Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  There are no more comfortable words in the language than Peace and Joy, which Richard Hooker has conjoined in a famous sentence. Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown. But Joy is a positive thing; in Joy one does not only feel secure, but something goes out from oneself to the universe, a warm possessive effluence of love. There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness. It was Happiness that I knew in those rare moments. The world was a place of inexhaustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of something infinite, ineffable and immortal, in very truth the garment of God.

  I had one experience in South Africa which has since been twice repeated. We all know the sensation of doing something or seeing something which is strangely familiar, as if we had done or seen it before. The usual explanation is that we have had the experience in our dreams. My version is slightly different. I find myself in some scene which I cannot have visited before, and which yet is perfectly familiar; I know that it was the stage of an action in which I once took part, and am about to take part again; I await developments with an almost unbearable sense of anticipation. And then nothing happens; something appears which breaks the spell...

  I was in the bushveld going from one native village to another by a road which was just passable, and which followed a sedgy stream. I was walking ahead, and my mules and boys were about two hundred yards behind. Suddenly I found myself in a glade where the brook opened into a wide clear pool. The place was a little amphitheatre; on my left was a thicket of wild bananas, with beyond them a big baobab, and on my right a clump of tall stinkwood trees laced together with creepers. The floor was red earth with tufts of coarse grass, and on the edge of the pool was a mat of ferns...I stopped in my tracks, for I had been here before. Something had happened to me here, and was about to happen again; something had come out of the banana thicket. I knew the place as well as I knew my own doorstep. I was not exactly frightened, only curious and excited, and I stood waiting with my heart in my mouth. And then the spell broke, for my mules clattered up behind me.

  Twice since I have had the same feeling. Just before the War I was staying at a house on a sea-loch in the West Highlands. I was about to stalk a distant beat of the forest which could only be reached by sea, so it was arranged that after dinner I should go down to the yacht and sleep there so as to be ready to start very early next morning. A boatman ferried me out to the yacht. I had dressed for dinner in a kilt, and suddenly in the midst of the shadowy loch I got a glimpse of my shoe-buckles protruding from beneath my ulster...I was switched back two centuries. I had been here before on these moonlit waters in this circle of dark mountains. I had been rowed out to a ship by a boatman who muffled his strokes, for danger was everywhere. Something fateful awaited me when I got aboard that hull which loomed above the heathery islet...I sat with my hands clenched in suspense. I leaped at the ship’s ladder as if I had been a castaway...But nothing happened; only the skipper was waiting to offer me a whisky-and-soda!

  The third occasion was during my first year of office as Lord High Commissioner in Edinburgh. I had gone out to read in the garden of Holyroodhouse and had chosen a spot close to a shrubbery, where one looked over a piece of unshorn lawn to the old pile. It was a balmy May morning, with the air blowing free from the Firth and great cloud galleons cruising in the sky. The grass in front of me was starred with daisies, and a little further on were blossoming fruit trees, and then the tourelles of the most ancient part of the Palace. There seemed to be a flight of white doves somewhere near, but they may have been seagulls from Musselburgh...I lifted my eyes from my book and was suddenly transported to another age. I was in France at some château of Touraine. I was looking at the marguerites and apple blossom of which Ronsard sang. Once this stage had been set for high drama in which I had had a share, and now it was set again. In a moment I should be summoned...But alas! it was only an aide-de-camp come to remind me that seventy provosts and bailies were invited to luncheon!

  VII

  I learned a good deal in South Africa, and the chief lesson was that I had still much to learn about the material world and about human nature. I was given a glimpse into many fascinating tracts of experience which I longed to explore. I discovered that there was a fine practical wisdom which owed nothing to books and academies. My taste in letters was winnowed and purged, for the spirit of the veld is an austere thing. I learned to be at home in societies utterly alien to my own kind of upbringing.

  Above all I ceased to be an individualist and became a citizen. I acquired a political faith. Those were the days when a vision of what the Empire might be made dawned upon certain minds with almost the force of a revelation. To-day the word is sadly tarnished. Its mislikers have managed to identify it with uglinesses like corrugated-iron roofs and raw townships, or, worse still, with a callous racial arrogance. Its dreams, once so bright, have been so pawed by unctuous hands that their glory has departed. Phrases which held a world of idealism and poetry have been spoilt by their use in bad verse and in after-dinner perorations. Even that which is generally accepted has become a platitude. Something like the sober, merchandising Jacobean colonial policy has replaced the high Elizabethan dreams. But in those days things were different. It was an inspiration for youth to realise the magnitude of its material heritage, and to think how it might be turned to spiritual issues. Milner, like most imperialists of that day, believed in imperial federation. So did I at the start; but before I left South Africa I had come to distrust any large scheme of formal organisation. I had begun to accept the doctrine which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was later to expound; that the Dominions were not ready for such a union and must be allowed full freedom to follow their own destinies. But on the main question I was more than a convert, I was a fanatic.

