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D. H. LAWRENCE'S THE WHITE PEACOCK: AN ESSAY IN CRITICISM W. J. KEITH The first novel of a distinguished novelist provides a hunting-ground for two kinds of critic-the student of influence and the searcher for anticipations of later and finer work. D. H. Lawrence's The White Peacock has suffered in both ways. I say "suffered" because I believe that both approaches tend to distort our response to the novel itself. It is clearly not a masterpiece. Indeed, when Ford Madox Hueffer first read the manuscript, he remarked: "It's got every fault the English novel can have." However, he immediately added: "But you've got GENIUS.'" Awareness of Lawrence's later achievement should not blind us to the clear but uncharacteristic manifestations of this genius in his first book. One of the few separate studies of the novel is Raney Stanford's "Thomas Hardy and Lawrence's The White Peacock," and his essay conveniently sums up the argument of the students of influence. As Stanford points out, it is "generally regarded as the most Hardyesque of any of Lawrence's works,"2 and the statement is backed up by an impressive, but by no means exhaustive, list of references. For the most part, however, the arguments that have been offered in support of this influence are superfiCial in the extreme, being manifested, to quote Stanford once more, "in the description of and in some vague feeling for nature and rural setting that both writers share."· This "vague feeling" should make us pause-and, indeed, when we come to consider the matter, Lawrence's natural description will be seen to bear little real resemblance to Hardy's at all. The first paragraph IS sufficiently representative: I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill·pond. They were grey, descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty. The whole place was gathered in the musing of old age. The thick-piled trees on the far shore were too dark and sober to dally with the sun; the weeds stood crowded and motionless. Not even a little wind flickered the willows of the islets. The Volume XXXVII, Number 3, April, 1968 D. H. LAWRENCE'S The White Peacock 231 water lay softly, intensely still. Only the thin stream falling through the mill· race murmured to itself of the tumult of life which had once quickened the valley. [I]' To link that with Hardy would inevitably lead to vagueness. One would be forced to fall back upon phrases like "a traditional rural countryside" or "the common theme of agricultural decline." But the diction and rhythms are essentially different, and invite a different response. A sentence like "The thick-piled trees on the far shore were too dark and sober to dally with the sun" would be as out of place in Hardy as the weighted, clumsy but stolid style of Hardy would be inappropriate here." Stanford himself offers more cogent points of resemblance. He demonstrates what he calls "Lawrence's development of Hardy's technique of using symbolic scenes as structural devices," and then goes on to discuss "the interest, even the obsession, that both writers display for feminine psychology embodied in uprooted or distressed heroines.'" In my view, Stanford presses some of his comparisons too far, but the general tenor of his remarks can be accepted. Indeed, it would be possible to draw attention to other points of resemblance: for example, the fictional adaptation of an actual landscape, the introduction of alien outside elements into a hitherto unchanging scene, the underlying feeling for the economic realities of rural life. None the less, the contrasts are more noticeable than the resemblances and are by no means confined to the stylistic. The introduction of a first-person narrator is another device that differentiates The White Peacock from all Hardy's novels7 and, indeed, from the rest of Lawrence's full-length work. Since the attitude of Cyril Beardsall is almost diametrically opposed to that of Hardy as omniscient narrator, the overall impression left by the novel is inevitably distinct. Although I am convinced that...

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