Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  There was the Horace Club which we founded and which met in summer in the President’s garden at Magdalen, when we supped on nuts and olives and fruits, drank what we made believe was Falernian, and read our poetical compositions. The club had outside members like Maurice Baring, and its published collection of verses is now, I believe, a collector’s piece...And there were odder fraternities, like the White Rose Club, when we drank to the King over the Water without a notion of what we meant. I remember my surprise in 1915 in Flanders when I found that Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the commander opposite us, was the gentleman whom we had been wont to salute by telegram on his birthday as Prince Robert of Wales!

  III

  Father Knox, in the dedication which he never published to his Spiritual Aeneid, has told of the bright company which was scattered by the War. I hesitate to make such a survey for my own time, since it is all so long ago, and to-day most of the names would have little meaning. But one or two I may select from that old world where “the sun rose over Magdalen and set over Worcester.”

  Cuthbert Medd, who died in 1902 just as he was about to join me in South Africa, had in some ways the most powerful mind I have ever known in a young man, and Lord Rosebery was of my opinion. He was a Northumbrian and therefore in some sense a fellow-Borderer, and together we tramped over most of Scotland. Aubrey Herbert, gentle, whimsical, utterly courageous, lived to be a Member of Parliament and to have a fantastic record in various terrains of the War. He was taken prisoner in the retreat from Mons, when, armed with an alpenstock, he must have presented a figure like Don Quixote’s; and, knowing Turkish, during a truce at Gallipoli he is said to have taken command of a Turkish unit and escorted it back to its trenches. To go tandem-driving with him at Oxford required fortitude, for he was very blind; to mountaineer with him deserved a Victoria Cross, for he was both blind and desperate...Then there was always with us the stalwart figure of Hilaire Belloc, who preached exotic doctrines in his great gusty voice — a man full of gnarled wisdom and also of a youthfulness younger than ours — who warmed the air about him and whose kindliness and charity were of the early Christian pattern. He founded a so-called Republican Club, and it became necessary to correct its extravagance by starting a rival institution, the S.G.D.F.P., or the Society for Grinding Down the Faces of the Poor! Let me record my conviction that much of his output in letters is as likely to live as any work of our time; no man has attained more perfectly to the “piety of speech” of the seventeenth-century lyrists; no man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.

  Of two friends I must write more fully. The first is Raymond Asquith. There are some men whose brilliance in boyhood and early manhood dazzles their contemporaries and becomes a legend. It is not that they are precocious, for precocity rarely charms, but that for every sphere of life they have the proper complement of gifts, and finish each stage so that it remains behind them like a satisfying work of art. Sometimes the curtain drops suddenly, the daylight goes out of the picture, and the promise of youth dulls into a dreary middle-age of success, or, it may be, of failure and cynicism. But for the chosen few, like Raymond, there is no disillusionment. They march on into life with a boyish grace, and their high noon keeps all the freshness of the morning. Certainly to his cradle the good fairies brought every dower. They gave him great beauty of person; the gift of winning speech; a mind that mastered readily whatever it cared to master; poetry and the love of all beautiful things; a magic to draw friends to him; a heart as tender as it was brave. One gift only was withheld from him — length of years.

  The figure of Raymond in those days stands very clear in my memory, for he had always the complete detachment from the atmosphere which we call distinction. He wore generally an old shooting-coat of light grey tweed and grey flannel trousers; the laxest sumptuary law would have made havoc of his comfort. He had rather deep-set grey eyes, and his lips were parted as if at the beginning of a smile. He had a fine straight figure, and bore himself with a kind of easy stateliness. His manner was curiously self-possessed and urbane, but there was always in it something of a pleasant aloofness, as of one who was happy in society but did not give to it more than a fraction of himself.

