among the dead, i make sir richard burton meet and talk with herbert spencer, and i always call this conversation the man and the mummy. it is strange, but we have not, so far as i am aware, any record of burton’s rich and provocative conversation, though i have been assured by men who knew him well that his talk was the best they had heard. sir richard burton is one of the men whom i most wish to meet, and perhaps when my happy sojourn on this planet comes to a close, i shall be allowed to serve him in some humble capacity. to me he has always seemed to belong to elizabethan times, and i think that he must often have cursed at fate for placing him in the middle of a century that could not fully understand or appreciate him.
in our own days we have many young men of a spirit akin to that of burton, though not one of them may possess a tithe of his genius or of his colossal intellect. i refer, of course, to our numerous soldier-poets—gallant young men of thought and action, of quick and generous sympathy, of noble aspiration. most of you who read what i am now writing must know at least one man belonging to this type, for there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them—men who, but for the war, would probably never have written a line of poetry, but whose souls have been stirred and whose hearts have been fired by the grandest emotion that can urge mankind to self-sacrifice: i mean the never-dying emotion of patriotism—that emotion at which the sexless sneer, which the “cosmopolitan” regards with amusement, and for which men of imagination and grit gladly die.
one soldier of this type i knew intimately, and i would gladly know many of those others who have thrilled us with their poems. let me describe my friend to you. he is no longer young: his precise age is thirty-five: but 270he was among those who, early in august, 1914, after first putting his small affairs in order, enlisted in lord kitchener’s army. he made no fuss about it, and told none but his most intimate friends what he had done. i met him a few months after he had joined up; he was then a corporal, and seemed to me the happiest man i had met for many a day. he told me that he had begun to write “seriously,” for hitherto his scribbling had been of a cursory and trivial nature. but he showed me none of his work, and it was not until he had been in france some little time that his verses began to appear in one or two reviews. having been granted a commission, he quickly rose to the rank of captain. he was mentioned in dispatches twice and, having led a particularly successful bombing raid on the enemy’s trenches, was awarded the military cross.
there is, i know, nothing very unusual in this bare record as i have set it down; the unusual, indeed extraordinary, nature of this case is that before the war my friend had been a reserved, unadventurous but very capable bank clerk, quite undistinguished and apparently without ambition. but hidden fires must from his youth have been smouldering in his heart, and it required the war’s disturbance and excitement to blow these ashes into flame, and the war’s opportunity was needed to disclose of what fine material he was made. i flatter myself that i had always known his nature was fine and distinguished, for though he was a bank clerk one would never have guessed it from his conversation and demeanour. i also know that, generations ago, his forbears played a by-no-means ignoble part in our country’s history, and for that reason alone i felt that, though concealed, there were imagination and aspiration abiding in his soul.
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one of my friends, anna wickham, knows d. h. lawrence very well, and one day i asked her if she 271would arrange for me to meet him at her house. but she brushed aside the suggestion with the few words that she was not particularly interested in lawrence and that my time might be wasted if spent with him. such a suggestion amazed, and still amazes me, and i cannot but think that anna wickham had never troubled to read any of d. h. lawrence’s writings, for it often happens among literary people that close friends do not look at each other’s work.
to me d. h. lawrence is perhaps the most peculiarly original english writer living. in his poems he is so egoistic as almost to seem like an egomaniac, and in two or three of his novels he is obsessed and overwhelmed by the passion of sex. yet in sons and lovers, and in that wonderful first book of his called, i think, the red peacock, he gets clean away from himself, and is as objective as all great creative artists are and should be. every writer must, of course, portray life in terms of himself, but only small men continually thrust themselves and themselves only on to an embarrassed public. but lawrence has an insatiable curiosity about himself, and it seems at times as though he is not anxious to discover or uncover life, but to penetrate to the deeps of his own nature and shout out at the top of his voice what he has found there. in such egoism, there is, of course, strength as well as weakness, and the very fault, so grave and so calamitous, that bars him from achieving great work is, nevertheless, an attraction to those who are much intrigued by psychology.
there are, are there not? two kinds of imaginative literature: the kind we read without more than a passing thought for the man or woman who has written it; and the kind we read primarily because we are enormously interested in the personality and temperament of the man or woman from whom that literature comes. in removing himself to italy instead of throwing himself heart and soul into the ugly but extraordinary life that these years are 272giving us, d. h. lawrence is, i believe, evading his destiny and is thereby weakening the gifts and tampering with the intellect of a man whose name should stand near the head of all contemporary writers.
if mr lawrence should by chance read these pages, he will acquit me of impertinence if he remembers that he has taken the public into his confidence, and that he must expect the public to make some comment upon what he, uninvited, has told us.
