by John Buchan
But all this was mere absorption, only half-conscious and quite uncritical. I found my first real intellectual interest in the Latin and Greek classics. This came to me when I was in my seventeenth year, just before I went to Glasgow University. For the next three years I was a most diligent student, mediaeval in my austerity. Things have changed now, but in my day a Scottish university still smacked of the Middle Ages. The undergraduates lived in lodgings in the city and most of them cultivated the Muses on a slender allowance of oatmeal. The session ran from October to April, and every morning I had to walk four miles to the eight o’clock class through every variety of the winter weather with which Glasgow fortifies her children. My road lay through the south side of the city, across the Clyde, and so to the slopes of Gilmorehill. Most of that road is as ugly as anything you can find in Scotland, but to me in the retrospect it was all a changing panorama of romance. There was the weather — fog like soup, drenching rains, winds that swirled down the cavernous streets, mornings that dawned bright and clear over snow. There was the sight of humanity going to work and the signs of awakening industry. There was the bridge with the river starred with strange lights, the lit shipping at the Broomielaw, and odours which even at their worst spoke of the sea. There was the occasional lift in the London train, which could be caught at a suburban station, and which for a few minutes brought one into the frowst of a third-class carriage full of sleepy travellers from the remote and unvisited realm of England. And at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the glow of a West Highland sunrise.
As a student I was wholly obscure. I made few friends; I attended infrequently one or other of the numerous societies, but I never spoke in a debate; and I acquired the corporate spirit only at a rectorial election, when, though a professed Tory, I chose to support the Liberal candidate, Mr. Asquith, and almost came by my end at the hands of a red-haired savage, one Robert Horne, who has since been Chancellor of the Exchequer. My summers were spent in blessed idleness, fishing, tramping and bicycling up and down the Lowlands, But my winters were periods of beaver-like toil and monkish seclusion. I returned home early each afternoon and thereafter was at my books until midnight.
After a brief dalliance with mathematics, my subject was classics. In Latin I was fairly proficient, thanks to my father’s tuition, but my Greek was rudimentary, and I was fortunate to find in Gilbert Murray a great teacher. He was then a young man in his middle twenties and was known only by his Oxford reputation. To me his lectures were, in Wordsworth’s phrase, like “kindlings of the morning.” Men are by nature Greeks or Romans, Hellenists or Latinists. Murray was essentially a Greek; my own predilection has always been for Rome; but I owe it to him that I was able to understand something of the Greek spirit and still more to come under the spell of the classic discipline in letters and life. I laboured hard to make myself a good “pure” scholar; but I was not intended by Providence for a philologist; my slender attainments lay rather in classical literature, in history, and presently in philosophy. Always to direct me I had Murray’s delicate critical sense, his imaginative insight into high matters, and his gentle and scrupulous humanism. In those years I read widely in the two literatures, covering much ground quite unfruitful for the schools. The other day I turned up an old paper on Claudian and was amazed at its futile erudition. I found that in another essay I had tried to analyse the mood of that wide-horizoned and fantastic sixth-century Ionia which made the background for Herodotus.
If Gilbert Murray was the principal influence in shaping my interests, another was the Border country, which I regarded as my proper home. In the old song of Leader Haughs and Yarrow Nicol Burne the Violer had given Tweeddale an aura of classical convention, and “Pan playing on his aiten reed” has never ceased to be a denizen of its green valleys. There is a graciousness there, a mellow habitable charm, unlike the harsh Gothic of most of the Scots landscape. I got it into my head that here was the appropriate setting for pastoral, for the shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil, for the lyrists of the Greek Anthology, and for Horace’s Sabine farm. I was wrong in fact; if you seek the true classical landscape outside Italy and Greece you will find it rather in the Cape Peninsula, in places like the Paarl and Stellenbosch. But my fancy had its uses, for I never read classical poetry with such gusto as in my Border holidays, and it served as a link between my gipsy childhood and the new world of scholarship into which I was seeking entrance.
This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. That is why the Oxford school of classical “Greats” seems to me so fruitful, for it compels a close study of one or two masters like Plato and Thucydides. The classics enjoined humility. The spectacle of such magnificence was a corrective to youthful immodesty, and, like Dr. Johnson, I lived “entirely without my own approbation.” Again, they corrected a young man’s passion for rhetoric. This was in the ‘nineties, when the Corinthian manner was more in vogue than the Attic. Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine — the virtue of a clean bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. Above all the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed. For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any chance of being a rebel, for I became profoundly conscious of the dominion of unalterable law. Prometheus might be a fine fellow in his way, but Zeus was king of gods and men.
