Edgar Rice Burroughs - "Tarzan of the Apes"

William Shakespeare - "The Life of Henry the Fift"

Stella G. S. Perry - "The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition"

John Ruskin - "The Ethics of the Dust"

Women in Love

D >> D.H. Lawrence >> Women in Love




Since, however, Gerald had come home and assumed responsibility in the
firm, and had proved such a wonderful director, the father, tired and
weary of all outside concerns, had put all his trust of these things in
his son, implicitly, leaving everything to him, and assuming a rather
touching dependence on the young enemy. This immediately roused a
poignant pity and allegiance in Gerald's heart, always shadowed by
contempt and by unadmitted enmity. For Gerald was in reaction against
Charity; and yet he was dominated by it, it assumed supremacy in the
inner life, and he could not confute it. So he was partly subject to
that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it. Now
he could not save himself. A certain pity and grief and tenderness for
his father overcame him, in spite of the deeper, more sullen hostility.

The father won shelter from Gerald through compassion. But for love he
had Winifred. She was his youngest child, she was the only one of his
children whom he had ever closely loved. And her he loved with all the
great, overweening, sheltering love of a dying man. He wanted to
shelter her infinitely, infinitely, to wrap her in warmth and love and
shelter, perfectly. If he could save her she should never know one
pain, one grief, one hurt. He had been so right all his life, so
constant in his kindness and his goodness. And this was his last
passionate righteousness, his love for the child Winifred. Some things
troubled him yet. The world had passed away from him, as his strength
ebbed. There were no more poor and injured and humble to protect and
succour. These were all lost to him. There were no more sons and
daughters to trouble him, and to weigh on him as an unnatural
responsibility. These too had faded out of reality All these things had
fallen out of his hands, and left him free.

There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat
mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow,
prowling step, her head bent forward. But this he put away. Even his
life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the
inner horror. Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay. It would
never break forth openly. Death would come first.

Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he
could be sure. Since the death of Diana, and the development of his
illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost
to obsession. It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some
responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart.

She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father's dark
hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous. She was
like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her,
really. She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and
most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful
affection for a few things--for her father, and for her animals in
particular. But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run
over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a
faint contraction like resentment on her face: 'Has he?' Then she took
no more notice. She only disliked the servant who would force bad news
on her, and wanted her to be sorry. She wished not to know, and that
seemed her chief motive. She avoided her mother, and most of the
members of her family. She LOVED her Daddy, because he wanted her
always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and
irresponsible in her presence. She liked Gerald, because he was so
self-contained. She loved people who would make life a game for her.
She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure
anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once. For she accepted her equals
wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her
inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they
were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common
people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving
from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or
continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.

The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate
depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never
suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose
the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the
whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so
strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a
soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or
responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the
threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really
nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her
father's final passionate solicitude.

When Mr Crich heard that Gudrun Brangwen might come to help Winifred
with her drawing and modelling he saw a road to salvation for his
child. He believed that Winifred had talent, he had seen Gudrun, he
knew that she was an exceptional person. He could give Winifred into
her hands as into the hands of a right being. Here was a direction and
a positive force to be lent to his child, he need not leave her
directionless and defenceless. If he could but graft the girl on to
some tree of utterance before he died, he would have fulfilled his
responsibility. And here it could be done. He did not hesitate to
appeal to Gudrun.

Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald
experienced more and more a sense of exposure. His father after all had
stood for the living world to him. Whilst his father lived Gerald was
not responsible for the world. But now his father was passing away,
Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of
living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his
captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him. He did not
inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea
of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force
that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father,
the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration. Gerald
was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his
feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart.

He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to
break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive
child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.
And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of
Birkin's talk, and of Gudrun's penetrating being, he had lost entirely
that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms
of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set.
He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of
conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But
the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action.

During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom.
The days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of
heroes, or spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly
the circumstances of his own life, so much that he never really saw
Beldover and the colliery valley. He turned his face entirely away from
the blackened mining region that stretched away on the right hand of
Shortlands, he turned entirely to the country and the woods beyond
Willey Water. It was true that the panting and rattling of the coal
mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his earliest
childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of
the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides against the
grounds of the house. The world was really a wilderness where one
hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a
condition of savage freedom.

Then he had been sent away to school, which was so much death to him.
He refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university. He had spent
a certain time at Bonn, at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity
had been aroused in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a
curious objective fashion, as if it were an amusement to him. Then he
must try war. Then he must travel into the savage regions that had so
attracted him.

The result was, he found humanity very much alike everywhere, and to a
mind like his, curious and cold, the savage was duller, less exciting
than the European. So he took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas,
and ideas of reform. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were
never more than a mental amusement. Their interest lay chiefly in the
reaction against the positive order, the destructive reaction.

He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines. His father
asked him to help in the firm. Gerald had been educated in the science
of mining, and it had never interested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort
of exultation, he laid hold of the world.

