SOURCE: "Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman," in PMLA, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 1, March, 1963, pp. 103-13.

I

Late in his life, in 1933, Yeats read Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love "with excitement," and found the love story of Lady Chatterley's Lover "noble." In Lawrence he found an ally "directed against modern abstraction"; and he considered that, with Joyce, Lawrence had "almost restored to us the Eastern simplicity." A hatred of Abstraction; a fearless plunge into the mire of human existence; an anti-intellectual stance (which was almost at times a pose); and a mythopoeic conception of art and life; these Yeats and Lawrence shared, whatever their differences—which were considerable. And what they shared accounts in part for their similar response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and that hero's search for experience: it was, they felt, guided too dominantly by intellectual choices. In 1928 Lawrence wrote to Aldous Huxley that he thought "Wilhelm Meister… amazing as a book of peculiar immorality, the perversity of intellectualised sex, and the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being, which is peculiarly bourgeois and Goethian." Yeats remarked that Goethe, a man "in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed," could "but seek … [Unity of Being] as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences." He insisted that "true Unity of Being … is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its quantity." But for Yeats, the poet, it was less problematic than for Lawrence, the novelist, to crusade against Abstraction and Intellection: the poem had its gnomic power to snap meaning at you in an instant of time; the novel had somehow to have people and a story—and a world in which both could occur.

The problem for Lawrence, as for most of the novelists of the nineteenth century, was the meaning of experience. For Goethe, who established the prototype of the Bildungsroman, the question was simpler. Wilhelm Meister must endure two trials of experience: the first would consist of Lehrjahre (apprenticeship), the tilt with experience, high and low, elevating and degrading; the second would then be a reaping of the rewards, for the Wanderjahre are the years when the Lehrjahre are tested in the large world, and at the end of which the hero emerges as a man of some wisdom who has found his place on the horizontal plane of worldly existence. Such a path through life made it necessary for the hero to adapt his inner self, in some degree, to the outer reality he faced, for the ultimate goal was selfhood within society: to attain it certainly involved the hero in intellectual discriminations and abstract values—though it was also an act of free will. The inability to engage the world on these terms led, in Goethe's conception, to the subjective weakness of a Werther who, unable to endure experience except emotionally, can only shoot himself. "It is justly said," Goethe told Eckermann, "that the communal cultivation of all human powers is desirable and excellent. But the individual is not born for this; everyone must form himself as a particular being—seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents." Although Lawrence would not have quarreled with the notion of man forming his "particular being," he would hardly have gone so far as to require that being to adjust his identity to the "general idea" of "all mankind."

It is not surprising that nineteenth-century fiction nourished itself on the Bildungsroman, particularly in England, though it encountered problems with the form that Fielding and Smollett were spared. After all, the Victorians were engage in a brave new world, and one had much to experience, and to learn from that experience, in order to come to terms with hard times in a hard world. Orphans and waifs, like David Copperfield and Heathcliff, Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre, serve their apprenticeship in countless novels; but the Wanderjahre are not always so neatly apportioned to a second volume—in equal balance to the first—as Goethe had been able to manage it (in David Copperfield three Wanderjahre are compressed into one short chapter.) A novelist like Dickens became increasingly uncertain what the hero ought to do at the end of his experience, or perhaps what he, the author, ought to do with his hero's experience. If David Copperfield finally achieves his patriarchal peace by the familiar hearth, in spite of the harrowing experiences from which Dickens spares neither his hero nor us, the case of Pip was harder to solve. We know of the two endings to Great Expectations, the happy and the unhappy: and was not Dickens' problem to decide how—or whether—to reward his heroes? In the happy ending Pip reaps his benefits as an exchange of values; suffering and wisdom are educative, and a pitying Pip rescues a pitiable Stella. But the unhappy ending is quite a different matter: Pip's expectations remain as unfulfilled as Stella's, whose face, voice, and touch at their final interview assured Pip that "suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching." Experience on either side leaves both wiser, sadder, and—on the level of immediate attainment or "adjustment"—unrewarded. Experience had indeed taught both what the world can be like, but it provided no guarantees that one could, or proscriptions that one ought, to live in it. Pater's notorious remark, "Not the fruit of experience, itself, is the end," seemed a logical conclusion by 1873: Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre had become merged in the instantaneous time-present; the future could not be relied upon to preserve either the meaning or intensity of experience, and the notion that wisdom was the fruit of experience was becoming as passe as the idea that emotion could be recollected in tranquility. The Picture of Dorian Gray is also a Bildungsroman in which the "Bild" after all is the central character; but Wilde had stood Wilhelm Meister on its head, fictionalizing Pater's doctrine of experience: Wanderjahre precede Lehrjahre, though time hardly separates them. While Dorian Gray experiences, his portrait learns: true suffering had been (almost) successfully projected onto a canvas in the attic.