  He had come up from Winchester with a great reputation, and also, I think, a little tired. His scholarship was almost too ripe for his years, and he had already conquered so many worlds that he was little troubled with ordinary ambition. As the son of an eminent statesman he had seen much of distinguished people who to most of us were only awful names, so that he seemed all his time at Oxford to have one foot in the greater world. Not that he gave this impression by anything that he said or did; it was rather by his whole-hearted delight in Oxford and his lack of reverence for the standards that ruled outside it. He had the air of having seen enough of the outer world to judge it with detachment.

  Even in those early years his great powers of mind were patent to all. I have never met anyone so endowed with diverse talents. In sheer intellectual strength he may have had his equals, and there were limits to his imaginative sympathies; but for manifold and multiform gifts I have not known his like. He was a fine classical scholar, at once learned and precise; he was widely read in English literature; he wrote good poetry, Greek, Latin and English; he had the most delicate and luminous critical sense; he had an uncanny gift of exact phrase, whether in denunciation or in praise. His ordinary conversation was chiefly remarkable for its fantastic humour, but when he chose he was a master of manly good sense. As a letter-writer he was easily the best of us, but his epistles were dangerous things to leave lying about, for he had a most unbridled pen. He could not write a sentence without making it characteristic and imparting into it some delicate ribaldry.

  As a speaker I never heard him in the political clubs; but in the Union he was easily the most finished debater of our time. It was a hey-day of Union oratory, for Hilaire Belloc, F. E. Smith and John Simon were our immediate predecessors and still took part in debates. He did not seem to seek to convince; smoothly, almost disdainfully, in his beautiful voice flowed his fastidious satire. There were no signs of careful preparation, and yet, had his speeches been printed verbatim, each sentence would have stood out as finely cut as in an essay of Stevenson’s.

  His politics were hereditary, not, I think, the result of any personal enthusiasm. He had a thoroughly conservative temperament, and loathed the worn counters of party warfare. Not greatly respecting many people, he had a profound respect for his father, and much resembled him, both in his style of speaking and in the quality of his mind. He would not condescend to cheap jack argument, and he distrusted emotion in public life. He was like his father, too, in many traits of character — his loyalty, his hatred of intrigue, his contempt for advertisement, and his great courage. I do not think that at that time he had any strong political opinions (though many prejudices about political figures) except on the question of the Church. He detested clericalism, and like the Irishman at Donnybrook when he found its head anywhere he smote it. I only once saw him in the Union roused to a real show of feeling. The matter in debate was whether some work attacking the Oxford Movement should be cast out of the library. The book was admittedly trash, but those who opposed its rejection did so on the ground that the reason alleged was not its literary badness but its opinions, and that such censorship over thought was intolerable. I can remember Raymond speaking with a white face and an unwonted passion in his voice. He asked where such censorship would stop. There were books on the shelves, he said, by Roman writers which poured venom upon the greatest man that ever lived. Were these books to be expelled? “I assure you,” he told the angry ranks of Keble and St. John’s, “that the fair fame of Caesar is as dear to me as that of any dead priest can be to you.”

  I do not think he could ever have been called popular. He was immensely admired, but he did not lay himself out to acquire popularity, and in the ordinary man he inspired awe rather than liking. His courtesy was without warmth, he was apt to be intolerant o
f mediocrity, and he had no desire for facile acquaintanceships. Also — let it be admitted — there were times when he was almost inhuman. He would destroy some piece of honest sentiment with a jest, and he had no respect for the sacred places of dull men. There was always a touch of scorn in him for obvious emotion, obvious creeds, and all the accumulated lumber of prosaic humanity. That was a defect of his great qualities. He kept himself for his friends and refused to bother about the world. But to such as were admitted to his friendship he would deny nothing. I have never known a friend more considerate, and tender, and painstaking, and unfalteringly loyal. It was the relation of all others in life for which he had been born with a peculiar genius.

  I have said that he came up to Oxford with little ambition, and he went down with less. He stood aloof from worldly success, not from any transcendental philosophy, but simply because the rewards of common ambition seemed to him too trivial for a man’s care. He loved the things of the mind — good books, good talk — for their own sake; he loved, above all, youth and the company of his friends. To such a man it was hard to leave Oxford, for it meant a break with youth and the haunts of youth, and he had no zest for new and commoner worlds. In looking over old letters from him I find a constant lament that that chapter must close.

