1D.H. Lawrence left Eastwood to take up his position as assistant schoolmaster at the Davidson Road School in Croydon in October 1908. Even as he worked on establishing himself in the London literary world, he wrote two stories in which a somewhat effete version of himself returns to a version of Haggs Farm to visit a transformed Jessie Chambers figure. In “A Modern Lover,” Cyril Mersham returns to visit Muriel and finds himself replaced by Tom Vickers, a young mining electrician. In “The Shades of Spring,” John Adderley Syson returns to visit Hilda Millership and discovers that she has begun a sexual relationship with Arthur Pilbeam, a young gamekeeper. This paper will explore the differences between the two stories and their main characters: Mersham and Syson, Muriel and Hilda. These differences illuminate Lawrence’s personal and artistic growth between the composition of “A Modern Lover” in late 1909 and the final revision of “The Shades of Spring” for the Prussian Officer collection in the summer of 1914.
2The two “homecoming” stories are intriguing critical add-ons to the Jessie Chambers/Miriam Leivers material in Sons and Lovers. At the conclusion of the novel, Paul Morel has left behind his tangled relationship with Miriam that has been a major component of the novel. When they were young, “she reminded Paul of some sad Botticelli angel,” and “their intimacy was so abstract” (SL 215, 216). Years later she agreed to have sex with him, but sex with Miriam always left him with “the sense of failure and of death”: “Instead of drawing them together, [the failed sex] put them apart” (SL 334, 335). Paul and Miriam meet once more just before the conclusion of the novel. Marriage isn’t a possibility, and she declines his half-hearted proposition: “And without marriage we can do nothing?” That marks “the end then between them.” On the final page of the novel Paul is leaning against a stile in the countryside with the “dark silence […] pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction” as he whimpers “Mother!” He gathers himself, refusing to “give in,” and famously walks “towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly” (SL 462 464).
3On 8 March 1912, Lawrence wrote his mentor Edward Garnett that the Forum, an American magazine, had accepted his revision of “The Soiled Rose,” the story that would ultimately become “The Shades of Spring.” Lawrence also enclosed a story he had written “three years back, and had forgotten. It is on the same theme, and I thought it might interest you – it is really curious.” That story was “A Modern Lover.” Lawrence added that he “would like thoroughly to revise it” (1L 372-373) before submitting it to a publisher.
4Lawrence wrote “A Modern Lover” at the end of 1909. The story was not published during his lifetime. It first appeared in Life and Letters in 1933 before it became the title story of the Modern Lover volume, a collection of unpublished and uncollected stories published in 1934. Lawrence wrote the first version of “The Shades of Spring” as “The Harassed Angel” in December 1911. He revised the story by March 1912. It was published as “The Soiled Rose” in the Forum in March 1913 and in Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield’s Blue Review two months later. Lawrence extensively revised the story before it was published as “The Shades of Spring” in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in November 1914. As Michael Black has observed, “The interest of ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘The Shades of Spring’ is that they show Lawrence circling round his own experience” (Black 112). The first versions of both stories preceded Sons and Lovers.
5A brief version of the homecoming story is found in “The Scarp Slope,” the final chapter of The White Peacock, published in January 1911. But the intriguing treatments of the homecoming story are “A Modern Lover” and “The Shades of Spring.” The only surviving manuscript of “A Modern Lover” dates from December 1909, not much more than a year after Lawrence had begun teaching in Croydon. The tension between London and Eastwood was still a central fact of his life. At the end of 1909 Lawrence was emotionally adrift, and he was feeling uncertain of himself as an aspiring member of the London literary community.
6Lawrence had traveled an immense distance – personally and artistically – by the early summer of 1914 when he revised “The Soiled Rose” (and re-titled it “The Shades of Spring”). This was part of his extensive, transformative revisions for publication of the best Prussian Officer stories. By the summer of 1914 he had published three novels, most impressively Sons and Lovers, and he had completed the third draft of the novel that would become The Rainbow (with material left over for Women in Love). In John Worthen’s words, Lawrence’s “new art came into its first flowering in the Prussian Officer stories” (PO xxx). He was excited about his artistic breakthrough and supremely confident in his relationship with Frieda. He had been with her for over two years, and they had gotten married on 13 July 1914.