Of course the Bildungsroman did not die; it merely changed some of its organizing principles, for the novelist still faced his problem: what was the hero to make of his experience? Was it to lead him to know the world in order to reject what was evil in it, or to accept what he found worth saving? And what if that find was, after all, not in the world but in the soul or psyche? Joyce's hero flies his nets, but then he was an artist and the case was therefore special. When Lawrence came of literary age with Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, the Bildungsroman in English fiction was, if not moribund, in a state of suspension. The hero still learned and he still wandered, but he did less of both; and his education was as likely to lead him to the fate of Wells's Mr. Polly as to have, like Galsworthy's young Jolyon, the door slammed in his face, or to end like Conrad's Heyst in a funeral pyre of his own making. Experience was proving to be a fairly ineffectual method of coping with the world.

Lawrence hated all enclosures, whether Marxian, Darwinian, or Freudian, and he had his quarrels with all three. But in particular, as he wrote in his essay on Franklin, he hated that kind of "barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up." Barbed wire: the metaphor is aptly commensurate with Lawrence's conception of life as struggle. To break through enclosures took not only a passionate will but the endurance to drive through all entanglements toward the periphery—and then beyond it. Unlike Daedalus you could not make your escape from the labyrinth merely by making a pair of wings: you had first to "come through" (to use Lawrence's language) on foot and bleed in the process. And that was truly to experience the world before you earned the right to reject it for what you found wanting in it.

Lawrence, of course, lived his own Bildungsroman—Lehrijahre and Wanderjahre: he would go his own ways. Toward his contemporary novelists he had little but contempt, ranging from mere petulance to hatred. One finds scattered in his writings condemnations of almost all the great novelists whom we consider today the giants of modern fiction: Flaubert, Proust, Gide, Mann, Joyce, Conrad (nor did he like Bennett, Galsworthy, Gertrude Stein, or Dorothy Richardson). He wanted no part, either of their subject or form: as innovators from whom he might learn he rejected them absolutely. In what sense, then, is Lawrence really modern, speaking of him as a novelist, not a philosopher or myth-maker? His modernity—like Yeats's—seems to be inherent in his apparent isolation from his contemporaries, an isolation that permitted him to solve (or attempt to solve) his aesthetic problems outside the great revolutionary innovations, from a position where it was still possible—because he ignored the experiments that lay between him and the past—to attach one-self to tradition by dint of one's own originality.

"The free moral and the slave moral," he wrote in an essay on Galsworthy, "the human moral and the social moral: these are the abiding antitheses." And these antitheses he would attempt to resolve in at least three novels—Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. In some fashion all three novels were variations of the Bildungsroman, but only in one—The Rainbow—did Lawrence fully succeed in achieving the kind of balance leaving him visibly aligned to a tradition and yet marking out a solution that defined what a modern Bildungsroman could be like—what the relation of the hero to his experience had become in the twentieth century.

II

Like all of Lawrence's novels, The Rainbow has suffered its share of abuse, but even admirers have attacked its ending—as they have that of Sons and Lovers and, to a lesser degree, Women in Love. This disaffection with the conclusions of novels otherwise highly regarded constitutes a serious charge: it calls in doubt not only the coherence of Lawrence's ideology but, more damaging, Lawrence's capacity as an artist to sustain his work and bring it to a proper end. With respect to Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow the question raised is the same: does the hero earn the rewards which the novelist bestows at the end? Or are Paul Morel's rather sudden determination to live purposefully and Ursula Brangwen's dramatic vision of the rainbow mere curtain-drops, the impatient gestures of a novelist already hurrying on to his next work? And what of Birkin's final disagreement with Ursula at the end of Women in Love—does it not sabotage the "star equilibrium" toward which the novel seems to be shaped? It is difficult to defend the ending of Sons and Lovers without reservations; the conclusion to Women in Love is more defensible; but with The Rainbow the problem seems crucial: to call in doubt that novel's resolution is to question the structure and meaning of the whole book, and to undercut the vision of the rainbow is to undercut all that precedes it. The risks are so high because the structure of the novel and the meaning that it carries forward depend on the validity of the rainbow image. Without the rainbow we would have something radically different from what Lawrence in fact has achieved, and this novel, which occupies the central position between Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, could not be—as I think it is—a higher achievement than its predecessor or successor.

