Résumé
T.S. Eliot made a withering critique of the notion of the Inner Voice; so withering as to invite reflection on the positive meaning of this conception. Rather than the mere indulgence of subjectivity assumed by Eliot, in Lawrence it rather suggests the difficulty of attending to something outside the self. Among the most significant sounds for human beings are the voices of other human beings but in these, because they are largely encountered in the abstraction of linguistic utterance, otherness is often obscured by the illusion of understanding; or indeed the illusion of misunderstanding. Hence Lawrence’s focus on the voice as such rather than what is said. I look first at some instances of Lawrence characters hearing, or listening to, the voices of other characters and then consider cases of listening to less individual voices, voices that seem to represent the impersonal and the cosmic. This leads to some reflection on the significance of rhythm in human utterance and more generally.
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- 1 “On Fear and on Romanticism,” in Adelphi, 1 (September, 1923), pp. 269-277.
1Lawrence’s sometime friend John Middleton Murry founded in 1923 the journal Adelphi in which he published an essay developing a great cultural polarity between classicism and romanticism; a polarity partly defined as the opposition between outside authority and the inner voice.1 Several influential figures in what we now think of as literary modernism were in a phase of reaction against the perceived romanticism and sentimentalism of the preceding generations and in some cases, such as Joyce and T.S. Eliot, they appealed to the spirit of classicism as a corrective. In seeking to honour both principles, Murry defended the romantic spirit of which we can now see Lawrence and Yeats as the greatest contemporary examples writing in English. But such an evaluation of Lawrence was not common at the time and Murry’s essay provided a point of departure for one of T.S. Eliot’s essays, “The Function of Criticism,” in which the notion of the Inner Voice, and its proponents, are subjected to withering critique. Such was Eliot’s influence through the early and middle twentieth century that Murry’s voice in the original controversy has for a long time hardly been heard, but Eliot’s own voice has also now lost much of its erstwhile authority. In this early essay, Eliot makes no mention of Lawrence but he was to apply the same critique to him at length in his book After Strange Gods (1948). It should be said that Eliot came to regret the later book and wished to have no further publication of it. He also, later again, came to see Lawrence more positively. But his initial critique of the inner voice, although reliant more on scorn and name-calling than analysis, provides a useful starting-point for reflecting on the romantic voice in Lawrence.
- 2 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 28. Hereafter SE.
2All parties to the controversy recognise the inner voice as associated with non-conformist religion; an association Eliot uses sardonically against Murry: “I did not realise that Mr Murry was the spokesman for a considerable sect.”2 Eliot also invokes Matthew Arnold to express a closely related class contempt:
The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formulated by an elder critic as “doing as one likes.” The possessors of the inner voice ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear and lust. (SE 27)
3As so often in Britain, a genuine cultural virtue is so saturated with snobbery that its intrinsic value is lost or contaminated. For, of course, Eliot has a point in defending respect for tradition and authority but he weakens it by blinding himself to the value of the opposing principle. Moreover, his scorn is not just a rhetorical device aimed at the reader: it is more importantly an internal displacement of attention. For Eliot entirely accepts that tradition is constantly renewed by change: this is the topic of his most influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), as well the thrust of his whole poetic oeuvre. Yet the present essay completely ignores the question of when, why and how the individual comes to modify tradition. This after all is the internal dynamic on which the continuance of the tradition ultimately depends.
4If this absence leaves the essay a rather crude polemic, riding on the prestige of the public persona Eliot was already developing, it is significant that the missing dimension is precisely the personal. The same avoidance was even more startlingly evident in the unevenness of the earlier essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The first part of that essay is deservedly famous for its discussion of how tradition is modified by the individual artist, and how a significant originality changes our retrospect on earlier works. No personal reference was required there even as Eliot’s own contemporary impact was constantly implied. But in the latter part of that essay he seeks to explain the personal process of poetic creation. I use the impersonal term “process” advisedly as Eliot describes it as an “Impersonal theory of poetry” and draws on the chemical analogy of the catalyst to declare that “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transform the passions which are its material” (SE 18). And later “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (SE 21). Once again, the binary extremes of “turning loose” of emotion or “escape from” it obfuscate the truly personal issue, the working through of feeling, while the hauteur of the last sentence quickly pulls up the drawbridge. Given what we now know about the state of Eliot’s feelings in these years, we can better understand his defensiveness.
