Life with a Capital L

by D. H. Lawrence

  Dostoievsky was perhaps the first to realize this devastating truth, which Christ had not seen. A truth it is, none the less, and once recognized it will change the course of history. All that remains is for the elect to take charge of the bread – the property, the money – and then give it back to the masses as if it were really the gift of life. In this way, mankind might live happily, as the Inquisitor suggests. Otherwise, with the masses making the terrible mad mistake that money is life, and that therefore no one shall control the money, men shall be ‘free’ to get what they can, we are brought to a condition of competitive insanity and ultimate suicide.

  So far, well and good, Dostoievsky’s diagnosis stands. But is it then to betray Christ and turn over to Satan if the elect should at last realize that instead of refusing Satan’s three offers, the heroic Christian must now accept them. Jesus refused the three offers out of pride and fear: he wanted to be greater than these, and ‘above’ them. But we now realize, no man, not even Jesus, is really ‘above’ miracle, mystery, and authority. The one thing that Jesus is truly above, is the confusion between money and life. Money is not life, says Jesus, therefore you can ignore it and leave it to the devil.

  Money is not life, it is true. But ignoring money and leaving it to the devil means handing over the great mass of men to the devil, for the mass of men cannot distinguish between money and life. It is hard to believe: certainly Jesus didn’t believe it: and yet, as Dostoievsky and the Inquisitor point out, it is so.

  Well, and what then? Must we therefore go over to the devil? After all, the whole of Christianity is not contained in the rejection of the three temptations. The essence of Christianity is a love of mankind. If a love of mankind entails accepting the bitter limitation of the mass of men, their inability to distinguish between money and life, then accept the limitation, and have done with it. Then take over from the devil the money (or bread), the miracle, and the sword of Cæsar, and, for the love of mankind, give back to men the bread, with its wonder, and give them the miracle, the marvellous, and give them, in a hierarchy, someone, some men, in higher and higher degrees, to bow down to. Let them bow down, let them bow down en masse, for the mass, who do not understand the difference between money and life, should always bow down to the elect, who do.

  And is that serving the devil? It is certainly not serving the spirit of annihilation and not-being. It is serving the great wholeness of mankind, and in that respect, it is Christianity. Anyhow, it is the service of Almighty God, who made men what they are, limited and unlimited.

  Where Dostoievsky is perverse is in his making the old, old, wise governor of men a Grand Inquisitor. The recognition of the weakness of man has been a common trait in all great, wise rulers of people, from the Pharaohs and Darius through the great patient Popes of the early Church right down to the present day. They have known the weakness of men, and felt a certain tenderness. This is the spirit of all great government. But it was not the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition in 1500 was a new-fangled thing, peculiar to Spain, with her curious death-lust and her bullying, and, strictly, a Spanish-political instrument, not Catholic at all, but rabidly national. The Spanish Inquisition actually was diabolic. It could not have produced a Grand Inquisitor who put Dostoievsky’s sad questions to Jesus. And the man who put those sad questions to Jesus could not possibly have been a Spanish Inquisitor. He could not possibly have burnt a hundred people in an auto-da-fé. He would have been too wise and far-seeing.