The major clue to the success of Lawrence's conclusion to The Rainbow lies in the criticism of the failure in Sons and Lovers. "The trouble" with that novel, complains one critic [Louis Fraiberg, in Twelve Original Essays on Great English Novels, edited by Charles Shapiro, 1960], "is that the characterization is too flat and that the contest is over too soon. As a consequence, no changes—either developmental or disintegrative—can take place.… This is not a finished book." Such a criticism, of course, assumes certain conventions, about both the novel and this novel in particular. One of them is that a novel like Sons and Lovers is intended to show growth of character, growth which leads to change, and precisely to such change, such "resolution of tensions," that makes the final achievement of the hero both believable and earned. It is also assumed that growth and change emerge out of "contest," and that in order to convince the reader that the fruits of such a contest are legitimate the struggle must be worthy of its rewards. If, then, Sons and Lovers fails in part because character remains static and contest is too inconclusive, it is precisely on those points that The Rainbow succeeds.

Tested against the criteria of character growth and significant struggle Sons and Lovers fails as a Bildungsroman where, traditionally, the hero meets the experiences of life by trial and error, by suffering and failure, and at the end is rewarded for his trials by faith and for his errors by knowledge. Whatever one says about the ending of Sons and Lovers, one fact is abundantly clear: Paul Morel's experience of the world has made him neither wise nor foolish but rather helpless. And the sudden shift in direction at the close betrays confusion and a poor sense of timing more than impatience: Lawrence had not yet solved what his hero was to do with his experience—if, indeed, it had been experience at all. Yet, in spite of the faltering at the end, Lawrence intuitively, I think, meant to have the sudden turn, just as later he fully intended to give us (and his heroine)—at the right moment—the image of the rainbow. Lawrence insisted with vigor that the novel had form: "I tell you it has got form—form," he wrote to Garnett, and one supposes he meant chiefly that Sons and Lovers was well constructed (which it was), unaware perhaps that it lacked the sort of form that goes beyond construction to attain a dimension of psychological truth. When Lawrence wrote to Garnett about his intentions in The Rainbow he spoke of gaining that dimension in what he considered a new way altogether: "I don't care about physiology of matter—but somehow—that which is physic—non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element—which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent … You musn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego."

Since Ursula is after all the heroine of The Rainbow, it is to her that we look for the book's texture. And—Lawrence to the contrary—Ursula is really more human than non-human, more a stable ego than a plastic psyche; old-fashioned she may not be, but she is both consistent (to her inner self) and inescapably committed to a "moral scheme," if such commitment implies an honest confrontation of life in the search for truth. The consistent—and human—character within a moral scheme: that has always been the traditional framework of the Bildungsroman; and a careful reading of The Rainbow reveals not a less traditional novel than Sons and Lovers (as Lawrence thought) but a traditional novel which has made its own space in the continuum. What Lawrence could not solve in Sons and Lovers he did solve in The Rainbow. This is not to imply that the novel is entirely conventional, or that Ursula is wholly a stable ego, for the timely ritual scenes—the moon episodes, the cathedral tableau—do attempt to convey some sense of a plastic psyche being molded beneath the character's secondary ego.

In rejecting the Proustian and Joycean techniques of projecting their characters' inner life, Lawrence substituted a real persona whose psyche would operate as a kind of antiself. In that way the hero's journey through experience would become a sort of dialogue of self and soul, a dialectic between the character's objective experience and his subjective assimilation of it. This provided the novel with a realism without depriving it of the psychological subtleties that Joyce or Virginia Woolf achieved by different routes. But the ritual scenes occur less frequently in The Rainbow than they do in Women in Love where, it is fair to say, they from the very choreography of the novel, holding it in place with delicately interlaced continuity. On close inspection, the letter to Garnett more accurately applies to Women in Love. In The Rainbow, the ritual scenes arrest, at crucial points, the more traditional narrative of the hero's pilgrimage toward knowledge; but, from each of these climactic pictorial dramas, Lawrence moves back to the central motion of his story. So that in the end, the stable ego is somehow made to accommodate the plastic ego. Ursula remains a fully realized character, whose inner life has been almost completely appropriated by her outer. Pared to the bone of her Being as she is at the end, we think of her, as we leave the novel, as character rather than psyche. And we feel, as we do not always feel in Lawrence, that the author has cared for that character: it makes for a unique accomplishment of integration—perhaps correlation is a better term—between the intentional direction of the artist and the demands that his character seems to have made against them. It is a triumph which Lawrence failed to repeat, not because his powers declined but because by the time he wrote Women in Love, he had truly achieved another—and radically different—dimension, from which there was no turning back.