5Perhaps the most magisterial modern expression of a proper relation between originality and tradition is Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in which Hans Sachs, himself a poet rather than an academic guardian of tradition, recognises how the originality of the Prize song, arising from Walther’s love for Elizabeth, has renewed the tradition. As critic on the present occasion, Eliot risks playing Beckmesser. And it is within this pedantically dichotomous view of feeling as inviting either turning loose or escape that Eliot reads the inner voice as simple abandonment to subjectivity and emotional indulgence. But the very notion of a voice strictly implies an encounter with alterity. A heard voice is necessarily the utterance of an other. Of course, there are delusional cases, such as the schizophrenics who hear voices. But even here, the voice comes as the voice of an other. The afflicted persons struggle not to believe this. And in this regard the schizophrenic may stand for all of us: as children of modernity in particular we all have heads full of voices of dubious or unknown authority. Eliot’s most influential poem, The Waste Land, is a cacophony of voices representing this condition and the struggle that is required to hear the voice of true counsel hinted at in the Sanskrit command in the last section of the poem. Far from being merely an indulgent subjectivity the notion of the inner voice points to an inescapable encounter within the self, to be sure, but with something beyond it.
- 3 1 Kings 19:12-13.
- 4 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambri (...)
6The classic religious instance from Lawrence’s Biblical heritage is Elijah in the Book of Kings who stands fast in turn through a great wind, an earthquake and a fire while hearing a “still, small voice.”3 It is perhaps unclear whether this strictly counts as an inner voice, but it does seem to be directed exclusively to Elijah. Such ambiguity characterises the inner voice and its defining quality in this instance is that it is not loud: it requires a willed focus, if not a straining, of attention to be heard. Perceived in that way, the image of the inner voice far from being an easy expression of subjectivity is the opposite: a straining to attend despite external noises and distractions. In that respect, the football fans on the way to Swansea might more reasonably be thought of as participating in a crowd emotion rather than following an internal voice. In Lawrence’s secular understanding, of course, such a voice would not manifest the divine but does often seem to represent that attention to otherness, to the mystery of being, which was his essential vision and which enabled him to think of himself as a “passionately religious man.”4 Eliot’s essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” seeks to affirm “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art [he says] is impersonal” (SE 22). In the abstract, of course, he is quite right, albeit he still forecloses the true complexity of the argument with dualistic extremes. In Eliot’s conception, when the poet surrenders himself to the past as an active presence giving impersonal form to the present emotion, that emotion is effectively removed from the life to become the “material” of art. Lawrence, as we know, was also deeply concerned with emotion experienced under the sign of impersonality but in his case it was not, or not primarily, for creating art: it was a way of living the life of feeling at once intensely and yet not just subjectively. The flow and recoil of sympathy that chiefly determines our lives is a mode of relation to the other, and to the world. In this constant dynamic, voices, and sounds more generally, have a significant part to play. In particular, voice can enable the impersonal presentation of jostling subjectivities which is crucial to Lawrencian narrative.
- 5 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridg (...)
- 6 D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), (...)
