wider sense) are the only class of human beings to which he would like
to belong. He can salve the regret that, rightly or wrongly, he feels
at not being a true artist, by watching artists work and providing
them with a model. He has done a good deal of experimental sculpture;
he told me once that somewhere, I think in Syria, there are twelve
life-size statues left by him on the roof of a house. Certainly some of
the decorations outside a nonconformist chapel in the Iffley Road at
Oxford are his work, but unsigned and indistinguishable from the rest.
I have seen silversmith work by him. He has written poems, but they
fall short of his intentions more seriously even than his handicrafts,
because poetry has more freedom possible to it than these. Lawrence’s
chief curse is that he cannot stop thinking, and by thinking I mean a
working of the mind that is not mere calculation from any given set of
facts, but a much more intense and difficult process which makes its
own facts and tests them as it goes and destroys them when it is over.
In all my acquaintance I know no more than three people who really
_think_, and these three include Lawrence. He seems to be perpetually
stretching his mind in every direction and finding little or nothing;
‘lunging about,’ as an Arab poet said, ‘like a blind camel in the
dark.’ At least the effort seems to make the mind harder and fitter.
But this account is getting too philosophical, and the simplest
conclusion about Lawrence is the best. It is not that ‘He is a great
man.’ The greatness of his achievement is in any case historical.
He, a foreigner and an unbeliever, inspired and led the broadest
national movement of the Arabs that had taken place since the great
times of Mohammed and his early successors, and brought it to a
triumphant conclusion. It is not that he is a genius. This has come
to be a vulgar almost meaningless word, attached to any competent
scientist or fiddler or verse-maker or military leader. It is not even
that he is an ‘erratic genius,’ unless ‘erratic’ means that Lawrence
does not do the usual things that men of successful talents do; the
ordinary vulgar things that are expected by the crowd. If Napoleon,
for instance, who was a vulgar rather than an ‘erratic’ genius, had
been in Lawrence’s position at the close of the 1918 campaign he would
have proclaimed himself a Mohammedan and consolidated the new Arabian
Empire. Lawrence did nothing of the sort, though he had popularity and
power enough perhaps to make himself Emperor even without an official
change of faith. But it would have been foolish to expect a man who
has qualities that shine in difficult weather to subdue them in calm
weather. He came away and left the Arabs to employ the freedom that
he had given them, a freedom unencumbered by his rule which, however
just and wise, would always have been an alien rule. He would have
contradicted himself had he suffered all those pains to free the Arabs
and then enslaved them under himself. The trouble with him often is
that he is too sane. He is impish at times but never erratic; he does
nothing without good reason, though his decisions may disappoint the
crowd. There was nothing erratic about Lawrence when he enlisted as an
airman in 1922. When I heard of it first it did not surprise me: one
learns not to be surprised at anything Lawrence does. My only comment
was ‘He knows his own needs,’ and now I can see clearly that it was
the most honourable thing to himself that he could have done. It was,
moreover, a course that he had decided on in 1919 and had suggested to
Air-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond before the Armistice. But not till Mr.
Winston Churchill had given the Arabs what Lawrence considered a fair
deal was he free to please himself. Politics accounted for the three
years’ delay.
The least and most that can be said about Lawrence is that he is a good
man. This ‘good’ is something that can be understood by a child or a
savage or any simple-minded person. It is just a feeling that you get
from him, the feeling ‘here is a man with great powers, a man who could
make most men do for him exactly whatever he desired, but yet one who
would never use his powers, from respect for the other man’s personal
freedom.’
Popular suggestions made lately for employing Lawrence’s talents or
genius have been as numerous and varied as they have been ridiculous.
The public has taken an interest in him that almost amounts to a claim
for ownership: but nobody owns Lawrence or will ever own him. He is not
a public Niagara that can be harnessed for any political or commercial
purpose. A Colonial Governor-Generalship? What sort of appointment is
that for a man who might have been an Emperor? And imagine Lawrence,
who has long come to the point of disbelieving in his existence and
every one else’s, laying foundation stones and attending ceremonial
parades and banquets! Lawrence, shortly after the War ended, was
invited to attend the reception after a society wedding. He went (a
man he liked was being married) in company with a young diplomatic
attaché who was much impressed by the occasion. ‘What name, gentlemen?’
asked the flunkey at the door. Lawrence saw his companion pulling
himself-together for an impressive entrance and the spirit of mischief
overcame him. ‘Messrs. Lenin and Trotsky,’ he said quickly. And ‘Mr.
