1Lawrence lived at a time of burgeoning interest in national music, fuelled by folk-song collectors around the globe. His letters and works resound with the words, imagery and rhythms of folk songs, a form of music he first encountered as a student teacher and continued to sing throughout his life. Music was his favourite subject at College, as Jessie Chambers tells us: “He liked the Folk songs, particularly the ballad of ‘Henry Martin’ and ‘I sowed the seeds of love’” (80). Favourites, too, of the farmer George Saxton in Lawrence’s first novel The White Peacock (1911), these are leading examples of old songs from an oral, communal tradition newly disseminated through schools by Cecil J. Sharp (1859-1924). In fact, “I sowed the seeds of love” was the very first song Sharp collected in 1903 (recordings, and other information, are available online from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: https://www.vwml.org/topics/song). Although by no means the first English folk-song collector, Sharp was the first to deploy the songs in an overtly nationalist campaign. His 1907 book on English Folk-Song urged:
the introduction of folk songs in the elementary schools to effect an improvement in the musical taste of the people, and to refine and strengthen the national character. Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan ; it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens, that we want. (173)
2In the early twentieth century, folk songs were thus a political issue of ‒ and putatively for ‒ “the people.” Not only in England, where Sharp was joined in folk song collecting by classical composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst and Percy Grainger, but in Central and Eastern Europe by Janáček, Bartók and Kodály, in Germany by the Wandervögel (see Krockel and Poller for parallels with Lawrence) and in America, where Sharp collected songs in the Appalachians in 1916-1918. In short, there was a global movement to reconnect music with its local roots, a movement variously construed as nationalist or cosmopolitan, redolent of nostalgic conservatism or a quintessentially modernist blending of old and new as epitomised by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
3From the outset some experts were sceptical about musical nationalism in general and about Sharp’s promulgation of English folk song specifically. In The English Review in 1912 the music writer Ernest Newman – mentioned in Lawrence’s early letters to Blanche Jennings about music (1L 100) – published two articles about what he called “The Folk-Song Fallacy.” Newman disputed the possibility of isolating any “national musical idiom” (Sharp’s term): “The truly great artists are citizens of the world. It is only the little ones who cannot see, or do not want to see, beyond their parish, their province, or even their country” (268). Nonetheless Sharp’s implied ideal of a rural England of yore – attacked though it was again by Marxist critics in the 1980s onwards (Boyes, Harker) – is one that took deep root and persists in populist movements today (Curtis).
4The contested status of the folk song is thus an important part of Lawrence’s personal and historical context that also provides a lens through which to reconsider his attitudes to the “folk” alongside his oft-noted ambivalence about Englishness and nationalism. While Lawrence the student teacher shared Sharp’s enthusiasm for singing at the core of the curriculum, he believed that “the main purpose of education was to teach people how to use their leisure, or rather how to use themselves”; as Chambers reports him saying, “‘Teach the adolescents to sing and dance and do gymnastics, and make things they enjoy making’” (Chambers 80). But he became increasingly convinced that schools were no place for such an education: in “Education of the People” (1920), he declares that “Folk song lives till we have schools, and then it is dead” (REF), a scenario he later illustrated in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), when Connie overhears a Standard Five singing lesson: “Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine […] What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails […]?” (LCL 152). That novel famously concludes with an appeal for the revitalisation of England through a return to old customs:
If the men wore scarlet trousers, as I said, they wouldn’t think so much of money: if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash […] They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, all of them, and to move and be handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances […] (299-301)
5A similar utopianism is evident in Lawrence’s late “[Autobiographical Fragment]” – unpublished and untitled in his lifetime, but retitled by Keith Sagar as “A Dream of Life” – in which the narrator falls asleep in 1927 and wakes up one thousand years later to find the people naked and gathering together to the “squeal of bagpipes” to dance and sing, “the soft booming and trilling of women and men singing against one another in the strangest pattern of sound” (LEA). There are also parallels with scenes in his novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), written the previous year, which brings men and women together in song and dance but in two separate circles: “a beautiful slow wheel of dance, two great streams streaming in contact, in opposite directions” (PS 131). It has often been noted that Lawrence’s perception of “blood consciousness” that separated sexes and races shades into a blood and soil ruralism that appealed to contemporary figures like Rolf Gardiner and John Hargrave, subsequently viewed as neo-fascists (see for example Delavenay), and this has rightly caused concern for Lawrence’s critics from Bertrand Russell onwards. It is not my intention to add specifically to that debate (see most recently Poller) so much as to expand on the inherent contradictions that Anne Fernihough points out in her discussion of “Lawrence and Fascism,” where she notes that “it is one of the strangest paradoxes that these völkisch ideologies could be used by Nazism on the one hand, and on the other by certain strands of radical feminism, particularly eco-feminism” (171). Since the English word “folk” was an adoption of the German “Volk” [people] into English (in 1846 by William J. Thoms), the naming of the English folk song was linked to the völkisch from the outset and the English folk song “revival” that followed in the second half of the nineteenth century entailed similar paradoxes.
