At Bandol, 1928-30, Lawrence wrote bitter pansies which vent his considerable hatred on the British middle-class and their vile modern world of machines where phallic consciousness was obscene and Lady Chatterley banished to the pornographic book trade. "These poems are called Pansies", Lawrence said, 06 "because they are rather Pensées than 64

Letters, I I , 1045. T h e f r a g m e n t s g a t h e r e d p o s t h u m o u s l y as " N e t t l e s " , " S o n g s I L e a r n e d a t S c h o o l " a n d " M o r e P a n s i e s " , d i f f e r e n t in t h e m e a n d m o o d f r o m t h e m y t h i c Last Poems. See R i c h a r d A l d i n g t o n ' s n o t e , Complete Poems, I I I , xxxv-xliv. G(! N o t e , Complete Poems, I I , x x x v - x x x v i . 65

92

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

anything else". They are offered in loose poetic form, mostly as doggerel satire which at its social best makes a sharp, single point without losing emotional balance or prolonging itself unduly. I t has been noticed t h a t Pansies have analogues with the acidic social comedy of many of Lawrence's last European short stories. But some Pansies are touched with a religious sense of wonder, and Lawrence, in this phase, has dropped neither his metaphysic nor his bestiary. We have, among the aggressive pieces, an intermixture of moods such as that set by the first poem: "Our Day is Over". Our day is over, night comes shadows steal out of the earth. Shadows, shadows wash over our knees and splash between our thighs, our day is done; We wade, we wade, we stagger, darkness rushes between our stones, we shall drown Our day is over night comes up Or in "Cups" Cups, let them be dark like globules of night about to go plash. I want to drink out of dark cups that drip down on their feet. These poems, with others like " H a r k In the Dusk", "Twilight", "Bowls", "The Sea, The Sea—", seem a prelude to the richer music of Last Poems. Intimately associated with this twilight mood of dissolving and darkness is the Swan, an old Laurentian emblem, which reappears significantly in six of his Pansies. "Swan", the first and most considerable of these, contains themes for which the others provide development and variation. In its first stanza, the creative-destructive mystery of a living cosmos is figured as an invisible swan. The effect of its hushed opening is itself not unlike the slow movement of wings.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

93

Far-off at the core of space at the quick of time beats and goes still the great swan upon the waters of all endings the swan within vast chaos, within the electron. In the present phase of cultural decay the god-bird . . . stoops now in the dark upon us; he is treading our women and we men are put out as the vast white bird furrows our featherless women with unknown shocks and stamps his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh. This invisible swan has come not from an actual encounter nor, by process of incremental symbolism, from earlier poetry. He emerges from the visionary metaphysic of " T h e Crown" (1915), republished in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925), where the swan appears with the serpent as one of the gods of corruption . . . with its reptile feet buried in the ooze and mud, and its voluptuous form yielding and embracing the ooze of water, its beauty white and cold and terrifying, like the dead beauty of the moon, . . . its neck and head like the snake, it is for us the cold white fire of flux . . . the salt cold burning of the sea . . . . . . when Leonardo and Michael Angelo represent Leda in the embrace of the swan they were painting mankind in the clasp of the divine flux of corruption, the singing death.67 Reduction back to nothingness, it will be recalled, is to be preferred to rotting inside a still intact social exterior. The spirit of destruction is divine when it breaks the shell and allows a flow back to creative sources. " Reflections, p. 75-76.

94

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

In " L e d a " , the poem i m m e d i a t e l y following " S w a n " , L a w r e n c e invokes singing death. Come not with kisses not with caresses of hands and lips and murmurings; come with a kiss of wings and sea-touch tip of a beak and treading of wet, webbed, wave working feet into the marsh-soft belly. " G i v e U s G o d s " , t h e n e x t poem, rejoices in a potential return of a true (i.e. animistic) view of t h e universe. Look then where the father of all things swims in a mist of atoms, electrons and energies, quantums and relativities mists, wreathing mists, like a wild swan or goose, whose honk goes through my bladder. Dispersing t h e sense of wonder generated b y the mysterious wing beats of " S w a n " and t h e profound associations of t h e " L e d a " myth 6 8 t h e poem ends in controversy w i t h the 'scientific man' w h o thinks he will father his own. " W o n ' t I t B e Strange ? " , a satirical f a n c y , mocks this same unbeliever with t h e prospect of " l i t t l e , w e b b e d greenish f e e t " , " r o u n d , wild v i v i d e y e " and the singing of invisible swans, high a b o v e , w h i c h will break his eardrums. Elsewhere in the v o l u m e " W h e n the R i p e F r u i t F a l l s " , asserts p o e t i c a l l y t h a t " W h e n fulfilled people die/the essential oil of their experience enters/the veins of living space, a n d adds a glisten/to the a t o m , t o t h e b o d y of i m m o r t a l c h a o s " . For space is alive and it stirs like a swan whose feathers glisten silky with oil of distilled experience 68 T h e inevitable modern comparison is with W . B . Y e a t s ' t r e a t m e n t of the m y t h in " L e d a " . T h e Y e a t s i a n bird is an annunciation, the L a u r e n t i a n an apocalypse, a return t o the formless d a r k ; y e t both poets hold t o a view o f history as recurrence.

T H E ANIMALS IN POETRY

95

In "Relativity" Lawrence confesses that he likes relativity and quantum theories "because I don't understand them/and they make me feel as if space shifted about/like a swan that can't settle,/ refusing to sit still and be measured". In "Space", following "Relativity", Lawrence reasserts that space is alive. "And somewhere it has a wild heart/that sends pulses even through me;/and I call it the sun;/and I feel aristocratic, noble, when I feel a pulse go through me/from the wild heart of space that I call the sun of suns". These poetic fragments of a metaphysic, with their shifting use of the swan metaphor, have a greater inherent order than might appear, even if Laurentian space refuses to settle. We begin with the invisible sun within the sun which is the ultimate creative mystery of the universe. Though the living universe may shift "like a swan", the standard Lawrence figure for "the body of immortal chaos" is the cloudy dragon of potentiality. 69 Swan, in one usage, is simply a type of the bird figure which, from "The Two Principles" onward 70 Lawrence makes an emblem of the creative heart of the universe (a more recognizable figure is the burning phoenix). In its more significant usage, in "Swan" and "Leda", the god-bird (associated in Lawrence's myth with reductive salt, festering marsh, flux, and "the way of the serpent" back to origins) manifests the negative aspect of a central mystery.Destruction, too, is divine; and there are phases of private and collective history when the religious act consists in accepting it. While "Swan" and its pendant "Leda" can be read by themselves, Lawrence, in these poems, recalls his old mythology. In a less negative mood Lawrence projects in "The Elephant Is Slow To Mate " a happy myth of sexual possibility in which the 09 I t is n o t a b l e t h a t t h e d r a g o n , w i t h which L a w r e n c e is preoccupied in The Plumed Serpent a n d related essays of his N e w Mexico p h a s e , does n o t a p p e a r in p o e t r y o u t s i d e of t h e r i t u a l c h a n t s in t h e novel. Apocalypse shows, however, t h a t L a w r e n c e ' s i m a g i n a t i o n c o n t i n u e d t o be engaged w i t h t h i s figure, m e t a p h o r i c a l l y t h e best r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of t h e fertile c h a o s which h e t o o k t h e u n i v e r s e t o be. S w a n , in its s e r p e n t i n e a s p e c t , h a s a n o b v i o u s connection. 70 Cf. The Symbolic Meaning, p . 177: " C e n t r a l w i t h i n t h e fourfold division is t h e c r e a t i v e reality itself, like t h e b o d y of a four-winged b i r d " .

96

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

beasts he recollects in tranquillity are natural emblems of right reverence for sex and, by contrast, models for human behaviour. The poem is a curious one among his animal pieces in t h a t it brings out what can only be called a classical tendency in late Lawrence. 71 We have formal verse, clearly developed structure, a certain Apollonian distance rather than ecstatic involvement. In lines which imitate the deliberate progress of the idyll, we find the 'huge old beast' and his mate showing no haste, waiting "for the sympathy of their vast shy hearts/slowly slowly to rouse/as they loiter along the river-beds/and drink and browse". Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts so they know at last how to wait for the loneliest of feasts for the full repast. They do not snatch, they do not tear; their massive blood moves as the moon-tides, near, more near till they touch in flood. What a reader is bound to notice here is the striking contrast to the situation in Birds, Beasts and Flowers with its tragic implications. "The Elephant Is Slow To Mate — " is a creation in a different mode — t h a t of innocence rather than experience —• and it is toward creation in this mode t h a t Lawrence is drawn in the last years of his life, however often he swings back to confront gritty social problems and imperfections on the human plane. The idyll of the elephants takes place in Eden. In Pansies, and in his final poems generally, Lawrence regards his animals from a certain distance of abstraction. They are remembered emblems, brief backward glances of the natural world from the perspective of a man who knows he is passing out of it. 71

The astringent, aphoristic quality of some pansies may also be called classic; but the decorum and logically developed structure of the elephant poem is in stronger contrast to the free verse and associative development by which Lawrence normally gets his happiest results.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

97

Elephants also appear in a scattering of pensées which may collectively be placed under the heading of the longest — "When I Went To The Circus". As expected, the contrast pointed is between the modern people watching and the live bodies of performers and animals (of which last the elephant is the most impressive manifestation of "the mystery t h a t lies in beasts"). Mystery is suggested by a sequence of brief illuminations which somehow appear to have got detached from the longer, more discursive poem "When I Went To The Circus". These — "Elephants I n The Circus", "Elephants Plodding", "On The Drum", and "Two Performing Elephants", — contrive, in their brevity and incomplete outlines, to register impressions at once sharp and suggestive. The huge old female on the drum shuffles gingerly round and smiles; the vastness of her elephant antiquity is amused. Other brief glimpses of animals and of Laurentian attitudes appear in "The Gazelle Calf", "Little Fish", "The Mosquito Knows - " , "Lizard", "Peacock", a group from which "The White Horse" in More Pansies seems to be left over. None of these have important doctrinal bearings, nor do they try to realize particular animals encountered as in Birds, Beasts and Flowers; b u t they have their momentary vividness, and convey familiar attitudes. More Pansies recall other old emblems. "Astronomical Changes" sees the Christian era (symbolically under the sign of the Fish) as passing away. "The Triumph Of The Machine" looks forward to the revolt of the downtrodden animal principles in man against the mechanization of life. The two poems are related in that Lawrence believed that Christian otherworldiness had caused the abandonment of the flesh to the machine and money devil. 72 In "Astronomical Changes" 73 72

His attack on Christianity in Apocalypse (passim) makes this plain. Cf. also his preface to an edition of Dostoe vsky's The Grand Inquisitor ( Phoenix, p. 286) in which he sympathizes with the problems of the Inquisitor: the spiritually elect ought to assume power, not renounce it to baser types. 73 For Lawrence's interest in astronomy see Frederick Carter's D. H.

98

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

Dawn is no longer in the house of the Fish Pisces, oh Fish, Jesus of the watery way, Your two thousand years are up. Doubtless the animal sign of the dawn is to be a creature of warm blood and fire, b u t the vision of the new day is no longer associated •with an epiphany in America. A f t e r The Plumed Serpent America is no longer the place of new beginnings. Lawrence remains hoping for t h e fresh impulse of life. H e predicts t h a t it is as inevitable as the smashup ahead; b u t he can no longer feel, a f t e r Mexico, t h a t the first shoot of new life will be in the New World, and perhaps all a man can do is find his own right relation with the holy. "The Triumph of the Machine", nevertheless, looks confidently toward the collective future. Inevitably, the animal principles fixed in man's nature will revolt in despair a n d wreck the industrial system. The swan, located here "in the marshes of his loins", "will beat t h e waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan". Within mankind, lamb principle will be converted to snake as the mild figure associated with love and upper-consciousness undergoes a demonic inversion: The lamb impulses which (in unfortunate metaphor) "frisk among the daisies of his brain", will "stretch forth their necks like serpents,/like snakes of hate, against the man in t h e machine". I n Last Poems, however, Lawrence does not even bother to be angry; he turns his eyes toward another world of pristine innocence. " . . . I lie in bed and look at the islands out to sea, and think of the Greeks", 74 Lawrence wrote from his villa at Bandol in November of 1929. For him, then, the ancient Mediterranean world of m y t h and Lawrence and the Body Mystical (London, 1930). Apocalypse, which came out of correspondence and association with Carter, was originally to have been an introduction to Carter's The Dragon of Revelation (London, 1931). Already a student of astrological symbolism, Lawrence read a first draft of Carter's book in 1924 at Chapala, Mexico, as he reports in a posthumous introduction to that version (Phoenix, pp. 292-303). A difficulty with astral symbolism, and one which doubtless inhibits Lawrence's use of it, is that it directs the mind away from earth and raises questions of spirit. Nehls, III, 408.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

99

legend was a great deal more real to his imagination than the era in which he still existed. The changeless sea enters his poetry as strongly as the spirit of place ever did. In such poems as "The Greeks Are Coming", "The Argonauts", "Middle of the World", "The Man of Tyre", "For Heroes Are Dipped in Scarlet", and "The Ship of Death" the archaic gods and heroes emerge as part of the eternal reality of place. 75 His reflections by the mythic sea led to a consideration of godlike beasts who inhabit it, and the appearance of two late bestiary poems in which the animals, realized more fully than abstract emblems, convey mystical Laurentian doctrine of rainbow bliss. "They Say the Sea is Loveless" celebrates the dolphin, his Dionysiac joie-de-vivre, and his amorous triumph over salt. They say the sea is loveless, that in the sea love cannot live, but only bare, salt splinters of loveless life. But from the sea the dolphins leap round Dionysos' ship whose masts have purple vines, and up they come with the purple dark of rainbows and flip ! they go ! with the nose-dive of sheer delight; and the sea is making love to Dionysos in the bouncing of these small and happy whales. Happy whales in "Whales Weep N o t ! " , a longer poem which follows immediately, are exemplars of ideal human relationships, social and sexual. As Robert Hogan has shown, the poem is another rejection of ideal Whitmanian love; and the Laurentian reverence for whales had had its beginning in the study of Melville's Moby Dick.16 In Kangaroo Lawrence had written 75 See Elizabeth Cipolla's "The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence", D. H. Lawrence Review, II (1969), 103-119 for an excellent discussion of his use of classical mythology. 76 '"The Amorous Whale", op. cit.

100

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

In the sperm whale, intense is the passion of amorous love, intense is the cold exultance in power, isolate kingship. With the most intense enveloping vibration of possessive and protective love, the great bull encloses his herd into a oneness. And with the intensest vibration of power he keeps it subdued in awe, in fear. These are the two great telepathetic vibrations which rule all the vertebrates, man as well as beast. 77 A species of 'vertebral telepathy', blood consciousness, is t h e t r u e means of communication among whales. Social b u t isolate, hotblooded b u t sea creature, whales reconcile in their massive bodies t h e polarities of power a n d love. Thus their love-making, even more so t h a n t h a t of t h e deliberate elephants, is exemplary. W h e n male and female unite t h e final life-dualism is resolved a n d t h e mystic rainbow of peace appears. And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth, Keep passing archangels of bliss from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea And all this happiness in the sea, in the salt where God is also love, but without words: and Aphrodite is the wife of whales most happy, happy she, and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea She is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea. This vision of the desirable, incorporating pagan a n d Christian figures of t h e divine within a L a u r e n t i a n metaphysic, springs out of t h e poet's deepest feelings a n d oldest doctrine. The p r i m a c y of

" Chap. X V I , "A R o w in Town".

THE ANIMALS IN POETKY

101

'blood' over discursive mind, 78 the rainbow myth of complete being beyond polarities, go back to his first efforts at Gargagno before the war to develop a 'philosophy'. Lawrence is content, at this late stage, to sing rather than to argue his metaphysic. We notice t h a t the amorous whale triumphs over salt. The full significance of this is to be found in a series of Last Poems through which, if we are familiar with Lawrence's typology, the swan principle of reduction clearly emerges as the opposite of what is manifest among whales as archangels of bliss. "Salt", the first poem tells us ". . . i s scorched water t h a t the sun has scorched/into substance and flaky whiteness/in the eternal opposition/between the two great ones, Fire and the W e t " . The myth receives further elaboration in Apocalypse where salt is seen as the child engendered by cosmic injustice. 79 "The Boundary Stone", "Spilling the Salt" and "Walk Warily", all further define the nature and function of salt, but it is in the last that we see the 'swan' principle emerge. The swan is here transmuted into a sundering angel whose day, the poem tells, has arrived Walk, warily, walk warily, be careful what you say: because now the Sunderers are hovering round, the Dividers are close upon us, dogging our every breath and watching our every step, and beating their great wings in our panting faces. 76

As vast blood creatures, whale and elephant have an obvious analogy. In Lawrence's work they have a typological connection suggested by "The Elephants of Dionysus" (Phoenix, p. 59) which enigmatic fable Tedlock (pp. 212-213) assigns to the last period at Bandol from September 1929. It seems akin in spirit to Last Poems where we find Dionysiac dolphins and godly whales. The elephants, returning with the 'bull foot' from his triumph in India, rout his inveterate enemies the Amazons but are themselves slain in battle at Samos. We seem to have a latent metaphorical association in Lawrence's imagination of dolphin-whale-elephant — 'blood-consciousness', and Dionysus. (Cf. the curious analogy of Moby Dick, St. Mawr and Strasbourg cathedral already discussed). Though Lawrence may not have thought of it that way, the conquest of India by Dionysus stands in ironic contrast with the performance of the pale prince observed in "Elephants". 79 P. 187.

102

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY'

The angels are standing back, the angels of the kiss. They wait, they give way now to the Sunderers, to the swift ones the ones with the sharp black wings and the shudder of electric anger and the drumming of pinions of thunder and hands like salt. Aside f r o m his whales and his hidden swan, Lawrence makes scarce a n d incidental use of his s t a n d a r d bestiary emblems in his final poems. I n " E v i l is Homeless", for example, he summons a familiar carrion vocabulary of abuse: " t h e grey vulture a n d the grey hyaena, corpse eaters/they dwell in t h e outskirt fringes of nowhere/ where t h e grey twilight of evil sets i n " . " L o r d ' s P r a y e r " speaks of " . . . t h e kingdom of t h e nightingale a t twilight" a n d of " . . . t h e kingdom of t h e fox in the dark/yapping in his power a n d glory/ which is d e a t h t o t h e goose". W h a t is likely to surprise a reader is t h a t in his final collection, a t long last, Lawrence's phoenix appears as t h e subject of a poem so named, a n d t h a t all it tells us (quite flatly) is t h a t The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Then the small stirring of a new small hub in the nest with strands of down like floating ash Shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle Immortal bird. F o r a resurrection poem which fully engages Lawrence's imagination we have t o t u r n t o " T h e Ship of D e a t h " . I n this poem " t h e long journey towards oblivion" over t h e d a r k sea ends hopefully in a f a i n t dawn of rose a n d yellow separating itself f r o m t h e blackness. The little ship of t h e soul "wings home, faltering and lapsing/on t h e pink flood", a n d we are witness to an analogue of t h e phoenix reborn f r o m ashes. T h a t t h e individual soul's a u t u m n a l journey over the salt waters m a y have no earthly r e t u r n is t h e possibility faced in " B u t t e r f l y " ,

THE ANIMALS I N POETRY

103

in which poem Lawrence presents a final emblem of his self signi ficantly different from either an outlaw red 'wolf' or inexhaustible phoenix. I t is the last of the poems which appear to have their origin in an encounter with a natural creature; and its emphasis is not on t h e essential otherness of butterflies, but the frailty and transient beauty of their lives, which suggest the brief passage of the human soul through the visible world. We are given the circumscribed world of the fading poet at Bandol in October. Butterfly, the wind blows sea-ward, strong beyond the garden wall! Butterfly, why do you settle on my shoe, and sip the dirt on my shoe, Lifting your veined wings, lifting them ? big white butterfly! I t is already October; the wind "polished with snow", blows strongly out to sea from the hills, but the white butterfly, temporarily content in Lawrence's warm house and garden with the red geraniums, will go. Will you climb on your big soft wings, black-dotted, as up an invisible rainbow, an arch till the wind slides you sheer from the arch-crest and in a strange level fluttering you go out to sea-ward, white speck! Farewell, farewell, lost soul! You have melted in the crystalline distance, it is enough ! I saw you vanish into air. That the butterfly may be a very personal emblem for Lawrence at this point seems natural if we know of his actual frailty in the last phase at Bandol. His unfinished "Autobiographical Fragment", 8 0 the result of his brief visits to the Midlands in 1926, makes the identification explicit. Descending in fantasy into an old quarry of his boyhood, Lawrence, at forty-two, falls asleep and awakens to 80

Phoenix,

pp. 8 1 7 - 8 3 6.

104

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

t h e green England of 2927 where the machines have vanished and fresh Anglo-Saxon types with Etruscan attitudes prevail. Lawrence's whiteness and frailty (now t h a t his clothes have t u r n e d to dust) are emphasized. I t is explained to him t h a t he has been asleep since 1927. " . . . You went to sleep, like a chrysalis . . . and you woke up like a butterfly . . . Why are you afraid to be a butterfly that wakes up out of the dark for a little while, beautiful ? Be beautiful, then, like a white butterfly . . ." "How long shall I live now, do you think?" I asked him. "Why will you always measure. Life is not a clock." I t is true. I am a butterfly, and I shall only live a little while. That is why I don't want to eat. 81 On this curious note the untitled, u n d a t e d sketch leaves off. In October 1927, the month Lawrence "fell asleep" in t h e fantasy at the age of forty-two, he was actually a t t h e ironically named Hotel Eden at Baden Baden. There he was half-heartedly undergoing a cure and protesting by letter t h a t his "shy appetite" recoiled from the amount of feeding involved. 82 Later the same month he was back a t Villa Mirenda, outside of Florence, completing his Etruscan essays. 83 I t is more t h a n likely t h a t his dream vision of a neo-Etruscan England, which ends with an image of the poet as frail white butterfly with a brief life-span, was actually composed in October 1927, the time indicated by the narrative. Pansies we know largely to have been composed a t Bandol in the last p a r t of 1928. and it therefore seems t h a t the white October butterfly of Last Poems appeared as an omen in the final autumn at Bandol in 1929. Lawrence, no doubt, remembered the Etruscan metamorphosis he had previously dreamed. Vanishing into the infinite the 'little soul' of the poem does not abide our questions of doctrine; b u t we may note t h a t its rainbow 91 82

83

Ibid., p. 836. Nehls, III, 164.

Ibid., p. 166.

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

105

movement is broken off at the crest, as if it is driven beyond the cyclic fatality of the two principles. Blown over the sterile waters it disappears into light — and mystery.

D. CONCLUSION

The poetry Lawrence makes of his bestiary symbols is extensive, varied in kind, and in degree of aesthetic worth. In general the best (which are surely considerable poems), begin with a response of wonder and achieve their shape as emblems without any rhetorical nagging or interference by the poet's concern for self. Theory best shapes experience where there is a radical acceptance of the thing contemplated in forgetfulness of the poet's mundane personality, its demands and hostilities. Look! We Have Come Through! is primarily a collection of love poetry, but in the concrete symboliste suggestivity of "Rabbit Snared in the Night" we have what is an archetype in Lawrence's work — the victim who secretly desires and compels outrage. Elsewhere the collection shows the first traces in poetry of the tiger-deer (or lamb) polarity. Birds, Beasts and Flowers has a considerable range. "Snake" and "Fish" present these natural creatures in their wonder of otherness, but also as emblems of doctrine within Lawrence's metaphysic. Tortoise life, in six poems, is regarded in its aspects of wonder, humor and terror, ending in "Tortoise Shout", with a dramatic cry against the inexorable sexual division with which reptile as well as man must cope. Tortoises, however, are not recurrent types in Lawrence's art: sex is usually not emphasized in its aspect of crucifixion but of resurrection, the restoration of single being by passing through sexuality. "Turkey-Cock" and "Kangaroo" give spirit of place in animal form. Vividly realized in externals, the bird becomes the incarnation of a brittle American will and darkly unfinished Red Indian aborigin a l l y which holds the seed of the future - an unfinished phoenix

106

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

emblem appearing to Lawrence in the Tuscan countryside out of his myth in Studies in Classic American Literature. Arriving in Australia without, as far as is known, any theory of place, Lawrence intuits the metaphysical nature of the innocent continent from the blood presence of a kangaroo who is at once 'other' and maternal protection. His inveterate dualism leads him to see a contrast between the down-pressing nature of Australian life (as if tied to the earth's navel), with a dominant upward and outward thrust of life in the Northern Hemisphere. "She Goat" and "Bibbles" illustrate two ways of treating a creature Lawrence knows on an everyday basis. Were it not for context and the explicitly doctrinal "He Goat" which precedes it, we might find nothing emblematical in the Sicilian member of Lawrence's household who provides her daily share of milk, frustration, and entertainment. The mode of imitation is primarily realistic, the attitude one of tolerant acceptance of contrary female teasing, egotism, and goatish lust. Bibbles, who emerges even more strongly as a personality, has also to stand as an emblem of indiscriminate American 'love', absorbing in her small person Lawrence's hatred of the Whitman heresy, unwittingly breaking the exclusive vows of service to lord and master made for her under Lawrence's natural law. If the poem is successful it would seem to be so because, for all the cruelty and distortion of doctrine, Lawrence still does take Bibbles seriously as an unique creature. Nevertheless, she is cast among the carrion birds. Sometimes Lawrence's admiration of vivid life-energy triumphs over doctrinal reservations. Created in a spirit of delight "The Blue J a y " , on his hissing pine-pillar of cloud, stands etched for us against the mountain snow of New Mexico — a living creature, a natural sign of assertive selfhood. Elsewhere Lawrence is less tolerant of the native bossiness this small American manifests. The "Eagle in New Mexico", as a creature of will and upper consciousness, provokes the poet's resistance; "The American Eagle", a purely abstract concept, is mocked with barbaric yawp and cartoon metaphor. Attracted and repelled by America, Lawrence in "The Red Wolf" meets a ghostly totemic father who represents the sullen spirit of place with

THE ANIMALS IN POETRY

107

which he would come to terms now that he has rejected Europe and Christianity. Lawrence's quarrel with Christianity is most prominent in "The Evangelistic Beasts" inspired by medieval iconography at St. Mark's in Venice. Traditional bestiary, read in terms of his own metaphysic, is given new life and interest. In "St. Mark" and "St. Luke" we have, in part, a reconversion of fabulous emblem into naturalistic one. But these rhetorical poems, so heavily laden with satire and polemic, are as likely to raise doctrinal controversy as obtain imaginative assent. The question of belief becomes too insistent. As the natural world slipped away from 1928 to 1930, Lawrence recovered it transfigured in myth. The invisible "Swan" of endings arrives to act out, in the gathering dust, a ritual derived from "The Crown". Remembered elephants, now types of blood consciousness and right reverence for sex, move impressively through an unhurried courtship free from the painful torments of tortoises and neurotic human rabbits. The amorous whale, triumphing in god-like bloodpower over salt, delights in a rainbow bliss beyond polarities. And a white butterfly, wind-borne, disappears seaward into light. Where a writer's weakness is often the condition of his strength it is vain to have regrets. Lawrence's poetic achievement is deeply involved with the dark metaphysic he struggled to create. In his poems he does not have the room he needs to develop creative symbol of the sort found in some of his novels (though "Rabbit Snared in the Night" moves in t h a t direction); but he presents a very living gallery of emblems, and remarkable glimpses of animal nature.

