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DEATH of a HERO
— Biography — VOLTAIRE WELLINGTON FOUR ENGLISH PORTRAITS THE STRANGE LIFE OF CHARLES WATERTON PORTRAIT OF A GENIUS. BUT… (Life of D. H. Lawrence) PINORMAN LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: A BIOGRAPHICAL ENQUIRY INTRODUCTION TO MISTRAL FRAUDS
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There may be little differences in an English family, for the best of friends fall out at times, but in all serious crises they may be depended upon to show a united front. Thank God, there can still be no doubt about it – apart from pure literature of the sheik brand and refining pictures in the revived Millais tradition, an English family can still be relied upon to present a united front against any of its members indulging in the obscene pursuits of Literature or Art. Such things may be left to the obscene Continent and our own degenerates and decadents, though it would be well if stern methods were adopted by the police to cleanse our public life of the scandal brought upon Us by the latter. The great English middle-class mass, that dreadful squat pillar of the nation, will only tolerate art and literature that are fifty years out of date, eviscerated, de-testiculated, bowdlerized, humbuggered, slip-slopped, subject to their anglicized Jehovah. They are still that unbroken rampart of Philistia against which Byron broke himself in vain, and which even the wings of Ariel were inadequate to surmount. So, look out, my friend. Hasten to adopt the slimy mask of British humbug and British fear of life, or expect to be smashed. You may escape for a time. You may think you can compromise. You can’t. You’ve either got to lose your soul to them or have it smashed by them. Or you can exile yourself.
It was probably worse in the days of George Augustus, and anyway he was only a grotesque and didn’t much matter. Still, the vitality of Isabel was real and should have found an outlet instead of being forced back into her and turned into a sharp, sour poison. And the pathetic efforts of George Augustus to be an aesthete and WRITE meant something, some inner struggle, some effort to create a life of his own. It was an evasion, of course, a feeble, flapping desire to escape into a dream world; but if you had been George Augustus, living under the sceptre of dear Mamma in the Sheffield of 1891, you too would have yearned to escape. Isabel opposed this new freak of George Augustus, because she also wanted to escape. And for her, escape was only possible if George Augustus earned enough money to take her and her baby away. She thought the Pre-Raphaelites rather nonsensical and drivelling – and she wasn’t far wrong. She thought Mr. Hardy very gloomy and immoral, and Mr. George Moore very frivolous and immoral, and young Mr. Wilde very unhealthy and immoral. But her reading in the works of all these immortals was very sketchy and snatchy – what really animated her was her immovable instinct that George Augustus’s only motive in life henceforth should be to provide for her and her child, and to get them away from Sheffield and dear Mamma.
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