Lawrence of Arabia’s Secret Dispatches during
the Arab Revolt 1915–1919
Edited by
Fabrizio Bagatti
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by PEN & SWORD MILITARY
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Copyright © Fabrizio Bagatti, 2021
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Contents
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Maps
Historical Truth and Textual Truth (by Fabrizio Bagatti)
Lawrence of Arabia’s Secret Dispatches during the Arab Revolt, 1915–1919
1. L.WoolleytoForeignOffice(August 1914)
2. Syria.TheRawMaterial(25 February 1915)
3. LawrencetoCrosthwaite(12 September 1915)
4. LawrencetoCrosthwaite(14 September 1915)
5. LawrencetoCrosthwaite(11 November 1915)
6. LawrencetoCrosthwaite(11 November 1915)
7. ThePoliticsofMecca(End of January 1916)
8. CablegramfromChiefDirectionMilitaryIntelligence,London toIntrusiveCairo(29 March 1916)
9. LawrencetoIntrusive(8 April 1916)
10. LawrencetoIntrusive(9 April 1916)
11. TheconquestofSyria.Ifcomplete(First half 1916)
12. TelegramfromViceroy,Foreign(28 May 1916)
13. Intelligence.I.E.F.‘D’(End of May 1916)
14. [ArabBureauSummarieswilldeal] (6 June 1916)
15. Mesopotamia(14 June 1916)
16. DraftlettertotheSherif(23 June 1916)
17. [TheblockadeontheHejazcoast] (9 July 1916)
18. NotebyCairoonArabLabour(5 September 1916)
19. HejazNarrative(5 September 1916)
20. Note(16 October 1916)
21. WilsontoGray(16 October 1916)
22. LawrencetoParker(24 October 1916)
23. TranslationoftheletterfromSherifFeisal(26 October 1916)
24. WilsontoEdwardGrey(25 October 1916)
25. TheSherifs(27 October 1916)
26. Feisul’sOperations(30 October 1916)
27. HejazAdministration(3 November 1916)
28. MilitaryNotes(3 November 1916)
29. WhenSherifFeisulwasinDamascus(3 November 1916)
30. Route(3 November 1916)
31. ReportbySykes(8 November 1916)
32. Note(17 November 1916)
33. NationalismamongtheTribesmen(17 November 1916)
34. TheTurkishHejazForcesandTheirReinforcement(26 November 1916)
35. ReportbySykes(29 November 1916)
36. LawrencetoHogarth(2 December 1916)
37. LawrencetoHogarth(5 December 1916)
38. LawrencetoWilson(6 December 1916)
39. [LeftYenboonSaturdayDec.2] (After 6 December 1916)
40. LawrencetoWilson(7 December 1916)
41. Lawrence(viaWilson)toArabBureau(7 December 1916)
42. SherifFeisal’sArmy(11 December 1916)
43. LawrencetoDirectorArabBureau(Around 11 December 1916)
44. Lawrence(viaWilson)toArabBureau(Around 12 December 1916)
45. LawrencetoCornwallis(19 December 1916)
46. LawrencetoWilson(19 December 1916)
47. LawrencetoWilson(25 December 1916)
48. LawrencetoWilson(25 December 1916)
49. LawrencetoCornwallis(27 December 1916)
50. LawrencetoR.Fitzmaurice(2 January 1917)
51. IntelligenceReport(4 January 1917)
52. LawrencetoWilson(5 January 1917)
53. LawrencetoDirectorArabBureau(7 January 1917)
54. RouteNotes(8 January 1917)
55. LawrencetoWilson(8 January 1917)
56. [Ameetingwasheld] (12 January 1917)
57. LawrencetoFitzmaurice(First part of January 1917)
58. LawrencetoFitzmaurice(Beginning of January 1917)
59. UmLejitoWeij(6 February 1917)
60. TheArabAdvanceOnWejh(6 February 1917)
61. TheSherifialNorthernArmy(6 February 1917)
62. Feisal’sOrderofMarch(6 February 1917)
63. NejdNews(6 February 1917)
64. [Localsituation] (11 February 1917)
65. [WeijFeb.12AsiibnAtiyehcamein] (After 18 February 1917)
66. LawrencetoClayton(28 February 1917)
67. LawrencetoFitzmaurice(5 March 1917)
68. Hejaz:ThePresentSituation(11 April 1917)
69. LawrencetoWilson(11 April 1917)
70. LawrencetoWilson(24 April 1917)
71. LawrencetoWilson(24 April 1917)
72. LawrencetoWilson(24 April 1917)
73. LawrencetoWilson(24 April 1917)
74. LawrencetoWilson(26 April 1917)
75. WilsontoClayton(28 May 1917)
76. ReportbyClayton(29 May 1917)
77. [NotebyCornwallis] (9 July 1917)
78. LawrencetoClayton(10 July 1917)
79. ClaytontoWarOffice(11 July 1917)
80. ClaytontoDirectorofMilitaryIntelligence(11 July 1917)
81. WilsontoArabBureau(13 July 1917)
82. WingatetoLawrence(14 July 1917)
83. TheHoweitatandTheirChiefs(24 July 1917)
84. [AtaninterviewonJuly27th] (28 July 1917)
85. LawrencetoWilson(28 July 1917)
86. TheSherif’sReligiousViews(29 July 1917)
87. [OnJuly29ththeSherif] (30 July 1917)
88. [TheSherifandHisNeighbours] (End of July, 1917)
89. TheOccupationofAkaba(First days of August 1917)
90. Twenty-sevenarticles(Before 20 August 1917)
91. LawrencetoClayton(After 21 August 1917)
92. LawrencetoClayton(27 August 1917)
93. ReportbyClayton(7 September 1917)
94. LawrencetoClayton(23 September 1917)
95. LawrencetoClayton(10 October 1917)
96. [NotesbyCornwallis] (21 October 1917)
97. ClaytontoJoyce(24 October 1917)
98. JoycetoClayton(4 November 1917)
99. ARaid(After 11 November 1917)
100. [NotesbyCornwallis] (27 November 1917)
101. AbdullahandtheAkhwan(After 4 December 1917)
102. AkhwanConverts(After 4 December 1917)
103. ArabBureautoG.S.I.(15 December 1917)
104. SyrianCross-Currents(Around 8 January 1918)
105. LawrencetoClayton(22 January 1918)
106. Tafileh(26 January 1918)
107. Arabia,North-West.Intelligence.NorthernOperations(11 February 1918)
108. LawrencetoClayton(12 February 1918)
109. LawrencetoAkaba(18 February 1918)
110. NotesonKasrElAzrakandthecountrylyingbetweenthat placeandtheHejazRailway(After 12 March 1918)
111. WingatetoKingHusein(18 June 1918)
112. TribalpoliticsinFeisal’sarea(24 June 1918)
113. Notes.Khurma(9 July 1918)
114. LawrencetoAkaba(30 August 1918)
115. Notes(October 1918)
116. [Thedestructionofthe4thArmy] (22 October 1918)
117. NotebyWilson(8 December 1918)
118. NotesonCamel-Journeys(24 May 1919)
Bibliography
HISTORICAL TRUTH AND TEXTUAL TRUTH: T.E. LAWRENCE AND THE ARAB REVOLT
BY FABRIZIO BAGATTI
