This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in his mind no organisations; he is mainly passionate aspiration and passionate protest. And that is not wonderful when we consider who he is. Surprising to think, this prominent young novelist is only thirty-four. Son of a Nottinghamshire coal-miner, a Board-school boy, his early career seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholarship made of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst of old-fashioned chaos in a room containing several classes. Then another scholarship, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon to teach for less than £2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extract from his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizes for history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English class. (This is rather embarrassing for those who believe in the public endowment of genius.)
I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already at twenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun _The White Peacock_, of which, year by year, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying the foundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter the literary life at a given moment: literature grew in him and with him, was always with him, even in the worst years of his delicate health. If literature was not his passion, it was to his passion what the tongue is to speech: the essential medium of his expression.
Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrence has not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a painter he ought to have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of the heron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints the countryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, but more often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicated with its wines. All through his novels runs this passionate streak, this vision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in _The White Peacock_ that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a story which one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presents to us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotional tone.