Lenin, Mr. Trotsky!’ the flunkey bawled out mechanically to the
scandalized assembly: which, indeed, included Royalty.
Another suggestion has been that Lawrence should be entrusted with
a mission to settle affairs in China. If Lawrence had any desire to
settle affairs in China, even supposing that he felt himself capable of
doing so, which is doubtful (it is quite possible that he is ignorant
of Chinese), he would certainly demand an absolutely free hand. And it
is then possible, indeed probable, that the solution he would provide
would be one not at all favourable to European control of Chinese
affairs. In any case, he had done this sort of thing once already: one
does not repeat unpleasant experiences, for hire, without conviction,
unless one has that sense of patriotic duty of which Lawrence is
completely free. Other silly suggestions have been that he should edit
a modern literary review, that he should be given an appointment in
connexion with the Mesopotamian oil-fields, that he should be made
director-general of British Army training or given a high post at
the British Museum. All these suggestions remind one of the various
methods detailed in mediæval books under the heading ‘how to catch and
tame a Unicorn.’ People do not seem to realize that he knows himself
pretty well and that he has chosen to serve in the Royal Air Force,
which is not a life that comes easily or naturally to him, for a full
engagement. He finds its difficulty worth coping with and is content.
If he wants to do anything else he will do so without prompting.
It is remarkable that the most popular suggestion has been
that Lawrence should head a great religious revival. In view of my
conclusion about Lawrence that he can best be described simply as a
‘good man’ there may seem to be something in that suggestion. But it is
as foolish as the rest. In the first place Lawrence has read too much
theology to be a simple, successful revivalist and does not believe
that religions can be ‘revived’, but only invented. In the second, he
would not think of using his personality for any new popular campaign,
military or religious, ever again. His nihilism is a chilly creed,
the first article of which is ‘thou shalt not convert!’ In the third
place....
But enough. Mr. George Bernard Shaw perhaps made the most practical
suggestion, that Lawrence should be given a government pension and
chambers in some public building (he mentioned Blenheim Palace) and be
allowed to spend his time exactly as it suited him. But I think that
Lawrence would be unwilling to accept even a gift like this; such an
arrangement would put him under a shadowy obligation to the public and,
anyhow, he does not believe that he is worth anyone’s paying. Also he
might have æsthetic objections to Blenheim Palace. Also someone else
already lives there. The only suggestion that I can make for the future
treatment of Lawrence is simply this: that he should be left alone
to maintain that rare personal liberty which so very few people are
capable of maintaining.
Most of what I have written is more or less in Lawrence’s favour.
What is the worst that can be said against him? A great many things,
perhaps, but they have mostly been said by Lawrence himself at one
time or another. In the first place, he is an incurable romantic and
that means that he is on doubtful terms with all institutions which
claim to preserve public stability. He has loved adventure for its
own sake, and the weaker side because it is the weaker side, and the
lost cause, and unhappiness. Now, the incurable romantic is approved
by society only if he is incompetent and fails, gloriously perhaps,
but conspicuously, and so proves that the stupid ordinary people
who control public security are always right after all. Lawrence’s
romanticism is not incompetent, it is not unsuccessful. When a European
monarch one day in 1919 greeted him with the remark, ‘It is a bad time
for us kings. Five new republics were proclaimed yesterday,’ Lawrence
was able to answer, ‘Courage, sir! We have just made three kingdoms in
the East.’
For the real success of his romanticism—a romanticism which, as in the
‘Winston’ settlement of the Middle East, the big achievement of his
life for which the War was a mere preparation, comes uncomfortably near
realism—he is naturally very much hated by most government officials,
regular soldiers, old-fashioned political experts and such-like; he is
a disturbing element in their ordered scheme of things, a mystery and
a nuisance. Even now, as a mechanic in the Air Force, he is a worry.