Among all historical sources relating to the military history of the First World War, the reports and dispatches of Thomas Edward Lawrence represent a wealth of material of exceptional importance. Among the various reasons that make the reading of the many unpublished texts I have collected in this volume fundamental, there is the need to clarify the role and importance of Lawrence in the Arab Revolt during the First World War. The myth of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, after 1919, had already established itself all over the world. But, after Lowell Thomas’s more sensational than scientific biographical work, a very large group of biographers and scholars have engaged in an attempt to debunk Lawrence and even discredit him altogether. As Arnold Toynbee wrote many years ago, ‘For a number of years past, “debunking” T.E. Lawrence has been a fashionable literary exercise. By now there is a row of books on this theme.’1 The confusion created by Lawrence’s detractors has ended up generating a controversy that people struggle with even today. Not surprisingly, those who try to attack or discredit him cite Lawrence’s reports as little as possible, preferring to casually gloss over them, as if they did not exist. Yet the truth of the story lies precisely in those (and in these) pages. Lawrence’s reports were official documents: they were read with scrupulous attention, evaluated, cross-verified with other sources and, as will be seen, published after a political-diplomatic
review process that often excluded entire sections from the printed version. It is precisely from those texts that we should start, because the original texts are the only true source. History is history and the military reports of an officer of the British Empire were and remain very important sources that we should take very seriously.
From a more markedly literary point of view, it is easy to realize that in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (or in Revolt in the Desert)2 Lawrence borrows entire pages of his reports and uses them for the solid ‘skeleton’ of facts – History – into which he grafts the ‘flesh’ –Literature – of his own reflections.
In September 1939, Lawrence’s brother Arnold collected in a limited-edition volume entitled Secret Dispatches from Arabia the texts written by Thomas Edward and published in the pages of the Arab Bulletin.3 Except for those select few who had been able to read the original copies of the Bulletin, this was the first time that texts of military reports (and related writings) covering the period of the Arab Revolt were circulated. The edition had been authorized by the British Foreign Office which, at that date, still considered both Lawrence’s materials and the originals of the Arab Bulletin from which they were taken confidential.
For his collection, Arnold had relied on the copies of the Bulletinin Lawrence’s possession and recovered after his tragic death in May 1935. As Arnold specified in his Preface, to the signed (or initialled) texts of certain attribution, he was able to add a few other articles that Lawrence himself had indicated as his own in copies of the Bulletin. Together with them appeared, for the first time, the text Syrian Cross-Currents,4 which was not published in the Bulletin but was part of that series of collateral publications that originated from the activity of the Arab Bureau – the intelligence department established in Cairo in 1916 – and was printed for a very limited circulation only among the senior officers of the British Army and key figures in British diplomacy and politics. After the enormous success of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Revolt in the Desert, this was the first occasion in which Lawrence’s military texts could be examined, so to speak, ‘from the inside’; that is, without the filter of a
subsequent editing (narrative or otherwise) and their possible reelaboration. For a long time, SecretDispatchesfrom Arabia was the only text that could be referred to for historical and documentary research on the sources of the Lawrence of Arabia myth. The slow release of the state secret, in fact, pre-cluded access to any other kind of archive source and, at the same time, the authority of the curatorship guaranteed both the correctness of the edition and its importance. Consider the fact that several years after 1939, the volume was re-published in 1991, edited by Malcolm Brown, who has also enriched it with other writings by Lawrence from newspapers and periodicals.5
It therefore seemed that nothing else remained to be done as regards to the 1915–18 period in which Lawrence had been engaged in the exploits which culminated in the defeat of the Turkish army and the conquest of Damascus. However, after the obligatory years of secrecy, archival materials began to be available on a large scale, even if only for scholars. A facsimile reprint of the ArabBulletinwas then produced in 1986 (albeit at a prohibitive price)6 and, meanwhile, numerous First World War historians as well as Lawrence’s biographers had been able to consult the original documents preserved by the Foreign Office (now an integral part of The National Archives).7
The question that then arises is: does the ArabBulletincontain, in print, all of Lawrence’s original reports? Are we actually reading what Lawrence wrote in his dispatches? A subsequent thorough verification of the original archive materials relating to the war in Arabia ended up radically changing the scenario.
When, on 15 December 1914, Lawrence arrived in Cairo he was a 26-year-old officer who very few people knew but who was by no means green. Trained in the university environment at Oxford, he soon dedicated himself to historical-archaeological studies and entered the orbit of Leonard Woolley, the most renowned British archaeologist of the time, a top advisor to the prestigious Ashmolean
Museum in London and in charge, since 1907, of excavations and research in Nubia and in the Mesopotamian area. While still a student, Lawrence completed a field survey, on a research trip: in the summer of 1909 he travelled, alone and on foot, 1,600km through the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in a vast area that includes northern Mesopotamia and the coasts of Palestine and Lebanon. He learned Turkish and Arabic, albeit superficially as yet, and returned home with a significant wealth of discoveries and ideas. In 1909 Lawrence was therefore already a specialist, before he’d even graduated. Woolley could not fail to notice this, and in 1910 invited the budding young archaeologist to be part of the excavation expedition to Carchemish (on the border between present-day Turkey and Syria) where traces and archaeological treasures of the ancient Hittite world were sought. The excavation campaign had been devised by D.G. Hogarth, the other great British archaeologist, on behalf of the British Museum in London. Lawrence took part with a grant of £100 a year.
