Recently in [113] DH Lawrence Category

Rupert imagines the island to be the perfect setting for a "Watteau picnic". Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter who specialized in party pictures, but with a dark undertone. This is why Rupert insists the island would host Watteau picnics, and not a Paul et Virginie picnic, as Ursula suggested. A romantic ideal of a book, Paul et Virginie would suggest something much more idyllic, and not at all in line with Ruper Birkin's view of life.

Plant life is also very prominent in this chapter (and the previous one). Here are some pictures of the plants mentioned.

On the bright hill-sides was a subdued smoulder of gorse.
	A few forget-me-nots flowered by the water.
She shrank from the little jungle of rank plants before her,
evil-smelling figwort
	and hemlock.

There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love.

The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was only emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream.

[Birken] : 'Why yes -- I don't make much of a success of my days. One seems always to be bumping one's nose against the blank wall ahead.'

Ursula laughed. She was frightened, and when she was frightened she always laughed and pretended to be jaunty.

`Your poor nose!' she said, looking at that feature of his face.

`No wonder it's ugly,' he replied.

I'm finding it a fascinating read. He gets a fairly long entry by Fadiman in the NLRP, where he admits to not particularily liking the man, but admiring his work.

The most striking thing to me about the writing is his way of repeating adjectives and adverbs, often several times within a single paragraph:

Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street.