nter he ought
to have been, so significant is for him the slaty opalescence of the
heron's wing and so rutilant the death of the sun. When he paints the
countryside, sometimes in his simplicity he is almost Virgilian, but
more often he is a Virgil somehow strayed into Capua and intoxicated
with its wines. All through his novels runs this passionate streak, this
vision of nature in relation to himself. But it is certainly in _The
White Peacock_ that this sensation attains its apogee. It is not a story
which one can condense. Strictly, it is not a story at all. It presents
to us a group of well-to-do people, cultured, and yet high in emotional
tone.

Mr Lawrence himself, who figures in it, is effaced; Lettice, wayward and
beautiful, is the fragrance of sex, but not more so than the honeysuckle
in the hedges; George, muscles rippling under his skin, insensitive to
cruelty, yet curiously moved by delicacy, is the brother of the bulls he
herds; and all the others, the fine gentlemen, the laughing girls,
farmers, school teachers, making hay, making music, making jokes,
walking in the spangled meadows, and living, and wedding, and dying, all
of them come to no resolution. Their lives have no beginning and no
end. Mr Lawrence looks: Pippa passes. It is almost impossible to
criticise _The White Peacock_, and the danger in an appreciation is that
one should say too much good of it, for the book yields just the quality
of illusion that a novel should give us, which does not of itself
justify the critic in saying that it is a great book. For the novel,
equally with the picture, can never reproduce life; it can only suggest
it, and when it does suggest it, however peculiarly or partially, one is
inclined to exaggerate the impression one has received and to refrain
from considering whether it is a true impression. It is the vividness of
Mr Lawrence's nature-vision carries us away; such phrases as these
deceive us: 'The earth was red and warm, pricked with the dark,
succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with gray-green
clusters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above the
light tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below in
the first shadows drooped hosts of little white flowers, so silent and
sad, it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless,
frail and folded meekly in the evening light.' They deceive us because
Mr Lawrence's realisation of man is less assured than his