by John Buchan
With me it did not last. Presently his style and manner began to mean less to me. He seemed to me too much of a looker-on, a phrase-maker in life, and I wanted robuster standards and more vital impulses. His fastidiousness came to repel me. I remember some years later reading the Open letter to Dr. Hyde on Father Damien, and feeling that the great apostle of the lepers would have had more in common with his vulgar assailant than with his adjectival defender. Stevenson seemed to me to have altogether too much artifice about him, and I felt a suspicion of pose behind his optimism and masculinity — the pose of an heroic invalidism, a variant of the bedside manner (for there may be a bedside manner of the patient as well as of the doctor). It was too self-conscious for greatness.
I have since returned to him with pleasure and revised that verdict. The judgment of eighteen was juster than the judgment of forty. I do not think that he was a great master, but he was a master, for within certain limits he ensued, and sometimes attained, perfection. I am convinced that in each generation he will be rediscovered by youth — ordinary youth, not clever, precocious, paradoxical young men, but the kind of youth that happily we shall always have with us, those whom Sir Walter Scott called “young people of bold and active dispositions.” That is a certain passport to immortality. Sophisticated middle age has its modes and changes, but the fashion of such youth is eternal.
V
My chief passion in those years was for the Border countryside, and my object in all my prentice writings was to reproduce its delicate charm, to catch the aroma of its gracious landscape and turbulent history and the idiom of its people. When I was absent from it I was homesick, my memory was full of it, my happiest days were associated with it, and some effluence from its ageless hills and waters laid a spell upon me which has never been broken. I found in its people what I most admired in human nature — realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. I asked for nothing better than to spend my life by the Tweed.
But how was it to be managed I considered sheep-farming, like my mother’s brothers; but at the moment sheep were not prosperous, and in any case they needed capital. Then I thought of being a man of letters, with a home among the hills! but I remembered Sir Walter’s saying that literature was a good staff but a bad crutch, and anyhow I did not fancy the business. It should be my hobby, not my profession. Meantime my interest in scholarship was daily growing, and it seemed to me that a Scottish professorship might offer the life I wanted. It became clear that I must somehow contrive to go to Oxford. If the worst came to the worst and other trades failed, I believed that I could always make a living as a hill-shepherd or a river-gillie.
CHAPTER III — OXFORD
I
As children we lived much in the past, and, as commonly happens, we interpreted that past by the present, and also permitted bygone ages to colour our everyday lives. The history of Scotland, of which alone we had much knowledge, was to us not a legend but a living memory; we took violent sides in its disputes and attached ourselves vehemently to its protagonists. Like most Scottish families we believed ourselves to be gently born. A certain John Buchan, a younger son of the ancient Aberdeenshire house of Auchmacoy, came south in the beginning of the seventeenth century and was supposed to have founded our branch. There was a missing link in the chain, and an austere antiquary like my uncle would never admit that the descent had more than a high probability; but we children accepted it as proven fact, and rejoiced that through Auchmacoy we could count kin back to the days of William the Lion. So in the high story of Scotland we felt a proprietary interest. A Countess of Buchan (with whom we had no conceivable connection) had crowned Robert Bruce; an Earl of Buchan as Constable of France had avenged Joan of Arc; a Buchan of Auchmacoy had fallen at Flodden beside the King; another had led the Jacobite remnant after the death of Dundee.
Brooding over Scottish history made us intense patriots of the narrowest school. Against our little land there had always stood England, vast, menacing and cruel. We resented the doings of Edward I, Henry VIII and Elizabeth as personal wrongs. The brutalities of Cumberland after the ‘Forty-five seemed to us unforgivable outrages which had happened yesterday. We early decided that no Englishman could enter Heaven, though, later, our delight in the doings of the Elizabethan seamen forced us to make an exception of the inhabitants of Devon. Even when we grew older and the intolerance abated, England remained for us a foreign place, not too friendly, to be suspected and even dreaded. My interest in London, when I first visited it, was not in its metropolitan wonders, but in its connection with Scotland’s history — that Simon Lovat had died on Tower Hill, that Balmerino’s head had been stuck up on Temple Bar, and disguised Jacobite spies had hid themselves in Soho. I had myself one particular reason for this suspicion. As a child I was always in terror of being compelled to earn my bread as a clerk should my father die. This gloomy fate I associated with some kind of English domicile, probably a London suburb. The suburbs of the metropolis, of which H knew nothing, became for me a synonym for a dreadful life of commercial drudgery without daylight or hope.