  So that, in this respect, Dostoievsky showed his epileptic and slightly criminal perversity. The man who feels a certain tenderness for mankind in its weakness or limitation is not therefore diabolic. The man who realizes that Jesus asked too much of the mass of men, in asking them to choose between earthly and heavenly bread, and to judge between good and evil, is not therefore satanic. Think how difficult it is to know the difference between good and evil! Why, sometimes it is evil to be good. And how is the ordinary man to understand that? He can’t. The extraordinary men have to understand it for him. And is that going over to the devil? Or think of the difficulty in choosing between the earthly and heavenly bread. Lenin, surely a pure soul, rose to great power simply to give men – what? The earthly bread. And what was the result? Not only did they lose the heavenly bread, but even the earthly bread disappeared out of wheat-producing Russia. It is most strange. And all the socialists and the generous thinkers of today, what are they striving for? The same: to share out more evenly the earthly bread. Even they, who are practising Christianity par excellence, cannot properly choose between the heavenly and earthly bread. For the poor, they choose the earthly bread, and once more the heavenly bread is lost: and once more, as soon as it is really chosen, the earthly bread begins to disappear. It is a great mystery. But today, the most passionate believers in Christ believe that all you have to do is to struggle to give earthly bread (good houses, good sanitation, etc.) to the poor, and that is in itself the heavenly bread. But it isn’t. Especially for the poor, it isn’t. It is for them the loss of heavenly bread. And the poor are the vast majority. Poor things, how everybody hates them today! For benevolence is a form of hate.

  What then is the heavenly bread? Every generation must answer for itself. But the heavenly bread is life, is living. Whatever makes life vivid and delightful is the heavenly bread. And the earthly bread must come as a by-product of the heavenly bread. The vast mass will never understand this. Yet it is the essential truth of Christianity, and of life itself. The few will understand. Let them take the responsibility.

  Again, the Inquisitor says that it is a weakness in men, that they must have miracle, mystery and authority. But is it? Are they not bound up in our emotions, always and for ever, these three demands of miracle, mystery, and authority? If Jesus cast aside miracle in the Temptation, still there is miracle again in the Gospels. And if Jesus refused the earthly bread, still he said: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ And for authority: ‘Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?’

  The thing Jesus was trying to do was to supplant physical emotion by moral emotion. So that earthly bread becomes, in a sense, immoral, as it is to many refined people today. The Inquisitor sees that this is the mistake. The earthly bread must in itself be the miracle, and be bound up with the miracle.

  And here, surely, he is right. Since man began to think and to feel vividly, seed-time and harvest have been the two great sacred periods of miracle, rebirth, and rejoicing. Easter and harvest-home are festivals of the earthly bread, and they are festivals which go to the roots of the soul. For it is the earthly bread as a miracle, a yearly miracle. All the old religions saw it: the Catholic still sees it, by the Mediterranean. And this is not weakness. This is truth. The rapture of the Easter kiss, in old Russia, is intimately bound up with the springing of the seed and the first footstep of the new earthly bread. It is the rapture of the Easter kiss which makes the bread worth eating. It is the absence of the Easter kiss which makes the Bolshevist bread barren, dead. They eat dead bread, now.

  The earthly bread is leavened with the heavenly bread. The heavenly bread is life, is contact, and is consciousness. In sowing the seed man has his contact with earth, with sun and rain: and he must not break the contact. In the awareness of the springing of the corn he has his ever-renewed consciousness of miracle, wonder, and mystery: the wonder of creation, procreation, and re-creation, following the mystery of death and the cold grave. It is the grief of Holy Week and the delight of Easter Sunday. And man must not, must not lose this supreme state of consciousness out of himself, or he has lost the best part of him. Again, the reaping and the harvest are another contact, with earth and sun, a rich touch of the cosmos, a living stream of activity, and then the contact with harvesters, and the joy of harvest-home. All this is life, life, it is the heavenly bread which we eat in the course of getting the earthly bread. Work is, or should be, our heavenly bread of activity, contact and consciousness. All work that is not this, is anat
hema. True, the work is hard; there is the sweat of the brow. But what of it? In decent proportion, this is life. The sweat of the brow is the heavenly butter.

  I think the older Egyptians understood this, in the course of their long and marvellous history. I think that probably, for thousands of years, the masses of the Egyptians were happy, in the hierarchy of the State.

  Miracle and mystery run together, they merge. Then there is the third thing, authority. The word is bad: a policeman has authority, and no one bows down to him. The Inquisitor means: ‘that which men bow down to.’ Well, they bowed down to Caesar, and they bowed down to Jesus. They will bow down, first, as the Inquisitor saw, to the one who has the power to control the bread.

