And one is always tempted to say “Let it be so.” But no, let it be not so. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, rather than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said “No” to the passion and the death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a false conclusion. His books were better than his life. Better the woman’s goal, sex and death, than some false goal of man’s.
Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha and that porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple tried so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better Vronsky’s final statement: “As a soldier I am still some good. As a man I am a ruin” — better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that beastly peasant blouse the old man wore.
Better passion and death than any more of these “isms.” No more of the old purpose done up in aspic. Better passion and death.
But still — we might live, mightn’t we?
For heaven’s sake answer plainly “No,” if you feel like it. No good temporizing.
EPILOGUE
“Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria.”
All the psalms wind up with the Gloria. — ”As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end. Amen.”
Well, then, Amen.
I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear little reader: if there be any dear little reader who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all by myself. — But don’t you think the show is all over. I’ve got another volume up my sleeve, and after a year or two years, when I have shaken it down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at the foot of your Liberty statue, oh Columbia, as I do this one.
I suppose Columbia means the States. — ”Hail Columbia!” — I suppose, etymologically, it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. columba, a dove. Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don’t roar me like the sucking doves of the critics of my “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.”
And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue, that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: “Do you see any green in my eye?” Of course I don’t, dear lady. I only see the reflection of that torch — or is it a carrot? — which you are holding up to light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayed across the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dear lady. And I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice little carrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an extraordinarily inexhaustible long time. And innumerable asses can collect themselves nice little heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up their heads and brag over them with fairly pan-demoniac yells of gratification. Of course I don’t see any green in your eye, dear Libertas, unless it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. The gleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia!
Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots this here little ass and makes you a nice present of this pretty book. You needn’t sniff, and glance at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn’t throw down the thinnest carrot-paring you can pare off, and then say: “Why should I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting nonsense!” You can’t pay for it, darling. If I didn’t make you a present of it you could never buy it. So don’t shake your carrot-sceptre and feel supercilious. Here’s a gift for you, Missis. You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn’t bite you. — No, you needn’t bother to put your carrot behind your back, nobody wants to snatch it.
How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought you a posy: this nice little posy of words and wisdom which I made for you in the woods of Ebersteinburg, on the borders of the Black Forest, near Baden Baden, in Germany, in this summer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made it specially for you — Whitman, for whom I have an immense regard, says “These States.” I suppose I ought to say: “Those States.” If the publisher would let me, I’d dedicate this book to you, to “Those States.” Because I wrote this book entirely for you, Columbia. You may not take it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny bit of Schwarzwald sap in it, and be finally disgusted. I admit that trees ought to think twice before they flourish in such a disgraced place as the Fatherland. “Chi va coi zoppi, all’ anno zoppica.” But you’ve not only to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but where ye may. And so, as I said before, the Black Forest, etc.
I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you’ll take my posy and put your carrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: “I’m sure, Mr. Lawrence, it is a long time since I had such a perfectly beautiful bunch of ideas brought me.” And I shall blush and look sheepish and say: “So glad you think so. I believe you’ll find they’ll keep fresh quite a long time, if you put them in water.” Whereupon you, Columbia, with real American gallantry: “Oh, they’ll keep for ever, Mr. Lawrence. They couldn’t be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectly lovely-colored ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much.”
Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we shall be with one another: and how much nicer it will be than if you snorted “High-falutin’ Nonsense” — or “Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish.”
When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it in the oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them a triumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he had short legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump of philoprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. And down either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large, well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don’t know what the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king’s appetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturally it looked as if Naples had done it on purpose.
As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant Italia Una! “Italy shall be one.” Ask Don Sturzo.
Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses and poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up this carrot of desire at arm’s length, and fairly hear her say, as one does to one’s pug dog, with a lump of sugar: “Beg! Beg!” — and “Jump! Jump, then!” And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there’s a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap!
Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely and sensibly. I don’t like you as a carotaia, precious.
Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements of Professor Pickering of Harvard, that it’s almost a dead cert that there’s life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there’s life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor bases his assertions on photographs — hundreds of photographs — of a crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I’m not satisfied. I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don’t come it over me with the triteness of these round numbers.
“Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably the springing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields of foliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and which disappear in a maximum period of eleven days.” — Again I’m not satisfied. I want to know if they’re cabbages, cress, mustard, or marigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And blossom! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, you might have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are good to eat, or if they’re purely for ornament.
I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to land on one of these fields of foliage and find a donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw!
“The plates moreover show that great blizzards, snow-storms, and volcanic eruptions are also frequent.” So no doubt the blossoms are edelweiss.
“We find,” says the professor, “a living world at our very doors where life in some respects resembles that of Mars.” All I can say is: “Pray come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin Signor Martian?”
Now I’m sure Professor Pickering’s photographs and observations are really wonderful. But his explanations! Come now, Colu
mbia, where is your High-falutin’ Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage which spring up at dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as quickly (!!!!) are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth is stranger than fiction.
I’ll bet my moon against the Professor’s, anyhow.
So long, Columbia. A riverderci.
STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE
This collection of literary essays was first published in book form in 1923. Lawrence’s work is startling, even revolutionary, for several reasons. The prose style is extremely informal, yet filled with penetrating psychological and moral insights. The themes running through Lawrence’s criticism are his concern with the primacy of the individual spirit and his belief in the importance of love, for better or for worse, as a force in human affairs.
Lawrence, 1923
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
The Spirit of Place
CHAPTER 2
Benjamin Franklin
CHAPTER 3
Hector St John de Crevecoeur
CHAPTER 4
Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels
CHAPTER 5
Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels
CHAPTER 6
Edgar Allan Poe
CHAPTER 7
Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter
CHAPTER 8
Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance
CHAPTER 9
Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast
CHAPTER 10
Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo
CHAPTER 11
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
CHAPTER 12
Whitman
CHAPTER 1
The Spirit of Place
WE like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children’s books. Just childishness, on our part. The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children’s tales, we miss all that.
One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne.
It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don’t listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has babbled about children’s stories.
Why ? — Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.
The world doesn’t fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can’t pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.
There is a new feeling in the old American books, far more than there is in the modern American books, which are pretty empty of any feeling, and proud of it. There is a ‘different’ feeling in the old American classics. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new, a displacement. And dis- placements hurt. This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut finger. Put a rag round it.
It is a cut too. Cutting away the old emotions and conscious- ness. Don’t ask what is left.
Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
The old American artists were hopeless liars. But they were artists, in spite of themselves. Which is more than you can say of most living practitioners.
And you can please yourself, when you read The Scarlet Letter , whether you accept what that sugary, blue-eyed little darling of a Hawthorne has to say for himself, false as all darlings are, or whether you read the impeccable truth of his art-speech.
The curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth. Like Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing himself all the while as a little horror.
Truly art is a sort of subterfuge. But thank God for it, we can see through the subterfuge if we choose. Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out . of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.
The artist usually sets out - or used to - to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never . trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
Now we know our business in these studies; saving the American tale from the American artist.
Let us look at this American artist first. How did he ever get to America, to start with? Why isn’t he a European still, like his father before him?
Now listen to me, don’t listen to him. He’ll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.
He didn’t come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.
Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will Iynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free ? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to Iynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.
No, no, if you’re so fond of the truth about Queen Victoria, try a little about yourself.
Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?
They didn’t come for freedom. Or if they did, they sadly went back on themselves.
All right then, what did they come for ? For lots of reasons. Perhaps least of all in search of freedom of any sort: positive freedom, that is.
They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That’s why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.
‘Henceforth be masterless.’
Which is all very well, but it isn’t freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you kind something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.
And after all there is a positive side to the movement. All that vast flood of human life that has flowed over the Atlantic in ships from Europe to America has not flowed over simply on a tide of revulsion from Europe and from the confinements of the European ways of life. This revulsion was, and still is, I believe, the prime motive in emigration. But there was some cause, even for the revulsion.
It seems as if at times man had a frenzy for getting away from any control of any sort. In Europe the old Christianity was the real master. The Church and the true aristocracy bore the resp
onsibility for the working out of the Christian ideals: a little irregularly, maybe, but responsible nevertheless.
Mastery, kingship, fatherhood had their power destroyed at the time of the Renaissance.
And it was precisely at this moment that the great drift over the Atlantic started. What were men drifting away from? The old authority ot Europe? Were they breaking the bonds of authority, and escaping to a new more absolute unrestrained- ness ? Maybe. But there was more to it.
Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposi- tion to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the hrst generation.
But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery. Hence the slow, smoul- dering patience of American opposition. The slow, smouldering corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the unwilling subject, the unremitting opposition.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 946