Ill T H E ANIMALS I N FICTION

A. P U R E PASSIONATE E X P E R I E N C E

If we examine Lawrence's major fiction for its use of the animal rhetoric and symbolism we have been describing, the following things become apparent: even before Lawrence began, in 1912, to issue statements of doctrine from Italy, we can find in his fiction some hints of the future bestiary. Secondly, the degree to which Lawrence uses animals as emblems and analogues of human states and qualities seems to bear little relationship to the aesthetic value of the work; though more important in some books than others, the rhetoric and symbolism are prominent both in major triumphs and in partial failures. Finally, while the animal rhetoric and philosophical myth-making persist to the end of his life (we can trace an unbroken line in the poetry and essays from 1912 onwards) the rhetoric is reduced to insignificance in Lady Chatierley's Lover, the one full-scale novel Lawrence undertook after his American experience. The present chapter is not intended as an exhaustive analysis of Lawrence's novels. Keeping the entire range of Lawrence's work in view, it concentrates on six books which best reveal the animal terms of his metaphysic in their relation to character and theme. These works — The White Peacock, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Kangaroo, St. Mawr, The Plumed Serpent — represent Lawrence in all but the last phase of his career as a novelist. From the very start of this career it might have been evident that here was a poet-novelist with intuitions and tendencies reaching beyond the normal social range of the novel. The autobiographical first novel The White Peacock, elegiac in tone, is in part a

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

109

farewell to adolescence and the cherished Eden of first affections. Looking back with tenderness at his vanishing boyhood and dissolving group, the narrator Cyril muses It was time for all of us to go, to leave the valley of Nethermere, a small nation with language and blood of our own, and to case ourselves each one into separate exile was painful to us. (Pt. II, Chap. 1) Yet we are not really presented with a study of provincial character as revealed in the manners of Nethermere. As Graham Hough has observed (after trying to describe the novel in conventional terms), Lawrence's profoundest interest is not in the human and social destiny of his characters. This is where the life of most novels is centered; but in The White Peacock . . . the center is displaced so that the circumference of the book includes, not only the characters and their personal fates, but the whole life of nature which surrounds and flows through them. The characters are only forms into which this universal mana transitorily flows, and it is mana that is Lawrence's real subject. 1 Removing the coal mines from the Midland country of his youth, and blurring the social realities of his working-class origins, 2 Lawrence brings into focus the whole life of nature as this is manifest in a rural English setting. Characters define themselves in part by their relationships with nature. Animals provide moral exempla and help characterize persons, although Lawrence's totemic manner is but faintly developed at this point. George Saxton the massive, slow witted young farmer, is, figuratively, an ox. Lettie, the young woman he courts unsuccessfully, teases him in the second chapter by referring to him as "box-bovis; an ox", with senses half asleep. His gratuitous talking of calving, breaking the conventions of late-Victorian propriety in the drawing 1 The Dark Sun pp. 31-32. This is particularly clear, Hough notes, in the funeral of Annable (Pt. 11, Chap. 11) in which all of nature is involved. 2 H e transposes what is recognizably his own family into a genteel (and artificial) middle-class milieu which corresponds to his mother's aspirations. The coal-mining father is conveniently removed, and the household talk is conspicuously educated, full of literary allusions.

110

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

room, makes 'my Taurus' disagreeable to Lettie in that same chapter. Clumsy in the drawing room, rejected for an upper-class suitor, the unfortunate George is destined to fail in life for want of both initiative and finesse. The brutal self-assertion towards which his weakness drives him, and the failure of this to achieve anything, is prefigured in the way he reacts to the news that Lettie will marry his rival. He receives the news while milking in the barn. I t upsets the normal half-conscious way he proceeds, and he tries to get his way by sheer force. He began to milk again. The cow stirred uneasily shifting her legs. He looked at her angrily, and went on milking. Then quite upset, she shifted again, and swung her tail in his face. "Stand still! "he shouted, striking her on the haunch. She seemed to cower like a beaten woman. He swore at her, and continued to milk. She did not yield much that night; . . . (Pt. I, Chap. VII) Returning later to the same cow with which force had achieved such poor results, George tries to be affectionate but finds, t h a t she is afraid. Jerking her head, she gives him a blow on the cheek with her horn. Baffled by both cow and woman, George claims t h a t "You can't understand them". While he refers consciously to Lettie, and generalizes from her case, the reader has just seen by George's reaction how he can fail to understand and control animal life as well. Later we find him as a drunken bully temporarily successful as a horse-dealer; but his brutality is weakness rather than strength; he cannot govern himself, and blindly tries to make life serve his whim. He ends as an alcoholic wreck. By Look! We Have Gome Through! (1917) the young bull in the field in "She Said As Well To Me" appears as a moral type ". . . all wistful and pathetic, like a monolith,/arrested, static". The dumb, yearning George of the earlier part of The White Peacock, certainly seems both pathetic and a case of arrested development. A more sentimental analogue of George is the slain pigeon that he and Lettie find in the wood (Pt. II, Chap. VII). Lettie is at great

THE ANIMAI S IN FICTION

111

pains to point out to George (already rejected) t h a t the creature has died fighting for a mate. Life, she underlines, is cruel, and love is its most cruel aspect. As t h e y b u r y t h e beaten lover and strew bluebells George is speechless with emotion. W i t h a fine instinct for flirtation, Lettie h a d earlier (Pt, I, Chap. I I ) selected " T i t Willow" as a love song for George to sing. W e are probably supposed to remember this when t h e y meet the dead pigeon who also died for love. Cyril, t h e girlish young-Laurentian narrator, has ambivalent feelings a b o u t t h e cruelty inherent in life and n a t u r e . I n t h e first chapter his tender character is distinguished f r o m t h a t of the casually b r u t a l George who destroys a nest of young field bees a n d breaks wings out of a fumbling curiosity. Nevertheless, Cyril half envies t h e hearty, unsqueamish male a t t i t u d e . 3 Compassionate though his n a t u r e is, he proves in t h e chapter called " T h e Scent of Blood" to have a killer's instinct like the rest of mankind. The cry of the h u n t e d rabbit, brings out an unsuspected streak of cruelty. There was a sharp little cry which sent a hot pain through me as if I had been cut. But the rabbit ran out, and instantly I forgot the cry and gave pursuit, fairly feeling my fingers stiffen to choke it. (Pt. I, Chap. V) One recalls here t h e revelation of Jessie Chambers concerning the young Lawrence when he was a s t u d e n t a t N o t t i n g h a m University. He would tell me with vehemence that nature is red in tooth and claw, with the implication that "nature" included human nature. Yet when he heard the cry of a rabbit tracked by a weasel he would shiver in pain 4 , 8 An unconscious homoerotic element appears to lie in this attraction, and many commentators have called attention to the bathing and drying episode in "A Poem of Friendship", Pt. II, Chap. VIII. Daniel Weiss, Oedipus in Nottingham (Seattle, 1962) provides a sensitive study, at once clinical and literary, of the psychogenic origin of some ambiguous patterns of behaviour in Lawrence's fiction. It seems vain, at this point, to deny that Lawrence projected into his art some unresolved personal conflicts which sometimes make him less of a power for 'life' and 'health' than some of his admirers might wish. 4 D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, p. 112.

112

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

A fascination with the scream of the trapped rabbit, and with the creature as type of the victim, was to remain with Lawrence for a long time. This obsession, as we have noted, produced the poem "Rabbit Snared in the Night", and the rabbit is to show itself in many ways in Women in Love. Swarming over the countryside of The White Peacock, the rabbits are protected by the dark, demonic Annable, 5 a malicious Panfigure. As gamekeeper for a sentimental squire who will not have the creatures hunted (however unprofitable they make life for tenant farmers), this former clergyman spends much of his time setting traps for weasels and men; since civilization is for him a 'painted fungus', his deepest wish is for everything to run wild again. Farming, cultivation, are antipathetic to his feral instincts. A friend of natural increase, hostile to mental culture (he has a 'lovely little litter' of wild children), Annable complains that his intellectual first wife did not dare to have children. His cardinal belief is expressed in a metaphor central to Lawrence's later work: "be a good animal", not something diabolical and "more than nature". Of his own children, " a pretty bag o'ferrets", he is proud: they can "fend for themselves as wild beasts do". I t is incorrect to make this misanthropic philosopher, as one critic has suggested " a human controlling principle in a nature t h a t otherwise runs wild", 6 or to see the rabbits as embodying a destruc5

The gamekeeper episode, virtually a story within a story, occupies Chapters I and I I of Part I. 6 Robert E . Gajusek, "A Reading of the White Peacock", Miscellany, pp' 191-192. This reading (p. 187) also claims of The White Peacock that it acknowledges and a t t e m p t s to reconcile the fundamental dualism of Lawrence's mind. The dark-light, above-below, air-earth, flesh-spirit, God-devil, bird-serpent, fire-ash opposition are firmly established in the book. The claim, however, would make the beginning novelist as complex and as skillful as the mature one, and appears to rest on textual inferences unsupported b y the general history of Lawrence's development. Similarly Patricia A b e l and Robert H o g a n in "D. H . Lawrence's Singing Birds", Miscellany, pp. 204-214, assume that Lawrence's well-known concern with m y t h and archetype, with Frazer, Frobenius and Jung, accounts for a ritual initiation and rebirth in the chapter where Cyril seeks Annable in the ruined church. W e

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

113

tive profusion in nature against which the principle stands. 7 Annable is on the side of the multiplying rabbits because they are a destructive force, hostile to civilization. H a d Lawrence been writing this novel a f t e r 1912 he might have supplied Annable with a dialectic of two principles and openly supported his assault on mental consciousness, b u t he h a d not yet worked out his doctrine of 'blood' intelligence. I n The White Peacock the surly Annable makes an unforgettable impression. Temporarily, he appears as a father-figure, revealing to Cyril the mysteries of nature and the essential depravity of culture-bearing woman; b u t he is soon hurried off-stage via an accident in a quarry; and his philosophy, so forcefully presented, remains without support in the rest of the novel. The moral implications of being a good animal remain to be developed in later works. If the Annable episode, for all its interest, seems on the surface largely irrelevant to The White Peacock, the title itself, briefly illuminated by the Annable story, also seems incidental. We see t h a t the white peacock is Lettie in the triumph of her beauty over two adoring males, George and Leslie (her husband-to-be) one New Year's Eve. They come home f r o m a moonlight walk. As she turned laughing to the two men, she let her cloak slide over her white8 shoulder and fall with silk splendour of a peacock's gorgeous blue over the arm of the large settee. There she stood with her W H I T E hand upon the peacock of her cloak where it tumbled against her dull orange dress. She knew her own splendour, and she drew up her throat laughing and brilliant with triumph. Then she raised both her arms to her head and remained for a moment delicately touching her hair into order, still fronting the two men (Pt. II, Chap. III). have no evidence, however, that Lawrence, at this stage of his career, had assimilated the anthropological wisdom here attributed to him, or was attempting to use it in his novels. 7 Gajusek, Miscellany, p. 192. 8 My emphasis, here and in the rest of the passage. The whiteness of her face and bosom under the moon had just previously been emphasized. Later, in The Rainbow and Women in Love, the feminine moon has aspects of sacred terror.

114

T H E ANIMALS I N FICTION

This is followed by a scene of the fiance crouching before her, warming her cold feet, while she complains of male privileges. The episode, t h o u g h ironic, is hardly misogynist in a n y obvious way; b u t its relation with an earlier episode, and t h e commentary of t h e gamekeeper on t h a t occasion, place Lettie in a curious light. We recall t h e moonlight appearance a n d shriek of t h e peacock in t h e abandoned churchyard where Cyril searched for Annable. Perched on t h e neck of an old bowed angel, "rough and d a r k " Again the bird lifted its crested head and gave a cry, at the same time turning awkwardly on its ugly legs, so that it showed us the full wealth of its tail glimmering like a stream of coloured stars over the sunken face of the angel (Pt. II, Chap. II). R o u g h a n d dark, b u t quite unbowed, Annable the former parson has t u r n e d t o animal r a t h e r t h a n angel virtues; b u t he preaches, f r o m this exemplum, a brief sermon on feminine v a n i t y and corruption "The proud fool! — Look at i t ! Perched on an angel, too, as if it were a pedestal for vanity. That's the soul of a woman — or it's the devil". "That's the very soul of a lady", he said, "the very, very soul. Damn the thing, to perch on that old angel. I should like to wring its neck". (Pt. II, Chap. II) Exorcising t h e 'screeching devil' with sods of earth, Annable points out its final iniquity "Just look!" he said, "the miserable brute has dirtied that angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement". (Pt. II, Chap. II)' Thence follows Annable's account of his cultivated first wife L a d y Crystabel, a corrupt culture-bearer, for whom he was an aesthetic idea r a t h e r t h a n a person. There is, however, an ambivalence in Lawrence's use of t h e white peacock as emblem. Lettie is presented as a r a t h e r more sympathetic character t h a n a L a d y Crystabel, a n d the novel is quite sensitive to the woman's point of view. Though Lettie does have her sadistic

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

115

moments with George, and does encourage him only to reject him, it is George who, failing in intelligence and initiative, brings about his own defeat. It seems, therefore, less than just to connect Lettie with the defiling peacock, though it is clearly Lettie from whom the novel gets its title; and it is hard entirely to disassociate her from the moon-lit image of the devil-bird in the graveyard. We may note that in its one other appearance before Lawrence discards this ambivalent 9 emblem, the white peacock is an incidental figure of female magnificence without anything sinister attached to it. In The Rainbow (1915), we find the following description of the young Anna Lensky on her wedding day. The marriage party went across the graveyard to the wall, mounted it by the little steps, and descended. Oh, a vain white peacock perching herself on the top of the wall and giving her hand to the bridegroom on the other side to be helped down ! The vanity of her white, slim daintily stepping feet, and her arched neck. And the regal impudence with which she seemed to dismiss them all, the others, the parents and wedding guests, as she went with her young husband (Chap. V). It is, then, only in the perspectives of Annable that the figure of the white peacock is truly diabolic. The negative side of the emblem is Lady Crystabel, first of a long Laurentian line of 'white' intellectual women hated by the author. After hearing the story of Annable's misalliance, Cyril says that Lady Crystabel is 'a white peacock'. The color, presumably, is suggested both by the moonlight in which the actual bird had been seen, and because it is appropriate to the latter-day spirituality, hostile to nature life, into which Lady Crystabel passed. Turning 'souly' and pre-Raphaelite, she saw her husband as a brute, "son animal — son boeuf', and by his last epithet Annable's cautionary tale of the poor young parson and the lady suggests itself once more as a sinister version of the GeorgeLettie story. George, we recall, is "box-bovis", "my Taurus", to the cultivated Lettie. 9

A n image of both female magnificence and diabolism, but w e h a v e to forget that actually it is the male bird that has the gorgeous plumage, not the female.

116

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

The basic conflict in Lawrence's first novel, one neither fully acknowledged nor resolved, is between male and female. Already the male is associated with the wild and the life of the senses; the female is associated with culture and intellect, the spirit. W e have a conflict of animal and angel principles or, to use later terms, Lion and Unicorn. Lion and fatherhood are driven out of town, 1 0 but the victory of the female principle is compromised by subversive, unresolved doubts about the reliability of women. Lawrence is later to attempt an emotional allegiance with the brute male, 11 but he is handicapped in this by a sensibility which betrays him into tenderness. Out of this fruitful quarrel with himself he was able to make powerful and complex works of fiction. The two novels which follow The White Peacock — The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and Lovers (1913) — contribute virtually nothing toward the animal rhetoric. Although they, too, show man in relation to the full life of nature, they are more concerned with man's relationships with flowers and trees than with animals. 12 In general 10 Annable appears briefly as a father-substitute for Cyril. The actua[ father, a drunken wastrel, is on the fringe of the story, his alcoholic doom illustrating the evils opposed by Mrs. Lawrence and her Band of Hope. It is clear enough that the author is, from the first, caught between the values of his mother and his vital though uncultivated father — the models, as I have suggested, of his dualistic cosmology. 11 Lawrence had already written Laetitia (the novel which later became The White Peacock) when he wrote from Croydon to a woman friend in 1908: "Pah — I have women's heroes. At bottom men love the brute in men best, like a great shire stallion makes one's heart beat" (Letters, I, 34). The identification of horse with male power is, of course, a prominent feature of Lawrence's later thought and art. 12 Florence B. Leaver, "The Man-Nature Relationship in D. H. Lawrence's Novels", University of Kansas City Review, XIX, (1953) 241-248, shows an interesting contrast between Lawrence's early and later or post-doctrinal, manners. Comparing The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers with Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent, she finds that "Flowers and trees gradually recede into the background and take a more conventional place as setting in the later books, whereas in the early novels they almost reach the stature of characters themselves" (p. 241). Like both The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers, The Trespasser makes symbolic use of vegetation and landscape.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

117

it may be said that both the weaker second novel and Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's first masterpiece, have a greater social emphasis than his maiden effort. For all the interpénétration of man andnature, the second and third novels are short of significant animals and tropes. Sons and Lovers, however, does have one episode which appears to anticipate an important line of development in Lawrence's bestiary. We are given a brief glimpse of a creature which exercises a powerful hold on Lawrence's imagination, one which takes on, in his later work, an important cluster of associations — the red stallion. In Chapter I X Paul Morel takes a country walk with Clara and Miriam, the two young women with whom he is involved. They meet a man leading a great red beast, impressive in equine beauty and vigor, which seems to belong to the heroic age of Knighthood and romance. For the isolated spinster to whose farm the horse belongs, the creature is a substitute for human maleness. Lacking a man, as Clara points out, she lavishes devotion on the horse. The disillusioned heroine of St. Mawr, a tale written after the horse had become a major figure in Lawrence's mythology, would despair of finding a real man in contemporary England and give her loyalty to a horse which, though savage through mismanagement, is a reproach to paltry modern males. 13

I t s two lovers, however, are metropolitan intruders conducting an affair on the Isle of Wight; these modern intellectuals are not connected with the normative rhythms of rural life as the people of Nethermere had been, and lack contact both with farm or wild animals. Isolated in their self-consciousness, they destroy each other. 13 Part of w h a t the modern Englishman has to contend with in a n y effort to become a dominant, equestrian t y p e is seen in the bitter feminist reaction of Clara, a 'new woman', to Paul's medieval fancy on seeing the stallion. H e speculates, idly, on w h a t it might have been to be a m a n on horseback, a knight. The independent Clara immediately accuses h i m of preferring not to let w o m e n fight for themselves. The exchange, beginning flippantly, ends in tension and sarcasm, charged with that trans-personal hostility of male and female which Lawrence registers in his art.

118

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

B. FIGHTING FOR T H E CROWN

The Rainbow and Women in Love, generally accepted as peaks of Lawrence's achievement, are radically involved with the metaphysic and related bestiary which, after 1912, found continuous expression in his art. As we have seen, Lawrence makes several attempts to give a prose exposition of his visionary philosophy ; but though certain basic ideas and animal metaphors remain constant, we never have, at any one point, a complete world-picture beyond further modification by new experience in life or new works of art. The novels are not simply the results of the developing philosophy; their insights contribute to it. For both the creative and the speculative activity clearly take place at the same time. Here it may be convenient to review some of the significant relations of art and philosophy before the complications introduced by Lawrence's actual experience of America or his attempts, in his last phase, to recover the pre-Christian, Mediterranean past. The first philosophic excursus is "The Lemon Gardens", one of the sketches written in North Italy in 1912-1913 and finally published, with others, in the volume Twilight in Italy (1916). In "The Lemon Gardens" we hear for the first time of the duality of tiger and deer, darkness and light, flesh and sprit, Father and Son, Italian and Northerner. The Italian sketches, however, belong to the same creative period as the beginnings of The Sisters, the projected novel which developed into The Rainbow (1915) and Women inLove (1920) ; both of these books share with "The Lemon Gardens" the metaphysical vision of dualism conceived in Italy. The wartime essay "The Crown", published like The Rainbow in 1915, is the most complete single exposition of Lawrence's myth with its animal expressions of basic principles. Reprinting this apocalyptic essay ten years later, Lawrence slighted its motivation as prophesy for a nation gone mad, but admitted that " I t says which I still believe";14 and all of his art produced after 1912 testifies 14

Lawrence's note on "The Crown", Reflections, np. H e had written Lady Cynthia Asquith in October 1915: "I don't w a n t the Signature to be a 'success', I w a n t it only to rally together just a few, passionate, vital, constructive people".

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

119

to the way in which the metaphorical conceptions of "The Crown" persisted. Like the "Study of Thomas H a r d y " , begun in 1914 but published only after Lawrence's death, "The Crown" shows the ambitious attempt the artist was making during the war years to shape a total view of man and the universe. 15 Women in Love (completed in 1916 although unpublished until 1920) gives powerful dramatic expression to the questions of being and ethics which concern Lawrence. Far from coming unwatched from his pen as 'pure passionate experience', this novel is closely connected with the philosophy already made public. While writing the final version of Women in Love Lawrence, in his cottage down in Cornwall, was studying classic American literature in the light of his developing metaphysics. 16 From this emerged a series of essays in The English Review (November 1918 to June 1919), ostensibly about classic American literature, but actually, like the study of Hardy, notes toward the definition of a Weltanschauung. To anyone who had read these essays, particularly "The Two Principles" (June 1919), there would have been little new or surprising in the secret doctrines unveiled fully in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), produced after the frustrated prophet had fled his native land at the end of the war. The Fantasia exposes the philosophy largely excluded from Lawrence's final book-version of his American studies in 1923; but its conclusions about plexuses and modes of perception, animal and human, need hardly be thought of as Lawrence's deductions from pure creative work. In "The Lemon Gardens" Lawrence had already decided that for soldiers, Italians and the great cats, creatures of darkness, consciousness is concentrated at the base of the spine. The Rainbow, first of Lawrence's 'philosophic' novels, is clearly the

is "The Reality of Peace", Phoenix, pp. 669-674 develops the same mythopoetic ideas as "The Crown" in a more discursive manner and with a greater destructive emphasis. By 1917, when it appeared, Lawrence's war-time difficulties and the banning of The Rainbow had made him even less hopeful about the prospects of European culture. 10

Letters, 1, 454.

120

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

work of a highly speculative artist who has already worked out analogies of the tiger principle. 17 In its famous overture The Rainbow immediately establishes human existence as part of the whole cycle of nature. The blond, slowspeaking Brangwen men live rooted in their Midland farm for generations. They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth . . . Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and bccame smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away . . . They took the udders of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings drew the heaving of the horses after their will. (Chap. I) The passage expresses orthodox Laurentian doctrine implicit in The White Peacock and schematized in "The Crown". The man is associated with blood consciousness, the flesh, instinctual life. The potent, earlier generations of Brangwens are masters of horses 18 which do their will. They face inward "to the heat of the blood" and rest content within themselves. But the woman is different. Her house faced out from the farm buildings and fields, looked out to the road and the village with church and Hall and the world beyond . . . She faced outwards to where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation, and with this behind them . . . Looking out, as she must, from the front of her house . . . she strained her eyes to see what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered himself in his conquest. . . (Chap. I). 17

Cf. m y discussion of this in Chapter I, pp. 38-39. Although it is not used as an archetype in his wartime essays, the horse is already as important as tiger, snake or swan in Lawrence's thinking, as this chapter endeavors to show. 18

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

121

The eternal feminine principle urges man on to works of intellect and civilization. The Rainbow shows the woman, in modern form, claiming the right to enter the activity of man in the world at large, and thereby calling for a new relationship between the sexes. For Lawrence the cosmic duality finds its analogue in the individual human microcosm; the harmony is everywhere a question of balance, right relationship. Behind the symbolic confrontation of male and female set forth in the opening, is the Laurentian myth of the Lion and the Unicorn. We know from "The Crown" that these two eternal opposites are engaged in elemental conflict, that the mystical rainbow of peace is produced from their battle royal, but that neither of these metaphysical beasts must triumph lest the arch be broken, the crown fall, the rainbow disappear. In Lawrence's complex series of analogues the Lion is associated with darkness, blood consciousness, the flesh, God the Father, Land and Sun. His bird sign is the eagle or hawk, and he stands for power. The fighting Unicorn, traditional defender of virgins, is associated with light, spirit and self-consciousness, God the Son, lamb, moon, woman and sea. His sky sign is the dove of peace, and his powerful will is for the world to acknowledge the single principle of love. The tiger, prominent in The Rainbow, is the murderous, purely devouring aspect of the Lion, a false absolute of willful enjoyment of the senses as an end in themselves; but Lawrence does not appear to dislike this creature as much as the pacific lamb willing to beavictim. The instinct of the Brangwen patriarchs was to make the woman supreme in the home. The men deferred to her on all household points, all points of morality and behaviour. The woman was the symbol for that further life which comprised religion and love and morality. The men placed in her hands their own conscience, they said to her "Be my conscience keeper, be the angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and my incoming". (Chap. I)19 19

There is an interesting analogy to this in Lawrence's view of Medieval culture and art. H e tells us in "The Lemon Gardens" (Twilight, p. 58). "In the Middle Ages Christian Europe seems to have been striving, out of a strong animal nature, towards the self-abnegation and abstraction of Christ".

122

T H E ANIMALS IN FICTION

But this deference is balanced by real respect, on the woman's side, for a man sure of himself. Men rule the outer world. In effect it is a happy conjunction of 'animal' and 'angel'. Tom Brangwen's marriage to Lydia, the strange Polish lady, makes for a significant modification of the pattern. Although she and her husband fight through to a profound happiness, and the rainbow is established between them, this is after two years of marriage and after Lydia, in effect, refuses to let her husband think of her as a higher being. The key passage comes in their reconciliation toward the end of the third chapter. Taking the initiative, Lydia summons Tom to stand before her and embraces his legs. He bent down to her, suffering, unable to let go, unable to let himself go, get drawn, driven. She was now the transfigured, she was wonderful, beyond him . . . Easiest he could kiss her feet. But he was too ashamed for the actual deed, which were like an affront. She waited for him to meet her, not to bow before her and serve her. She wanted his active participation not his submission. Taking the risk of equality means abandoning the old idea of woman being essentially "finer". Perfection in self and in marriage lies in an acknowledgement and reconciliation of the claims of Lion and Unicorn, beast and angel, painful though the process may be. One of Lydia Brangwen's virtues, for Lawrence, is that she refuses to be pacific lamb just as she refuses to be an angel with someone else's conscience to keep. Love and hate pass freely between the couple in their early married life. Pregnancy, for example, makes for silence and distance between them. She is then little interested in sex and Tom seethes with fury. "Sometimes his anger broke on her, but she did not cry. She turned on him like a tiger, and there was battle" (Chap. II). This has a salutary effect on Tom, in the long run, as lamb-like endurance, which might have made him feel hatred of virtue, would not have; he learns to contain himself. The occasional flashes of tiger we see in Lydia are not sinister as those in her daughter Anna, who will marry a lamb worshipper. Anna, the child of Lydia's first, Polish marriage, bears the mark of this fierce aristocratic beast from the first.

