Odious Corollaries in D. H. Lawrence

Extract

The most serious and perceptive assault on Lady Chatterley's Lover, in the recent flurry of controversy, issued from Dr Leavis in his review of the Pelican Special which told the story of the trial. Apart from his judgment that it is a bad novel, and the persuasive rationale that he offers there to support this decision, which, though much sharpened and more circumstantial, is essentially the one he reached in his book on Lawrence in 1955, Dr Leavis makes an interesting sociological comment on the significance of the Defence’s success. The Prosecution, he observes, was defeated, ‘not by the presentment of any sound or compelling case, but by its realization that it was confronted by a new and confident orthodoxy of enlightenment’. The verdict, in fact, registered a change in the values of educated people—a change which owes a good deal, in ways that it would be instructive to examine, to the deep impact of Lawrence’s work on a whole generation, and of Dr Leavis’s own faithful interpretation of it (the terms in which the novel was, and is, generally defended, and even read, were originally put about by him). Now, if it is true, as it seems to be, that our moral environment has been sensibly modified, so that people brought up on admiration for Lawrence can now carry the day, it is important to insist, as Dr Leavis does in his review, and has always done, on how intimately and indissolubly the worst in Lawrence is related to the best.