Gradual Evolution of English Short Story and D.H. Lawrance

Abstract

In early cultures the world over, the story-teller had a special place. Before written language was used, historic, religious and cultural knowledge was passed from generation to generation orally, and as the keeper of all this collective knowledge, the story-teller was one of the most important people in the community. While some stories can be deliberately told to perpetuate a narrow world view, most traditional stories can provide the "larger context" within which we are invited to move beyond conflict. The instinct of story-telling perhaps sprang up with human life, but the principles of the modern short story in English were not crystallized till the nineteenth century. The short story proper, which is a deliberately fashioned work of art, and not just a straight forward tale or one of more events, belongs to modern times. In England Rudyard Kipling was the first person who cultivated the art of writing short stories in the modern sense of the term and was followed by a number of eminent writers, such as Conrad, Galsworthy, Wells, George Moore, Bennett, D. H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham. Life consists in the achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us... this, if we know it, is our life and our eternity: the subtle, perfected relation between me and my whole circumambient universe. Art, says Lawrence, is one of the ways of achieving and revealing the relation between man and circumambient universe at the living moment. For Lawrence there is no dichotomy between art and life, and the level of art is not different from that of life. Lawrence distrusted the abstract, unvital, cerebral orientation towards life. since such an approach takes one nowhere near the reality: it doesn't help man to develop and realize his 'self', his being. Lawrence sees man's tragedy as springing from his attaching too much importance to the mind and neglect of instinctive life. The emphasis on the primacy of the blood or the natural urge of man is central to Lawrence's thinking. It is only by obeying the natural urges, intuitions and instincts that a man can know the mystery of the 'outer darkness' that surrounds this world and that which is beyond the conscious mind.