7“The Shades of Spring” is not merely a story “on the same theme” as “A Modern Lover”; the two stories are arguably versions of the same story. Having somehow forgotten that he had written “A Modern Lover,” he wrote a story with the same basic plot and versions of the same characters. The restless literary intellectual returns home to the “country of his past” (PO 98) to pay a visit to his former sweetheart, a farmer’s daughter. He discovers that he has been replaced by a nonintellectual lover. Both stories include an evocation of the natural world that the protagonist left behind when he departed for London. But the very similar stories are fascinatingly different because the Lawrence of 1914 was so different from the Lawrence of 1909.
8In the two stories Lawrence attempts to come to terms imaginatively with his complicated relationship with Jessie Chambers, his intellectual soulmate, sometime girlfriend, and fleetingly his mistress. The two stories provide fascinating perspectives on Lawrence at two points in his early career: near its beginning in late 1909 and at an exhilarating moment of artistic achievement in the summer of 1914. As Janice Hubbard Harris has aptly concluded, “If one learns nothing more from the [two stories] […], one should see that Paul and Miriam in Sons and Lovers constitute only one interpretation of the difficulties Lawrence and Jessie went through” (Harris 43). In addition, “A Modern Lover” seems to illuminate a particular moment in Lawrence’s relationship with Jessie Chambers.
9Before I discuss the two stories, let me say a few words about Lawrence’s brief rendering of the homecoming narrative in “The Scarp Slope,” the final chapter of The White Peacock. Cyril Beardsall has returned to Nethermere “a year or two after [his] last visit,” where he has become “a stranger, an intruder.” Tom Renshaw – whom Emily is going “to marry in three weeks’ time” – is a “well-built fair man” with “something soldierly in his bearing.” Tom is “exceedingly manly: that is to say he did not dream of questioning or analysing anything.” Cyril feels smugly superior to his old sweetheart’s fiancé. After all, Tom can hardly compare with Cyril, who was “as restless and as urgent as the wind” – a memory that causes “a last flicker of the old terror” in Emily (WP 305, 306, 307, 308). Cyril turns his attention for the rest of the chapter to his old friend George Saxton, who has descended into alcoholism. This four-page homecoming scene creates the template for both “A Modern Lover” and “The Shades of Spring.”
10“A Modern Lover” and “The Shades of Spring” have much in common. They both begin with the autobiographical protagonist approaching on foot the farm where his former sweetheart lives. Both characters encounter the young woman’s parents and brothers. (In “The Shades of Spring” Hilda – like Jessie Chambers – has four brothers). Both Mersham and Syson arrive at mealtime. Mersham thinks about the books he and Muriel had read together. Syson opens a cupboard and finds it “full of his books, his old lesson books, and volumes of verse he had sent [Hilda]” (PO 103). Both stories feature the tapestried chair the Chambers family owned, “the Countess” in “A Modern Lover,” “the countess’ chair” in “The Shades of Spring” (LAH 33, PO 104). In Muriel’s parlor Mersham sees the “little, gilt-blazed water-colours that he hated so much because he had done them in his teens” (LAH 33). The “youthful water-colours” in Hilda’s parlor “no longer made [Syson] grin” (PO 103).
11We do not know how either protagonist earns his living. It is reasonable to suspect that Mersham is an aspiring writer. We do learn that Syson is “a success” and does “some good work” (PO 109), perhaps as a writer. In any event both men are very literary. Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, “the Russians” (LAH 33), Ibsen, Balzac, Maupassant, and Flaubert are among the novelists Mersham and Muriel had read together. Syson refers to a Rossetti poem, quotes a line from a Verlaine poem from memory, remembers a William Morris poem, and thinks about Dante and Beatrice.
12Lawrence describes the nonintellectual lovers in similar physical terms. Muriel’s new lover Tom Vickers is “a handsome man, well set up.” Mersham notes Tom’s “fine limbs, the solid, large thighs, and the thick wrists,” and he classifies “his rival among the men of handsome, healthy animalism” (LAH 39). Hilda’s lover Arthur Pilbeam is “manly and good-looking”: “the strong forward thrust of his chest, and the perfect ease of his erect, self-sufficient body, gave one the feeling that he was taut with animal life” (PO 99). Both Mersham and Syson powerfully affected their former sweethearts. Mersham’s “talk lifted Muriel as in a net, like a sea-maiden out of the waters, and placed her in his arms, to breathe his thin, rare atmosphere” (LAH 43). In the old days Syson was even more remarkable: he “could make [the stars] flash and quiver, and the forget-me-nots come up at [her] like phosphorescence” (PO 107). Both couples – Mersham and Muriel, Syson and Hilda – take a walk in which they reflect on their old relationship and their current situation. The former lovers depart for London at the conclusion of both stories.
