ndencies and an exponent of their outlook. He has all the unruliness
of the small group that is rising up against the threatening State, its
rules and its conventions, proclaiming the right of the individual to
do much more than live--namely, to live splendidly.

It is this link makes Mr Lawrence so interesting; this fact that, like
them, he is so very much of his time, so hot, controversial, uneasy;
that, like them, he has the sudden fury of the bird that beats against
the bars of its cage. But while the young men sneer at society, at the
family, at every institution, Mr Lawrence tends to accept these things;
he has no plan of reform, no magic wand with which to transmute the
world into fairyland: he claims only as a right to develop his
individuality, and to see others develop theirs, within a system which
tortures him as another Cardinal La Balue.

This it is differentiates him from so many of his rivals. He has in his
mind no organisations; he is mainly passionate aspiration and passionate
protest. And that is not wonderful when we consider who he is.
Surprising to think, this prominent young novelist is only thirty-four.
Son of a Nottinghamshire coal-miner, a Board-school boy, his early
career seems to have been undistinguished: a county council scholarship
made of him a school teacher, imparting knowledge in the midst of
old-fashioned chaos in a room containing several classes. Then another
scholarship, two years at college, and Mr Lawrence went to Croydon to
teach for less than L2 a week. Then the literary life, though I extract
from his record the delightful fact that at college they gave him prizes
for history and chemistry, but placed him very low in the English class.
(This is rather embarrassing for those who believe in the public
endowment of genius.)

I have said 'then the literary life,' but I was wrong, for already at
twenty-one Mr Lawrence had begun _The White Peacock_, of which, year by
year, and he confesses often during lectures, he was laying the
foundations. Mr Lawrence did not, as do so many of us, enter the
literary life at a given moment: literature grew in him and with him,
was always with him, even in the worst years of his delicate health. If
literature was not his passion, it was to his passion what the tongue is
to speech: the essential medium of his expression.

Sometimes when reading one of his works, I wonder whether Mr Lawrence
has not mistaken his medium, and whether it is not a pai