They suspect some diabolic trick for raising mutiny or revolt. They
refuse to believe that he is simply there because he is there. That he
wants to be quit of affairs and become politically and intellectually
unemployable.
Again, he is not even a single-minded romantic: he clearly despises
his romanticism and fights it in himself so sternly that he only makes
it more incurable. People like Lawrence are in fact an obvious menace
to civilization; they are too strong and important to be dismissed
as nothing at all, too capricious to be burdened with a position of
responsibility, too sure of themselves to be browbeaten, but then
too doubtful of themselves to be made heroes of.
The only original thing—if it is original—that I can say against
Lawrence—if it is against him—is this: he keeps his enormously wide
circle of friends, who range from tramps to reigning sovereigns and
Air-Marshals, as much as possible in watertight compartments, each
away from the other. Towards each friend he turns a certain character
which he keeps for that relationship and which is consistent with it.
To each friend he reveals in fact some part of himself, but only a
part: these characters he never confuses. So there are many thousands
of Lawrences, each one a facet of the Lawrence crystal: and whether
or not the crystal is colourless and the facets merely reflect the
characters of the friends whom they face, Lawrence himself has no
notion. He has no intimates to whom the whole might be shown. The
result of this dispersion—his friends are not casually made but chosen
out, representing various departments of art, life, science, study (and
he has an especial tenderness for ruffians)—is that such of his friends
as are of a possessive nature try to corner him, each believing that
he alone knows the real Lawrence, so that there is a comical jealousy
when they meet. This may be also partly due to Lawrence being a person
about whom it is easier to feel than to speak. One cannot put him into
words—I cheerfully own to failure—because he is so various, because he
has no single characteristic or humour that one could swear to. So his
friends resent every description of him that they hear and cannot give
one of their own to justify their resentment. Hence, probably, their
possessive secrecy.
In getting together material for this book I have had more than one
rebuff from friends who have carefully treasured some personal
relation with which they thought themselves uniquely favoured. In
spite of rebuffs I have tried to get bearings on Lawrence from as many
angles, friendly and hostile, as possible: and if the only Lawrence
that I still can see is the facet that he has consistently presented to
me in the seven years that I have known him—well, let it be so: if it
is only _a_ Lawrence and not _the_ Lawrence, it is nevertheless more
plausible than most supposedly complete individuals that I know.
I would not offer Lawrence, nor most certainly would he offer himself,
or consider himself, as a model of conduct, or as a philosophic system.
Circumstances and his own lifelong efforts have made him more free of
human ties than other men. He can therefore dispose of himself in any
market at any given time. Others cannot; they have careers, ambitions,
families, wants, hopes, fears, traditions, duties—all binding them to
that organized human society in which Lawrence seems to play only an
accidental and perfunctory part. It is this extraordinary detachment,
this final insulation of himself, which makes him the object of so
much curiosity, suspicion, exasperation, admiration, love, hatred,
jealousy, legends, lies. He has resolutely and painfully adopted the
attitude towards organized society, ‘you go your way and I’ll go mine,’
‘leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone,’ but organized society
cannot control itself in its hue-and-cry after a lost lamb that is
perversely in need of no crook or fold. It is perhaps the triumph of
his detachment that one can write of him in this way, as if he were a
character in ancient history, confident that whatever one writes will
not affect the man himself in the least, that his check will be only on
infringements of copyrights that are no longer entirely his own.
For all that, he has not been able to keep himself to himself in
one rather serious respect. Wherever he goes and makes his presence
felt he seems to leave behind, probably unconsciously and certainly
unwillingly, a number of fictitious Lawrences, people who seek to get
something of the man’s power by a mere imitation of what happen to be
at the time his outward peculiarities. An affected lack of ease in
society, an affected self-withdrawal, an inclined carriage of the head,
a deliberate economy of gesture and vocabulary, a peculiar dragging of
the words _yes_ and _no_, a lack of emphasis at the moments of arrival
and departure—whenever I meet these, I know that the Lawrence legend
is stalking about, a ghost as persuasive, as destructive, as false as
the Byron legends of a hundred years ago. Lawrence has a right to be
Lawrence; he is his own peculiar invention. But at second and third
hand he is occasionally comic, as when some ambitious, conventional,
sporting, self-indulgent lion tries on his unicorn skin. But more often
it goes beyond the comic stage: strong silent little men are even more
insufferable than strong silent big ones. And by a cosmic joke in the
worst taste the legend of ‘The Uncrowned King of Arabia’ has become
popularly entangled with a novelist’s myth of ‘The Sheik of Araby.’