  I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching the rest out of her culture and traditions, and the spirit of the Dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands. I saw in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home open country instead of a blind alley. I saw hope for a new afflatus in art and literature and thought. Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people. It was humanitarian and international; we believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world. As for the native races under our rule, we had a high conscientiousness; Milner and Rhodes had a far-sighted native policy. The “white man’s burden” is now an almost meaningless phrase; then it involved a new philosophy of politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble.

  The result was that my notion of a career was radically changed. I thought no more of being a dignified judge with a taste for letters, or a figure in British politics. I wanted some administrative task, some share in the making of this splendid commonwealth. I hoped to spend most of my life out of Britain. I had no desire to be a pro-consul or any kind of grandee. I would have been content with any job however thankless, in any quarter however remote, if I had a chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and the solitary place glad.

  CHAPTER VI — THE MIDDLE YEARS

  I

  The years from 1903 to 1914, a truce for Britain between two campaigns, are for the historian the germinal period of the Great War, but to some of those who lived through them they seemed rather an empty patch — confusae sonus urbis et illaetabile murmur.

  I had looked forward in South Africa to spending the next decade in foreign service. When I returned to England late in 1903 it was in the expectation of going soon to Egypt, where Lord Cromer had selected me for an important financial post; but the home authorities declined to ratify his choice, no doubt rightly, on the ground of my youth and inexperience. So I was compelled to go back to the Bar, where, with much restlessness and distaste, I continued for the next three years. Though I hoped daily for an appointment abroad, I realised that I must behave as if the Law were to be my life’s profession. I went back to Ro
wlatt’s chambers, had an occasional brief of my own, and “noted” cases for the Attorney-General, my old friend Sir Robert Finlay.

  But my chief work was the preparation of a law book. I asked Lord Haldane’s advice and he suggested a study of that intricate and evasive topic, the liability to the British tax of income earned abroad. So I published in 1905 a monograph on the taxation of foreign income, which for many years was the only work on the subject, and which I am proud to think that great man, F. W. Maitland, pronounced a workmanlike performance. When the Balfour Government fell and the Attorney-General went out of office, I had a year of private practice, in which, because of my book and my South African connections, I made a fair income. But I found it a dull job, for I rarely had the chance of going into court, and in any case the business of waiting to be hired compared unfavourably with the steady rhythm of administrative work. So, when it became clear that there was no immediate hope of service abroad, I seized a chance which offered and went into business. I left the Bar with sincere regret. There is no more honourable and expert profession, none in which the sinews of the mind are kept in better trim, as there is no more loyal and kindly fraternity. And I believe that there are few callings in which success is more certain for anyone with reasonable talents and the requisite industry and patience.

  Those years were not the pleasantest in my life. South Africa had completely unsettled me. I did not want to make money or a reputation at home; I wanted a particular kind of work which was denied me. I had lost my former catholicity of interests. I had no longer any impulse to write. I was distressed by British politics, for it seemed to me that both the great parties were blind to the true meaning of empire. London had ceased to have its old glamour. The eighteenth-century flavour, which entranced me on coming down from Oxford, had wholly departed, leaving a dull mercantile modern place, very different from the strenuous, coloured land I had left. I sat in my semi-underground chambers in Middle Temple Lane, feeling as if I were in Plato’s Cave, conversant not with mankind but with their shadows. Something, too, seemed to have happened to London society. I had now acquired a large circle of acquaintances, and had become an habitual diner-out, but it was in a society with little charm for me. The historic etiquette was breaking down; in every walk money seemed to count for more; there was a vulgar display of wealth, and a rastaquouère craze for luxury. I began to have an ugly fear that the Empire might decay at the heart.

  But I had my consolations. The first was new friends, and of these the chief was Richard Haldane, then enjoying a huge practice at the Bar and much prestige in Liberal circles. Some time earlier I had got to know what was left of that pleasant esoteric group which their critics called the “Souls,” and through them I met Haldane. With him, besides, I had many Scottish connections. We both came of Presbyterian stock, and we had both a strong interest in philosophy. As a young lawyer I revered a counsel who had cast his shoe over the House of Lords and made the Judicial Committee his wash-pot. We were both hardy walkers. In his younger days at the Bar, Haldane, after a busy week, would take a Saturday evening train to Brighton and tramp the fifty-odd miles to London on the Sunday. But what chiefly attracted me to him was his loyalty to Milner. Milner thought him the ablest man in public life, abler even than Arthur Balfour, and alone of his former Liberal allies Haldane stood by him on every count.

  How can I hope to reproduce my old friend for those who did not know him, or knew only his public form To the ordinary man he was a reputation rather than a person. His large smooth face, with the kindly wrinkles round the eyes, suggested a benevolent sphinx; his manner of speech was that of an oracle declaiming wisdom from some cloudy tripod, an impression enhanced by his small toneless voice. His appearance was that of some bland ecclesiastic of the Middle Ages, as if his true vocation were not legal or judicial, but priestly. One could picture him at midnight conclaves in an archiepiscopal palace, or splitting hairs at some high Church Council. There is a story that in his early days in London he was present at a dinner in an evangelical household, at which two famous American preachers were the principal guests. Before leaving, the evangelists spoke to each of the company privately on spiritual affairs. When they reached Haldane and saw his smile they left him alone. “No need, dear brother,” they said, “to ask how it is with your soul.”

