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Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society 
ISSN 0963-1747

Vol. VIII, No. 1, Autumn 1998

Edited by Philip Kerrigan

Lawrence in Retrospect
H. M. Tomlinson

Reprinted from the Library Review, Autumn 1956

If the lucky chance should take us unaware, would we, at sight, recognise genius in a stranger? Would we have seen at once that T. E. Lawrence, for an instance, was as singular a figure as one out of a fable of the Arabian Nights? I don't think so. Anyhow, I did not. When first I saw him, as a stranger, I wondered what that apparently insignificant fellow was doing there; and then forgot him, till he came up and spoke to me. 

After all, who saw Wuthering Heights in that reserved young woman Emily Bronté? Or another-world-than-this in Blake ? Or the power to over-awe a Government at war in Florence Nightingale ? It is nearly always so. It was seventy years before it got fully through to us that the man who wrote Moby Dick was a master. 

The trouble with genius is that we are not very good at entertaining angels unaware. Nor does genius bother to put us right. It remains unknown for what it is until its hour strikes, and its occasion is come. Even then, and it has happened more than once in history, strange genius may be as successful at the start as a voice crying in the wilderness. To make matters worse, the difference between creative genius and crankiness, and even charlatanry, is not obvious always and at once. 
Talent, on the other hand, may have startling characteristics. It can be attractive and delightful. We have words for it: brilliant, clever, original, charming, devastating, epoch-making, and many more. You could never overlook so-and-so in an assembly of distinguished men and women. There he was. The animation and laughter in the corner where he happened to be drew your notice forthwith, with his picturesque head overall; at the same time, you might have remained innocent of the presence there of little Thomas Hardy. 

Genius is not invariably self-assertive and confident. It is seldom responsive. It does not come out in small talk. What will touch it off is unpredictable. We all know that though we are never mistaken in the sign of assured authority, such as that given by an earthquake, we are fairly certain to miss the still, small voice.

Once I stood in a room with nobody near me but a man who was not only a general of inspiring genius in the last war, but also a statesman and a scholar. The slight figure close at hand had nothing about him to show this. It only slowly dawned on me, owing to the occasion, that this probably was Field-Marshall Earl Wavell himself; and it was. He proved to be almost as shy and inarticulate as modest people usually are. It was in action that his genius came out, to surprise the enemy with a move nobody else had thought of, and to shock them with the indisputable evidence of the superiority of mind to the usual routine of trained intelligence. He really was a great man, but not in appearance, and not in conversation. 

We have learned since that Winston Churchill himself, so well able to discern the drama in circumstance, remained unsure of Wavell's unique quality. Wavell seemed passive; he could not be dramatic. Behind what looked like his absence of mind, or indifference, or of being slow in the uptake, the problem was already being placed in a light to which others were blind. Lincoln was just as deceptive to those about him. Since Wavell's death, his peers in the war, admirals and generals, have told me what they thought of him in terms even of reverence. It is only after death that such a man attains full dignity, for then his ghostly presence is felt in a way that his common presence, when he was out and about, was not; we are aware of a vacancy, and nobody else to fill it. Talent can do what many can do, and do it far better. Genius does what nobody else can do. 

So we felt when we heard of the tragic death of Lawrence of Arabia. It was a foolish name to have given him, but it was obvious and an easy one to the newspapers, which have to devise easily-recognised labels for men and things. And didn't he get publicity! The limelight was enough to have scorched him. He could not escape it, not even in the attic of his Dorset sanctuary. Cameras and ladders followed him up. 

But did he try to escape ? One critic remarked that he had a gift for backing into the limelight. And there is a story that a friend met him by the gates of the British Museum, and greeted him. Lawrence was in his service uniform. 'So you recognised me,' said Lawrence. 'Of course.' 'Do you know " said Lawrence, sadly, 'I've come to this place for years, and nobody here has recognised me yet.' 
As if, remarked his friend, when relating this, 'What's the good of a disguise if nobody sees through it?' 

It is not surprising that Winston Churchill recognised Lawrence for what he was. That great man's recognition is an assurance of the startling and revolutionary quickness of Lawrence's thought, though not of his spiritual value. In the right company, Lawrence's reticence would go, and what he had to say compelled one's attention. If you attempted to answer him, casual words would not do. There was danger about, and you knew it, but just where was it? For his speech was cunning. You looked at his lean face with its challenging chin, and the search of his light eyes put you in a fix. There could be no quibbling. This man himself knew no fear, and would despise evasion. Churchill would have known his own sort in a happy interview with Lawrence. 

But Wavell, who also knew him, saw that in him, and more. His knowledge of Lawrence's austere nobility is enough for me. Nothing that all the adverse critics of the man have said of him, in gossip or in print, affects me more than the wind-blown straws in the porch of an empty house. It appears they did not know him. One of his most savage critics has admitted that he never even saw the man. 
Of course, anyone who knew him, and had watched his career in astonishment and amusement, could make a comic tale of his waywardness and inconsistencies. A man of genius, like the rest of us, may be vain and silly now and then. If we knew no more of Coleridge than his weakness for opium, his indolence, his misery with his bowels, his domestic shortcomings, and his habit of maundering, how account for The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan? From whence came that star-dust ? Out of Freudian dogma ? 

