It may seem a simple point, but in making it Louis MacNeice was appreciating an important source of Lawrence's strength. Lawrence grew up in closer touch with a real England, both industrial and agricultural, than virtually any other writer of his generation, and was able to express that reality with such freshness and ‘verve’ because he was unencumbered (in a way resistant to ‘education’) by the conditioned responses of a cultural establishment. It is not so much that his vision ‘faded’ as he travelled away from his roots, but that it became more and more internalized. Like the Romantic poets before him, he was always conscious of a ‘social’ mission, and creativity on the scale of Lawrence's (his surpassing achievement, the trio of great novels, falls outside my scope here) invariably refuses to be reduced to the measure of its detractors. But he repeats, I think one can generalize, a classic Romantic profile: what begins as a challenge, with revolutionary implications, to a social condition, withdraws to an inward or ‘other’ world.