  The bread, the earthly bread, while it is being reaped and grown, it is life. But once it is harvested and stored, it becomes a commodity, it becomes riches. And then it becomes a danger. For men think, if they only possessed the hoard, they need not work; which means, really, they need not live. And that is the real blasphemy. For while we live we must live, we must not wither or rot inert.

  So that ultimately men bow down to the man, or group of men, who can and dare take over the hoard, the store of bread, the riches, to distribute it among the people again. The lords, the givers of bread. How profound Dostoievsky is when he says that the people will forget that it is their own bread which is being given back to them. While they keep their own bread, it is not much better than stone to them – inert possessions. But given back to them from the great Giver, it is divine once more, it has the quality of miracle to make it taste well in the mouth and in the belly.

  Men bow down to the lord of bread, first and foremost. For, by knowing the difference between earthly and heavenly bread, he is able calmly to distribute the earthly bread, and to give it, for the commonalty, the heavenly taste which they can never give it. That is why, in a democracy, the earthly bread loses its taste, the salt loses its savour, and there is no one to bow down to.

  It is not man’s weakness that he needs someone to bow down to. It is his nature, and his strength, for it puts him into touch with far, far greater life than if he stood alone. All life bows to the sun. But the sun is very far away to the common man. It needs someone to bring it to him. It needs a lord: what the Christians call one of the elect, to bring the sun to the common man, and put the sun in his heart. The sight of a true lord, a noble, a nature-hero puts the sun into the heart of the ordinary man, who is no hero, and therefore cannot know the sun direct.

  This is one of the real mysteries. As the Inquisitor says, the mystery of the elect is one of the inexplicable mysteries of Christianity, just as the lord, the natural lord among men, is one of the inexplicable mysteries of humanity throughout time. We must accept the mystery, that’s all.

  But to do so is not diabolic.

  And Ivan need not have been so tragic and satanic. He had made a discovery about men, which was due to be made. It was the rediscovery of a fact which was known universally almost till the end of the eighteenth century, when the illusion of the perfectibility of men, of all men, took hold of the imagination of the civilized nations. It was an illusion. And Ivan has to make a restatement of the old truth, that most men cannot choose between good and evil, because it is so extremely difficult to know which is which, especially in crucial cases: and that most men cannot see the difference between life-values and money-values: they can only see money-values; even nice simple people who live by the life-values, kind and natural, yet can only estimate value in terms of money. So let the specially gifted few make the decision between good and evil, and establish the life-values against the money-values. And let the many accept the decision, with gratitude, and bow down to the few, in the hierarchy. What is there diabolical or satanic in that? Jesus kisses the Inquisitor: Thank you, you are right, wise old man! Alyosha kisses Ivan: Thank you, brother, you are right, you take a burden off me! So why should Dostoievsky drag in Inquisitors and autos-da-fé, and Ivan wind up so morbidly suicidal? Let them be glad they’ve found the truth again.

  ‘Elegy’ by Rebecca West (1930)

  It is difficult to describe accurately the effect that D. H. Lawrence’s death had on London. If one says that the effect was tremendous, one makes a suggestion of a capital in mourning, which is ludicrous. Not even among his own caste was he honoured as he should have been. I myself realized with a shock how much of what I had always put down as Lawrence’s persecution mania had a solid basis, in fact, when I read obituaries in which not only was the homage due from the living to dead genius meanly denied, but the courtesy paid to any corpse was so far as possible withheld. ‘Messy stuff,’ was the delicate phrase bestowed by one of our greatest dailies on his poetry. He might, judging from another of them, have been a lunatic of the same sort as those who, though normal and even exceptionally gifted at most times, every now and then embarrass their friends by suddenly removing their clothes in public places. Less crass than these but just as infuriating were the articles by mediocrities whom we cannot blame for having stayed in safety, since they plainly lacked the vitality to push on the long journey to the edge of danger. They made excuses for Lawrence. It appeared to them that he saw life as a flaming mystery because he suffered from tuberculosis, though nothing seemed plainer to those who knew him best than that this malady gained its hold only because his intense perceptions had exhausted his body. It appeared to them that he wanted to crack the crust which society has allowed to form on the surface of its existence and look underneath, because he was a miner’s son and had an inferiority complex about the respectable. If that were true, it were still not to be sneered at, for if a creature of such quality as Lawrence found himself in a world that by its social ordinances ignored that quality, he had a right to question those ordinances. But there was so much more than that in the spiritual drama of Lawrence’s life that it is not true. Those traits in Lawrence could hardly have emerged save to those who were regarding their subject very oddly because they were looking at it through the wrong end of field glasses, wishing to see that which is much greater than themselves as much less.

