subject, which may or may not be a fruitful subject for a novelist to study. What he has brought back in the form of exposition interests me very little, but there is no doubt that his investigations have influenced his fiction, even this book which was written before everybody went a-freuding. The true novelist, the analyst of human character, has always been a psychologist in an untechnical sense. Before Henry James was Balzac; before Balzac was Goethe; before Goethe was the author of Hamlet. Mr. Lawrence is too fine an artist to import into his art the dubious lingo of psychoanalysis. I doubt, however, if without that muddled pseudo-science (muddled because the facts are muddled) Mr. Lawrence's later fiction would be just what it is. And the main theme of Sons and Lovers is the relation of Paul to his mother. No, it is not an Œdipus-Jocasta "complex" nor a Hamlet-Gertrude "complex," though you may assimilate this touching story to those complexes if you enjoy translating human life in such terms. The important thing is that Mr. Lawrence has created a new version of the old son-mother story which is more ancient than Sophocles and which shall be a modern instance as long as there are poets and novelists. In its lowest form it is the sentimental home-and-mother theme so dear, and rightly dear, to the hearts of the people. In its highest form it is tragic poetry. And only a little below that poetry is the tremendous pathos of Paul's last whimper in this book.

Let whoever cares to try analyse or psychoanalyse. I doubt if Mr. Lawrence himself could make clear work of explaining his book. It is not necessary. It is enough that he has made his characters understandable through and through, even their perplexities understandable as perplexities. That is all the artist, the interpreter of life in fiction, can do or ought to do. And to do it with clearness and fidelity and with magical command of words, the mysterious thing called "style," is to be a great artist.

Out with my candle? There is light on the next page.

John Macy

CONTENTS

SONS AND LOVERS

PART ONE

CHAPTER I
THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS

"The Bottoms" succeeded to "Hell Row." Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brook-side on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder-trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place. The gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron field of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally opened the company's first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had acquired an evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed away.

Carston, Waite and Co. found they had struck on a good thing, so, down the valleys of the brooks from Selby and Nuttall, new mines were sunk,