13In “A Modern Lover” Cyril Mersham returns to the fictional version of Haggs Farm two years after leaving it. In “The Shades of Spring” John Adderley Syson has not been back for “six or eight years” (PO 98). The landscape the protagonists must navigate to reach the farm is very different. In “A Modern Lover” “[t]he road was heavy with mud. It was labour to move along. The old, wide way, forsaken and grown over with grass, used not to be so bad.” (LAH 28). In contrast in “The Shades of Spring” “[t]here was not the least difference between this morning and those of the bright springs” when Syson was last here. “The hazels still spread glad little hands downwards, the bluebells here were still wan and few, among the lush grass and in shade of the bushes” (PO 98). It is also significant that Mersham’s homecoming takes place in winter, Syson’s in spring.
14Cyril Mersham is callow, self-important, and manipulative. His intention in returning to visit Muriel is anything but honorable; his homecoming is a fool’s errand. John Adderley Syson, who has been away longer, is older, more mature, and more established. Even though he has been married for fifteen months, he makes the journey to “his past,” to see Hilda. Unlike Mersham, Syson realizes that he is making his journey to “the country he had abandoned” as an “intruder” and “trespasser” (PO 101, 99). Syson’s homecoming will conclude with self-understanding and newfound appreciation of his former sweetheart.
15Lawrence’s rendering of Mersham’s thoughts as he approaches the farm makes clear that he is a “mere sham.” Mersham is a satiric portrait of the artist. The pompous, overblown rhetoric of his thoughts, his inflated self-image, and even his tortured word order reveal him as someone who can never become a writer whom Lawrence would approve of: “Here, on the further shore of the sunset, with the flushed tide at his feet, and the large star flushing with strange laughter, did he himself naked walk with lifted arms into the quiet flood of life” (LAH 29).
16Mersham seems almost solipsistic, cut off from reality in a self-contained world of bloated language:
Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of life
to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither, enough to
satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could laugh the crystalline
laughter of the star, and bathe in the retreating flood of twilight like a
naked boy in the surf, clasping the waves and beating them and answering
their wild clawings with laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain. (LAH 29)
17“Orion had strode into the sky,” but Mersham “shivered, stumbled down the path” before coming into the “exceedingly, painfully muddy” yard with “a disgust of his own feet, which were cold, and numbed, and heavy” (LAH 30). Pretentious language cannot protect Cyril Mersham from the mud.
18Mersham had expected a “fine broad glow of welcome” from Muriel and her family, but they only ask for his “news.” Self-deluded, he believes that they really want the “timorous buds of his hopes, and the unknown fruits of his experiences, full of the taste of tears and what sunshine of gladness had gone to their ripening.” Mersham self-consciously and condescendingly plays the role of urbane intellectual. When everyone sits down to dinner, he uses “English that was exquisitely accurate, pronounced with the Southern accent, very different from the heavily sounded speech of the home folk.” The “irony of the situation appealed to him, and added brightness and subtlety to his wit.” Meanwhile Muriel, unsettled by Merham’s return, “hung her head over her plate, and ate little.” When Muriel’s two brothers – who are both miners – kneel on the hearth-rug to wash their backs, Mersham, ever the detached aesthete, “watched them, as he had watched the peewits and the sunset” (LAH 31-32). Lawrence’s satiric portrait of Mersham perhaps verges on the comic.
19Mersham, at loose ends in the city, has returned to Muriel. He acknowledges that their relationship had been a failure, and he wants to make a fresh start with her. As he “lay out indolently in the chair” (LAH 36), he proposes in euphemistic, pseudo-poetic language that they initiate a sexual relationship:
“You see” he said “life’s no good but to live—and you can’t live your
life by yourself. You must have a flint and steel, both, to make the sparks
fly. Supposing you be my flint, my white flint, to spurt out red fire for
me.” (LAH 36)
20Mersham, who “used to shrink from the thought of having to kiss” Muriel (PO 37), has changed. The halting pseudo-Paterian language of his proposition calls attention to its baseness. Before Muriel can respond, they hear the voice of Tom Vickers, her new boyfriend. Mersham asks who it is, and Muriel “looked at him, and confessed with her eyes, guiltily, beseechingly.” She is embarrassed about her “second best” boyfriend. Mersham is shocked that “he’s in my place!” “[S]miling and becoming ironical” (LAH 37), he wonders whether he can replace his replacement.
