ABSTRACT
The striking impression that emerges from the detailed parallels between the two novels (The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent) is that in the later one D. H. Lawrence is in effect trying by a highly self-conscious effort of will to recreate a mode of feeling that was once spontaneously and in large measure unreflectingly his. In this later exercise in primitivism Lawrence seems to be forcing or working against the best qualities of his own sensibility. Primitivism in the sense of the promotion of a return to a pre-civilized way of life is always in danger of bad faith in that the primitivist urge can never actually be realized or tested in real life and is likely therefore to be nothing more than a safely civilized indulgence, an easy assumption of moral superiority. Where Lawrence’s primitivism comes from his own animistic sensibility, T. S. Eliot’s primitivist motifs are derived from a highly developed cultural and religious tradition.
