STUDIES   IN   A   DYING   CULTURE
it accord him die greeting of a fellow-arizen and all
the admiration felt by a stay-at-home for a colonist.
Heroes are born with the aptitude perhaps, but are
made by circumstances. And there is something pecu-
liarly instructive as to the nature of heroes in the example
of the bourgeois, Lawrence, dowered with all the hero's
legendary gifts, called to action and yet through cir-
cumstances unable to answer the call. A man of un-
usual force of personality, intense ambition, and rare
intellectual ability, Lawrence showed from his early
years a strange restlessness. This resdessness of the hero
is not unusual. It is as if from the beginning he feels
in his heart die tension of the new soaal relations, but
it is at first an appetite without an object. With Law-
rence as with other heroes the splendid past was to
engross that appetite and not merely in the form of
his technical interest in archaeology, but also as an
attraction to the something large and vivid that there
was in die anaent world, submerged in the tawdriness
of modern conditions, so that he was driven to wander
through the spaaous deserts of the primitive East.
The nostalgia which afflicted him was plain enough.
It was for ampler social relations, purged of the pettiness
and commercialisation of capitalism. Every stage in his
life derives its explanation only from this ruling need.
As a kind of scholar gipsy he rubbed shoulders in his
youth widi all classes and conditions of the East. He
found his nostalgia satisfied to the greatest degree by
the free and open manners of the Bedouin. Their free-
dom and the value they attached to character and
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