21Mersham patronizes Vickers, telling him that he and Muriel are “discussing affinities, that ancient topic. You’ll do for an audience.” Mersham classifies “his rival among the men of handsome, healthy animalism, and good intelligence, who are children in simplicity, who can add two and two, but never xy and yx.” The disengaged Mersham plays the scene “sprawled […] in the chair, his eyelids almost shut, his fine white hands hanging over the arms of the chair like dead white stoats from a bough.” Always playing at being an artist, he is pleased to have “developed the situation to the climax he desired” (LAH 39, 40, 42).
22Tom departs, and Mersham and Muriel go out walking in the strange fairy-tale world of “the trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters below.” Despite the beauty of the night, Mersham once again goes “ankle deep in mud.” Emerging from the wood onto a hillside, Mersham kisses Muriel, “and they laughed low together.” Muriel acknowledges that she prefers the intellectual, sophisticated Mersham to Vickers. Mersham praises his rival’s simplicity and warmth, but the praise is actually a prelude to his renewing his proposition. After telling Muriel that he likes her “not to wear corsets” so that he can see her “move inside [her] dress,” he explains that he doesn’t have the money to get married, and “what’s the good of letting the years go, and the beauty of one’s youth” (LAH 45, 47): “[…] and—if you’re willing—you’ll come to me, won’t you?—just naturally; as you used to come and go to church with me?— and it won’t be—it won’t be me coaxing you—reluctant?—will it?” (LAH 47). He takes Muriel in his arms and kisses her, as the night-mist drenches his moustache. When she replies that “it’s much harder” for an unmarried woman to have a sexual relationship, he circuitously responds that there are ways to avoid pregnancy: after all, “one need not blunder into calamities” (LAH 47).
23Muriel refuses to accept the arrangement Mersham proposes. The clueless Mersham angrily points out that he has given her books – as if this is the reason she should sleep with him. But Muriel is adamant: “It’s so different for a woman,” and they would “have to be—creeping together in the dark.” The insensitive, self-centered Mersham believes that Muriel is actually “playing the coward against her own inclinations.” The calculating pseudo-artist “had played a difficult, deeply-moving part all night, and now the lights suddenly switched out.” And still, Muriel “offer[s] him” her lips “for love” (LAH 48, 47, 48). Apart from having a new boyfriend, she seems unchanged from the woman Mersham left behind. He does not kiss Muriel before parting, and she does not even say goodbye.
24Lawrence’s composition of “A Modern Lover” coincides with a disturbing moment in his relationship with Jessie Chambers. When Jessie had visited him in London in November 1909, he told her that he wanted a woman to sleep with, letting her figure out that he meant her. Jessie later recalled “Lawrence’s complete change of attitude towards our relationship” in December 1909. He went up to Haggs Farm on Christmas Eve of that year and “told [her] that he had found out – he had really loved me all along and not realised it […] He said that all our long association was in reality a preparation for this ‘un intimité d’amour’” (LAH 226). As Worthen observes, Lawrence wrote his story “A Modern Lover” very soon after he made his demand on Jessie, “and with what reads like some genuine emotional recollection” (Worthen 74).
25Jessie later reported to Émile Delavenay that Lawrence had shown her the “first and quite different version” (Chambers 105) of “A Modern Lover” – a version in which Tom Vickers doesn’t appear (LAH xxvi) – before Christmas 1909. She believed that he “never intended it to be published” (Chambers 105): perhaps because it drew so directly on that painful moment in their relationship. He must have written the version surviving in manuscript (including Vickers) shortly afterwards. The fictional version of Lawrence asking Jessie for sex without marriage plays out in “A Modern Lover.” Jessie Chambers agreed to have sex with Lawrence although she knew that he did not love her. Muriel turns Mersham down.