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

123

The girl was at once shy and wild. She had a curious contempt for ordinary people, a benevolent superiority . . . as a child she was as proud and shadowy as a tiger, and as aloof. . . Like a wild thing, she wanted her distance. (Chap. IV) Married t o her dreamy, young English cousin Will Brangwen, she is to find in his r a p t u r e before t h e mystical L a m b of God something incomprehensible which she w a n t s t o destroy. I n Church he is t r a n s p o r t e d in contemplation of the stained glass figure of the victorious lamb. She had always liked the little red and yellow window. The lamb, looking very silly and self-conscious, was holding up a forepaw, in the cleft of which was dangerously perched a little flag with a red cross. Very pale yellow, the lamb with greenish shadows. Since she was a child she had liked this creature . . . Yet she had always been uneasy about it. She was never sure that this Lamb with a flag did not want to be more than it appeared. (Chap. VI) H a t i n g her husband's devotion t o this single principle of love a n d humility, although she does n o t know why, she " w a n t e d t o rend h i m " for t h e ecstasy which his face a n d body show. H e r rationalistic mockery a t home is designed t o m a k e him ashamed of his reaction to mystical symbols. Will Brangwen however, is not only a lamb. As it develops in the same chapter, " A n n a Victrix", he can be a p r e d a t o r y hawk in his passion, a n d his wife takes delight in bringing out this aspect of his nature. . . . she loved the intent, far look of his eyes when they rested on her . . . She wanted his eyes to come to her, to know her . . . They remained intent, and far, and proud, like a hawk's naive and inhuman like a hawk's. So she loved him and caressed him and roused him like a hawk, till he was keen and instant, but without tenderness. He came at her fierce and hard, like a hawk striking and taking her. He was no mystic any more, she was his aim and object, his prey. And she was carried off, and he was satisfied, or satiated at last.

124

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Then immediately she began to retaliate on him. She too was a hawk. If she imitated the pathetic plover running plaintive to him, that was part of the game. As he prowled round her, she watched him. As he struck at her, she struck back. (Chap. VI) Ultimately victorious in this contest of will, of passion become highly aware of itself and delighting in its own power, Anna, in the same chapter, is identified with two blue tits scuffling happily in the snow: '"They were really fighting, they were really fierce with each other !' she said, her voice keen with excitement and wonder, as if she belonged to the bird's world, were identified with the race of birds". She approves since, for her, the conflict is a healthy and passing thing, the expression of vitality in a relationship. Will recognizes an appeal and question in her face, but does not know how to answer. 20 And indeed there is something less than innocent in the unresolved conflict of the human lovers, a certain decadence better suggested by the tiger than by a bird emblem of power. Fulfilled in motherhood, Anna does not respect Will, who roams in " a black shadow, shy, wild, a beast of prey" on the margins of her joy. Here it is well to return to fundamentals so that we can see how Anna, herself so fierce, can stand in opposition to a beast of prey. 2 0 The type of love relationship Anna appears to need is imagined by Aaron Sisson the hero of the novel Aaron's Rod (1922): "Two eagles in midair, maybe, like Whitman's Dalliance of Eagles . . . grappling, whirling, coming to their intensification of love-oneness there in mid-air . . . B u t all the time each lifted on its own wings; each bearing itself up on its own wings at every moment of the mid-air love consummation. That is the splendid love-way" (Chap. X I I I ) : Cf. Kingsley Widmer, "Birds of Passion and Birds of Marriage in D. H. Lawrence", University of Kansas City Review, X X V , (1958), 73-79. Widmer stresses that for Lawrence it is the extremity of passion and not ordinary morality which is 'good' in a relationship. He also notes that in Lawrence "true marriage is the submission of the woman to the independent and purposeful m a n " (p. 77); yet the apparent equality of the eagles makes for a contradiction which is constant in Lawrence. Which sex, which principle, takes priority? I n what circumstances?

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

125

Behind personality and individual history stands Lawrence's opposition of male and female principles. Will worships the mystic Lamb of humility out of a powerful animal nature, blood consciousness. Anna, facing the other direction from the lamb, is yet identified with idealism. In Anna's mind That which was human, belonged to mankind, he [Will] would not exert. He cared only for himself. He was no Christian. Above all, Christ had asserted the brotherhood of man. She, almost against herself, clung to the worship of the human knowledge. Man must die in the body, but in his knowledge he was immortal. (Chap. VI) Affirming the priority of Mind (a term Lawrence tends to use interchangeably with Spirit), she is radically antagonistic to bloodconsciousness, the primacy of fatherhood and flesh. She does not really feel t h a t Will is the father of the child she carries, and the Lord she magnifies in the bliss of her conception is God the Son (the Unicorn). Ironically, the lamb is one aspect of this latter god. 21 Clearly we are dealing here with a quite different sense of character than in a traditional novel, and need to remember Lawrence's aim as he expressed this to Edward Garnett in 1914.22 Anna, fulfilled in spiritual joy becomes, in effect, identified with the lamb. Will, excluded from her happiness turns tiger. At first she went on blithely enough with him shut down beside her. But then his spell began to take hold of her. The dark, seething potency of him, the power of a creature that lies hidden and exerts its will to the destruction of the free-running creatures, as the tiger lying in the darkness 21

In "The Reality of Peace" (Phoenix, p. 690), Lawrence explains that we cannot always be burning tigers though that may be the moral trope of the moment. "For even the mother-tiger is quenched with insuperable tenderness when the milk is in her udder. She lies still, and her dreams are frail like fawns. All is somehow adjusted in a strange, unstable equilibrium". The strangeness and instability of the balance in The Rainbow will probably continue to puzzle and absorb readers. 22 Letters, I, 282.

126

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

of the leaves steadily enforces the fall and death of the light creatures that drink by the waterside in the morning . . . Gradually she realized that she was being borne down by him, that he was pulling her down as a leopard clings to a wild cow and exhausts her and pulls her down. (Chap. VI) Years later their relationship finds a new basis in a tigerish enjoyment of t h e flesh which annihilates t h e reality of their m a n y offspring a n d their d a y t i m e personalities. Symbolically, t h e y plunge into a darkness which passes into t h e flux of corruption. They abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification of her body. All the shameful, natural and unnatural acts of sensual voluptuousness which he and the woman partook of together, they had their heavy beauty and their delight. Shame, what was it ? It was part of extreme delight. (Chap. VIII) 2 3 Ursula Brangwen, t h e first child of their marriage, was born with t a w n y skin and bronze hair. H e r yellow cat-like eyes, constantly emphasized in t h e novel, indicate f r o m the first those lion-tiger qualities latent in her n a t u r e ; and the heritage of her parents perhaps includes a disposition to " S h a m e " , t h e title of an i m p o r t a n t chapter. As the story focuses on her development, another of Lawrence's character emblems emerges - t h e Swan; b u t this is not as open a m a t t e r as in t h e case of t h e great cats. Like her mother before her, the self-contradictory Ursula is antipathetic t o lamblike mildness. 2 4 Partly through the rationalizing 23 We can recognize in this that Will and Anna, in Lawrence's terms, are spiritually 'Italians' rather than Northern, Protestant types. 24 As a young girl her attitude is at first ambivalent. Chap. X I tells of the conflict between her Sunday and week-day world, her passion for Christ and her recoil from the humble side of Christianity. A passage describes her bliss at seeing lambs in spring and feeling Jesus once again in the countryside. She finally comes to identify Jesus with sentimentality.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

127

influence of W i n i f r e d Inger, a Lesbian schqol teacher u n d e r w h o m she studies f o r her m a t r i c u l a t i o n e x a m , a n d w i t h w h o m she is t e m p o r a r i l y i n f a t u a t e d , U r s u l a strips all religion of dogma, t a k e s t h e h u m a n m i n d as t h e m e a s u r e of everything. She knows t h a t t h e t w o great religious motives are f e a r a n d love, a n d t h a t t h e motive of fear is base, s o m e t h i n g t o be left t o t h e worshippers of Moloch, Power. F o r L a w r e n c e this is perversion since all power is n o t b a d ; t h e Lion should be d r i v e n o u t of t o w n b y t h e Unicorn. U r s u l a cannot help d r e a m i n g of Moloch a n d t h e power m o t i v e . Her God was not mild and gentle, neither Lamb or Dove. He was the lion and the eagle. Not because the lion and the eagle had power, but because they were proud and strong; they were themselves, they were not passive subjects of some shepherd, or of some loving woman, or sacrifices of some priest. She was weary to death of mild, passive lambs and monotonous doves. If the lamb might lie down with the lion, it would be a great honour to the lamb, but the lion's powerful heart would suffer no diminishing. She loved the dignity and self-possession of lions. Raging destructive lovers, seeking the moment when fear is greatest, and triumph the greatest, the fear not greater than the triumph, and the triumph not greater than the fear, these were no lambs nor doves. She stretched her own limbs like a lion or a wild horse, her heart was relentless in its desires. (Chap. X I I ) Lion a n d wild horse b o t h , in different ways, express t h e passions. I n her self-consciousness however, U r s u l a is more terrible as a 'raging d e s t r u c t i v e lover' t h a n either of these creatures of 'flesh' a n d 'blood'. H e r rationalizing m i n d is hostile t o t h e d a r k n e s s in which t h e y reside. I n " F i r s t L o v e " (Chap. X I ) a reader familiar with L a w r e n c e ' s m y t h will recognize in t h e lovemaking of U r s u l a a n d her cousin, Anton Skrebensky, t h e u n m i s t a k a b l e action of t h e Swan, or in this c o n t e x t , A p h r o d i t e , queen of t h e senses, whose cold w h i t e fire consumes a n d does n o t create. 2 5 25 Both swan and Aphrodite are associated with the salt cold burning of the sea, the white fire of reduction; Cf. the description of Michaelangelo's Ledn. and that of Aphrodite, queen of the senses, the gleaming, sea-born

128

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

The love begins with splendid self-assertion, male against female, an affirmation in each of t h e m a x i m u m self. I t develops, unacknowledged, into an impersonal b a t t l e in which t h e m a n is destroyed. I n t h e first encounter She stood for some minutes in the overwhelming luminosity of the moon. She seemed a beam of gleaming power. She was afraid of what she was. Looking at him, at his shadowy, unreal wavering presence a sudden lust seized her to lay hold of him and tear him and make him into nothing . . . She looked at him and her eyes gleamed bright and inspired. She tempted him. Transformed into merciless, sea-born Aphrodite, analogous to the salt swan of corruption, she invites Anton t o t h e nuptials of death. And timorously, his hands went over her, over the salt compact brilliance of her body . . . If he could but net her brilliant cold, salt-burning body in the soft iron of his own hands . . . He strove subtly but with all his energy, to enclose her, to have her. And always she was burning and brilliant and hard as salt, and deadly. Yet obstinately, all his flesh burning and corroding, as if he were invaded by some consuming, scathing poison, still he persisted, thinking at last he might overcome her. But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive salt, around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. This is an image of " m a n k i n d in the clasp of t h e divine flux of corr u p t i o n " , t h e aphrodisiac frenzy of t h e swan in t r i u m p h . The final, definitive encounter, is six years later when Skrebensky, an officer, returns home f r o m I n d i a on leave. Girl a n d boy have developed into m a n a n d woman, b u t , in essence, there is no change. Skrebensky is, on one level, certainly 'male' enough, able to t a k e

goddess of destruction in "The Lemon Gardens" (Twilight in Italy, p. 232). Bird and goddess are one, and both have their affinities with the Laurentian moon.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

129

Ursula into t h e d a r k 'Africa' of sensual pleasure; b u t ultimately, metaphysically, he cannot satisfy her. He seemed so balanced and sure, he made such a confident presence. He was a great rider, so there was about him some of the horseman's animal darkness. Yet his soul was only the more wavering, vague. He seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. She knew nothing of it. She could only feel the dark heavy fixity of her animal desire. (Chap. XV) Skrebensky has no t r u e self. W e remember t h a t in " F i r s t L o v e " he h a d been unable to define himself except in abstract, ideal terms of nation a n d army. Ursula, struggling fiercely for fulfillment, has pride in t h e non-social reality of herself and is stronger t h a n her lover. The problem is more t h a n t h a t of physical incompatibility, 2 6 though for Lawrence t h e sexual act itself often seems to be the ultimate test of all t h a t we are. Skrebensky fails again on the moonlit dunes of t h e Channel where t h e corrosive swan appears in t h e figure of beaked harpy. Then there in the great flare of light she clinched hold of him, hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her arms round him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce, beaked harpy's kiss. The water washed over their feet, but she took no notice. She seemed unaware she seemed to be pressing in her beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. (Chap. XV) U n d e r the malign influence of the moon and t h e salt sea, Ursula and her lover t a s t e "The Bitterness of E c s t a s y " (the chapter's title). 20

Lawrence qualifies his admiration for sheer animal vitality b y Ursula's rejection of A n t h o n y Schofield (Chap. X I V ) . A n t h o n y comes from a virile line of gamekeepers and farmers; he has goatish, golden-brown eyes and other marks of satyr vitality. Though Ursula feels sexually alive in his presence, he is too exclusively a creature of the senses; and, perhaps, there in something sinister about 'the steady, hard fire of moonlight' in the glance of this Pan. His hard sensuality is too conscious a thing for Laurentian approval. Potentially, he is the "Black, proereant male of the selfish will and libidinous desire . . ." described in "He-Goat". And is he domesticated, 'tamed'.

130

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Anton meets sexual defeat, mental consciousness annihilates blood consciousness, woman destroys man. Personality, in any conventional sense, seems to have little to do with a more than human process. Terrible though the swan may be, it is, like the serpent, a principle of sacred destruction preferable to carrion eaters and stagnant marsh creatures who feed perversely on corruption within dead social forms. Two of these, Winifred Inger and Ursula's uncle Tom, are appropriately wedded to each other in the chapter "Shame", and are described persistently in swamp terms. Ursula's cultivated uncle maintains the old forms of life within which there is now, in Lawrence's view, the flux of corruption, decomposition. "His real mistress was the machine" and Winifred too "worshipped the impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter". Serving this new Moloch they are free from what is to them "the clog and the degradation of human feeling". Ursula, whose swanlike impulse is to annihilate the status quo, eventually sees Winifred as "unquickened flesh" that reminded her of the great "pre-historic lizards", and finds in her moist uncle the "nauseating effect of a marsh, where life and decaying are one". Metaphorical^, these regressive forms of life propagate in the watery female element. Abstractly, there are sound reasons why these two should marry (the match has social approval); but for Lawrence theirs are the perverted nuptials of the dead. The cleansing swan in its salt, white fury, speeds up the reduction of such dead forms. Its destruction is divine, a prelude to the new day. B y contrast the joyous emblem of the phoenix, the fiery bird of new beginnings, belongs only to the first of the novel's three generations.27 Although it is never mentioned directly, we know that 27 I n " T h e C a t h e d r a l " , C h a p t e r V I I , A n n a hangs b a c k in spite of a powerf u l psychic m o v e m e n t t o w a r d the altar. " T h e a l t a r w a s barren, its lights gone out. God burned no more on t h a t bush. I t w a s dead m a t t e r lying t h e r e " . Modern Christianity, in short, is l e f t with t h e ashes of an escaped phoenix, a wild creature not circumscribed even b y t h e inclusive order of the cathedral. T h e rainbow, w i t h which the fabulous bird is identified, stands o v e r and a b o v e t h e arch of cathedral; and it comes and goes mysteriously.

T H E A N I M A L S I N FICTION

131

this self-renewing creature beyond polarities comes into being when the two principles of power and love, male and female, are reconciled beyond the mystical conflict of their wedding. Drunkenly inspired at his step-daughter's wedding, Tom Brangwen gives a comic version of this when he says that if we have to be angels, and angels are neither male or female, then a married couple create this third thing which rises at Judgment Day praising the Lord. B u t his son-in-law Will Brangwen, in spite of early promise, lacks the creative force needed to produce the third thing. His favoiite work is wood-carving, and he first presents Anna with a carved butter-stamp "a mythological bird, a phoenix, something like an eagle, rising on symmetrical wings, from a circle of very beautiful flickering flames that rose upwards from the rim of the cup" (Chap. IV). Delighted with this emblem, Anna loves creating it over and over. I t seems a strange new thing come to life in every piece of butter. At this point of the relationship Will, hawklike and yellow-eyed, his voice sometimes almost feline, appears to have the tell-tale marks of royal power; but in the chapter "Anna Victrix" he finds himself overmatched and cannot complete his panel of the Creation with its myth of the female born from the male. His Eve, partisan to her sex and the intellectual principle, denies masculine creation. As a consequence of the woman's triumph the second generation of opposites do not produce, in themselves and in their marriage, the required third thing, the mystical unity of the phoenix. Split off from love, exploited by the predatory intellect, the living body of passion is consumed in mere reductive sensation. In Lawrence's terms, God the father is denied in the flesh; but the novel's final chapter, "The Rainbow", presents an extraordinary mimesis of his power through the creative symbol of the horses. 28

28

The t w o other creative symbols which show the height of Lawrence's imaginative power are presented in Chap. IV, where Will and A n n a stack corn sheaves by blazing moonlight, and in the later description of the Lincoln cathedral, Chap. V I I . In all three of these episodes we h a v e the illusion of the infinite in the finite.

132

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

These animals, unlike previous emblems, are presences which escape categories; analysis does not exhaust meaning. If, however, we read the episode at the archetypal level, keeping in mind t h a t we know of how Lawrence's poetic intuitions tend to shape themselves, what we see is, quite unmistakably, the wordless dance of two principles in movements of encirclement and escape. Trapped by pregnancy, Ursula formally submits to the social scheme by resigning herself to life with Skrebensky. In a spirit of humiliation rather than humility she sends him a repentant letter saying she is now ready to be his wife though this means giving herself to social bondage with a man she despises and a way of life — that of the Anglo-Indian 'aristocracy' — she hates on principle for its essential emptiness. For her the imperial idea is no substitute for a living faith. Feeling the seething of her frustration "rising to madness within her" t h a t she should bear a child to nothing and accept rather than create a role for herself, Ursula slips out to walk in the October rain 29 "lest the house suffocate her". Outside it is "very splendid, free and chaotic". Sheltering temporarily in a wood it seems that The vast booming overhead vibrated down and encircled her, the treetrunks spanned the circle of tremendous sound, myriads of tree-trunks, enormous and streaked black with water, thrust like stanchions upright between the roaring overhead and the sweeping of the circle underfoot. She glided between the tree trunks afraid of them. They might turn and shut her in as she went through their martialled silence. So she flitted along, keeping an illusion that she was unnoticed. She felt like a bird that had flown in through the window of a hall where vast warriors sit at the board. (Chap. XVI)

29 The legendary massacre of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins is commemorated b y the R o m a n Catholic Church on October 21. Since this British virgin, reluctant to marry a pagan, was eliminated by wild H u n s on horseback, it is possible that Lawrence intends a deliberate irony in Ursula's name. H e twice makes the point that she is named from the saint — in Chap. V I where she first appears as a baby, and in Chap. X I where she gives name t o t h e baby daughter of a bargeman.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

133

Encircled by thunder, Ursula fears the powerful soldier trees which suggest a dark male power which now might "shut her in" She breaks into the open, escaping from those "grave booming ranks". In the driving rain, she "must beat her way back through all this fluctuation to stability and security", 30 but in her heart there is "a small living seed of fear". Suddenly she is aware of the horses, looming up in the rain. Like the thunderous trees, they are aware of her. She pursued her way with bent head. She did not want to lift her face to them. She did not want to know they were there. She went on in the wild track. She knew the heaviness on her heart. It was the weight of the horses. But she would circumvent them. She would bear the weight steadily, and so escape. She would go straight on and on, and be gone by. Suddenly the weight deepened and her heart grew tense to bear it. Her breathing was laboured. But this weight she could bear. Ursula unconsciously hopes that she can circumvent the male world by assuming the role of mother, a heavy role but one she can "bear". She will pay this tribute to the flesh, but somehow keep herself to 30 E. L. Nicholes's pioneer study, "The 'Symbol of the Sparrow' in The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence", MLN, L X I V (1949) 173-174, noted the allusion to Bede's famous simile of the sparrow from his account of "The Conversion of Edwin". Lawrence, in the Nicholes interpretation, is drawing a clear parallel between Ursula's flight from insecurity back to insecurity and the sparrow's flight, in the graphic Anglo-Saxon parable, through the lighted hall filled with warriors back into the dark. Patricia Abel and Robert Hogan, "D. H. Lawrence's Singing Birds", Miscellany, pp. 204-214, argue that, although the allusion is there, Lawrence is using it in accordance with his own pagan faith. B y this interpretation Ursula is fleeing from a cathedrallike confinement (imaged by the trees) back to wild nature in a ritual pattern found elsewhere in Lawrence. While there is certainly a movement of escape from encirclement (which the present study emphasizes), we do not seem to have a clear issue of Laurentian freedom of the wild versus a traditional religious order. The booming soldier trees and the thunder horses are both aspects of a dark power which must be recognized by the individual, conscious mind, the light.

134

THE ANIMALS

X FICTION

herself, remain unknown. Although it is now the t r i u m p h of the horses, she feels " T h e y would burst before her. They would burst before h e r " . Blood is not omnipotent. The horses do burst before her, move on; b u t in ritual, dancelike movements t h e y r e t u r n again t o encircle her. She knew they had not gone, she knew they awaited her still . . . She was aware of their breasts, gripped clenched, narrow in a hold that never relaxed, she was aware of their red nostrils flaming with long endurance, and of their haunches, so rounded, so massive, pressing, pressing, pressing to burst the grip upon their breasts, pressing forever until they went mad, running against the walls of time, and never bursting free. Their great haunches were smoothed and darkened with rain. But the darkness and wetness of the rain could not put out the hard, urgent massive fire that was locked within these flanks, never never. She went on drawing near. She was aware of the great flash of hoofs, a bluish, irridescent flash surrounding a hollow of darkness. Large, large seemed the bluish incandescent flash of the hoof-iron, large as a halo of lightning round the knotted darkness of the flanks. Like circles of lightning came the flash of hoofs from out the powerful flanks. The massed fire of t h e horses in their powerful blood consciousness t r i u m p h s over woman, water a n d conscious mind. Now before, now behind, crashing a n d swerving b y in their transport, t h e y enclose a n d dominate. That concentrated, knitted flank of the horse-group had conquered. I t stirred uneasily, awaiting her, knowing its triumph. I t stirred uneasily, with the uneasiness of awaited triumph. Her heart was gone, her limbs were dissolved, she was dissolved like water. All the hardness and looming power was in the massive body of the horse-group. Yet we do n o t have t o t a l victory, annihilation, only a submission, a recognition. Ursula escapes f r o m t h e horses, outwits t h e m ; Mind, individuality, is not abolished. A passage in " T h e Crown" suggests an analogue of what has happened. Lawrence is describing t h e interplay of t h e two principles, the primacy first of one t h e n of the other

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

135

The flesh of darkness, triumphant, circles round the treasures of light which it has enveloped, which it calls Mind, and this is the ecstasy, the dance before the Ark, the Bacchic delirium. And then, within the womb, the light grows stronger and finds voice, it calls out "Behold. I am free, I am not enveloped within this darkness".31 We cannot expect Ursula, after her experience with the horses, to overvalue mind or fail in reverence to the flesh with which those dark beasts are clearly identified.32 They reaffirm the power and mystery of the Father, demonstrate, in remarkable fashion, the primacy of blood consciousness. Life decrees that Ursula is not to bear a child to Skrebensky (who cables from India that he is married); but, though she loses the child, she finds, in her convalescence, that she has conceived a new hope. "The heroic man would come to her out of the Infinite and she should hail him." She is to accept what God will send and not try to create a man out of her own desire. We know that this means that her 'blood' must choose,33 and it is in this hopeful frame of mind that she is given a promise by the appearance of the rainbow in the book's final paragraph. The account of The Rainbow given above does not attempt to unravel all the complexities of its ambitious theme, nor does it focus on the social and historical realities which the novel so well illuminates. Anything like a full comprehension of The Rainbow, however, must take into consideration the peculiar metaphysic Lawrence is shaping, and the way in which he expresses his ideas of being, of good and of evil, in the animal tropes of human and cosmic nature. 31

Reflections, p. 9. The Ursula of Women in Love, not quite the same person, does not seem to have gone through such an experience. 33 In Lawrence's fiction after 1912 resistance to a definitive command of the blood is analogous to resistance to divine grace. What comes from our deep passionate soul is right in spite of what discursive intellect and social habit may dispose us to think. 32

136

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Visionary though they may be, the surging horses have a firm basis in empirical reality which it requires small contact with real animals to know. We may have a nightmare projection of 'horseness' rather than horse; and the episode, functioning dramatically as creative symbol, radiates an imaginative charge beyond categories; b u t a sense of real horses is never lost. Yet even in this episode we can clearly see the outlines of Lawrence's metaphysical myth. The horses have an allegorical dimension in which they are types of blood consciousness and teach the Laurentian doctrine of godhead in the flesh. While we may wish to note the primordial associations of passion and power which the horses may carry, 34 it is well to remember more particularly what the trope suggests to Lawrence. Ursula, whose favorite girlhood reading was Genesis, had dreamed of some day being discovered by one of the paradoxical Sons of God who were not sons of Adam and consorted with fair daughters of men in former, more sacred times. In his apostrophe to the horse in Apocalypse,35 Lawrence called this "dominant symbol", stamping and threshing the "dark meadows" of our souls, "a throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potence". He reminds us that the sons of God who, according to Enoch, came down and begot the great Titans, had "the members of horses". Ursula's vision, as well as the ruddy St. Mawr, is involved in this explanation.

34 C. G. J u n g in his Symbols of Transformation, II, 274-282, devotes considerable attention t o the psychological archetype of the horse in its association with lightning, power and the sexual instinct. H e reports (pp. 277-278) that an uneducated w o m a n patient who had been violently forced b y her husband often dreamt that a wild horse leapt over her and kicked her in the abdomen with his hind hoof. The horse's hoof, in folklore and mythology, is associated with fertile water, and the horse with pregnant women. I n these Jungian perspectives Ursula's psychic experience appears quite understandable, particularly her 'laboured' breathing and sense of oppression. A natural symbol, and one with long historic associates, the horse tends to break out of Lawrence's personal conventions. 35

P p . 92-98.

