Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 1019
When Cromwell was published in 1934 the subject had become acutely topical, for dictators were arising in Europe who claimed, without warrant, to follow in his steps. This made me return to what had been an undergraduate ambition, a portrait of Augustus. I had already done a good deal of work on the subject, and my first two winters in Canada gave me leisure to reread the Latin and Greek texts. I have rarely found more enjoyment in a task, for I was going over again carefully the ground which I had scampered across in my youth. Augustus seemed to me to embody all the virtues of a dictator, when a dictator was needed, and to have tried valiantly to provide against the perils. The book was kindly received by scholars in Britain, America and on the Continent, though my Italian friends jibbed at some of my political deductions.
In my book on Sir Walter Scott, published in the centenary year of his death, I tried not only to pay tribute to the best-loved of Borderers, but to repeat my literary credo. All these four books were, indeed, in a sense a confession of faith, for they enabled me to define my own creed on many matters of doctrine and practice, and thereby cleared my mind. They were a kind of diary, too, a chronicle of my successive interests and occupations. They were laborious affairs compared to my facile novels, but they were also a relaxation, for they gave me a background into which I could escape from contemporary futilities, a watch-tower from which I had a long prospect, and could see modern problems in juster proportions. That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
IV
Reading has always filled so large a part of my life that for a page or two H may be allowed to set down my literary vicissitudes. It is a sad tale, for it records a steady narrowing of interests. In the ‘nineties, when I first discovered the world of books, I had a most catholic taste in them. I was attracted by every new venture, I had few dislikes, my purpose was exploration rather than judgment, orthodoxy had no claims on me, and I identified appreciation with enjoyment. I was Montaigne’s ondoyant et divers reader, undulating and diverse.
Then — some time in my early twenties — the arteries of my taste seemed to narrow and harden. I became more fastidious, but with an eye less on eternal canons of excellence than on my own pleasure. I was now a critic, but on a purely subjective basis. Certain things satisfied me and certain things did not, and I was inclined to limit myself to the former. Since I knew what these were in the older literature and had no certainty of finding them in the new, I became conservative in my reading. As a publisher I had to keep a watchful eye on contemporary letters, but there my motive was commercial; for my pleasure I went to old fields. I speak, of course, of imaginative work. I was an assiduous student of the moderns in philosophy and history.
Not being a critic I was not called upon to formulate the reasons for my preferences, but I was conscious that I had standards of a sort. One was a belief in what the French call ordonnance, the supreme importance of an ordered discipline both in matter and style. Another was a certain austerity — I disliked writing which was luscious and overripe. A third was a distrust of extreme facility; a work of art, I thought, should be carved in marble, not in soapstone. There were other half-conscious principles, and the whole batch constituted a strict, dry and rather priggish canon, which kept me from taking any real interest in the literature of my own day. One or two Romans (Virgil especially), Shakespeare and Wordsworth pretty well contented me among the poets, and in prose, apart from history and philosophy, I had recourse chiefly to the seventeenth-century writers. I had become what Dr. Johnson called Gray, a “barren rascal.”
During the War my general reading was confined to a few classics, but after 1918, feeling rejuvenated and enterprising, I did my best to get on terms with my contemporaries. Alas! I had put it off too long. My ear simply could not attune itself to their rhythms, or lack of rhythms. Much of the verse seemed to me unmelodious journalism. Often it was a pastiche of Donne, but it seemed to reproduce only his tortured conceits, and not his sudden flute notes and moments of shattering profundity. I have always been a poor reader of fiction — perhaps because I could tell myself my own stories — and I was baffled by the immense, shambling novels that poured steadily from the press in Britain and America.
The trouble was that my intelligence admitted the merit of much that filled the rest of me with ennui. Proust, for example. I disliked his hothouse world, but it was idle to deny his supreme skill in disentangling subtle threads of thought and emotion. It was what Henry James had striven to do, and partially succeeded in, before he fell into the tortuous arabesques of his later manner. There may be limits to the value of hitting a nail on the head, but it is better than fumbling with an evasive tin-tack. Again, I had read as a duty the principal works of the Russian novelists, and — with the exception of War and Peace and one or two of Tourgeniev’s — was resolved never to attempt them again. I suffered from a radical defect of sympathy. Their merits were beyond doubt, but their method and the whole world which they represented seemed to me ineffably dismal.
Not that I did not admire much contemporary work. I thought Virginia Woolf; as a critic, the best since Matthew Arnold — wiser and juster, indeed, than Arnold. I esteemed certain writers (principally American, like Sinclair Lewis and Booth Tarkington) who seemed to have the visualising power and the gift of absorbing, torrential narrative which mark the good novelist. To go a little further back, Mr. H. G. Wells’ studies of certain phases of English life, in books like Kipps, The Wheels of Chance and Mr. Polly, were destined, I thought, to live as long as the English tradition endured. But the rebels and experimentalists for the most part left me cold. “The life of reason,” Santayana has written, “is our heritage and exists only through tradition. Now the misfortune of revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that they wish to be disinherited even more than they are.”
