by John Buchan
For this great class the world has become more rigid than I remember it. A young man seems to me to have fewer avenues open to him, and fewer chances in these avenues. I leave out of account the pre-eminence of mind or character which we call genius, for that will always hew out a course. I am speaking of youth of reasonable capacity and moderate ambitions, which seeks a calling with hope and daylight in it, which is capable of a great effort of patience but must have a glimpse of some attainable goal.
Wherever I look I seem to detect a deepening and narrowing of ruts. Technological progress, to be sure, has increased their number, but too few emerge into open country. The older universities have now returned to the mediaeval practice, and by way of new scholarships are far more accessible to those of scanty means. But what lies at the end of a university course? A high standard of attainment will no doubt take one into the upper walks of the teaching profession, and a moderate standard perhaps into the civil service, but besides that — what? Too often the only choice is some minor scholastic or clerical job in which a man is apt to stick fast for the rest of his days. Business is now accepted as a calling for those who have received a liberal education. But does business to-day give an active man without capital the chances it offered a couple of generations ago? Has it not become so desperately specialised that an ambitious entrant may all his life be condemned to be a minor cog in a huge machine? At the bottom of the class the position is worse. The clerk who begins on a pittance may have nothing to look forward to except small yearly increases till he reaches in middle age an income which will just support a household. He has, too, a haunting sense of economic insecurity, for the State takes no interest in his troubles.
The difficulty is not that the path from the log cabin to the White House is not made easy; that will always need vigorous axework and a stout heart. It is that society has become so rigid that average youth is deprived of those modest hopes which are its peculiar grace and the source of its value. And this narrowing of opportunity has come about when its mental outlook has been infinitely broadened. A dozen new means of enlightenment have opened up the world to it and vastly stimulated its interests. The clerk of fifty years ago had no ambition beyond a little house in the suburbs, and was content if he saw himself on the way to its attainment; the same man to-day, educated, open-eyed, imaginative, chafes bitterly at his confinement in a groove which may be far narrower than that of his predecessors.
The result in the end must be revolution, the most dangerous kind, a revolution of the middle classes. It is on their discontent that the dictators to-day have based their power. The working classes do not come into the picture; partly because, being nearer the margin of subsistence, they are more likely to be content with what meets their immediate needs and gives them present security; partly because, having less education, they do not suffer from the unsatisfied cravings of the educated. The dictators have won their power largely by an appeal, not to a suffering proletariat but to the forgotten “little man” of the middle classes whom reformers in the past have accountably neglected. They have given him a sense Or dignity and importance, and opened vistas for him. They have brought him into the inner fold of the State when hitherto he has been a disconsidered outsider. Black and execrable as is most of their work, they have this to their credit; they have restored pride and confidence to large sections of a class which had begun to despair. There lies their strength — and also their doom, when it is realised that the horizon they have revealed to youth is no more than a painted back-cloth.
I have had much to do with young men on several continents and in many countries, and I regard this shrinking of opportunity as one of the gravest facts of our age. It will remain an urgent matter long after the guns are silent. Somehow or other we must make our social and economic world more fluid. We must widen the approaches so that honest ambition and honourable discontent may have elbow-room. The world must remain an oyster for youth to open. If not, youth will cease to be young, and that will be the end of everything.
There is another side to the problem. With all our reservoir of skill and knowledge there is a lamentable dearth to-day of the higher talent. Or rather, while this talent must exist, it is uncommonly difficult to lay one’s hand on it. Anyone who has had experience in such matters knows how hard it often is to find men for the higher posts in finance, industry, journalism and academic and political life. Admittedly the talent is somewhere, if we have any confidence in our fellowmen, but how to find it e The Miltons may remain for ever mute and inglorious, the Hampdens only village worthies. If our society were more open-meshed and elastic it should be possible for a shining gift to reveal itself before it is too late. Were I a multi-millionaire I would devote my fortune to making an inquisition for the discovery of genius, so that those fitted to be our leaders should get their feet out of the mire in time to help the world. For in the last resort it is not the machine that matters, but the man.
IV
The dominant thought of youth is the bigness of the world, of age its smallness. As we grow older we escape from the tyranny of matter and recognise that the true centre of gravity is in the mind Also we lose that sense of relativity, which is so useful in normal life, provided it does not sour into cynicism, and come more and more to acclaim absolute things — goodness, truth, beauty. From a wise American scholar I take this sentence: “The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them. With minds but slightly evolved beyond those of our animal relations, we are tortured with precocious desires, and pose questions which we are sometimes capable of asking but rarely are able to answer.” With the recognition of our limitations comes a glimpse of the majesty of the “Power not ourselves.” Religion is born when we accept the ultimate frustration of mere human effort, and at the same time realise the strength which comes from union with superhuman reality.