137

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

C. DIES

IRAE:

WOMEN

IN

LOVE

Lawrence saw Women in Love, unlike The Rainbow, as a "purely destructive" vision.36 In the earlier work, which recalls Genesis and the Flood, the destruction of old modes of life and consciousness was, hopefully, a prelude to a happier new creation. Women in Love, for which Frieda suggested the title Dies Iraep is written as if under the shadow of final judgment. Rupert Birkin, the Laurentian hero, sees the struggle between himself and Ursula in apocalyptic terms. " I t was a fight to the death between them — or to new life". 38 They win through to individual salvation, though this involves a virtual abandonment of the disintegrating world around them, metaphorically a flight from the doomed city into the wild. Between Gerald Crich and Ursula's sister Gudrun, the other pair of lovers, the man-woman struggle (for Lawrence the focus of cosmic realities) is totally destructive. Gerald is part of the universal death by ice and abstraction which Lawrence saw overtaking the Northern races. In this respect the novel, standing outside Biblical conceptions, has for theme the twilight of the gods, although both Hebraic and Nordic analogies find their place with Lawrence's mythopoesis.39 3C

Letters, I, 519. Letters, I, 480. 38 A t t h e conclusion of Chap. X I I Ursula makes an open challenge to Birkin. Theirs is to be t h e creative holy war of what t h e previous novel called Lion and Unicorn, power and love. Out of this is to come the rainbow-crown of life — conspicuously absent in this destructive book. 39 Gerald, for example, is both a Siegfried and (by the prominence given his 'accidental' slaying of his brother), a Cain. For Lawrence the killing represents Gerald's unconscious wish. Gerald, as we shall see, is a natural killer with a dread of his own death which is actually a desire for self-murder. The analogies are free, unsystematic ones. H a r r y T. Moore (Life and Works, p. 163) suggests certain conscious parallels with Wagner's Ring (as indeed the prominence of t h e rings scene between Ursula and Birkin in Chap. X X I I I itself makes probable). We recall, too, t h a t both The Rainbow and Women in Love grew out of w h a t was first entitled The Sisters and then The Wedding Ring (Moore, Intelligent Heart, p. 161). T. A. Smailes, "The Mythical Bases of Women in Love", D. H. Lawrence Review, I (1968), 132-136, discusses Gerald Crich as Germanic hero. 37

138

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

The dualistic patterns with which we are familiar re-appear power and love, male and female, dark and light - - as also the archetypal animal tropes; but little of this suggests that Lawrence is now fixed in a hieratic style, incapable of modulation or of absorbing new experience. If, as Angelo Bertocci has said, "Lawrence fails when he seeks to enforce meanings he has not created, or when he yields to a didactic passion for explication, forgetting meanings he has already created dramatically", 40 his metaphysical perspectives, at best, clarify the immediate dramatic experience. One important new development in Women in Love's dualism is in the spiritual geography which frames the action. From "The Lemon Gardens" onward Lawrence had been concerned with the essential differences in being which, for him, distinguish Northern from Mediterranean peoples. In "Moony" (Chap. XIX), Birkin meditates upon an elegant West African statuette and the purely sensual, unspiritual knowledge of centuries behind it. Thousands of years ago her race had broken the connection between conscious mind and the senses. They "had died, mystically" turning their backs on "the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness". This African trope towards "Knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have . . . " is something the European Birkin recognizes in himself. He (and Gudrun too we may recognize) is secretly moved to make the beetlefaced fetish his divinity. The general danger for European civilization, however, lies in the opposite trope It would be done differently by the white races. The white races, having the Arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfill a mystery of ice destructive knowledge, snow abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun-rays. Thinking of his friend Gerald, the prophetic Birkin sees him as 40

"Symbolism in Women in Love", Miscellany,

pp. 83-102.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

139

one of those strange white wonderful demons of the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in his knowledge, death by perfect cold ? Was he a messenger, an omen of universal dissolution into whiteness and snow? In "Snowed Up" (Chap. XXX) the suicidal Gerald carries out his trope by setting his powerful will on an impossible snow-peak. On his moonlit way to self-annihilation he passes the Laurentian opposite to the African beetle fetish, a half buried crucifix, and knows that "somebody was going to murder him". For Lawrence, Gerald's whole life had been a slow murder of his physical self in the service of abstraction. Between the African sun-destruction and the moon-cold death of the Arctic a "Mediterranean" solution seems possible. Birkin and Ursula literally go south to Italy down the old Imperial Road, but myth is in conflict with empirical fact if we think of Italy as other than the ideal image of two principles in creative balance. It is far from clear how Italy itself is going to escape the creeping industrialization from the North.41 The murderous progress of idealism and mechanism is described in "The Industrial Magnate" (Chap. XVII). Thomas Crich, "the father, the Patriarch", 42 who denies pride and lordship, "wanted his industry to be run on love". In his humility he sees his laborers as better than himself because they are poorer and suffer more. All men are equal in Christ, and he cannot accept the natural 'disequality' which he sees in the flesh. Analogically he is, or wishes to be, a manifestation of Lawrence's Unicorn principle in that he is for equality, spiritual love, peace and plenty. Mrs. Crich, caged but defiant, asserts a lionlike pride, power and aristocracy. Her emblems are consistently the demonic and predatory ones. When her willful children are whipped, she paces outside the study door "like a tiger with murder on her face". If Thomas A painful consciousness of this informs Twilight in Italy. Typologically, Crich senior is Lawrence's bull of substance, the provider, identified with the proletariat, and a manifestation of the equalitarian principle of the Unicorn of which all sacrificial animals are a type. Cf. "St. Luke" 41

42

in Birds,

Beasts and

Flowers.

140

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Crich worshipped the great sympathetic Godhead of humanity, she "opposed him like one of the great demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey . . . she had beat against the bars of his philanthropy, and like a hawk in a cage . . . she had sunk into silence". Again, she would "come down like a wolf on the crawling supplicants". Her Laurentian critique of charity is that sometimes her husband seems "a subtle funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people", or in plainer language, t h a t he is sentimentally fond of being softhearted. 43 I n the marriage of the elder Criches power and love contend, and the love principle, socially enforced, conquers. This time the position of the man and woman are reversed; but we have seen that tiger and lamb are not exclusively related to one sex. Gerald, their son, reveals the inner logic of the machine when he takes over management of his father's mines. His ethics are those of efficient production, and the driving motive of his life is "to subjugate Matter to his own ends". Soldier, explorer, industrial genius, he is not ashamed of having power and authority, but for Lawrence his is the wrong sort of power, furious and vindictive, under the mask of impersonal efficiency. "He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon". When he enters the firm, we may say, it is as if his mother's tigerish spirit has a huge death-dealing mechanism at its disposal. H e creates "a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness". Since, for Lawrence, the general European will is now suicidal, Gerald is a true manifestation of the Zeitgeist; but this ice-cold intellectual is tiger and victim, alternately a sadist and a masochist. The cruelty in Gerald's nature is first dramatized in the chapter "Coal D u s t " (IX) where the Brangwen sisters watch him force his mount to face a colliery train at a crossing. He is riding a red Arab 43

Lawrence's comic talent has, perhaps, a certain likeness to that of Dickens. See Leo Gurko, "The Lost Oirl: D. H. Lawrence as a Dickens of the Midlands", PMLA, L X X V I I I (1963), 601-605. More striking than any similarity, however, is Dickens's open regard for sentimentality and Lawrence's violent attempts to disengage himself from what he regarded as the decay of the love ethic. In Lawrence no deserving persons are both poor and humble. Without pride there is no virtue.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

141

mare whose fineness and sensitive beauty are emphasized. The animal, an emblem of delicate, natural life, exists, in Gerald's mind, simply to do his will; blood and instinct have no natural rights. Cutting relentlessly into flesh with his bright spurs, he masters the bloodied mare, coldly forcing her to face the mechanical horror from which she recoils. A certain ambiguous identification of horse with part of the rider's self lies in the following description where the horse's very terror becomes mechanical. The mare struck and pawed away mechanically now, her terror fulfilled in her, for now the man encompassed her; her paws were blind and pathetic as she beat the air; the man closed round her and brought her down, almost as if she were part of his own physique,44 Totally identified with the plunging mare, Ursula understands Gerald "in pure opposition". She is later to tell him t h a t "however man is lord of the beast and the fowl he still does not have any right to violate the feelings of inferior creation". 45 I t may be objected that for Lawrence the lion has natural rights over the inferior lamb it eats, but Gerald's fixed will is not, for Lawrence, a natural expression of lordly passion. I t is mechanical. Gudrun, whose basic nature we may not yet understand, has an ambivalent reaction. She faints on seeing the spurs pressing the wounds of the tortured mare but recovers cold, hard and indifferent; it is as if something gives way within her. Hereafter it becomes plain that Gudrun is part of the Laurentian flux of corruption, t h a t her sympathetic flow, reversed, moves toward the 'African' infinity of pure sensation and division. 44

My emphasis. Gerald's Prussian policy of 'blood and iron' may be thought of as an outrage against his own living flesh. The further implications of this become plain with the appearance of the rabbit Bismarck, so appropriately named after the strong-willed 'Iron Chancellor' that Gerald partly resembles. A deadly analysis of the brutalizing military spirit is also to be found in the title piece of The Prussian Officer and other Stories already published (1914). More attractive than either the famous chancellor or the officer, Germanic Gerald, nevertheless, is infected with the mechanical drive to brutality which, for Lawrence, is not part of being a good animal. In Women in Love he is still trying to reconcile the will to power with love. 45 Chap. X I I .

142

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

In horses and in women, Birkin explains to Ursula, there exist two wills — to be wild and free and to submit to human power out of love.46 Ursula, a self-confessed 'bolter', covertly challenges the male to a creative battle in which, by the end of the novel, freedom and authority appear temporarily to be reconciled. Gudrun's declaration of total war, delivered by an irrational blow,47 leads to the destruction of male power. Ironically, the last figure for Gerald as he lies in frozen death ("Exeunt" Chap. X X I ) is 'a dead stallion' that Birkin had seen as "a dead mass of maleness". Another aspect of Lawrence's horse metaphor is the statuette produced by Loerke, the novel's Nibelung 48 sculptor who, serving and expressing industry in his art, is further advanced in social hatred and negation than anyone in the work. The statuette was of a naked girl, small, finely made sitting on a great naked horse. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. The horse stood stock still in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power. (Chap. XXIX) Overcome by the power of this sadistic art-work "Gudrun went pale, and a darkness came over her eyes like shame, she looked up with a certain supplication, almost slave-like". 49 Ursula, running true to form, attacks the distorting cruelty of both art-work and artist. "Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are 46

Ibid.

47

She is interrupted by Gerald in a dramatically unmotivated dance before t w o fierce Highland bullocks. Her hatred of malehood (and perhaps t h e taunting of the castrated bulls) m a y be explained by the Lesbian h y p o t h e s i s which this study develops. 48 While Loerke's name recalls the role of Loki in the Volsung story, his dark dwarfish appearance, his skill with mettlework, and his rejection of love suggest more powerfully an analogy with Alberich rather than t h e trickster god of fire. Lawrence's analogies, as already noted, are multiple and unsystematic. 49 She looks at Loerke rather like Minette looked at Gerald earlier in Chap. VI. The fuller implications of this show themselves in "Rabbit" (Chap. XVIII).

T H E ANIMALS I if FICTION

143

sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really". 50 In spite of Loerke's pretence that it is a pure work of art unrelated to life, she examines him on its genesis and judges: "The horse is a picture of your own stock, stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored". Loerke, a homosexual, likes only child-women not yet twenty. Men, however, are good at all ages "so he has the size, something of massiveness and — and stupid form". 5 1 In this artist the man-hating Gudrun finds a partner further advanced in nihilism and corruption. 52 Loerke, Birkin finds, is the guide for those who hate the ideal in their souls and "want to explore the sewers". Although described variously as 'gnome' and 'bat', this "little obscene monster of the darkness" who lives "in the river of corruption just where it falls into the bottomless pit", has, for the most appropriate emblem in the present context, "the wizard rat that swims ahead". 5 3 Behind, 6 0 The statuette is clearly that of a machine horse. Loerke, a quasi-futurist, serves industry with his talent, transmutes blood, organic life into iron mechanism. The horse conceptualized as stupid mechanical force stands in vivid contrast to the delicate Arabian m a r e or, for that matter, the living presences of Ursula encountered in The Rainbow. These last were frighteningly 'aware'. Ursula's concern with horses in the present book m a y have something to do with her analogical role as the Valkyrie. 6 1 This happens to be an excellent description of Loerke's current male lover who appears in the same chapter. 52 At this point her relationship with Gerald is already a painful failure. The chapter " D e a t h and L o v e " ( X X I V ) shows Gerald coming to her as to his mother and bringing her a sense of death: " s h e was the great bath of life, he worshipped her. Mother and substance of all life she was. And he, child and man, received her and was m a d e whole. His pure body was almost killed. B u t the miraculous, soft effluence of her breast suffused over him, over his seared, damaged brain, like a healing lymph, a soft soothing flow of life itself, perfect as if he were bathed in the womb a g a i n " . Gudrun, however, " l a y wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness". 6 3 Birkin supplies the obscene rat emblem and trope in "Continental", Chap. X X I X . A chilling reflection is that Loerke, as "little obscene monster who swims ahead in 'the river of corruption'", is one analogue of Gerald, an explorer of darkness in his embryonic regression. Loerke himself is physically a child.

144

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

in the stagnant death marshes, various idealists and aristocrats besport themselves. This last image emerges in "Breadalby" (Chap. VIII). There the weekend guests at a noble country house which gives the episode its name are transformed, figuratively into 'great lizards'54 as they swim in the pond. They suggest the wealth, brains, and beauty of the industrial age immersed in watery corruption. Gerald, in particular, loves the element of water, swims magnificently, and has explored the recesses of the Amazon. 55 It is, however, in frozen water that he finds his death, his final choice being non-tropical. Thus far all of the animal tropes mentioned in Women in Love have been fairly conventional in their associations, or, like the horse, quite clear in didactic function. A more original and complex trope is that of the rabbit, which ambivalent creature has a central place in the book. The famous chapter "Rabbit" (XVII) celebrates the secret 'obscene' marriage of Gudrun and Gerald, united by a common lust for cruelty. Priest and victim at the ritual is the great black and white rabbit Bismarck, splendid and fierce on the one hand (a kingly 'lion' in the wisdom of the child Winifred) 56 but a 'sickening

64 W e recall, in The Rainbow, a similar description of t h e homoerotie T o m B r a n g w e n and his m a t e W i n i f r e d immersed like lizards in t h e social swim. 55 A n o t h e r image of t h e m u d , s a v a g e r y and corruption t h a t runs through the novel. T h i s South A m e r i c a n river, c o n n o t a t i n g a r o t t i n g wilderness, h e a t and warrior w o m e n (Gudruns) seems t o flow f r o m its h e a r t of darkness into E n g l a n d . Describing a steamer trip u p t h e T h a m e s f r o m Westminister B r i d g e t o R i c h m o n d , G u d r u n (Water — P a r t y , X I V ) recounts, for Gerald, r a n k scenes of m u d and social corruption e v e r y w h e r e . M u d l a r k s d i v i n g into the filth for coppers (to the a m u s e m e n t of the passengers) produce L a w r e n c e ' s v o c a b u l a r y of abuse — 'carrion', ' v u l t u r e ' , ' j a c k a l ' . T h e second state of primitivism is fouler t h a n the first. Characteristically, the m o d e r n pleasureboaters g o u p river, against the stream. F o r L a w r e n c e our modern tendencies are inverted. Our interior 'river' runs b a c k w a r d s . 60 A n isolate child, fonder o f animals t h a n of has t h e insight of innocence. T h o u g h she h a s not t h e fierce wonder " a l m o s t as big as a l i o n " and m y s t e r y long veiled f r o m t h e rationalist eyes of

people, the y o u n g e s t Crich read " T h e C r o w n " , she sees 'a real king'. She keeps her her F r e n c h governess, w h o

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

145

fool' 57 in its fear of d e a t h . Unpredictable in bursts of rabbit madness, Bismark is " u n mystère", "ein W u n d e r " 5 8 in a n y language. An unique being, he is t h e commanding image of an episode which functions as one of Lawrence's notable creative symbols. E a c h of t h e lovers tries t o subdue t h e magically strong r a b b i t a n d is painfully scratched in t h e process. These r i t u a l wounds, over which t h e y secretly gloat, initiate t h e m formally into an abhorrent cult of cruelty which expresses their deepest desire. Blind with desire t o master, t h e sadistic Gerald fights what seems for an i n s t a n t to be t h e dragon force of blood consciousness itself. The long, demon-like beast lashed out again, spread on the air as if it were flying, looking something like a dragon, 59 then closing up again, inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man's body, strung to its efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came up in him. Swift as light he drew back and brought his free hand down like a hawk, 60 on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there came the unearthly abhorrent scream of a rabbit in the fear of death. I t made one immense writhe, tore his wrists and his sleeves in a final convulsion, all its belly flashed white in a whirlwind of paws, and then he had it slung round and had it under his arm. I t cowered and skulked. His face was gleaming with a smile. F o r b o t h the scream of the rabbit, an ambiguous Laurentian motif which here produces terror r a t h e r t h a n pity, opens u p a world of unholy desires. Looking a t Gudrun, Gerald intuits t h a t the points out that "il n'était que un chancelier". A chancellor, Gerald explains, "is a sort of judge". He does not understand that at the moment his own case is to be tried. 57 Gudrun's half truth. 58 Lawrence, one of whose favorite words is 'wonder', here shows his preference for the deeper German soul. The governess, one of the few Gauls in Lawrence's fiction, is superficial with her 'mystère'. Bismarck is 'ein Wunder'. 59 Lawrence has not yet begun to write about dragons, but this passing trope for the life-force deserves notice here. 60 A trope of the 'lion', power principle. We have seen Gerald also as tiger. At other moments he appears as wolf, a totem especially appropriate to a Volsung.

146

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

scream has " t o r n the veil f r o m her consciousness". She, too, is a demonic rabbit. Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange darkened eyes strained with underworld knowledge, almost supplicating like a creature which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition. The ambiguous G u d r u n is his victim, b u t one who is destined to destroy him because, as it develops, Gerald himself possesses t h e devilish rabbit-wish for his own fulfillment in death. As t h e y comp a r e wounds (a scene t h a t recalls t h e red mare's slashed, outraged flesh), we note Gerald's near-mystical masochism, the other side of his active delight in administering pain. His sinister blood-brotherhood with t h e 'victim', women and rabbit, is readily apparent. I t was as if he had knowledge of her in the long red rent in her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her, deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness . . . The rabbit completes his spell by suddenly racing round "in a h a r d tense circle t h a t seemed to bind their b r a i n s " stopping just as suddenly to bring to an end his black mass of inverted roles. Gudrun, in a m o m e n t of high irony, rejoices: "God be praised we aren't r a b b i t s " . A moment later, by rabbit-like transition a n d inversion, the "high shrill voice" with which she h a d spoken becomes, at the end of t h e episode "strong, slow, almost man-like". 6 1 I t is not for nothing t h a t Bismarck, high priest of this initiation d r a m a , is a baffling creature of two principles. 01

G e r a l d ' s 'poor j o k e ' on t h e w o r d A m a z o n is m o r e valid t h a n h e realizes. Birkin, t r y i n g t o a c c o u n t for h e r s u d d e n blow, suggests " T h e A m a z o n s u d d e n l y c a m e u p in h e r , I s u p p o s e " . " I h a d r a t h e r it h a d been t h e O r i n o c o " , Gerald r e t u r n s (Chap. X V I ) . I n Chap. V I I I we h a d glimpsed t h e o t h e r side of G u d r u n ' s d a n g e r o u s p o t e n t i a l i t y . A t a c o u n t r y h o u s e c h a r a d e she p l a y s ' w o m a n loving' R u t h t o U r s u l a ' s N a o m i . " I t w a s s t r a n g e t o see h o w G u d r u n clung w i t h h e a v y , d e s p e r a t e passion t o U r s u l a , y e t smiled w i t h s u b t l e malevolence against h e r " . Gerald is excited b y t h e p e r f o r m a n c e .

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

147

Lawrence's poem "Rabbit Snared in the Night", already treated in this study, is a key to the final struggle between Gerald and Gudrun. In "Snowed U p " (Chap. X X X ) he tries to strangle his victim-destroyer in the Tyrolean Alps. As in the poem, there is an explicit identification of murder with perverse sexuality, the death analogous to an annihilating orgasm. In this case, however, Lawrence achieves dramatic form and frees us from the oppressing sense of personal involvement. Gerald, anticipating the pleasure of killing Gudrun, whose attention to Loerke madden hims, thinks in sexual terms. A sudden desire leapt in his heart to kill her . . . His mind was absent all evening estranged by the snow and his passion . . . what a perfect voluptuous consummation it would be to strangle her, to strangle every spark of life out of her, till she lay completely inert, soft, relaxed forever, a soft heap lying between his hands, utterly dead. Then he would have had her finally, and forever . . . The opportunity comes later in the chapter. Stepping in for Loerke (who has been battered in a one-sided contest), the man-hating Gudrun attacks Gerald, striking him in the face as she had done once before when interrupted in her dancing f u r y before the Highland cattle. Astonished at first at the final blow which she had promised him then, Gerald takes her by the throat. The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. . . The struggling was her reciprocal, lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight . . . We recall the demoniacal bunny of the poem desiring "this intermingling of the black and monstrous fingers of Moloch/in the blood jets of your throat". In the present case, however, fulfillment is not reached. Gerald, interrupted by Loerke's mockery, recoils in contempt and disgust from this black extremity of passion. Turning away, he walks blindly up the glistening slopes to the other, spiritual ecstasy of Northern self-annihilation, leaving Gudrun and Loerke to pursue the African process to its logical conclusion.

148

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

The imperial German rabbit, black as well as white, may be said to rule over the whole novel. An expanding symbol, but a convincing mimesis of a real rabbit, he gathers into his mysterious unity the ambiguous potencies which Lawrence sees in man and the universe. In his complexity, Bismarck suggests the full range of Lawrence's dualism; but as an emblem of the times perhaps the most important suggestion he carries is that Europeans have gone mad with a lust for cruelty, and self-murder. Part of what it means to be a rabbit, and the rabbit's infection of society, is dramatized earlier in Women In Love than commentators thus far appear to have recognized. Not only does the "Rabbit" chapter illuminate Gerald's later struggle with Gudrun, it clarifies the previous picture of Soho-Bohemia loves in "Creme De Menthe" (Chap. VI) and "Totem" (Chap. VII). Gerald, acting the part of the pure, willful tiger,62 is sexually excited by the lisping, demi-mondaineMinette, an appointed victim who, under an ice-cold Nordic exterior, is psychically African 63 — and rabbit wishing to be strangled. She appealed to Gerald strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. 62 Throughout the chapter he is seen as predatory cat with his will coiled at the base of his spine. 63 In the first edition of Women in Love (N. Y., Seltzer, 1920) Minnette, called Pussum, had appeared openly as a dark 'Egyptian' t y p e with long black hair. Gerald had also seen her in the W e s t African t o t e m of the w o m a n in labor. Robert L. Chamberlain, "Pussum, Minette, and t h e Afro-Nordic symbol in Women in Love", PMLA, L X X V I I I (1963), 406-416, has s h o w n t h e African content of t h e Nordic Minette. Lawrence, under threat of libel, had bleached Pussum, making her a blond 'ice-flower' rather than a tropical 'red lotus'. I n the definitive, revised edition (London, 1921) and in t h e Viking Compass edition derived from it (N. Y., 1960), Minette's black interior is still readily apparent. Chamberlain argues cogently that the change is governed b y subtle reasons of design as well as b y prudence.—He sees PussumMinette, and rightly I believe, as a central, controlling metaphor of d u a l destruction. H e has not, however, noticed Pussum-Minette's psychic relationship with the black and white Bismarck, both in her 'victim' reactions and those she produces in others. The novel's nuclear and most comprehensive symbol appears to be the ambivalent rabbit.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

149

She was so profane, slave-like watching him, absorbed by him. He sat with his hands on the table, his sun-browned rather sinister hands that were animal and yet very shapely and attractive, pushed forward towards her. And they fascinated her. She looked so small and childish and vulnerable, almost pitiful. And yet the look in her eyes made Gerald feel drowned in some potent darkness64 that almost frightened him. (Chap. VI) Ironically, this creature of darkness and corruption, a scavenger of the dissolving social body, has a 'metaphysical' 65 fear of black beetles — another image of her own state. B y subtle analogy, the pregnant Minette is connected with the beetle-faced totem of the savage woman in labor who represents a culture of sheer physical sensation, knowledge of obscene mysteries; both form part of the ambivalent rabbit metaphor which the novel builds of black and white. In darkest Soho the blonde ice-goddess of corruption turns men into beasts of prey — and rabbits. Halliday, Minette's lover, is one such rabbit. He gave Gerald the impression that he loved his terror. He seemed to relish his own horror and hatred of her, turn it over and extract every flavour from it, in real panic. Gerald thought of him as Gudrun is to think of Bismarck as a strange fool, and yet piquant. Obliging Halliday's rabbit desire for pain, Minette suddenly, at one point in the same chapter, undergoes a bestial metamorphosis. Acting out the cat trope suggested by her name, 66 she slashes his hand with a knife to show him that she is not afraid of blood. On the surface there is a certain metaphorical confusion, but when we meet the fierce, slashing Bismarck at another initiation, we can recognize the strange dual necessity, metaphysical as well as psychological, behind the shifting figure. This we may take to be a glimpse of her African interior. The prophet Birkin's insight in the same chapter. 66 Gerald, an expert in tropical wild life, calls her " a young female panther". 61

65

150

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

The subtle rabbit fills the novel with analogues of his riddling presence. In his final epiphany Bismarck appears in the sinister Loerke, demi-urge of our time, who will survive the death of love and heroism. Loerke, "the rock bottom of all life", is a pure unconnected will perfectly detached from everything but his inhuman art. I have already indicated the appropriateness of his description as 'bat' and as "the wizard rat that swims ahead" in the social corruption in our time; but to account fully for his power we have to focus, as commentary thus far has not done, on the first full description of Loerke. This makes him a rabbit-troll identified with the novel's reigning divinity. Out of doors he wore a Westphalian cap, a close brown velvet head with big brown velvet flaps down over his ears, so that he looked like a lopeared rabbit or a troll. . . His eyes were arresting — brown, full like a rabbit's or like a troll's, or like the eyes of a lost being, having a strange, dumb depraved look of knowledge and a quick spark of uncanny fire. (Chap. XXIX) I n Loerke's "dream of fear", a rabbit's ambivalent longing for destruction, "the world went cold, and snow fell everywhere, and only white creatures, Polar bears, white foxes, and men like awful snow-white birds persisted in ice-cruelty". 67 Lawrence's personal obsession with the 'mad' victim-rabbit, which we first see in the Cyril of The White Peacock, enters, in Women in Love, the metaphysic he had worked out through Twilight in Italy, The Rainbow and "The Crown". The obsession is to receive,