7We have come in recent times to hear the word “voice” used as a political metaphor for representation and perhaps as a result may lose its first instance reference to the unique sound of an individual bodily presence irrespective of what it might have to say. What we say, Ursula recognises when listening to Birkin, is only a kind of “dumbshow” in which “words themselves do not convey meaning.”5 The true expression, or expressiveness, may lie in the quality of the voice itself. Indeed, in so far as language is a shared system of abstract counters it can produce the illusion of understanding by obscuring the sense of otherness, whereas it is the human voice, which we think of as merely the necessary material medium of speech, that carries the inalienable stamp of unique individuality. Anna Brangwen’s first interest in her cousin Will is manifest as a fit of giggles at his singing. Note her reply when asked if he has such a remarkable voice: “No, it’s not that,” said Anna, “Only it tickled me—I couldn’t tell you why.”6 The word “tickled” gives the voice a physical and incipiently erotic impact. Then later: “It was the little things, his movement, the funny tones of his voice, that showed up big to Anna. The matter-of-fact things he said were absurd in contrast” (R 105). And then, when he begins to speak of his passionate appreciation of medieval church architecture:
His talk was fragmentary, he was only half articulate. But listening to him, as he spoke of church after church, of nave and chancel and transept, of rood-screen and font, of hatchet-carving and moulding and tracery, speaking always with close passion of particular things, particular places, there gathered in her heart a pregnant hush of churches, a mystery, a ponderous significance of bowed stone, a dim coloured light through which something took place obscurely, passing into darkness: a high, delighted framework of the mystic screen, and beyond in the furthest beyond, the altar. It was a very real experience. She was carried away. And the land seemed to be covered with a vast, mystic church, reserved in gloom, thrilled with an unknown Presence. (R 105-106)
8Characteristically, the unfolding syntax of the long middle sentence carries, with sympathy rather than irony, a double subjectivity: her entry into his world. The preceding focus on Anna’s listening to Will’s voice guides us to understand her present response. Although she will one day come to reject his religiose idealism, at this moment she is led into it specifically as his world, something quite new and different from her own: “he was a hole in the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed on an outside world” (R 106).
- 7 England, my England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199 (...)
9Likewise, in the story “The Last Straw,” formerly known as “Fanny and Annie,” the central episode turns on a now more mature woman’s response to a man’s singing in church. Fanny knows she is settling for a lesser ambition in returning to her home town to marry Harry yet the story depends on our seeing some quality in him which she dimly, but to her credit, recognises. He seems in many respects a rather dull fellow but, despite his comically working-class pronunciation, the aspect at which she consciously bristles, his singing voice has “a certain defiant passion which pleasantly crisped the blood of the congregation. Fanny felt the crisp flames go through her veins as she listened.”7 From then on the narrative withholds information about Fanny’s feelings and intentions until her final declaration to Harry’s mother: “I’ll stop with you to-night, Mother” (EME 166). Harry’s voice has carried the near total burden of his distinctive being, the male other to whom Fanny responds. The positive accent on voice is pointed up by contrast with the initially unnamed Mrs Nixon, Annie’s mother, who is at first merely “a shouting female voice” and a “loud, angry female shout” while the “tall, weird minister” restores order with “his strong, bell-like beautiful voice—the only beautiful thing about him” (EME 161-162). In both these episodes Lawrence’s focus on the voice enables him, and them, to get behind the social and moral categories at the forefront of the women’s minds and register the unique otherness to which they ultimately respond.
- 8 The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridg (...)
10Rather differently, Lawrence has several stories of the supernatural in which characters hear more mysterious voices not emanating from another identifiable individual. In “The Last Laugh” and “The Rocking-horse Winner” these voices express a something of vital significance which is heard by some characters and is either unheard or repressed by others. Once again, the voice seems an individual, or even private, experience but gives access to something beyond the self. If the god Pan has long been banished from our world view, some individuals can still respond to his presence and especially so at times of carnival or licenced release from norms. In the Christmas setting of “The Last Laugh” the mysterious voice says nothing but is highly expressive: coming from the figure of Pan it is a pre-verbal affirmation of life that fascinates Miss James while terrifying the repressive Marchbanks literally to death. Similarly, in “The Rocking-horse Winner,” young Paul picks up the money anxiety in the house as ghostly whispers; once again the quality of the voice is more significant than the content. Actually, it seems anyone can hear them but Paul is the only one who listens: “The children could hear it all the time, though nobody ever said it aloud.”8 The mother, whose money anxiety is conscious and constant, does not hear the sinister whispers although at the end she perhaps comes to see the point.