There was impressed photographically on his consciousness the great
industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of it. Down the valley ran
the colliery railway, linking mine with mine. Down the railway ran the
trains, short trains of heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty
wagons, each one bearing in big white letters the initials:

'C.B.&Co.'

These white letters on all the wagons he had seen since his first
childhood, and it was as if he had never seen them, they were so
familiar, and so ignored. Now at last he saw his own name written on
the wall. Now he had a vision of power.

So many wagons, bearing his initial, running all over the country. He
saw them as he entered London in the train, he saw them at Dover. So
far his power ramified. He looked at Beldover, at Selby, at Whatmore,
at Lethley Bank, the great colliery villages which depended entirely on
his mines. They were hideous and sordid, during his childhood they had
been sores in his consciousness. And now he saw them with pride. Four
raw new towns, and many ugly industrial hamlets were crowded under his
dependence. He saw the stream of miners flowing along the causeways
from the mines at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,
slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate
to his will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little
market-top on Friday nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human
beings that were making their purchases and doing their weekly
spending. They were all subordinate to him. They were ugly and uncouth,
but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine. They made
way for his motor-car automatically, slowly.

He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He
did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly
crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of
mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of
sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings
of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions,
like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the
individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else
mattered.

Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so
far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a
good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That
was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry,
was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest
was by-play.

The mines were there, they were old. They were giving out, it did not
pay to work the seams. There was talk of closing down two of them. It
was at this point that Gerald arrived on the scene.

He looked around. There lay the mines. They were old, obsolete. They
were like old lions, no more good. He looked again. Pah! the mines were
nothing but the clumsy efforts of impure minds. There they lay,
abortions of a half-trained mind. Let the idea of them be swept away.
He cleared his brain of them, and thought only of the coal in the under
earth. How much was there?

There was plenty of coal. The old workings could not get at it, that
was all. Then break the neck of the old workings. The coal lay there in
its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter,
as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will
of man. The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the archgod
of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man's will was the
absolute, the only absolute.

And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The
subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits
of victory were mere results. It was not for the sake of money that
Gerald took over the mines. He did not care about money, fundamentally.
He was neither ostentatious nor luxurious, neither did he care about
social position, not finally. What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of
his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. His will was
now, to take the coal out of the earth, profitably. The profit was
merely the condition of victory, but the victory itself lay in the feat
achieved. He vibrated with zest before the challenge. Every day he was
in the mines, examining, testing, he consulted experts, he gradually
gathered the whole situation into his mind, as a general grasps the
plan of his campaign.

Then there was need for a complete break. The mines were run on an old
system, an obsolete idea. The initial idea had been, to obtain as much
money from the earth as would make the owners comfortably rich, would
allow the workmen sufficient wages and good conditions, and would
increase the wealth of the country altogether. Gerald's father,
following in the second generation, having a sufficient fortune, had
thought only of the men. The mines, for him, were primarily great
fields to produce bread and plenty for all the hundreds of human beings
gathered about them. He had lived and striven with his fellow owners to
benefit the men every time. And the men had been benefited in their
fashion. There were few poor, and few needy. All was plenty, because
the mines were good and easy to work. And the miners, in those days,
finding themselves richer than they might have expected, felt glad and
triumphant. They thought themselves well-off, they congratulated
themselves on their good-fortune, they remembered how their fathers had
starved and suffered, and they felt that better times had come. They
were grateful to those others, the pioneers, the new owners, who had
opened out the pits, and let forth this stream of plenty.

But man is never satisfied, and so the miners, from gratitude to their
owners, passed on to murmuring. Their sufficiency decreased with
knowledge, they wanted more. Why should the master be so
out-of-all-proportion rich?

There was a crisis when Gerald was a boy, when the Masters' Federation
closed down the mines because the men would not accept a reduction.
This lock-out had forced home the new conditions to Thomas Crich.
Belonging to the Federation, he had been compelled by his honour to
close the pits against his men. He, the father, the Patriarch, was
forced to deny the means of life to his sons, his people. He, the rich
man who would hardly enter heaven because of his possessions, must now
turn upon the poor, upon those who were nearer Christ than himself,
those who were humble and despised and closer to perfection, those who
were manly and noble in their labours, and must say to them: 'Ye shall
neither labour nor eat bread.'

It was this recognition of the state of war which really broke his
heart. He wanted his industry to be run on love. Oh, he wanted love to
be the directing power even of the mines. And now, from under the cloak
of love, the sword was cynically drawn, the sword of mechanical
necessity.

This really broke his heart. He must have the illusion and now the
illusion was destroyed. The men were not against HIM, but they were
against the masters. It was war, and willy nilly he found himself on
the wrong side, in his own conscience. Seething masses of miners met
daily, carried away by a new religious impulse. The idea flew through
them: 'All men are equal on earth,' and they would carry the idea to
its material fulfilment. After all, is it not the teaching of Christ?
And what is an idea, if not the germ of action in the material world.
'All men are equal in spirit, they are all sons of God. Whence then
this obvious DISQUALITY?' It was a religious creed pushed to its
material conclusion. Thomas Crich at least had no answer. He could but
admit, according to his sincere tenets, that the disquality was wrong.
But he could not give up his goods, which were the stuff of disquality.
So the men would fight for their rights. The last impulses of the last
religious passion left on earth, the passion for equality, inspired
them.

Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy
war, with a smoke of cupidity. How disentangle the passion for equality
from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of
possessions? But the God was the machine. Each man claimed equality in
the Godhead of the great productive machine. Every man equally was part
of this Godhead. But somehow, somewhere, Thomas Crich knew this was
false. When the machine is the Godhead, and production or work is
worship, then the most mechanical mind is purest and highest, the
representative of God on earth. And the rest are subordinate, each
according to his degree.

Riots broke out, Whatmore pit-head was in flames. This was the pit
furthest in the country, near the woods. Soldiers came. From the
windows of Shortlands, on that fatal day, could be seen the flare of
fire in the sky not far off, and now the little colliery train, with
the workmen's carriages which were used to convey the miners to the
distant Whatmore, was crossing the valley full of soldiers, full of
redcoats. Then there was the far-off sound of firing, then the later
news that the mob was dispersed, one man was shot dead, the fire was
put out.

Gerald, who was a boy, was filled with the wildest excitement and
delight. He longed to go with the soldiers to shoot the men. But he was
not allowed to go out of the lodge gates. At the gates were stationed
sentries with guns. Gerald stood near them in delight, whilst gangs of
derisive miners strolled up and down the lanes, calling and jeering:

'Now then, three ha'porth o'coppers, let's see thee shoot thy gun.'
Insults were chalked on the walls and the fences, the servants left.

And all this while Thomas Crich was breaking his heart, and giving away
hundreds of pounds in charity. Everywhere there was free food, a
surfeit of free food. Anybody could have bread for asking, and a loaf
cost only three-ha'pence. Every day there was a free tea somewhere, the
children had never had so many treats in their lives. On Friday
afternoon great basketfuls of buns and cakes were taken into the
schools, and great pitchers of milk, the school children had what they
wanted. They were sick with eating too much cake and milk.

And then it came to an end, and the men went back to work. But it was
never the same as before. There was a new situation created, a new idea
reigned. Even in the machine, there should be equality. No part should
be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal. The instinct for
chaos had entered. Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having
or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one
part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of
being. But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical
equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of
man, the will for chaos.

Gerald was a boy at the time of the strike, but he longed to be a man,
to fight the colliers. The father however was trapped between two
halftruths, and broken. He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and equal
with all men. He even wanted to give away all he had, to the poor. Yet
he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly that he must
keep his goods and keep his authority. This was as divine a necessity
in him, as the need to give away all he possessed--more divine, even,
since this was the necessity he acted upon. Yet because he did NOT act
on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of chagrin because
he must forfeit it. He wanted to be a father of loving kindness and
sacrificial benevolence. The colliers shouted to him about his
thousands a year. They would not be deceived.

When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position.
He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian attitude of
love and self-sacrifice was old hat. He knew that position and
authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant
about it. They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they
were functionally necessary. They were not the be-all and the end-all.
It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a
controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously
controlled. This was merely as it happened. As well get excited because
a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole
universe wheels round the sun. After all, it would be mere silliness to
say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have
just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them
separately, as the sun. Such an assertion is made merely in the desire
of chaos.

Without bothering to THINK to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a
conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a
problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive
machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of
everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less
according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision
made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own
amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody.

So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order. In
his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the
conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not
define to himself at all clearly what harmony was. The word pleased
him, he felt he had come to his own conclusions. And he proceeded to
put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established
world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word
organisation.

Immediately he SAW the firm, he realised what he could do. He had a
fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed.
This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the
underground, and reduce it to his will. And for this fight with matter,
one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism
so subtle and harmonious in its workings that it represents the single
mind of man, and by its relentless repetition of given movement, will
accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman
principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald
with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a
perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he
had to subjugate. There were two opposites, his will and the resistant
Matter of the earth. And between these he could establish the very
expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and
perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical
repetition, repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. He
found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-principle of
perfect co-ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated
motion, like the spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning, as the
revolving of the universe may be called a productive spinning, a
productive repetition through eternity, to infinity. And this is the
Godmotion, this productive repetition ad infinitum. And Gerald was the
God of the machine, Deus ex Machina. And the whole productive will of
man was the Godhead.

He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect
system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted, timeless, a
Godhead in process. He had to begin with the mines. The terms were
given: first the resistant Matter of the underground; then the
instruments of its subjugation, instruments human and metallic; and
finally his own pure will, his own mind. It would need a marvellous
adjustment of myriad instruments, human, animal, metallic, kinetic,
dynamic, a marvellous casting of myriad tiny wholes into one great
perfect entirety. And then, in this case there was perfection attained,
the will of the highest was perfectly fulfilled, the will of mankind
was perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically
contra-distinguished against inanimate Matter, was not the history of
mankind just the history of the conquest of the one by the other?

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