67

This, of course, would include t h e Volsung Gerald in his heroic a s p e c t as wolf. I n " S n o w e d U p " (Chap. X X X ) w h e n G u d r u n q u a r r e l s w i t h Gerald over L o e r k e " H i s face w a s w h i t e a n d gleaming, she k n e w t h a t she w a s in his p o w e r — t h e w o l f " . A m o m e n t l a t e r h e h a s t u r n e d m a c h i n e r a t h e r t h a n a n i m a l , a n d she observes w i t h ' f a t a l c o n t e m p t ' , his 'clenched m e c h a n i c a l b o d y ' . A s a s a v a g e wolf, a c t i n g f r o m t h e blood impulse of power, h e is justified. A s a fixed, a b s t r a c t will h e is d e a t h t o himself.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

151

as its lighthearted farewell, the sketch "Adolf" 68 published in 1920 where Lawrence recalls, with wit and humor, the meek insolence of a childhood pet. Beyond this, the rabbit itself disappears; but those insights into human reality which Lawrence had used the rabbit to suggest still remain; he simply finds other objective correlatives. While it lasts, however, Lawrence's special involvement with the rabbit, transmuted into art, carries a certain hypnotic power. The essence of rabbitness, but more than a rabbit, Bismarck reminds us uncomfortably of "that which is inhuman" in human nature. The novel's creative relationship is between Birkin, who inclines to misanthropic sermons on the Flux of Corruption 69 and the power of evil, and the more optimistic Ursula, who refuses to renounce love and hope. Basically a 'dry soul' although she does not understand Herakleitus, Ursula is associated primarily with the 'warm', 'flamy' roses of Lawrence's iconography rather than the white lotus that blooms in the mud and darkness. 70 Her feminine principle of Phoenix, pp. 7-13. W. S. Marks III, "D. H. Lawrence and His Rabbit Adolf: Three Symbolic Permutations", Criticism, X (1968), 200-216, traces the family line from the historical Adolf to the symbolic Bismarck. The article, available after I had completed my own study, uncovers Adolphus, the intermediary rabbit of Lawrence's first draft of Sons and Lovers. I gladly accept the suggestion that Adolphus (German: noble wolf), carries in his name a hint of paradox in his double nature. 69 In Chap. XXVIII a letter of his is read to the amusement of unbelievers at a cafe. A reader who had struggled with Lawrence's war-time essays will recognize what is hardly a parody of their tone and language. Lawrence is well aware of how absurd he can sound, but the fact remains that in Women in Love the prophetic Birkin's vision of a Flux of Corruption is accurate, despite the evangelical bombast through which it is presented. 70 In "Water Party" (Chap. XIV) she confesses to Birkin that she is not sure she understands this sardonic pre-Socratic (even if her own recurrent descriptions are 'lambent flamy'. Although a creature of dual potentialities, like all of Lawrence's characters, she stands in contrast to her sister Gudrun, who is the type associated with sea-born Aphrodite, snakes, swans and lotuses in that 'dark river of dissolution' which Birkin (in "Water Party") sees as running through everyone. In "Moony" (Chap. XIX) we are faced with the mystery that the white moon, sign of watery Aphrodite, includes the shape of the rose. Ursula expresses Lawrence's ontological morality when 68

152

T H E ANIMALS IN FICTION

love (and liberty) has to be reconciled with Birkin's male desire for authority. In "Mino", (Chap. X I I I ) Birkin finds an exemplum in the relationship between the Italian cat 71 (from which the episode derives its title) and a fluffy, wild female from the woods from whom he forces an acceptance of himself as a 'sort of fate'. Perfect equilibrium in love casts out any democratic freedom to live for her promiscuous self alone. To the puzzled Ursula, who sees male bullying in action, Birkin tries to explain the fatality of an existential encounter between the sexes 'There is', he said in a voice of pure abstraction, 'a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there that I would want to meet you — not on the emotional, loving plane — but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures'. A pure union of this sort, a 'star-equilibrium' is irrevocable once established; and "the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people . . .".72 We may see that though the rainbow figure has disappeared the essential credo it expresses remains. Real relationship, between cats or humankind, is a dual fate, not an individual freedom; and the 'Unicorn' spiritual ideal by itself is false egotism. Ursula, nevertheless, makes plain t h a t she will not stand for any male bullying. she tells Birkin, w h o agrees, that the important thing is to flower, whether as lotus or rose. She thinks, however, that she is not a flower of evil but 'a rose of happiness', and she is correct. 71 "Mino-the cat — has been out all night as usual", Lawrence reported from Lerici, Italy, in January 1914 (Letters, I, 261). In the novel Mino is transformed into an emblem of Latin order and wedded to the free British female. His name and manner suggests the proper treatment for the promiscuous human Minette. 72 I n contrast to this creative vision of Birkin, Loerke and Gudrun (Chap. X X X ) h a v e a mocking fancy of the world blown in t w o with each half setting off through space in opposite directions. These t w o halves, in Lawrence's cosmology, are male and female.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

153

Hermione Roddice, Birkin's high-born mistress, is another case. A sinister, top-heavy intellectual, she stands for discursive mind against t h e flesh she uses and degrades. She scorns Ursula as a "strongly, female, healthy selfish w o m a n " with no 'mind' and sees only 'animalism' in Birkin's attraction towards such a type. H e r a t t i t u d e towards actual male animals is instructive. I n Chapter V I I I she a n d some of her guests walk t h r o u g h t h e park a t her c o u n t r y home. They looked at the shy deer, and Hermione talked to the stag, as if he too were a boy she wanted to wheedle and fondle. He was male, so she must exert some kind of power over him. They trailed home by the fish ponds, and Hermione told them about the quarrel of two male swans, who had striven for the love of the one lady. She chuckled and laughed as she told how the ousted lover sat with his head buried under his wing, on the gravel.' 3 She is t h e same way with t h e young Italian cat as she caresses a n d babies him. " I t was always t h e same, this joy in power she manifested, peculiarly in power over a n y male being". H e r 'love' is a masked will t o power which she uses to subdue t h e male world. Striking back a t her, Birkin copies a Chinese drawing of a goose which lives f r o m centers which she cannot know with her willful intellect. ' I know [he tortures her] what centers they live from — what they perceive and feel — the hot, stinging centrality of a goose in the flux of cold water and mud — the curious bitter stinging heat of a goose's blood, entering their own blood like an inoculation of corruptive fire — fire of the cold-burning mud — the lotus mystery'. (Chap. VIII) 73

I n this she recalls Lettie in The White Peacock who had tormented George with the example of a male bird who perished in battle for a female. The Birkin-Hermione relationship also bears a slight resemblance to that of L a d y Crystabel and Annable as the poor young person. Birkin, socially inferior to Hermione, is a school inspector w h o m his patroness, in courtly tradition, would polish and refine. Lawrence radically rejects the male vassalage involved in this medieval heritage. H i s counter-myth is of the cultured lady finding health and salvation by stepping 'down' to a vital, outlaw representative of her social inferiors.

154

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

To understand Hermione's strange reaction, 'her sick convulsion' and feeling of dissolution setting in her body, of being "gone in horrible corruption", we have to see, concealed within the present goose, Lawrence's myth of the divine, destroying swan. 74 Given his embattled position, there are naturally moments when Birkin wishes he could do without woman. In "Man to Man" (Chap. XVI), he meditates painfully on the sexual division of mankind — a theme Lawrence is later to elaborate in his remarkable tortoise poems. 75 In the famous "Moony" (Chap. X I X ) Birkin tries to destroy the dangerous white goddess reflected in a dark pool. This episode, functioning as creative symbol, is a complex one which the present study need not treat at length. 76 We must here content ourselves with noting some of the suggestive animal shapes of moon which Birkin's booming rocks hurl into the air. At first the image of love throws out "arms of fire like a cuttlefish, like a luminous polyp . . .". In Kangaroo Lawrence is to use a parallel figure for the white, ideal love the hero Somers is trying to escape. I t is "the ideal become like an octopus with a ghastly eye in

11 Cf. t h e figure of M i c h a e l a n g e l o ' s L e d a a l r e a d y discussed i n m y t r e a t m e n t of " T h e C r o w n " . G e r a l d , a g r e a t s w i m m e r a n d d e s t r o y e r , a p p e a r s i n a l o t u s - s w a n c o n t e x t i n " S k e t c h - B o o k " ( C h a p . X ) w h e r e G u d r u n s i t s 'like a Buddhist' contemplating actual m u d and water plants. The white Gerald e m e r g e s t o v i e w r o w i n g a b o a t ; s h e is a w a r e , a s h e s t a n d s , of his b o d y " s t r e t c h ing a n d s u r g i n g like t h e m a r s h - f i r e . . . " . I n " D e a t h a n d L o v e " ( C h a p . X X I V ) s h e is t h e b r i d e of t h e s w a n . G e r a l d " p o u r e d all h i s p e n t u p d a r k n e s s a n d c o r r o s i v e d e a t h . . . T h e t e r r i b l e f r i c t i o n a l violence of d e a t h filled h e r , a n d s h e r e c e i v e d i t in a n e c s t a s y of s u b j e c t i o n , in t h r o e s of a c u t e , v i o l e n t s e n s a t i o n " . W h a t H e r m i o n e recoils f r o m , r e f u s i n g t o a c k n o w l e d g e w i t h i n h e r s e l f , G u d r u n seeks.

75

See p p . 74-76 in p r e s e n t s t u d y . M e t a p h y s i c a l l y , t h i s i n v o l v e s t h e p r i m o r d i a l s t r u g g l e of d a r k n e s s a n d l i g h t , t h e t w o p r i n c i p l e s of c r e a t i o n . I n The Rainbow L a w r e n c e h a d s u g g e s t e d t h i s s a c r e d b a t t l e i n t h e e p i s o d e of U r s u l a a n d t h e h o r s e s . H e r e t h e a n i m a l t e r m s of h i s fluid m e t a p h y s i c a r e a b s o r b e d in m o o n a n d d a r k w a t e r ; b u t o n t h e a r c h e t y p a l level t h e b a t t l e , a s a l w a y s , is b e t w e e n L i o n a n d U n i c o r n . 76

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

155

the center, and white arms en wreathing the world". 77 He had "to try to disentangle himself from the white octopus of love". 78 The moon flakes rise "like white birds" which we might not go wrong to associate, typologically, with vain white peacocks. Something very like the Aphrodite-swan appears to be, ineradicably, at the heart of the mystery. But at the center, the heart of all, was s t i l l . . . a white body of fire writhing and striving and not even now broken open, not yet violated. It seemed to be drawing itself together with strange, violent pangs, in blind effort. It was getting stronger, it was reasserting itself. Birkin had addressed the moon as Cybele, the castrating Syrian goddess, but she is also the Laurentian Aphrodite and the indestructible swan in frenzy. Logically, all these things are difficult to reconcile with Ursula, who, watching in the dark woods "was dazed, her mind was all gone"; nevertheless, she, impersonally, is Woman, identified with moon, 79 water and danger for man. After the stoning "she felt she had fallen to the ground and was spilled out, like water on the earth". Birkin cannot destroy the moon, about which he has ambivalent feelings, but he does score a manifest symbolic victory in his assertion of male power. 80 " Chap. X I I I . A little later, predictably, the octopus becomes "the dragon of a great old ideal with its foul poison breath". 78 Chap. X V I I . 79 The distorted moon still reasserts itself as a 'ragged rose'. Try as h e might to shatter spiritual love, Birkin sees "the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments . . .". Ursula, w e know, is associated with the mystic rose of love. Overwhelmed by a bombardment of glowing images, a reader m a y easily be disposed to accept the episode as more than the sum of its parts, without pausing to ask how or w h y the flame rose emerges from moon and water. Singing rather than preaching, Lawrence triumphs over discursive intellect, exploding the categories of ordinary thought. 80 Since the father principle is associated with darkness and earth in Lawrence's cosmos, this metaphor of spilt water implies a feminine submission — as well as the release of sexual tension. Cf. the Ursula of Chap. X V of The Rainbow in her final moonlight encounter with the unfortunate Anton Skrebensky. The (sea) water there is bitter, the moonlight metallic, and the woman on the barren sand hard, unsatisfied, painfully conscious.

156

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Desperate struggle rather than joyous fulfillment is what is memorable in Women in Love. Even the Birkin-Ursula union is not a final and stable one since at the end Birkin argues, inconclusively, that a man needs, in addition to marriage, a species of blood-brothership such as the dead Gerald had rejected. There are clearly going to be other arguments in Italy before the star-equilibrium is established. In all of this struggle, what has happened to the phoenix, the Laurentian bird of bliss ? We may hardly notice the feeble appearance of this bird trope in "Continental" (Chap. XXIX) where the happy Ursula first sings: "She felt like a bird flying in air . . . enjoying herself extremely in the balance and flight of the song...". Shortly afterwards, the smell of cattle in their stalls brings back her childhood and dead life, the abyss of the past, the Marsh, Anton Skrebensky. We are to believe, however, that she is a new creature. She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself pure and silvery, she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin. That old shadow-world, the actuality of the past — ah let it go. She rose free [a self-renewing phoenix] on the wings of her new condition. Practical questions are likely to raise themselves in the reader's mind. We may be prepared emotionally to accept the promise of the new day at the end of The Rainbow since Lawrence's prose works for a majestic close and our minds are still slightly dazed from the encounter with the horses. In the present case we have the bold statement that history is abolished, and we know that Ursula and Birkin cannot live forever in a timeless cloud of unknowing. Taken together, The Rainbow and Women in Love illustrate both the persistence and the mutability of Lawrence's basic myth of the two principles which he can neither abandon nor complete. The dynamic wcrld picture, first Hebraic and then Teutonic in its coloring, derives from the slippery opposition of male and female, each unstable analogue of power and love containing some part of its opposite. The later Mexican metamorphoses of the contestants,

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

157

although it is to involve a shift in emphasis, does not alter the metaphysical frame. What is perhaps most notable is that two real creatures, about which Lawrence has special feelings in actual life, enter his literary cosmos charged with a hypnotic intensity. The horse, an ancient, natural symbol, is raised to apocalyptic proportions in The Rainbow, though we would not suspect in any of Lawrence's philosophical writings (before he got to New Mexico) how important this beast is to him. The humble rabbit, a focus of Lawrence's early obsession with pain and death, is likewise given a dramatic role which transcends that of the animal emblems explicated at length in "The Crown" and elsewhere. Wonderful Bismarck is himself a Lion and a Unicorn — and the essence of real rabbit. In both novels Lawrence makes use of a free (and sometimes confusing) play of animal figures as a way of presenting human character in various states of being. These descriptive figures shift and merge as the characters, in accordance with the author's metapsychology, manifest different aspects of their nature. Where this is rendered in dramatic terms, the emblems serving as commentary on externalized human motive in action, the reader is not likely to run into special difficulties. Where Lawrence, as in describing the secret effect of Birkin's sketch on Hermione, seems to assume that his readers know his private myth of the swan, the emphatic assertions of her reactions may not fully convince any but the initiated. The phoenix, Lawrence's personal emblem, the fiery sign of his positive faith, does not preside over the Brangwensaga after the first generation in The Rainbow. What emerges as the true sign of our disintegrating era is the cold, reptilian swan of endings, a sundering angel.81 Feeling that European civilization was doomed — the suicidal end product of Christianity, machines and abstraction — Lawrence sets out on his savage pilgrimage. In metaphor, but only there, health and sanity were still possible in "Italy" where Lawrence had dispatched Birkin and Ursula. In life Lawrence's own quest for salvation was to take him and Frieda (via Sicily, Ceylon, 81

Cf. my discussion of the swan poems of Pansies, pp. 92-95, 102.

158

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Australia and Taos) to Mexico, and an invocation of the dark, preChristian gods. The way to Mexico and the modifications thereby introduced into the animal rhetoric of Lawrence's fiction, must now be our concern.

D. THE SAVAGE PILGRIMAGE

Harried by draft-board, censor, and the activities of British intelligence (official and private), the embittered Lawrence of the war years described himself as "a fox cornered by a pack of hounds", 8 2 and as a caged 'wild-cat' who longed for "some sort of free, lawless life". 83 His creative impulse lapsed. By 1917, having finished Women in Love, he had so far lost faith in England and in humanity a t large t h a t we find him saying t h a t he is interested in philosophy, not fiction, since he found people 'ultimately boring' and fiction was not possible without them. He was happy "only with the thoughts t h a t transcend humanity". 8 4 Although the discouragement was temporary, Lawrence's intensified interest in philosophy and in what he had earlier called the 'non-human' element in humanity, clearly shows itself in the fiction he produced in his next phase (1919-1925). This fiction, which reflects both his flight from European civilization and his preoccupation with the themes of leadership and power, shows a Lawrence less concerned than before with giving human and dramatic substance to his visionary ideas; he is more directly the preacher. Only in The Plumed Serpent does his creative imagination seem fully engaged in a full-scale work; and there he has only an ambiguous success as he tries simultaneously to celebrate demonic wildness and authority, anarchic vitalism and a new order of civilization.

82 83 84

Letters, I, 497. From Cornwall, circa January 15, 1917. Letters (Huxley ed.), p. 434. From Berkshire, March, 1918. Letters, I, 514. May 23, 1917.

T H E A N I M A L S I N FICTION

159

His novella "The Fox", first written in England in 1918, expanded in Sicily in 1921,85 provides us with a significant transition to what we may call the wilderness phase in Lawrence's life and art. Externally, "The F o x " seems to belong to the old order of things. Lawrence makes skillful use of the traditional novella form; he excludes cosmology and gives the action a firm basis in familiar human psychology; the ritual patterns of his totemic myth 86 are imitated on a realistic level. But the spirit of the tale is something new. Radically hostile to the traditional moral order, it celebrates the primal morality of a good (i.e., wild) 'animal' as against conventional ethics, for Lawrence the dead legalism of the "little walled city". 87 March and Banford, two young women, attempt to run a farm in wartime England. Although there is no overt Lesbianism in the relationship, its emotional content is that of a marriage, with the robust, attractive March as the responsible partner. The arrangement appears to be contra natura since, in spite of all their efforts, the chickens and ducks do not flourish. Furthermore, since the war "the fox was a demon"; and this mocking predator, "as difficult as a serpent to see" as he slides along the deep grass, adds greatly to the general anxieties of a most unhappy rural seat. Confronting the outlaw fox, whom she hunts in the woods, March has the uncanny experience of knowing that he knows her; he holds her momentarily 'spellbound'. When a ruddy young soldier arrives, the grandson of the former owner of the farm, March knows him as the fox (an identification made easy by his red hair, sly, vulpine looks, odor, and yelping laugh). 88 Curiously relaxed now the fox is there, March hunts no more but dreams two prophetic dreams. 85

Moore, Life and Works, p . 207. See J o h n Vickery, " M y t h a n d R i t u a l in t h e S h o r t e r F i c t i o n of D . H . L a w r e n c e " , Modern Fiction Studies, V (1959), 65-82. 87 Cf. H a r d y s t u d y , Phoenix, p . 419. 88 L a w r e n c e , later t h e R e d Wolf of Taos, is clearly identified w i t h this t o t e m i c figure b o t h in a p p e a r a n c e a n d s e n t i m e n t . Cf. his N e w Mexico p o e m " T h e R e d W o l f " in Birds, Beasts and Flowers a n d m y discussion of t h e wolffox t y p o l o g y , p p . 86-88. 8C

160

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

In the first, the fox, "very yellow and bright like corn", 89 sings to her in the dark and sears her mouth with his fiery brush, thereby anticipating the "quick burning" 9 0 kiss the young man will give her later in their relationship. The boy sacrifices his animal totem. Hunted in a tight little island with a network of hedges, the' fox, he feels, has no chance against men and dogs and noises in the night "like a fence of sound". He himself, the night of the kill, had been fleeing the relentless sound of Banford's voice as she argues against March's acceptance of the outsider. I n March's second fox dream, however, Banford is dead, and to keep her warm in her coffin March covers her with the skin of the dead fox which has acquired powerful sexual associations. This dream is prophetic of Banford's death (a removal unconsciously desired by March); but it is also, perhaps, an ambiguous sign of the taboo against killing one of his own 'kind' which the young 'fox' has already broken. He kills the fox himself rather than let it fall prey to the hounds and men. He will contrive to let the stubborn Banford resist him by standing where the dead tree he is chopping will crush her. He will not allow her to keep March and continue to prey on her vitality. The fox slaying, then, can be seen a rehearsal 91 89 Vickery (op. cit., p. 80) shows in this the traditional association of the fox with Dionysus as the corn spirit, and also how the image recalls the custom of fastening burning torches to a fox's tail as punishment for having destroyed crops in the past. Lawrence was acquainted with Fraser's The Golden Bough and totemism at this point of his career (See Letters, I, 394 and 618). He seemed seriously to believe that there were animal principles of man which totemism recognizes. Some tribes, he speculates even before his Australian novel, "really were Kangaroos" by a species of blood consciousness. Speculations like these help to explain the inevitable quarrel between himself and the rationalist Bertrand Russell of whom he enquired what science had to tell of such matters in December, 1915 (Letters, I, 394). 90 Considering her old-maidish habit of pursing her lips some fierce sensual fire seems needed. Later, showing the other side of h i s nature, the boy gives her 'a young frightened kiss'. 91 This suggestion of John Vickery (op. cit., p. 81) helps clarify the boy's fox-slaying, otherwise a slightly puzzling act.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

161

of his subsequent mercy-killing of the sick Banford and the death of an unhealthy relationship. The dream, March's secret wish, is prophetic of this death. Filled with wonder at the dead fox, March finds him "incomprehensible", beyond her range of understanding. Nailed flat on a board "as if crucified" he gives her an uneasy feeling. I n terms of Lawrence's literary cosmos, if not clearly so in this story, it is Christianity that has killed the last bit of wild animal in dying England; but the death of the animal self is also the death of its spiritual adversary — exemplified by the pale white Banford. Cornish by birth and upbringing 92 the non-English hero, significantly in the Laurentian scheme of things, had run away to Canada. In effect he brings to England a touch of the North American wild to which he prepares to return with March at the end of the story. Although he is self-explanatory in terms of the particular literary world in which he lives, we can get a wider perspective on this feral creature if we see him as Lawrence's new man, his blood changed by the new world. We are told "He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer, and not a soldier stuck in a regiment". He stalks his prey with a powerful will t h a t becomes the fate of his victim, and he seems to have certain affinities with N a t t y Bumpo 93 and the semiwild Americans Lawrence applauded in his Crevecoeur 94 study. Lawrence describes the hunted March as being, at first, as "suspicious as a hare". Later in the story she has a 'fascinated rabbit look', but there is nothing very sinister about the rabbit trope in this case. I t simply signifies that, independent though she is, March 92

As an aboriginal Briton he is, for Lawrence, radically different — like t h e Welsh groom Lewis in St. Mawr, and other Celtic heroes who are outside t h e pale of English and Christian consciousness. I n "The Nightmare", Chapter V I of Kangaroo, Lawrence's autobiographic account of his Cornwall experience during t h e war, includes speculation t h a t t h e spirit of t h e preChristian world lingers in truly Celtic places. I n effect t h e Celts, yet unbroken and untamed, maintain some contact with t h e sacred wild. 93 The Deerslayer, Lawrence noted, is symbolically t h e slayer of the L a m b in spite of his nominal Christianity: English Review March 1919 (in Arnold, The Symbolic Meaning, pp. 109-110). 94 Studies, pp. 41-45.

162

THE ANIMAI.S IN FICTION

wants to be overcome, wills the fate she is apparently resisting. She is to be rescued from the dead folds of convention, the perverted 'sanity' of the ideal love that binds her to Banford; she is to relax in the protection and security of a dominant male. This is the first important work of Lawrence's fiction which makes an unqualified claim of male supremacy. By one implicit figure both young women are identified with the hens on whom the fox preys. Banford, in particular, is always described in bird terms. When the soldier first arrives she gossips with him and is "full of perky interest, like a bird". She takes the news that March is going to marry "like a bird that has been shot: a poor little sick bird". She stands up to her rival "like a little fighting cock", endeavoring to prevent him from seeing March alone. Willing the death of Banford at the story's climax, the boy "looked up into the sky like a huntsman who is watching a flying bird". When the tree fells her he watches her fall "as he would watch a wild goose he had shot". Herself ruddy and obviously full of Laurentian 'blood', March is ultimately identified with the fox totem and, in her dreaming nature, with blood consciousness as opposed to the pale, rationalizing Banford; but a reader need have studied no Laurentian doctrine at all to grasp the essential conflict; all is public, dramatized. What a special knowledge of Lawrence's animal rhetoric suggests in the relationship of the two girls amounts, perhaps, to no more than a marginal note of the artist to himself. March, living an emotionally perverted life as man-woman, paints swans and water lilies, those Laurentian emblems of corruption. When the fate of the young man is in balance — will he be accepted as a guest at the farm or not? — he says that, as an alternative, he could "go to The Swan in the village". For Lawrence this may carry private associations — a creative relationship with a woman or the flux of corruption — but the choice of the inn's name and of the motifs which March paints, although hardly incidental for the artist, is not governed by any imperatives of aesthetic design. Whether the story's end represents a clear victory for life and health over death and corruption is a matter open to question.

THE ANIMALS I S FICTION

163

From a traditional, Christian point of view, the idea is absurd. A person differs from an animal by the possession of an immortal soul and by knowledge of good and evil. A fox may kill without guilt to obtain a mate. A man may not murder even a latent lesbian if she stands between him and the woman he wishes to marry: even a sick, degraded person was made in the image of God. We are to fight the disease, hate the sin, b u t are simultaneously under the hard commandment to love and help the person. While it is obvious t h a t compassion itself may pass into a corrupt sentimentality t h a t blurs judgment, it is not so obvious t h a t the ethical solution to the story's impasse is for the man to murder the repulsive Banford. Kangaroo, the next work of fiction in which animal rhetoric is of central importance, 9 5 is a sketchy novel composed out of Lawrence's fleeting contact with Australia in 1922. Richard Aldington calculates t h a t , except for the last brief chapter added in September at Taos, New Mexico, it was written in about five weeks 96 in Australia. Lawrence never re-wrote, as he usually did, his "wild novel of Australia"; 97 he gave it to the printer in first d r a f t . I t remains a novel notable for its sense of the Australian landscape, for conveying quite vividly an illusion of the spirit of place and the feel of things Australian, t h a n for credibility of plot. A mixture of realism and allegory, it rehearses the themes of power and love which engaged Lawrence during the war years. Our old acquaintances, the Lion and the Unicorn, are sent once more into dialectical 95 The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod. (1922) are marginal cases. I n the first the tawny-eyed Italian hero Ciceio is consistently a 'tiger', and t h e potent horse is part of a 'Red Indian' circus act; but animals and animal imagery are not in central focus, in spite of incidental similes which help characterize. See Leo Gurko's "The Lost Girl: D . H . Lawrence as 'a Dickens of the Midland"', PMLA, L X V I I I (1963), 602. Lawrence's animal rhetoric is of even less importance in Aaron's Rod, although w e have noted its didactic image of the birds of passion in connection with t h e theme of balance in t h e marriage of Will and A n n a Brangwen. 96 Introduction in Viking Compass B o o k s edition (N. Y., I960), pp. v i i - x , taken from the Heinemann Phoenix Edition (London, 1955). 97 Letter June 4, 1922 cited in Aldington, p. viii.