26Lawrence wrote “The Harassed Angel,” the first version of “The Shades of Spring,” in Croydon between 15 and 25 December 1911. He wrote the story in bed, while recovering from double pneumonia. He explained to Edward Garnett on 30 December 1911 that he wrote the story before he “could sit up much. You’ll find it, perhaps thin – maladif” (1L 343). N.H. Reeve suggests that Jessie Chambers’s “visit to Croydon, either on 16 or 23 December 1911, probably had a good deal to do with the creation of the story” (VG xxviii). Lawrence had begun to revise Paul Morel in November of that year, shortly before falling ill.
27At the end of May 1913 Lawrence wrote Helen Corke a letter about the story that he now called “The Soiled Rose”:
I wrote it while I was still in Croydon – still in bed after the last illness.
Don’t you think it a bit affected? It is a bit stiff, like a sick man’s work. –
So that the philosophy which is in the ‘Soiled Rose’ didn’t hold good
for me long after the writing of the story. (1L 553)
28In May 1913 Lawrence was working on The Rainbow, and he had been with Frieda for over a year. No wonder he believed that he had left behind the “philosophy” in “The Soiled Rose.” His final revision of the story during the breakthrough summer of 1914 communicates a sense of his having achieved a new personal and artistic identity.
29The protagonist of “The Shades of Spring” is John Adderley Syson (“sigh son”), a name that obviously echoes the name of the Victorian literary figure John Addington Symonds. Symonds was married with children, but he is best remembered for his advocacy of homosexuality and the “open secret” of his own homosexuality. Lawrence’s association of Syson with the homosexual Symonds seems a vestige of the earliest conception of the character. The John Adderley Syson of “The Shades of Spring” is in no way struggling with his sexual identity. He does not resemble the posturing Cyril Mersham. He doesn’t deserve the name Lawrence has given him.
30In “A Modern Lover” Mersham attempts to start a new sexual relationship with his former sweetheart. In “The Shades of Spring,” Syson is seeking to understand what went wrong in his old relationship with his former sweetheart and perhaps to rekindle some sort of non-sexual connection with her. Mersham, the pseudo-artist, tries and fails to “develop the situation” with Muriel to the dubious outcome he desires. Syson’s homecoming turns out to be a passive journey of discovery about Hilda and himself. At the end of “A Modern Lover,” Mersham is clueless and defeated. At the end of “The Shades of Spring,” Syson has arrived at a new appreciation of Hilda as well as a degree of self-understanding.
31Syson takes the shortcut through the wood on his way to Willeywater Farm. “[E]xtraordinarily glad” to be back, he abruptly encounters Arthur Pilbeam, the “manly and good-looking” young gamekeeper, who informs Syson that he’s “courtin’ Hilda Millership.” Pilbeam supposes that he and Hilda will get married. After Syson says that he has been married for fifteen months, Pilbeam – obviously jealous – asks why he keeps “writing to her for, and sending her poetry books and things.” Unlike Mersham, Syson realizes that it is questionable for him to be visiting his old girlfriend: “What a fool he was! What god-forsaken folly it all was!” (PO 98, 99, 100, 101).
32At the farmhouse Syson discovers that Hilda had grown “very womanly.” He declines the invitation to join the family for “dinner” (which, as one of Hilda’s brothers points out, the Londoner Syson would call “lunch”). Syson is overjoyed to have returned to the farm: “To his last day, he would dream of this place, when he felt the sun on his face, or saw the small handfuls of snow between the winter-twigs, or smelt the coming of spring” (PO 103, 102).
33The newly confident Hilda makes Syson feel “constrained,” “foolish, almost unreal, beside her.” Unlike Muriel in “A Modern Lover,” Hilda has achieved not only “calm acceptance of herself” but also “triumph over him.” When she speaks to him in “the old low, husky tone of intimacy,” he feels “a quick change beginning in his blood.” He is still attracted to his old girlfriend: “He noticed the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels.” But Hilda “was a different person to him. He did not know her.” Syson “knew quite well what she had been for him. And gradually he was realising that she was something quite other, and always had been.” He even notices “a certain hardness like arrogance hidden under her humility” (PO 103, 104). For the first time he is discovering who Hilda truly is while learning how wrong he was about their relationship.