And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother’s voice saying to her: “My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.” (WWRA 243)
11A casual reading may understand this ending as the brother’s voice giving the story a rather sententious conclusion. But the narrative does not specify that the brother actually utters these words, merely that the mother hears them. Only as an imaginary internalised voice perhaps do they now penetrate her consciousness although even then it is an open question to what extent she truly recognises their moral authority.
- 9 D.H. Lawrence, The Poems, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (...)
12In all these cases, the heard voice acts as a mode, even a test, of attention focused on something beyond the self. Lawrence was aware of the difficulty this poses not just for the individual but on the collective cultural level. In the poem “Snake” he sought to escape “the voices of [his] accursed human education” so as to see the natural creature as guest rather than pest.9 In a comparable spirit, he tried to hear the voices of other human cultures. The knowledge of other European languages is reflected in his fiction as an aspect of appreciating the idiosyncratic otherness even of neighbouring peoples but in the nineteen-twenties he tried to hear the more radically alien voices of indigenous Americans.
13His encounter with native Americans included a strong focus on hearing their literal voices and here incomprehension of the language enforces a response to the pure quality of the sound. Kate Leslie listens to the ceremonial song:
- 10 D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L.D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987), p. (...)
The drum began to beat with an insistent, intensive rhythm, and the flute, or whistle, lifted its odd, far-off calling voice. It was playing again and again the peculiar melody Kate had heard at first.
Then one of the men in the circle lifted his voice, and began to sing the hymn. He sang in the fashion of the old Red Indians, with intensity and restraint, singing inwardly, singing to his own soul, not outward to the world, nor yet even upward to God, as the Christians sing. But with a sort of a suppressed, tranced intensity, singing to the inner mystery, singing not into space, but into the other dimension of man’s existence, where he finds himself in the infinite room that lies inside the axis of our wheeling space. Space like the world, cannot but move. And like the world, there is an axis. And the axis of our worldly space, when you enter, is a vastness where even the trees come and go, and the soul is at home in its own dream, noble and unquestioned.
[…] There was no recognisable rhythm, no recognisable emotion, it was hardly music. Rather a far-off, perfect crying in the night. But it went straight through to the soul, the most ancient and everlasting soul of all men, where alone can the human family assemble in immediate contact.10
14There is a pervasive question over all ekphrastic accounts of music in narrative. Does the significance lie in an offstage experience that we cannot literally encounter within the text or does it rather lie in the prose elaboration in which it is contained? This question still pertains whether the music is well-known, such as the Beethoven fifth symphony in E.M. Forster’s Howards End, or is purely imaginary as in the works of Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. A German reader once remarked to me that he found Thomas Mann’s description in The Magic Mountain of the concluding aria of Aida more moving than the opera itself and the remark is apt. Despite the powerful nudge to think of Verdi’s music as the object in question, and it is of course a necessary condition of the episode, the true object is the set of meanings attributed by the narrative. And likewise here, while Lawrence was doubtless attempting to convey the actual sounds of Indian song, the true meaning lies in the textual description, a central feature of which is its reversal of the usual direction of the inner voice: instead of straining to hear, the singer sings “inwardly, singing to his own soul.” While this registers the inescapably outsider status of the narrative viewpoint, its condition of speculative interpretation, what the singer invokes is the same dynamic that has been seen in the stories already discussed. Far from being an expression of subjectivity, his voice addresses something beyond himself, an extreme of impersonality: “The strange, inward pulse of the drum, and the singer singing inwardly, swirled the soul back into the very centre of time, which is older than age.” And the conclusion of the description affirms the sense of a universal humanity underlying difference: “it went straight through to the soul, the most ancient and everlasting soul of all men, where alone can the human family assemble in immediate contact.” The deepest sense of connection with other human beings is found, it seems, through an intensely inward attention. This relates to Lawrence’s late life reflections on his sense of outsiderdom as in essays such as “Which class I belong to.” His sense of connection with humanity did not pass through the common forms of political or social solidarity and one can imagine his distaste for later identity politics as a heady combination of egoism and collectivism both of which distract from the inner attention.