But this was not just about archaeology. In these territories of the Ottoman Empire there were also archaeological expeditions from Germany: rubbing shoulders, future enemies shared cultural interests that partly masked the need to gather information or more marked economic interests. The Ottoman Empire had recently built a very long railway which, in essence, connected Mecca with Istanbul; it was built with the help of Germany, but it was Great Britain that partly supplied the fuel for the locomotives. Turkey, Germany and Britain had also reached an agreement in the early years of the twentieth century on the trading of oil from the Mesopotamian area, even before that new resource became a subject of contention in the history of relations between Europe and the Near East.8
The 1910 archaeological campaign in Carchemish ended in June 1911, by which time Lawrence had become skilled in handling some Arabic dialects and Turkish. In 1911, in another trip that proved his powers of endurance, Lawrence undertook a second journey on foot (this time of 1,300km) across the territory on the border between present-day Turkey and Syria.9
The hints of the future war were already perceptible, and the attention of the British moved towards the Suez Canal. In January 1914, Hogarth and Lawrence carried out an excavation campaign in the Negev desert but the nature of that expedition was clear to both of them. In a letter to his family, Lawrence wrote in 1914: ‘We are obviously only meant as red herrings, to give an archaeological colour to a political job.’10 On that occasion, he went as far as Petra and Akaba. As the war drew closer, Hogarth and Lawrence published a detailed study of the Negev11 which also contained useful information for those who need to find out about the whole area. The First World War broke out in August 1914, when Lawrence was in London. He did not enlist immediately but was already in the orbit, thanks to Woolley and Hogarth, of the British Government’s intelligence services: people like the three archaeologists returning from Arabia became immediately valuable. Lawrence also knew how to draw (as a good archaeologist does) and cartography became the first part of his military service.
Perhaps the most ‘tangled’ point of the whole zone, at the outbreak of the war, was precisely this ‘Arabia’ that the British perceived to be a weak point of the Ottoman Empire but which they still had no idea how to exploit. Pressured by the conflict and needing to ease pressure on the Suez Canal, Britain planned to hit the Ottoman Empire by attacking from the Mediterranean. In February 1915, the British Empire, with the support of France and the consent of Russia, began the so-called Gallipoli campaign. The effort aimed to occupy the Dardanelles Strait, ensuring control by sea and, at the same time, to establish a foothold on the Ottoman Empire’s territory. Operations lasted until January 1916, when the Allies, faced with unexpected resistance by the Turks, had to reembark, leaving the area after suffering significant losses. Meanwhile, in December 1915, Britain planned to attack from Mesopotamia as well, thus devising a kind of pincer movement to strike the Ottoman Empire from the west and east. The operations in Mesopotamia, which began with the landing at the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, soon became bogged down in the interior. The
British army was bottled up in Kut where the troops, from December 1915 to April 1916, engaged in a desperate resistance until the inevitable surrender.
As these events unfolded, the British Foreign Office began to think about the question of Arabia from a different perspective. In agreement with the Ministry of War, it realized that it was necessary to devise a different strategy to attack the Ottoman Empire in its own territory. The Secretary of State for War was then Field Marshal Lord Herbert Kitchener and the Information Service of the Ministry of War also was answerable to him. Kitchener had been a commander in the Sudan and during the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa; he had also been Commander-in-Chief in India. It is worth pointing out that in 1874, at the age of 24, Kitchener had explored the so-called Holy Land for cartographic reasons, paid for by the Palestine Exploration Fund itself, which would later subsidize Hogarth and Lawrence. Perhaps he was not a fan of Arabia like the two archaeologists who found themselves in that area many years later, but certainly he was familiar with Arabia and the Arabs. In the first instance, Kitchener reorganized the so-called Egyptian Expeditionary Force and, at the same time, chose an officer who was given the task of working out a strategy for Arabia, entrusting to him the Information Service which was being set up in Egypt. That officer was Gilbert Falkingham Clayton, Director of Intelligence for the British forces from 1914 to 1916 and then Chief Political Officer for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force until the end of the war. In addition to Clayton there was another officer, Mark Sykes, a figure destined to become fundamental, as we will see, in the entire theatre of operations. Kitchener, Clayton and Sykes shared similar ideas about the East. Unfortunately Kitchener and Sykes both died before they could write their historical accounts of the period.12
Throughout this time, Lieutenant Lawrence was in Cairo dealing with cartography and intelligence. He was part of a group that also included Hogarth, Kinahan Cornwallis, Herbert Garland, George Ambrose Lloyd, George Stewart Symes, Philip Graves, Gertrude Bell, Aubrey Herbert and William Ormsby-Gore (names that recur
throughout the pages of this volume). Also, in December 1915 Sykes began to think that such a group ought to form a special office in charge of countering the Turkish-German propaganda trying to rouse the Arabs in a jihad against the Allies.13 Sykes’ project included counter-propaganda activities but also the collection of political and military information throughout the zone, in order to bring the Arabs closer to Great Britain. It may have seemed a logical and simple idea, but it was not so: contrary to what one might expect, the opponents of the initiative were not only the Turks and the Germans. The Government of India didn’t want to delegate its activities to others in an area stretching from Mesopotamia to Suez. This was partly because it was concerned that a coalition of the Arab forces would cause upheaval among the Muslims of India. The fear of a jihadand the danger of stirring up a hornet’s nest in India prevailed over the need to coordinate military efforts. There was also the issue of prestige within the imperial organization. The Government of India regarded affairs in Arabia as their business – why should Cairo have anything to do with them?