6Like many British citizens, Lawrence knew German folk songs before he ever heard English ones. For him, the ground for the English folk song had been prepared by the German Romantics, but also by Walter Scott, a collector of Scottish ballads. Further context is also provided by nineteenth-century socialists such as Edward Carpenter, who wrote socialist hymns and ballads, including this call for national revival in “England Arise” in his Chants of Labour: A Songbook for the People (1888):
People of England ! All your valleys call you,
High in the rising sun the lark sings clear,
Will you dream on, let shameful slumber thrall you?
Will you disown your native land so dear?
Shall it die unheard –
That sweet pleading word?
Arise, O England, for the day is here!
7The appeal here to “valleys,” “larks” and “native land” has some similarities to the ruralist nationalism of Sharp’s later folksong project, a meeting of socialist and [small] conservative politics embodied by Sharp himself as a Fabian, who may even have shared his sister’s enthusiasm for Carpenter. Evelyn Sharp’s memorial of Carpenter (who died in 1929) records that she “read [his] books when […] young” and “wore his sandals on my summer holidays […] ma[d]e […] with his own hands.” Carpenter probably also exerted some influence over Lawrence through their mutual friend Willie Hopkin (Booth) and there may be some parallels between Carpenter’s ballad about the people of England arising from their slumber and the sleeper in Lawrence’s “[Autobiographical Fragment]” who awakes to a brighter future.
8There are parallels, too, between the Fragment and the utopianism of William Morris, particularly the idea of the “education of desire” suggested by Miguel Abensour in his study of Morris: that is a utopianism that sought to “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way” (translated in Thompson 1977, 791). Different from Sharp’s desire to educate, Lawrence’s interest in folk song is a way to re-educate people to express desire, and, just as folk song often had sexual connotations, for Lawrence it offered a way of writing the body – particularly the male body. The rest of this paper, then, will sketch the evolution of Lawrence’s thinking about folk song in his early works set in England, focusing on his wartime story “England my England,” which adapts a real-life folk-follower of Cecil Sharp, before considering his treatment of foreign “folk” in The Plumed Serpent. But to begin with, what do we mean by “folk”?
9In German, “Volk” means the people, but in English “folk” came to have specific associations. “Talk to any old peasant,” Sharp wrote, “and you will find that he has an intimate acquaintanceship with the old songs” (133). However,
For the last century and more the practice of singing folk songs has, in England, fallen into abeyance amongst all classes, save only the peasantry. A purifying and refining influence has thus […] been withdrawn from the nation, and not, I believe, without detriment to it. (xxv, my emphasis)
10Sharp’s invocation of a “purifying” influence chimes ominously with the ideas of racial purity that developed in the following decades, but his major concern was purification from what he regarded as a degraded version of popular music circulating in the urban music halls. Lawrence, who was fond of music-hall songs, probably did not have “purifying” in mind when he taught folk songs to the Chambers family as they worked on their farm, milking the cows and harvesting the fields. These were the activities that had inspired the folk songs in the first place, their rhythms accompanying and easing the work as witnessed in The White Peacock. Here, for instance, George sings “the old song[s],” “I sowed the seeds of love” and “The Ash Grove,” as he carries milk-buckets across the yard (WP 54, 52). Although scenes like this throughout Lawrence’s work may seem to reflect romanticised associations of English folk song with a rural, pre-industrial way of life, his depictions are always ambivalent and inherently unstable (see for example Ruderman and Rylance). The White Peacock is set in Nethermere – a play on “Never more” – a vestige of bygone days, threatened by rot and decay and rats in the mill-race, which comes most alive in the outdoor scenes involving George. These are scenes that eroticise his body, the most active body in the novel, and often through the gaze of its male narrator. In the homoerotic chapter “A Poem of Friendship,” Cyril describes how, following a naked swim, Afterwards they return to the fruitfulness of the fields and resume their mowing, “singing” (224) as they labour (see also Reid 2009).
