Lawrence of Arabia
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They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects layfallow in incurious resignation. Their imaginations were vivid, but notcreative. There was so little Arab art in Asia that they could almostbe said to have had no art, though their classes were liberal patrons,and had encouraged whatever talents in architecture, or ceramics, orother handicraft their neighbours and helots displayed. Nor did theyhandle great industries: they had no organizations of mind or body.They invented no systems of philosophy, no complex mythologies. Theysteered their course between the idols of the tribe and of the cave.The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of lifeunquestioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable,entailed on man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thingimpossible, and death no grief.
They were a people of spasms, of upheavals, of ideas, the race of theindividual genius. Their movements were the more shocking by contrastwith the quietude of every day, their great men greater by contrastwith the humanity of their mob. Their convictions were by instinct,their activities intuitional. Their largest manufacture was of creeds:almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of theseefforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export(in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translatedinto the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, hadconquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations wassubjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes.Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their desertswere strewn with broken faiths.
It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about themeeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of allthese creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required aprophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them hadbeen of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Theirbirth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearningdrove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lessertime in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returnedwith their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, andnow doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creedsfulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law bythe parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate whofailed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whomtime and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set onfire. To the thinkers of the town the impulse into Nitria had ever beenirresistible, not probably that they found God dwelling there, but thatin its solitude they heard more certainly the living word they broughtwith them.
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