Therefore, since by the law man must act or move, let his motion be the utterance of the God of Peace, of the perfect, unutterable Peace of Knowledge.
And man has striven this way, to utter the Universal Peace of God. And, striving on, he has passed beyond the limits of utterance, and has reached once more the silence of the beginning.
After Sue, after Dostoievsky’s Idiot, after Turner’s latest pictures, after the symbolist poetry of Mallarme and the others, after the music of Debussy, there is no further possible utterance of the peace that passeth all understanding, the peace of God which is Perfect Knowledge. There is only silence beyond this.
Just as after Plato, after Dante, after Raphael, there was no further utterance of the Absoluteness of the Law, of the Immutability of the Divine Conception.
So that, as the great pause came over Greece, and over Italy, after the Renaissance, when the Law had been uttered in its absoluteness, there comes over us now, over England and Russia and France, the pause of finality, now we have seen the purity of Knowledge, the great, white, uninterrupted Light, infinite and eternal.
But that is not the end. The two great conceptions, of Law and of Knowledge or Love, are not diverse and accidental, but complementary. They are, in a way, contradictions each of the other. But they are complementary. They are the Fixed Absolute, the Geo metric Absolute, and they are the radiant Absolute, the Unthinkable Absolute of pure, free motion. They are the perfect Stability, and they are the perfect Mobility. They are the fixed condition of our being, and they are the transcendent condition of knowledge in us. They are our Soul, and our Spirit, they are our Feelings, and our Mind. They are our Body and our Brain. They are Two-in-One.
And everything that has ever been produced has been produced by the combined activity of the two, in humanity, by the combined activity of soul and spirit. When the two are acting together, then Life is produced, then Life, or Utterance, Something, is created. And nothing is 01 can be created save by combined effort of the two principles, Law and Love.
All through the medieval times, Law and Love were striving together to give the perfect expression to the Law, to arrive at the perfect conception of the Law. All through the rise of the Greek nation, to its culmination, the Law and Love were working in that nation to attain the perfect expression of the Law. They were driven by the Unknown Desire, the Holy Spirit, the Unknown and Unexpressed. But the Holy Spirit is the Reconciler and the Originator. Him we do not know.
The greatest of all Utterance of the Law has given expression to the Law as it is in relation to Love, both ruled by the Holy Spirit. Such is the Book of Job, such Aeschylus in the Trilogy, such, more or less, is Dante, such is Botticelli. Those who gave expression to the Law after these suppressed the contact, and achieved an abstraction. Plato, Raphael.
The greatest utterance of Love has given expression to Love as it ls in relation to the Law: so Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, Tolstoi. But beyond these there have been Turner, who suppressed the context of the Law; also there have heen Dostoievsky, Hardy, Flaubert. These have shown Love in conflict with the Law, and only Death the resultant, no Reconciliation.
So that humanity does not continue for long to accept the conclusions of these writers, nor even of Euripides and Shakespeare always. These great tragic writers endure by reason of the truth of the conflict they describe, because of its completeness, Law, Love, and Reconciliation, all active. But with regard to their conclusions, they leave the soul finally unsatisfied, unbelieving.
Now the aim of man remains to recognize and seek out the Holy Spirit, the Reconciler, the Originator, He who drives the twin principles of Law and of Love across the ages.
Now it remains for us to know the Law and to know the Love, and further to seek out the Reconciliation. It is time for us to build our temples to the Holy Spirit, and to raise our altars to the Holy Ghost, the Supreme, Who is beyond us but is with us.
We know of the Law, and we know of Love, and to that little we know of each of these we have given our full expression. But have not completed one perfect utterance, not one. Small as is the circle of our knowledge, we are not able to cast it complete. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Apollo is foolish, Athena mechanical. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the conclusion is all foolish. If we had conceived each -party in his proper force, if Apollo had been equally potent with the Furies and no Pallas had appeared to settle the question merely by dropping a pebble, how would Aeschylus have solved his riddle? He could not work out the solution he knew must come, so he forced it.
And so it has always been, always: either a wrong conclusion, or one forced by the artist, as if he put his thumb in the scale to equalize a balance which he could not make level. Now it remains for us to seek the true balance, to give each party, Apollo and the Furies, Love and the Law, his due, and so to seek the Reconciler.
Now the principle of the Law is found strongest in Woman, and the principle of Love in Man. In every creature, the mobility, the law of change, is found exemplified in the male; the stability, the conservatism is found in the female. In woman man finds his root and establishment. In man woman finds her exfoliation and florescence. The woman grows downwards, like a root, towards the centre and the darkness and the origin. The man grows upwards, like the stalk, towards discovery and light and utterance.
Man and Woman are, roughly, the embodiment of Love and the Law: they are the two complementary parts. In the body they are most alike, in genitals they are almost one. Starting from the connexion, almost unification, of the genitals, and travelling towards the feelings and the mind, there becomes ever a greater difference and a finer distinction between the two, male and female, till at last, at the other closing in the circle, in pure utterance, the two are really one again, so that any pure utterance is a perfect unity, the two as one, united by the Holy Spirit.