III

The Rainbow, as we know, was scheduled at one point in its writing—when Women in Love was not yet conceived of as a separate novel—to be entitled The Wedding Ring; that title proved to be unsuitable for both novels. Lawrence probably rejected the title for The Rainbow, in spite of its apparent aptness to the marriage theme traced through several generations, because the ring image, wrongly conceived, might contradict an essential element of meaning in the novel. For it is Ursula's express triumph over her experience to break through all circles, all encircling hindrances, and among them, particularly, the circle of the wedding ring. Even in Women in Love she still rejects the ring, flinging Birkin's gift of three rings into the mud; and she can only accept the rings when they are joined by the flower, which she brings to her reconciliation with Birkin as a symbol of continuing growth. It is growth, indeed, that The Rainbow is centrally occupied with: two long chapters in the novel are headed "The Widening Circle," and both circles—the first leading from childhood to adolescence, the second from adolescence to adulthood—as they increase in circumference increase in the threat of enclosing and arresting Ursula's growth. Paradoxically, the widening circles cannot keep pace with the widening of Ursula's aspiring soul, and the larger her world becomes, the more acute is her realization of its limitations. Growth is Ursula's emblem; at times, as in the moon scene, it is a frightening, inhuman vitality, saved only by the humanness of character which Lawrence succeeds in building into her. Experience may be a teacher, but to Ursula it is more than that—it is the very motive of life, something she hunts out as an end in itself (though the rainbow is at the end of it) until, in Women in Love, Lawrence, through Birkin, teaches her its limitations. At the beginning of Women in Love, when Gudrun and Ursula talk discursively about marriage, Gudrun suggests that the experience of wifehood may, after all, be a necessary treasure in one's life. But Ursula is skeptical that marriage is an experience: "More likely," she says, "to be the end of experience."

This voracious appetite for experience is not unique with Ursula: her mother, Anna, possessed it in its barest state, and her grandmother, Lydia, had merely disguised it under her aristocratic pretensions, her "foreignness." One aim in tracing the three generations of women is to demonstrate the progressive shades of meaning in their appetites for experience: in Lydia it is partially subdued by convention, only to stir underneath as melancholia and frustration; in Anna it is wild and undirected and self-consuming. Only in Ursula does this appetite become truly attached to a conscious being, become, ultimately, directed and civilized. Therefore, the striving—and the failure of achievement—of the earlier generations prepares us for the vital center of the novel: the education of Ursula, through whom the preceding, and partial, impulses are carried to successful completion.

In the opening pages of The Rainbow we are told that the women looked to the "spoken world beyond," to the Word within the World. Facing outward, just as the men face inward, the women seek to fulfill their "range of motion" by searching for "knowledge," "education," and "experience." Only Ursula finds all three—and finds them wanting. Anna is a primitive version of Ursula, and her experiences so often resemble Ursula's that Lawrence at times seems almost to be straining the point. But the differences are more significant than the similarities, for Anna remains unconscious, to the end, of the full meaning of her experiences. Her main defense against the encircling world and the roofed-in arch of the church is multiplication of self: by producing scores of children she erects a kind of shield around herself. But children remain at best unwilling ambassadors and cannot negotiate for her. Ursula realizes this almost from the start as she chooses the opposite way: not padding the self protectively but stripping it to the core.

In the harvest scene between Will and Anna, the latter reveals the doomed nature of her relationship with life which consists in trying to achieve the impossible simultaneity of isolation and relatedness, the repulsion of being within the ring (of marriage) and the passionate necessity to possess its very center. There is no Birkin here who can explain the complex "star equilibrium" in which a man and a woman find separateness in union. Anna is torn between what she fears most and craves most, and it is this scene which clearly presages her future. It is a ritual, very Lawrentian with its moon and mood of incantation. Anna is always first in returning her harvest to the stooks. As Will comes with his bundle Anna leaves: it is a "rhythm" in which she "drift[s] and ebb[s] like a wave." But the rhythm that keeps them together keeps them apart: "As he came, she drew away, as he drew away, she came. Were they never to meet?" Always there remains the "space between them" until at last they meet and make love—until, that is, Anna, with her Brangwen passion, subdues her opposing Will.

