D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in a mining village in England. His father was a miner, and his mother was a schoolteacher. With his mother’s encouragement, Lawrence was educated and became a schoolteacher himself, escaping life in the mines. His works include the novels Sons and Lovers (1912), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920), as well as and several collections of poetry and short stories. Lawrence often felt as though the forces of modern civilization were against him; he was no friend of “progress” through industrialization, which he thought inimical to man’s natural being. Some of his books were banned because of their graphic love scenes, and he had trouble with the British authorities because his wife was German and because he objected to British foreign policy.
from Benjamin Franklin
Lawrence’s interest in America and its literature is manifest in his 1923 book, Studies in Classic American Literature, from which the following selection is excerpted.
The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance.
Education! Which of the various me’s do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress?
Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress me, according to your dummy standards.
The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz1?
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There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience?
Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?
Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard College?
The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.
The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?
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Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.
At the beginning of his career this cunning little Benjamin drew up for himself a creed that should “satisfy the professors of every religion, but shock none.”
Now wasn’t that a real American thing to do?…
The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood2 that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white-skinned hordes of the next civilization.
Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!
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Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth. And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they.
This is Benjamin’s barbed wire fence. He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock… .
A Quaker friend told Franklin that he, Benjamin, was generally considered proud, so Benjamin put in the Humility touch as an afterthought. The amusing part is the sort of humility it displays. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates,” and mind you don’t outshine either of these two. One can just imagine Socrates and Alcibiades3 roaring in their cups over Philadelphian Benjamin, and Jesus looking at him a little puzzled, and murmuring: “Aren’t you wise in your own conceit, Ben?”…
Which brings us right back to our question, what’s wrong with Benjamin, that we can’t stand him? Or else, what’s wrong with us, that we find fault with such a paragon?
Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. “This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,” saith Benjamin, and all America with him… .
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I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance-silence-order-resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity-justice-moderation-cleanliness-tranquility-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I’m really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:
“That I am I.”
“That my soul is a dark forest.”
“That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.”
“That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.”
“That I must have the courage to let them come and go.”
“That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”
There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.
Then for a “list.” It is rather fun to play at Benjamin.
There’s my list. I have been trying dimly to realize it for a long time, and only America and old Benjamin have at last goaded me into trying to formulate it.
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And now I, at least, know why I can’t stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.
(1923)