While Lawrence collected news and information and drew and corrected his maps, Mark Sykes began a long tug-of-war with India to create a stable organization that was to be called the Arab Bureau. Meetings and debates on the subject began in early December 1915 and ended on 7 January 1916, when the Committee of Imperial Defence published a document sanctioning the birth of the Arab Bureau, to be based in Cairo. The purposes of the Office were clearly indicated: ‘[. . .] harmonise British political activity in the Near East [and to] keep the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Committee of Defence, the War Office, the Admiralty, and Government of India simultaneously informed of the general tendency of Germano-Turkish Policy.’14
This was the first great opportunity that Lawrence, along with other Cairo officials interested in the fate of Arabia, had been waiting for. In a way, it could be said that Sykes created a pond in which the fish Lawrence could then swim at ease. Once the Arab Bureau was established, Lawrence began to pester the Cartographic Service in
order to escape his daily tasks, demonstrating, based on his own direct experience, that no one knew the area as well as he did.15 Cartography grew to be a suffocating job and he had other and wider horizons in mind: he put forward a barrage of ideas and projects. At that moment the critical issue was Mesopotamia and the agonizing situation of the British army at Kut. Lawrence (with Hogarth) tried to push for a British landing at Alexandretta, on the coast of Lebanon, which seemed more suitable than anywhere else. He wrote to Hogarth on several occasions and, in the meantime, wrote down pages and pages of notes on Syria which would be published only much later but revealed, already in 1915 and January 1916, showing an amazing maturity in political-military analysis.16
In the first part of 1915 Lawrence therefore still had the road to Mesopotamia on his mind and focused on that, knowing full well that he was one of the few who knew the whole area thoroughly both historically-politically and geographically. Such qualities did not go unnoticed. In a desperate attempt to break the siege of Kut and free British soldiers from certain captivity, Great Britain decided in April to send, in strict secrecy, three officers to bribe the Turkish commanding general: they were free to spend up to £2 million, a mind-boggling figure (and not just for the time). One of the three officers was Thomas Edward Lawrence, who went to Kut for the strange mission but, at the same time, to test the strength of the secret Arab associations that could trigger a revolt in Syria in the rear of the Ottoman Empire. Regardless, the mission failed: the Turkish commander refused the offer and Great Britain suffered the humiliation of the surrender and imprisonment of tens of thousands of men. Still, the Army acknowledged that Lawrence had performed the tasks assigned to him well. Back in Cairo, Lawrence began to weave his own plot as an informer and continued to write reports and reflections centred on Syria and its eventual conquest.17 From a tactical point of view his ideas were already very clear and, in essence, represented in a nutshell the future military history of the Arab Revolt:
The only way to rid ourselves of this (hostilities in the Yemen being impossible) is by cutting the Hedjaz line. The soldiers are paid and supplied with arms etc. along this line, and its existence is always a present threat of reinforcements. By cutting it we destroy the Hedjaz civil government which like all Turkish local administrations is excessively centralised: and we resolve the Hedjaz army into its elements: an assembly of peaceful Syrian peasants and incompetent akin officers. The Arab chiefs in the Hedjaz would then make their own hay: and for our pilgrims sake one can only hope, quickly.18
Strategically, however, the question remained: who should achieve the tactical objectives? It is already clear from the texts that, in his mind, the idea of a British military intervention in Mesopotamia or elsewhere was beginning to be replaced by that of a revolt of the Arabs that opposed the Turks from within the Ottoman Empire and confronted them on their territory, weapons in hand. What it took, Lawrence began to think, was a general Arab Revolt that spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and that this revolt should have leaders, means and strategies.
Meanwhile, Sykes, to put a stop to the ‘perfect babel of conflicting suggestions and views’19 afflicting the British commanders, among other things, favoured the birth of what immediately became the ‘Bible’ of the Information Service in Cairo and of the whole area between Egypt and Syria: the Arab Bulletin. Conceived as a reasoned anthology of reports and news (including a section dedicated to enemy propaganda), the Arab Bulletin secretly circulated only at the highest levels and in a very limited number of copies. The first issue was published on 6 June 1916 and Lawrence signed it as Director. The ‘premise’ was lapidary in the indication of the editorial programme: ‘Arab Bureau Summaries will deal with any political events in Turkey or elsewhere that affect the Arab movement.’20
Lawrence signed only Numbers 1 and 9 as the Director; the task would be carried out by others (Hogarth and Cornwallis above all)
until the last issue, published on 30 August 1918.21 However, it is evident that, of what was published there, Lawrence himself was both the author (signing with his unmistakable initials ‘T.E.L.’) and an inexhaustible supplier of first-hand news and materials.
We have therefore arrived at the texts written by Lawrence for the Arab Bulletin. As indicated in the first issue, this was a printed publication of military reports. This choice was quite innovative: in general, up until that time reports were compiled for obvious reasons of service and circulated within the hierarchy in such a way that the information allowed army cadres to make informed choices. With the publication of the Arab Bulletin, for the first time military intelligence reports were transformed into a fortnightly magazine. This would include a careful selection of all the reports and offer edited reading, not so much for ‘external’ propaganda purposes, but to act as ‘internal’ information limited only to top level military and diplomatic cadres.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the military question, what is relevant from the point of view of the texts is that the publication took place after editorial work carried out by both Arab Bureau and Bulletin management. Reports are rarely published in their original form, word for word; those parts deemed unpublishable for reasons of relevance or expediency are modified. Reports are often summarized in a few lines or condensed into paragraphs that summarize texts of much greater length. Furthermore, the chronological sequence undergoes some significant changes. From the moment of writing to that of the printed publication in the Arab Bulletin, considerable periods of time can go by: in part this is due to the objective difficulties of communications, but it also happens because the editorial management may believe that a given report or message is not immediately suitable for publication and, therefore, its printing can be postponed. The most striking example of these ‘delays’ is precisely the text that is published in this volume as No. 2. Written by Lawrence at the end of February 1915 (as confirmed by the same management of the Arab Bulletin), it was only printed in March 1917. Furthermore, it may also happen that a
given report or message is not published and remains in the military archive without proof of its existence. Each piece of information must then be verified through cross-comparisons, which extends dates of publication.