Now the point of this scene is, in part, to convey Anna's violation of the rhythm that had kept her apart from intimacy; or, to put it differently, to show how she chooses one way, though committed to another. The intimacy is all too temporary, severed during the fortnight of honeymoon. And the "space between them" is never finally breached. Anna's pursuit of experience is therefore always blinded by the insistent demands of an inner resistance to accept experience, to go through with it to the end in order to test its validity. Ursula commits herself to experience in the full knowledge of risk and is willing to taste—again and again—the ashen fruits of the experiences that fail her—religion, education, knowledge, passion. Anna's incomplete and arrested tilt with experience rewards her with only an incomplete and arrested vision of the rainbow, and Lawrence could not be clearer about his meaning:

Dawn and sunset were the feet of the rainbow that spanned the day, and she saw the hope, the promise. Why should she travel any further?

Yet she always asked the question. As the sun went down … she faced the blazing close of the affair, in which she had not played her fullest part, and she made her demand still: "What are you doing, making this big shining commotion?"

… With satisfaction she relinquished the adventure to the unknown.

… If she were not the wayfarer to the unknown, if she were arrived now, settled in her builded house, a rich woman, still her doors opened under the arch of the rainbow, her threshold reflected the passing of the sun and moon, the great travellers, her house was full of the echo of journeying. [Italics mine]

Were Anna content with the "echo of journeying" as a fit substitute for the journey itself, her attainment of family, house, and children would be well enough for creative life. But she is not content. And since she has no way of working out her discontent other than yearning for that in which she is unwilling, always, to play her full part—the experience of life measured to its ends—she is left with a finite vision after all, a rainbow whose two ends bind her to the rising and setting sun, to the limited existence of an everyday world.

It is a mistake Ursula does not make because she has the courage to face the annihilating, but paradoxically freedom-giving moment of having journeyed fully committed to the end of experience. In the central Cathedral scene, Anna "claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. She had always a sense of being roofed in"; yet her claim is undercut by her incapacity to approach anything beyond the roof. She turns immediately to the gargoyles which she reduces, defensively, to human shapes, an act of reassurance, not of faith. Ursula's struggle for the beyond is differently shaped. To each new experience she brings the whole of herself. Her encounter with religion is total: she even plays out, against her intuition, the practical results of offering the other cheek, and only rejects the act after her cheeks burn with the slap of her sister's hand. Failing in religious faith she puts next her faith in love, though she enacts it, at first, amidst the ruins of her old faith, in the interior of the church which, with its fallen stones, its ruined plaster, its scaffolding, is all too symbolically under constant repair.

Always, with Ursula, there is yearning followed by enactment: she never retreats, she always chooses. Three quarters through the novel we find her amidst an emblematic landscape, which aptly projects her state of being constantly on the verge of setting foot into another world, of widening her circle:

The blue way of the canal would softly between the autumn hedges, on towards the greenness of a small hill. On the left was the whole black agitation of colliery and railway and the town which rose on its hill, the church tower topping all. The round white dot of the clock of the tower was distinct in the evening light.

That way, Ursula felt, was the way to London, through the grim, alluring seethe of the town. On the other hand was the evening, mellow over the green watermeadows.…

Ursula and Anton Skrebensky walked along the ridge of the canal between.… The glow of evening and the wheeling of the solitary pee-wit and the faint cry of the birds came to meet the shuffling noise of the pits, the dark, fuming stress of the town opposite, and they two walked the blue strip of water-way, the ribbon of sky between.

The canal divides the two shores which together form the whole of Ursula's potential world and, incidentally, the whole of the world which she experiences in the novel. On the right lie the fields of her birth, the fecund earth on which she and Skrebensky first consummate their love; on the left lie the colliery, the town, the church, and London, each of which is once tested and discarded. She rejects the fecund earth when she renounces the blood-prescient nature of Anthony for the sake of the journey onwards: "But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses." The refusal of the church we have already pointed to; with Winifred Inger, Ursula pushes away the colliery of her uncle Tom—"impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter"—and London as well, the London of Miss Inger, sophisticated perversion. And the town, where Ursula is so brutally initiated into the man's world, is gladly forsaken too: "The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town.… What is it?—nothing, just nothing." She will have to walk through the town, not towards it, like Paul Morel, and the transcendence can only occur vertically toward a vision, since on the horizontal plane—where Anna was always condemned to move—the landscape of the world is, at the end of the novel, fully exhausted of possibilities.