  No two friends were ever more unlike than he and I. He chaffed me unmercifully about my Calvinism, my love of rough moors in wild weather, my growing preference for what he called the Gothic over the Greek in life, my crude passion for romance. “You scoff at the cult of Beauty,” he once wrote to me, “in your coarse Scotch way. I grind my teeth when I hear people praise the machinery of Scotch education. Depend upon it, my poor dear soul-starved pedlar, the English public-school system is the only one which fits a man for life and ruins him for eternity. And commendation cannot go further than that, as you know well if you had the honesty to acknowledge it.”

  There was one consequence of this lack of ambition which the world may well regret. Except in his letters, he scarcely used his great gift for literature. A few poems are all that remain. One of these, an Ode in Praise of Young Girls, written shortly before the War, is to my mind the finest satirical poem of our day. He wrote many verses — he used to scatter them about his letters — but he rarely finished them. He and I once prepared a complete Spectator, a parody of that admirable journal. The three middle articles, I remember, were on God, Bridge, and Harvest Bugs. Raymond wrote the poem, a Tennysonian elegy, supposed to have been written by a well-known Oxford dignitary, On a Viscount who died on the Morrow of a Bump Supper.

  When I went to South Africa in 1901 Raymond had just taken a first in “Greats,” and was reading law for an All Souls’ Fellowship. We maintained a regular correspondence, and the sight of his bold, beautiful handwriting was the pleasantest part of mail days in Johannesburg. He wrote pages of delightful political gossip, and unveracious accounts of the doings of our friends, and — very rarely — news of himself. Here are two extracts:

  “Eighteenth-century methods worked well enough while we had a talented aristocracy, but we can’t afford nowadays to limit our choice of Ministers to a few stuffy families, with ugly faces, bad manners, and a belief in the Nicene Creed. The day of the clever cad is at hand. I always felt it would come to this if we once let ourselves in for an Empire. If only Englishmen had known their Aeschylus a little better they wouldn’t have bustled about the world appropriating things. A gentleman may make a large fortune, but only a cad can look after it. It would have been so much pleasanter to live in a small community who knew Greek and played games and washed themselves...I hear you think I oughtn’t to be up at Oxford a fifth year. You are probably right, but, honestly, I haven’t the ambition of a louse and I don’t see why I should pretend to it. There are a few things and people at Oxford that I intend to keep close to as long as I decently can, and I don’t care a damn about the rest. If one fell in love with a woman or believed in the Newcastle Programme or had no dress clothes it might be different. But the world as I see it just now is a little barren of motives...I suppose I may have what is called a spiritual awakening any day, and then I shall start to lie and make money with the best of them...The law is a lean casuistical business and fills me with disgust.”

  . . . . .

  “The bleak futility of our public men on both sides is a thing one never hoped to see outside the neo-Celtic school of poetry. The general effect is that of a flock of sheep playing blind man’s buff in the distance on a foggy day. Rosebery continues to prance upon the moonbeam of efficiency and makes speeches at every street corner; but he might just as well call it the Absolute at once for all the meaning it has to him or anyone else. No one has the least idea what he wants to ‘effect,’ and beyond a mild bias in favour of good government and himself as Premier, nothing can be gleaned from his speeches...He has started a thing called the Liberal League, which appears at present to consist of three persons — himself, my father, and Grey — backed by a squad of titled ladies, who believe that the snobbery of the lower classes is greater than their greed. I trust that may be so; they say there is a good spot in everyone if one knows where to find it...As to law, I am in the position of a Danaid incessantly pouring into the leaky sieve of my mind the damnable details of Praetorian Edicts and the Custom of Gavelkind. If they didn’t run out at once I think I should be mad by now. God knew what He was about when He provided me with a bad memory, and I am not the one to withhold praise where it is due.”

