by John Buchan
Oliver’s mind had two sides — one strictly logical, delighting in close and compact argument, and the other imaginative and intuitive. He was not one who overvalued ratiocination, for he held that in the greater matters of life the mind must fling itself forward beyond its data, and that the possession of this instinct was what constituted the difference between the great and the less great among mankind. Such a power he believed to be found chiefly in simple souls, and this explained his admiration for soldiers. He was contemptuous of the hyper-subtle and the intellectually arrogant; the clever fool seemed to him the worst of all fools. He believed that the ordinary man was the best judge of most things, and might, if lawyers and pedants could be kept out of the way, be trusted to govern the country. The worst vice was seeing the trees and missing the wood, but it was a vice of clever, not of plain, people.
He used to attribute this conviction to his business experience, but it came from something deeper, something far back in his Border ancestry. There was a good deal in him of the mystic and the poet. He transfigured every political subject he wrote on — tariff reform, Ireland, military training — by opening up imaginative vistas. He might start with the pose of a commonplace man wearily repeating truisms, but he ended startlingly as a seer. History became his favourite study because it gave his imagination room for the reconstruction of men’s souls, and because it showed truth in action. Principles he valued high, but he saw them not as dogmas but as pictures and deeds.
This conjoint power of visualising and divining made him a brilliant writer, and at moments almost a great one. He was an admirable painter of historical portraits, and he was skilled in tracking the progress of a doctrine. His style was eminently simple and clear, but capable also of a strong eloquence; his general urbanity had its moments of tenderness, but it could harden, too, into deadly satire.
His published writings, owing partly to his ill-health and partly to a fastidiousness which made him produce slowly, give no real impression of the fertility and originality of his mind and the delightfulness of his society. He had the Border quality, of which Sir Walter Scott is the great example, of intellectual generosity and geniality. His conversation was a joy to his friends. He had all the Baconian requirements; he was a full man from wide reading and much thought; an exact man from his scrupulous logic; and a ready man from his native wit. And behind the colour and light there was a friendly warmth which made it good to be with him. He never dogmatised; his sharp dialectic made him a noted pricker of bubbles; he had the gift of impromptu perfection of phrase, so that his talk was as finished as his prose. His humour, though irony and satire were among his weapons, was for the most part tolerant and debonair, and he had an acute sense of farce and fun.
Oliver did not write because he liked writing, but because he had causes to plead. A preacher at heart, he testified at all times to the truth that was in him. He loved his country deeply, and strove to serve her by lifting contemporary disputes into a larger air, and to seek guidance for the future by a patient diagnosis of the present and a wise reading of the past. He never wrote merely for artistic effect, but always to convince — to break down some lie or to establish some verity. That is why he wrote so well. That is why he has had, I think, a real and enduring influence on political thought. He made out of politics a philosophy — though he disliked the word — and his wisdom will not die, though the causes which he served may change.
I do not profess to have understood T. E. Lawrence fully, still less to be able to portray him; there is no brush fine enough to catch the subtleties of his mind, no aerial viewpoint high enough to bring into one picture the manifold of his character.
Before the War I had heard of him from D. G. Hogarth, and so many of my friends, like Alan Dawnay, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert, served with him in the East that he became a familiar name to me; but I do not think that I met him before the summer of 1920. Then we found that we had much in common besides Hogarth’s friendship — an admiration for the work of C. E. Doughty, including his epics; similar tastes in literature; the same philosophy of empire.
Until his death I saw him perhaps half a dozen times a year while he was in England. He had gathered round him a pleasant coterie, most of whom I knew. But we never worked together, though we once projected a joint-editing of the Gadarene poets — there were others from Gadara besides Meleager. He would turn up without warning at Elsfield at any time of the day or night on his motor-cycle Boanerges, and depart as swiftly and mysteriously as he came.
Yet in a sense I knew him better than many people whom I met daily. If you were once admitted to his intimacy you became one of his family, and he of yours; he used you and expected to be used by you; he gave of himself with the liberality of a good child. There was always much of the child in him. He spoke and wrote to children as a coeval. He had a delightful impishness. Even when he was miserable and suffering he could rejoice in a comic situation, and he found many in the ranks of the R.A.F. and the Tank Corps. What better comedy than for a fine scholar to be examined as to his literacy by the ordinary education officer? And the game of hide-and-seek which he played with the newspapers amused him as much as it annoyed him.
When I first knew him he was in the trough of depression owing to what he thought to be the failure of his work for the Arabs, which involved for him a breach of honour. Mr. Churchill’s policy eventually comforted him, but it could not heal the wound. Physically he looked slight, but, as boxers say, he stripped well, and he was as strong as many people twice his size, while he had a bodily toughness and endurance far beyond anything I have ever met. In 1920 his whole being was in grave disequilibrium. You cannot in any case be nine times wounded, four times in an air crash, have many bouts of fever and dysentery, and finally at the age of twenty-nine take Damascus at the head of an Arab army, without living pretty near the edge of your strength. But he had been endowed also with a highly keyed nervous system which gave him an infinite capacity for both pleasure and pain, but never gave him ease. There was a fissure in his nature — eternal war between what might be called the Desert and the Sown — on the one side art and books and friends and leisure and a modest cosiness; on the other action, leadership, the austerity of space.