164

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

conflict; but Lawrence now seems pessimistic about a balance between the two principles, or the possibility of a renaissance of European culture overseas. I n pursuit of his dark, authoritarian gods of the wild he has stepped outside what had previously served as the framework of his thought. I t is painful for his autobiographical hero Somers, off on a new scent, to hear the political leader Ben Cooley (Kangaroo) praise his wartime essays, preach against fixity, and speak of the need for authority. Himself an unhappy confusion of two principles and two sexes, Kangaroo says some of the right Laurentian things, but is radically mistaken in his Whitmanesque faith in universal love. For Lawrence-Somers the reign of love is over and we could not, in any case, have universal brotherhood combined with the hierarchical principle of power and authority. For all his grotesque physical resemblance to his Australian totem Kangaroo, the would-be saviour (partly Jewish) is a manifestation of the Unicorn, the principle of increase, peace and plenty. We must not be deceived by the occasional roars of this heretical, humanist 98 lamb. In Chapter VI ("Kangaroo") Somers, on first meeting, sees immediately t h a t he is both a protective Kangaroo and a Jehovah figure. He wants to establish "my state of Australia as a kind of Church" with himself Pope-patriarch as the "wise subtle spirit of life" had suggested in his memory of Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor". His face takes on the "odd look of a sheep or a kangaroo" or again " a pondering eternal look, like the eternity of the lamb of God grown into a sheep". Lawrence, we recall, had already written broadly satiric verses about the Evangelistic Beasts of Venetian iconography, of the Lion of J u d a h ("St. Mark") bewitched by the silvery voice of the lamb which resembles the dulcet tones of Kangaroo." Kangaroo's private storm-troopers, the tribal and nationalist Dig98

His is to be a church without dogma, concerned with the material and psychological good of man, not with his eternal salvation. The supernatural dimensions has vanished. 99 In Chapter X I Somers the prophet declares "You sort of figure yourself as a Kangaroo of Judah, instead of a Lion of Judah".

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

165

gers, are happy (like the crusading lions) to indulge themselves in the voluptuous pleasures of bloodshed in the sacred cause. Knowing that his movement needs more support of this violent kind, Kangaroo invites Somers to become his complementary tiger 100 to keep up the crown. The Australian knows he is ultimately Unicorn, and offers with what is indeed " a heavy playfulness", to tie a bayonet to his nose for the sake of the archetype. According to his version of "The Crown" the two pillars of the world do not fight each other. The common enemy consists, humanly speaking, of jackals, hyenas and ant-men full of cold energy; dingoes, rabbits, rats andstarlings. 101 If we do not understand how seriously Lawrence takes Christianity as his great enemy, we may not (as Graham Hough has said) 102 understand why Somers is so impressed by the secularized caricature of agape in Kangaroo, or why the ultimate rejection of this figure (left unloved to die of a bullet through his marsupial pouch) involves a special trauma for Somers. In condemning Kangaroo to die because he will not say that he loves him, Somers is also doing something very like denying mother 1 0 0 Somers is a mail suffering from murderous, nihilistic impulses. At the conclusion of Chapter V I I I , "Volcanic Evidence" he describes himself as 'a sort of human bomb' and as having " m y devil coiled up exultant like a black c a t " in his belly. 1 0 1 The carrion creatures and the hard-shelled, egotist ants are familiar types in Lawrence's vocabulary of abuse. The dingoes, rabbits, rats and starlings from which Australia is to be saved are undesirable immigrants into the innocent continent, the dingo itself having arrived fairly recently with the blackfellows from Asia, and the rest of the pests with Europeans. Metaphysically, Australia is to be made a country fit for sheep (another immigrant), about which Lawrence is extremely negative. Kangaroo's paradoxical position is that he would use the tiger for peace and increase. A further irony is the obvious resemblance of a Kangaroo to a giant rabbit. 102 The Dark Sun, p. 112-113. For good measure Lawrence also associates the round-bellied Cooley with Buddha, both by the connotations of his coolie name and in his recurrent, trancelike postures of heavy, half tropical beauty. Lawrence had arrived in Australia from Ceylon where his American friends, the Brewsters, were studying Buddhism, this other rejected religion of the old dead world. Amorous Walt Whitman, as already mentioned in this study, is also involved.

166

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

and women generally. 103 In Chapter V, previous to this rejection, Somers had had a nightmare in which a terrifying madwoman, at once mother, wife and all the girls of his youth, rises to accuse him of denying her and betraying her great love. Frightened into submission in this case, he protests that he does love. But the woman, she seemed almost old now — only shed a few bitter tears, bitter as vitriol from her distorted face and . . . turned, as it seemed to the dreaming Somers, away to the sullen and dreary, everlasting hell of repudiation. Somers rejects love as the motherly Kangaroo understands this, as he also does the claim of his wife Harriet that love be the primary motive of his life. The novel's sub-plot of his struggle with the female and her values is a variation and amplification of the 'political' plot. Woman, Kangaroo-Christianity, and the supremacy of ideal love have all to be rejected by the free seeker of dark gods. As far as anyone knows, Australia has not been blessed with giant mutations of the domestic cat which could inhibit the rabbit principle. For purposes of myth and metaphorical analogy Lawrence smuggles into Australia a bloody legend of creatures "as big as a smallish leopard". A neighbor tells Somers (Chapter V) t h a t he had seen in the tropical North a striped 'tiger-cat' that had disemboweled a large male Kangaroo (another of these cats had fought with a prize boar-hound to their common destruction). The human Kangaroo's 'disembowelment' comes about in a show-down between the Diggers and a radical socialist movement headed by the lean, catlike Willie Struthers. Although Struthers has his party line of mateship equality, and universal brotherhood of the working class, and he appeals to the proletarian-born Somers on that basis, he is, under the mask of his abstract love, a blood-thirsty tiger. Like his opponent Kangaroo he 103

The womanless Kangaroo, 'wedded to his ideals', makes a very feminine appeal for Somers* affections, using a great deal of the emotional bullying which Lawrence associates with spiritual women. Hough, noting the female in Kangaroo, calls attention to the vaguely homosexual tone of the relationship with Somers (op. cit., p. 111).

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

167

expresses, in his real nature, a principle contrary to his creed. As leader of the democratic herd he neither likes to shake hands nor does he like to be touched in any way; he has no share of bloodconscious solidarity with mankind, and is essentially a solitary killer. Somers wavers between the two principles at the final confrontation. At one moment he gloated with the Diggers against the black and devilish figure of the isolated man Struthers on the platform, who halfcrouched as if he were going to jump, his face black and satanic. And then, as the numbers came, unbearable in its ghastly striking: Eight! like some hammer stroke on the back of his brain, and he jumped up into the air like a lunatic, at the same moment as Struthers sprung with a clear leap, like a cat, towards the group of static grinning exsoldiers. (Chap. XVI) In the resultant melee the provident Kangaroo is fatally wounded. Since Somers is identified with the ripping cat it is, figuratively, true enough t h a t he participates in the death of the Digger chief. Tired of politics and the human world, Somers turns for relief to unspoiled nature and to the wonder of animal creation. At the Sydney Zoo, for example, he feels a "dark animal tenderness", obviously a matter of blood rather than ideal love, for gentle sensitive Kangaroos. We may consult Lawrence's poem "Kangaroo" in Birds, Beasts and Flowers for fuller understanding of the emotion and the impression. Meditating on whales Somers sees, in these fortunate creatures, emblems of a transcendant harmony in which power and love, isolation and community, are reconciled. He wishes that he himself could swim clean away from the cloying Whitmanesque love of mankind: if one could only be warm-blooded, icily self-sufficient as a fish, and enjoy a non-verbal communication like the huge, phallic seabeasts. 104 He recoils from "the ideal of love become like an octopus 104

Gf. my full treatment of this metaphor in connection with Moby Dick and Lawrence's whale poems in Pansies and Last Poems, pp. 99-101.

168

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

with . . . white arms enwreathing the world", and "an ever-renewed dragon with its foul poison breath" (Chap. XIII). Consequently, the dying Kangaroo undergoes a final metamorphosis. On his deathbed he threatens "like a dying snake rearing u p " , and, in another image his shadowed face is like " a dusky cuttlefish under a pool, deep down" (Chap.' XVII). The 'foul poison breath' becomes the smell in the room t h a t no amount of perfume can remove. The action of Kangaroo, it should be plain, is governed by the ideology of "The Crown" (1915) and by the war-time essay on Whitman (repudiating his amorous love), which Lawrence had revised in Sicily and had published in 1921.105 The scenery is new, but the myth and its conflicts are old. Under the costume of the native Kangaroo we see the detested lamb and the unicorn principle of love. In America, by contrast, the Laurentian myth undergoes a radical transformation as the author attempts to shed all traces of Christianity, to absorb the wild spirit of place, and to utter a new word. The immediate forerunner of Lawrence's St. Mawr is a red Australian stallion called Adam. Travelling in Mexico in 1923, Lawrence partially re-cast and re-wrote the manuscript of a novel on which he had agreed to collaborate with an Australian woman named Mollie Skinner. 106 In transmuting her original story The House of Ellis into The Boy in the Bush he added, among other things, horseriding scenes from his New Mexico experience 107 and a final chapter (XXVI) entitled "The Rider on the Red Horse". 108 The novel's now feral hero, Jack Grant, described as a 'lamb' when he arrived from England in the first chapter, rides off into the 105

Arnold, D. H. Lawrence and America, p. 85-91. The first published version of the essay has high praise for Whitman, but still rejects amorous love. The version in Studies is more emotional and more negative about Whitman. 106 Moore, Life and Works, p. 209. 107 Op. cit. 108 Miss Skinner, in Nehls, II, 271, say that the last two chapters are Lawrence's additions.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

169

interior wild with three women and ambitions of setting up a patriarchial domain. His unfallen, adamic horse, with whom he is in special touch communion, is clearly an expression of his passionate self, his 'blood'. The Boy in the Bush was published in 1924. In J a n u a r y of t h a t year Lawrence, on an unhappy visit to bleak and horseless London, wrote to a friend in Taos an apostrophe to the horse in which he claimed t h a t pedestrian man, deprived symbolically of his better half, was no good. 109 Back in New Mexico in the spring of t h e same year he retired to the pine woods about his mountain ranch to compose a new story, St. Mawr, in which he discharged his hatred of English life and rode away, in spirit, to the American southwest. For all his demonic wildness St. Mawr is a fairly conventional emblem only slightly touched with the sense of 'otherness' on which Lawrence insists discursively in this troubling marriage of prophetic essay and dramatic fable. I t is the expressionist New Mexican landscape t h a t dramatizes Lawrence's deeper poetic intuitions, and this, as we shall see, is figured as a dragon force. The function of the sainted horse is to lead the heroine, the rootless American Lou Witt, back to the holy wilderness from which the next impulse of life is to come. St. Mawr, who with his "wild brilliant, alert head . . . seemed to look at her out of another world", shows up the impotence of the modern age (in which he himself refuses to breed) and of modern males who cannot master the life-forces he represents. Rico, Lou's handsome husband, is an aesthetic sham given to uneasy backward glances "like a horse t h a t is edging away f r o m its master". All sweetness and civility on the surface, he fears "to erupt like some suddenly wicked horse". I n men like Rico, Lou is to say to her sardonic mother a f t e r her eyes have been opened, "the animal has gone queer and wrong". Mrs. Witt, full of demonish Texan energy and will, sympathizes with the stallion as well, giving an equine pronunciation to the affected title belle-mere which her son-in-law bestows on her.

109

Letters, II, 767-770.

170

T H E ANIMA T.S IN FICTION

Two squires of low degree are in right relationship with the dangerous St. Mawr. Lewis the bearded Welsh groom, a feral type with pale grey eyes like a wild-cat, insists, correctly enough, that the horse is not bad but badly managed. Phoenix, a Mexican Navajo from Arizona, in feudal relations to his patrona Mrs. Witt, has an aboriginal understanding of wild vitality. These two servants, although unsatisfactory as potential husbands, are still men in whom the instinct for lordship is not yet dead. In England the great god Pan, spirit of the wild, may still be glimpsed as a hidden mystery in a horse, but men, in general, have lost vitalizing contact with him. This emerges clearly from a discussion between the questing Lou and Dean Vyner, artist, alchemist and village character, in whose goatish and Mephistophelean appearance there lingers a trace of the diminished, fallen Pan. 1 1 0 Rico, with his arched, Mephistophelean brows and pseudo sexuality (his marriage has become a nervous, platonic arrangement), is a mockery of Pan. The turning point of the tale is a moment of panic on an expedition to a hill place on the Welsh border called The Devil's Chair. St. Mawr instinctively recoils at a dead adder in his path. Rico, as insentient as the late Gerald Crich, but less masterful, tries, with explosive results, to compel the horse onward in a manifestation of blind, abstract will divorced from an intuitive self. The horse, thrown backwards in the struggle, manages to hurt Rico seriously and to spoil the good looks of another young man. An outraged County society demands that the horse be cut. Reversed, the thwarted force St. Mawr represents can become purely evil. In retrospective vision Lou recalls a twisting red beast "whose inverted bulk seemed to fill the universe", how he was "almost like some terrible lizard, for several moments"; and by this dragon trope St. Mawr is connected with the life energies so imaged both in the New Mexican part of the story and the section of The Plumed Serpent which Lawrence had already written at Chapala in 110

Lawrence's " P a n in America", a n e x p a n s i o n of this t h e m e , m a k e s plain t h a t for h i m P a n still lingers in America (Phoenix, pp. 2 2 - 3 1 ) .

T H E A N I M A L S I N FICTION'

171

1923. 111 I n the context of "poison bites of the myriad evil ones" of Lou's general vision of evil emanating from inverted energy, St. Mawr has a fleeting resemblance to the scorpion-horses of Apollyn "reversed and hellish, stinging as it were backwards" in Lawrence's explication of Apocalypse,112 Lou and her mother smuggle St. Mawr away to Texas. There he loses both his coldness and his apocalyptic associations and is left behind, apparently as an inadequate focus of what Lawrence wishes to reveal. I n the last analysis he is only an emblem. The final pages of the tale, in which the seething mountain landscape is vividly rendered in all its sense of danger and beauty, move toward creative symbolism. Lawrence glories in the animosity of the spirit of place, "the crude, half created spirit of place like some serpent-bird forever attacking man . . .". " E v e r y new stroke of civilization", he tells us, "has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated to the 'dragon' . . ." But there is a wild exhilaration in the contest in which man taps some of the primoridal dragon power. The very humming birds, blue jays, hawks and woodpeckers of the region are charged with ferocious vitality. 1 1 3 The secret knowledge of the New England pioneer women who had preceded Lou into the wild was t h a t in this animist landscape of power and beauty there was no merciful God in the sky. Like Lawrence, she liked it better where 'God' was "more awful and more

111 See Moore, Intelligent Heart, p p . 314-345 for t h e f u l l h i s t o r y of composition. L a w r e n c e completed t h e n o v e l in O x a c a in 1925 w i t h a g a p of n e a r l y eighteen m o n t h s b e t w e e n t h e first a n d t h e second s t a r t . I n C h a p a l a L a w r e n c e h a d been in correspondence w i t h t h e E n g l i s h h e r m e t i c i s t F r e d e r i c k Carter, whose first m a n u s c r i p t of The Dragon of the Apocalypse Lawrence r e a d (See Phoenix, p p . 292-303). Mexico a n d d r a g o n s were clearly in L a w rence's m i n d as h e composed his T a o s s t o r y . 112 These t e r r i b l e creatures, c o m b i n i n g horse w i t h locust, lion, a n d scorpion, were once good " b u t being superseded, of a p a s t order, a r e now reversed a n d hellish stinging, as it were, b a c k w a r d s " , Apocalypse, p p . 177-178. 113 Cf. t h e p o e m s " H u m m i n g B i r d " a n d " T h e Blue J a y " in Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

172

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

splendid", "shaggy as the pine trees and horrible as the lightning", b u t the source of the kind of pure energy we had seen in the stallion. Clarified by his transfer to his home region, the mestiso Phoenix 114 becomes part of the Indian spirit of squalor and savagery which, though an expression of the dragon's resistence, is figured as rat. The disenchanted Lou sees him operating as a promiscuous rat in pursuit of shawled Indian and Mexican women who are 'furtive', 'rat-like' and 'mousey'. In "lurking invidious Indians with something like a ratlike secretness and defeatedness in their bearing" she sees "the weight of dirtlike inertia" against which "the latent fire of the vast landscape struggled". Lawrence is not a primitivist in any conventional sense of the word. 115 In St. Mawr there is a double rejection 116 both of the modern age with its 'Augean stable of metallic filth' and of the old savage squalor. Every civilization, the author notes, falls into a sordidness when it loses its 'inward vision and cleaner energy'. Pack rats, in the pioneer story become 'symbols of the debasing malevolence' t h a t was part of the spirit of the place. When Lou and her mother arrive to take possession of the ranch they see what Mrs. Witt calls 'the boss of the place' — a pack-rat sitting erect on a roof plank 'like an old Indian'. Las Chivas, the mountain ranch, recalls in its name the goat herd kept there in the earlier pioneer experiment. These beasts of increase and plenty, however, bring in flies, rats and smells, their own touch of squalor. Fortunately, the natural ecology itself imposes harsh limits on their endless generation, the mysterious malevolence refusing to allow a single principle to triumph. These goats, called

114

H e is associated with the Arizona eity and there is reason in this for the n a m e tag; but we m a y suspect t h a t Lawrence is having a private joke: this fallen Indian is an ironic allusion to t h e regenerate, burning m a n associated with Lawrence's old emblem. 115 Kingsley Widmer, "The Primitivistic Aesthetic: D. H . Lawrence", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X V I I (1959) 344-349, shows Lawrence antithetical to primitivism in its traditional sense. 116 Widmer, op. cit., p. 352.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

173

'fire mouths' because they destroy tender young vegetation, may themselves been seen as a paradoxical expression of dragon. On an indefinite leave of absence from Rico, Lou has retired to the mountain in complete disillusion with the tamed human world where not even sex is any longer a sacred mystery. 117 She is a vestal to the wild pan-spirit which she believes (against all the logic of the landscape) cares for her. Her special brand of primitivism and her dream of real manhood, expressed in one of her New Mexico conversations with her mother, deserves close attention since it sums up and clarifies a great deal of what Lawrence's fiction has been trying to convey. I don't want to be an animal like a horse, or a cat, or a lioness, though they all fascinate me, the way they get life straight . . . I don't admire the cave man, and that sort of thing. But think, mother, if we could get our life straight from the source, as the animals do, and still be ourselves . . . A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is even. And he'd never cease to wonder . . . He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one fixed automatic thing. Naturally such a dream of human possibility can be given literary substance far more easily in romance and poetic fable than in a fictional world in which profane questions of social and historical fact obtrude. St. Mawr itself seems to move on more than one plane of imaginative reality. Mrs. Witt, as Graham Hough has observed, "makes all the impact of a person met in real life", 118 and this effect is achieved by ordinary methods of characterization in realistic fiction. Lewis, the aboriginal Briton, carries a fringe of Celtic twilight in a home-made folk-lore of moonbeams and little people about which both he and the tale appear to be in earnest. Emblematic St. Mawr is both a horse and an allegory. The expressionist landscape of Taos, dragon by analogy, is a concrete universal of 117 The rat-like promiscuity of jazz age moderns, intent on 'a good time', is as displeasing as Phoenix's sexual squalor. 118 The Dark Sun, p. 182.

174

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

forces beyond good and evil in which it is not difficult to believe while reading. Such affirmation as the story makes, however, is conditioned by the nihilistic irony of Mrs. Witt, who has the last unbelieving word 119 after her daughter's raptures over the impersonal animism that wants her. In response to the call of the wild, the disillusioned Lou undertakes a savage pilgrimage from London to Taos mountain, shedding enroute the dead skin of her old'civilized' consciousness; she wills to recover her own soul. That her via negativa may not be at an end is the subversive Laurentian hint with which the story closes. If she is to free herself from all illusion, then it is possible that Las Chivas itself will go the way of St. Mawr and other created forms. St. Mawr is best described not simply as a totemic story but as a religious, one, an individual quest for connection with the dragonwilderness of potentiality so as to get life "straight from the source". I t declares that European civilization is finished, t h a t God, the ideal personal God of Christianity, is dead, but that mana endures forever. I t looks with enthusiasm upon a universe of vital chaos, constant disintegration, innocent of divine compassion; and its interest is centered, not in man and society, but in " t h a t which is non-human". In The Plumed Serpent Lawrence will t r y to imagine social and political consequences of his religious vision. E. T H E S E R P E N T P O W E R

In considering the major expressions of Lawrence's animal rhetoric in his fiction, we have examined two long tales, "The F o x " and "St. Mawr", where the fox and the stallion, two emblems important to Lawrence, are there singled out for special treatment. In the novels, nevertheless, we can best trace continuity and development. 119 Something of a 'fire mouth' herself, her comment on the price of the ranch is "Then I call it cheap, considering all there is to it: even the name". This undercuts Lou's remark "It saves m e from cheapness mother". I t also seems to hint, via the name, at an ironic emblem for the t w o w o m e n on the mountain waiting for Pan, the goat-god.

T H E A N I M A L S I X FICTION

175

If we take a long perspective on these, the following pattern emerges: In The White Peacock the struggle is between the bird, associated with woman, moonlight , culture and false spirituality, and the dark Pan-forces of nature incarnate in the sensual male. The decision seems to be given to the white bird and its values. The dualistic myth of "The Crown" animates The Rainbow. There the creative struggle of Lion and Unicorn principles (manifest as alternate tiger and lamb tropes of human character) is for new, unified being, beyond the polarities of dark and light, male and female. But the phoenix rising in flames, sign of the new man, does not make itself felt as much as the devouring tiger or the annihilating swan in its aphrodisiac frenzy; and the potent, blood-conscious horses, rising from a naturalistic level to creative symbol as they re-affirm God the Father in the flesh, are certainly the most memorable animals in the novel. Like The Rainbow, Women in Love affirms a quasi-mystical balance of male and female principles, a 'star equilibrium'; but the novel is most remarkable for the power with which it dramatizes hatred and disintegration. Its commanding image is the ambivalent figure of Bismarck the rabbit, which Lawrence treats as a creative symbol both of unique life and of dual destruction, 'African' and 'Nordic'. Tiger and lamb figures are themselves absorbed into the enigmatic, demon rabbit. In Kangaroo, by an unhappy modern confusion of principles, Ben Cooley is the lamb who roared. The rejection of this emblematic figure by the tigerish Somers is a rejection of spiritual love in its Christian, Buddhist, or Whitmanian expressions. Recoiling into animal pride and isolation, Somers also rejects organized social love on the Marxist model, seeing behind this a mean envy and an impossible attempt to live by the single principle of equality. The image of power and authority, combined with an animal species of tenderness which is dark and non-spiritual, is the happy whale imagined by Somers. Lawrence's decision is for dark-gods of the potent wild. He seems here to have abandoned his notion of a fruitful marriage of light and dark principles in balance.

176

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

The Plumed Serpent, as his publishers persuaded him to call his Quetzalcoatl,120 is about another type of marriage, ostensibly of two principles, but meaning, in practice, the absorption of light into dark. I t is as if the horse-troop had over-ridden all trace of individual consciousness in Ursula, or as if the surly Annable, changed into a great serpent, had swallowed the white peacock in its pride. Lawrence provides a good sketch of his new world of animistic vision in one of the essays from Morning in Mexico, "The Hopi Snake Dance". There is, for the Pueblo Indian, no perfect God who created us from His knowledge and foreordained all things. There is only the cosmic Sun of Creation, a terrible dragon, but less than we are; the living cosmos is "a great furnace, a dragon's den, whose heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being". Divinity is the outcome, not the origin, and so far the best gods are men, who have won their frail perfection from the dragon-clutch of the resisting cosmos which is yet the source of power. This is the aboriginal wisdom of the world which the faithful Hopi still maintain in essence. If, in Mexico, men "fell into the horror of the crude, pristine gods, the dragons", Lawrence believed t h a t among the Pueblo Indians "even the most terrible dragon is still somewhat gentlehearted". 1 2 1 What Lawrence does is to transfer his experience of Pueblo religion122 to Mexico where, perhaps, some traces of gentleness may still be discovered in the terrible potencies of the dragon whose feathered rain he had seen the Hopi trying to catch. In possession of ancient wisdom new men may legitimately declare themselves to be gods. On the human level the plot of The Plumed Serpent is as follows: Widow of an Irish revolutionary, the heroine Kate Leslie finds herself in Mexico at forty without knowing why she had come to 120

Letters, II, 844. Mornings in Mexico, pp. 150-155. 122 The force of revelation with which New Mexico and Pueblo religion struck Lawrence is described in "New Mexico", Phoenix, pp. 141-147. Cf. also the final section of St. Mawr which celebrates the harsh, beautiful spirit of place and its exhilarating effects. 121

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

177

'this high plateau of death'. She is disgusted with her thrill-seeking American friends, Owen and Villiers, and with the insect-like nastiness of Mexico City in its commercialized death-ritual of the bull-fight. In her search for self-renewal she departs from modern America, both Anglo and Hispanic, slowly to immerse herself (with misgivings) in a movement to revive the pre-Columbian gods. This movement is sponsored by the Indian General, Cipriano Viedma, in conjunction with Don Ramón Carrasco, his religious superior. The latter's estate in Sayula, by the strange waters of a lake that is like a mirage, becomes the center of national regeneration. Triumphing over the sickly remains of Catholicism (which has no Laurentian blood-roots in Mexico), offering a vision of life more exciting than socialist equality and European clothes, the new Church and its new order are finally established by national law. Kate herself, her rationalism overcome by the Laurentian grace of blood, consents to join the new pantheon with Don Ramón and the General. The worth of this novel, and its place in the Lawrence canon, are still matters of dispute. There is general agreement that it contains, in its evocation of place, some of Lawrence's most brilliant travel writing; but, in spite of passages which can suspend disbelief by a sense of ritual and wonder, Lawrence did not everywhere succeed in fusing the visionary element with the documentary. Setting aside the question of overall value, we find, on close inspection, t h a t for all its complex of symbolism, the novel makes less systematic use of animals than might be expected from title, theme and setting. A multitude of creatures are briefly realized without being part of any symbolic pattern. A limited number of animal figures function as significant emblems of character and doctrine in terms of the new Quetzalcoatl myth which absorbs, and transmutes in some cases, the bestiary derived from "The Crown". No animals emerge as creative symbol in the manner of Bismarck and Ursula's horses. The most insistent metaphorical presence is the dragon-snake which expresses the subterranean nature of Mexico. As K a t e perceives quite early

178

THE ANIMALS I N FICTION

Superficially, Mexico might be all right: with its suburbs of villas, its central fine streets, its thousands of motor-cars, its tennis and its bridgeparties. The sun shone brilliantly every day, and the big bright flowers stood out from the trees. I t was a holiday. Until you were alone with it. And then the undertone was like the low, angry snarling purring of some jaguar spotted with night. There was a ponderous, down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the great folds of the dragon of the Toltecs winding around one and weighing down the soul. And on the bright sunshine was a dark stream of an angry impotent blood, and the flowers seemed to have their roots in spilt blood. The spirit of place was cruel, downdragging, destructive. (Chap. I l l ) Here we see t h a t Lawrence, naturalizing his Old World tiger, assimilates its destructive spirit with t h e larger conception of the heavy, blood dragon. K a t e , whose affinities (in this context) are with the bright quetzel, feels, a t the start of the next chapter, "like a bird r o u n d whose body a snake was coiled itself. Mexico was the s n a k e " (Chap. IV). And it is Cipriano who will not let her go. W a t c h i n g him a t a dinner party She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in the man suggested the heavy ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins. That was what it was, the heavy-ebbing blood of powerful reptiles, the dragon of Mexico. (Chap. I l l ) H e r fascination for his glittering black eyes is tinged with fear; she feels "somewhat as t h e bird feels when t h e snake is watching i t " . I n t h e conclusion of Chapter X X V I I there is a rapprochement between herself and a snake who clearly recalls the Lord of the underworld of Lawrence's Sicilian " S n a k e " poem. Married to Cipriano b y t h e rites of the new religion, b u t still p a r t l y resisting the downward pull of Mexico, she is strangely aware of his presence with her during a t e m p o r a r y absence. Suddenly before her she saw a long, dark soft rope lying over a pale boulder. But her soul was softly alert at once. I t was a snake, with a subtle pattern along its soft dark back.