Booksellers have wasted a good deal of time in explaining that ‘Revolt
in the Desert’ is not a sequel to ‘The Son of the Sheik.’
Now, the difficulty of writing a definite summary of what Lawrence
is or was at any given time is that he makes a point of keeping his
opinions and desires as far as possible in a state of solution; he
prevents them, that is, from crystallizing into a motive that will
affect the opinions, desires and actions of other men. When, in spite
of all precautions, a motive does appear, a force is generated that
is nearly irresistible, and while this lasts he stands out with
glaring distinctness as a figure in history. But his greatness or
power or whatever one may call it, though popularly revealed on such
occasions, results apparently from his negative policy of being sure
of nothing, believing nothing, caring for nothing, all the rest of the
time. And with this paradox my study must end.
III
Lawrence once attended on the Emir Feisal, the chief Arab leader of
the Revolt, when he was privately received at Buckingham Palace.
Lawrence was wearing Arabian dress; the white robe, the belt, the
dagger, the silk and gold head-dress, and was rebuked by a person of
importance: ‘Is it right, Colonel Lawrence, that a subject of the Crown
and an officer too, should appear here clothed in foreign uniform?’
He answered respectfully but firmly, ‘When a man serves two masters
and has to offend one of these, it is better for him to offend the
more powerful. I am here as official interpreter of the Emir Feisal,
whose uniform this is.’ Lawrence’s problem, whether his loyalty lay
towards the Arabs or towards England when England and the Arabs were
in conflict, was the most difficult problem of his life. England could
claim earlier rights of allegiance—he was for two years a British
army officer before he began the Arabian adventure—while his natural
instinct to side with the weaker cause inclined him to press the Arab
claim even against the interests of British Imperial expansion. When
further it seemed that the right lay on the side of the Arabs rather
than on that of his own country he was even more divided in mind.
How he came to be in this position cannot be shown without a short
chapter of history and geography. The first thing to be explained is
what is meant by ‘The Arabs.’ The Arabs are not merely the inhabitants
of the country called Arabia: the word includes all those Eastern
races which speak the language called Arabic. The Arabic language is
spoken over an area as big as India, lying between a line formed by the
extreme eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red
Sea, and a second line farther east parallel with it formed by the
River Tigris and the Persian Gulf as far as Muscat on the Indian Ocean.
This rough parallelogram of land, which is much longer than it is wide,
includes Syria, Palestine, Transjordania, Mesopotamia and the whole of
the Arabian Peninsula. The people who live in it are called Semites,
the children of Shem. The Semites were cousins by blood even before
they were given a common religious language, Arabic, by Mohammed’s
conquests and his _Koran_. Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician,
Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, the principal Semitic languages, are all
related to each other rather than to the languages of African Ham or
Indo-European Japhet. Into this Semite country many foreign peoples
have from time to time forced a way, but none have kept a footing for
long. Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Franks (the Crusaders)
have in turn tried, but their colonies have gradually been destroyed
or swallowed up by the Semites. The Semites have themselves sometimes
ventured out of their area and in turn been drowned in the outer world.
France, Spain and Morocco to the west, India to the east, were reached
in the great days of the Mohammedan conquests. But with few scattered
exceptions the Semites have never been able to live outside their old
area without changing their natures and customs.
[Illustration:
description: Map of Arabian peninsula
title caption: THE ARAB AREA
]
This Semite country has many different climates and soils. On the west
is a long range of mountains running all the way from Alexandretta
in Northern Syria, through Palestine and the land of Midian till it
reaches Aden in Southern Arabia. It has an average height of two or
three thousand feet, is well watered and well populated. On the east
is Mesopotamia, a plain lying between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris,
its soil one of the most fertile in the world, and below Mesopotamia
another but infertile plain stretching from Kuweit along the
Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. On the south there is a long range
of hills facing the Indian Ocean, which supports a fair population.