His character has been a quarry for the analysts and I would not add to their number. It is simplest to say that he was a mixture of contradictories which never were — perhaps could never have been — harmonised. His qualities lacked integration. He had moods of vanity and moods of abasement; immense self-confidence and immense diffidence. He had a fastidious taste which was often faulty. The gentlest and most lovable of beings with his chivalry and considerateness, he could also be ruthless. I can imagine him, though the possessor of an austere conscience, crashing through all the minor moralities to win his end. That is to say, he was a great man of action with some “sedition in his powers.”
For the better part of three years he was a leader of men and a maker of nations. Military students have done ample justice to his gifts as a soldier. Perhaps his contribution to the art of war has been a little overstated, but beyond question he foreshadowed a new strategy and tactics — audacity in surprise, the destruction of material rather than of men, blows at the enemy’s nerve centre and therefore at his will to resist. And he could put his doctrine into effect with speed and precision. If he had come out of the War with a sound nervous system and his vitality unimpaired, he might have led the nation to a new way of life. For he had a magnetic power which made people follow him blindly, and I have seen that in his eye which could have made, or quelled, a revolution. He had also an astonishing gift for detail. He knew more about the history and the technique of war than any general I have ever met. He understood down to the last decimal every weapon he employed and every tool he used. He was a master both of the vision and of the fact.
What deflected him from his natural career of action For deflected he was; he made deliberately lo gran rifiuto; he cut himself off from the sphere in which he was born to excel.
It is idle to speculate on what would have happened if he had ended the War with perfect balance and undamaged nerves; if he had he would not have been Lawrence. There was a fissure in him from the start; the dream and the business did not march together; his will was not always the servant of his intelligence; he was an agonist, a self- tormentor, who ran to meet suffering halfway. This was due, I think, partly to a twist of puritanism, partly to the fact that, as he often confessed, pain stimulated his mind; but it was abnormal and unwholesome. He was a great analyst of himself, but he never probed the secret of this crack in the firing. Sometimes he put it down to his war experiences, sometimes to his post-War disillusionment, when he was inclined to talk the familiar nonsense about youth having been betrayed by age. But I think it was always there, and it tended to gape under stress. When there was no call to action he was torn by his divided thoughts. “The War was good,” he once wrote, “by drawing over our depths that hot surface wish to do or win something.”
He was disillusioned, too, about mundane glory, disillusioned too early. “I wasn’t a King or Prime Minister, but I made ‘em and played with ‘em, and after that there was not much more in that direction for me to do.” The man of action in him gave him an appetite for fame, even for publicity, and the other side of him made him despise himself for the craving. His conscience forbade him to take any reward for his War services, but there were times when he thought it a morbid conscience. So, pulled hither and thither by noble and contradictory impulses, he had moods when he hated life. “Oh, Lord, I am so tired! I want so much to lie down, to sleep and die. Die is best because there is no réveillé. I want to forget my sins and the world’s weariness.”
He craved, like a mediaeval monk, for discipline and seclusion. To use a phrase of his own, he was done with trying to blow up trains and bridges, and was thinking of the Well at the World’s End. He wanted padlocks, as Hogarth said, and that was why he enlisted in the R.A.F. as a mechanic. It was a true instinct, for, unless after 1922 he had found mechanical work under discipline, the fissure might have become a gulf. I remember that at that time I came across some words written by the Sir Walter Raleigh of our day about the Elizabethan Raleigh, who was a collateral kinsman of Lawrence. “The irony of human affairs possesses his contemplation...The business of man on this earth seems trivial and insignificant against the vast desert of eternity.”
He had found refuge from the life of action in another kind of activity, for he had always an itch to write. He was contemplating the Seven Pillars as early as September 1917, and he had no sooner entered the Air Force than he planned a book on his experiences. “Writing has been my inmost self all my life,” he wrote in his last years, “and I can never put my full strength into anything else.” This interest brought him after the War into literary and artistic circles. In one way this was very good for him, since it gave him a host of new interests and much welcome companionship, but I fear that it also increased his tendency to introspection. What was an intellectual pastime to those cultivated ingenious friends of his might to him be deadly serious. But one thing it did — it made him write.
To me he seems to be a great writer who never quite wrote a great book. All his writing was a sort of purgation, a clearing from his mind of perilous stuff, and consequently the artistic purpose was often diverted by personal needs. The Seven Pillars is ostensibly the story of a campaign and it contains brilliant pieces of story-telling; but, as he said of it himself, it is “intensely sophisticated.” It is a shapeless book and it lacks the compulsion of the best narrative, for he is always wandering off down the corridors of his own mind. The style has its great moments, but it has also its lapses into adjectival rhetoric. The Mint is a tour de force, an astonishing achievement in exact photography; no rhetoric here, but everything hard, cold, metallic and cruel. His power of depicting squalor is uncanny, though there is nothing in the Mint, I think, which equals a later passage describing a troop-ship on its way to India; that fairly takes the breath away by its sheer brutality. In the Mint he weaves words and phrases from the gutter — les gros mots — into a most artful pattern. But I cannot think the book a success. It lacks relief and half-tones; also shape. In his own phrase it is a “case-book; not a work of art but a document.”