To say that Ursula searches for selfhood is descriptive but not very profoundly interpretive, for that fact is of lesser importance by far than the manner of her search. I have already said that the growth of Ursula's world coincides with the diminishing possibilities of her functioning creatively within it. From that point of view the novel is largely negative, consisting of a number of refusals and rejections without any corresponding affirmations. But the search for self, in the fitting image of husk and kernel at the end of the book, is a process of stripping away all layers that disguise and protect self from the truth of self (it resembles Lear's stripping process). So while the circle of the world widens, the circle of the self narrows in inverse proportion: the larger the one, the smaller—and the nearer to the core—the other. Ursula's annihilation of Skrebensky under the moon is no mere repetition of Anna's subjugation of Will under the same moon: it is, indeed, a far more violent and total act, but one with more results as well, and more motive. Ursula has the ability—which Anna lacked—to convert experience into knowledge: she masters the economics of experiencing to perfection. What she discovers is Skrebensky's lack of self and through it she is illumined on the nature of self—her own and in the abstract. She triumphs—not as Anna had, in order to subdue Will, but to create a self of her own. There under the moon she is awakened for the first time to the awful power of self—and its dangers; and it frightens her, enough to prevent her from severing her relationship with Skrebensky. It is true that her lust motivates her to "tear him and make him into nothing," but that impulse itself spells out the nature of a ceaselessly moving self. After she destroys Skrebensky, her soul is, understandably enough, "empty and finished": destruction has not come without its price. When he leaves she feels that emptiness even more acutely. Although she has seen the power of self she has not gained control of it by far, "since she had no self." Only after turning with shame and hatred on Winifred Inger and uncle Tom does she get any closer to it, and that double rejection makes way for her final struggles.

The last episodes with Skrebensky have puzzled a good many readers and some, like Hough, have suggested that Lawrence himself was not clear on the subject. Yet if Lawrence was not, Ursula was, for she predicts the failure of her resumed affair before she ever embarks on it: "Passion is only part of love. And it seems so much because it can't last. That is why passion is never happy." Yet, in the tradition of the hero undergoing the education of life, knowledge—of a kind—often precedes the experience that will confirm it. The true hero must always experience before he can truly know: he never substitutes intuitional wisdom for the living through itself. Often, as with Ursula, this is a conscious sacrifice at the alter of life's suffering, and it is consciousness, as I have said, that distinguishes Ursula as the kind of hero she is. "Ursula suffered bitterly at the hands of life": and that is proper for the hero whom life educates in its bitter school. But consciousness makes such suffering even more intense and makes it so precisely because it injects and maintains some ideal toward which all action gravitates with certainty and direction. When she and Anthony face a beautiful sunset, it is Ursula's consciousness of its beauty that gives her the capacity for feeling pain—the pain that comes with recognizing the inevitable disparity between the achieved and the achievable. "All this so beautiful, all this so lovely! He did not see it. He was one with it. But she saw it, and was one with it. Her seeing separated them infinitely." Sight precedes perception; acknowledgment precedes knowledge.

It is this aspect of conscious perception in the pursuit of experience that I have earlier called civilized; but the cost of such awareness is very high and makes for the awful negation that burdens the whole novel. Ursula is hardly unaware of it: the pressure is always there, to seek out life, to encounter it in battle, to discard and to be defeated, and to move on again:

She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard.…

No matter! Every hill-top was a little different, every valley was somehow new.…

But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was. Only she was full of rejection, of refusal. Always, always she was spitting out of her mouth the ash and grit of disillusion.… She could only stiffen in rejection, in rejection. She seemed always negative in her action.

Such is her state as Lawrence moves into the final pages of his story, and to extricate Ursula from her negation, to provide her with an earned vision at the close was, as is apparent, no easy task. At this point Ursula begins to perceive, dimly, a world outside experience, a world outside the "circle lighted by a lamp," a world dark and mysterious where "she saw the eyes of the wild beast gleaming." Towards that world she must move, out of the circle of the lighted lamp, from the illumination of familiarity into the shadows of the unknown, truly the unknown. This constitutes the search beyond the finite self the personal self.

One day, watching the sea roll in, she comes to know that through the self-consciousness of seeking life one is heir to the shocks of recognition which reveal what one has not attained, an exercise of the imagination which presupposes fulfillment of things the other side of the present. Touched by the beauty of the rhythmically moving sea—as she was by the sunset—she laughs and weeps from a single impulse. Then she follows "a big wave running unnoticed, to burst in a shock of foam against a rock … leaving the rock emerged black and teeming." Her wish for the fate of the wave is symbolic: "Oh, and if, when the wave burst into whiteness, it were only set free!" If, that is, the wave, making its climactic collision with the rock of the opposing world, could only be liberated from its flux of experience, prevented somehow from falling into the sea again, only to become water for another wave. If only Ursula could fly the flux of her experience and bear away her trophy, the fruits of experience, to the safety of some timeless region that would not condemn her to this ceaseless repetition of battle with life. The image of the liberated wave resembles the circle lighted by a lamp, and both resemble the encircling horde of stallions at the end.