There are therefore two kinds of problems: that of fidelity to the originals and that of the correct timeline. These problems are also accompanied by the research of what, written by Lawrence, has not been published in the pages of the Arab Bulletin. Then, another element needs to be added. The publishers of the Arab Bulletin produced, in addition to the latter, a series of supplementary issues that focused on topics and themes that needed to be treated separately and more extensively. These issues were not physically incorporated in the Bulletinbut circulated independently, with a very limited printing and utmost secrecy, in around twenty copies. Here, too, Lawrence had the opportunity to contribute very important writings.22
In this edition of Lawrence’s reports and various dispatches I have tried, for the first time, to rearrange the material, taking into account all these factors. In 1939, when the edition edited by Arnold Lawrence was published, this work would not have been possible because the confidentiality of the documents meant that the Arab Bulletinwas the only printed source that could be referred to. Since then, as state secrets have gradually been released, it has become possible to follow the story of T.E. Lawrence’s texts along two axes of investigation. The first was the textual one, which required addressing two questions: precisely how many were Lawrence’s ‘secret dispatches’ and how many of them were published at the time? And then: what differences exist between the published texts and their original versions? The second axis is the temporal one: what is the correct chronological location of those writings based on the comparison between the originals and the printed publication?
Using this methodology, Lawrence’s entire writings during the First World War take on a completely different aspect from what has been read so far in the various editions of the reports to which I referred at the beginning of this introduction.
Still, in terms of methodology, I have included in this anthology the texts by Lawrence of which the originals, preserved by the Foreign Office (which later became part of the materials kept at The National Archives in London), can be consulted. I have avoided inserting the most markedly epistolary material. Lawrence’s letters are collected in several exhaustive editions and can easily be referred to in order throw further light on the documents presented here.23 Some exceptions to this decision were imposed for the purpose of a better understanding of the unfolding of events or because, even in the editions of the letters, omissions had been made that were worth amending. On the other hand, the telegrams, letters and annotations of the wartime period that I have included are different because, with good reason, they are as significant as those that were officially defined as ‘reports’. See, for example, the materials directed to Captain Fitzmaurice and the notes dictated to Edward Robinson, hitherto entirely unpublished.
Consulting the materials available at The National Archives, I found that not only some reports or dispatches by Lawrence had never been published in the Arab Bulletin, but that the preliminary drafting work had often heavily modified the original versions. The reader will have no difficulty in noticing this. Let’s take just one example, short but very significant. In his famous report describing Hussein’s family and children, Lawrence talks about Feisal, concluding in this way in the holograph manuscript:
[. . .] full of dreams and the capacity to realise them, with keen personal insight, and a very efficient.
At the time of going to press in the Bulletinthe conclusion changes to:
[. . .] full of dreams and the capacity to realise them, with keen personal insight, and a very efficient man of business [my italics].
The reason for this addition (missed by almost all commentators) is unclear to us today, but the original demonstrates how Lawrence certainly did not write of Feisal as a ‘man of business’! On the topic, report published in this volume as No. 57 ought to be taken in consideration, for Lawrence wrote about Feisal: ‘Clever, wellinformed, pro-foreign: excitable, proud, ambitious; very pleasant in manner’, and ‘man of business’ about Abd el Kader el Abdu only.
The editorial intervention in the texts appears gradually less intrusive the more Lawrence’s military career and his exploits in the field acquire weight and relevance during the course of the war in Arabia. Probably this also responded to a hierarchical evaluation: the texts of a young and unknown second lieutenant or lieutenant were more likely to be edited. The situation changes as Lawrence rises in rank until he reaches that of lieutenant colonel and, in parallel, receives the highest honours assigned to him for the military actions successfully carried out.24
But Lawrence was also, if this expression can be used, a writer on loan to the military and it is precisely as an author that I would also like to consider him. Recovering the original versions of his writings is necessary for good philological practice. It is also important for literary history to respect such exceptional writer and in the process to shed fresh light on his complex biography.
As I have partly mentioned, 1916 represents for Lawrence the key moment in his participation in the First World War. From tedious cartographic matters, he moved on to play an increasingly active role in the operations of the military intelligence services. His work in the Arab Bureau acquired greater definition and greater weight. However, as soon as the first issue of the Bulletin came out, Mark Sykes began to publish a periodical of his own: the ArabianReport. It was nothing more than a further anthology of the texts printed by the Arab Bureau in Cairo to which he added new material on the basis of his personal evaluations and choices. Moreover, Sykes often included information that, apparently, not even the Arab Bureau could have known and that derived from his intense politicaldiplomatic activity, conducted behind the scenes of the Arab Revolt.
The Arabian Report comprised two distinct sections: the first was entitled Appreciation of Attached Arabian Report and consisted of the reflections and analyses that Sykes was able to make by reading every single issue of the Bulletin; the second was entitled Arabian Report and contained both anthologized material from the Bulletin and, at times, additional documents inserted by Sykes himself. In essence, therefore, the Arabian Report duplicated the Arab Bulletin and commented on it from a more markedly political and diplomatic point of view.
What reason was there for such a project, and why did Sykes take up such a burden?25 The answer is that in 1916 the situation in Arabia had changed radically. In the first place, Britain had come to the painful realization that, with only its own army, it would be difficult to defeat Turkey (as Gallipoli and Kut had shown). Secondly, the search for a way to bring the Arabs as a military force into the war had begun. This was not an easy task, because the Arabs did not have a real army (not one the Allies would have liked) and did not even have a supreme leader to guide them in battle. Until that moment, Turkey had secured the support of the Arabs mainly by buying them off and blackmailing them in various ways: using military threats, for example, or by raising religious issues that identified the Allies as Christians and, therefore, enemies of Islam which Turkey wanted to defend. Furthermore, the Arabs were divided into opposing tribal factions: the Turks took care to ‘divide and rule’ in order to better control them as a whole. The British were well aware of this situation and had been looking for a way to intervene since 1914. Once the situation was assessed, the figure of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi (1854– 1931), who since 1908 had been Sharif and Emir of Mecca and therefore the custodian (by genealogy) of the Holy Places of all Islam, became increasingly important. His religious and political rank made him the most prominent figure in the whole of Arabia even though other Arab leaders opposed him on the basis of territorial claims or dogmatic conflicts. However, Arab intellectuals and politicians who, at home or abroad, supported the
cause of Arab independence and the creation of an Arab national state looked towards Hussein.