To-day the quality of our religion is being put to the test. The conflict is not only between the graces of civilisation and the rawness of barbarism. More is being challenged than the system of ethics which we believe to be the basis of our laws and liberties. I am of Blake’s view: “Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect a synagogue of Satan.” There have been high civilisations in the past which have not been Christian, but in the world as we know it I believe that civilisation must have a Christian basis, and must ultimately rest on the Christian Church. To-day the Faith is being attacked, and the attack is succeeding. Thirty years ago Europe was nominally a Christian continent. It is no longer so. In Europe, as in the era before Constantine, Christianity is in a minority. What Gladstone wrote seventy years ago, in a moment of depression, has become a shattering truth: “I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the State and the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the Gospel of Christ.”
The Christian in name has in recent years been growing cold in his devotion. Our achievement in perfecting life’s material apparatus has produced a mood of self-confidence and pride. Our peril has been indifference, and that is a grave peril, for rust will crumble a metal when hammer blows will only harden it. I believe — and this is my crowning optimism — that the challenge with which we are now faced may restore to us that manly humility which alone gives power. It may bring us back to God. In that case our victory is assured. The Faith is an anvil which has worn out many hammers.
We are condemned to fumble in these times, for the mist is too thick to see far down the road. But in all our uncertainty we can have Cromwell’s hope. “To be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next to a Finder, and such an one shall every faithful, humble Seeker be at the end.” So, as a tail-piece to this book, I would transcribe a sentence of Henry Adams: “After all, man knows mighty littl
e, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down and pray.” Dogmatism gives place to questioning, and questioning in the end to prayer.
THE END
PILGRIM’S REST VALLEYS OF SPRINGS OF RIVERS
This valediction ends Memory Hold-the-Door as its author left it ready for publication. The next work he planned was to be a book about fishing. Only the two chapters that follow were completed and were found among his papers with the pencilled title: Pilgrim’s Rest
“Praised art Thou, my Lord, of Sister Water, for manifold is her use, and humble is she, and precious and pure.” — ST. FRANCIS.
CHAPTER I — THE SPRINGS
If fishing, as I maintain, be not only a craft but a way of life, then a fisherman must begin young. A small boy desires some tangible reward for his adventures. He has the British soldier’s innocent passion for loot. So in the spring he will collect eggs, and in the autumn bring back mushrooms, and nuts and berries, and if he live in a land of streams he will begin early to try and catch fish. When about the age of nine I first plied a rod I was confined by my lack of skill to a narrow arena. The sophisticated trout of Tweed and the lower reaches of the burns were beyond me, and my hope lay in the slender runlets far up in the heather.
Those runlets were a long way off, so I only reached them in the brisk spring weather, when even short legs could manage a half-score of miles. Now this is the way of the upper Tweedside hills. Their tops, which are commonly in the neighbourhood of 2500 feet, are not peaks but a tableland. The plateau may be pitted with peat haggs or be a field of coarse bent, but always in its hollows there are stretches of mountain gravel, the milk-white debris of quartz. In those hollows there is also stagnant water, sometimes a true bog hole, sometimes only a moisture in the shingle. This water, drawn from the rains and the snows, sinks into the soil and feeds the eternal springs, ice- cold and diamond bright, which a few hundred feet below the summit begin to well out of the hillsides.
The well-heads take different forms. Sometimes there is a little ravine where patches of old snowdrifts linger until early summer, and there the fountain is commonly a pool in the rocks. More often it is the centre of a patch of bright green moss on the open hill, a tiny cup of water haunted by water beetles, whence a trickle seeps downward through sphagnum and rush, sundew and butterwort and grass of Parnassus. Presently both types have found their destined channel and a miniature glen is the consequence, where at first the water spouts at a steep angle and the pools are precarious things on the lip of cascades. But soon the ground flattens and the runlet has become a burn, less dependent on the law of gravity, and picking its course among bent and blaeberries and heather, the habitation of small dark trout, a fishable water.
To reach this kind of stream as a child I had usually to cross a watershed, and therefore the bald summits appear in all my recollections. There grew cloud-berries, which are not found below the 2000-feet line, bright red at first, but ripening to amber, the material of the best jam in the world. There also one met the graceful little blue hawk, the merlin. I frequented the place chiefly in April, when the skies were often grey and the air sharp, but when a mild west wind blew and the world leaped suddenly into spring. Down in the little glens there was a turmoil of nesting birds — ring ouzels and water ouzels, an infinity of meadow pipits, grouse and black game, and above all the curlew. The spring cry of the last was the true voice of the wilderness — pooeeli, pooeeli — kirlew — wha-up. It was eerie, fantastic, untamable, but it had none of the savagery of the buzzard’s mew or the raven’s croak. It was the voice of a habitable wilderness not wholly inimical to man.
