LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
51
One cannot avoid having in mind the frail red bearded writer with
the messianic vision. Lawrence here rejects not only Christ's par–
ticular mission, but also the self-created legend that had its absurd
apotheosis in the notorious "last supper" at the Cafe Royale.
If
he assumed the messianic role, he soon learned its bitter
fruits.
There were plenty of Judases within his own circle, and like the
man of the Christ story, Lawrence learned how much he himself
was responsible for the betrayals he had suffered. We were given
anticipations in his letters of his abdication of the messianic role;
admissions that his doctrine of spontaneity and individual being
was compromised by the categorical imperatives that he was con–
stantly issuing. In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, Lawrence ad–
mits his own impulse to lay compulsions upon other people-to dic–
tate
his
spontaneous feelings to others.
And never again will I say, generally, "the war"; only "the
war to me." For to every man the war is himself, and I
cannot dictate what the war is or should be to any other
being than myself. Therefore I am sorry for all my generalities,
which must be falsities to another man, almost insults. Even
Rupert Brooke's sonnets which I repudiate for myself, I
know how true it is for him, for them.
For Lawrence the creative life cannot develop except in a condition
of privacy and aloneness, and he often urged others to that condi–
tion of true solitude in which a man could obey his own deepest
creative impulse.
Shelter yourself above all from the world, save yourself,
screen and hide yourself, so subtly in retreat, where no one
knows you . . . hiding like a bird, and living busily the other
creative life, like a bird building a nest.
Like Christ, Lawrence chose the single way, and though he
was tempted in his loneliness onto the false paths of society and
politics, he remained essentially loyal to the single way. In Karl
Jaspers' characterization of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche we may
get a glimpse of the significance of Lawrence's loneliness.
. . . With them, a new form of reality appears in history.
They are, so to speak, representative destinies, sacrifices whose
