It is stupid to explain symbols. Yet after all that is the dull function of criticism, to explain something--as if the creator of a work of art had not given all the necessary explanation in the very act of creation. Whoever does not understand Lawrence on immediate contact will not understand him better after the intervention of a critic. But it is the pleasure and the privilege of a critic to have his secondary imagination set on fire by the primary imagination of a man of genius, to spread the fire if he can by the cold fluid of critical exposition--as water carries burning oil. Well, then, Aaron's rod is doubly symbolic. His rod which, in the Biblical phrase, bloomed, blossomed and yielded almonds, is a flute. And the symbol is also phallic, as, indeed, it is in the Bible. Aaron's flute, the musical instrument, is smashed in an accident which is as irrational as life itself. The instrument in its other aspect is broken by the supreme and only rationality--that of human character. In all his books, beginning with "Sons and Lovers," Mr. Lawrence has shown relatively little interest in those mere sequences of external events which novelists artificially pattern into plots. He throws some matter-of-fact probabilities to the winds, as in "Aaron's Rod," when he makes a man from the English collieries a master flautist and alleges that he got a hearing in Italy, where there are more good flautists to the square inch than in England to the square mile. But Aaron is an unusual person. "It is remarkable," says his creator, "how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England." Mr. Lawrence has always been interested in slightly eccentric characters, and so he stands apart from his contemporaries who call themselves realists or naturalists because they deal with the commonplace or the recognizably normal. After all, extraordinary persons in fiction, as in life, are better worth knowing than ordinary persons. Mr. Lawrence does not make his people so widely different from the general run of human beings as to put a strain on credulity, and he studies them with a subtle and firm understanding. Their talk sounds real. Their emotions are alive in his bold and delicate prose. He has made amateurish excursions into psychoanalysis, which may or may not be a fruitful subject for a novelist to study. The real novelist has always been a psychologist in an untechnical sense. Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import into his art the dubious lingo of psycho-analysis; he remains the poet, the dramatist, his symbols and images uncorrupted by pseudo-science. Aaron's dream in the last chapter--no modern novel is complete without at least one dream--is easily "freuded" (cave, corridor, and water symbols), but Mr. Lawrence refrains from analysis.