T H E S I S

68
natural beauty* In fact, he is killed by the mechanical ”thing”,
that is, the "horror”, the squalor of the mechanical world that
Mellors abominates too. He says:
“I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again,
and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake."
(LCL 230)
Mellors cannot really fight the mechanical ”thing” either, but
he does not have to die, he remains as a symbols the keeper of
natural life. He is also the symbolic bearer of the ”phallic
consciousness”, which is going to save civilization from the
“thing”.
But like Lawrence he cannot prevent his lyric Eastwood-
Tevershall in the novel - from being degraded by the machine «■
The following long passage purports not only to show the
ugly and dark face of industrialism in LCL? contrasting with that
passage from The Whits Peacock (pp. 26-27) about the green hills
and woods of Eastwood (Nethermere), but also offers the opportunity
to compare the early, rural, idealistic style of The White
Peacock with Lawrence’s highly elaborate and seemingly hopeless ,
lament against industrial civilization. Thus the later novels
“The car ploughed up hill through the long squalid straggle of
Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate
roofs, glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with
coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness
had soaked through and through everything. The
utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter negation
of natural beauty, the utter absence of the instinct for
shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter
death of human intuitive faculty was appalling.
♦•t
The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and
stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational
chapel, which thought itself superior, was