  His personality was so unlike those of other public men that he became the centre of myth. The impression got abroad that his methods were of a subtlety which was almost devious. It was wholly false. He was a practical man, and was always prepared “by indirections to find directions out,” but he was eminently single-minded and sincere. As a friend said of him, you could hear him “tramping up the back stairs.” What he had in a full degree was the gift of persuasion, the power of wearing down opposition by sheer patience and reasonableness; and he had also that chief of diplomatic talents, the ability to read an opponent’s mind and shape his argument accordingly. His old affection for Germany made him slow to give up hope of peace, but it never blinded him, and he probably understood the German spirit better than any man in Britain.

  This persuasiveness made him a tremendous figure at the Bar. He was a learned lawyer, but there were many legal pundits. Where he differed from his rivals was in his power of getting back to principles and presenting his argument as an inevitable deduction from any sane conception of the universe. To differ from him seemed to be denying the existence of God. He could dignify the most prosaic case by giving it a philosophic background. This was no mere forensic trick; it was the consequence of sincere conviction, of a habit of mind which saw everything in organic relations.

  It made him a most formidable advocate, especially in questions of constitutional law, but now and then it led to disaster. The Scottish Church case was an example. The point there was whether the United Free Church could alter certain ecclesiastical and doctrinal tenets without forfeiting endowments which had been given while these tenets were held in their unchanged form. Haldane led for that Church, and his argument fell into two parts — one historical and the other philosophical. The historical argument was simply that a Scottish Church, looking at the historical growth and the traditional conception of a Kirk in Scotland, must be assumed to have the right to change its tenets within certain broad limits and to retain its endowments, unless the instruments creating such endowments contained specific words to the contrary. To that argument I believe there was no answer, and had it been really pressed the Court could not have resisted it. But Haldane was not an historian, and he concentrated on the philosophical argument based on the familiar Hegelian formulas — that identity exists through change and difference, that a thing is itself only because it is also in some sense its opposite, and so forth. It was a remarkable piece of dialectic, but it was an impossible argument to present to a court of justice, and it had the most disastrous effect upon various members of the House of Lords. One, I remember, became fatally confused between the philosophic term “antinomy” and the metal “antimony.” Lord Halsbury’s masculine intelligence dealt harshly with Haldane’s metaphysics, and the Court — wrongly, I think — decided against the United Free Church.

  His gift of philosophical synthesis and of adequate language in which to expound it had, of course, its very real dangers. He had great speculative ability, and his Gifford Lectures, The Pathway to Reality, composed while walking between his flat and the Law Courts and delivered extempore, are a wonderful instance of a popular philosophical exposition in clear and graceful language. But I used to feel that his facility tended to blunt the edge of his mind A man who has been nourished on German metaphysics should make a point of expressing his thoughts in plain workaday English, for the technical terms of German philosophy seem to have a kind of hypnotic power; they create a world remote from common reality where reconciliations and syntheses flow as smoothly and with as little meaning as in an opiate dream. I remember that once, while staying with him at Cloan, a Scottish professor and I consulted him about a difficult passage in Hegel’s
Phenomenology, and received a fluent explanation which apparently satisfied him, but which seemed to us to leave the difficulty untouched. In later years he became deeply interested in those questions where metaphysics, physics and mathematics have a common frontier, but experts in such matters have told me that he never quite grasped the points at issue, though he was always ready to expound them. There were moments when his impressive words seemed to mean nothing in particular. I once accompanied him through his constituency of East Lothian when he was defending Milner’s policy, including Chinese labour on the Rand. I came out of the hall with two old farmers. “Was he for it or against it?” one asked. Said the other, “I’m damned if I ken.” Also his brand of Hegelianism inclined him to be a little too optimistic about the friendliness of the universe. He was apt to ante-date the higher unity in which contraries were to be reconciled.

  There was another side to him, not often found in a philosopher. He had a genius for practical work, for construction and administration. Britain never had a greater War Minister, for he made the army which triumphed in 1918, though the mischances of politics did not permit him to direct it in the campaigns. This is now universally acknowledged, and the best authority, Lord Haig, has paid his work a tribute which I do not think any civilian War Minister in history ever received before from a Commander-in-Chief. But his labours also in the cause of national education should not be forgotten. There is no subject on which it is so easy for the mind to ossify and generous ideals to end in stale platitudes. Haldane was never the slave of a dogma, and could look at a question freshly on its merits. It was this matter more than any other which alienated him from the traditional parties, who seemed to him to lack imagination and to be slavishly bound to formulas. He was never a socialist in the Marxian sense, but on the question of education the Labour party seemed to him more open-minded than the others, and readier to kindle to a new vision.