34Syson is happy to have returned to the beautiful natural world of his youth, but he has always aestheticized the experience. He feels as if he is “back in the eternal” and “back in an enduring vision.” He tells Hilda that she “keep[s] a real idyllic atmosphere.” Most tellingly, he says that the young gamekeeper is “also in Arcady.” Syson is somewhat at a distance from the natural world. In contrast Hilda declares that she is “like a plant” that “can only grow in [her] own soil.” When she emphatically declares that what matters is “being one’s own self and serving one’s own God,” Syson experiences a Cyril Mersham moment: “his heels sank into soft clay” (PO 98, 103, 105, 106).
35Hilda informs Syson that she “was married the same night as” him – though [n]ot legally.” Muriel resisted Mersham’s sexual advance; Hilda has taken a lover of her own. Furthermore, she achieved some sort of personal closure by beginning her sexual relationship with Pilbeam on the night that Syson was married. Hilda takes Syson to the rather fetishistic “keeper’s log hut,” complete with pheasant coops. An “ample rabbit-skin rug” is on a “large couch,” “patch-work rugs of cat-skin, and a red calf-skin “were on the floor, while hanging from the wall were other furs.” Hilda puts on “a cloak of rabbit-skin and of white fur, with a hood, apparently of the skins of stoats” (PO 106, 107). The hut is where Hilda initiated sex with the young gamekeeper. Because of details like these, Julian Moynahan observes that the story is “a kind of arch which ties together the erotic dilemma of Sons and Lovers and the final solution of the dilemma in Lady Chatterley” (Moynahan 176-77). In any event Hilda has happily left behind the world of poetry and watercolors and begun a new life with a vengeance.
36Hilda misses Syson’s ability to “make [the stars] flash and quiver, and the forget-me-nots come up at me like phosphorescence.” But she no longer needs Syson; now she has “them all for herself.” She “disapprove[s]” of what Syson has become, and she is bitter about his behavior when they were sweethearts: “You plucked a thing and looked at it till you had found out all you wanted to know about it, then you threw it away.” She is a “separate being,” and he took her “away from [herself].” He bullied her, and she was glad when he left her. Syson is “startled to see his young love, his nun, his Botticelli angel, so revealed.” Accepting the truth of Hilda’s accusations, he realizes that “[i]t was he who had been the fool” (PO 107, 108, 110). Miriam Leivers – Paul Morel’s “Botticelli angel” – never told Paul off like this – but she did reluctantly take Paul as a lover.
37Pilbeam joins Hilda and Syson. As the three of them go “down the gloomy path,” Syson recites a line of Verlaine’s poem “Colloque sentimental” (“Sentimental Conversation”):” “Qu’il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l’espoir” (PO 110). The Cambridge Edition explanatory note identifies the quotation, but, oddly, it does not translate it or explain its significance.
38In “Colloque sentimental” a man and a woman, former lovers, are walking through a wintry park. Syson quotes the poem because it is so apropos: Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé: two ghosts are recalling the past. The line fits Syson and Hilda, even though they are shades of spring rather than ghosts of winter. In the poem the man is remembering their happy times together, but the woman has moved on and is not interested in reminiscing about the past. The line Syson quotes means “How blue the sky was, and how high our hopes.” The woman replies that “Hope has fled, defeated, toward the dark sky.” Hilda’s reply to the line Syson recites is impressive: “we can’t walk in our wild oats—we never sowed any” (PO 110). Hilda was such an excellent French student of Syson’s that she remembers the penultimate line of the Verlaine poem: “Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles”: “So they walked together in the wild oats.” Her rejoinder that she and Syson never sowed any wild oats is an accusation. The sexual failure was Syson’s fault.
39“A Modern Lover” concludes with Mersham and Muriel going their separate ways in the darkness. But “The Shades of Spring” concludes with a sort of coda in which Syson climbs “the bank to the gorse bushes, whose sparks of blossom had not yet gathered into flame.” He is “extraordinarily moved” because he has learned the truth about his relationship with Hilda. As a sort of preview to Birkin’s retreat to the gorse after being smashed on the head by Hermione, Syson lies in the midst of the “sprigs of tiny purple milkwort and pink spots of lousewort.” “What a wonderful world it was—marvellous, for ever new” (PO 110).