My serious preferences I was always ready to defend. But I could also take pleasure in the second-, third- and even the fourth-rate on purely sentimental grounds. I believe that the taste in literature of most people sets fairly early in life, and in essentials does not alter, except in the case of a few superior minds which remain always receptive and yet anchored to eternal values. What delights in an impressionable youth gives inevitably a lasting bias to the judgment. A music lover who can appreciate the austerest merits may have also an irrational liking for ditties which have no artistic credentials. So, in literature, oddments are carried over from youth and continue to please, not because of their intrinsic quality but because they were first read or heard on happy occasions, and the memory of them recalls those blessed moments. It is pure sentimentality, but how many of us are free from it? My memory is full of such light baggage. Stanzas of Swinburne, whom I do not greatly admire, remind me of summer mornings when I shouted them on a hilltop, and still please because of the hill-top, not the poetry. In the ‘nineties Austin Dobson and others had made popular various exercises in old French metrical forms like the ballade, the rondeau and the villanelle; even Robert Bridges succumbed to the fashion. There was no great value in such confections, but I have a lingering taste for them, since they are entwined with memories of golden afternoons in cool, green Oxfordshire backwaters. Some of W. E. Henley’s lyrics are often in my mind because they were the viaticum of an unforgettable spring walking tour. I have the same feeling about certain songs of R. L. Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling’s early work. So I am in this position: — I believe I can judge fairly the greater books which all my life have been my companions; I am attached to certain things produced in my youth which, but for their sentimental associations, would probably not appeal to me; the modern work most loudly acclaimed my traditionalist mind is simply not competent to judge at all.
Apart from what our fathers called belles-lettres I have continued to be a voracious reader. In my day there have been no books, no Das Kapital or Origin of Species, which have opened up new avenues of thought. There has been no Hegel to attempt a new system of world philosophy. Except for F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality I do not think any book has been published which our descendants will regard as a philosophical classic. But there have been seminal works in various related branches of thought, such as Freud’s in psychology, and those of Einstein and his colleagues in a type of physics which almost fulfils Pope’s prophecy and “of metaphysics begs defence.” This latter subject I regard with a fascinated awe, but from afar off, for I have not the key with which to enter the city. My knowledge of mathematics stops with a desperate finality just when the difficulties begin. The new physicist has a grammar of his own, for his substantives are equations with which the reader must be familiar before he can follow the argument.
For some years I have found my chief interest in history, since in the fog in which we live I get comfort from tracing the puzzled lives of those who traversed the same road. As in philosophy, so in history; we have had no venture on the grand scale; Mr. G. M. Trevelyan’s England under Queen Anne is the nearest approach to it. Perhaps such work is now less easy, because of a more scientific view of evidence and an austerer conscience in the historian. The work of the quarriers and masons has become so intricate that the architects have been compelled to limit the scale of their buildings. But I have seen one heresy relinquished. Few historians would now assent without qualification to J. B. Bury’s famous dogma, “History is a science — no less and no more.” It is a science, but it is a great deal more. It is an art, a synthesis rather than a compilation, an interpretation as well as a chronicle. The historian, if he is to do justice to the past, must have a constructive imagination and a reasonable mastery of words. The scientist must be joined to the man-of-letters.
One heartening movement I can detect — a greater consideration for the average man. There have been brilliant specimens of synoptic history, which summarises a long tract of time, such as Mr. Herbert Fisher’s Europe, Mr. George Trevelyan’s England, and Mr. S. E. Morison’s United States. The philosophies have made an honest attempt to descend from the schools to the market-place. All the principal thinkers of the last thirty years have a more or less popular appeal: Bergson in France, Croce in Italy, William James and Santayana in America; sometimes indeed the literary graces are so luxuriant as to obscure the thought. Valiant attempts have even been made to expound the cloudy trophies of the new physics. It has been pre- eminently the age of the vulgarisateur in the best sense of that word. I think the tendency wholly admirable. Lord Rutherford used to say that no conclusion which he ever reached was of any use to him until he could put it into plain English, into language understood by the ordinary man. Attempts to present the history of the world as an interrelated intelligible process, or to give a bird’s-eye view of the long march of the sciences, may be faulty in detail, with many arbitrary judgments, but they do furnish principles of interpretation which enable the reader to find at any rate one way in the world of thought — perhaps a little later to make his own way. In this task the vulgarisateur may be preparing the soil for a rich future harvest, just as the work of the Sophists cleared the ground for Plato.
V
Living in the country I escaped the close social intercourse of London. Apart from Oxford and country neighbours, I was dependent for society on friends whom I visited and who visited me. Of these, fortunately, many are still alive, but I would pay my tribute to four who have gone.
“How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows”
After his short ambassadorial term in Washington, Edward Grey came little to London. His health had become a serious business, since to his failing eyesight other bodily ailments were added. When I first knew him in my undergraduate days I thought him the most fortunate of mortals, for he had everything — health, beauty, easy means, a great reputation, innumerable friends, the gift of succeeding in whatever he tried, whether in sport or public affairs. Before he died I was often reminded of those eerie words which Herodotus puts into the mouth of Amasis: “I know that the gods are jealous, for I cannot remember that I ever heard of any man who, having been constantly successful, did not at last utterly perish.” One by one his sources of happiness vanished. He lost a beloved wife; he saw his work as peacemaker close in the bloodiest of wars; his eyesight and his general health failed; his country home was burnt down; his intimate friends died before their time; a second marriage gave him only short-lived comfort, for it soon ended with his wife’s death.
Yet he did not cease to be happy, for he built a new life out of the wreckage of the old. He could no longer browse among books, but he took to writing them, and learned the satisfaction of being explicit in print as well as in speech. Trout fishing was no more for him, but for a time he could still fish for salmon with his friend, Frank Pember, the Warden of All Souls, in certain convenient Highland rivers. He could not watch birds at a distance, but he had his colony of ducks at Fallodon, and he became a wizard in detecting birds’ song. In what seemed to me to be a single note he could discern a blend of several birds.
Under the buffetings of life he never winced or complained, and the spectacle of his gentle fortitude was both a heartbreak and an inspiration. More than any man I know he possessed his soul. Most of us have some friend whom above all others we would wish our sons to resemble. I have no doubt as to my choice, and I am glad to think that I was able to associate him with a memorable occasion in the life of my eldest boy. When John, who was an ardent bird-lover and fisherman, came of age, I gave a small dinner for him at the House of Commons, and Edward Grey came down from Northumberland to take the chair and propose his health. It was a happy chance that a boy should be speeded on his journey in life by the man whom in all the world he most revered.
Henry Newbolt died when he was well on in the seventies, but he never became middle-aged. Everything about him remained boyish — his slim figure, his lean alert face, his endearing, almost ingenuous, ardour, everything except his grey hair. I had known him a little before 1914, and in the last year of the War I found in him a most able colleague. But though he did well by his generation he never quite belonged to it. Providence had cast him for a bard, a companion of men-at-arms and the chronicler of their deeds. He found his niche in letters in a kind of half-lyric, half-ballad, the best of which must live since they are enshrined in the popular memory. But for him that was only half a life. He would have liked, himself, to move in the thick of great deeds. It seems ungenerous to say of one who had so much happiness in the world that he was not quite at home in it, but I think it is true that, apart from his poetry, he never found work which wholly satisfied him. I can picture him more easily as a minstrel singing of Border raids in which he had shared, or a iongleur in the trail of a crusade, or like Volcker of Alsace in the Niebelungenlied, with his sword-fiddle-bow whose every stroke was a note of music.
In conversation he had few superiors. He was not a great architect of talk like Arthur Balfour, but a contributor, always in perfect tune with the occasion. In this also he was a little outside his age, belonging rather to the era of breakfasts, when busy men began their day with scholarly talk. I do not mean the solemn meals of that deposit of the glacial age, the Philosophic Radicals, or the scarcely less solemn feasts at which Macaulay pontificated — a character in Sybil complains bitterly that only Liberals ever breakfasted out! — but the later and gentler affairs which did not wholly go out of fashion until the close of last century. Their place has been taken by dining-clubs, like Grillion’s, the Literary Society, and The Club, and there Henry was at his best. He was happiest on literary topics, and of the three men of letters I have known who could talk well I should put him first. Edmund Gosse had moments of petulance and uncertain temper; St. Loe Strachey was too copious, apt to drown a topic with a spate of words; but Henry Newbolt had always a nice sense of the relevant and unfailing intellectual courtesy. I liked to hear him quote poetry in his low crooning recitative; it was like overhearing a delightful child repeating to himself his favourite pieces.
I first came to know Frederick Scott Oliver just after the publication of his book on Alexander Hamilton. He was engaged, like myself, in trying to work out a reasonable philosophy of empire, and I was attracted to him by his freedom from party bias and his acute historical sense. Also he was a fellow Borderer. His health was poor, but his ruddy complexion and clear eyes gave him the look of a Border shepherd. His strong, finely modelled face was not unlike Alexander Hamilton’s. In a peruke he would have been the model of some eighteenth-century gentleman from a canvas of Sir Joshua.
For a decade he was the ablest pamphleteer in Britain. His Alexander Hamilton was in a sense a pamphlet, for it had a direct topical moral. His writings on the Ulster question and his Ordeal by Battle were real pamphlets, in which political views were set out with an eloquence and a precision long absent from the literature of politics. After the Armistice his health worsened, and he gradually withdrew from business, in which he had been very successful, and gave up his remaining years to the study of British policy in the first half of the eighteenth century — a task which combined political philosophy and history proper. He had bought the estate of Edgerston, which lies at the top of the Jed valley and runs up to the watershed of Cheviot. In that beautiful place he united the life of the scholar and of the country gentleman, and it is in that environment that I shall always think of him, striding about in his rough clothes to examine his young trees, or sitting in the circular library upstairs, which was scented with tobacco and old calf, and looked out over gardens to the bent of the hills.