But these outer fringes of watered country frame an enormous waste of
thirsty desert, much of it still unexplored. In the heart of the desert
in Central Arabia there is a large group of well-watered and populous
oases. To the south of these oases is a great sand desert stretching
to the inhabited hills which line the Indian Ocean: it is impassable
to caravans for lack of water and cuts off these Southern hills from
true Arabian history. East of the oases, between them and Kuweit, the
eastern limit, is a desert of gravel with some stretches of sand which
make travelling difficult. To the west of the oases, between them
and the populated western hills which line the Red Sea, is a desert
of gravel and lava with not much sand in it. To the north, a belt of
sand and then an immense gravel and lava plain filling up everything
between the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates where
Mesopotamia begins. It is over the western and northern deserts that
Lawrence did most of his fighting.
The hills of the west and the plains of the east are the most active
parts of the Arabic area, though being more exposed to foreign
influence and trade, whether European or Asiatic, the Arabs there
are not so typically Semitic in character as the inhabitants of the
deserts and of the central oases protected by the desert. It was on
the desert tribes that Lawrence depended most for military help in the
Arab Revolt, and it was the Arabs of the northern Syrian desert to whom
for personal reasons he was most anxious to give freedom. Lawrence
has described the process by which the desert tribes come into being.
The south-western corner of Arabia, south of the holy city of Mecca,
is called Yemen. It is a fertile agricultural district famed for
coffee but much overpopulated: and for the surplus population there
is no easy outlet. To the north is Mecca, where a strong foreign
population drawn from all the Mohammedan world jealously bars the
way. To the west is the sea and across the sea lies only the Sudanese
desert. South is the Indian Ocean. The only way out is east. So the
weaker tribes on the Yemen border are constantly pushed out into the
bad lands, where farming becomes less and less easy, and farther out
still until they become pastoral and finally are forced into the actual
desert. There they work about from oasis to oasis perhaps for several
generations until they may be strong enough to establish themselves
again as agricultural Arabs in Syria or Mesopotamia. This, writes
Lawrence, is the natural circulation that keeps Arabia healthy.
The great deserts are not, as might be supposed, the common property
of all the Arab tribes to wander about in according to their pleasure.
The territories are strictly divided up between the various tribes
and clans, who may graze their camels and flocks only in their own
pastures. Thus any clan new to the desert must either fight or pay
tribute to maintain itself in any fixed territory. It may pass through
and be given free hospitality, but after three days the journey must be
renewed. As if the natural hardships of desert life were not enough,
the old-established desert tribes are at constant feud with each other,
and until the Arab Revolt began had no common thought or motive. (There
are moreover outlaws, men with no tribe, who rob and kill any man they
meet.) The Bedouin’s curse has always been the curse of Ishmael, to
have his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. Yet
on the whole he keeps to a very strict code of honour in his tribal
warfare. The two most important cities in Arabia are the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina. Mecca is about fifty miles inland, about
half-way down the Red Sea: Jiddah is its port. Medina, two hundred
and fifty miles to the north of Mecca, is about one hundred and fifty
miles inland behind the range of hills. Every year for more than a
thousand years there has been a great pilgrimage to these cities from
all over the Mohammedan world. The most famous route is from Damascus
in Syria, twelve hundred miles south across the Arabian deserts. Until
recently this was a painful journey on foot or camel back, from which
thousands of pilgrims, mostly old men who made this pilgrimage as the
final religious act of their life, used never to return. One of the
chief sources of wealth for the desert tribes was then this yearly
pilgrimage. They sold food and animals to the pilgrims and were paid
for the caravan’s safe passage through each tribe’s territory. If the
money, however, was not paid they would raid the caravan and cut off
and rob the stragglers. The Bedouin Arab had a great contempt for the
pilgrims, mostly townsmen from Syria and Turkey, and regarded them as
his natural prey. A railway was at last built from Damascus to Medina,
and the pilgrims were able, just before the outbreak of the War, to
set out in reasonable hope of a safe return. There only remained the
stretch between Medina and Mecca not yet linked by a railway. The
Damascus-Medina railway was built for the Turks by German engineers.
The pretext for building it was a pious one; the real reason was to
give Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, access for his troops to the Holy Cities,
other than by the Suez Canal.