Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  IV

  I found another way of using my leisure. In the spring of 1911 I became the Conservative candidate for the counties of Peebles and Selkirk, a constituency which then stretched from within a dozen miles of Edinburgh to within twenty miles of the Border.

  My motives were mixed. I had always felt that it was a citizen’s duty to find some form of public service, but I had no strong parliamentary ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment which I felt impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent. Like Montaigne I could forgive “neither the commendable qualities of my adversaries nor the reproachful of those I followed.” I was apt to fall into the mood which Macaulay attributes to Halifax:

  “His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the community and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which he had, at that moment, the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector.”

  My political experience at the time was nil, and my views were shallow and ill-informed — inclinations rather than principles. I believed profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world peace, and as a factor in the solution of all our domestic problems, but I no longer accepted imperial federation, and I had little confidence in Mr. Chamberlain’s tariff policy. For socialism I had the distrust that I felt for all absolute creeds, and Marxism, to which I had given some attention, seemed to me to have an insecure speculative basis and to be purblind as a reading of history. On the other hand I wanted the community to use its communal strength when the facts justified it, and I believed in the progressive socialisation of the State, provided the freedom of the personality were assured. I had more sympathy with socialism than with orthodox liberalism, which I thought a barren strife about dogmas that at that time had only an antiquarian interest. But I was a Tory in the sense that I disliked change unless the need for it was amply proved, and that I desired to preserve continuity with the past and keep whatever of the old foundations were sound. As I used to put it in a fisherman’s simile, if your back cast is poor your forward cast will be a mess.

  So I went into politics with a queer assortment of interests. I hoped to see the Empire developed on the right lines; the Dominions enabled to grow into self-conscious nations; emigration undertaken as a reasoned policy, fully planned at each end, and not as a mere overspill of population. Then I wanted something done about resettling the land of Scotland. Since my boyhood I had seen land slipping out of cultivation into pasture, and glens where once a dozen hearths smoked now inhabited only by a shepherd and his dog. For the rest I was critical of the details of Mr. Asquith’s policy, but approved its purpose — old-age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, and most of the famous 1910 Budget. In the quarrel with the House of Lords I was on the Government’s side. By 1914 I had come to differ violently from them on the matter of Ulster, for though a federal home-ruler, after the fashion of my friend, F. S. Oliver, their blundering in the treatment of Ulster roused some ancient Covenanting devil in my blood.

  I came of a Liberal family, most of my friends were Liberals, I agreed with nine-tenths of the party’s creed. Indeed, I think that my political faith was always liberalism — or rather “liberality,” as Gilbert Murray has interpreted the word. But when I stood for Parliament it had to be the other side.

  Now that the once omnipotent Liberal party has so declined, it is hard to realise how formidable it was in 1911 — especially in Scotland. Its dogmas were so completely taken for granted that their presentation partook less of argument than of a tribal incantation. Mr. Gladstone had given it an aura of earnest morality, so that its platforms were also pulpits and its harangues had the weight of sermons. Its members seemed to assume that their opponents must be lacking either in morals or mind. The Tories were the “stupid” party; Liberals alone understood and sympathised with the poor; a working man who was not a Liberal was inaccessible to reason, or morally corrupt, or intimidated by laird or employer. I remember a lady summing up the attitude thus: Tories may think they are better born, but Liberals know that they are born better.

  All this was a little trying to the natural man, and he longed to breach the complacency. It had small justification. In the old bad days of the early nineteenth century the Whigs were probably more intellectually alive than the Tories; but the situation had wholly changed. A youth in Scotland who called himself a Tory was almost certain to be thinking about politics, and not merely cherishing a family loyalty. I got together a fine group of young men, and we refused no challenge, but argued any question anywhere with anyone; my public meetings frequently ended in a discussion at a street corner or in a public-house. That brave band is now scattered; many of them fell in the War; some are now ornaments of the Labour party. We were crude enough, but at any rate we tried to get down to realities, on which our opponents for the most part maintained a conspiracy of silence. Their strength lay partly in what remained of Mr. Gladstone’s Sinaitic authority, and partly in a stubborn, almost feudal, conservatism. Their sires and grandsires had been Liberal, and it would be treason to desert the standard. It was a moral question; not reason but loyalty was at issue. I had innumerable Liberal friends, who would speed me from the door with “I’d dae onything for ye but vote for ye.”

  It was hard to fight against this family compact. But we steadily made way, and we certainly gave the place a fairly thorough political education. For example, I find that I once discoursed for an hour and a half on the taxation of land values and had a keen discussion afterwards. I brought eminent speakers into the constituency, such as F. E. Smith, Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Robert Finlay, Alfred Lyttelton and Robert Horne, and that was a delicate business, for in many matters I differed from my party. In 1914 my energy declined: I began to feel that the ordinary matters of debate were falling out of the picture as I saw creeping towards us the shadow of war.

