He had also had a vision of the real Middle Ages as opposed to the Morrisian romantic image of them. In Chartres cathedral, he had been overwhelmed by a sense of space and light – just as William Morris had been fifty years earlier. It was, he wrote, ‘a feeling I had never had before … as though I had found a path … as far as the gates of heaven and had caught a glimpse of the inside, the door being ajar’. 2Throwing off his Ruskinesque mannerism, Lawrence’s genuine ecstasy shines through in this, the most moving of all his pre-war letters, as for the first time he realized that not freedom – as Ruskin believed – but absolute faith had enabled medieval craftsmen to create a masterpiece like Chartres. The world of the medieval mason had been a narrow one, indeed, but he had had certainty: a certain connection with God, a certain knowledge of his place in the cosmos. It was not freedom which the industrial era had lost – for technology was ultimately a liberating force – but certainty. While the Renaissance, which Lawrence so much despised, had introduced rational enlightenment, it had also introduced doubt, which he would later call ‘our modern crown of thorns’: ‘Certainly Chartres is the sight of a lifetime,’ he concluded, ‘a place truly in which to worship God. The Middle Ages were truer that way than ourselves, in spite of their narrowness and hardness and ignorance of the truth as we complacently put it: but the truth doesn’t matter a straw, if men only believe what they say or are willing to show that they believe something.’ 3It is another of the great paradoxes of Lawrence’s life that as a thinking man par excellencehe was able to see that faith was everything, but was too rational to believe in anything himself. His condemnation of himself as ‘insanely rational’ was the perfect expression of this paradox. He would come to envy the Arabs, who humbled him by their simple faith. They were, he saw, a people who still inhabited the spiritual certainties of the Middle Ages: ‘a people of primary colours’, as he put it, ‘or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour’. 4By 1908 Lawrence had already begun to lose his faith in Christianity and, according to one story, had lost his job as a Sunday School teacher for reading ‘his boys’ a story by the disgraced Oscar Wilde. It was Sarah who destroyed his faith for him, just as she destroyed almost everything else in his life: ‘she begs us to love her … he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, ‘and points us to Christ, in whom, she says, is the only happiness and truth. Not that she finds happiness herself … she makes Arnie and me profoundly unhappy. We are so helpless; we feel that we would never give any other human being the pain she gives us, by her impossible demands … we cannot turn on love to her … like a water-tap; and Christ is not a symbol but a personality, spoiled by the accretions of such believers as herself.’ 5Any vestige of faith he might have had at twenty was certainly gone by the time he wrote: ‘I haven’t any convictions or disbeliefs – except the one that there is no “is”.’ 6His admission later that though he had ‘fenced his life with scaffolding of more or less speculative hypotheses’ one could ‘really know nothing’ 7was entirely in keeping with the Lawrence who told Robert Graves: ‘I fall … into the nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false God in which to believe.’ 8
In place of spiritual certainty, Lawrence used intuition – the rational ability to compute how events have come about and where they are heading. It was a quality which gave him an air of prescience, and which Clare Sydney Smith would romanticize as ‘the power of foretelling’. Lawrence certainly did not have some magical fortune-telling ability, as Smith envisaged it, for though his intuitions could be staggeringly accurate, they were occasionally dreadfully wrong. Lawrence was adept at selecting and navigating possible paths through the universe, and, as George Lloyd would comment, he had a ‘genius for thinking ahead of nine people out of ten’. 9It was a correct intuition which had told him, long before his latest trip to France, that Crusader castles in Syria would be the inevitable culmination of his planned thesis. It was Charles Bell of the Ashmolean, though, who guided him towards the topic of the pointed arch and vault. It had long been contested as to whether this structure had been adopted from Oriental sources by the Crusaders, or whether the Crusaders themselves had introduced it as an innovation in the East. Lawrence’s knowledge of medieval castles in Britain and France qualified him perfectly for such a study: Bell suggested that he should visit Syria and settle the issue once and for all. 10
Lawrence was now back in his bedroom at Polstead Road, lamenting the loss of his rooms in college and craving a sense of physical separation from the family. He needed ‘quietness’ for his studies, and he persuaded his parents to build him a small cottage at the bottom of the garden, containing a bedroom and a study, piped water, a fireplace and even a telephone to the house. To insulate it doubly against outside noise, Lawrence hung its walls with Bolton sheeting. Vyvyan Richards would often find him there, lying on the hearthrug by a crackling fire, reading his way through a pile of books, or carefully drawing his own foot. Once, Richards startled him in the act of striding up and down along an odd-looking board with nails banged into it. Lawrence explained that he was practising the art of pacing out distances covertly, which would be essential for his next trip if he wished to avoid being arrested as a spy. There are other intimations that he was readying himself for an expedition to the East during the winter of 1908. In October he had begun reading Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta,the classic work on Arabia and the Bedu, written by the most distinguished desert explorer of the era – a book which Lawrence would later praise as ‘a bible of its kind’. Its combination of Chaucerian prose and Elizabethan construction appealed to him enormously, since he recognized that Doughty had deliberately set out to purify the English language in the same way that William Morris had done. For Lawrence, stirring adventures and dramatic experiences were of little use unless they were presented in perfect prose, and for this reason he did not admire Richard Burton – possibly the most interesting Orientalist and explorer of the nineteenth century. He condemned the highly-strung, irascible, formidably talented Burton as ‘vulgar’ and dismissed his books as being ‘written in so difficult an English style as to be unreadable’. 11Like Morris’s novels, Arabia Desertawould remain close to his heart for the rest of his life.
In winter 1908, Lawrence joined the newly formed Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet – an act which astonished his peers. The avowed non-conformist, who refused to play organized games ‘because they were organized, because they had rules’, was now voluntarily putting on army uniform, bowing to military discipline and meekly taking orders. The truth may be that the OTC appealed to his masochistic fantasy about military life – not quite as satisfying as being a humble Gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery, perhaps, but a uniform just the same. The Jesus College contingent was a bicycle-mounted signals unit, which gave him opportunities for cycling, and he considered some of the training to be of real value. He later wrote that he had learned to fire a Vickers machine-gun in the OTC, which was of use to him during the Arab Revolt, though he would tell Liddell Hart that his OTC experience was ‘negligible’ in the sense of teaching him strategy. 12He did practise pistol-shooting assiduously, however, and in December found an opportunity to test his compass-work when he and Scroggs Beeson marched on a bearing from the top of Cumnor Hurst in a snowstorm, wading freezing streams and breasting snowdrifts until they almost fell into the Isis at Folly Bridge.