In Croydon, the Socialists are so stupid and the Fabians so flat.’ (Not only in Croydon, alas.) Then, during the war, there was his plan to co-operate with a few friends to take independent political action; but ‘I would like to be remote, in Italy, writing my soul’s words. To have to speak in the body is a violation to me.’ And in the end he wouldn’t violate himself; he remained aloof, remote, ‘essentially separate.’ ‘It isn’t scenery one lives by,’ he wrote from Cornwall in 1916, ‘but the freedom of moving about alone.’ How acutely he suffered from this freedom by which he lived! Kangaroo describes a later stage of the debate between the solitary artist and the man who wanted social responsibilities and contact with the body of mankind. Lawrence, like the hero of his novel, decided against contact.
He was by nature not a leader of men, but a prophet, a voice crying in the wilderness—the wilderness of his own isolation. The desert was his place, and yet he felt himself an exile in it. To Rolf Gardiner he wrote, in 1926: ‘I should love to be connected with something, with some few people, in something. As far as anything matters, I have always been very much alone, and regretted it. But I can’t belong to clubs, or societies, or Freemasons, or any other damn thing. So if there is, with you, an activity I can belong to, I shall thank my stars. But, of course, I shall be wary beyond words, of committing myself.’ He was in fact so wary that he never committed himself, but died remote and unconnected as he had lived. The daimon would not allow it to be otherwise.
(Whether Lawrence might not have been happier if he had disobeyed his daimon and forced himself at least into mechanical and external connection with the body of mankind, I forbear to speculate. Spontaneity is not the only and infallible secret of happiness; nor is a ‘would-be’ existence necessarily disastrous. But this is by the way.)
It was, I think, the sense of being cut off that sent Lawrence on his restless wanderings round the earth. His travels were at once a flight and a search: a search for some society with which he could establish contact, for a world where the times were not personal and conscious knowing had not yet perverted living; a search and at the same time a flight from the miseries and evils of the society into which he had been born, and for which, in spite of his artist’s detachment, he could not help feeling profoundly responsible. He felt himself ‘English in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England’: that was why he had to go to Ceylon and Australia and Mexico.
He could not have felt so intensely English in England without involving himself in corporative political action, without belonging and being attached; but to attach himself was something he could not bring himself to do, something that the artist in him felt as a violation. He was at once too English and too intensely an artist to stay at home. ‘Perhaps it is necessary for me to try these places, perhaps it is my destiny to know the world. It only excites the outside of me. The inside it leaves more isolated and stoic than ever. That’s how it is. It is all a form of running away from oneself and the great problems, all this wild west and the strange Australia. But I try to keep quite clear. One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America.’
His search was as fruitless as his flight was ineffective. He could not escape either from his homesickness or his sense of responsibility; and he never found a society to which he could belong. In a kind of despair, he plunged yet deeper into the surrounding mystery, into the dark night of that otherness whose essence and symbol is the sexual experience. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence wrote the epilogue to his travels and, from his long and fruitless experience of flight and search, drew what was, for him, the inevitable moral. It is a strange and beautiful book; but inexpressibly sad. But then so, at bottom, was its author’s life.
Lawrence’s psychological isolation resulted, as we have seen, in his seeking physical isolation from the body of mankind. This physical isolation reacted upon his thoughts. ‘Don’t mind if I am impertinent,’ he wrote to one of his correspondents at the end of a rather dogmatic letter. ‘Living here alone one gets so different—sort of ex-cathedra.’ To live in isolation, above the medley, has its advantages; but it also imposes certain penalties. Those who take a bird’s-eye view of the world often see clearly and comprehensively; but they tend to ignore all tiresome details, all the difficulties of social life and, ignoring, to judge too sweepingly and to condemn too lightly.
Nietzsche spent his most fruitful years perched on the tops of mountains, or plunged in the yet more abysmal solitude of boarding-houses by the Mediterranean. That was why, a delicate and sensitive man, he could be so bloodthirstily censorious—so wrong, for all his gifts, as well as so right. From the deserts of New Mexico, from rustic Tuscany or Sicily, from the Australian bush, Lawrence observed and judged and advised the distant world of men. The judgments, as might be expected, were often sweeping and violent; the advice, though admirable as far as it went, inadequate.
Political advice from even the most greatly gifted of religious innovators is always inadequate; for it is never, at bottom, advice about politics, but always about something else. Differences in quantity, if sufficiently great, produce differences of quality. This sheet of paper, for example, is qualitatively different from the electrons of which it is composed. An analogous difference divides the politician’s world from the world of the artist, or the moralist, or the religious teacher. ‘It is the business of the artist,’ writes Lawrence, ‘to follow it (the war) to the heart of the individual fighters—not to talk in armies and nations and numbers—but to track it home—home—their war—and it’s at the bottom of almost every Englishman’s heart—the war—the desire of war—the will to war—and at the bottom of every German heart.’
But an appeal to the individual heart can have very little effect on politics, which is a science of averages. An actuary can tell you how many people are likely to commit suicide next year; and no artist or moralist or Messiah can, by an appeal to the individual heart, prevent his forecast from being remarkably correct. If the things which are Caesar’s differ from the things which are God’s, it is because Caesar’s things are numbered by the thousands and millions, whereas God’s things are single individual souls.
The things of Lawrence’s Dark God were not even individual souls; they were the psychological atoms whose patterned coming together constitutes a soul. When Lawrence offers political advice, it refers to matters which are not really political at all. The political world of enormous numbers was to him a nightmare, and he fled from it. Primitive communities are so small that their politics are essentially unpolitical; that, for Lawrence, was one of their greatest charms. Looking back from some far-away and underpopulated vantage-point at the enormous, innumerable modern world, he was appalled by what he saw. He condemned, he advised, but at bottom and finally he felt himself impotent to deal with Caesar’s alien and inhuman problems. ‘I wish there were miracles,’ was his final despairing comment. ‘I am tired of the old laborious way of working things to their conclusions.’ But, alas, there are no miracles, and faith, even the faith of a man of genius, moves no mountains.
Enough of explanation and interpretation. To those who knew Lawrence, not why, but that he was what he happened to be, is the important fact. I remember very clearly my first meeting with him. The place was London, the time 1915. But Lawrence’s passionate talk was of the geographically remote and of the personally very near. Of the horrors in the middle distance—war, winter, the town—he would not speak. For he was on the point, so he imagined, of setting off to Florida—to Florida, where he was going to plant that colony of escape, of which up to the last he never ceased to dream.
Sometimes the name and site of this seed of a happier and different world were purely fanciful. It was called Rananim, for example, and was an island like Prospero’s. Sometimes it had its place on the map and its name was Florida, Cornwall, Sicily, Mexico and again, for a time, the English countryside. That wintry afternoon in 1915 it was Florida. Before tea was over he asked me if I would join the colony, and though I was an intellectually cautious young man, not at all inclined to enthusiasms, though Lawrence had startled and embarrassed me with sincerities of a kind to which my upbringing had not accustomed me, I answered yes.
Fortunately, no doubt, the Florida scheme fell through. Cities of God have always crumbled; and Lawrence’s city—his village, rather, for he hated cities—his Village of the Dark
