The banal is that in which we see a statement falling back on itself, returning us, empty-handed, to where we were. This is the tautology that lies at the end of all ultimate thinking, the tautology of the closed and therefore vicious circle, the circle of intellectual process that sends Marlowe's Faust to the Devil, and a later philosopher, Wittgenstein, to the premature retirement of a schoolmaster's life. Fortunately, Wittgenstein found it possible to overcome the immobilisation of his thought by a sense of banality by questioning the established conventions of language, and proposing to leap over the boundaries that had previously brought him to a standstill. As an ‘enemy of convention’, to use Lawrence's epitomisation of the poet, he explains his new approach:

To say ‘this combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary, it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may show where the property of one man ends and that of another begins. So, if I draw a boundary line, this is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.

By such an open-minded and inventive approach (which is scarcely available to the dogmatist, for example) the exploring thinker can hope to avoid the beaten track that brings him full circle, suspecting himself, and possibly the world, of being banal. In the communicating of ideas, however, the banal statement may be seen as a positive, if ironic, device, of genuine value in a rhetoric that has to overcome not so much the boundaries of language itself, as the boundaries of the listener's prejudice and understanding. The artist is quick to make use of such a device in, for example, the apparently ‘pointless’ story. Thus, the ‘shaggy dog story’ expressly uses the movement of the banal, the sense of ‘getting nowhere’, in order to gain its effect.

These considerations are relevant when asking how Lawrence's poetry employs the banal. Certainly, Lawrence sees the experience of man as generally tending to the banal. That cognition and conation, as principles for dealing with the experiences of the world, do not suffice of themselves to produce adequate spiritual attitudes, Lawrence, and Spinoza before him, make clear. Only by applying Spinoza's third principle of ‘affectation’, i.e. feeling, can the sense of banality in life be overcome; or, as Lawrence would have it, by means of an instinctive (as opposed to rational) leap into the outer darkness, away from the futile immobilising inner world of the ‘ego’, whose vicious circle of ‘self-knowledge’ can only bring ‘corruption’:

Thus the false I comes into being: the I which thinks itself supreme and infinite, and which is, in fact, a sick foetus shut up in the walls of an unrelaxed womb. … It is tremendously conceited. It can only react upon itself. And the reaction can only take the form of self-consciousness. … Therefore there remains either to die, to pass into the outer darkness, or to enter into self-knowledge. …

(‘Within the Sepulchre’, 1915)

To experience life as banal is to experience it in the state of that ennui which so exercised the spleen of Lawrence's immediate precursors, the Symbolists. Even the sense of Beauty is incapable of sustaining itself and providing a means to explore outwards. In this state, Paradise itself become banal, and one recalls Croce's story of the Russian woman lured by the sun to Italy. Going to live in an idyllic valley which overlooks the whole glorious sweep of the Bay of Naples, she was at first delighted with the great expanse of blue water and the blue enveloping sky. Eventually, however, she became discontented with the boring ‘blue washbasin’, sold up her villa and left. But, as Croce adds, even this description (the cuvette bleue) was a ‘legitimate poetic creation’, and we can see how the self-deception of the rationalisation was used, to overcome the sense of banality, the sense of being returned to the self, empty-handed.

The unpleasantness of banality is the unpleasantness of disappointed hope: and the encouragement of hope and confidence in the world is what we look for in experience, whether this hope requires a spiritual, aesthetic, or some other kind of form or stimulus. So Lear asks Cordelia for the truth as he hopes it to be, not as it really is.

