by John Buchan
Leave your kelp-rocks to the undisturbed possession of seals and mermaids, if there be any — you will buy barilla cheaper in South America. Send your Highland fishers to America and Botany Bay, where they will find plenty of food, and let them leave their present sterile residence in the utter and undisturbed solitude for which Nature designed it. Do not think you do any hardship in obeying the universal law of nature, which leads wants and supplies to draw to their just and proper level, and equalize each other; which attracts gold to those spots, and those only, where it can be profitably employed, and induces man to transport himself from the realms of famine to those happier regions, where labour is light and subsistence plentiful.
[Sympathy with poverty]
The same realism is seen in his attitude to the poor. He had no belief in the wizardry of abstract political rights; his view was Coleridge’s—”It is a mockery of our fellow creatures’ wrongs to call them equal in rights, when by the bitter compulsion of their wants we make them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart and dignify the understanding;” so he set himself within his own orbit to make a better commonwealth. He introduced at Abbotsford a system of health insurance, and being always mindful of the moral issue, he refused the easy path of charity, and in bad times arranged for relief work at full wages. He was a foe to tippling houses, and defended the Scottish reluctance to grant licences as compared with England. He proposed a scheme of unemployment insurance in factories, the premiums to be paid wholly by the owners, on the ground that it would retard unhealthy industrial expansion and compel manufacturers to rely less on casual labour. These are scarcely the notions of a crusted Eldonite.
It may be admitted that Scott’s sympathies with labour and his knowledge of its problems were circumscribed. To the pathetic early struggles of trade-unionism he was always hostile, for he scented conspiracy, and he was horrified to discover symptoms of it in Galashiels. He was above all things a countryman, who knew and honoured the peasant; of the proletariat in the towns, and
the fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities,
he had Wordsworth’s ignorance and restless fear. But for the poor man whom he understood, who was knit to him by a common domicile and ancestry, he had sympathy and understanding in the amplest measure. He proposed to show Washington Irving “some of our excellent plain Scotch people — not fine gentlemen and ladies, for such you can meet everywhere, and they are everywhere the same.” They were the stock which he most honoured, for they were the most idiomatic and enduring thing in the nation. It was this love of plain folk which made Crabbe his favourite reading. They are the true heroes and heroines of his novels, and they were his best friends in life. He respected them far too much to sentimentalize over them; indeed he had their own contempt for sensibility. When a perfervid young lady swooned on being presented to him and then kissed Henry Mackenzie’s hand, Scott’s comment was that of a Border peasant: “Did you ever hear the like of that English lass, to faint at the sight of a crippled clerk of session, and kiss the dry withered hand of an old tax-gatherer —— !” He had the same tenderness, the same tough fescennine humour, the same rugged sense of decency. He never entered the “huts where poor men lie” with the condescension of a district visitor, for you cannot patronize that which is yourself. Of all great writers, perhaps, he was the one who lived closest to the poor. He was nearer to them than Shakespeare, who saw only their comedy and their vices; far nearer than Shelley, to whom the poor were the “polluting multitude,” though he might pity and defend them; nearer even than Wordsworth, who did not know how to unbend. Of Wordsworth a country neighbour said that he “was not a man as folks could crack with nor not a man as could crack wi’ folks,” whereas of Scott the report was that he talked to everyone as if he were a blood-relation.
As an old man Wordsworth confessed that, while he had never had any respect for the Whigs, he had always had a great deal of the Chartist in him. Of Scott it may be said that he had much of that practical socialism which Toryism has never lacked. He envisaged life in terms rather of duties than of rights; he hated the rootless and the mechanical; he believed in property but only as something held on a solemn trust; his social conscience was too quick to accept the calculating inhumanity of the economists. To him, as to Newman, it seemed that a worthy society must have both order and warmth. If he had ever sought a formula for his creed it might well have been Bagehot’s famous phrase, “Toryism is enjoyment”.
III
[His rule of life]
Scott had not the metaphysical turn of his countrymen, and he had no instinct to preach, but the whole of his life and work was based on a reasoned philosophy of conduct. Its corner-stones were humility and discipline. The life of man was difficult, but not desperate, and to live it worthily you must forget yourself and love others. The failures were the egotists who were wrapped up in self, the doctrinaires who were in chains to a dogma, the Pharisees who despised their brethren. In him the “common sense” of the eighteenth century was coloured and lit by Christian charity. Happiness could only be attained by the unselfregarding. He preaches this faith through the mouth of Jeanie Deans — indeed it is the basis of all his ethical portraiture, it crops up everywhere in his letters and Journal, and in his review of Canto III of Childe Harold in the Quarterly he expounds it to Byron and labours to reconcile him with the world. This paper should not be forgotten, for in it Scott professes explicitly his moral code. Its axiom is that there is no royal road to heart’s ease, but that there is a path for the humble pilgrim. The precepts for such are —
to narrow our wishes and desires within the scope of our present powers of attainment; to consider our misfortunes as our inevitable share in the patrimony of Adam; to bridle those irritable feelings which, ungoverned, are sure to become governors; to shun that intensity of galling and self-wounding reflection which our poet has described in his own burning language; to stoop, in short, to the realities of life, repent if we have offended, and pardon if we have been trespassed against; to look on the world less as our foe than as a doubtful and capricious friend whose applause we ought as far as possible to deserve, but neither to court nor to condemn.
