«Eugenia» (1894), who is herself racially sound, rejects Lord Brinkhampton, a «neuropath» and degenerate, and proposes to the aptly named Saxon Wake. Wake is a 'yeoman,' but makes up racially for what he lacks socially. This will be the race-preserving, the eugenic-the Eugeniac-marriage. Such racially sound marriages should preferably be complemented, as Allen's language suggests and as the conclusion to The Beth Book makes clear, by a mystical union.
Mystical-eugenic unions were all very well, but they did presuppose an abundant supply of healthy, strong- willed young men and women. Narratives promoting race preservation had to balance the dream of a New Hedonism against the reality, as it was perceived, of social decrepitude. Whereas the New Woman novelists tended to pair different types of degeneracy-the hoggish and the hysterical, Morlock and Eloi-their successors tended to pair a couple seeking regeneration with a -620- couple or couples doomed to degeneracy. This new pairing emerges tentatively in
Forster's
In Lawrence's
Gerald Crich will act out this analysis of race and national death. He is no degenerate. He does not suffer from some inherited flaw. But he is constantly placed, both as an individual and as the member of a class, by quotations from the discourse of race and national death. His great achievement has been to make the mines profitable, breaking with his father's mid-Victorian philosophy of paternalism and muddlingthrough, and promoting a new creed of organization and efficiency. One of the issues that separates father from son is the proper attitude toward the 'whining, parasitic' poor. Thomas Crich feeds the supplicants; his wife and his son both want to turn them away. But the issue is framed in the son's terms rather than the father's, in the language of Lankester's Social Darwinism.
Gerald himself can be associated with early twentieth-century campaigns for 'national efficiency': physical health; scientific and technological training; military and naval preparedness; industrial modernization; a government of national unity. Gudrun imagines that she might inspire him to become the Napoleon or the Bismarck of modern Britain. 'She would marry him, he would go into Parliament in the Conservative interest, he would clear up the great muddle of labour and industry.' The application of business ethics and methods to public policy was one of the causes promoted by the national efficiency movement. That would be Gerald's 'new gospel,' if he could only bring himself to mean it.
That he cannot is due to his failure to form relationships. Gerald is not a degenerate destroyed by some inherited genetic flaw. He is a conditional degenerate-he often behaves as if he were drunk-who is corrupted by the degenerate environments he encounters. Degeneracy exists in the two bohemias-Halliday's and Loerke's-he inhabits briefly at the beginning and at the end of the novel. Halliday's circle is the kind that might easily have got itself denounced in Nordau's Degeneration. Lawrence makes sure we get the point about Halliday: 'His face was uplifted, degenerate, perhaps slightly disintegrate, and yet with a moving beauty of its own.' While Birkin observes bohemia coolly, then passes on, Gerald lingers, intrigued, appalled, fascinated, drawn inexorably into moral, sexual, and physical conflict. He loses Minette to Halliday just as he will later lose Gudrun to Loerke.
Loerke, the 'mud-child,' the 'very stuff of the underworld of life,' -622- is Lawrence's best shot at a degenerate. Extravagantly Jewish and homosexual, he fulfils to an almost parodic degree the requirements of stereotype. He is an evolutionary test case, a parasite, a creature developed at once beyond and below humanity, into pure destructiveness. Gudrun succumbs to Loerke; Gerald fights him and loses. Never himself a degenerate, Gerald, unlike Birkin, cannot create an alternative to degeneracy. His failure propels him, like Jude, into the final spiral of the degeneration plot. His desire for «finality» drives him on to a conclusion, but his 'decay of strength' ensures that the conclusion will be death.
Gerald's story exemplifies the degeneration theory that glosses it so consistently. Rupert and Ursula's story, on the other hand, looks back to those tentative imaginings of mystical-eugenic union in Gissing and Grand, in George Egerton's 'The Regeneration of Two' (1894), in Forster. Lawrence's parallel narratives are sometimes seen as part of a literary revolution, as distinctively modernist. But they might also be regarded as the solution, at once formal and ideological, to a problem first articulated thirty years before.
A passage in Arnold Bennett's journal for June 15, 1896, describes the aged male inmates of the Fulham Road workhouse. 'Strange that the faces of most of them afford no vindication of the manner of their downfall to pauperdom! I looked in vain for general traces either of physical excess or of moral weakness.' Well-read in French fiction, an admirer of novels like A Mummer's Wife, Bennett naturally looks for evidence of degeneracy in the undeserving poor. But he cannot find any. To his eyes, the faces reveal wear and tear, not monstrosity. Like his friend Emily Symonds, Bennett may have wondered whether he ought not to behave more like a naturalist. But temperament, and the relative eclipse of naturalism, dictated that his novels, beginning with A Man from the North (1898), should confine themselves to mundane wear and tear. Unlike Zola, or Gissing, or Moore, he did not attempt any «vindication» of biomedical theory.
By the end of the 1890s, the brief phase of the slum novel was effectively over. The East End of London was still a point of automatic reference in many novels, but the portrayal of working-class life became increasingly lighthearted. Symptomatic of the new mood was the instant success of William de Morgan's genial, old-fashioned romances. Dickens, not Zola, was the model. Addressing the Boz Club, William Pett Ridge claimed that Dickens had revealed the «romance» and the -623- 'cheerfulness' in the lives of 'hard-up people.' Some writers, he went on, described the poor as though they were 'gibbering apes.' But such «naturalism» was outmoded. 'The reading public knows better; it knows that the Dickens view is the right view.' Ridge, like Edwin Pugh and W. W. Jacobs, was proud to be considered a disciple of Dickens. His best-known working-class novel, Mord Em'ly (1898), is a sentimental, facetious tale about a slum girl whose vitality is nourished rather than impaired by London life.
At the same time, a new territory and a new class had become visible, as suburbia spread out from London and the major industrial centers and coastal resorts, boosted by railway expansion and the advent of the motorcar. Suburbia was as tribal as the slums, as tempting to the cultural anthropologist; more so, perhaps, since the new tribe was composed of avid novel-readers. The result was a flourishing genre of fiction which, taking its tone from Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) and the Grossmiths' Diary of a Nobody (1892), celebrated or gently mocked suburban life-styles and values.
Critics of suburban life seized on its monotony. Ruskin put the objection pithily when he alluded to 'those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar.' Suburbia permitted neither difference nor community. It denied the vision fostered by Romanticism and embedded in nineteenth-century social theory, the vision of a society united by common human bonds but differentiated
