68
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Santayana, to take two random instances, demonstrate. It is impossible
to write good criticism when the critic is not able to shoot his hatred
through an intellectual projector of some power. In the absence of a
powerful projector, instead of becoming a focussed light beam which
reveals on the screen of his book the reasons why Lawrence is objectively
irritating, Mr. Tyndall's hatred deploys itself in diffuse, picayune ridicule,
and in somewhat obtuse malice. But there is nothing· easier than poking
fun at a man who takes himself as seriously as a stuffed owl.
If
it didn't
reveal the pathetic need for love on the part of a heart that tolerated noth·
ing but dominion over others, the famous Last Supper incident at the Cafe
Royal would be a superbly funny story; just as the fulminations against
his day would be ridiculous if they were not made by a man who, even as
he made them, was impaled like one of Goya's figures, by his.own frustra–
tions. It is easy to appeal to the reader's feeling for smut-and who hasn't
it?-by dropping insinuations in passing about Lawrence's homosexual
tendencies; and easier still to show one's superior logical equipment by
pointing out the contradictions in Lawrence. But it would have been more
to the purpose, if a little more difficult, to disclose to the reader how these
contradictions are mostly verbal, and how below them there is to be found
an integrity of purpose and an emotional consistency which is seldom
achieved even by the clearest and most logical of intellects. Had he
noticed these, Mr. Tyndall could have made a point really worth making
and far more damaging to Lawrence than those he makes, for Lawrence's
consistency and integrity, being purely emotional, are the expression of
an infantile will dominating one Qf the most perspicuous and powerful
intellects of our day, to our own loss. Only an infantile genius could have
been as thoroughly off and as silly as Lawrence could often be, and been,
at the same time, as prescient of, as sensitive to, the illness of our age.
The second reason for Mr. Tyndall's failure is that in spite of his
scholarship and a second hand erudition picked up from Lovejoy and other
easy sources, he really lacks an adequate sense of his problem. Mr. Tyn·
dall is inordinately vain about his scholarly discoveries, and tells us, with
the self-gratulations of a little Jack Horner, the actual names of some of
the books from which Lawrence made his profuse and erratic cribbings.
Proficient at the graduate game of chasing up sources, when he gets at
Lawrence's sources he has no more sense of what they import than he has
of what Lawrence himself means. Having traced Lawrence to Blavatsky
and Bessant, and revealed to us the ethnography and history Lawrence
read, Mr. Tyndall thinks he has explained him. Whereas of course he has
only pushed the problem one notch back and left it as much in the dark as
it was before-unless one believes, as Mr. Tyndall seems to believe, that
one has explained anti-intellectualism by calling it anti-intellectualism,
proto-fascism, by calling it proto-fascism, and the revolt against the
machine by telling us that the rebels do not like the machine.
There is a wide spread belief in Venezuela that wild cows are more
dangerous to fight than wild bulls, for bulls, they say, close their eyes when
