Obituary

Abstract

Lawrence was the most remarkable and most lovable man I have ever known. Contact with him was immediate, intimate, and rich. A radiance of warm life streamed from him. When he was gay, and he was often gay— my dominant memory of him is of a blithe and joyful man—he seemed to spread a sensuous enchantment about him. By a natural magic he unsealed the eyes of those in his company: birds, beasts, and flowers became new-minted as in Paradise; they stood revealed as what they were, and not the poor objects of our dull and common seeing. The most ordinary domestic act—the roasting of a joint of meat, the washing-up of crockery, the painting of a cottage room—in his doing became a gay sacrament. He surrendered himself completely to whatever he had in hand; he was utterly engrossed by it. And the things he took in hand were innumerable. In bare record they may seem fantastic, as when for weeks together he decorated little wooden boxes, or, years later when, during his last Christmas in England, he fashioned a marvellous little Adam and Eve beneath the tree in Eden, made of modelling clay and painted; but those who shared in these makings will remember them for some of the most simple, happy hours in their lives.

Times Literary Supplement, 13 Mar 1930, p. 208 (unsigned).