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but he ran away and ceased singing. He seemed near, and she wanted to touch him. Shestretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.
    Banford, the sensitive one, dies when Henry deliberately fells a tree her way, and Henry and March marry and are to be unhappy and embattled forever after.
    And now, in Lawrence’s work, what of his extraordinary characters? Are they real, recognizable, neat men and women? Would you know them if you saw them? Not even, I think, if they began to speak on the street as they speak in his stories, in the very words—they would appear as deranged people. And for this there is the most reliable of reasons: Lawrence’s characters don’t really speak their words, and they’re not walking about on the street. They are playing like fountains or radiating like the moon or storming like the sea, or their silence is the silence of wicked rocks. It is borne home to us that Lawrence is writing of human relationships on earth in terms of his own heaven and hell, and on these terms plot and characters are alike sacrificed to something: that which Lawrence passionately believes to transcend both and which is known and found directly through the senses. It is the world of the senses that Lawrence writes in. He almost literally writes from within it. He is first wonderful at making a story world, a place, and then wonderful again when he inhabits it with six characters, the five senses and sex. And the plot is by necessity a symbolic one. We know straight from thestart in “The Fox” that every point in the story is to be made
subjectively
. “He knew her. And she knew he knew her.” And we know she knew he knew her: this by his almost super-normal appeal to, and approach by way of, what can be seen, felt and heard. What has made this story strange is also what empowers us to understand it. It is hypnotic. Human relationships in his stories are made forces so strong that
what
they are (and what you and I should perhaps find indescribable) is simply, when we read him, accepted without question.
    It is characteristic of Lawrence that in describing the relationship between the two women, March and Banford, which is outwardly unconventional, he is stating perfectly clearly within his story’s terms the conventional separation at work in the two halves of the personality—the conscious and the unconscious, or the will and the passive susceptibility, what is “ready” and what is submerged. March and Banford may well be the two halves of one woman, of woman herself in the presence of the male will. Lawrence prosecutes his case with the persistence of a lawyer, with the mowing down of any dissent that the prophet is allowed to practice. But what moves, convinces, persuades us, all the same, is, so to speak, the odor of the fox—for the senses, the poetic world that lies far deeper than these shafts of argument or preaching really go, work Lawrence’s spell.
    For Virginia Woolf in her stories the senses mattered extremely, as we know; toward sex she was a critic. But the beauty and the innovation of her writing are both due to the fact, it seems to this reader, that the imprisonment of life in the word was with her a concern of the intellect as much as it was with the senses. She uses her senses intellectually,while Lawrence, if this is not too easy to say, uses his intellect sensually. While Chekhov patiently builds up character, Lawrence furiously breaks down character. It doesn’t need fiction writers to tell us that opposite things are very often done in getting at the truth. But it was Lawrence who was like the True Princess, who felt that beneath forty featherbeds there was a pea. Lawrence was as sensitive to