THE ANIMALS IX FICTION

179

Feeling her presence, it contracts itself and disappears, "with incredible soft quickness", into a little gap at the bottom of a wall. When it had all gone in, Kate could see the last fold still, and the little flat head resting on the fold like the devil with his chin on his arms . . . So the wicked sparks of the eyes looked out at her from within the recess. Watching out of its own invisibility.123 Unlike the man in the Sicilian poem, K a t e is not betrayed by the voice of her human education into throwing anything. Meditating on all the unseen things and places of the earth, she finds herself disposed to accept all creation and all modes of existence. Between herself and the devil-snake, we are told, she feels 'a certain reconciliation'. This is clearly a prelude to her agreement to remain in Mexico in the last chapter. General Viedma, a pure-blooded Zapotec educated at Oxford, has other analogies and meanings beyond his primary one of coatlsnake. As 'red Huitzilopchtli of the Knife', the war-god, he is the destructive element in the god-head, a dangerous serpent power that rises from below and is associated with earth, darkness, fire and blood. Flaming poppy, cardinal bird and favorite red horse also help compose his iconography. By his yellow fire and his deadly sting 124 he recalls the yellow scorpion of an incident in his childhood. In his fearlessness and innocence he had presented this venomous creature to the kindly English bishop who was to adopt and educate him (Chap. III). 125

123 Wicked and earthly here, the bright eyes of the invisible snake connect h i m by analogy with Quetzalcoatl, the unseen watcher in the sky whose symbol of the Morning Star I discuss in another context. Like the emblematic toad of folklore, Lawrence's dragon bears a precious jewel in his head. 124 The "First Song of Huitzilopochtli" (Chap. X X I I ) explicates various symbolic colors with which he is associated: "Down in the center of the earth/ Is the yellow, serpent-yellow, shining of m y sun". Those who run athwart this serpent flame are bitten and m u s t die. Huitzilopochtli's primary color, however, is cardinal red. 125 I n "Auto D a F e " (Chap. X V I I ) the images of the church at Sayula are rowed out to the Isle of Scorpions on the lake and sent back to heaven in a

180

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

Finally, General Viedma is an American Pan, the primordial goat-god of the wild. With his tufted beard, arched eyebrows and impersonality in the act of sex, he is at once the 'Devil and anathema of our forefathers', 126 and the divinity of which we caught a glimpse in the horse St. Mawr, but also, much earlier, in the satyr Annable. Brought to earth and transformed into the goddess Malintzi, the 'green blade of grass', Kate brings little effective force of mercy into the godhead. She had recoiled from the bull-fight (Chap. I); she had gone to elaborate lengths (Chap. XIV) to save a bird on the lake from the senseless violence by village boys. But when Cipriano in "Huitzilopochtli's Night" (Chap. X X I I ) executes the 'grey dogs' who had tried to kill Ramon, she ultimately accepts the spirit of human sacrifice in which the deed is performed. As the new Laurentian female, woman or goddess, she is required to admit the primacy of the snake and leave the running of the greater world to him. Contrasting emblems of the new faith, more complex, but no more consistent than the old duality of "The Crown", indicate varying relations between bird and snake and raise questions concerning what the bird stands for. In "The Plaza" (Chap. VIII), where K a t e is beginning to know the new movement, she receives one of the Quetzalcoatl hymns on a pamphlet which bears a rough print of a serpent that had its tail in its mouth; a curious deviation from the Mexican emblem which is an eagle standing on an opal, a cactus with great flat leaves, and holding in its beak and claws a writhing snake. This eagle stood slim upon a serpent, within the circle of the snake that had black markings round its back, like short black rays pointing inwards. At a little distance, the emblem suggested an eye. pillar of flame. The bishop had preserved the child Cipriano by having him place the scorpion in the clerical hat — an action that carries ironic suggestions in the light of later developments. Cipriano had been destined for the priesthood by his adoptive father. 126 "America, Listen to Your Own", Phoenix, p. 90. See also "Pan in America", Phoenix, 22-31.

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

181

The ancient enmity of bird and serpent, Olympian and underworld powers, is ended. The eye, it develops in the course of the book, is itself the watching Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star, the pool of peace and regeneration, but unless we look at the new unity from the perspectives of infinity we see clearly enough t h a t the eagle of the spirit is circumscribed by the endless serpent. The emblem gets extended meanings by a species of repetition at once incremental and circular. In "Lords of the Day and Night" (Chap. XI), a Quetzalcoatl smith forges for his patron a slender, wingless bird within a circle of iron. This, he explains to K a t e "is the bird within the sun" the unfinished quetzal creature, whose wings are to come later, is thus a hardly disguised phoenix of the Mexican soul enclosed within the ambiguous serpent power. Mexico, K a t e had previously seen, was in the toils of its old dragon past, full of people half-created, at the mercy of old influences. Yet the way forward is the cyclic way backwards; for the snake, by latent metaphor, does have a natural capacity for shedding its old skin and is thus an analogue of the type of power needed by the bird. Ramón explains to Cipriano (Chap. X I I I ) t h a t Mexico is like an ancient egg, still sound, on which 'the bird of Time' has been sitting for centuries. A reader may be in some doubt whether what is to emerge will more resemble quetzal or coatl. "The Opening of the Church" (Chap. XXI), presents another picture of bird-serpent relations. It was a naked man, carved, archaic, and rather flat, holding his right arm over his head, and on the right arm balanced a carved wooden eagle with outspread wings whose upper suiface gleamed with gold, near the light, and whose under surface was black shadow. Round the heavy left leg of the man image was carved a serpent, also glimmering gold, and its golden head rested in the hand of the figure, near the thigh. The face of the figure was stark. This is, of course, an idol of the living Quetzalcoatl, Lord of the Two Ways, in a posture recalling religious exercises Don Ramón performs ; but it suggests an equal partnership of bird and serpent power which the novel does not make very credible.

182

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

W h a t t h e novel dramatizes most powerfully is the downward p a t h of t h e serpent, the pull of blood. If Lawrence m a y be said anywhere t o have succeeded in showing a radical u n i t y of serpent, a n d bird, it is in t h e impressive choral singing and dance in " T h e P l a z a " (Chap. V I I ) ; b u t let us observe t h e terms of this u n i t y a n d how it comes about. T h e half-naked ring of men in the torchlight, "Something dark, heavy, a n d reptilian in their silence and their softness", fascinate K a t e in their male power. As t h e y sing their wordless song to a d r u m "touching the sensitive m e m b r a n e of t h e n i g h t " , t h e y are transformed into birds, b u t distinctly unspiritual ones. . . . like birds flying from a tree, one after the other, the individual voices arose, till there was a strong, intense, curiously weighty soaring and sweeping of male voices, like a dark flock of birds flying and dipping in unison. The ambiguous undulations of t h e heavy bird-song project a snake. I n t h e dance which follows all execute 'the savage bird-tread', as t h e y go " d o w n t h e p a t h of t h e s n a k e " , while " t h e wild song rose again like a bird t h a t has alighted for a second". The great double wheel, pure male on the outside, bisexual within, revolves b y the impersonal power of sex, t h e creative aspect of t h e ambiguous serpent; b u t this, too, becomes t h e image of a mysterious turning bird in a cosmic dance of generation. I t was sex, but the greater, not the lesser sex. The waters over the earth wheeling upon the waters under the earth, like an eagle silently wheeling upon its own shadow. She felt her own sex and her womanhood caught up and identified in the slowly revolving ocean of nascent life, the dark sky of the men lowering and wheeling above. She was not herself, she was gone in the ocean of the great desire. As the man whose fingers touched hers was gone in the ocean that is male, stooping over the face of the waters. The slow, vast soft touching revolution of the ocean above upon ocean below . . . Herself gone into her greater self, her womanhood consummated in the greater womanhood. And where her fingers touched the fingers of the man, the quiet spark, like the dawning star, shining between her and the greater manhood of men.

THE ANIMALS IN MOTION

183

Her feet were feeling the way of the dance-step. She was beginning to learn softly to loosen the uplift of all her life, and let it pour slowly, darkly . . . into the dark body of the earth. Caught in this sensual music, bird and snake are wedded in one body of desire. I n the process the unpleasant associations of serpent are removed, and heavy birds of passion, sinking downward to darkness, become an expression of blood rather than spirit. Lawrence's cosmic analogies are with an imaginable human state in the life of a character who seems, at this point of the story, real enough. And the dance is presented as an experience, not a program for literal imitation. Don Ramón, avatar of the undivided Quetzalcoatl, is an aristocrat of almost pure Spanish lineage, his blood only remotely Indian. He belongs to Mexico in his union with Cipriano (a relationship that bears a curious resemblance in some ways to that between N a t t y Bumpo and the Great Serpent). 127 He is also Mexican because the fair-faced, bearded god is part of Mexico's heritage. A primitivist by choice, Don Ramón is a graduate of Columbia, where he seems to have studied anthropology. He is well familiar with cyclic theories of dying and reviving gods which find their way into the Quetzalcoatl hymns. At the mythic level the conception of Quetzalcoatl is quite consistent. A celestial creature, he is greater than the serpent, whose fertilizing and destructive power he, as the first term of the revolving trinity, contains. 128 Identified with "the wind, the breath of 127 recall L a w r e n c e ' s high p r a i s e of Cooper's L e a t h e r s t o c k i n g novels a n d t h e A m e r i c a n m y t h which h e felt t h e y c o n t a i n e d . L a w r e n c e n o t e d t h a t t h e p r i m a r y relation in t h e series w a s m a l e t o m a l e t h e Deerslayer w i t h his b l o o d - b r o t h e r Chingachgook. Studies, p p . 55-71. 128 I t b e a r s a c e r t a i n r e s e m b l a n c e t o H i n d u cosmology. B r a h m a , t h e Creator, Shiva, t h e D e s t r o y e r , a n d Vishnu, t h e P r e s e r v e r , a r e all B r a h m a . Cipriano, like Shiva, is b o t h t h e phallic a n d t h e d e a t h - d e a l i n g s n a k e . R a m ó n , in h i s cherishing aspect, is a V i s h n u . K a t e is largely t h e r e as a m a t t e r of convenience, a t m o s t t h e g e n e r a t i v e a s p e c t of Shiva-Cipriano in t h e cosmic dance. Ironically, t h e green v e g e t a t i o n goddess is, o n t h e n a t u r a l level, a w o m a n p a s t childbearing. A n a c c o u n t of L a w r e n c e ' s a v a i l a b l e h e r m e t i c

184

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

life", "the eyes t h a t see and are unseen", 129 his sky colors are blue and white rather than the red and green of the earthly quetzal. As we have seen, red and green are assigned respectively to Huitzilopochtli and Malintzi, dual extensions of his single nature. Theologically, the sacred union of Don Ramón with Cipriano is prior to and more important than the marriage of Cipriano and Kate. If, in the natural sense, Don Ramón would be the child of the second union, as the divine Quetzalcoatl he produces first the wargod and then, conjointly with this son, Malintzi. I t is literally true t h a t Don Remón creates a role first for himself and then for Cipriano and Kate. One of Kate's insights (Chap. IX), had been t h a t "the highest thing Mexico might produce would be some powerful relationship of man to man". As below, so above the female assumes a subordinate place. In the new cosmology, in which the wheeling, male ring encloses an inner, generative mystery, the hated Magna Mater who had caused Lawrence so much trouble in the past can hardly emerge as a threat. Unlike the Christ he replaces, Quetzalcoatl has no mother. He returns, with the compliance of Don Ramón, from the 'earthfilmy' waters of Lake Sayula which is itself an analogue of the mysterious Morning Star. Hardly water at all, the lake's 'pale milk

sources will be found in William York Tindall's D. H. Lawrence and Susan his Cow. L. D. Clark's "Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence's 'The Plumed Serpent'" (Austin, 1964), pp .113-125, offers, in terms of Aztec mythology, a slightly different reading of the trinity; but there is no radical conflict with my own analysis of Quetzalcoatl as the generative figure. The present study, less interested in possible historical sources than in the Laurentian shaping of universal archetypes, is particularly indebted to Phillip Wheelwright's study — of sun, wheel, serpent and primal triad in his "Emblem and Archetype", The Burning Fountain (Bloomington, 1954) pp. 123-154. 129 Kate's reflection on the beautiful Quetzalcoatl rather than the "fanged, feathered, writhing stone of the National Museum" (Chap. III). That is not the one, she thinks, who perhaps had "sailed into heaven, like a meteor returning . . . gone back as a peacock streaming into the night, or as a bird of Paradise, its tail gleaming like the wake of a meteor . . .".

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

185

of thunder' gives the illusion of having no boundaries, although it is, in mystical sense, within the cosmic wheel of generation for which the snake dance on the plaza provides an image. On the lake (Chap. V), Kate and the reader first hear of the star from boatmen and swimmers who call themselves Quetzalcoatl's men. Moving with the current of the frail waters, at peace Kate felt she had met the mystery of the natives, the strange and mysterious gentleness between a Scylla and Chrybdis of violence; the small, poised body of the bird that waves wings of thunder and wings of fire and night, in flight. But central between the flash of lightning and the break of thunder, the still, soft body of the bird, poised and soaring forever. In a late chapter (XXVI) Kate decides that Ramón's godhead lies neither in the blood nor in the spirit but in the star within him: "The mysterious star that unites the vast universal blood with the breath of the spirit, and shines between them both". If, however, we observe what is dramatized rather than what the author asserts, we will find, both in Ramón and in the story, little 'breath of the spirit' in any meaningful sense of that heavily connotative phrase. We can find, between quite monstrous violence, a 'mysterious gentleness', as in the wonder of the wheel dance, but this is clearly of the blood. At the right distance lake, wheel, star and eye merge into the single mystery of the beautiful bird reborn. As soon as a Don Ramón comes into focus with a program of action the problem of belief becomes acute, particularly so if we cannot forget the black demon of misanthrophy130 which, he confesses, howls within him, or his contempt for the 'monkeys'131 to whom he is bringing salva1 3 0 Chap. X I I I . Like Cipriano, with whom he is speaking of hatching the long delayed phoenix, he suffers from a 'black monster' of inward rage and distrusts mankind. In this he recalls the frustrated Lawrence-Somers in Australia. 131 A term he picks up from K a t e (Chap. X V I I ) , where he advises her to hate humanity, to turn beyond it to 'the greater life'.

186

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

tion. At moments he is uncomfortably like Conrad's celebrated Mr. Kurtz. Lawrence himself supplied the inevitable protest in Kate's cry. For heaven's sake let me get out of this and back to simple human people. I loathe the very sound of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. I would father die than be mixed up in it any more. Horrible, really, both Ramón and Cipriano. And they want to put it over me with their high-flown bunk, and their Malintzi... I was born Kate Forrester and I shall die Kate Forrester. I want to go home. (Chap. XXII) America changed Lawrence and, temporarily, the poetic worldview which his art reflects. Yet he was to leave behind his revolving trinity and tangle of dragons, and to return, in Italy, to the basic myth of "The Crown". In poems of his last phase old emblems reappear, while Lady Chatterley's Lover, less cosmological than any major fiction since Sons and Lovers, has minimal contact with Etruscan tombs, but none with Aztec ones. I t is written as if Lawrence had never been to America. I n any case, the animal rhetoric of his Mexican cosmos reveals very familiar European shapes and conceptions which we may here summarize. The phoenix finds his Mexican analogue in the quetzal of new being who sits within the snake-wheel. The cardinal bird, a feathered poppy of excess, suggests, in another way, the nature of the original, flaming phoenix. The subtle serpent, with which Lawrence had come to terms in "The Reality of Peace" during the war, and who had manifested himself in Sicily as the underworld king in the poem "Snake", becomes an analogue both of General Viedma and the great dragon of Mexico. The circling ring of horses t h a t almost captures Ursula in The Rainbow is analogous to the outer circle of male power in the dance of the wheeling snake. The old tiger, transformed into a jaguar in Kate's first perception of the angry spirit of Mexico, finds his human expression in the actions of Ramón in "The Attack on Jamiltepic" (Chap. XIX).

THE ANIMALS IN FICTION

187

There he is repeatedly described as a 'great cat' terrible in battle, exulting in death. We recall the identity of tiger and soldier. Kate herself, before Cipriano, had been a sexual tigress of the breed we recognize by memories of The Rainbow. Suddenly she [Kate] saw herself as men often saw her: the great cat, with its spasms of voluptuousness and its life-long lustful enjoyment of its own isolated, individuality . . . Each time to seize a sort of power, purring upon her own isolated individuality. (Chap. XXVII) Goat-bearded Cipriano, the Pan-figure, is in a line of descent from satyr men that begins with Annable and ends with Lady Chatter ley's lover. The jackal and hyena types of men are changed to grey, coward dogs, with yellow mouths full of rabies, who devour delicate human dreams. Huitzilopochtli keeps a sharp eye open for these, being in this context a protective deity guarding the flock. It does not bother Lawrence that the distinctly wolfish protector of frail 'rabbit' and 'deer' dreams132 is expressing a principle contrary to his nature. For this the poet had severely criticized the Christian lion of "St. Mark". Owen and Villiers, Kate's American companions at the bullfight, are familiar types of 'carrion birds' feeding on rotten sensations. The metaphor is complicated by the fact that they are also (particularly Villiers) expressions of American eagle, will. They are, at any rate, not as repulsive as the citified Mexicans Lawrence de-

132 T h e songs of " H u i t z i l o p o c h t l i ' s N i g h t " (Chap. X X I I ) develop this doctrine. L a w r e n c e is here disposed t o use rabbit and deer as a p p r o v e d t y p e s of h u m a n sensitivity. Carlota, D o n R a m o n ' s intensely spiritual first w i f e , "delicate and sensitive as a C h i h u a h u a dog and w i t h t h e same slightly prominent e y e s " , had, K a t e felt 'a doglike fineness of gentleness'. B u t there is no compassion for her w h e n she dies of convulsions induced b y seeing her husband desecrating t h e church a t S a y u l a (Chap. X V I I ) . She is represented as a n o t h e r 'good' L a u r e n t i a n w o m a n t r y i n g spiritually t o m u r d e r her husb a n d . R a m o n ' s second wife Teresa is also delicate, b u t touched with a flicker of snake imagery as w h e n , defending her submissive, h a r e m role against K a t e , she "raised her head proudly, showing her brownish t h r o a t like a rearing, crested s n a k e " (Chap. X X V I I ) .

188

T H E ANIMALS I N FICTION

scribes by his familiar tropes of 'beetle' and 'insect' in the rhetoric which derives from "The Crown". The bull, from the first a Laurentian creature of small repute, is shown once again as pathetic, slow-witted type, a mere victim like George Saxon. At the bull-fight Kate had always been afraid of bulls, fear tempered with reverence for the great Mithraic beast. And now she saw how stupid he was, in spite of his long horns and his massive maleness. Blindly and stupidly he ran at the rag each time, and the toreadors skipped like fat-hipped girls showing off. (Chap. I) We recall Gudrun dancing aggressively before the baffled Highland bullocks and Lawrence's negative commentary on the father of the herd in "St. Luke". Perhaps the most interesting of the transformations, however, is one of which Lawrence does not seem to be aware. His outlaw fox-totem becomes the homeless red wolf in Taos, where he scorns the threat of pueblo dogs. 133 Red Huitzilopochtli in Mexico, like the lion of "St. Mark", is a guardian of moral law, and protects the flock against rabid grey dogs — a bloody task which he performs with obvious enjoyment. The outsider, become an insider, is fully identified with the savage spirit of place.

183

"The Red Wolf", Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

IV T H E LAST PHASE: P U R E ANIMAL MAN

In flowery Tuscany, where civilized men still lived in harmony with nature; in the ancient places of sensitive, vanished Etruscans; in the ageless beauty of the tranquil Mediterranean where, in his imagination, archaic gods and heroes were living presences, Lawrence found renewed inspiration in his final phase. He never entirely overcame his obsession with social power and glory (as his unfinished Apocalypse testifies), and he still showed his tiger's nature in the savage satire of Pansies and some of his late short stories; but the most impressive part of his achievement from 1926 to his death in 1930 is marked by a new tenderness. Etruscan Places, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Man Who Died, and Last Poems show a Lawrence far more identified with gentle expressions of life than with ferocious destroyers — a shift in emotional focus which makes for a different image of the hero and is itself the result of a changing response to the nature of things. His autumnal blossoming may be said to begin when he takes up residence at Villa Mirenda, outside of Florence, in the spring of 1926. The fertile, smiling Tuscany of landscaped hills and secluded valleys, Lawrence saw, 1 had been shaped through thousands of years by the ceaseless labor of naked human hands; yet in the process of this intensive cultivation neither 'Pan' or 'his children' had been driven away. The countryside, preserved by its irregularity from mechanical, large-scale cultivation, was still 'natural', full

1

"Flowering Tuscany", Phoenix,

pp. 45-46.

190

THE LAST PHASE: P U R E ANIMAL MAN

of nightingales, 2 wild-flowers, and streams t h a t murmured secretly through thickets of blackthorn. Man, without modern machinery, could live without disfiguring the earth; and this ancient place of civilization, without the exhilarating challenge of New Mexico (where all life appeared a savage battle for survival), was clearly still in touch with the sacred wild. I n the garden of Tuscany, into which evil mechanical principles had not yet entered, P a n and his children were a great deal more gentle t h a n in wild America. The virtues Lawrence now celebrated were those of the cultivator, the man who preserved and nourished, whose prime interest was in hea'thy increase and plenty. And, like their surviving offshoots in the same region, 3 the old stock (with whom Lawrence so strongly identified in Etruscan Places) h a d no tradition of bloody conquest , nor did they have the historical Aztec liabilities of cannibalism and mass human sacrifice. The civilization Lawrence read in the art-motifs of Etruscan tombs, which he visited at Eastertide, 1927, was gay, elegant and spontaneous, a " n a t u r a l flowering of life". T h a t it went down before R o m a n efficiency and militarism was no proof of its inferiority — "Because a fool kills a nightingale with a stone, is he therefore greater t h a n the nightingale?" 4 Yet Lawrence remained capable of falsifying his blood response, of ignoring his case against force, insisting t h a t , in accordance with the mystical duality founded in nature and recognized in the animal motifs of the tombs, R o m a n 'wolves' were, in effect, divinely appointed to destroy Etruscan and other 'deer' so as to keep a metaphysical balance. 5 Once again he

- "The Nightingale", Phoenix, pp. 40-44. 3 "Italy today is far more Etruscan in its pulse t h a n Roman: and will always be so. The Etruscan element is like the grass of the field and the sprouting of corn . . ." Etruscan Places, p. 53. A s Lawrence points out (pp. 52-53) "It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. B u t for the green grass, no empire would rise, no m a n would eat bread". Whitman's "Song of Myself" seems to be involved in this pacific notion. 4 Etruscan Places, p. 82. 5 Ibid., p. 95.

THE LAST PHASE: PUKE AXIMA1. MAN

191

tried to translate his poetic vision of a formal metaphysical harmony into exact correspondences on the moral and empirical level. This Utopian enterprise, here as elsewhere, makes for confusion and contradiction. His meditations on "The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia" were published in 1928. In March that year, having written the final version of Lady Chatterley's Lover after a desperate siege of illness,6 he admitted, in his famous letter to Witter Bynner, that he was "becoming a lamb at last". Not the leadership principle and the military ideal he wrote, but "some sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men and men and women", 7 was the wave of the future. The tigerish hero was obsolete. Both Mellors, the gamekeeper who loves Lady Chatterley, and the nameless hero of The Man Who Died, are wounded creatures grown wise in suffering. Though they still face life with unbroken courage and faith, they are like frail deer who must survive by intelligence and evasion in their battle with the evil collective will of society. Although animal rhetoric and symbolism play a comparatively small part in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the following things might be noted: Clifford Chatterley, the insentient, crippled industrialist, is described by the author (Chap. X ) as "almost a creature, with a hard efficient shell . . . one of the amazing crabs and lobsters of the modern, industrial and financial world, invertebrates of the crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of hard pulp". This is the degenerate result of denying his fleshly reality and wishing to be pure mind; it is also Lawrence's standard trope of 'civilized' corruption within an external form. Riding upon "the achievements of the mind of man", Clifford, in his motorized wheel-chair, can be seen as a mechanical centaur. He 6 See Mark Schorer's Bibliographical Note (pp. 345-346) in the Modern Library reprint of the first American edition by Grove Press, Inc. (N. Y . , 1959). 7 Letters, I I , 1045.