Lamb used to poke fun at Coleridge: but after his death, Lamb would sit with his friends about the fire, taking no part in the eager converse, and presently would look up and exclaim, in irrelevant dismay and incredulity, 'Coleridge is dead.' And Lamb himself was not like the rest of us. Could there be a greater tribute to a vanished personality ? 

I would not claim for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or for The Mint, the manuscript of which was insured for £100,000 - more publicity! - that they have the right to be placed with the English classics. This is not an attempt at literary criticism. And if I cannot agree with Edward Garnett, who said that Lawrence's long narrative of the campaign in Arabia when he led the Arabs against the Turks is a masterpiece, I know it is a faithful record of things as they are in our day that could have been done only by a writer for whom truth was the thing to aim at, though he had no love for the look of it. Anyhow, we cannot tell the ultimate worth of any item of prose or poetry in contemporary literature. Time will find that out. 

Still, I can affirm Lawrence's compelling mind and character. I have felt it. It was at Max Gate, Thomas Hardy's home, that I saw Lawrence first, and speculated, though not much, over what a private in the Tanks had to do at an exclusive table. Hardy was next but one to me; between us was an English lord. I came out of a reverie to attend to a question from Hardy. 'What do you think of Doughty's Arabia Deserta?' 

I replied that, of course, it was the greatest travel book in the English language. 
The aristocrat next to me grew animated, and even pleased. 'You do think all that of it?' 
'I think,' I said, 'there is all that to say of it.' 

At that moment, across the table, I met a glance from the Tank private, and was transfixed. It was boring into me; but I forgot it again with the next cup of tea. 

We were dispersing, and I was with Siegfried Sassoon when the man of the Tanks came up to us and Siegfried at once lit up with delight. 'Here's Lawrence,' he said. 'Do you know him ?' 
I could see in his face, as he scanned me, good reason for his fame. It was certain, also, that his high and quick mind could be impish. His smile showed that. He knew he had taken me in. His talk made it clear that he did not rise early in the morning to be the same as everybody else. He was provocative, and larkishly, perhaps for the fun of upsetting fixed opinions. He was genuinely serious, however, about Doughty, a hero of his. He was grateful for what I had said to one of our aristocracy about that book. He told me that, learning Doughty was, to put it mildly, not well-to-do, he went, some time back, to the nobleman, whom he did not know, to point out that a distant relative, who had written our greatest book of travel, needed help; and was that known to him ? It was not; and the nobleman proved to be noble. I had, it seems, inadvertently, confirmed the matter, and so Lawrence looked on me with favour. 

We might have heard nothing of him but for the first great war. An archaeologist, and lover of the classics, he was in Asia Minor looking into the obscurity of the Hittite civilization when war broke out. His extraordinary adventures that soon followed everybody knows from Revolt in the Desert. But not everybody knows that when that 'best-seller' reached a certain figure he ordered his publisher to stop it. It was being overdone. Moreover, it had earned the amount of money he wanted [to repay the cost of producing the subscribers' edition of Seven Pillars]. He himself took nothing of it, and the book had made quite a fortune. 

He was so varied in his interests that machinery or Homer or metaphysics could start him off. It is therefore easy for his detractors to question his special knowledge. Was he, for example, really an Arabic scholar ? Only the pundits know. All we know is that Lawrence, with what he knew of Arabic, and with what he was in himself, did what nobody else could have done, not even all the Arabic scholars in assembly. He reconciled Arab tribes with their age-long feuds and hatred of each other, made one body of them, picking up the art and science of war as he went along, and at last led a victorious Arab army into Damascus. Somehow, those very touchy and intractable tribes saw reason to repose a common faith in the man; and yet he was, to them, an infidel. There, anyhow, is one fact about Lawrence, and it has something of the look of the miraculous. 

Yet when one saw only a slight figure in khaki wearing ammunition boots, it was not easy to assume so much in an instance. Yet that was the man who did it, in addition to translating Homer. One evening I thought I saw the secret of it. He came unexpectedly after dark to my home in a London suburb. He sat by the fire with my wife and children. The children politely put aside their home-work. They had only heard of him; I do not think they wondered in the least because of a visitor whose name was frequently mentioned. Besides, they were easily bored with related incidents of war, for they had experienced Zeppelin nights; war was a disagreeable and shuddery subject, and here appeared to be an ordinary soldier. Men of their own family they knew well had been killed in the war. 

We began to talk. At least we got round to Asia Minor. He began to tell us. The children were listening. They were looking at him. It was to them he talked. He was gentle and persuasive. He began to take on the look of a visitor from another world, with unheard-of things to report. People of the remote past, mere names at school and legendary, came to life, and began to walk about. There is something in that story of the Pied Piper. A fellow of his kind was with us that memorable night; it would have been natural to follow him anywhere.

As he was going, I had a private word with him. Why was he, of all men, in the army? 'Because,' he said, 'I have in it no volition of my own. All is provided for me, and I am under orders. I am of no importance, and lost among others of the same importance.' 

In other words, it was away of escape from the world, which was no place for him. In the Middle Ages, he would have entered a monastery, I suppose, or perhaps have become a preaching friar, living on bread and water, devoted to the beauty of the Church, but a menace to ecclesiastical authority in the freedom of his speech, and his persuasiveness to more of the spirit, less of the letter. 

Reprinted with permission of the Estate of H. M. Tomlinson. 

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