  Old electioneering tactics can interest nobody, and they never greatly interested me. What made my work as a candidate a delight was the people I moved among. I did not want to be just any kind of Member of Parliament; I wanted to represent my own folk of the Border. I have written of them in an earlier chapter that they had the qualities I most admired in human nature; realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. To the first quality the ballads bear witness, to the second the history of Scotland. As examples of the third let me tell two stories.

  Mr. Gladstone once paid a visit to a Tweedside country, and in the afternoon went out for a walk and came to a gate which gave upon the glen. It was late in November, a snowstorm was threatening, and the sheep, as is their custom, were drawing out from the burn-side to the barer hill where drifts could not lie. An old shepherd was leaning on the gate, and to him Mr. Gladstone spoke in his high manner “Are not sheep the most foolish of all animals? Here is a storm pending, and instead of remaining in shelter they are courting the fury of the blast. If I were a sheep I should remain in the hollows.” To which the shepherd replied: “Sir, if ye were a sheep ye’d have mair sense.”

  The second belongs to my own candidature. Heckling in the Borders is carried, I think, to a higher pitch of art than anywhere else in Britain. It is pursued for the pure love of the game, and I have known a candidate heckled to a standstill by his own supporters. Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act had ust been introduced, and at a meeting at remote Ettrickhead the speaker was defending it on the ground that it was a practical application of the Sermon on the
Mount. A long-legged shepherd rose to question him, and the following dialogue ensued:

  “Ye believe in the Bible, sir?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “And ye consider that this Insurance Act is in keepin’ with the Bible?”

  “I do.”

  “Is it true that under the Act there’s a maternity benefit, and that a woman gets the benefit whether she’s married or no?”

  “That is right.”

  “D’ye approve of that?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “Well, sir, how d’ye explain this? The Bible says the wages of sin is death and the Act says thirty shillin’s.”

  For three years my wife and I spent most of our leisure in getting acquainted with my possible constituents. We visited twice every hamlet, farm and cottage in the two shires. That involved lengthy journeys in wintry weather, but it meant also halcyon summer days in the long glens of Tweed and Ettrick and Yarrow. It was not canvassing, for I rarely mentioned politics. Since I spoke their own tongue and knew most men by their Christian names, those visits gave me a chance of entering into the pastoral life of the uplands, as Sir Walter Scott entered into it in his quest for ballads. I learned many things that do not come usually within the orbit of a politician. I cannot tell how my friends regarded me in that capacity, but I think that they came to consider me as one of themselves with whom they need not stand on ceremony. Once at a lamb fair a shepherd paid me what I believe was a sincere though left-handed compliment. “We’ve gotten the richt sort of candidate in you this time,” he said. “Your predecessor was an awfu’ nice man, but he was far ower much of a gentleman and far ower honest!”

  V

  During those years I moved among a good many social groups. I had friends in commerce and finance, in the army and navy and civil service, in most branches of science and scholarship, and especially in the law and politics. But as a writer it was my misfortune to be too little in the society of writers. This was partly due to my preoccupation with other interests. My upbringing never gave me the chance of the pleasant bohemianism associated with the writer’s craft. As a publisher I came to know many authors, English and French, but it was only a nodding acquaintance. I must confess, too, I fear, that I rarely found a man of letters who interested me as much as members of other callings. A writer must inevitably keep the best of himself for his own secret creative world. I had no appetite for studio talk. I never knew the enthusiasm which is given by membership of a coterie designed to preach some new gospel in art. My taste was for things old and shabby and unpopular, and I regarded with scepticism whatever was acclaimed as the Spirit of the Age. I was born to be always out of fashion.

  Also I felt — no doubt wrongly — that the author in social life was rarely the natural creature that God intended. His public form inclined to be an innocent pose forced on him by his admirers — robustious, cynical, forward-looking, elfin, wistful — something, anyhow, that could not be sustained without artifice. A man who as a longshoreman or a mason would have been a pleasant companionable fellow, became as a writer as restless as a grasshopper and apt, like the grasshopper, to be a burden.

  Andrew Lang was a close friend, and after his death Henry Newbolt, but these friendships were based on other things than literature. With G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring I never differed — except in opinion. I was fascinated by Rudyard Kipling’s devouring interest in every detail of the human comedy, the way in which in conversation he used to raven the heart out of a subject. I knew Thomas Hardy fairly well and revered his wonderful old age “like a Lapland night,” and what T. E. Lawrence called “his unbelievable dignity and ripeness of spirit.” Stephen Reynolds, who wrote A Poor Man’s House, and who chose to live as a Devon fisherman, was an intimate friend.