15The paradox of inner and outward attention is reflected in the two elements of the music: the voice of the singer keeps to the “strange, inward pulse of the drum.” Rhythm is a richly significant phenomenon which has attracted much academic interest in recent decades, sparked partly by Henri Lefebre’s Rhythmanalysis (1992). Laura Marcus’s recent Rhythmical Subjects, however, surveys the widespread interest in rhythm through the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She sees the principal source of this in Herbert Spencer whom Lawrence is known to have read closely. Spencer saw the universe as rhythmic through and through including in its evolutionary processes. Both this earlier and the more recent theorising of rhythm emphasise three interrelated aspects. Rhythm is an intimately bodily experience; it runs counter to the regularity of poetic metre or the machine; and it dissolves inner and outer as the subjectivity of rhythm is inseparable from its collective and environmental dimension. The Rainbow enacts such Spencerian rhythms from its progressive three generation structure down to its repetitive syntax. Its characters are most fully alive when they are most fully “rhythmical subjects.” The episode in which Tom Brangwen takes the crying Anna to feed the cows during Lydia’s childbirth is a notable instance of what this means. Both characters are initially overcome with emotion but following the impersonal necessity of feeding the animals Tom engages in a rhythmic activity filling and carrying the food bucket. As the cows start rhythmically to eat, raising and lowering their heads, the movements generated by Tom start to fill the whole barn while the child, tucked close to his body, is absorbed into its rhythm. Both he and Anna regain their individual poise through their absorption into these impersonal rhythms.
16There are two opposite significances in modernist literary thematising of music. One tradition, the Dionysian, often invoked by Thomas Mann, comes from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche, seeing music as the dissolution of rational ego in uncontrolled instinctual drive. An opposite tradition, the Apollonian, privileges music’s structural dimension implying a rational ordering. In this conception, the aural experience, while rigorously bound to temporality, takes its meaning from a spatial structure described in the mind. Music is the art which most vividly spatialises time. Hence its significance for T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in their search for the “still point in the turning world” or Joyce’s Ulysses in its mythopoeic timelessness. Typically, however, Lawrence dissolves this dualistic choice. Rhythm is an intensely inner experience felt as a corporal temporality often following, or affecting, the beating of the heart. In that regard it seems to answer to the Schopenhauerian immersion and loss of self. Yet it also absorbs the individual into a temporal shaping that stabilises and affirms relationship with the non-self: the self is experienced not as isolated consciousness but as fullness of being felt as relatedness.
17In conclusion, then, the different instances in this paper of listening to voice have a common thread: the emphasis lies not in what is said so much as in the impact of the sound. “The Rocking-Horse Winner”’ is a partial exception and it is also unusual in having an overt moral conclusion. The story itself seeks to tell the reader something. Otherwise, it shares a sense of the difficulty and importance of listening, of hearing the sound of the other within the self. All these passages offer a counter to Eliot’s characterisation of the inner voice as indulgent subjectivity. Indeed, in Studies in Classic American Literature, as he seeks to hear the voice of America that has been suppressed by its writers, Lawrence comments on the notion of “doing as one likes,” sharing Eliot’s disapproval but from an opposite standpoint:
- 11 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John W (...)
[…] the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.11
18Of course, Eliot was not wrong to see problems and dangers in the notion of the inner voice but Lawrence shows that the true encounter with something beyond the self can only occur within it.
Notes
1 “On Fear and on Romanticism,” in Adelphi, 1 (September, 1923), pp. 269-277.
2 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 28. Hereafter SE.
3 1 Kings 19:12-13.
4 The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 165.
5 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 186.
6 D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 105. Hereafter R.
7 England, my England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.161. Hereafter EME.
8 The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 230. Hereafter WWRA.
9 D.H. Lawrence, The Poems, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 305.
10 D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L.D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987), p. 126.
11 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 18.
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Michael Bell, « Hearing Voices », Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 57 | 2025, mis en ligne le 17 novembre 2025, consulté le 09 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/4114 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/158n6
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