We regret to announce the death of Mr. David Herbert Lawrence, the novelist, which occurred in a sanatorium at Vence, near Nice.
Mr. Lawrence was a writer who has exercised a more potent influence, perhaps, over his generation than any of his contemporaries. Born (on September 1, 1885) and reared in a mining village near Nottingham, he was early exposed to the life-killing conditions in which a mechanistic industrialism has entangled mankind. He was educated at Nottingham High School and University, and, after a short period as a teacher, went to Germany. He had already written some poetry, but it was not until 1913 that he published a novel, ╥Sons and Lovers,╙ which at once marked him as a writer of unusual power. The war intensified his loathing of the ╥huge, obscene machine,╙ to the effects of which his childhood and youth had been prematurely exposed. It made him a rebel against all the accepted values of modern Western civilisation, one who challenged the disintegration not only of those who were actually caught in the blind mechanism of industry but of all who reflected a stultifying materialism either in a hard possessiveness, a soft emotionalism, or a sterile intellectualism.
He could not have assailed and portrayed this disintegration with such magnetic force and insight if he had not experienced it to an abnormal degree in himself. Endowed with an intense physical and mental sensitiveness, he personified, as only a genius pain-obsessed beyond the possibility of humour or tolerance could, the suffering of a self-conscious mind exasperated by the soulless clangour of machinery, stifled by the fumes of all its waste products, and seeking fanatically to recover unity and health by a return to the primitive. It was this which drove him eventually to Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Mexico. He sought the unity of an instinctive life, untainted by self-conscious thought, among the Indians, in beasts and birds, reptiles, fish, and even mosquitoes. He sought it in trees and flowers and fruits. And the finest of his writings, whether in poetry or prose, are those which evoke the hot, bright, throbbing life of unconscious things, of the primitive dance, the sleek stallion, or the fireflies in the corn.
Gifted with extraordinary powers of sensuous divination, few writers have so intimately realised in words the electric force in the form and movements of animal life or the burning beauty of nature╒s colours. In contact with such life his self-conscious mind found transient appeasement from its hysteria and tortured bitterness. But these were at best only moments of respite. For Lawrence╒s writings are one long cry of agony and protest against a conflict in himself which can never be resolved. The cry is a cry of sex. For the sexual relation epitomised for him the mystery of life and, through his failure to find satisfaction in it, the disease of modern life, its divided being, its mental and physical sterility.
Through all his novels and short stories, from the early ╥Sons and Lovers,╙ perhaps his finest, through ╥Women in Love,╙ ╥Aaron╒s Rod,╙ and ╥The Rainbow,╙ down to his last privately printed ╥Lady Chatterley╒s Lover,╙ this conflict of love and hate goes on between man and woman, each seeking appeasement in the other, yet failing to find it because, tied to the physical, they are tied also to its recurring cycle of desire and revulsion, which they are too self-conscious either to enjoy or inform with spiritual meaning.
╥Sons and Lovers╙ is distinguished from its successors not only by the fact that Lawrence╒s ideas are more implicitly embodied in the action and characters than in his later novels, but by its recognition of some aspects of love other than that of a sex battle, and particularly in his analysis of the crippling love of a son for his dead mother. Apart, however, from this novel and parts of ╥The Rainbow,╙ he was always too obsessed by sexual fever and frustration to admit, still less to analyse, such spiritual potentialities of love as self-sacrifice or human devotion. Indeed, he never ceased to denounce such qualities as springing from a weakness which was the negation of that instinctive wholeness to which he so hopelessly aspired. And because he could attain to the heaven neither of spirituality nor of pure naturalism, his writing is full of the cruelty of a personal hell in which was no pity or understanding, and laughter was never heard. Nor could a writer so obsessed by the physical and so hostile to the conscious mind which he could not silence create varied or subtle characters. His characters are always the same protagonists. On different battlegrounds they are always a man and a woman engaged in fighting each other out of self-consciousness. It is a grim and endless contest. As Lawrence wrote in one of his poems,
This love so full
Of hate has hurt us so.
Yet there is a dark, convulsed beauty in his repeated renderings of it. For he was a magnificently equipped craftsmen, and he was a man possessed.
In such travel-books as ╥Twilight in Italy╙ and ╥Sea and Sardinia,╙ in ╥David,╙ the best of his plays, and in the best of his poems and short stories he drew upon the primitive sources of his being with remarkable effect. And even where the struggle between tortured flesh and mind is most convulsed and relentless, or he becomes, as in ╥Fantasia of the Unconscious,╙ the fanatical preacher and theorist, a flame of agonised sincerity burns through the style. It may be, for the most part, a destructive flame, but no writer since Tolstoy has wrestled more fiercely or significantly than Lawrence with the death in life from which he could never break free.
