Now Lawrence was joined in Florence by Frieda and her daughters. Through his friend, Pino Orioli, he had found a house - the Villa Mirenda - at the familiar rent of ninety-five pounds a year. Frieda saw it and heartily approved. For a time the four stayed at the Lucchesi pension. Then the girls returned to England and the Lawrences moved in. By the middle of May - a May long remembered in France and Italy for the cold ferocity of its rains - they were established in the new house.
At first the idea of the Mirenda, as described by Lawrence in his letters, was that it should serve as a pied à terre, so that they might come and go, and lend it (to us and others) when they were away. But in fact it became their much loved home till the summer of 1928, and they were there for a time as late as April, 1929. That it could not be the permanent, nor the all-the-year-round home for which Lawrence was then beginning to long, he knew fairly soon. The rooms which formed the upper part of an attractive old farm villa were fine and large in good weather but bare and cold and comfortless in bad. It stood in good country, lovely country in the spring, but it was a mile and a half from the tram terminus at Scandicci and then half an hour's journey by tram from the Duomo. It was a good place in which to write and paint - especially paint - but a bad place in which to be ill.
And unhappily from this point onwards Lawrence's plans and movements were to be dictated more and more arbitrarily by illness. That he might bring to fruition the findings of his pilgrimage, he must bend himself to seize and seek every chance of health. He had the strongest hopes that he would be restored; but he had to admit that he was a fugitive, and he never ceased to face the fact that death might overtake him. When Murry identifies him with his own reading of Herman Melville - as a man with 'a long thin chain round his ankle' while he tries frantically to run away, he appropriates a tempting simile and conveys an easy half-truth. But he has omitted two essential elements in Lawrence's life, the elements of art and of illness. And surely he is confusing the needful pilgrimage across the world of a young and delicate, but comparatively sound man, to whose art and aims pilgrimage was a first necessity, with the later and different restlessness imposed upon an experienced man by the struggle for physical existence.
Lawrence was the first to confess that his trip round the world and his visits to Mexico, New and Old, were 'a kind of running away'. But he needed absolutely to run from the world he knew and to see the world he did not know. It was his initial quest to see if the two ends of humanity might not be brought together - 'our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era' - for the beginning of a new life-mode. And to do this he had to see with his own eyes the Buddhist priest in his temple and to hear with his own ears the Indian drum-tap on the mesa. He must subject his own body to the 'boneless suavity' of the East, to the rawness of Australia, to the 'overriding of life' of America. If it was only that in his own person he was the representative of Europe in thus subjecting himself, he had to do it, discovering and condemning himself in the process.
I've been a fool myself, saying Europe is finished for me. It wasn't Europe at all, it was myself, keeping a stranglehold on myself. And that stranglehold I carried over to America; as many a man, and woman worse still, has done before me.
So he wrote in an article for America called 'Europe versus America', in April, 1926. It goes on:
Now, back in Europe, I feel a real relief. The past is too big, and too intimate, for one generation of men to get a stranglehold on it. Europe is squeezing the life out of herself, with her mental education and her fixed ideas. But she hasn't got her hands round her own throat not half so far as America has hers; here the grip is already falling slack; and if the system collapses, it'll only be another system collapsed, of which there have been plenty. But in America, where men grip themselves so much more intensely and suicidally - the women worse - the system has its hold on the very sources of consciousness, so God knows what would happen if the system broke.
This is confession, but it is also discovery, and it is the kind of discovery that comes only by pilgrimage, and by pilgrimage of the savage kind. It is far removed from the musings that emanate from editorial armchairs. It is indeed removed from any mere musings. In the making of such confessions and discoveries Lawrence fulfilled his paramount duty and his essential destiny.
But there might, and there should have been more, had he lived. There is every indication that, his pilgrimage fulfilled, Lawrence was not the man to live unsettled and rootless. He knew that every sane creature, man as well as bird or beast, is tied in the long run to a place or compelled to a rhythm by an invisible chain, be it long or short. He believed in natural phases, in the changing needs of age, and in vital progressions and recessions, as strongly as he disbelieved in evolution, as commonly understood. He was quick to know when youth was over, and to make ready for the different richness of age, which to youth can seem so poor and maimed a thing. Even as a boy it was the faded quietness of the married woman that moved him, and September was his favourite month.
As surely as he had genius Lawrence had the capacity for serene and fruitful old age. In the best sense of two hackneyed but correct expressions, he was already mellowing into a true pontiff of life and letters, who could not have failed of widespread acknowledgement. This is not to say that he failed to do his work. Neither is it to suggest that his ultimate influence would have been increased by established acceptance. I do not think it would. The pontifical voice echoes less hauntingly and long than the voice of one crying in the wilderness. This is merely to say that the potentialities were there - the wisdom, the sanity, the fine incalculableness, the incorruptibility and the passion that is never all spent - in short the capacity to accept responsibility and to blossom afresh in bearing it. Like Mr George Moore, Lawrence would always have remained an artist, yet like Mr H. G. Wells he would always have realised that our age needs most of all a certain life activity in the artist which forbids his preoccupation with artistic perfection. Abundant evidence for these conclusions will be found in his latest works - in Assorted Articles, Etruscan Places, and the magnificently measured Apocalypse, with its profound understanding of Christianity, such an understanding as true repudiation requires. Also in his Last Poems. Not one of these works is marred by a trace of shrillness, decay or impatience. Thanks to his own valiant diligence he had won the recognition and the moderate financial prosperity that were needed for him to set and spread his roots. And he knew it. By 1927 at latest - more probably by 1926 - he was ready to stay quietly productive in some chosen home, or anyhow, as the swallows do, to obey some steady rhythm between two homes.
By now he had seen what he wanted to see in the world, and he was home-loving by nature. Lawrence was far from being of that omnivorous tribe that must ever be fed with new travel by way of excitement. It might even be said of him that he was the most incurious of men. In the summer of 1926 he said to me - and I knew he spoke truly - that except for the inconvenience of being blind, he would not care now if he were to lose his sight. He had looked his fill, and now there was something other than looking to be done. Certainly he cared not a straw about his greatly increased deafness, which was doubtless the reason why one never thought of noticing it as an affliction. As often as not, one felt that with his outward ears he was hearing rather more than he wanted, and that some degree of deafness was to be desired as a protection against the wearisome chatter of the world. When Dorothy Brett would recharge her listening-machine, I have heard him laugh and ask if any human conversation was worth the three shillings needed for a fresh battery. He was, of course, nothing like so deaf as she, but, had he been past the aid of acousticons, it would not have mattered beyond the practical inconvenience. This will sound exaggerated only to those who did not know him. To those who did he conveyed - quite unconsciously - the strange conviction that if all five senses were to desert him (or anyhow all but the sense of touch) he would still be able both to apprehend and to express the life about him by some direct magic of the blood. The trouble was that in his very blood he now had to grapple with the enemy illness.