The professional writer, unlike the Russian lady in Naples, undertakes in his work to satisfy critical judgement, his own and his readers'. For him, ‘legitimate poetic creation’ has its legitimacy also in his exercising the right to publish. This is especially true of the didactic writer, who is addressing mankind. But the didactic writer, the man with a message, seldom pauses to analyse the nature of language, and the nature of ideas from a philosophical point of view. His fervour may obscure the triteness of his more banal remarks, both for himself and his disciples. This is probably because he is not usually a doubting sort of person, at least so far as his message is concerned. Now Lawrence is pre-eminently a didactic writer concerned with the here and now. He is also averse to seeking ‘self-knowledge’, which he equates with the process of ‘analysis’ which to him means being a ‘corpse’. He sees man as ‘looking forever at himself’, and in doing so resorts to the idea of the barren tautology, of the banal. And because Lawrence (as a poet) writes in a spontaneous manner, and explicitly refuses to analyse and revise his poems—excising unwanted banalities, faulty rhythms, etc.—we can see how he recommends a condition tantamount to self-ignorance, adopting it himself both as a person and as an artist. He prefers the third way, to go ‘into the outer darkness’, without looking back. Unfortunately, the exclusive identification of the artist with his inspirational process is only too liable to reduce his faculty for the critical process; if his poetry is allowed to come only like Keats's ‘leaves to the tree’, and is not judged critically either during or after composition, then it will too often show the tree's lack of art. It will know neither where it needs pruning, nor why. Writing to his friend, Edward Marsh, Lawrence says:

I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of craftsmen. … Remember, skilled poetry is dead in fifty years.

No doubt we should understand his ‘skilled’ to mean ‘merely skilled’, and his ‘self-knowledge’ to mean ‘mere self-knowledge’, such ellipsis being a rhetorical device, of which Lawrence must have been aware, even if his polemical verve may have led him to exaggerate its use. What, then, of the banalities that sometimes—if infrequently—occur in his work? Can one assume that they too are a considered and legitimate rhetorical device intended, for example, satirically? In the following example, the melodramatic tone, generated in the first place by the elevated Biblical style, gives way to a plethora of bathetic qualification. It begins his poem on St. Mark, from ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’:

There was a lion in Judah
Which whelped, and was Mark.
But winged.
A lion with wings.
At least at Venice.
Even as late as Daniele Manin.

The banal in this instance can be regarded as that literal banality of the merely contingent when seen by the idealist in contrast with the transcendental; that is to say, the sublunar world of Venice bounded by the temporality of a particular human-being (Daniele Manin) and the factitious nature of a sculptured ‘lion with wings’. All this in contrast with the introductory myth of vague place and time, ancient Judah, where monsters and miracles are not entirely out of place. This is surely not intended to seem banal. Should we see it then as the approach of a realist, using a kind of realism, similar to that which may prompt a rendering of Hamlet in modern dress, or ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in the style of Rhythm and Blues? Can we say that Lawrence manages here to rise high enough to ‘jump over the boundary’ of language—that is to say, poetic usage—and use a banal expression from which to spring to a total expression of opposite effect? And what of those instances where he leaves us with unqualified banality? Are they to be interpreted as deliberate attempts to use cliché, triteness, sheer flatness of expression in order to get through to the truth, and to get the truth through to the reader? Attempts which fail? Or, if not deliberately banal, nevertheless failures of some other intention, e.g. of being realistic, modern, up to date, using popular speech and the register of conversation, in reaction against what he conceives to be effete poeticising?

Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘The Evangelistic Beasts’:

They are not all beasts.
One is a man, for example, and one is a bird.

Once again Lawrence seems anxious to forestall criticism; in this case, that his title is inapposite. He seems self-consciously to be making excuses for having gone too far. Taken out of the context of the ensuing lines, and ignoring the presumed expository intention, it would of course be easy to ridicule these quotations on the count of being banal. But that is true of many an excellent line, if we are in the mood to burlesque. But are these excellent lines? And what should we say of these opening lines from ‘The Hands of God’?

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.

