Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine - The World War I ...

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA 25
lacked the surrender of soul to submit himself lowly
and reverently, even to the first poet. Of Matthew
Arnold's three requisites for translating Homersimplicity,
speed and nobility, all dominating qualities
of Lawrence's being—he failed somehow in presenting
the third, substituting as often as not some defiant and
most un-Homeric puckishness of his own, so that
Dr. Johnson's criticism of Pope's Iliad would be no less
applicable to Lawrence's Revised Version. The classical
Arab could become in a trice a street Arab. Nevertheless,
Lawrence's Odyssey possesses two outstanding merits.
It represents Lawrence as well as Homer, and it has by
hero-worship or the silken thread of snobbishness led to
Homer thousands that could never have faced the
original, or even the renderings of Pope, Chapman, or
Butcher and Lang; just as for countless Londoners the
"approach" to the Portland Vase, visible but neglected
for a century in the British Museum, was induced through
its auctioning at Christie's in the presence of the Prince
of Wales.
Lawrence sent me in Cyprus, inviting comment, the
typescript of The Mint, a remarkable and sometimes
brutal picture of his early days in the Air Force. The
narration was no less fine than the description, but the
contrast between the lives and the language of all ranks
was startling indeed. It seemed that they could only find
relief from the cloistered rigour of their existence by
expressing their emotions with an almost epileptic
obscenity. 1 I offered, by a necessary minimum of blue
pencil over a total of some thirty pages, to enable the
book to emerge from the steel safe in which I had to
guard it when not in use, into general reading: but
Lawrence said the language was the life, sooner than
falsify which he would rather not publish at all. (Part
1 Perhaps on the precept of Catullus :
" Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum, versiculis nihil necessc est."