192

THE LAST PHASE: P U R E ANIMAL MAN

glories (Chap. X I I I ) that he has no natural horse: "Plato", he comments "never thought we'd go one better and have no steeds at all, only an engine". Mellors, good with real horses, sees him (Chap. XI) as merely 'tame' and 'nasty' rather than civilized, a spiritual gelding whose paralysis downward from the waist becomes the image of his hatred of natural life. In Clifford's final trope (Chap. X I X ) he becomes to Mrs. Bolton (the shrewd Magna Mater who nurses and manages him), 'the fallen beast, the squirming monster'. This image of a successful industrial monster with a triumphant female carries associations that are faintly Apocalyptic and may well be part of the author's ironic intentions. On the archetypal level the two present us with a picture of the old Dragon and the Whore. Degenerate coal men of the last days, slaves of the industrial beast, appear to the rebellious Connie Chatterley (Chap. XI) as "weird fauna of the coal seams . . . animals of coal and iron and clay . . . The animal of mineral disintegration". Contemplating things like these in one of his regressive moments of perversity, Mellors (Chap. XV) looks forward to the end of the human species, to a time when the defiled Midlands might revert to a wilderness of wolf dogs and wild pit-ponies; but as a prospective father, with a hostage to fortune, he elects to take a more hopeful attitude in spite of the bad times he sees coming. Against all odds, he is prepared to bet on the future. Appropriately, the novel's key image is a bird, 'a little spark', breaking out of its shell into new life. As a gamekeeper Mellors breeds pheasants to repopulate the woods desecrated by poachers and war-time lumbering. Connie Chatterley's frustrated womanhood, and the appeal the frail but vital Mellors makes to her, converge when (Chap. XX) he places a new-born chicken in her hand. Like the child which she and Mellors are destined to bring into the world, the emerging bird symbolizes delicate new life in all its promise and vulnerability. Mellors, the man who once had almost died in his Army life, is a natural horseman who had chosen to step down to his proletarian origins from the officer caste to which he had risen in the cavalry. Though

THE LAST PHASE: PURE ANIMAL MAN

193

his way with horses is mentioned only in passing, we know t h a t for Lawrence a rapport with these animals is a sign of aristocratic virtue. A Lewis without moonshine, Mellors is a well-read and muchtraveled man who conceals books on Buddhism at his cottage. As compared with Annable (his prototype) our new man of the woods is not given to brutish self-assertion. Where the first prophet of natural life remained embittered by experience and blundered into a meaningless death, the last, with the courage of tenderness, opens himself to the future and — phoenix-like — renews his life in middle-age. For all the bitter social realities it confronts, Lady Chatterley's Lover seems, in spirit, a modern pastoral 8 which derives much of its imaginative force from Lawrence's vision of the green world we have lost by our fall into abstraction and mechanization. In the idyllic mode of creation (which prevails in Lawrence's final phase), his lovers, for all their tortoise scars and histories, do not first have to engage in desperate psychic combat before they can win through to sexual fulfillment and salvation. The great sex war is now virtually at an end, and if we seek proper analogues of the lovers' bliss we will find them in the nuptials of happy whales and deliberate elephants which Lawrence also celebrates in the poems of his last years. Innocence restored, phallic bracken appears between the happy bluebells of the Chatterley wood (Chap. XIII), "lifting its brown curled head like legions of young snakes with a [tender] new secret to whisper to Eve". We can, by cooperation with the true laws of nature, regain the greater life of the body, return to our first state; yet it is certainly open to question, whether Lady Chatterley's Lover should not really have been a novella like The Man Who Died where the vision need not have been subject to 8

In pastoral romance the idyllic country provides an ideal standpoint from which w e m a y judge the abnormalities of court and city life. Pastoral conventions, however, do not encourage an author t o disturb his courtly audience with real prophetic curses, warnings of the wrath to come, and a serious challenge to seek salvation in the woods. Lawrence's pastoral, the rhetoric of an outlaw, is informed by a radical hatred for the evil modern city, a n intense desire to stir up his readers.

194

T H E LAST PHASE: P U R E ANIMAL MAN

heavy realistic pressures and the demands of full-scale characterization. 9 More fortunate than Mellors in t h a t he lives in an earlier, more sacred world, the hero of The Man Who Died finds it simpler to evade those who, in his words, "lead the little life of jealousy and property", but he, no less than the gamekeeper, survives by his wits. We should not make too much of the tale's analogy between the jaunty young gamecock freed from captivity 1 0 and the man who emerged from his tomb. The vivid, unbroken sun-bird goes forth to slay a challenger and acquire, as his earthly kingdom, a goodly number of hens. Though the resurrected man sees the bird as an emblem of courage and vitality which he admires, he himself is not a fighter in any but a spiritual sense, and certainly not a killer. To the young priestess of Isis who seeks him, the man is the dismembered Osiris, the divine victim to whom she must be the goddess. In sacred marriage with her he will be made whole, brought into touch with humanity. Lawrence is no more attached than he ever was to the idea of allowing oneself to be sacrificed for others (the man sees his former life as tragic idealism, a betrayal of human nature); but now, lamb at last, he has more compassion with victims. An orthodox Christian might say that the blind eros out of which he had made so much of his art — the source of rending tigers and rampaging horses — is now infused with agape, which was always something different from the sentimentality which Lawrence had imagined it to be. To Lawrence, of course, the new tenderness is distinct from anything connected with the spiritual principle of the Unicorn because it is of the flesh. Lawrence's bestiary, as this study has shown, is closely bound up with the fluid metaphysic and symbolic geography which, though 9 See K e i t h Sagar, The Art of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 196-198. 10 The story has its origin in the small white rooster emerging from an egg which Lawrence saw in a shop window on Palm Sunday during his tour of Etruscan places in 1927. See The Intelligent Heart, pp. 345-423, for an account of Lawrence's final period.

THE LAST PHASE: PT'BE ANIMAL MAN

195

never a complete system, remains a shaping force in his art from 1912 to his death. The animal tropes and symbols derive from his speculative interests in anthropology and occult doctrines; from his special sensitivity to real animals; from his poet's disposition to think in metaphor and analogy. His imagination is so concrete that he sometimes appears to lose all distinction between things and the insights which he finds in them; and this last tendency can lead to magical thinking, a superstitious response to sheer energy, a certain insouciance before the random universe of indifferent dragon power which we could compel if only we had the proper ritual. I believe, however, t h a t the best intuitions of Lawrence's radically religious art offer something better than regression, in bad faith, to a premythologized world. Animals fascinated him, as they did his heroine Lou Witt, by their capacity to get life "straight from the source", by the way they lived in permanent communion with the living God of nature and could not refuse to do so — in other words because animals are without sin. "Only Man", one of Lawrence's Last Poems, tells us all too plainly that No animal, no beast nor creeping thing no cobra nor hyaena nor scorpion or hideous white ant can slip entirely through the fingers of the hands of god into the abyss of self-knowledge knowledge, of the self-apart-from god.11 To Lawrence, the mystical materialist, everything t h a t lives is holy; but Lawrence the moralist has no difficulty in finding emblems of evil in nature. The 'pure animal man' imagined by Lou burns 'like a flame fed straight from underneath' but has human intellect. This is also Lawrence's vision of a rational being, open to the creative mystery of the universe, with a will in harmony with the divine power on 11 See also "The Hands of God" and "Abysmal Immortality". It is not easy, Lawrence tells us, but man can take the plunge into endless self-analysis and fall away from the hands of the living God.

196

THE LAST PHASE: P U R E ANIMAL MAN

which he knows he depends. The hero is clearly an unfallen Adam, and the world of fulfilled 'animal' potentiality one more version of that earthly paradise buried in the human heart. In the total context of Lawrence's work Annable's dark commandment to 'be a good animal' takes on suggestions remote from the gamekeeper's blunt materialism: only man, with his special consciousness of his self, can be a good animal. Being a good animal involves reverence for the wonder of the physical world as inseparable from a divine force which is present in persons and all existing things. I t means a humble acceptance of one's dependence, as a living creature, on something 'other'. To call this force 'the invisible sun behind the sun' is obliquely to recognize, beyond images, an unconditioned, transcendent reality which cannot be held within the literal terms of that primitive animism to which Lawrence would have us return for a fresh start. Lawrence's 'blood knowledge' (in more traditional language, his knowledge through co-naturality 12 ) is hardly infallible, but it often does provide a sound corrective to the propositions of his discursive intellect. As a consequence, and in spite of some conflict between the two ways of knowing, his visionary art, rich in contradiction, is far more impressive than might seem possible from any analysis of his amateur metaphysic; and in following where his creative intuition led he arrived, in his Last Poems, at a new point of departure in the thought-adventure t h a t constitutes his life. We can hardly mistake the intensely spiritual quality of poems such as "Bavarian Gentians", "Shadows", "The End, The Beginning" and "The Ship of D e a t h " where, without operatic gestures of satanism, the celebrant of the flesh is reconciled to his own death as

12

See Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (N. Y., 1952), pp. 22-29. Co-natural knowledge, according to Thomist philosophy, is knowledge acquired not through concepts, but by inclination, by sympathy. The moral knowledge of the virtuous man, and the mystical knowledge of the contemplative is of this kind. So is poetic knowledge — a creative intuition, at the depths of the poet's being, wherein both the poet's self and the thing contemplated are revealed in unity.

THE LAST PHASE: F U B E ANIMAL MAN

197

part of the gift of this life. There the sense of a reunion of human with divine life involves a conversion of the heart and will, a vindication of individual consciousness in that righteousness consists in active cooperation with a cosmic order beyond man's grasp. The feeling of identification with infinite potentiality, carrying with it the death of the ego, is simultaneously the sense of a self grounded in the indestructible mystery of being. Gently, and in faith, the figure of the seeker embarks on the long journey into oblivion, praising the hidden God, daring to hope for a resurrection beyond the gathering darkness. These poems, the haunting fragments of a religious vision, present us with an heroic image of man that can find its animal type only in the phoenix — a creature decidedly more than nature, and beyond conflicting dualities.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I . W O R K S B Y D. H. L A W R E N C E ' 1. The

White Peacock

Novels

(London, 1911; London, 1955).*

The Trespasser (London, 1912). Sons and Lovers (London, 1913; New York, 1958).* The Rainbow (London, 1915; New York, 1961).* Women in Love (New York, 1920; New York, I960).* The Lost Girl (London, 1920). Aaron's Rod (New York, 1922). Kangaroo (London, 1923; New York, I960).* The Boy in the Bush (with M. L. Skinner) (London, 1924). The Plumed Serpent (London, 1926; New York, 1951).* Lady Chatterley's Lover (Florence, 1928; New York, 1959).*

2. Shorter

Fiction

St. Mawr, together with The Princess (London, 1925). The Man Who Died (Paris [entitled The Escaped Coc/fc], 1929). The Virgin and the Gypsy (London, 1930). The Portable D. H. Lawrence, ed. Diana Trilling (New York, 1947). The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence, 3 vols. (London, 1955).

Where an edition other than the first is listed, references in the text are to the one marked * in this Bibliography. 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY

199

3. Poetry The Complete Poems, 3 vols. (London, 1955). The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, eds. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F . Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (New York, 1964).

4. Essays, Miscellaneous " T h e Crown", Signature, I - I I I (London, 1915) 3-14, 1-10, 1-10. Twilight in Italy (London, 1916). Movements in European History (under pseudonym Lawrence H. Davison), (London, 1921). Sea and Sardinia (New York, 1921). Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious [New York, 1921] and Fantasia of the Unconscious [New York, 1922], (New York, I960).* Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923), (Garden City [New York], 1955).* Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (Philadelphia, 1925). Mornings in Mexico (New York, 1927). Apocalypse (Florence, 1931; New York, 1932).* Etruscan Places (London, 1932, New York, 1957).* The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. (with Introduction) Aldous Huxley (New York, 1932). Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. (with Introduction) E d w a r d D . MacDonald (New York, 1936). The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. H a r r y T . Moore, 2 vols. (New York, 1962). The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Armin Arnold (London, 1962). Phoenix II : Uncollected, Unpublished, and other Prose Works, eds. Warren R o b e r t s and H a r r y T . Moore (New York, 1967).

II. S T U D I E S OF D. H. L A W R E N C E Abel, Patricia, and R o b e r t H o g a n , " D . H . Lawrence's Singing B i r d s " , I n H a r r y T . Moore, ed. A D, H. Lawrence Miscellany (Carbondale [Illinois], 1959), p p . 204-214. Arnold, Armin, D. H. Lawrence and America (London, 1958). Auden, W. H . , " S o m e Notes on D . H. Lawrence", Nation, C L X I V (1947), 482-484.

200

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auden, W . H., "Two Bestiaries", The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1962), pp. 300-303. Baldanza, Frank, " D . H . Lawrence's Song of Songs", Modern Fiction Studies, V I I (1961), 106-114. Bartlett, Phyllis, "Lawrence's Collected Poems: The Demon Takes Over", PMLA, L X V I (1951), 583-593. Bertocci, Angelo P., "Symbolism in Women in Love", I n Moore, A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, pp. 93-102. Blackmur, R . P., " D . H . Lawrence and Expressive F o r m " , The Double Agent (New York, 1935), pp. 103-120. Brewster, E a r l and Ashsah, D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence (London, 1934). Bynner, Witter, Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D.H. Lawrence (New York, 1951). Carswell, Catherine, The Savage Pilgrimage : A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1932). Carter, Frederick, D. H. Lawrence and the Body Mystical (London, 1932). Chamberlain, R o b e r t L., "Pussum, Minette, and t h e Afro-Nordic Symbol in Lawrence's Women in Love", PMLA, L X X V I I I (1963), 407-416. Channing-Pearce, Melville, The Terrible Crystal: Studies in Kierkegaard and Modern Christianity (New York, 1941), pp. 179-189. Cipolla, Elizabeth, "The Last Poems of D. H . Lawrence", D. H. Lawrence Review, I I (1969), 103-119. Clark, L. D., Dark Night of the Body : D. H. Lawrence's 'The Plumed Serpent' (Austin, 1964). Daleski, H . M., "The Duality of D. H . Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (1959), 3-18. — , The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lavsrence (Evanston, 1965). Eliot, T. S., After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York, 1934), pp. 38-43, 62-67, and passim. Engelberg, E d w a r d , "Escape from t h e Circles of Experience: D. H . Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman", PMLA, LXXVIII (1963), 103-113. E . T. [Jessie (Chambers) Wood], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London, 1933). Ford, George H., Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and the Stories of D.H. Lawrence (New York, 1965). Freeman, Mary, D. H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of His Ideas (Gainesville [Florida], 1955). Gajdusek, R o b e r t E., " A Reading of The White Peacock", I n Moore, A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, pp. 188-203. Goodheart, Eugene, The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence (Chicago, 1963). Gregor, Ian, "The F o x : A Caveat", Essays and Criticism, I X (1959), 10-21.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

201

Gregory, Horace, D. H. Lawrence: Pilgrim of the Apocalypse (New York, 1933). Gurko, Leo, "Kangaroo : D. H . Lawrence in Transit", Modern Fiction Studies, X (1964), 349-358. —, "TheLost Girl: D. H . Lawrence as a 'Dickens of t h e Midlands'", PMLA, L X X V I I I (1963), 601-605. Hinz, Evelyn, " D . H . Lawrence's Clothes Metaphor", D. H. Lawrence Review, I (1968), 87-113. H o f f m a n , Frederick J . and H a r r y T. Moore, eds., The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence (Norman [Oklahoma], 1953). Hogan, Robert, "The Amorous Whale: A Study in t h e Symbolism of D. H . Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (1959), 39-46. Hough, Graham, The Dark Sun : A Study ofD. H.Lawrence (New York, 1957). Kenmare, Dallas, Fire-Bird: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1951). Lawrence, Frieda, Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence, ed. E . W . Tedlock, J r . (New York, 1964). Leaver, Florence B., "The Man-Nature Relationship of D. H . Lawrence's Novels", University of Kansas City Review, X I X (1953), 241-248. Leavis, F. L., D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York, 1956). Lindenberger, Herbert, "Lawrence and t h e Romantic Tradition", I n Moore, A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, pp. 326-341. L u j a n , Mabel Dodge, Lorenzo in Taos (New York, 1932). Marks, W . S., I I I , "D. H . Lawrence and His R a b b i t Adolf: Three Symbolic Permutations", Criticism, X (1968), 200-216. Merrild, Knuld, A Poet and Two Painters: A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1938). Moore, H a r r y T., The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1951). — , The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1954). —, ed. A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany (Carbondale [Illinois], 1959). Mori, Haruhide, "Lawrence's Imagistic Development in The Rainbow and Women in Love", EHL, X X X I (1964), 460-481. Nehls, E d w a r d , D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. (Madison, 1957-1959). Nicholes, E. L., "The Simile of the Sparrow in The Rainbow b y D. H . Lawrence", I n H o f f m a n and Moore, The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 159-163. Panichas, George A., Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H. Lawrence's Religious Quest (The Hague, 1964). Pinto, V. de S., " P o e t Without a Mask", Critical Quarterly, I I I (1961), 5-18. Read, Herbert, The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry (London, 1953), pp. 87-100. Rieft, Philip, "A Modern Mythmaker", Myth and Mythmaking (New York, 1960), pp. 240-275.

202

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Roberts, Warren, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1963). Sagar, Keith, The Art of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1966). —, " T h e Genesis of The Rainbow and Women in Love", D. H. Lawrence Review, I (1968), 179-199. Schorer, Mark, "Women in Love and D e a t h " , Hudson Review, V I (1953), 34-47. Scott, N a t h a n A., J r . , " D . H . Lawrence: Chartist of the Via Mystica", Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature (New York, 1952), p p . 112-117, 247-260. Smailes, T. A., "The Mythical Bases of Women in Love", D. H. Lawrence Review, I (1968), 129-136. Spilka, Mark, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomington, 1955). Tedlock, E . W., J r . , The Frieda Lawrence Collection of Manuscripts: A Descriptive Bibliography (Albuquerque, 1958). Theobald, J o h n R., "The Dionysian Strain in t h e Poems of D. H . Lawrence", (Unpubl. diss. University of Iowa, 1942). Tindall, William York, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York, 1939). Tiverton, F a t h e r William [William R o b e r t J a r r e t t - K e r r ] , D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (London, 1951). Vickery, J o h n B., " T h e Golden Bough and Modern P o e t r y " , Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X V (1957), 277-282, 287-288. —, " M y t h and R i t u a l in t h e Shorter Fiction of D. H . Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (1959), 65-82. Vivante, Leone, A Philosophy of Potentiality (London, 1955), pp. 77-115. Vivas, Eliseo, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and Triumph of Art (Evanston, 1960). Weiss, Daniel, Oedipus in Nottingham (Seattle, 1962). Widmer, Kingsley, "Birds of Passion and Birds of Marriage in D. H . Lawrence", University of Kansas City Review, X X V (1958), 73-79. —, " O u r Demonic Heritage", I n Moore, A D.H. Lawrence Miscellany, p p . 13-27. —, " T h e Primitivistic Aesthetic: D. H . Lawrence", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X V I I (1959), 344-353. Wilde, Alan, "The Illusion of St. Mawr: Technique a n d Vision in D. H. Lawrence's Novel", PMLA, L X X X I X (1964), 164-170. Wildi, Max, "The Birth of Expressionism in the Work of D. H . Lawrence", English Studies, X I X (1937), 241-259. Williams, George G., " D . H . Lawrence's Philosophy as Expressed in His P o e t r y " , Rice Institute Pamphlet, X X X V I I I (1951), 73-94. Wright, R a y m o n d , "Lawrence's N o n - H u m a n Analogues", Modern Langvage Notes, L X X V I (1961), 426-432. Young, Archibald M., " R h y t h m and Meaning in Poetry: D. H . Lawrence's 'Snake' ", English, X V I I (1968), 41-47.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

203

III. ADDITIONAL WORKS Bodkin, Maud, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (New York, 1958). Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York, 1966). Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, 1959). Fingensten, Peter, "The Six-Fold Law of Symbolism", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, X X I (1963), 344-353. Forster, E . M., Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927). Frye, Northrop, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957). J u n g , C. G., Symbols of Transformation, 2 vols. (New York, 1962). Maritain, Jacques, The Bange of Reason (New York, 1952). Okey, Thomas, The Story of Venice (London, 1931). Wheelwright, Philip, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism (Bloomington, 1959). Yeats, W . B., A Vision (New York, 1956). Zimmer, Heinrich, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell (Washington, 1946).

INDEX

Aaron's Rod, 65, 163n. Abel, Patricia (and Robert Hogan), 10n., 112n., 133n. "Adolph", 151 Africa, 22, 138 — 139, 148 Aldington, Richard, 28n., 91n., 163 Apocalypse, 11, 49—50, 66 — 67, 171 Arnold, Armin, 14n., 66n., 168n. Aaden, W . H., 9n., 14n., 16n. Bartlett, Phyllis, 58n. Bernhardt, Sarah, 60n. Bertocci, Angelo, 138 "Bibbles" (dog), 14n., 8 5 - 8 9 Birds, Beasts and Flowers, 11, 29, 31, 40, 65—90, 105 — 07. For individual poems and animals: American eagle, 82 — 84; "Ass,The", 76 — 77; "Bibbles" 8 5 - 8 9 ; "Elephant", 7 8 - 8 0 ; "Fish", 73; "He Goat", 77—78; "Kangaroo", 8 0 - 8 1 ; "St. J o h n " (eagle), 70—71; "St. L u k e " (bull), 40, 61, 70; "St. Mark" (lion), 69, 188; "St. Matthew" 6 7 - 6 9 ; "Red Wolf, The" (fox), 83, 85 — 87; "She Goat", 78; "Snake", 61, 71 — 72, 178 — 79; Tortoises, 7 4 - 7 6 ; "Turkey Cock", 8 1 - 8 2 Bismarck (rabbit), 15, 65, 144—51, 157 Blake, William, 32, 36 (tiger) Bodkin, Maude, 60 "Border Line, The", 25 (apocalyptic vision) Boy in the Bush, The, 168, 169 Brewster, Earl and Ashsah, 44n., 62 Bumpoo, Natty, 47, 161, 183n. "Butterfly", 103—05 Bynner, Witter, 91, 191 Carswell, Catherine, 13n.

INDEX

205

Carter, Frederick, 97 —98n., 171n. Chamberlain, R o b e r t L., 148n. Chambers, Jessie, 111 Channing-Pearce, Melville, 26n. Christ, 26, 27, 40, 48, 68—69, 73, 77, 9 7 - 9 8 , 126n„ 139. See also "The Man Who Died" Cipolla, Elizabeth, 99n. Clark, L. D., 184n. "Crown, T h e " (Lion-Unicorn myth), 11, 32, 3 9 - 4 2 , 107, 118 — 19, 120—36 (in The Rainbow), 163 — 65 (in Kangaroo) Daleski, H . M., 34—36 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 93 Devil, 26, 28, 85 — 86. See also P a n . Dostoevsky, 97n., 164 Eliade, Mircea, 18n., 35n. Etruscan Places, 11, 13, 31, 40, 48n., 53—54, 189, 190 Fantasia of the Unconscious, 11, 30n., 46, 49, 51, 54n., 61, 66 Fingesten, Peter, 68n. Forster, E . M., 9 "Fox, The", 13, 1 5 9 - 6 3 . See also " T h e Red Wolf". Franklin, Benjamin, 20 Frazer, Sir James, 112n. Frye, Northrop, 13—14n. Gajusek, R o b e r t E., 112n. Garnett, Edward, 15n., 125 Gregory, Horace, 9n., 15 Gurko, Leo, 140n. H a r d y , Thomas (Lawrence's study of), 17—18, 19 Hogan, Robert, 10n., 99. See also Abel, Patricia. Hough, Graham, 33, 109, 165, 173 J u n g , C. G., 27, 30, 136n., 112n. Kangaroo, 12, 38, 48, 80, 154—55, 163 — 68 Kenmare, Dallas, 21 Lady Chatterley's Lover, 12, 13, 44, 189, 191 — 94 Last Poems, 11, 12, 13, 17, 2 7 - 3 0 , 31, 67, 9 8 - 1 0 5 , 189, 195, 196. "Butterfly", 1 0 3 - 0 5 ; whales, 9 9 - 1 0 1

206

INDEX

Lawrence, Frieda, 58, 137 Leaver, Florence B., 116n. Leavis, F . R., 9n. Lindenberger, Herbert, 10—11 Look! We Have Come Through/, 11, 58 — 65. For individual poems: "Doe a t Evening, A " , 58 — 59; "Love on t h e F a r m " , 64; "Manifesto", 60, 62; " R a b b i t Snared in the N i g h t " , 62—65, 107; "She Said As Well to Me", 60 Lost Girl, The, 65 Luhan, Mabel (Dodge), 83n., 85n. "Man W h o Died, T h e " ("The Escaped Cock"), 13, 41n„ 189, 191, 193, 194 Maritain, Jacques, 196n. Marks, W . S., 151n. Merrild, K n u d , 87 Michelangelo, 36, 93, 127n. Moby Dick, 41, 4 6 - 4 9 , 51, 55, lOln. Moore, H a r r y T., 57n., 59n., 67n., 69, 74n., 137n., 171n. Mornings in Mexico, 56n., 176 Murry, J o h n Middleton, 89n. Nehls, Edward, 74n. Nicholes, E . L., 10, 133n. Okey, Thomas, 67n. P a n , 27, 28, 86n., 180, 189. See also Devil. Pansies, 12, 24—25, 28, 90—98. Swan poems, 92 — 95; elephant poems, 9 5 - 9 7 , 101 Phoenix, 1 7 - 1 8 , 2 2 - 2 3 , 42n„ 43, 45, 51, 54, 61, 1 0 3 - 1 0 4 , 151 Pinker, J . B., 17 Plumed Serpent, The, 13, 50, 174, 176 — 88. Eagle and serpent, 180 — 85; Mexican bestiary, 186 — 88 Rainbow, The, 12, 15, 19, 23, 31, 37, 57, 58, 62, 115, 118, 119 — 36. Horses, 132 — 36; swan (Aphrodite), 127—28, 129 " R e d Wolf, T h e " , 83, 85 — 87, 188. See also "The F o x " Reflections on the Death of A Porcupine, 31n., 39n., 42 — 43 Russell, Bertrand, 59 Sagar, Keith, 194n. "St. Mawr", 12, 24, 50, 1 6 8 - 7 4 Sehorer, Mark, 63n. Smailes, T. A., 137n.

207

INDEX

Sons and Lovers, 31, 117 Spilka, Mark, 65n. Studies in Classic American

Literature,

11, 20, 31, 46 — 49, 66, 188n.

Tindall, William York, 32, 78n., 184n. Tiverton, William (William R o b e r t Jarrett-Kerr), 33 Totemism, 59 — 60 Trespasser, The, 116 Twilight in Italy, 11, 31n., 36 — 39, 67, 119 "Two Principles, The", 22, 33 Van Gogh, Vincent, 26 Vickery, J o h n , 160n. Vivante, Leone, 18, 21 Vivas, Eliseo, 9n., 13n., 15, 22 Weiss, Daniel, 11 I n . Wheelwright, Philip, 13n., 184n. White Peacock, The, 19, 61n., 64, 108—116. Rabbits, 111 — 13 W h i t m a n , W a l t , 168, 190n. Widmer, Kingsley, 24, 86, 124n., 172n. Wildi, Max, 12n„ 32 Williams, George G., l l n . Women in Love, 12, 15, 23, 31, 57, 58, 63, 118—19, 137 — 58. Bismarck (rabbit), 144—51, 157; goose (swan), 153 — 54, 157; horse, 140—43 Yeats, W . B., 11, 25, 94 Young, Archibald M., 72n. Zimmer, Heinrich, 27