Unless this passage is interpreted as expository—say, in the manner of a sermon's introductory text—then it is hard to see how it justifies itself or encourages us to read the rest of the poem. Isn't this rather that prosaic matter-of-factness that sermonising tags capitalise as a means of bringing, like the parable, a heavenly meaning down to earth—and us down to earth also, but the better to fill our hands with the rewarding Truth? (See Herbert's poems for this apparently ingenious simplicity—but coupled with a dedication to the practice of art.) A reading of the rest of the poem does, I think, confirm that the intention is expository, and that, moreover, the influence of the sermon or moral polemic is, with Lawrence, extremely important. There is certainly no banality intended, either here or, I suspect, anywhere else in Lawrence's poems—intended, that is, as a rhetorical device. Matter-of-factness is another question, and the two should be kept distinct. The first would indicate a conscious acceptance of the conventions of art. The second would indicate an ignoring of those conventions at least to the extent that the naïve artist can ignore them in dispensing with the relatively sophisticated prescriptions of traditional techniques. Following this distinction, we can see that banality is not to be equated with matter-of-factness as technical simplicity of expression. In the practice of art (whether painting or poetry) the banal shows itself very often in a tepid desire to keep to this side of the conventional boundary, rather than leap over, whether into a novel form, or simply into that realm of the uniquely alive, which all achieved works inhabit. Thus a poem which is the antithesis of the simple, may, despite its ornate and highly worked surface, and the emotion and disturbance of its matter, be a thoroughly conventional exemplar of its genre, and, in merely returning the reader to himself and what he already knows, may give him that unproductive experience that he can call, in a word, banal.

The informal, conversational register that Lawrence chooses to work in—it includes a rather feminine, chatty tone—often has the characteristics not only of the new style of his time, free verse, but additional idiosyncrasies, particularly of diction, of his own making. It is not just that words like ‘black-paper’, ‘forameniferae’, ‘bolshevistically’, ‘Plutonic’ and so on are new, either in poetic usage or as actual coinages; the examples of Eliot and Pound have already set the pace. These modernisms, and the awkwardness of rhythms, prompt a comparison with the contemporary practice of the Dadaists, amongst them Duchamp, who presented a bottle-rack and a urinal as works of art. Whatever the intention (to encourage a new attitude to the role of art? A desire to épater le bourgeois?), the effect is that of a revolt against the established rules of art. But the new art could claim technical and formal achievement, whereas Lawrence often seems to shy away from such an objective, and his letter to Edward Marsh supports this view. It may be more accurate to describe his revolt from the rules as taking him in another—and traditional—direction, that of the simplicity, which, in painting, is called the naïve.

Naïvety in style is the most difficult of all kinds of expression that an artist can aim at, because in treating the subject it seems to ignore the traditional rules of form; it seems to be content with, and even to aim at, a style of art that is artless. In Lawrence's case, it is to be seen how and whether his style is naïve and his meaning banal—and whether there is not a dynamic relationship between these qualities.

If Lawrence wishes his poems to give us pleasure, then he will aim at a poetry that we can respect or enjoy, because it lifts our hope, even perhaps with a sense of élan. And if that élan, or flight, loses its impetus, either through flying up with too much zest and stalling in hyperbole, or sinking because it runs out of fuel, then the art lurches into a failure as art. It has an accident, and becomes confused with the merely ordinary and earthbound. Naturally, the higher the attempt, the greater the fall. And the banal which is ridiculed in art goes unnoticed in a textbook—indeed hardly exists as such—for the one raises our emotional expectations and invites us to identify with the artist, the person, while the other communicates neutrally and dispassionately. Normally, we are not emotionally involved, and so do not feel let down.

