, and the
consciousness of his outlawry, should have made a great book. But this
one of Mr Lawrence's novels fails because the author needs a wide sphere
within which the particular can evolve; he is clamouring within the
narrow limits of his incident; Sigmund appears small and weak;
unredeemed by even a flash of heroism; his discontented wife, her
self-righteous child hold their own views, and not enough those of the
world which contains them. An amazing charge to make against a novelist,
that his persons are too much persons! But persons must partly be types,
or else they become monsters.

It would be very surprising if Mr Lawrence were not a poet in verse as
well as in prose, if he did not sing when addressing his love:--

'Coiffing up your auburn hair
In a Puritan fillet, a chaste white snare
To catch and keep me with you there
So far away.'

But a poet he is much more than a rebel, and that distinguishes him from
the realists who have won fame by seeing the dunghill very well, and
not at all the spreading chestnut-tree above. Though he select from the
world, he is greedy for its beauty, so greedy that from all it has to
give, flower, beast, woman, he begs more:--

'You, Helen, who see the stars
As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree,
You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses,
Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me,'

'Helen, you let my kisses steam
Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink
Me up, I pray; oh, you who are Night's Bacchante,
How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink!'

I cannot, having no faith in my power to judge poetry, proclaim Mr
Lawrence to Parnassus, but I doubt whether such cries as these, where an
urgent wistfulness mingles in tender neighbourhood with joy and pain
together coupled, can remain unheard.

And so it seems strange to find in Mr Lawrence activities alien a
little to such verses as these, to have to say that he is also an
authoritative critic of German literature, and the author of a prose
drama of colliery life. More gladly would I think of him always as
remote from the stirrings of common men, forging and nursing his dreams.
For dreams they are, and they will menace the realities of his future if
he cannot 'breathe upon his star and detach its wings.' It is not only
the dragon of autobiography that threatens him. It is true that so far
he has written mainly of himself, of the world in intimate relation with
himself