On 1 November 1914, following previous approach manoeuvres and in the new scenario drawn at the outbreak of the First World War, Kitchener wrote a telegram to Sharif Hussein promising him that ‘[. . .] Great Britain will guarantee the independence, rights and privileges of the Sherifate against all external foreign aggression, in particular that of the Ottomans’.26
The seed was sown, and Hussein hung in the balance for a long time between a possible alliance with the British and a forced submission to the Turks. From July 1915 to 10 March 1916, a substantial correspondence took place between Hussein and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner for Egypt: after protracted negotiations, it was finally agreed that Great Britain would support the Arabs’ requests for independence, if the latter supported the British against the Ottoman Empire. Mark Sykes was present throughout these negotiations and personally designed the official flag of the revolt for Hussein. Allocations of money, arms supplies and logistical support were available. The organization of the borders of a future Arab state would be established after the end of the war. To give substance to all this, Hussein would have to unleash an Arab Revolt that put him in the field against the Turks. The Revolt officially broke out on 10 June 1916. Four days earlier the first issue of the Arab Bulletin had been released which explains clearly why Sykes regarded it as so important and took it upon himself to comment on it promptly.
What Hussein did not know in June 1916 was that on 3 January of the same year, just six months earlier, Great Britain had entered into a pact with France (and with the consent of Russia and Italy) to divide the entire zone of the Near East. The pact goes down in history as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, after the two officials who had conducted the negotiations. The Agreement did not include the promise of an independent Arab state. Basically, Mesopotamia was being split in two. The northern part would go to France, which would control Syria and Lebanon; the southern part would go to
Great Britain, with access to the Persian Gulf and control of Baghdad. Russia secured a strip of territory to act as a buffer with France in the north; some small territories on the shores and between the islands of the Red Sea went to Italy. Arabia would have its independence limited roughly to the current territory of Saudi Arabia, with the heavy shadow of a British protectorate. This is not the place to anatomize the Sykes-Picot Agreement and its subsequent amendments at the end of the First World War; there is no need to dwell on the details here.27
Suffice to note, two important factors concern us here. First, T.E. Lawrence did not know in 1916 of the existence of the Agreement28 and the outbreak of the Arab Revolt on 10 June presented itself to him as a great opportunity. Now there was a revolt and a leader, at least on the political-religious level. Alexandretta and the plans for landings in Syria were outdated and there was a new strategy which, in essence, would be the one that Lawrence had outlined in May and which has already been described above.
Another factor was the French involvement which was inconvenient for British and Arabs. On the strength of the SykesPicot Agreement, the French government requested that a representative of its officers be sent to support Great Britain in its relations with the Arabs. Colonel Brémond was sent; readers of this anthology will soon get to know him. Suffice it to say here that the French wanted the Arab Revolt to be limited in its scope. Allowing the Arabs north to Damascus and Aleppo meant that after the war the French would have to face them in Syria. They approved of the Revolt, but wanted to restrict it to the Hejaz – the west coast of the Arabian peninsula – where the British would deal with Hussein. As the Revolt gained momentum, conquering Akaba first and then Damascus, French involvement became extremely awkward for the British. Lawrence, after meeting Brémond, immediately understood who and what he had to deal with and tried to get rid of him. The unpublished report sent by letter on 8 January 1917 is clear proof of this.29 Sykes took longer to understand the problem (or perhaps become concerned about it), but when he did, his reaction was
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which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete masterwork, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism. Every one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness of Hellenistic and of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass machineproduction, “Progress” and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the historical surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs, but deepest and last things are in question here—the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well.[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.
Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture and Civilization—the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts.” That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist—in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization—whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.
To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast form-world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy. They could carry it and actualize it without “knowing” it. They
had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire. Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a “natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an “order of society” which not only can be but must be altered[437]—then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culturelandscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.
Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them.[438] Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident—hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice—or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian” or “rational” criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis— sceptical, practical, artificial—alone represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The “People” means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic—this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence[439]—and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old “estates”—gentry and priesthood—he is the only organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for him either in Stoic or in Socialistic thought.
Thus the Faust of the First Part of the tragedy, the passionate student of solitary midnights, is logically the progenitor of the Faust
of the Second Part and the new century, the type of a purely practical, far-seeing, outward-directed activity. In him Goethe presaged, psychologically, the whole future of West Europe. He is Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul. As the Faust of the beginning is to the Faust of the end, so the Hellene of Pericles’s age is to the Roman of Cæsar’s.
VSo long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to live straight before him naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilizationmorale that which he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means, the other is a function of logic. As late as Plato and as late as Kant ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts, or the rounding-off of a metaphysical system, something that at bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no longer so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer
govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, up to the Yoga and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems in which formal ethics occupied a very modest place. But now it became “moral philosophy” with a metaphysic as background. The enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.
To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s. This exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization. Every ethic is a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or practical, grand or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish, therefore, between a tragic and a plebeian morale. The tragic morale of a Culture knows and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws therefrom the feeling of pride that enables the burden to be borne. So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and German Catholicism. It is heard in the stern battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it echoes still in the Marseillaise. The plebeian morale of Epicurus and the Stoa, the sects of Buddha’s day and the 19th Century made rather battle-plans for the outmanœuvring of destiny. What Æschylus did in grand, the Stoa did in little—no more fullness, but poverty, coldness and emptiness of life—and all that Roman bigness achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void. And there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great Baroque masters—Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe—the manly will to inward mastery of natural things that it felt to be far below itself, and modern Europe’s state-provision, humanity-ideals, worldpeace, “greatest happiness of greatest number,” etc., which express the will to an outward clearance from the path of things that are on the same level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the will-to-power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable, but the fact remains that material bigness is not the same as metaphysical majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks that which former men had called God. The Faustian world-feeling of deed, which had been efficient in every great man from the Hohenstaufen and the Welf to Frederick the Great, Goethe and
Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a philosophy of work Whether such a philosophy attacks or defends work does not affect its inward value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the Civilization-idea of Work are related as the attitude of Æschylus’s Prometheus and that of Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other lolls. It was deeds of science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton performed, but it is scientific work that the modern physicist carries out. And, in spite of all the great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it is the plebeian morale of every day and “sound human reason” that is the basis of all our expositions and discussions of Life.
