Mr. Lawrence and the central source, I think, of his power as a writer is his marvelous awareness of life in nature. To a limited extent he responds to the life in people, particularly in deep, vital, inarticulate people. The articulate life of people in society he regards as mainly tedious. But he responds as if there were no barrier between him and the life which pulses in beasts, birds, flowers, clouds, the sea and the spumy star clusters of the Milky Way. Arnold called Wordsworth "a priest of the wonder and bloom of the world." It is a beautiful phrase, but it should have been reserved for D. H. Lawrence. Wordsworth was an interpreter of the contemplative mind. Wordsworth saturated nature with purely human emotion, he filled the woods with the "still sad music of humanity," he tinted the skies with a divine benevolence not their own. Mr. Lawrence does not taint the air with human preconceptions or "pathetic fallacies." And to reward him for his disinterested adoration of the multitudinous spirit of life, the "thing in itself," it seems as if life had let him penetrate into intimacies unknown even to those who have made most boast of her confidences.
One might illustrate the point by quoting innumerable lovely things from his record of the bright intoxicating passage of the seasons over the English land. But our question here is not primarily a question of beauty, and not at all a question of conventionally recognized beauties. It is a question of life and the adorableness of life. It is a question of life discovered afresh by a sixth sense—life magically rendered, rippling and quivering under the impulse of the élan vital. To illustrate Mr. Lawrence's incessant captures of moving life I could ask nothing more conclusive than this:
