Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  Let us twain go where the boat is

  Rocking by the riverside,

  By the beds of myosotis

  And the lilies open-eyed,

  Where the little sedgebird’s note is

  Heard by men at eventide.42

  Although JB worked extremely hard on his books in the vacations, he found time for fishing, as well as helping his Masterton relations on the farm. He felt the romance of their work and admired immoderately the shepherds that he met. He particularly enjoyed rising at dawn to ‘look the hill’:

  delighting in the task, especially if the weather were wild. I attended every clipping, where shepherds came from ten miles round to lend a hand. I helped to drive sheep to the local market and sat, heavily responsible, in a corner of the auction-ring. I became learned in the talk of the trade, and no bad judge of sheep stock. Those Border shepherds, the men of the long stride and the clear eye, were a great race – I have never known a greater … My old friends, by whose side I used to quarter the hills, are long ago at rest in moorland kirkyards, and my salutation goes to them beyond the hills of death. I have never had better friends, and I have striven to acquire some tincture of their philosophy of life, a creed at once mirthful and grave, stalwart and merciful.43

  Shepherds get the best press of any working people in the Bible, and a pretty good one in The Pilgrim’s Progress as well, so it is hardly surprising that JB was so influenced by them. They are to be found everywhere in his early writings, fiction and non-fiction. His skill as a fisherman of hill burns, as well as his family connections with the well-respected Masterton brothers, gave him an almost unique access (for a Glasgow boy) to this breed of highly independent, observant, often devout and always hardy race. Much later, in the House of Commons in 1931, he told the no doubt bemused company that he would rather take the view of a Border shepherd on most questions than that of all the professors in Europe. He meant it.

  His uncles would inevitably have been expert in divining changes in the weather. The success of their sheep-farming, even the security of shepherds’ lives and those of their charges, might depend on them knowing when the heavy snows or the ‘Lammas rains’ were coming. One of the enduring fascinations of JB’s novels is the way he uses weather as a protagonist, sometimes benign, more often malign, but always an influence on the action. At the same time, he learnt how the moon behaves, what happens at sunrise and sunset, and even probably how to guide his way by the stars, all of which knowledge informed his fiction, especially the adventure stories and historical novels.

  The summer of 1893, after Violet’s death, JB borrowed an old bicycle so that he could go further afield for his fishing expeditions and explore the hills surrounding the valleys of the rivers Clyde and Annan. There is a charming, joky triolet in the Commonplace Book he kept for a few years from 1890 about his brakes failing and him being laid up with a cut head.44 At one point, he cycled all the way from Broughton to Moffat, past the deeply creepy Devil’s Beef Tub, where he saw a dead man on the roadside, which frightened him considerably and from which he fled. And, since he always had a fascination for waterfalls, he cycled up the side of Moffat Water to see the Grey Mare’s Tail, and into the hills above the lonely clachan of Tweedsmuir to Talla Linns.* The roads were grass-grown and empty, the motorcar unknown. The sound of the ‘whaups’ (curlews) and ‘peesweeps’ (lapwings) and the sight of wild flowers in the bent stayed with him all his life.

  When not out on the hill or at the riverside, or concentrating on his books, he wrote essays, his first published and paid-for work being Angling in Still Waters, which came out in The Gentleman’s Magazine in August 1893, just before his eighteenth birthday. In the essay he describes getting up before dawn to fish the River Tweed, noting the weather and landscape, the sounds and sights of peaceful Tweeddale, and the excitement of it all. He wrote to Charlie Dick: ‘Sir James Naesmyth [of Drumelzier] has read my article in the Gentleman’s and told my uncle that he is going to prosecute me for poaching on his heronry and produce my essay for evidence. “The wicked have digged a pit etc.” ’45 It is unsurprising that this essay should have been, ostensibly at least, about fishing, a sport that retained its fascination all his life. He had begun at the age of nine in the burns around Broughton; initially catching trout with worms, he was soon expert with the fly. Later he took to salmon fishing as well. He was undoubtedly encouraged, even perhaps taught, by his Uncle Willie, whose salmon rod he inherited in 1906. His technique was exemplary, as his eldest son recalled: ‘My father, for all his slight figure, could throw a salmon fly thirty yards, and use a heavy greenheart rod all day. He was one of the finest salmon fishers that I have ever watched. The rod appeared to do his work for him. The perfect curve of his back cast seemed to follow forward with the fly drawing out the long, straight line ahead, independent of his agency. It is the hallmark of all experts that the instrument appears to do its own work.’46

  More fishing articles followed: ‘Rivuli Montani’ in October 1894 described the mountain streams of the Borders, while ‘The Muse of the Angle’ in January 1895 explored those writers with a particular facility for writing about fishing. (He had a lifelong admiration for Izaak Walton and The Compleat Angler.) He was paid 30 shillings per article: the money was very useful.

