Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/43

 book, which can be read easily enough but can hardly be taken in, with its full import, unless one has in mind everything that led up to it.

"Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me?" So, sitting on the lid of cultivated English fiction, wrote Henry James to that able lookout for young talents, Mr. Hugh Walpole, in 1913, on the appearance of Mr. Lawrence's third novel, "Sons and Lovers." "Send him and his book along," he continued, "by which I simply mean inoculate me, at your convenience . . . so far as I can be inoculated." Next year, in his much-quoted essay on "The New Novel," James warily circled around Mr. Lawrence three or four times, without actually boarding him, with, I suspect, a dim septuagenarian presentiment that Mr. Lawrence was a power, and, potentially, an intensely hostile power. As he was. As he is. Mr. Lawrence admired William James: he wore a beard. Henry James was a smooth master of bien-séances—smooth-faced and bland as a Roman prelate.

In 1922 Mr. John Macy, who, with characteristic generous enthusiasm, had flung up his cap for "Sons and Lovers," ranked Mr. Lawrence with Meredith and Hardy, and declared that he knew of no other writer of his generation "endowed with his great variety of gifts." In 1923 Dr. Joseph Collins, psychologist and alienist, allured to the task by Mr. Lawrence's obvious interest for the psychoanalyst, avowed that he once had had high hopes of this man, but he added sternly that Lawrence had "sown in glory and raised in corruption," that his instincts were perverted and that it was a pity the British did not "annihilate every trace of him."

In 1924, Mr. Herbert Seligman carried on the de-