English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Fiction
To sum up, I suggest that the rough classification of the seven young
men must not be taken as fixed. Some are more autobiographic than
evocative; some are receptive rather than personally active, and yet
others have not chosen between the two roads. Yet, taking them as a
whole, with the reservation of possible dark horses, these are probably
the men among whom will be found the two or three who will 'somehow,' in
another ten years, lead English letters. It will be an indefinable
'somehow,' a compound of intellectual dominance and emotional sway. We
shall not have a Bennett for a Bennett, nor a Wells for a Wells, but
equivalents of power, and equivalents of significance, who will be
intimately in tune with their time and better than any will express it.
Three Young Novelists
1. MR D. H. LAWRENCE
It is not a very long time ago since Professor Osler startled America
and England by proclaiming that a man was too old at forty. This is not
generally held, though, I suppose, most of us will accept that one is
too old to begin at forty. But that is not the end: very soon, in
literature at least, it may be too late to begin at thirty, if we are to
take into account the achievements of the young men, of whom Mr D. H.
Lawrence is one of the youngest. Mr Lawrence is certainly one of the
young men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, and
can have none if they are of any value, but a partner in their
tendencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unruliness
of the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, its
rules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual to
do much more than live--namely, to live splendidly.
It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, like
them, he is so very much of his time, so hot, controversial, uneasy;
that, like them, he has the sudden fury of the bird that beats against
the bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at the
family, at every institution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things;
he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to transmute the
world into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop his
individuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system which
tortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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