realisation of
nature. I doubt the quality of his people's culture, the spontaneity of
their attitude towards the fields in which they breathe; their
spontaneity seems almost artificial.

That impression Mr Lawrence always gives; he sees the world through a
magnifying-glass, and perhaps more so in _Sons and Lovers_ than in _The
White Peacock_. In that book he gives us unabashed autobiography--the
story of his early youth, of his relation to his mother, a creature of
fitful, delicate charm. Mrs Morel is very Northern; she has, with the
harshness of her latitude, its fine courage and its ambition; Paul
Morel, the hero, is Mr Lawrence himself, the little blue flower on the
clinker heap. And those other folk about him, dark Miriam, slowly
brooding over him; her rival, that conquering captive of sex; the
brothers, the sisters, and the friends; this intense society is vital
and yet undefinably exaggerated. Perhaps not so undefinably, for I am
oppressed by unbelief when I find this grouping of agriculturists and
colliers responding to the verse of Swinburne and Verlaine, to Italian,
to Wagner, to Bach. I cannot believe in the spinet at the pit's mouth.
And yet all this, Mr Lawrence tells us, is true! Well, it is true, but
it is not general, and that is what impairs the value of Mr Lawrence's
visions. Because a thing is, he believes that it is; when a thing is, it
may only be accidental; it may be particular. Now one might discuss at
length whether a novelist should concentrate on the general or on the
particular, whether he should use the microscope or the aplanetic lense,
and many champions will be found in the field. I will not attempt to
decide whether he should wish, as Mr Wells, to figure all the world, or
as Mr Bennett, to take a section; probably the ideal is the mean. But
doubtless the novelist should select among the particular that which has
an application to the general, and it may safely be said that, if Mr
Lawrence errs at all, it is in selecting such particular as has not
invariably a universal application.

Mr Lawrence lays himself open to this criticism in a work such as _Sons
and Lovers_, because it has a conscious general scope, but in _The
Trespasser_ his conception is of a lesser compass. The book holds a more
minute psychological intention. That Sigmund should leave his wife for
another love and find himself driven to his death by an intolerable
conflict between his desire, the love he bears his children