  In 1902 I tried to induce Raymond to come and visit us in South Africa. Lord Milner also did his best, but nothing would make him leave England. “What have you to offer me?” he wrote. “Certainly not those who are clad in soft raiment (we saw them at the Coronation!), nor do I imagine that any voice cries in your desert in a way which tends to edification.” He was now a Fellow of All Souls, and enjoying himself, as appeared from the pictures of delights which he drew to lure me home, and his hilarity about politics. “No two people seem to disagree about anything — except Rosebery and C. B.; and neither of them has anything you could call an opinion, except about each other; in which opinion, of course, they are both right.” Then suddenly he was heard of in Egypt, and we found ourselves in the same continent. He thought meanly of the Nile, the monuments, the scenery (“about as picturesque as a spittoon”), everything except the climate. “The sunsets are wonderful, passing from palest green through every shade of yellow to deepest purple with a rapidity and precision which is more like Beerbohm Tree than the Almighty.” He rejoiced to see a land where, he said, any kind of self-government was manifestly out of the question. At that time he was not enamoured of what he called “middle-Victorian shibboleths.”

  When I came back from South Africa at the end of 1903 I found that Raymond had cut loose from Oxford, and was already in London society the same distinguished and slightly detached figure which he had been at the University. He was reading for the Bar, and had plenty of leisure to enjoy life and see his friends. At that time I lived in the Temple with Harold Baker, and the three of us used to go for country walks of a Sunday and have periodical dinners at which we drank claret on the old scale. He had become even handsomer than before, and in London clothes he had a slightly ascetic look. Oxford was behind him, and he had set himself to make the best of his new life. He looked with a more kindly eye upon politics, for the Tariff Reform controversy had left him a strong Free Trader, and he began to speak a little for his party. But till he was settled in practice at the Bar he took neither law nor politics too seriously. He was not a whit more ambitious than at Oxford, and had still about him the suggestion of some urbane and debonair scholar-gipsy, who belonged to a different world from the rest of us. It was this air of aloofness which gave him his peculiar attraction to those who met him for the first time, and acquaintance did not stale that charm. There was in him all the fascination of the unexpected and unpredictable. His wit flowed as easily as a brook, and into curious eddies. He had a great talent for acute but surprising descriptions o
f people, especially those whom he did not love. His humour was oftenest the Aristophanic úɼ¼± À±Á± ÀÁ¿Ã´¿º¹±½. I remember one instance. Someone, in one of the round games which were then popular, propounded a stupid riddle: “What is that which God never sees, kings rarely see, and we see every day?” The answer is “An equal.” Raymond’s answer was “A joke.” In the autumn of 1903 John Morley’s Life of Gladstone in three bulky volumes descended upon the world. I once heard Raymond asked the inevitable question — had he read them. “Often,” he replied brightly.

  Then he fell in love and married — in July 1907, the same month as my own wedding. He and I gave our final bachelor dinner together at the Savoy. Marriage did not, I think, wake his ambition, as he once prophesied it might, but it regularised his talents: canalised, as it were, a stream which had hitherto flowed at random. He settled down seriously to work at the Bar, with Parliament somewhere in the future. He succeeded, of course, up to a point. His father was now Prime Minister, and he was naturally briefed in important cases as a junior for or against the Crown. Of course, too, he did his work well, for he was incapable of doing anything badly. But I question if he would ever have made one of the resounding successes of advocacy. For one thing he did not care enough about it; for another, he scorned the worldly wisdom which makes smooth the steps in a career. He had no gift of deference towards eminent solicitors or of reverence towards heavy-witted judges. He would probably have passed, if he had lived, through the stage of Treasury junior to a seat on the Bench, where his perfect lucidity of mind and precision of phrase would have made him an admirable judge — a second Bowen, perhaps, without Bowen’s super-subtlety. But I do not think he would ever have won that commanding position at the English Bar which was due to his talents.