40Syson feels “as if [the world] were underground, like the fields of monotone hell.” Feeling “a pain like a wound” “inside his breast,” he remembers the knight in William Morris’s poem, “The Chapel in Lyoness,” who “lay wounded, with the truncheon of a spear deep in his breast, lying always as dead, yet did not die.” The literary allusion fits into the harmony and calm Syson feels as he lies on the hillside reconciling himself to the truth. The pain of discovering that he had misunderstood and mistreated Hilda is understandable. “He knew now it had never been true, that which was between him and her, not for a moment. The truth had stood apart all the time.” Syson’s homecoming has allowed him to “see her as she [is]” and “give her her due” (PO 110, 104, 105). If the truth is painful, it is also liberating.
41Syson hears voices and sees Hilda and Arthur Pilbeam together. She reassures her jealous lover, saying that she loves him and that she is not upset that Syson has departed. A bee crawls up Pilbeam’s sleeve and stings him. Hilda “picked out the sting, put her mouth to his arm, and sucked away the drop of poison” before giving him “the reddest kiss you’ll ever have.” The image of Hilda sucking Pilbeam’s blood suggests that he may be in for some hard times. Syson then sees “the keeper with his mouth on the throat of his beloved, whose head was thrown back, and whose hair had fallen”: a tableau of sexual passion that underscores how badly Syson had misjudged his former sweetheart. Hilda tells Pilbeam that they will be married – “[but] not just yet.” Secure in her identity – and also in her power – she says that “[i]t is most beautiful as it is.” The overflowing fecundity of nature is everywhere in the story, seeming to verify Hilda’s strong, confident personality: “Like a stream, the path opened into azure shallows at the levels, and there were pools of bluebells, with still the green thread winding through, like a thin current of ice-water through blue lakes” (PO 111, 112, 100).
42Lawrence wrote “A Modern Lover” in December 1909 soon after he had asked Jessie Chambers to initiate a sexual relationship. Desperately wanting sex, he asked the woman whom he believed would not turn him down. The autobiographical Cyril Mersham in the story is callow, self-important, and insensitive. His behavior toward Muriel is indefensible. He learns nothing and returns, defeated, to London. The character of Mersham seems to reveal Lawrence’s guilt over his behavior toward Jessie. Mersham is a harshly satiric self-portrait, a character impossible to like or sympathize with. Note that Lawrence was trying out this fictionalized variation on his broken relationship with Jessie Chambers almost a year earlier than he began the first version of Paul Morel.
43The original draft of “A Modern Lover” is available in The Vicar’s Garden volume of the Cambridge Edition. N.H. Reeve titles the story “The Harassed Angel” even though Lawrence crossed out that title and suggested two other unused possibilities. Interestingly, in the 1911 manuscript Syson has been in London for six or eight years, just as he has been in “The Shades of Spring.” Lawrence was imagining a homecoming far in the future. In “The Shades of Spring” those six or eight years come close to aligning with the time of his departure for London.
44The several revisions of the story from “The Harassed Angel” in 1911 to “The Shades of Spring” in 1914 transform Syson from an affected, snobbish, secretly jealous ironist to a genuinely sympathetic human being. At the conclusion of the 1911 “The Harassed Angel,” Syson is “extraordinarily wretched,” “unutterably miserable,” and “drearily, hopelessly wretched” (VG 153) because he has been defeated. At the conclusion of the 1914 “The Shades of Spring,” Syson’s homecoming leaves him “extraordinarily moved” (PO 98) because he has learned the truth.
45Lawrence wrote “The Harassed Angel” in December 1911 at the time he was working on the third version of Paul Morel. “The Harassed Angel” became “The Soiled Rose” and even “The Dead Rose” before it was published in the Prussian Officer volume as “The Shades of Spring.” Lawrence seems not to have understood his own story when his titles characterize Hilda Millership as “soiled” or even “dead.” She is appealingly alive even in the “Harassed Angel.” The story’s final title at last changes the focus from Hilda to the two former sweethearts. But even then, Hilda seems to be a particularly robust “shade.”
46In “The Shades of Spring,” Syson learns that he had created a false image of Hilda Millership when they were sweethearts. He learns that he was to blame for the failure – including the sexual failure – of that relationship. Hilda is no “Botticelli angel,” and probably she never was. She has become a self-assured, independent woman with a lover in a relationship that she controls. Although this knowledge is painful, the truth is liberating. Syson has learned that you can’t go home again. But at least his homecoming, unlike Cyril Mersham’s, leads to self-knowledge and to his coming to terms with his past.