From Meredith to Lawrence: The Nature Tradition

182 2. From Meredith to Lawrence: The Nature Tradition Roger Ebbatson. Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A_ Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: HumanitieiTP, 1981). $40.00. Although much has been written about D. H. Lawrence, Roger Ebbatson sees him from a special viewpoint which adds considerably to one's understanding and appreciation of his achievements. His book, Lawrence and the Nature Tradition, even though it suggests at times a doctoral dissertation, is carefully organized and contains reminders of his thesis to guide the reader through some of the more detailed analyses of Lawrence's works and those of other novelists who are seen in "the Nature tradition." Ebbatson claims that the Romantic concept of Nature, New England Transcendentalism, the Victorian literature of the "open road," and the debates about evolution provide a "complex body of thought and feeling about Nature" for the development of a fiction "centring in Nature," and that, crucial in the formation of the Victorian mind, there is a "coherent and dynamic" body of thought, a doctrine of which Wordsworth's The Ρτ-elude is the "text-book." Following Wordsworth , the Nature tradition in the novel took the form of a synthesis of Romantic visions of Nature as "revelation and deliverance" and "Darwinian pictures of man's ordeal in the natural world," a tradition which culminates in the work of D. H. Lawrence, Ebbatson's study reveals the sources of Lawrence's art in the treatment accorded to the "Nature-theme" in the novels of his most immediate predecessors . These novels formed a "clear tradition" upon which the younger generation, notably Lawrence and E. M. Forster, were able to draw. And they marked the culmination of a long artistic debate upon man's place in Nature. The Nature tradition extends the modes of English fiction, and the novel develops into a form suitable for exploring the large theme of man's relation with Nature. This tradition appears at the opposite pole to the contemporaneous Flaubertian tradition as perfected by Henry James and his followers. The Romantic movement in the novel is concerned with reconciling subject and object, man and Nature; from Blake onwards, Cartesian dualism, Hobbesian materialism, and Hartleian mechanism become the identifiable enemies of Romanticism, The Romantic Naturphilnsophie is fundamentally an expression of an act of reintegration with the external world by means of which the individual spirit regains its lost integrity. Through Nature, man may be reconciled with his fellow men: The Prelude testifies eloquently to the humanitarian tendency of Nature-worship. The climactic ascent of Snowden embraces all of Wordsworth's elements of the poem in a final coherent vision of unity in multiplicity and of peace in energy: "it appeared to me/ The perfect image of a mighty mind,/ Of one that feeds upon infinity." Wordsworth's legacy to the nineteenth century was the dual insight of the primacy of Nature and the fellowship and community of man. The dialectic between Romantic and Darwinian evolutions of Nature forms the basis for this tradition of the novel; the Wordswordthian natural harmony is "discomposed" by the "cries and suffering and struggle" discerned by Tennyson and leads 183 to the deepening pessimism seen in Spencer and Huxley. The generations of novelists after Dickens were direct heirs of both Romantic and scientific versions of Nature. A clear line of development in the English novel, with man and Nature as a central theme, can be seen, leading directly from George Meredith to Lawrence. Lawrence's keynote is energy and movement; for him, Nature is an "impassioned unity." His central theme is the image of the single soul which "instantly changed the moment you thought of it and became a dual creature"; his emphasis is on duality, unity, and separation. The cutting-off from Nature, whether caused by Christianity, intellectual consciousness, industrialism and mechanization, or by an insidious combination of all these forces, resulted in a civilization based on democracy and technology. This development may be seen in Lawrence's thought from the warmth of colliery life in Sons and Lovers and the plays, through the portrayal of the death of a culture in Women in Love. to the redemption offered in Lady Chatterly's Lover...