VI
Each Culture, further, has its own mode of spiritual extinction, which is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And hence Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically equivalent as end-phenomena.
For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always been misunderstood. It was not a Puritan movement like, for instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the Apostle Paul,[440] but a final and purely practical world-sentiment of tired megalopolitans who had a closed-off Culture behind them and no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent to and “contemporary” with Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-philosopher his first adherents.[441] Its roots lay in the rationalist-atheistic Sankhya philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly accepts, just as the social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the Sensualism and Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its superficial exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and the Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the sense of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the
matter Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their original forms—and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging to later stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.
Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and the Western “Socialist” of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies. The teacher Nagasena tells King Milinda[442] that the parts of the car in which he is journeying are not the car itself, that “car” is only a word and that so also is the soul. The spiritual elements are designated Skandhas, groups, and are impermanent. Here is complete correspondence with the ideas of association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of Buddha contain much materialism.[443] As the Stoic appropriated Heraclitus’s idea of Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as the Socialism based on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel) Goethe’s deep idea of development, so Buddhism treated the Brahman notion of Karma, the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a being actively completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite materially as a world-stuff under transformation.
What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word in Nietzsche’s sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this selfrepudiation, each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its whole existence. The Faustian nihilist—Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or Wagner—shatters the ideals. The Apollinian—Epicurus or Antisthenes or Zeno—watches them crumble before his eyes. And the Indian withdraws from their presence into himself. Stoicism is directed to individual self-management, to statuesque and purely present being, without regard to future or past or neighbour Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over
all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen. Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research could compare with Christianity,[444] is hardly reproducible in words of the Western languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana and point to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace, Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still, none of this comes anywhere near the strange profundity of the Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would seem as though the soul of an old Culture, when from its last refinements it is passing into death, clings, as it were, jealously to the property that is most essentially its own, to its form-content and the innate prime-symbol. There is nothing in Buddhism that could be regarded as “Christian,” nothing in Stoicism that is to be found in the Islam of A.D. 1000, nothing that Confucius shares with Socialism. The phrase “si duo faciunt idem, non est idem”—which ought to appear at the head of every historical work that deals with living and uniquely-occurring Becomings and not with logically, causally and numerically comprehensible Becomes —is specially applicable to these final expressions of Culturemovements. In all Civilizations being ceases to be suffused with soul and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in each several Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and subject to the form-language of a particular symbolism. And just because of all this individualness of the Being which, working in the unconscious, fashions the last-phase creations on the historical surface, relationship of the instances to one another in point of historical position becomes decisively important. What they bring to expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to expression so marks them as “contemporary” with one another. The Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has already been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic drama and the Nirvana-idea. One’s feeling is that ethical Socialism, although a century has already been given to its development, has not yet reached the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will finally possess. Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe
formulation that Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now there is a look of the Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher order and the narrower appeal, when its tendency is the RomanPrussian and entirely unpopular tendency to self-discipline and selfrenunciation from sense of great duty; and a look of Buddhism in its contempt for momentary ease and carpe diem. And, on the other hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean look in that mode of it which alone makes it effective downward and outward as a popular ideal, in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of each-for-himself, but) of individuals in the name of all.
Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts, doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds, all ornament, every column and verse and idea—are ultimately religious, and must be so. But from the setting-in of Civilization they cannot be so any longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion, so—and consequently—the essence of every Civilization is irreligion —the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the creativeness of Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against Haydn, of Lysippus as against Phidias, of Theocritus as against Pindar, knows not what the best means in art. Even Rococo in its worldliest creations is still religious. But the buildings of Rome, even when they are temples, are irreligious; the one touch of religious architecture that there was in old Rome was the intrusive Magiansouled Pantheon, first of the mosques. The megalopolis itself, as against the old Culture-towns—Alexandria as against Athens, Paris as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg—is irreligious[445] down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry intelligence of the faces.[446] And, correspondingly, the ethical sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-feeling become irreligious; “Christianity,” so called (and qualified even as “true Christianity”), is always on the lips of the English Socialist, to whom it seems to be something in the nature of a “dogma-less morale.” Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic religion, and Buddhism as compared with Vedic, and it is of no importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed
to Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his atheism, or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or even goes on believing in God.
It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man’s being, that becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from the Culture to the Civilization, the Climacteric of the Culture, as I have already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses its spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of begetting. Unfruitfulness—understanding the word in all its direct seriousness—marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and “race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored—and of course not remedied—in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.[447]
VII
As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every declinetime founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as Athens called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement;[448] the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of sport and “best-sellers.” It is this lateappearing mass and not “mankind” that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and Confucian China.
Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the Diatribe. [449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansionelement common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-topower. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the best but to the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes obtained by them. It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an intellectual male-prostitution by speech and writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic. If Christianity in its original expansion became involved with this spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed.[450] Primitive Christianity was a Magian religion and the soul of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know —introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the market-places of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or country-side) survives to this day to tell us who it was that this propaganda affected last. What a difference, indeed what
diametrical opposition, between Paul and Boniface the passionate Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous cultivating Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East! Here was youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into those of Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or antiChristian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware.
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is, life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol-questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such, apparently, being the gravest problems that the “men of the New Order,” the generations of frog-perspective, are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand newborn on the threshold of the new Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry—would have felt it degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them. Buddhism is unthinkable without a bodily diet to match its spiritual diet, and amongst the Sophists, in the circle of Antisthenes, in the Stoa and amongst the Sceptics such questions became ever more and more prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol-question, and a whole series of philosophers took up that of vegetarianism. And the only difference between Apollinian and Faustian methods here is that the Cynic theorized about his own digestion while Shaw treats of “everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other dictates. Even Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish in his Ecce Homo.
Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization-ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to it wears its form.
Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought Stoicism hardest, was a Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek was. The Latin language of the last centuries before Christ was the mightiest of Stoic creations.
Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a lifefeeling under the aspect of Aims;[452] for the directional movement of Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living, aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the two it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from Buddhism and Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of Nirvana and Ataraxia, are no less mechanical in design than Socialism is, but they know nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of expansion, of its will-to-infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.
