Artist and Prophet

...But often Lawrence relied more upon the pitch of his voice than upon an articulate presentation of his vision...

...Consequently, as a reaction to Lawrence's stridency, excess and vagueness, much of the criticism about him has been denunciatory (most notable, perhaps, was the response of T. S. Eliot, who found Lawrence ill-informed, an advocate of barbarism...

...Despite Goodheart's generally scrupulous objectivity, however, there are occasional lapses into self-dcfcnsiveness...

...Lawrence's political visions contain a further impediment...

...Since World War II, however, criticism dealing with Lawrence has not only grown more voluminous but less partisan...

...Moreover, in Lawrence's writing there are a good many seriously presented passages written as though conceived in a mood of irony that somehow got lost along the way...

...Unburdened by the politically concrete, Lawrence gave himself over to the bond with the future, to the prophet in himself whose meditations—even upon the past—constitute an "ulterior view of the future...

...As a social prophet, Lawrence was impatient with political forms and committed to a politics of impulse...

...And some of the most favorable criticism, provoked as much by the reproaches of Eliot and others as by Lawrence's own work, has been largely defensive: an attempt to tame Lawrence into several respectable traditions...

...Goodheart's appreciation of his subject stops short of idolatry...

...One of the virtues of his book is its readiness to acknowledge Lawrence's frequent wrong-headedness...

...The Laurentian individual, according to Goodheart, is the possessor of an impulse toward community...

...He also ranges across modern literature and thought in search of analogues, and finds them in Rilke, Blake, Dostoycvsky and Nietzsche...

...Though greatly enamoured of Lawrence's writing...

...Through careful scholarship, Goodheart has illuminated Lawrence's visionary eradication of the Freudian struggle between impulse and social responsibility, and suggested the particular usefulness of his radical vision...

...Accordingly, Goodheart ranges across Lawrence's essays and fiction in order to draw out his Utopian vision...

...And for the critic of D. H. Lawrence there are special difficulties, not the least of which has to do with the indigestible mixture ot deep insight, rhetorical foolishness and downright quackery in Lawrence's attempts to provide a rationale for his fictions...

...He was, as Diana Trilling has suggested, "dedicated to the renovation of society by means of a revolution in the individual consciousness...

...the consequence was a conflict between message and method...

...Eliseo Vivas, for example, is taken to task for distinguishing between the propagandist and the artist as well as for suggesting that the central concern in Lawrence's writing is not the admissibility of his love ethic but its organic presence in the work of literature...

...Reviewed by ARTHUR EDELSTEIN Department of English, Hunter College Literary analysis inevitably involves the difficulty of reducing to reasonableness that which must hide its reasons—sometimes even from itself...

...Yet we are urged to avoid, as Lawrence did not...

...These are perhaps stimulated by Goodheart's desire to justify his own mode of analysis, a mode which, the claims of the introduction notwithstanding, places far greater emphasis upon the elaboration of Lawrence's ideas than upon any judgment of their artistic declaration of a social vision which, like 18th century sentimentalism, located the ethical motive within the individual...

...The debate with Vivas, though, is a small matter in a book which so trenchantly examines the thinking of an important novelist...

...More attention, he feels, should be paid to Lawrence's radical efficacy...

...In this fresh study, Goodheart attempts to correct what he sees as the current overemphasis on Lawrence's debts to tradition, mainly the moral tradition of the English novel...

...one must constantly distinguish between the serious and the ironic, the inferred and the intuited, the idea-as-idea and the idea-as-metaphor...

...His vision of life should not be taken as a guide to conduct," but that vision should be attended to so that we can avoid suffering "the hubris of complacency and selfcongratulation, of a facile faith in humanity and civilization...

...the confusion of a visionary ideal with an ethical prescription...

...an impulse from which, ideally, an unrepressive society could be constructed...

...He places Lawrence alongside these figures as one of the "tablet-breakers," men "who appear at significant crises in culture and whose characteristic impulse is to divert the current of tradition into new and hitherto unknown channels...