We stood and looked at each other as we rubbed ourselves dry. He was well proportioned, and naturally of handsome physique, heavily limbed […] he knew how I admired the noble, white fruitfulness of his form. (WP 222)
11Folk songs themselves often contain thinly veiled sexual allusions – the seed in “I sowed the seeds of love” is both agrarian and human – which may have added to their appeal for Lawrence. We might compare an early Lawrence poem like “Cherry Robbers” with traditional songs like “Cherry Ripe” or “The Cherry Tree Carol” (another of his favourites) in which “cherry” is code for virginity (Reid 2019). We might also think of George Saxton’s “rhythmic body” as “firmly planted, he swung with a beautiful rhythm from the waist” (WP 47, my emphasis) – George embodies the promise of a return to nature and to the sexual body, which though thwarted in Lawrence’s first novel, will be a recurrent theme throughout his oeuvre. The scene in which George pats Cyril dry after their swim in some ways foreshadows a more ceremonial scene in The Plumed Serpent in which Don Ramón anoints General Cipriano – in a culmination of the singing and dancing that bonds the Men of Quetzalcoatl. Cipriano first encourages his soldiers “to dance naked […] to rub themselves with the red earth-powder, over the oil,” telling them: “This is the oil of the stars […]. This is the red blood of volcanoes. Rub yourselves with it, you will have the power of the fire of the volcanoes, from the centre of the earth” (365). This novel heralds a return to nature at its most cosmic and elemental, that Cipriano himself then experiences at the hands of Ramón: “he was a man without a head, moving like a dark wind over the face of the dark water” (368) – imagery that is a recurrent refrain in the Songs of Quetzalcoatl to which I will return at the end of this paper.
12There are many obvious differences between The White Peacock and The Plumed Serpent, but my focus here is on a shift from English bodies to foreign bodies calibrated by Lawrence’s use of the term “peasant.” In Cecil Sharp’s definition the English folk were “peasantry” (see above), but this is not a term which Lawrence applies to George Saxton or uses at all until he observes foreign “peasants” during his travels. Although there are over 500 references to peasants in Lawrence’s work (and a further 110 to “peons” in The Plumed Serpent), his first novel to feature the term is The Rainbow, where it is used only a few times to describe foreign peasants and mostly by Lydia, herself a foreigner. Peasants also emerge in the essays of Twilight in Italy: sometimes to describe male flesh, as in “The Crucifix Across the Mountains”, in which a wooden figure of Christ contrasts with the hot body of a haymaker, whose
shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy, pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards the loins, secretly ; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical sensation. (TI 92)
13As Julianne Newmark observes, Lawrence’s “experiences in Gargnano helped to crystallise his belief in bodily knowledge as religious and devotional: “the blood, the flesh […] [are] wiser than the intellect,” as he wrote in late 1912 [1L 503]) (68). Although he began to shape these insights in Twilight in Italy, it was only after the war that he began to explore them more fully in his fiction, grasping toward ways of re-educating people to live by the desires of the blood and the flesh rather than the intellect, and his exploration of different cultures during the 1920s was critical to this evolution. The vast majority of references to peasants thus occur in Lawrence’s works of the 1920s: notably in the last chapter of The Lost Girl, the second half of Mr Noon and in the short story “Sun,” where Juliet’s awakening has as much to do with the body of a male peasant as with the climate. The Plumed Serpent much more frequently deploys the Mexican term “peon” defined as follows: “Mexico meant the dark-faced men in cotton clothes, big hats: the peasants, peons, pelados, Indians, call them what you will” (PS 75).
14The communality that Lawrence perceived in the art of Italian peasants and later in his experiences of Native American culture, marks his recognition of, Newmark writes, “an artistry that he understood as communal not individual; communal art to him was the opposite of art associated with crude commercialism, recognition or fame” (68). Or to invoke a stock Lawrencian term it is art for life’s sake rather than art for art’s sake. This was also a key distinction for Sharp between folk songs and classically-composed art songs; Sharp valued “the song created by the common people” as “the products not of the individual, but of a people or community” or what he calls “the folk muse”: “we are indebted to the process of oral tradition, not only for preserving them, but for creating them as well” (9-10). By the end of the 1920s, where Lawrence diverged from Sharp (who died in 1924) was about the possibility of preserving the old ways of life of the English peasantry: “The industrial England blots out the agricultural England,” Connie Chatterley observes, and like her Lawrence was ultimately ambivalent about where he belonged: “England my England! But which is my England?” (LCL 156). A question that he began to address in his earlier short story.