In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through and through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense, the welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought to be given and must be given freedom to do, regardless of obstacles of wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental morale, morale directed to happiness and usefulness, is never the final instinct, however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The head and front of moral modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this respect Rousseau’s pupil) excludes from his ethics the motive of Compassion and lays down the formula “Act, so that....” All ethic in this style expresses and is meant to express the will-to-infinity, and
this will demands conquest of the moment, the present, and the foreground of life. In place of the Socratic formula “Knowledge is Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the formula “Knowledge is Power.” The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole world bear the form of his view, thus transferring the idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into the ethical field. This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as though the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.
It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it is the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of work as commonly understood, the civilised form of Faustian effecting. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose moral programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or ardently championed—are only effective in so far as they either lie, or are mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force. Otherwise they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all modernism, between the popular side with its dolce far niente, its solicitude for health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal peace—in a word, its supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher Ethos which values deeds only, which (like everything else that is Faustian) is neither understood nor desired by the masses, which grandly idealizes the Aim and therefore Work. If we would set against the Roman “panem et circenses” (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and Egypt) it would be the “Right to Work.” This was the basis of Fichte’s thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of StateSocialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate in the Duty to Work.
Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "ære perennius," the willto-duration. Apollinian man looked back to a Golden Age; this relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical care, who feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen— arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.
It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the different great Cultures has pictured world-history in its own special way. Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically present with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal history was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of looking at history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of creation and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and Evil, God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its culmination, one single Peripeteia—the appearance of the Saviour. Faustian man sees in history a tense unfolding towards an aim; its “ancientmediæval-modern” sequence is a dynamic image. He cannot picture history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts is not indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it is the image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest sense is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that has been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.
And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism— becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence
is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air It is the same with Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor and Galilean” and “Master-builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner and with everyone else. And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions of millennial scope— nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained conception of a “return,” which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life’s lie is the foundation of Bayreuth—which would be something whereas Pergamum was something—and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.
IX
It remains, now, to say a word as to the morphology of a history of philosophy. There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has its own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression
and forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an intellectual ornamentation that is closely related to that of architecture and the arts of form. From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what “truths” thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of them. For it is the particular way in which a macrocosm presents itself to the understanding man of a particular Culture that determines a priori the whole necessity of asking them, and the way in which they are asked.
The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian and the Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further, in each case, all the great questions have been posed at the very outset. There is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and bring into form, no Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come up for the old Orphic temple-teachings.
It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind expresses itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether such books are personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst ourselves or anonymous fluid masses of texts as in India, and whether the result is a set of comprehensible systems or, as in Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are veiled in expressions of art and ritual. Whatever the variations, the general course of philosophies as organisms is the same. At the beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the worldimage seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic distinctions, not only of science but also of philosophy, are dependent on, not divorced from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In this springtime, thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in status, priests Such were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic and the Vedic as of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455] centuries. With the setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier, philosophy becomes urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to religion and even
dares to make that religion itself the object of epistemological criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of the world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high places and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep experience of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from Thales to Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of pre-Confucian and pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know more than the fact that they existed.
At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after them there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture, thought mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and answering them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression —and, as we have said before, ornamental significance—until exhausted; and then it passes into a decline in which the problems of knowing are in every respect stale repetitions of no significance. There is a metaphysical period, originally of a religious and finally of a rationalistic cast—in which thought and life still contain something of chaos, an unexploited fund that enables them effectively to create —and an ethical period in which life itself, now become megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry and has to turn the still available remainder of philosophical creative-power on to its own conduct and maintenance. In the one period life reveals itself, the other has life as its object. The one is “theoretical” (contemplative) in the grand sense, the other perforce practical. Even the Kantian system is in its deepest characters contemplated in the first instance and only afterwards logically and systematically formulated and ordered.
We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism. And in fact it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the analytical mathematic, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the great pre-Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside
Newton and Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and Archimedes, at the summits of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the Calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle. And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical, and so were Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better When the form-world of numbers passed out of its ken, philosophy lost a great convention, and since then it has lacked not only structural strength but also what may be called the grand style of thinking. Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth thinker (Gelegenheitsdenker).
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it is philosophy, the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of “stone for bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the sake of the fourth book that the first three exist at all. Kant merely thought that it was the same with him; in reality, pure and not applied reason is still his centre of creation. There is exactly the same difference in Classical philosophy before and after Aristotle—on the one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos to which a formal ethic adds almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics as such, as programme, as necessity with a desultory ad hoc metaphysic for basis. And the entire absence of logical scruple with which Nietzsche, for instance, dashes off such theories makes no difference whatever to our appreciation of his philosophy proper.
It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to Pessimism from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to develop his system by the pessimism that fell upon him in his
seventeenth year Shaw, a most significant witness, observes in his “Quintessence of Ibsenism” that one may quite well accept Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his metaphysics—therein quite accurately discriminating between that which makes him the first thinker of the new age and that which is included because an obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the attempt would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one has no difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-andthrough an inner and very early experience, while he covered his metaphysical requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of a few books, and never managed to state even his ethical theory with any exactitude. Just the same overlay of living seasonable ethical thought on a stratum of metaphysics required by convention (but in fact superfluous) is to be found in Epicurus and the Stoics. We need have no doubt after this as to what is the essence of a Civilization-philosophy.
Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain.” And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character. The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a critique of society.
The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the imperative mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained a science. But as soon as “philosophy” became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics
as the basis of thought about the world—hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.
To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same. There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought-structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author. Any and every such philosophy is, from the first word to the last, from its most abstract proposition to its most telltale trait of personality, a thing-become, mirrored over from soul into world, from the realm of freedom into that of necessity, from the immediate-living into the dimensional-logical; and on that very account it is mortal, and its life has prescribed rhythm and duration. The choice of them, therefore, is subject to strict necessity. Each epoch has its own, important for itself and for no other epoch. It is the mark of the born philosopher that he sees his epoch and his theme with a sure eye. Apart from this, there is nothing of any importance in philosophical production—merely technical knowledge and the industry requisite for the building up of systematic and conceptual subtleties.
Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is only Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from actual practitioners) are the dramatists. They are the real philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of dates and “results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or what it might be.
Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question
