The Latest from Colonel Lawrence
(Copyright 1927. by George Bernard ,Shaw.) evolt in the Desert. By T. E. Lawrence. (Jonathan Cape. 30s.)
ins abridgment of the famous Seven Pillars (itself an bridgment) contains as much of the immense original as nvone but an Imam has time to read. It is very handsomely ad readably printed, and has not a dull or empty sentence rum end to end. It contains sixteen reproductions of the tistration.s to the Seven Pillars, including a portrait of 'cisal, the superb drawing of Mr. D. G. Hogarth, and a logical one of the author by Mr. Augustus John a remark- Lie Chino-Johnian group by Mr. Cosmo Clark ; three por- mks by Mr. W. Roberts, which are triumphs of the draughts- anship that sprang from Cubism ; and seven of the portraits Arab chiefs which Mr. Eric Kennington went into the' Ned to make so consummately and humorously skilful in eir combination of the popular style of the pavement artist u disarm the chiefs) with his own very original and inde- ndent modernity : the Perfect Futurist turned Perfect .reever. The book does not, like the original, leave you dit a sense of having spent many toilsome and fateful years the desert struggling with Nature in her niOst unearthly mods, tormented by insomnia of the -conscience : indeed it is isitively breezy ; but that will not be a drawback to people 19. having no turn for " salutary self-torture," prefer a book at can be read in a week to one that makes a considerable rod on a lifetime.
.1mong the uncommon- objects of the -worldside, the most Li !mutton include persons who have reached the human it of literary genius, and young men who lrave packed into
forepart of their lives an adventure of epic bulk and ocasity. The odds against the occurrence of either must be 1,E-11 more than a million to one. But what figure can timate the rarity of the person who combines the two ? Yet c combination occurs in this amazing age of ours in which sit holding our breaths as we await wholesale destruction ' one another's hands, In Mr. Apsley Cherry-Garrard's ,rst Journey in the World we have a classic on Antarctic duration written by a young man who endured it at its Ickes'. And within ten years of that we have " Colonel srenee " (the inverted commas are his own) appearing first the war news from Arabia as a personage rather more ,rmible than Prester John, and presently emerging into lir definition as the author of one of the great histories of N. world, recording his own .conquests at an age at which lug company officers are hardly allowed to speak at the
table,. .
The fate of the man who has shot his bolt before he is and has no more worlds to conquer, may be compared Itirilisly with-that of the genius who dies unwept, unhonored, unsung, and is dug up and immortalized a century later. ihody will ever be able to decide which is the more enviable. it is mitigated if The hero has literary faculty as a second eina to his bow ; and Colonel Lawrence has this with a 11,geance. He can re-create any scene, any person, any .1" by aimple. description; with m vividness that leaves us more complete possession of it than could "the sensible true avouch of our own eyes." He packs his narrative h detail:that would escape nine hundred and ninety-nine
of
A thousand observers ; so that when he has made you The star/ 0I.Feises motley legions its plainly'as he -sit* it
himself, he has also left you with an exact knowledge of how an Arab mounts a camel and arranges his outlandish clothes for riding, and how he manages to carry a slave with him (when he has one) as a western might carry a portmanteau. As to the landscape painting, no padding novelist gravelled for lack of matter ever approached Col. Lawrence's feats in this art. And the descriptions are not interpolated : they are so woven into the texture of the narrative, that the sense of the track underfoot, the mottntains ahead and around, the vicissitudes of the weather, the night, the dawn, the sunset and the meridian, never leaves you for a moment.
You feel, too, the characters of the men about you : you hear the inflections of their voices, the changes in their expres- sion, all without an instant of reader's drudgery. There is a magical brilliance about it ; so that you sec it at once with the conviction of reality and with the enchantment of an opera. Auda after his roaring camel charge, with his horse killed, his field glass shattered, and six bullet holes through his clothes, unhurt and ascribing his escape (under Allah) to an eighteen- penny. Glasgow Koran which he had bought as a talisman for a hundred and twenty pounds, is at once a squalidly realistic Arab chieftain and a splendid leading baritone. The descrip- tion has the quality of orchestration. Lawrence's own famous mune charge, which was checked by his having the camel shot under hint, and ended, after a whole Arab tribe had thundered over him, in the irresistible anti-climax of the discovery that he had shot the camel , himself, makes a page that reams Tenny-son's Charge of the Light Brigade to minor poetry.
These blazing climaxes of adventure stand out from an Inferno of tormented bodies and uneasy souls in which one is glad to meet a rascal for the sake of laughing at him. The subjective side which gives Miltonic gloom and grandeur to certain chapters of The Seven Pillars, and of the seventy and seven pillars out of which they were hewn, plays no great part in this abridgment : Lawrence's troublesome conscience and agonizing soul give place here to his impish humor and his scandalous audacities ; but it will interest the latest French school of drama to know that their effect remains, and imparts an otherwise unattainable quality to the work, even though they are not expressed;
The political side of the revolt, important and extraordinary as it is, need not be dwelt on here : it is now public property ; and the value of the national service rendered by its author is patent to everybody, except, apparently, those whose function it is to give official recognition to such services. It is character- istic of the author and hero of this book that he has provided most effectively against the possibility of his ever making a farthing by it ; and it is equally characteristic of the powers that be, to assume that he is amply provided for by it. He is left in his usual ultra-scrupulous attitude ; but the nation can • hardly claim to have left itself in a generous one. For it is ' England's way to learn young men not to know better than their elders. Nothing could have been more irregular than the methods by which Lawrence disabled Turkey in the Great War by hurling an Arab revolt on her rear ; and to encourage and reward irregularity would be to set a bad example to the • young.
" -Bittrxxan -SHAD%
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