  Of the greatest figures I saw most of Henry James. Would that I had seen more of him, for I loved the man, and revelled in the idioms of his wonderful talk, which Mr. Percy Lubbock has admirably described—”his grandiose courtesy, his luxuriant phraseology, his relish for some extravagantly colloquial term embedded in a Ciceronian period, his humour at once so majestic and so burly.” I have two vivid memories of him. Once I had to act as host in a relative’s country house where he was a guest. A New Englander knows something about Madeira and the house had a wonderful cellar of that wine, so at the end of dinner I called his attention to what he was about to drink, promising him a new experience. He sipped his glass, and his large benign face remained impassive while he gave his verdict. I wish I could remember his epithets; they were a masterpiece of the intricate, evasive and noncommittal, and yet of an exquisite politeness. Then I tasted the wine and found it swipes. It was the old story of a dishonest butler who was selling the famous vintages and replacing them by cheap stuff from a neighbouring public-house. The other occasion was when an aunt of my wife’s, who was the widow of Byron’s grandson, asked Henry James and myself to examine her archives in order to reach some conclusion on the merits of the quarrel between Byron and his wife. She thought that those particular papers might be destroyed by some successor and she wanted a statement of their contents deposited in the British Museum. So, during a summer week-end, Henry James and I waded through masses of ancient indecency, and duly wrote an opinion. The thing nearly made me sick, but my colleague never turned a hair. His only words for some special vileness were “singular”—”most curious”—”nauseating, perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.”

  The people I saw most of were the politicians. The pre-War years witnessed the end of a fashion which had continued since the 1688 Revolution, and which made politics the chief interest of the educated classes. To-day, when they are the uneasy preoccupation of everybody, it is hard to recapture the precise atmosphere of that decade when to many they were still a game ruled by all kinds of social and family etiquettes. Controversy was not so sharp as to prevent the different sides mixing pleasantly, and I still remember the surprise of old-fashioned people when in 1913 the Parliament Act and the Ulster question led to breaches of private friendship. There was a good deal to be said for the fashion, since Britain’s traditional policy is always compromise. Its drawback was that it handicapped fresh and sincere thinking on public affairs. The Government party, with the exception of a few rebels, was content to stand in the ancient ways; Mr. Lloyd George’s social experiments were rather the development of an old, than the inception of a new, creed, and his much-criticised finance was cuts off the standard joints. The Opposition confined itself to opposing, though a few younger men, like Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert, stood for something more than a negation. One turned to the new Labour party to find people who were trying to strike out new paths — and rarely found them.

  Politics in the circles in which I dwelt were an absorbing topic, at least the small change of politics. A by-election woke a spate of gossip; a general election had the sporting interest of a struggle between counties for the cricket championship. The bitterness caused by Mr. Lloyd George’s platform manners has been much exaggerated; I have heard aged Tories describe him as “varminty” with unwilling admiration in their voices. The assumption seemed to be that the fundamentals of politics were fixed and much the same as they had always been, and that disputes were only about pace and emphasis To many they were a drawing-room game, almost a drawing-room comedy. In certain circles there was, of course, discussion about principles and theories, and the traditional creeds were always being analysed and defined. But they remained the traditional creeds. The social and economic fabric was assumed to be what it had been at the close of the nineteenth century, with a few novel elements which could easily be adjusted. There was little consciousness that new facts were emerging in all quarters, social, political, economic, religious, which required a new interpretation, that all our problems needed a fresh analysis, and that the most venerated principles must be rethought and restated. The world was undergoing chemical combinations in which no element was left unchanged. The constituents o
f society were being altered, both in proportion and quality. The old economics were going out of date since they were deductions from a state of things which had ceased to be. Current beliefs in every department were imperceptibly changing, and what was true of Britain was not less true of the world at large.

  The imperception of the nation was reflected in the Government. That Government contained, I think, as high an average of ability as was ever found in a British Cabinet. Its members were admirably fitted to carry on; they were not so well fitted to foresee and originate. Haldane was different, but he was absorbed in his department, and Mr. Churchill, too, had definitely become a specialist. Two men, Edward Grey and Asquith, set the tone of the administration. Both were in the great tradition of our public life. Grey had some of the qualities of the Lord Althorp of the first Reform Bill, and as Foreign Secretary something of the patient sagacity of Lord Salisbury. Half a century earlier he would have been a very great Foreign Minister, but he was a man of an era, and that era had passed. The position of Britain in Europe had radically changed, and the old business of wise compromise and nice adjustment was out of date. New, strange, inconsequent forces were at work to upset the old balances. He felt these forces but he did not understand them — perhaps no man did. When the crisis came he was in my belief as adequate to it as was possible for any British statesman cast in his mould. What was needed was a different mould, something like the desperate boldness of Cromwell or Chatham.