Lawrence does write poems which lose their impetus, and sometimes quite soon, e.g.:

Fig-trees, weird fig-trees
Made of thick smooth silver,
Made of sweet, untarnished silver in the sea-southern air—
I say untarnished, but I mean opaque—
Thick, smooth-fleshed silver, dull only as human limbs are dull …

(‘Bare Fig-Trees’)

and his rhythms sometimes degenerate to the extent that the reader is made to stumble. An example of such a compound fault of rhythm and banality can be found in ‘Manifesto’:

And the sweet, constant, balanced heat
of the suave sensitive body, the hunger for this
has never seized me and terrified me.
Here again, man has been good in his legacy to us, in these two primary instances

Is this last line a product of deliberately naïve artistry or of a defective ear? The banality occurs through breaking off suddenly from the subjective and emotional flight, returning us to ourselves with that objective, prosaic, textbook ‘two primary instances’ and ‘Here again’. On the other hand, it may be that Lawrence is here making a deliberate sacrifice of euphony in the name of a new art, the rules of which he might support vehemently. But he does not mention such rules or lead us to expect them. Another example of this type, where the terminal line breaks free is:

Ah Phoenix, Phoenix,
John's Eagle!
You are only known to us now as the badge of an insurance company.

(‘The Evangelistic Beasts’)

These examples, and many others, are so eccentric, that only a tension supplied by the reader, in rendering them vehemently, would seem to give them sufficient life and movement. But how can it be legitimate to claim that the lines are, in that case, intrinsically justified, as the poet's success, rather than extrinsically justified as the reader's success? The claim can stand only if this is a new kind of art, which must therefore be judged by new rules. But what is the evidence that Lawrence intended to produce a new art, rather than the traditional art of poetry vivified with ‘regular’ innovations? The alternative claim could be that the intensity and vehemence required are in fact already there, just as they are in Lawrence's prose when he informs it with his most passionately held convictions. And such intensity is paradoxically apparent in lines which seem to aim rather at the rhythm and diction of conversation, or Lawrence's own letters, as later on in ‘St. John’:

For the almighty eagle of the fore-ordained Mind
Is looking rather shabby and island-bound these days:
Moulting, and rather naked about the rump, and down in the beak,
Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos.

It may seem far-fetched to ascribe intensity to, or behind, these lines, if we take them as merely conversational and relaxed in the way we normally use those terms. But that is because normal relaxed conversation does not generally occur in an ambience of personal conviction, whether the topic is political or religious. If we can see that Lawrence is here speaking as a reformer in the tradition of English Nonconformist zeal, we can then accept that there is an underlying vehemence of conviction that generates all the élan that the poem requires. It does not then have to come from the reader. Only the reader's sympathetic understanding is required.

Many of the Last Poems are religious utterances, in one case an explicit prayer—his version of the Lord's Prayer. In fact we can see in Lawrence's work as a whole the stigmata of the man of religion, and if we fail in that kind of commitment which so profoundly and entirely binds him to his tenets, we shall be in danger of mistaking his passion and vehemence in the same way that we might mistake the manifestations of an exotic religion as crude, noisy and extravagant. Whether Lawrence is teaching the reader or rehearsing his homiletics to himself is not clear, nor perhaps, important, since the spirit of didacticism does not entirely depend on an audience, either of one or many. In many ways, Lawrence, for all his attachment to journalistic phraseology, his public explosions of public idols, is an intensely private writer, and yet he has the courage to show himself in public as a genuine man of feeling. He is vulnerably private, with a candour and lack of humour that no politician, the epitome of the public man, could ever afford. He seems often to shock himself as well as the bourgeois, and we have seen already how timid he can be of his bold other self, with its proclivity for sweeping statements which have to be amended.

Because Lawrence takes himself seriously, we must too, in order to judge his work. This is not to say that his art must therefore be beyond criticism, but rather that it must be accepted on this near side of criticism, taken on trust, while we search out his overall purpose. To dispose of the art first would be to risk mere aestheticism, a vice he himself belaboured, seeing in it, as every man with a message is likely to, the danger of loss of meaning at the expense of a temporary pleasure. In the English tradition of teaching, the Puritan still makes himself heard, railing like Ananias, at the falsehood of all fictions which do not pay their respects to God.

If we do not share a man's belief in his message, whether his work is homily, polemic, or love-letter, then we are liable to withhold the sensitive sympathy which permits us to share his vehemence and exaggerations. But a poet writing poetry may be expected to justify his claim to such indulgence so long as he publishes his work as art.

It may be that Lawrence's ideal audience will not notice his naïvety as an artist, and therefore will not feel the need to supply the tension necessary to save the ‘Manifesto’ rhythms from stumbling. There may be no criticism of his prosaic diction, with its fustian ‘for example's and ‘here again's. It may be that there is no tradition of criticism of such trifles, if the context of that audience and of Lawrence himself is seen not so much as poetry, as pulpit.

When Lawrence quotes, ‘To be or not to be’ he is not being ironically banal, as Eliot might have been; nor literary, like Pound. Rather, he is citing Scripture, since Shakespeare was the lay bible of his late Victorian education. Once accepting this view of him, we can then appreciate Lawrence's use of a diction that is modern for the sake of some other consideration than art's. The tradition in poetry that Lawrence refers to, no doubt unconsciously, is that of the writer-prophet: he no more considers himself a mere artist—poet or novelist—than presumably did Isaiah or Job. It is surely not inappropriate to see him (and one thinks of Whitman too) as the prophet striding in from the desert, loud and repetitious from too much solitude, impetuous to tell, summon and warn. In writing ‘Manifesto’ Lawrence may, in the title, be answering the godless Bolsheviks he so enjoys hating. He likes a fight, we know, and can be as downright and uncompromising as that other reformer and writer of prayers, Martin Luther: ‘Here am I—I can no other’. It would be surprising then if Lawrence, as preacher, was aware of the hackneyed clang in what is for him essentially a religious watch-word, incapable of sounding hackneyed to the faithful:

To be or not to be, is still in question.
This ache for being is the ultimate hunger.

It is use that the spontaneous preacher has in mind, rather than ‘beauty’ or similar abstractions. And Lawrence knows the use, as a preacher, of novelty and colloquialism in the congregation's language; and this may account for his accepting what is often the catch-phrase of the moment, the jargon of the drawing-rooms he frequented:

You are the wish, and I the fulfilment
You are the night, and I the day.

(‘Bei Hennef’)

a line that seems curiously banal in a passionate love-poem, considering how the terminology of Freud has up-dated the succeeding hoary trope.

But Lawrence presents himself as a poet, and the occasional faults of his poetry cannot be excused on the grounds of an over-riding didactic purpose. Certainly his method prevents him from excluding the faults of banality, diction and rhythm not only at the time of composing, but later when preparing for the press. His own avowal of his favoured method puts a premium on spontaneity, so that the faults are fostered by his reluctance to criticise his own mental process. We may think, then, that this reluctance is being rationalised into something positive when he aspires to ‘the finest instinct imaginable’. Unfortunately, the finest instinct is wanting too often in Lawrence's own practice, despite the ‘pulse of violent emotional power’ ascribed by W. E. Williams in the Introduction to his edition of the poems (Penguin, 1950). The pulse is there, certainly, but how often it misses a beat and threatens a seizure of the poem as a whole. Such a corporal metaphor is in keeping with Lawrence's own image, as expressed in his defence of his repetitiveness:

The only answer is, that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from the pulsing frictional to-and-fro which works up to a culmination.¹

This strange answer is no real answer: we know only too well the manifold excuse of the natural for the unreasonable (O Rousseau, what crimes are committed in thy name!). But as a writer, Lawrence knows how essentially contradictory the implications of his appeal are to his creative intention, namely, that of making the artificial (ars facere, ‘art-making’). For we have no reason to believe the defence that might be proposed, that he was mainly a didactic preacher, not intending artistry. He himself says he aims at an art of ‘the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of craftsmen’. But in aiming higher than the skill of the craftsman would take him, he is, however, proposing an artistic method as risky as it is ancient: that of the extemporising bard.

That Lawrence understood himself to be a conscious artist, both as writer and painter, is hardly disputable. How is it, then, that whatever priority he gave to his didactic message, or the immediacy of his feeling, his artistic intention did not in fact follow up to fulfil itself adequately—at least to the extent of tidying up those flaws of rhythm and diction which are so outstanding? It may be that incompetence, wherever it occurs, is as hard to ‘explain’ as competence. Certainly no mere explanation of Lawrence's competence can do justice to the vitality of his vision. If he wanted his poems to live longer than fifty years, was he prepared to give them every chance of doing so? That merely skilled poetry soon loses its attraction is only to be expected. But what is to take the place of mere skill, if not inspiration from outside or genius from inside? There seems to be no argument made for inspiration, and there is a disavowal of mere intellect and skill. Is it that Lawrence, arrogant or not, gambles on the unerring aim of his native and unaided genius? Is this what he means by trying for ‘the finest instinct imaginable’?

What is in question here is Lawrence's sincerity, the congruence of his actions, intentions and attempts at self-knowledge; his attempts at self-knowledge being, in the first place, the basis for sincerity. It is obvious that his actions and intentions were aimed at the conscious writing of poetry. But his attempts at self-knowledge must, to judge by his constantly repeated warnings against such attempts, have been in opposition to his preference for a non-intellectual approach—that of ‘intuition’, or, as he says, ‘instinct’. Why then did his intuition not save him from publishing such uneven work? Did he recognise that a hit-or-miss method might require some suppressions? It may be that he judged the whole as justifying the parts. For him, perhaps, the whole was not frustrated by the parts. That is to say, his critical judgement was not in fact excluded from the decisions to publish. And so we come full circle, to the simple, perhaps banal, conclusion that his talent is ‘uneven’.

But we cannot leave it at that. The final and deciding factor may be that of his self-knowledge. A deficiency of self-knowledge in the matter of his artistic intentions might account for the unevenness of his poems. This deficiency would make it difficult for him to judge the nature of his intuitions, his ‘instinct’. Not only self-knowledge, but knowledge of some other men's work would have told him of the risks of his preferred method, and the danger of avoiding self-criticism. That he did not recognise the existence of those risks may well have been due to his pre-eminent desire to rely only on the ‘finest instinct’, to the exclusion of judgement. Such a desire might then have been strong enough to allow the deflection of his unguided will into a certain wilfulness. For the artist, the wish to be his own instrument played on by his own emotions is normal. But if he forbids free play to his judgement, and refuses to be his own critic, he risks failure in the manner of the merest amateur. Since Lawrence was very much a professional writer, one must look further than the amateur's ineptness or carelessness, to some positive inhibiting factor. Such a factor, I believe, exists, and betrays its presence in the abruptness of the last lines of ‘The Evening Land’, a poem dedicated to his distrust of the American way of life:

Dark, elvish,
Modern, unissued, uncanny America,
Your nascent demon people
Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket
Allure me till I am beside myself,
A nympholept,
‘These States!’ as Whitman said,
Whatever he meant.

Whether arrogance or conceit is operating here, or simply rough humour, is not certain; but the tone is very much at variance with the cautious, qualifying attitude already noted in earlier examples. Such unevenness of self-confidence is itself a clue to what we may postulate as the most fundamental cause of the faults under discussion; namely, a fear on Lawrence's part of self-questioning and self-knowledge. Such a fear would account for his aversion to self-analysis, and the process of analysis in general. It would also lead him to prefer intuition and instinct to rational judgement, and would interfere with his criticism of his own work. Again, while encouraging him to the intuitional leap in the dark, it would also cause him to adopt a defensive position once he had landed. Thus we are encouraged by some of our fears to overcome the restraints of other fears: and it is likely that Lawrence's preference for the ‘outer darkness’, however daunting it may seem, is prompted by the impelling fear of self-knowledge.

Note

1. See W. W. Robson's article ‘D. H. Lawrence’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, ed. 1970.