At the age of nine my only lure was the worm. I could not cast a fly properly, and on the lower waters I made myself too conspicuous. But in those little hill runlets rush and heather provided a natural cover, and the fish were innocent things. I would drop my worm in a pool and let it float down the hidden stream until there came a check and a small trout was swung high over my head. If it came off the hook it was as often as not lost in the thick herbage. Now and then it was too heavy for such treatment — half a pound in weight perhaps — in which case it was dragged clumsily ashore. This was the beggarly element of fishing, but both exciting and satisfying. I have had as many as four dozen in a day, to be fried for breakfast in oatmeal and eaten bones and all. To call such takings a “basket” would be a misnomer, for I did not possess a creel, but carried my catch in my pockets or threaded through the gills on rushes.
In April and May I never felt lonely, for the birds were cheerful companions. But when the summer quiet fell on them I used to have fits of panic in the silence and solitude. The worst places for this were the glens where there was no heather, but only moss and bent and turf, for heather, especially when charred in patches by moorburn, was to me a half-human thing Greenness, utter, absolute greenness, has all my life seemed to me uncanny, and the places which in my memory are infested with a certain awe are the green places. Take the Devil’s Beef Tub, the green pit in the hills on the road from Tweed to the head of Annan. Rudyard Kipling once told me that, far as he had wandered, and much as he had seen, this uncanny hollow seemed more than any other spot to be consecrated to the old gods. The haunted chasm in Kubla Khan was in a Green hill. There was a song popular on the Border called The wild glen sae green. It was in such green “hopes,” as we called them, that sometimes I came to the edge of fear. If there were sheep in sight I was never afraid. But if there were no sheep about, and a shoulder of hill shut out the world, I became conscious that I was alone in an enclosed place without the company of bird or beast. Then the terror of solitude laid hold of me, and I fled incontinent until I reached a herd’s cottage.
It was in one of those childish expeditions that I first realised the wonders of dawn. Someone had told me that the trout in summer took best in the dark before sunrise, and one day I crept out of bed, dressed in the mirk, and slipped from the house when everyone was asleep. Having no watch I had miscalculated the time, and had started far too soon, for I seemed to be walking for hours before, from the watershed ridge, I saw the first flush in the east. The journey was achieved with a quaking heart, for I had heard tales of midnight gatherings of weasels which to anyone who fell in with them meant death. However, there were no weasels, and when I sat on a rock and watched the east turn from grey to rose-pink and then to banded crimson, and the great golden orb spring from beyond the furthest hills, I felt like Cortez staring at the Pacific. Fishing was impossible for me that morning, for I had had all the adventure I wanted for the day. The glory of the spectacle and a gnawing hunger sent me home forthwith, a small being both entranced and awed.
Since then I have seen the sun rise in many places — West Highland dawns over the wintry Glasgow streets as I plodded to college; moorland dawns when I awoke chilled and famished beside some Galloway loch; the superb pageants which greet the mountaineer when he breakfasts on some high saddle of rock or snow; dawns in the African bush or on the high veld, when the dew lay heavy and the morning scents were like spices; eerie dawns in Flanders and Picardy when the sun sprang out of enemy country to the sound of enemy guns; dawns over ocean and prairie and desert. One of the misfortunes of advancing age is that you get out of touch with the sunrise. You take it for granted, and it is over and done with before you settle yourself for the daily routine. That is one reason, I think, why, as we grow older, the days seem shorter. We miss the high moments of their beginning.
II
Below the clefts of their source and the round cups of the “hopes” begin the glens which the burns have sculptured out of the massif of the hills. Now the streams become important, for they are the key of the landscape.
From my earliest youth I have been what the Greeks called a “nympholept,” one who was under the spell of running waters. It was in terms of them that I read the countryside. My topography was a scheme of glens and valleys and watersheds. I would walk miles to see the debouchment of some burn with whose head-waters I was familiar
, or track to its source some affluent whose lowland career I had followed. There was no tributary of the upper Tweed that I could not name, and, when I came to possess a bicycle, the same was true of the adjacent waters of Clyde and Annan, Ettrick and Yarrow. At any time in my childhood I could have drawn a map of my neighbourhood, which, so far as the streams went, would have been scrupulously exact.
Ever since then I have translated, like Michael Drayton in Polyolbion, every land with which I was connected into the speech of its rivers. A hill country was simple enough, but the flat English lowlands were at first a little puzzling, and I have never found it easy in places where the valleys were ill-defined. But even there I was true to my fad. South Africa to me was not the Cape peninsula and the Karroo and the high veld and the bushveld, but the valleys of the Orange, the Vaal, the Caledon, the Tugela, the Limpopo and the Zambesi, and I could never rest there till I knew what exiguous streams drained what arid places. Even Switzerland was not pictured as mountain ranges, but as river valleys shadowed by clusters of peaks. The eastern seaboard of America is for me not a group of states and cities, but the courses of the Kennebec, the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac and the James. Canada I found most satisfying, with the superb trough of the St. Lawrence, the streams that radiate into Hudson’s Bay from east, south and west, the gigantic Mackenzie seaming the North with its tributaries, and the fierce rivers that cut their way through the Rockies and the Coast range to the western sea.