I never cared for his version of the Odyssey, for I did not share his view that that poem was Wardour Street. Lawrence had had the ideal experience for an Homeric scholar. “For years we were digging up a city of roughly the Odysseus period. I have handled the weapons, armour, utensils of those times, explored their houses, planned their cities. I have hunted wild boars and watched wild lions, sailed the Aegean (and sailed ships), bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men.” But he was not simple-souled enough to translate Homer, so he invented a pre-Raphaelite Homer whom he could translate. I believe that the Letters will rank as high as any of his books, because they show nearly all the facets of his character; and he never wrote better prose than his description of the bleak sea coast of Buchan.
His fame will endure, and as time goes on the world may understand him better; as he wrote of Thomas Hardy, “a generation will pass before the sky will be perfectly clear of clouds for his shining.” I last saw him at the end of March 1935, when on a push-bike he turned up at Elsfield one Sunday morning and spent a long day with me. He was on his way from Bridlington to his Dorsetshire cottage. He looked brilliantly well, with a weather-beaten skin, a clear eye, and a forearm like a blacksmith’s. His nerves, too, seemed to be completely at ease. He had no plans and described himself as like a leaf fallen from a tree in autumn, but he was looking forward avidly to leisure. He spoke of public affairs and his friends with perfect wisdom and charity. When he left I told my wife that at last I was happy about him and believed that he might become again the great man of action — might organise, perhaps, our imperfect national defences. She shook her head. “He is looking at the world as God must look at it,” she said, “and a man cannot do that and live.”...A few weeks later he was dead.
I am not a very tractable person or much of a hero-worshipper, but I could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world. I loved him for himself, and also because there seemed to be reborn in him all the lost friends of my youth. If genius be, in Emerson’s phrase, a “stellar and undiminishable something,” whose origin is a mystery and whose essence cannot be defined, then he was the only man of genius I have ever known.
CHAPTER IX — PARLIAMENT
After some six years of my ivory tower I grew restless. I rejoiced as much as ever in the prospect from it, but I came to feel that it should be a sanctuary to return to and not a heritage for continuous habitation. In addition to the work of my firm I held several directorships, but I did not find that business absorbed all my energies; while my writing, which gave me enormous pleasure, would have lost its charm for me unless kept as a relaxation. The fatigue of the War, moral and mental, was passing, and my bodily ailments could be kept within bounds. The truth is that in my late forties I experienced a ridiculous resurgence of youth. In Scotland I was as active as ever on the hill, and in my early morning rides in Oxfordshire I seemed to recapture the precise emotions of twenty-one. The very tunes I had hummed then were back on my lips. Reason told me that it was folly, that I was only Donne’s “aged childe and grey-headed Infant”; but I had not a single grey hair, and I was unfeignedly grateful for this return, even if illusory, of what had been a most happy youth.
That horrid possession, a social conscience, also began to prick me. My forecast of the grim consequences of the War had not been quite realised, but I believed that they were only retarded. I clung to a hope in the League of Nations and expounded it to many audiences, but my confidence was declining; I did not believe that such an institution could be effective straight from its birth, and I did not find the spirit abroad in the world which would encourage an organic growth. I had an ugly fear that its foundations were on sand, and that the first storm would overthrow it.
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When I examined my political faith I found that my strongest belief was in democracy according to my own definition. Democracy — the essential thing as distinguished from this or that democratic government — was primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament, and not an economic structure or a political machine. The testament involved certain basic beliefs — that the personality was sacrosanct, which was the meaning of liberty; that policy should be settled by free discussion; that normally a minority should be ready to yield to a majority, which in turn should respect a minority’s sacred things It seemed to me that democracy had been in the past too narrowly defined and had been identified illogically with some particular economic or political system such as laissez-faire or British parliamentaryism. I could imagine a democracy which economically was largely socialist and which had not our constitutional pattern.
Believing this, I had come to feel that the faith, if it were to continue, must set its house in order. Its essential value was not questioned, but its efficiency had declined, since it had been clogged by irrelevancies. There was a great deal of false democracy about, the kind of thing dreaded by the great American federalists like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Also I feared another war, for force is democracy’s eternal foe. Senor de Madariaga seemed to me to have written wise words: “a democracy that goes to war, if beaten, loses its liberty at the hands of its adversary; if victorious it loses its liberty at its own hands.” But most of all I was alarmed lest the creed should lose its glamour. It was too much taken for granted; and I thought that it might perish from the sheer ennui of its votaries. I could not guess that in a year or two it would become once again the oriflamme of a crusade, a cause to be fought for against odds.