From my Highlighter: A Twisted Man, but Smart (Part II)

Continued...you can read the first part here.

Passages from D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. My version: Penguin, 1977.

Lawrence believes in the spirit. He even understands it, albeit in a warped way:

"The root of all evil is that we want this spiritual gratification, this flow, this apparent heightening of life, this knowledge, this valley of many-coloured grass, even grass and light prismatically decomposed, giving ecstasy. We want all this without resistance. We want it continually. And this is the root of all evil in us." p. 82

Well, yes, but that yearning is also the root of all good. That desire for spiritual gratification is nothing less than what is called the summum bonum, the final call, our ultimate destiny. When that divine signal gets distorted, troubles arise. We seek that spiritual gratification in warped ways. The desire to seek itself, though, is not the root of all evil.

“[P]eople may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will; that is enough to keep them going.” p. 171 Go to any mass sporting event for confirmation of this observation.

On a more serious note: Spiritual darkness doesn’t kill a person’s ability to think and act. A person can move forward and regress at the same time. But as he improves his faculties for thought and action, but doesn’t elevate his spiritual nature as well, his capacity--and potential--for doing horrible things increases. Because Society is Man writ large (Plato), the same truth applies to civilization. Eric Voeglin liked to point out that a civilization can progress and regress at the same time.

“The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. . . . But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.” p. 180. “Art,” Maritain said, “is a virtue of the practical intellect.” The artist must possess the virtue proper to his activity. In this, it is aesthetic. Art is concerned with morality, but I think morality is secondary. The artist paints—writes, sculpts...conveys--what is true/real. Morality is nothing less than living in accordance with truth.

If an artist sets out to be moral, it’s hard to imagine how his art won’t be didactic.

You sculpt the piece first. The meaning comes later.

“Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Melville: it is the moral issue which engages them. They all feel uneasy about the old morality. Sensuously, passionally, they all attack the old morality. But they know nothing better, mentally. Therefore they give tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy. Hence the duplicity which is the fatal flaw in them, most fatal in the most perfect American work of art, The Scarlet Letter.” p. 180.

Really? I’m no Hawthorne expert (and sadly, the Hawthorne expert at GCSU sold his soul to the NEA :), but the witness of his daughter Rose implies that he had a mental and emotional allegiance to traditional morality (whether that’s the same morality Lawrence is referring to, I don’t know). From Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being:

You know [St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer] was founded by Hawthorne’s daughter? My evil imagination tells me that this was God’s way of rewarding Hawthorne for hating the Transcendentalists. One of my Nashville friends was telling me that Hawthorne couldn’t stand Emerson or any of that crowd. When one of them came in the front door, Hawthorne went out the back. He met one of them one morning and snarled, “Good morning Mr. G., how is your oversoul this morning?”

[More passages to follow at a later date. I might make this a regular blog feature.]