Ursula's final experience with the lighted circle of the world is her futile passion with Skrebensky, and it is preceded by the botany classroom scene in which Ursula makes her penultimate leap. She sees the speck under her microscope moving and it appears vitally alive, but Ursula questions its beingness, its teleology, if it has one: "She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite." By being a fully realized self, one could in fact fly the circle into a "oneness with the infinite": "To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity." To capture the wave out of the sea was to catapult it into the infinite reaches, where it might be preserved with wholeness. Such an insight followed by yet another disillusionment is not meaningless. The affair with Skrebensky, aside from providing proof of what she has perceived, serves also to clarify the contours of the circle which Ursula must flee. Already as a school teacher she had felt increasingly the "prison … round her"; and the sense of wishing to break out of the enclosing and binding circles becomes sharply defined in the penultimate chapter in which, on two occasions, the final rainbow image is clearly prefigured. "This inner circle of light in which she lived and moved" has become too much to bear; and finally she would "not love [Skrebensky] in a house any more." She must go to the downs, into the open spaces, where in the darkness of night she experiences the final "bitterness of ecstasy." They await the dawn: "She watched a pale rim on the sky.… The darkness became bluer.… The light grew stronger, gushing up against the dark … night. The light grew stronger, whiter, then over it hovered a flush of rose. A flush of rose, and then yellow … poising momentarily over the fountain on the sky's rim." Here the spectrum of colors certainly suggests the rainbow—the rose burns, then turns to red; "great waves of yellow" are flung over the sky, "scattering its spray over the darkness, which became bluer and bluer … till soon it would it self be a radiance." And finally the sun breaks through, "too powerful to look at." Some pages earlier appeared another image, also suggestive of the rainbow, and again Ursula and her lover were in the open: "And in the roaring circle under the tree … they lay a moment looking at the twinkling lights on the darkness opposite, saw the sweeping brand of a train past the edge of their darkened field." Such deliberate preparation hardly suggests haste and impatience when Lawrence came to the final pages of his novel.

IV

That Ursula's journey through the widening circles of experience, and her ultimate flight beyond those circle into the arches of heaven, may be limited acts after all is a question Lawrence does not raise until Women in Love. There, in retrospect, Ursula sees at one point the possibility that even the exhaustion of experience may bring one only to the threshold of death. Socrates was right: the unexamined life was not worth living; but the modern novelist had to ask whether the examined life was worth living: "She had travelled all her life along the line of fulfilment, and it was nearly concluded. She knew all she had to know, she had experienced all she had to experience, she was fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into death."

But in The Rainbow it is not the falling into death but the falling away from it which dominates as an image. In the scene with the stallions Ursula finally accomplishes her transcendence of the circles, precisely by letting herself drop from a tree. In doing so she fulfills the wish given us in an earlier image: "She saw herself travelling round a circle, only an arc of which remained to complete. Then, she was in the open, like a bird tossed into mid-air, a bird that had learned in some measure to fly." Repeatedly the horses come to ring her—"Like circles of lightning came the flash of hoofs"; "They had gone by, brandishing themselves thunderously about her, enclosing her." As the circle closes, every horizontal route of escape "to the high-road and the ordered world of man" is cut off. There is only one way she can move—up: "She might climb into the boughs of that oak tree, and so round and drop on the other side of the hedge." So she proceeds; and her symbolic drop liberates her—as such drops often do in literature—into a consciousness of separateness done with temporal and spatial dimensions of world: "time and the flux of change passed away from her, she lay as if unconscious … like a stone … unchanging … whilst everything rolled by in transcience … [she was] sunk to the bottom of all change." Now may the kernel shed the enclosing husk and "take itself the bed of a new sky"; only the child remains: "[it] bound her … like a bond round her brain, tightened on her brain." But when that bond is loosened she is ready for her rainbow—ready because free at last from the perpetuity of experience which had victimized her for so long. There is no taking the past away, for it had to be; only the full commitment to the circles of experience allows one to escape them. Ursula has escaped the fate of her father, who had gained "knowledge and skill without vision."