15In September 1915, Lawrence described the first published version of “England, my England” as “the story of most men and women who are married today – of most men at the war, and wives at home” (2L 386), but it was also based on a specific real-life couple, Perceval and Madeline Lucas whom he met on the Meynell family’s Greatham estate. In 1916, when Lucas died in the war as he does in the story, Lawrence wrote that he “wish[ed] the story at the bottom of the sea,” although he reiterated that “the great desire is not to fight for house and home. They will prove to themselves, by fighting, that their greater desire, on the whole, was not to fight for their nation, or sea-power, but to know a new value” (2L 635, my emphasis). His 1922 version of the story develops these questions of nationalism and “value” by significantly extending its first, pre-war part and adding more details drawn from Lucas’s real life. Perceval Lucas was a staunch member of Cecil Sharp’s folk-collecting team and folk songs are now mentioned three times: Egbert “had a passion for old folk-music, collecting folk-songs and folk-dances, studying the Morris-dance and the old customs.” While his father-in-law stands for industrialism, Egbert belongs to an older way of life that is a form of “Knowledge” or “secret of life” that is symbolised by his “supple body” (26). In this way, Egbert has some of the promise of the life-loving peasants that Lawrence had encountered ten years earlier in Italy, but, crucially, he does not make his living from the land: he merely landscapes the garden, living off his father-in-law’s industrial wealth and flitting off to London to dabble amateurishly in the arts. As Rick Rylance points out, life at Crockham cottage is not “an authentic, ‘revived’ alternative […]. This is a notional English folk revival without the village, without the folk, and – for that matter – without the revival” (18). The communality that informed Lawrence’s apprehension of Italian peasants is utterly lacking from “England, My England”.
16The arrival of the war in the story crystallises a confrontation between machine warfare and the life of the body when Egbert is fatally wounded by a shell. But the war is not presented as a straightforward confrontation between nations or peoples, Egbert has “no conception” of patriotism, “Imperial England and Rule Britannia was just a joke to him”:
No, he had no desire to defy Germany and to exalt England. The distinction between German and English was not for him the distinction between good and bad […] a man was good or bad according to his nature, not according to his nationality. (27, my emphasis.)
17The distinction of “nature” is troubling, however, and becomes linked with ideas of primitivism and racial vitality in Lawrence’s fiction of the 1920s. Egbert has traces of the savagery and darkness that Lawrence will seek out in New and Old Mexico: “His heart went back to the savage old spirit of the place” associated with the “presence of unseen snakes” in this cottagey version of the Garden of Eden, but Egbert resembles “a harmless snake [that] swerves and swerves and swerves away from an outstretched hand” (24-5). He is not one of “the lords of life” as depicted in Lawrence’s poem “Snake” or in his novel The Plumed Serpent.
18The Songs and Hymns of Quetzalcoatl that mark the transformation of Ramón and Cipriano into living representatives of the old Aztec gods are an odd conjunction of sources, which conflate Mexican history with the rhythms of Native American drumming and the Congregational hymns of Lawrence’s youth. To these I would like to add some further parallels with folk songs. The final version of the novel spreads Ramón’s “gospel” via printed song sheets rather than the oral transmission emphasised in the draft version titled Quetzalcoatl (Q 150-1). The songs are written by an individual, Ramón, and then shared with the people, which is contrary to Sharp’s definition of a folk song written by a community, but his definition has been disputed for reasons both practical and historical. Many of the English ballads that have survived were originally disseminated by printed broadsheets and this is a tradition that Lawrence seems to adapt with his song sheets in The Plumed Serpent, there is even a chapter titled “The Written Hymns of Quetzalcoatl.” Later we are told that Ramón takes the hymns to be printed in the city and then they are distributed far and wide by Cipriano’s soldiers:
in every town there was a recognised Reader of the Hymns […]. And Readers who went round to the villages […]. And though [the people] took not much active notice of the Hymns, they craved for them […] as a relief from the weariness and ennui of mankind’s man-made world. (260)
19The Hymns are a form of propaganda or manifesto – similar to the original broadside ballads that spread real news and sometimes sedition from the sixteenth century onwards – and akin to Sharp’s intention with the English folk song revival, they depict an alternative to the industrial present through a return to nature and old customs. The first hymn builds a picture of Mexico as a bride who will be awakened by the return of Quetzalcoatl: the land is depicted through images of fecundity both natural and sexual, akin to folk song, as the returning Aztec god
[…] started down the long slope
Past the mount of the sun.