To this philosophy he added a stalwart trust in the Christian doctrines, a trust which was simple, unqualified and unquestioning. His was not a soul to be troubled by doubts or to be kindled to mystical fervour, though he was ready to admit the reality of the latter. There is a passage in the Journal where he defends the work of Methodism as “carrying religion into classes in society where it would scarce be found to penetrate, did it rely merely upon proof of its doctrines, upon calm reasoning, and upon rational argument.” But such excitements were not for him; for his mind to seek them would have been like drug-taking, a renunciation of self-discipline. In the Scotland of his day this teaching was much in season. The old fires of Calvinism had burned too murkily, the light of the Aufklärung had been too thin and cold, but in Scott was a spirit which could both illumine and comfort his world. He gave it a code of ethics robuster because more rational, and he pointed the road to a humaner faith.
IV
[A man of the centre]
The strong wine of genius too often cracks and flaws the containing vessel. The mind revolts against the body, the subconscious against the conscious, and there is an expense of spirit in a waste of fears and frustrations. But just as there was no strife or sedition in Scott’s intellectual powers, so there were no fissures in his character. Carlyle spoke truth when he said that a sounder piece of British manhood was not put together in that eighteenth century of Time. He was a man of the centre, like his own Johnny Dodds of Farthing’s Acre. There was a clearing-house in his soul where all impulses were ordered and adjusted, and this repose gave him happiness. That was the secret of his geniality, for throughout his crowded life he was at peace with himself, and had the gift of communicating his peace to the world. This balance did not chill, as it does wi
th many, the emotional side of his nature, but it gave it depth and stability; instead of sentiment he had pity and tenderness, and his perfect courage was never marred by bravado. The words which Sir Walter Raleigh has used of Shakespeare apply most fully to him; he was a “man cast in the antique mould of humanity, equable, alert and gay.”
Such a one makes a light and a warmth around him. Scott had no enemies, except a prejudiced few who had never met him. No class, no type escaped his glamour. To Byron, who did not praise readily, he seemed “as nearly a thorough good man as a man can be.” He was the centre round which for thirty years there clustered a whole community of most diverse men and women, and when the sun set the constellation was scattered. James Ballantyne died four months after his friend, James Hogg followed him after three troubled years, and those who survived him longer were to the last under his spell. To Lady Louisa Stuart, to Lockhart, to Morritt and Cranstoun, even to Jeffrey and Cockburn he remained the major influence in their lives. Skene, who wandered about the world for thirty years more, was found by his daughter just before his death sitting by the fire with a strange radiance in his face. “Scott has been here,” he cried, “dear Scott! He told me that he had come from a great distance to pay me a visit, and he has been sitting here with me talking of all our old happy days together. He said it was long since we had met, but he is not in the least changed; his face was just as cheerful and pleasant as it used to be.”
[Liberator and reconciler]
Skene’s dying vision is a parable of Scott’s bequest to the world. He has left us not only the products of his fancy but almost his bodily presence, a personality which to his lovers is as real as if in the flesh he still moved among us. Alone of the great imaginative creators he draws us to an affectionate intimacy. It is the man rather than the writer that still haunts his own Border, like an emanation from its changeless hills and waters, so that on some forgotten drove-road in Ettrick one almost looks to see in an autumn gloaming his ruddy face and silvery hair, and to hear the kindly burr of his speech. It has been given to him to conquer the world, and yet remain the tutelary genius of his native glens.
He seems to me the greatest, because the most representative, of Scotsmen, since in his mind and character he sums up more fully than any other the idiomatic qualities of his countrymen and translates them into a universal tongue. John Knox gave his land the Reformation, an inestimable but a perilous gift, which led to high spiritual exaltations, but also to much blood and tears. By itself it was a forcing-house to produce monstrous growths, and it required to be freshened by the sun and winds of the common world. Burns, with a Greek freedom in his soul, gave Scotland her own French Revolution, burned up much folly with the fires of poetry, and reconciled in a common humanity ancient warring elements in the national life. Scott completed what the eighteenth-century philosophers had begun and gave her her own Renaissance. He is, with Burns, her great liberator and reconciler. He saved his land from the narrow rootless gentility and the barren utilitarianism of the illuminates; he gave her confidence by reopening to her the past; and he blended into one living tradition many things which the shallow had despised and the dull had forgotten. Gently he led her back to nature and the old simplicities. His mission was that of Hosea the prophet:—”Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she shall sing there as in the days of her youth.”
