Lawrence’s hatred of the intellect, of the “upper story” (there is maybe a class prejudice here), is strange, certainly, in a man who himself lived almost wholly for ideas. The fact that they were his own made the difference apparently; he had hammered them out for himself. They were not quite so much his own as he thought, one must add. Was he unconscious of being one of a number of writers who disliked and distrusted the intellect, who, like him, held it responsible for most of the ills of modern civilization? He showed no awareness of such a fellowship, just as he showed no awareness of a paradox underlying the whole position, that is, that without the intellect and its system-making bent neither he nor his fellow-thinkers would have been able to carry out their mission of teaching at all. His insistence on blood and instinct as superior to brain was a mental construct incapable of proof except on the mental level.
Yet if his ideas, true or false, have stayed with us, if he was a novelist of ideas in my second, missionary, sense to whom we can still listen—the only one, probably—this must be because he was an artist as well as a cogent, programmatic mind, in other words, because he makes us feel as we read those novels that there is something in what he says. But while despising the intellect, he would not have liked the name “artist” either. For him it would have been six of one and half a dozen of the other—who could measure which was the less effete? He was unable to get along with any of his own kind, really, and could only associate, finally, with people who shared his ideas, which was bound to mean in practice people who consented to have no ideas of their own.
His life was a near-tragedy, and his self-infection, quite early, with concepts—which, when he took them for absolutes, made him quarrelsome—shared responsibility with his bad lungs. But if he had not been fevered, he might not have taken to the stump, and we might never have had these burning novels or, if you wish, tracts. Far more than the discussion novels with their eternal seesaw, they are truly novels of ideas. Without ideas none of them, after Sons and Lovers, could even palely exist. If you cut out Naphta and Settembrini, and the author’s musings on time, The Magic Mountain will still hold up as a story of a sort. The equivalent cannot be argued of Aaron’s Rod, say. I am not sure whether this makes Lawrence better or worse than Mann; at any rate it makes him special. At the same time, surprisingly, it links him with the old novelists, to whom I shall turn next. If you are going to voice explicit ideas in a novel, evidently this requires a spokesman, and I shall begin by discussing the spokesman.
2
AS I WAS SAYING, if you are going to voice ideas in a novel, plainly you will need a spokesman. In the traditional novel such semi-official figures are familiar to us and, on the whole, welcome. We quickly learn to recognize which of the characters will be a standin for the author, that is, which one we can trust as appointed representative with full powers to comment on what is happening and draw the necessary conclusions. There is nothing wrong with this; events in life seldom speak for themselves. Whether it is world events that confront us or local skulduggery—an ecological scandal or somebody running off with a friend’s wife—we frequently want somebody to explain them to us, sketch in the background, suggest where our sympathies should lie. There is no reason we should be worse off in a novel, as long as the novel is assumed to have some reasonably close connection with our immediate life or a life we are acquainted with through reading and report.
The novel in its classic period—the nineteenth century—took on that burden without protest. Protest only began to be heard toward the end of the century, when the novel, aggrieved by how much it had been expected to carry on its increasingly slender shoulders, made the first motions toward emancipation. Up until James, the novelist had been a quite willing authority figure, a parent, aunt, in Tolstoy’s case a Dutch uncle. The popular novelist (and there was no other kind, the art novel not having been discovered) was looked up to as an authority on all sorts of matters: medicine, religion, capital punishment, the right relation between the sexes. If the role was uncongenial or momentarily wearisome, he had the resort of the short story or the tale to turn to, neither of which carried such heavy responsibilities to the common life.