Till I saw beneath me
White breast-tips of my Mexico
My bride. (119)
20Although Quetzalcoatl as embodied by Ramón is far from a peasant, he adopts the peasant style of dress described as “the costume of the peones, the white blouse jacket and the white, wide pantaloon trousers.” As his wife Carlota mocks, he has “become one of the people—a real peon—a Senor Peon, like Count Tolstoy” (167-8). The Men of Quetzalcoatl weave serapes that Ramón designs, although often they go shirtless so we can admire their torsos. After the men embrace, naked breast to naked breast, Kate studies her future husband Cipriano: “The soft, cream-brown skin of his back, of a smooth, pure sensuality, made her shudder […]. The full-fleshed, deep-chested, rich body of the man made her feel dizzy” (182). The fetichisation of foreign bodies in the novel has often been remarked (Stevens, Torgovnick) and the term “pure” is jarring in this context, sharing something with Sharp’s ideal of purifying a nation through the reintroduction of old customs. Indeed, the discourses of the “folk” and the “primitive” were linked, as Mark Slobin observes, since the “folk” were perceived as “the internal primitives of Euro-America” (qtd in Born and Hesmondhalgh).
21Cumulatively the hymns of Quetzalcoatl mount a trenchant criticism of modern life: Hymn VI “What Quetzalcoatl Saw in Mexico” describes a descent into greed that robs the land of its natural resources:
They want gold, they want silver from the mountains,
And oil, much oil from the coast […]
Wonderful are the machines of the greedy ones!
And you, Mexicans and peons, what do you do?
We work with their machines, we work in their fields,
They give us pesos made of Mexican silver.
They are the clever ones. (PS 256)
22This is a call to action and an attempt to re-educate the desires of the people so that they are no longer enslaved to “the machines of the greedy ones.” The desire for a more natural way of life is encapsulated in the “Welcome to Quetzalcoatl”:
Quetzalcoatl loves the shade of trees.
Give him trees! Call back the trees!
We are like trees, tall and rustling.
Quetzalcoatl is among the trees.
23The simplicity of this quatrain resembles the radical rhetoric of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. More generally there are similarities too with Carpenter’s socialist hymns as previously quoted:
England, arise! The long, long night is over,
Faint in the East behold the dawn appear;
Out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow –
Arise, O England, for the day is here;
From your fields and hills,
Hark! The answer swells –
Arise, O England, for the day is here!
24Lawrence’s mission in The Plumed Serpent, however, is ultimately cosmopolitan rather than nationalist. The reimagined holy trinity of Ramón, Cipriano and Kate is deliberately mixed race (respectively Spanish-Mexican, Indian-Mexican and Irish) and the aim is for their religion to spread across the globe:
As if, from Ramón and Cipriano, from Jamiltepec and the lake region, a new world was unfolding, unrolling, as softly and subtly as twilight falling and removing the clutter of day. It was a soft, twilit newness slowly spreading and penetrating the world […] (359)
25This central idea of the lake as an epicentre sending ripples across a new world is reinforced by the novel’s oceanic imagery, which dissolves separateness and resistance, often embodied in the circle dances, I mentioned in my introduction.
26This returns us, finally, to Rolf Gardiner whose key rhetorical motifs included centres, circles and rings (Rylance 19). When Lawrence first wrote to Gardiner in July 1924, he was sceptical about ideas of “World unison”: reflecting that “you cant even have a ‘perfect’ camp on a Bucks common” (5L 67). He was writing about the Kibbo Kift movement founded by John Hargrave (aka White Fox):
I know there has to be a return to the older vision of life. But not for the sake of unison. And not done from the will. It needs some welling up of religious sources that have been shut down in us: a great yielding […] a yielding to the darker, older unknown. (68)
27What he referred to as “value” in “England, My England,” Lawrence now conceives as a “welling up” of “religious sources” (note once more the imagery of water), yet the religious movement in The Plumed Serpent ends in ambivalence. Soon after that novel was published, by December 1926, he has retreated from the communal religion of The Plumed Serpent to the idea of “a centre of silence, and a heart of darkness” (5L 591) – this will become Wragby Wood in Lady Chatterley. He then writes to Gardiner:
I will try to come to England and make a place – some quiet house in the country –where one can begin […] and learn dances from all the world [ …]. And learn music the same […] We need only be even two people to start. I don’t believe in numbers, or haste […]. And there must also be work connected – I mean earning a living – at least earning one’s bread. (5L 591)
28For Lawrence, folk songs and dances are not an end in themselves, and they are certainly not nationalist; they must be attached to working the land and learning to live a fully embodied life. In this, at least he agreed with Gardiner, who also wrote that: “Music should not be an end in itself” but an “essential and organic part of the workaday world.” But their ways parted as Lawrence refused, as he did throughout his life, to affiliate with any specific movement, on the left or right, and remained committed to his own, deeply personal vision of the re-education of desire.