We start from one side or the other, from the female side or the male, but what we want is always the perfect union of the two. That is the Law of the Holy Spirit, the law of Consummate Marriage. That every living thing seeks, individually and collectively. Every man starts with his deepest desire, a desire for consummation of marriage between himself and the female, a desire for completeness, that completeness of being which will give completeness of satisfaction and completeness of utterance. No man can as yet find perfect consummation of marriage between himself and the Bride, be the bride either Woman or an Idea, but he can approximate to it, and every generation can get a little nearer.
But it needs that a man shall first know in reverence and submit to the Natural Law of his own individual being: that he shall also know that he is but contained within the great Natural Law, that he is but a Child of God, and not God himself: that he shall then poignantly and personally recognize that the law of another man’s nature is different from the law of his own nature, that it may be even hostile to him, and yet is part of the great Law of God, to be admitted: this is the Christian action of “loving thy neighbour,” and of dying to be born again: lastly, that a man shall know that between his law and the law of his neighbour there is an affinity, that all is contained in one, through the Holy Spirit.
It needs that a man shall know the natural law of his own being, then that he shall seek out the law of the-female, with which to join himself as complement. He must know that he is half, and the woman is the other half: that they are two, but that they are two- in-one.
He must with reverence submit to the law of himself: and he must with suffering and joy know and submit to the law of the woman: and he must know that they two together are one within the Great Law, reconciled within the Great Peace. Out of this final knowledge shall come his supreme art. There shall be the art which recognizes and utters his own law; there shall be the art which recognizes his °wn and also the law of the woman, his neighbour, utters the glad embraces and the struggle between them, and the submission of one; there shall be the art which knows the struggle between the two conflicting laws, and knows the final reconciliation,
where both are equal, two in one, complete. This is the supreme art, which yet remains to be done. Some men have attempted it, and left us the results of efforts. But it remains to be fully done.
But when the two clasp hands, a moment, male and female, clasp hands and are one, the poppy, the gay poppy flies into flower again; and when the two fling their arms about each other, the moonlight runs and dashes against the shadow; and when the two toss back their hair, all the larks break out singing; and when they kiss on the mouth, a lovely human utterance is heard again-and so it is.
MOVEMENTS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
This school textbook was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1921. At the time Lawrence was facing financial difficulties and he wrote this non-fiction work to secure much needed funds. The first edition was published under the pseudonym Lawrence H. Davison, because fictional works such as The Rainbow had been prosecuted for eroticism.
Davidson Road School, Croydon, where Lawrence worked as an energetic and innovative teacher
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter I. Rome
Chapter II. Constantinople
Chapter III. Christianity
Chapter IV. The Germans
Chapter V. The Goths and Vandals
Chapter VI. The Huns
Chapter VII. Gaul
Chapter VIII. The Franks and Charlemagne
Chapter IX. The Popes and the Emperors
Chapter X. The Crusades
Chapter XI. Italy after the Hohenstaufens
Chapter XII. The End of the Age of Faith
Chapter XIII. The Renaissance
Chapter XIV. The Reformation
Chapter XV. The Grand Monarch
Chapter XVI. The French Revolution
Chapter XVII. Prussia
Chapter XVIII. Italy
Chapter XIX. The Unification of Germany
Epilogue
Introduction
At the present moment, history must either be graphic or scientific. The old bad history is abolished. The old bad history consisted of a register of facts. It drew up a chart of human events, as one might draw up a chart of the currants in a plum-pudding, merely because they happen promiscuously to be there. No more of this.
The new history is different. It is, we repeat, either graphic or scientific. Graphic history consists of stories about men and women who appear in the old records, stories as vivid and as personal as may be. And this is very nice for little children: the only trouble being that with so much personal element there can be very little historic. No doubt the great people of the past were personages, and quite as personal as we are. Unfortunately, nothing is more difficult than to re-create the personal reality of a bygone age. Personality is local and temporal. Each age has its own. And each age proceeds to interpret every other age in terms of the current personality. So that Shakespeare’s Caesar is an Elizabethan, and Bernard Shaw’s is a Victorian, and neither of them is Caesar. The personal Caesar we shall never know. But there is some eternal, impersonal Caesar whom we can know, historically. And for this reason, let us beware of too much of the personal element, even for little children. It tends to shut out the strange, vast, terrifying reality of the past, even as the charming cosiness of a garden shuts out the great terror and wonder of the world. And even for tiny children, if we proceed to speak at all of the past, we must not shut out the space and fear and greatness. We must not make it too personal and familiar. We must leave in the impersonal, terrific element, the sense of the unknown, even as it is left in Red Riding Hood or any true nursery tale. It is wrong to envelop our children in so much cosiness and familiar circumstance. It is wrong to feed their souls on so many personal tit-bits. It is an insult to the past, which was not personal as we are personal, and it is a ridiculous exaggeration of the present. We are not the consummation of all life and time. Yet we put our sentiments and our personal feelings upon Caesar, as if Caesar were no more than a dummy figure whom we have to dress up to our own personal mode. Then we call it history — graphic history.
No wonder the scientific school protests. But if graphic history is all heart, scientific history is all head. Having picked out all the currants and raisins of events for our little children, we go to the university and proceed to masticate the dough. We must analyse the mixture and determine the ingredients. Each fact must be established, and put into relation with every other fact. This is the business of scientific history: the forging of a great chain of logically sequential events, cause and effect demonstrated down the whole range of time. Now this is all very well, if we will remember that we are not discovering any sequence of events, we are only abstracting. The logical sequence does not exist until we have made it, and then it exists as a new piece of furniture of the human, mind.
The present small book is intended for adolescents, for those who have had almost enough of stories and anecdotes and personalities, and who have not yet reached the stage of intellectual pride in abstraction.
It is an attempt to give some impression of the great, surging movements which rose in the hearts of men in Europe, sweeping human beings together into one great concerted action, or sweeping them apart for ever on the tides of opposition. These are movements which have no deducible origin. They have no reasonable cause, though they are so great that we must call them impersonal.
There is no earthly reason for such a vast madness as that of the Crusades. Given every circumstance of the year 800 A.D. in Europe, could the First and Second Crusades be deduced? Logical sequence does not exist until it is abstracted by the human mind. In the same way, there is no more reason for the Renaissance than there is reason for the singing of a blackbird. A rook is a black bird which makes a nest in spring. And yet it does not sing.
And so, we must not be so assured when we regard the historic faculty as a faculty for the ascertaining and verifying of facts, and the ascribing of certain sequence and order to such facts. This is only the hack-work of history — science, it may be. But history proper is a true art, not fictional, but nakedly veracious.
Inside the hearts, or souls, of men in Europe there has happened at times some strange surging, some welling-up of unknown powers. These powers that well up inside the hearts of men, these are the fountains and origins of human history. And the welling-up has no ascribable cause. It is naked cause itself.
Thus the Crusades, or the Renaissance, these are great motions from within the soul of mankind. They are the sheer utterance of life itself, the logic only appearing afterwards. Logic cannot hold good beforehand, even in the inorganic world. Earthquakes are disasters from without. They should be predictable. Yet no one can predict them, because the mysterious and untellable motion within the hearts of men is in some way related to the motion within the earth, so that even earthquakes are unaccountably related to man’s psychic being, and dependent upon it.
Therefore this little history is an attempt to count some of the great pulsations that have shaken the hearts of men in Europe, and made their history. Events are details swirling in the strange stream. Great motions surge up, men sweep away upon a tide. Some are flung back. The same passional motive that carried the north of Europe into Protestantism caused the Spaniards to flood to America and to react in the Inquisition. It is all beyond reasonable cause and effect, though these may be deduced later. It is all outside personality, though it makes personality. It is greater than any one man, though in individual men the power is at its greatest.
We cannot say, for example, that the Reformation arose because the Pope sold Indulgences. It arose because a new craving awoke in the hearts of men, a craving which expressed itself later as a passion for immediate, individual relationship of a man with God. There is no reason why such a passion, such a craving should arise. All that the reason can do, in discovering the logical consequence of such passion and its effects, afterwards, is to realise that life was so, mysteriously, creatively, and beyond cavil.
All that real history can do is to not
e with wonder and reverence the tides which have surged out from the innermost heart of man, watch the incalculable flood and ebb of such tides. Afterwards, there is a deducible sequence. Beforehand there is none.
Life makes its own great gestures, of which men are the substance. History repeats the gesture, so we live it once more, and are fulfilled in the past. Whoever misses his education in history misses his fulfilment in the past.
Chapter I. Rome
The date of the founding of the city of Rome is given as 753 B.C. But at that time Rome could scarcely have been more than a savage little village of shepherds or herdsmen. None the less, it was a village of brave, active men, and it grew gradually into a town, fortified in the seven hills by the bank of the Tiber. Surrounding it were hostile races, hostile cities bigger than itself. But the Romans knew how to stick to one another, and they made headway. Gradually Rome became the leader of the towns and peoples in the wide plain of Latium, which surrounded her. She was head of the Latin League.
After the year 500 B.C. we can be fairly certain of Roman history. At that time Rome was a republic. It had now no king, and no nobles, dukes or counts or lords, as we know them. Yet it was divided into two classes, the upper and lower — patrician who were rich and proud, and plebeian who were poor. These two classes held great meetings, to decide what was to be done, and to choose leaders. The chief men in Rome were the two consuls, who were elected in the council of the people, to hold office for one year only.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 891