  In the vacations, he would sometimes cycle or take the train from Broughton to Peebles, to stay with his uncle and two spinster aunts. The aunts were hospitable and notably God-fearing, but their piety may have trumped their familial feeling in the case of their bachelor brother Alexander, a lawyer who seems rarely, if ever, to have been mentioned in the family after he went to England as a young man. There was another unmarried brother, Tom, known as ‘the black sheep of the family’, who became a sailor and went to Australia, but they never lost touch with him.

  JB and his uncle Willie became fast friends, since the latter, a cultured middle-aged bachelor, with a pale face, dark eyes, hooked nose and a neat black beard that made him look like a sparer version of Edward VII, was plainly a delightful man, and an unusual one, even for a Scottish provincial town that respected learning and bred the occasional scholar with a national reputation such as John Veitch, Professor of Logic at Glasgow. Willie was competent, organised and cheerful, with broad interests. He was a keen fisherman, a collector of antiquarian books, a great reader of poetry and French novels, and an inveterate European traveller. He encouraged JB to learn French, which was to prove very useful in later life, and introduced him to Flaubert, Maupassant, Dumas, Gautier and Daudet. He also gave him valuable books, including an Elsevier’s version of the works of Tacitus from 1621, in very good condition, which his nephew had bound in leather.47

  JB’s letters to Charlie Dick are full of his reading. In April 1893, for example, he was deep into the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert’s brother, a prominent English Deist. This, with the work on Bacon, shows the beginnings of a profound and lasting interest in the seventeenth century. Another book that he read but probably never finished, since he found it ‘very smart but very tiresome after a little’,48 was Robert Hichens’ roman à clef about Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, called The Green Carnation, which was published in 1894 but so scandalised the reading public that it was withdrawn the following year.

  At this age, his principal inspirations in fiction were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Meredith. He read Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae for ‘the 4th or 5th time’ that summer. His sailor uncle Tom, who was visiting Peebles, told him ‘that he had lived for six months in Samoa and had often seen Robert Louis. He said that he is a sort of King there, but that he goes about with nothing on him except a blanket, worn toga-wise, and pinned at the shoulder with a Cairngorm brooch. Fancy! Sic a sicht for sair een! A decent, honest Scotsman come to that!’49

  It is hardly surprising that Stevenson should be such an important early influence on JB and his generation, since he was at the height of his fame at this time (dying in 1894) and, most importantly, he was Sco
ttish:

  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 was at once Scottish and cosmopolitan, artist and adventurer, scholar and gipsy. Above all he was a true companion.50

  Looking back to his youth in the late 1930s, JB had to admit that Stevenson’s influence on him did not last and that he tired of his phrase-making, since ‘I wanted robuster standards and more vital impulses’.51 He thought his prose too fastidious, too self-conscious, with too much artifice about it. But in the late 1890s, Stevenson was almost the ideal mentor for a young Scot who already sensed that his future lay in the world of letters. As for George Meredith, JB was attracted to him as an optimist, ‘who believes that the universe is on the side of man’s moral strivings. He believes in the regeneration of the world by man, and in the high destiny of humanity.’52

  Much of September that year he spent with his family on the Isle of Arran, and one senses he was beginning to feel confined by the family circle, and was happy to escape back to the Borders to stay with his grandmother and ‘Antaggie’ at Broughton Green, where in early October he was to be found working on an historical novel about seventeenth-century Tweeddale, which he called John Burnet of Barns.

  In his second session at Glasgow, he moved up to Gilbert Murray’s top class and the two men got to know each other better. Murray was much more than a simple scholar, he was an innovative and inspiring teacher, and his influence on JB can scarcely be overstated:

  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.53

  Murray was a convinced Liberal, a social reformer and a champion of women’s university education, as was his wife, Lady Mary (née Howard), an aristocratic Englishwoman of beauty, style, intelligence and high principles, but not much sense of humour. She had inherited Castle Howard, a great house in Yorkshire, but had given it to her brother. Her parents were interested in art and social reform, and numbered amongst their friends George Eliot, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John Morley. Lady Mary was much admired – being both exotic and open-hearted – by the Glasgow students who came across her. Murray had brought with him from Oxford the tradition of pastoral care that the collegiate system fostered, and the Murrays were unusual in entertaining some of their students at their home, both in term time and in the vacations. In 1895, JB spent several days with them at Sheringham, on the Norfolk coast, where he and the Murrays read Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray aloud to each other in the evenings.

  JB’s Essays and Apothegms of Francis, Lord Bacon was published in the spring of 1894, and he rode over to Peebles to see the piles of copies of his book in Redpath’s bookshop. In June, when he was nearly nineteen, he acquired another brother, Alastair Ebenezer, the healthy child of his parents’ middle age, and some consolation for the loss of Violet the year before.

  The year 1894 was also when Henry Jones arrived at Glasgow, to take up the Chair of Moral Philosophy. Professor Veitch of Peebles had earlier introduced JB to Descartes, before ever he went to Glasgow and, although not especially attracted by Jones’ ‘semi-religious Hegelianism’, he wrote in his reminiscences that ‘a braver, wiser, kinder human being never lived’.54 He was of the age to hero-worship his elders, especially those who saw the spark in him.