THE KING’S GRACE
A BIOGRAPHY OF KING GEORGE V.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
PART I
CHAPTER I. THE PAGEANT OF SUCCESSION
CHAPTER II. AN UNEASY HERITAGE
CHAPTER III. THE RESTLESS YEARS
CHAPTER IV. DESCENSUS AVERNI
PART II
CHAPTER I. CONTACT
CHAPTER II. THE FORTRESS
CHAPTER III. THE SALLIES
CHAPTER IV. SURRENDER
PART III
CHAPTER I. SOUR-APPLE HARVEST
CHAPTER II. THE CHANGING EMPIRE
CHAPTER III. A HOUSE IN ORDER
EPILOGUE
King George V, broadcasting at Sandringham
“May I add very simply and sincerely that if I may be regarded as in some true sense the head of this great and widespread family, sharing its life and sustained by its affection, this will be a full reward for the long and sometimes anxious labours of my reign of well-nigh five-and-twenty years.”
By kind permission of “The Times”
“The Englishman is taught to love the King as his friend, but to acknowledge no other master than the laws which himself has contributed to enact.”
Goldsmith: Citizen of the World.
PREFACE
This book is not a biography of the King, the time for which has happily not yet come, but an attempt to provide a picture — and some slight interpretation — of his reign, with the Throne as the continuing thing through an epoch of unprecedented change.
I have incorporated a few passages from my History of the Great War, published in 1922.
J. B.
PROLOGUE
For fifteen centuries there have been kings in Britain, and for more than three hundred years there has been a single kingship. It has changed in character since the old monarchs, who ruled by virtue of their ownership of lands or their prowess in battle, but it has succeeded always in adapting itself to the changing character of our people. Like many of the deeper truths of government, it cannot be readily defined. Parliament can alter the laws at will, but the seventeenth-century doctrine still holds — that there is a “law fundamental,” which may not be tampered with as long as the nation remains what it is. So kingship, which during the ages has shed much of its old power, yet maintains its central function, and continues to be a primary instinct of our people. A great revolutionary like Cromwell might upset one form of it, but only to spend himself in the effort to find another. We have rebelled against kings, but never against kingship.
In the last two hundred years, while the Throne has lost in definable powers, it has gained in significance. There have been wise monarchs and some not so wise, but the inherent and accumulated majesty of the office has increased. It is not only higher than any other human estate, but of a different kind from any other, for it is the mystical, indivisible centre of national union. It is the point around which coheres the nation’s sense of a continuing personality. In any deep stirring of heart the people turn from the mechanism of government, which is their own handiwork and their servant, to that ancient, abiding thing behind governments, which they feel to be the symbol of their past achievement and their future hope.
But the Throne has altered in other things besides constitutional practice. It has come closer to the lives and interests of the citizen. The King is to-day far more a people’s king than when an Edward or a Henry returned in triumph from the French wars. The office has come into the light of common day without losing its traditional glamour. Its dignity has not declined, but affection has been joined to reverence. Since the Tudors the phrase has been the King’s Majesty. To-day the older form of words is the more fitting, the King’s Grace.
There is nothing quite like the status of our Crown in the modern world, and I cannot find any close parallel in history. In law it can do no wrong; its Ministers alone are responsible and accountable. In a season of turmoil it remains a punctum indifferens, a calm at the heart of the storm. The King is of no class, being above classes; he is as much akin to the worker in the mine and to the labourer in the field as to the highest nobility. He can have no party bias, for his only bias is towards the whole people. He cannot initiate policies, though he creates the atmosphere that makes policies feasible. What is done in his name in the ordinary business of government is the work of others, and to them goes the blame or the credit. Of his own accord he does not interfere, unless there is a turning of distracted partisans to him
, as to the traditional bulwark of the nation. Pinnacled above all, he is yet closer to the national consciousness than even the most famous Minister. His duty is not to act but to be, to represent the ultimate sanctities of the land which endure behind passing fevers and bewilderments: like Time,
“who in the twilight comes to mend All the fantastic day’s caprice.”
When in a high mood of exaltation or sorrow the nation becomes a conscious unity and turns to him, then and only then does he intervene.
But the pedestal on which the King is placed is also a watch-tower. Having the whole people in his care, and having no prejudice of class or dogma or party, he is concerned only with the greater things, the profounder movements of national destiny. So in this year of his Silver Jubilee I have tried to present the spectacle of his reign with the Throne as the abiding background — such a spectacle as might be viewed from a high tower; and to attempt what interpretation of its significance is permitted to one who is himself a dweller in the confused lowlands.
PART I
CHAPTER I. THE PAGEANT OF SUCCESSION
A new reign opens with ceremonial, the pageant of death and of life. A king has gone; the King lives. On May 6th 1910 King Edward VII died. His body at first lay in state in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace, whence it was conveyed in solemn procession to Westminster Hall. There for three days it rested on a great bier, guarded day and night by his soldiers, while all classes of his people filed silently past. On Friday May 20th came the State Funeral, when the dead king was carried through the thronged London streets on his way to Windsor, and was laid to rest in the vaults of St. George’s Chapel with the stately rites which attend a monarch’s burial. The voice of Garter King-at-Arms announced that it had pleased Almighty God to call a great prince out of this transitory world unto His Mercy, and that his son King George now reigned in his stead.