pluck at you, pervade you, stir the centers of emotion, as Mr. Seligman suggests—or else they produce a reaction of repugnance and send you out slamming the door after you, as Dr. Collins has done. Mr. Lawrence has this token of genius, that he affects readers as Whitman, Hardy and Dostoievsky affect them: He makes flaming disciples, on the one hand, and on the other hand he allures a certain number of temporary devotees, who subsequently shudder away from him as from the brink of a precipice and the roar of chaos.
I suspect this second group is composed of those who were first charmed by the luxuriance of natural beauty in his earlier novels and then shocked by the frank insistent association of beauty in his poetry and elsewhere—in "Amores," "Tortoises," and "Birds, Beasts and Flowers"—with Alma Venus, the generative and reproductive forces in nature.
For my own part, I came to him in his strenuous and somewhat yeasty middle period, between "Rainbow," 1915, and "Kangaroo," 1923, when he was troubling our censors with things which they were probably incapable of understanding, such as "Women in Love" and "Aaron's Rod." Though I felt immediately the power and the seriousness of intention in these books and their unfitness for children and censors, I was—by reason of an antecedent inoculation—nearly immune to them, very little stimulated by them till "Studies in Classic American Literature" struck me by its original critical force and interested me in the course of Mr. Lawrence's development. The two books in which I felt most his captivating charm and his substantial power as a novelist were "The White Peacock" and "Sons and Lovers."
The undebatably potent and enthralling virtue in