  He was much influenced that year by Walter Pater, whose Plato and Platonism was published in 1893. JB was already keen on Plato as a poet, but Pater showed him the value of the influence of the Greek philosopher on seventeenth-century Calvinist divines, such as Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, the so-called Cambridge Platonists:

  … 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 temporal.55

  To JB, their Calvinism had been mellowed and warmed by the love of humanity and of all things true and beautiful.

  For style, however, he was far less inclined to copy the over-ripe and prolix romanticism of Walter Pater, however good the matter of what he wrote, than that exhibited by John Henry Newman, the Catholic theologian, and T. H. Huxley, the scientist, ‘whose one aim was to say clearly what they had to say and have done with it – a creed which would be regarded, I fear, as a sort of blacklegging by most men of letters’.56 For JB clarity was of paramount importance.

  In his third year at Glasgow, he contributed a few pieces to the university magazine, and gave papers to the Alexandrian and Philosophical societies. However, apart from some canvassing in the Rectorial election when he supported H. H. Asquith, which led to fisticuffs with Robert Horne,* he was not really visible. But he was working with such dedication and success that, in the autumn, he decided to try for a scholarship to Oxford University. Gilbert Murray almost certainly suggested this to him, but would have been pushing against an open door. JB’s studies and the university life had inevitably widened his horizons, and Murray probably told him that study at Oxford would be the best route to an academic post in Scotland. He decided to apply to Brasenose College, rather than the more usual (for Scotsmen) Balliol College. Although Walter Pater had died several months before he applied, he wanted to go to a college that still felt his influence, and was full of his friends, such as the Principal, Dr Heberden, and the chaplain, Dr Bussell.

  Life at home in Queen Mary Avenue was becoming increasingly stifling. His closeness to his mother was lifelong, but he was now also someone in whom she placed great hopes. In his book of reminiscences, late in life, he hinted at the difficulties, but was too guarded to explain them in a really illuminating way to his readers – a necessary obfuscation because his brother and sister, equally devoted to her, were still alive:

  … in my adolescence we sometimes arrived at that point of complete comprehension known as a misunderstanding. We had no quarrels, for to each of us that would have been like quarrelling with oneself, but we had many arguments. Instinctively we seemed to grasp the undisclosed and hardly realised things which were at the back of the other’s mind.57

  His teenage rebellion was not generated by resentfulness at his relatively confined circumstances, nor exasperation that the family were not smarter or richer, but rather frustration that there was an exciting world to be explored, which he could only travel in his imagination. This frustration was fuelled by a strong intuition that his mother wanted him to stay nearby. She was as ambitious as he was and, for a minister’s wife, surprisingly worldly, but that world was Glasgow or, at the widest, Scotland. She had discovered early in life that her husband was wedded to good, selfless work amongst his shabby congregation and, despite any endeavour of hers, would remain in relative obscurity. So her focus had switched to her bright and talented eldest boy; for her, or rather for him on her behalf, nothing short of Moderator of the Free Church would do.

  It was at this precise moment, however, that her hopes were permanently dashed. In early January 1895, JB travelled to Oxford for the entrance examination, a visit that was little short of a revelation to him:

  It was, I remember,
bitter winter weather. The Oxford streets, when I arrived late at night from the North, were deep in snow. My lodgings were in Exeter College, and I recall the blazing fires, a particularly succulent kind of sausage, and coffee such as I had never known in Scotland. I wrote my examination papers in Christ Church hall, that noblest of Tudor creations. I felt as if I had slipped through some chink in the veil of the past and become a mediaeval student. Most vividly I recollect walking in the late afternoon in Merton Street and Holywell and looking at snow-laden gables which had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages. In that hour Oxford claimed me, and her bonds have never been loosed.58

  He achieved a Junior Hulme scholarship to Brasenose College, his tutor, Dr Fox, later recalling that his essay in the scholarship exam was just like a piece of Stevenson. He abandoned the University of Glasgow after three years, leaving without taking a degree.

  At the same time he was working on a couple of short stories, ‘The Herd of Standlan’ (first published in Black and White magazine in 1896) and ‘A Journey of Little Profit’ (first published in The Yellow Book the same year), in which a drover comes up against the Devil. He was very anxious to get these projects finished before he went up to Oxford.

  That year, 1895, his uncle Willie was granted, along with all his father’s descendants, the right to bear heraldic arms. The crest on the escutcheon was a sunflower with the motto ‘Non inferiora secutus’. The Buchans were entitled now to call themselves gentlefolk. JB was proud of this as doodles in a ‘commonplace book’ of the time show. He might be a hard-up Scottish provincial, but he was, in his own eyes at least, on a par with the men he would meet at Oxford, and not just intellectually.

  Just before he left Glasgow, he wrote to Gilbert Murray, enclosing an advance copy of his first novel, Sir Quixote of the Moors: Being Some Account of an Episode in the Life of the Sieur de Rohaine. The dedication read: ‘To Gilbert Murray. Whatsoever in this book is not worthless is dedicated by his friend.’ He wrote to him: