Psychology in Lawrence's Movements in European History

Psychology in Lawrence's Movements in European History Daniel J. Schneider University of Tennessee "Everychapter, I sufferbefore I begin, because I doloathethe broken part of historical facts. But once I can get hold of the thread of the developing significance, then I am happy, and get ahead." Thus D. H. Lawrence wrote on 23 January 1919 to Mrs. Nancy Henry, apropos of his work on Movements in European History. He added: "I am rather pleased with it; there is a clue of developing meaning running through it: that makes it real to me" (Lawrence, Letters 466). Lawrence was pleased chiefly, no doubt, because he was able to satisfy his imagination by relating the movements of history to the deep impulses or instincts which he took to be fundamental in the human psyche and which he had already discussed at length in "Study of Thomas Hardy," "The Crown," and other essays. As James C. Cowan, James T. Boulton, and other critics have pointed out, Lawrence 's seminal idea in Movements is that "mankind lives by a twofold motive: the motive of peace and increase, and the motive ofcontest and martial triumph. As soon as the appetite for martial adventure and triumph in conflict is satisfied, the appetite for peace and increase manifests itself, and vice versa. It seems a law of life" (306). Boulton points out, further, that these two motives are the "love" and "power" motives which Lawrence refers to in such works as Aaron's Rod and The Ladybird (viii). He might have added that they are also the "sympathetic" and "voluntary" impulses that Lawrence defined in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious as the deepest motives of the unconscious mind. The alternation of the sympathetic impulse to peace and unison with the voluntary impulse to conflict and division constitutes the basic Action and Reaction, the great To and Fro of history. The problem Lawrence faced, in describing the great movements of European history — in getting hold of "the thread of the developing significance" — was that of isolating and defining in every movement the sympathetic forces or races and the opposing voluntary forces or races; and then of assessing, at every period of history, the relative strength and "tendency" of the sympathetic and voluntary needs. The extent to which he developed his pattern of psychic conflict has not been fully appreciated. The pattern is subtler than the basic paradigm of "Peace followed by War" or "Unity followed by Division" or "Creation followed by Destruction." It is also subtler than the archetypal pattern of repetition which Evelyn J. Hinz describes in her essay "History as Education and Art: D. H. Lawrence's Movements in European History." To the basic pattern Lawrence wedded key ideas 97 98Rocky Mountain Review and symbolic contrasts that were prominent in The Rainbow and Women in Love. The most important of these are the oppositions of North and South, of freedom and "submission," of spirit and flesh, of "Love" and "Law." The nature of the opposition between North and South is not stated explicitly until chapter 14, "The Reformation," where Lawrence, building on ideas he had found in Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in Edward Gibbon, and perhaps in Hippolyte Taine,1 writes: "From the south come the impulses that unite men into a oneness: from the north come the strong passions which break up the oneness and shatter the world, but which make in the long run for a freer, more open way of life" (206). Associated with the basic opposition between North and South are almost all of the other oppositions that can be found in Lawrence's fiction and in his discursive writings. The South connotes the "Law," blood-sympathy, mindlessness and submission as well as peace and unity; the North connotes spiritual "Love," consciousness, separation, division, individualism , and destructiveness. As Lawrence had telescoped the eras of Law and Love in The Rainbow, so he sought to abstract from European history the changing relationships of the two. He had prepared himself to write this history not only in the second part of"Study of Thomas Hardy" but also in Twilight in Italy, where he saw the Renaissance as the dividing line between...