  The most sympathetic obituary I have yet seen was an affectionate note on him as a man which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement.

  I desire (if I can) [says the anonymous writer] to correct the impression, which is widespread, that D. H. Lawrence was a madman of genius, savagely bent on violating sanctuaries, and bruising the finer conscience of his fellow men. To defend Lawrence’s passionate convictions is no part of my hasty undertaking. These do not need to be defended, only to be understood, and understood in the light of an experience extraordinary in its depths and comprehensiveness. And again I am not invoking the beauty of his personality to excuse his work. It is right that I should make it clear that I do not consider his work needs any excuse.

  It is true that the unknown goes on to say:

  If it was wrong, it was passionately wrong; and to be passionately wrong is far better than to be coldly right.

  a sentence which I find it impossible to record without expressing my dissent.

  If it was not right, it was not right with attendant conditions that have no demonstrable connection with values, and to be not right with these attendant conditions that have no demonstrable connection with values is to be more right than to be right with other attendant conditions that also have no demonstrable connection with values.

  Such a statement seems to me wrong in itself, and unnecessary as a defence of Lawrence, since he was passionately right. But we can follow this anonymous writer without question when he says:

  Lawrence was the most remarkable and the most lovable man I have ever known. Contact with him was immediate, intimate and rich. When he was gay, and he was often gay – my dominant memory of him is of a blithe and joyful man – he seemed to spread a sensuous enchantment about him. By a natural magic he unsealed the eyes of those in his company; birds and beasts and flowers became new-minted as in Paradise; they stood revealed as what they were, and not
the poor objects of our dull and common seeing. The most ordinary domestic act – the roasting of a joint of meat, the washing up of crockery, the painting of a cottage room – in his doing became a gay sacrament.

  This is the poet; and this was Lawrence.

  This article is just in its estimation of his wonder: and so too was an obituary in the Manchester Guardian. But, considering the sowing, this is a meagre harvest that his genius reaps from contemporary fame; and it might be supposed that the Frankfurter Zeitung was right in the leader it published the other day, which claimed with a sneer that Lawrence was better appreciated in Germany than in England. Yet it is not so. The grief caused by his death proves far otherwise. I do not speak of his friends and his intimates. They had all cause to regret him for purely selfish reasons. Such a gay companion as the article in The Times Literary Supplement delineates is not easily replaced; nor such a friend.

  He was completely generous. At a moment when there were not ten pounds between him and destitution he thrust five of them upon a friend and because the friend refused them, flew into a transport of high-pitched rage.

  It was not only with his money he was generous. He had caritas. That which was needed had to be given. These traits in him would explain the grief of his friends; but another explanation, which can only lie in his genius, must be found for the effect of his death on those who had never set eyes on him. I know nobody of middle age or less, above a certain standard of intellectual integrity or imaginative vigour, who is not stricken by his loss. The prevalent feeling was well described by a young man, a critic and a poet, who said to me the other day, ‘I’ve felt rather ill ever since Lawrence died.’ There is the general malaise one feels after a severe shock, after a loss that cannot be made good.