Indeed I cannot imagine a more precious viaticum than the classics of Greece and Rome, or a happier fate than that one’s youth should be intertwined with their world of clear, mellow lights, gracious images and fruitful thoughts. They are especially valuable to those who believe that Time enshrines and does not destroy, and who do what I am attempting to do in these pages, and go back upon and interpret the past. No science or philosophy can give that colouring, for such provide a schematic, and not a living, breathing universe. And I do not think that the mastery of other literatures can give it in a like degree, for they do not furnish the same totality of life — a complete world recognisable as such, a humane world, yet one untouchable by decay and death —
“based on the crystalline sea
of truth and its eternity.”
III
I came to philosophy quite naturally as a consequence of my youthful theological environment. Not that I ever had the itch of the metaphysician to make a rational cosmos of my own, for I did not feel the need for such a contraption. The cosmology of the elder Calvinism, with its anthropomorphism and its material penalties and rewards, I never consciously rejected. It simply faded out of the air, since it meant nothing to me. I remember that an ancient relative assured me that Sir Walter Scott, having neglected certain evangelical experiences, was no doubt in torment; the news gave me much satisfaction, for the prospect of such company removed for me any fear of the infernal regions; thenceforward, like Dante’s Farinata degli Uberti, I “entertained great scorn for Hell.” But the fundamentals of the Christian religion were so entwined with my nature that I never found occasion to question them. I wanted no philosophy to rationalise them, for they seemed to me completely rational. Philosophy was to me always an intellectual exercise, like mathematics, not the quest for a faith.
I had begun to read in the subject long before I took the philosophy classes at the University, my first love being Descartes, to whom I was introduced by our Tweeddale neighbour, Professor John Veitch, the last of the Schoolmen. Henry Jones was the Moral Philosophy professor at Glasgow, and with him I formed a life-long friendship, for a braver, wiser, kinder human being never lived. But the semi-religious Hegelianism then in vogue, first preached by Edward Caird and continued by Jones, did not greatly attract me, and I owed allegiance to no school. I read wide
ly, with the consequence that when I went to Oxford I found that I had done most of the work for the final examination, and had leisure there to read more widely than ever.
Looking back, my industry fills me with awe. Before I left Glasgow I had read and analysed many of the English and Scottish philosophers, most of Kant, and a variety of lesser folk. At Oxford I read — with difficulty and imperfect comprehension — a large part of Hegel. I kept up this conscientious study right to the eve of the Great War. Then alas! I fell away, for I found, like Henry James, that history began to oust philosophy from my affections. Science, apart from what I picked up as a field-naturalist, was practically unknown to me, though I learned a certain amount of physics from my philosophical reading. That was the biggest gap in my education.
My interests, as I have said, lay not in the search for a creed, but in the study of the patterns which different thinkers made out of the universe. I had a tidy mind and liked to arrange things in compartments even when I did not take the arrangement too seriously. This meant that inevitably I missed much; quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis. My quest for truth, unlike Plato’s, wholly “lacked the warmth of desire.” It was a mental gymnastic, for I had neither the uneasiness nor the raptures of the true metaphysician. “Philosophy,” Sir Isaac Newton once wrote, “is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.” I loved the intricacies of argumentation. A proof is that while I am not conscious of having ever argued about religion, or about politics except professionally, I was always very ready to dispute about philosophy. I would have been puzzled to set down my views as to the nature of thought and reality, for they were constantly changing. I never considered it necessary to harmonise my conclusions in a system. Had I been a professed philosopher I should have been forced to crystallise my thought, but, as it was, I could afford to keep it, so to speak, in solution. L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure. I was of the opinion of the Scottish metaphysician that it is more important that a philosophy should be reasoned than that it should be true.
But two conclusions — or rather inclinations — emerged from my studies, and still abide with me.
Plato, not the system-maker but the poet, had a profound influence on my mind. Platonism was to me not a creed but a climate of opinion, the atmosphere in which my thoughts moved. Such an atmosphere is largely the consequence of temperament, and I think I was born with the same temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century, who had what Walter Pater has called “a sensuous love of the unseen,” or, to put it more exactly, who combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal with a delight in the seen and the temporal. Dieu ne défend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent à revenir à lui. If men are either Platonists or Aristotelians then my category was certainly the first.
Again, my philosophical reading left me with certain intellectual habits — a dislike of grandiose mechanical systems, and a distrust of generalities. Having only one or two strong convictions, which might well be called prejudices, I was inclined to be critical of a superfluity of dogmas. Arthur Balfour’s Defence of Philosophic Doubt and Foundations of Belief which fell into my hands, increased this temperamental bias. I developed in most subjects, and notably in politics, a kind of relativism — a belief in degrees of truth and differing levels of reality — which made me judge systems by their historical influence and practical efficiency rather than by their logical perfections. I began to admire Carlyle’s “swallowers of formulas.” There were eternal truths, I decided, but not very many, and even these required frequent spring-cleanings. I became tolerant of most human moods, except intolerance. It was a point of view which I have since seen cause to modify, but it was perhaps a salutary one at that stage in my life.