At the end of the novel there is no doubt that the reader has earned a vision of the rainbow, for he, unlike Ursula, has been subjected to the struggle of not one but three generations. But, if we look upon The Rainbow as a modern Bildungsroman, a trial and error warfare with experience, which allows finally a glimpse of an ideal that rises inevitably out of experience, then there can be little doubt that Ursula too has earned the right to her open, semi-circular rainbow, leaving her free like a bird "that has learned in some measure to fly."

In none of the three major novels—Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love—does Lawrence resolve his ending as the logical, inevitable conclusion to a single ruling passion. Had he done so Paul Morel should have committed suicide; Ursula should have died of her heavy losses; and Women in Love should have been altogether an impossible book to write. Those who accuse Lawrence of a sleight of hand at the end of novels fail to see the intuition and later the consciousness of his purpose, for he was quite aware that his conclusions were not the neat, conventional climaxes that satisfy a reader's expectations because they are coincident with his prophecies. Such endings he would have considered "immoral":

Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for [or dying for, he might have added]. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to.… If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship, a pure relatedness … and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction.

No one emotion carried to its end tells the whole truth, because it obstructs the basic complexity of the human psyche, its multifarious potential to act, to fulfill, at many levels, its inner needs in balance with the outer demands of the world. "The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." Lawrence goes on to call this "living moment" a "fourth dimension," "a revelation of the perfected relation, at a certain moment, between a man" and his object. And that "which exists in the non-dimensional space of pure relationship is deathless, lifeless, and eternal… beyond life, and therefore beyond death." So precisely does Ursula exist at the conclusion of The Rainbow. Here Lawrence succeeded in capturing the "momentaneous" (it is a favorite word) in the midst of timelessness: this is the essential meaning of the rainbow. Ursula's "living moment" is therefore beyond life or death, in the fourth dimension where neither hope nor despair has any business.

In its demand that the hero experience—indeed, that he seek out experience—and suffer for it, The Rainbow remains an entirely conventional Bildungsroman, a type of novel naturally suited to a man of Lawrence's passionate pedagogic temperament. But in rejecting, at the end both the hero who is a helpless victim of experience and the hero whom experience transforms into a malcontent, Lawrence achieved a new dimension for the novel of education in the twentieth century: the hero has been "emotionally educated [which] is rare as a phoenix." Here lies the true originality of form in The Rainbow: at the end of experience the hero has gained the privilege of release from it; and the Lehrjahre—post-apprenticeship learning—really lie ahead in the Wanderjahre, in the inconclusiveness of Women in Love, where experience is not tested against the world but against one's self. The end of experience, in the modern world, is only the beginning of selfhood. Life is no longer just a school nor experience a mere teacher: both have become antagonists to conquer in exchange for freedom. It is a fair war since Lawrence never refuses to exact the price of suffering. The "human moral," having fully tested the "social moral," is at liberty to discriminate. Such a view of experience has influenced a writer like Hemingway (one of the few modern novelists Lawrence admired), whose heroes—despite their hunger for experience—wish finally to become educated "emotionally" and thereby be liberated from the compulsive tests of experience, Hemingway going Lawrence one better by suggesting a "fifth dimension" in which this might be achieved. Certainly the ending of The Old Man and the Sea owes something in spirit to that of The Rainbow: after the worst that experience can inflict, the old man comes home to dream of the lions on the beach.

"While a man remains a man, a true human individual," Lawrence insisted, "there is at the core of him a certain innocence or naivete … This does not mean that the human being is nothing but naive or innocent. He is Mr. Worldly Wiseman also to his own degree. But in his essential core he is naive." Here surely is an account of Ursula as we find her at the end of the novel: worldly-wise but purged, and at the core innocent. For Goethe the end of experience was also the end of innocence, for in his world the hero's path was still clearly marked so that, in proportion as the hero grew wise, he would choose the right way: the flux of experience gave way to the steadiness of wisdom. For Lawrence—as for others, of course—the modern world offered no such clear topography, and experience had indeed become, in a way, as Pater had said, an end in itself. Wilhelm Meister, Goethe told Eckermann, "seems to say nothing more than that man, despite all his follies and errors, being led by a higher hand, reaches some happy goal at last." Love, Lawrence said, "travels heavenwards": "Love is not a goal; it is only a travelling … death is not a goal; it is a travelling.… There is a goal… absolved from time and space, perfected in the realm of the absolute." For a moment Ursula and the rainbow merge to chart that absolute—vertical, not horizontal; and in that merging they objectify what Lawrence set down as a definition of art: "the relation between man and his circumambient universe." But Ursula reaches no "happy goal" at the end of her experience in The Rainbow, and the novelist, like his heroine, had to begin again, from a different perspective, where Goethe could contentedly end.