IV
I have used the word politics, but at this stage I was no politician, being interested only to a small degree in theories, and not at all in parties. In that complacent old world before the South African War youth did not easily feel the impact of national problems. Generally speaking, I was of a conservative cast of mind, very sensible of the past, approving renovation but not innovation. Lord Falkland’s classic confession of faith might have been mine—”When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.”
High-flying political schemes seemed to me either dangerous or slightly ridiculous — which was Dr. Johnson’s view. “So, sir,” said Boswell, “you laugh at schemes of political improvement?” “Why, sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” In those days my social conscience was scarcely awake.
There was little reason why it should be. I was far too absorbed in my studies to read the newspapers, and I had no interest in the small beer of party controversy. As for philanthropic sensibility in the face of poverty and sickness, a minister’s family had little time for such a luxury. So far my life had been spent chiefly among the poor — the fisher-folk and weavers of a Fife village, one of the poorest quarters in the city. We were engaged in a perpetual fight with destitution and suffering and had no leisure for theorising.
Again, I could never feel that emotional condescension with which the âmes sensibles approach the subject. These see the pathological in any mode of existence different from their own. I lived close to working-class life and knew that it had its own humours and compensations, and that it nourished many major virtues like fortitude and charity. I respected the working classes so profoundly that, like William Morris, I did not want to see them turned into middle classes, as some of their patrons desired. My upbringing had made any kind of class feeling impossible. I was one of the poor myself without a penny behind me, compelled to make my way in the world from nearly as bare a start as the lad from the plough-tail or the loom. I had had a better education, came of better stock and had better health than most — these were my sole advantages. But, except for the first, it did not seem to me that the politicians could do much about them.
My politics were largely based on my historical reading, which gave me a full crop of prejudices — prejudices of which I stood in a certain awe, as Hazlitt advised. I early discovered my heroes: Julius Caesar, St. Paul, Charlemagne, Henry of Navarre, Cromwell (of whom I acquired a surprisingly just appreciation), Montrose, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee. I disliked Brutus, Henry VIII, Napoleon (him intensely), most of the 1688 Whigs, all four Georges, and the whole tribe of French revolutionaries except Mirabeau. But I was a most patchy historian, and it was not until Oxford that I acquired a serious interest in historical science.
Meantime I was trying to teach myself to write. Having for years wallowed and floated in the ocean of letters I now tried to learn to swim. My attempts were chiefly flatulent little essays and homilies and limp short stories. My models were the people who specialised in style — Walter Pater and Stevenson principally; but my uncle, my father’s youngest brother, was a great lover of French literature, and under his guidance I became an earnest student of Flaubert and Maupassant. There was also Kipling, then a rising star in the firmament, but he interested me more because of his matter than his manner. The consequence of those diverse masters was that I developed a slightly meretricious and “precious” style, stiff jointed, heavily brocaded, and loaded with philosophical terms. It took me years to supple it. But those imitative exercises did me good in the long run, for they taught me to be circumspect about structure and rhythm and fastidious about words. My performance, heaven knows, was faulty enough, but the intention was sound.
I wrote copiously, but I also read widely in English and French literature. Certain blind spots I discovered which alas! have remained blind. I had no taste for most of the minor Elizabethans or the Restoration dramatists. I thought the eighteenth-century novelists on the whole over-valued. Only a little of Shelley pleased me, and, though I revered Emily Brontë, I found it impossible to read Charlotte. While I revelled in Alexandre Dumas I could not rank him high. With Carlyle I was easily satiated. I think my chief admiration, so fa
r as style was concerned, was for John Henry Newman and T. H. Huxley.
Stevenson at that time was a most potent influence over young men, especially Scottish university students. Here was one who, though much older than ourselves, was wonderfully young in heart. He had the same antecedents that we had, and he thrilled as we did to those antecedents — the lights and glooms of Scottish history; the mixed heritage we drew from Covenanter and Cavalier; that strange compost of contradictions, the Scottish character; the bleakness and the beauty of the Scottish landscape. He had tramped with a pack on Lowland and Highland roads, and had seen the dawn rise over the wet city streets, and had filled the midnight hours with argument, and had done all the things that we were doing. His hunger for life had not been less than ours. And then he had taught himself to write miraculously, and for those of us who were dabbling clumsily in letters his expertness was a salutary model, for it meant hard and conscientious labour. He spoke our own language as a colleague and also as a mentor, for he was a preacher at heart, as every young Scotsman is, since we have all a craving to edify our fellows. As a guide to northern youth in the ‘nineties Stevenson filled the bill completely. He was at once Scottish and cosmopolitan, artist and adventurer, scholar and gipsy. Above all he was a true companion. He took us by the hand and shared in all our avocations. It was a profound and over-mastering influence, and I think it was an influence wholly benign.