I looked forward, therefore, to visiting this sinister and fascinating land with some foreboding. The thing happened when I was seventeen, when, on a bicycle, I crossed the bridge of Tweed at Coldstream and explored a strip of Northumberland. I entered England with the traveller’s mingled sense of insecurity and distinction. To my surprise I found it very like my own countryside. The people spoke with almost my own accent. The bent and heather of the Cheviots were like my domestic hills; the valley of Till was lusher perhaps than that of my moorland waters, but the hill burns were in no way different...The following year I paid my first visit to London to stay with a great-uncle. Incuriously I inspected the sights, but the place made little impression on me, though the scents and sounds of London in the autumn gave me a strong feeling of snugness and comfort...Then a few months later I went up to Oxford to sit for a scholarship. This was my true first visit to England, when I came under the spell of its ancient magnificence and discovered a new loyalty.
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.
II
Brasenose as the home of Walter Pater had a special fascination for me, and, though he had died in the spring before I sat for a scholarship, I was glad to go to a college where he had lectured on Plato, and which was full of his friends. My first impressions of Oxford were unhappy. The soft autumn air did not suit my health; the lectures which I attended seemed jejune and platitudinous, and the regime slack, after the strenuous life of Glasgow; I played no game well enough to acquire an absorbing interest in it. Above all, being a year older than my contemporaries, I felt that I had been pitchforked into a kindergarten. The revels of alcoholic children offended me, and, having an unfortunate gift of plain speech, I did not make myself popular among those emancipated schoolboys. I must have been at that time an intolerable prig. Consequently the friends I made at first were chiefly hard-working students like myself, or older men in other colleges. Also I was very poor. For two years I could not afford to dine in hall. My Oxford bills for the first year were little over £100, for my second year about £150. After that, what with scholarships, prizes and considerable emoluments from books and articles, I became rather rich for an undergraduate.
One advantage of my early seclusion, and of the fact that Brasenose was a small college situated in the he
art of Oxford, was that I made friends throughout the University. Presently the political clubs, the Union, and Vincent’s added to this circle, and I think that before I went down I had as catholic an acquaintance as any man of my time. I came to know well a few seniors who were either living in Oxford as dons, or came up often on visits — men like Hilaire Belloc and F. E. Smith, John Simon and Leo Amery. I had a large acquaintance among athletes and sportsmen, chiefly the rowing and rugby football groups, and thus I came to know my future partner in business, T. A. Nelson, the Oxford rugby captain, and a Scottish international. Among younger men who overlapped my time were Arthur Salter of Brasenose and Edward Wood (Lord Halifax) of Christ Church.
There were many of the older generation whose friendship I enjoyed. First, in my own college, there was the Principal, Dr. Heberden, whose slender figure with its scholar’s stoop seemed at first out of place in the robust life of Brasenose. Slowly his gentle humanity came to be understood, and when he died in 1922 the College mourned for him as a close-knit family mourns for its father. There was the chaplain, Dr. F. W. Bussell, Walter Pater’s chief friend, and the nearest approach in my acquaintance to a mediaeval polymath. He was my tutor, whom I delighted in surprising, for from Nietzsche, whom I had just discovered, I would quote extracts in my essays which were a little startling to a clerk in holy orders. In Balliol there was the Master, Edward Caird, who was always a little homesick, I think, for Scotland, as I realised at Sunday breakfasts. There was J. A. Smith, who to philosophic profundity added Gaelic scholarship; there was Francis Urquhart (“Sligger”), a happy boyish figure who survived to be a link between post-War Oxford and my own secure generation. At Trinity there was R. W. Raper, silent and infinitely wise; at Magdalen Herbert Warren, the President; and at Christ Church the massive, bohemian figure of York Powell, and John Phillimore, afterwards of Glasgow, one of the best Latin scholars of our day. At Worcester there was Dr. Daniel, the intimate of a host of literary men and a connoisseur of fine printing; and at Jesus Sir John Rhys, who nourished my new-found Celtic enthusiasm. At All Souls there was Sir William Anson, the Warden, lawyer and statesman; and W. P. Ker, with a face “like an intelligent brick wall,” who knew every corner of Scotland, and whose flashes of silence were more eloquent than speech. I had the privilege, too, of knowing some of the bachelor Fellows of the old regime, “characters” all, who kept the monastic flag flying in despite of the new domesticated Oxford of the Parks. One, especially, I remember, who asked me to dinner at high table in my first year. For three courses he spoke not a word, while I plied him with nervous questions about the weather, the Boat-race, and what not. Then he turned on me his formidable face. “Young man,” he said, “I would remind you of what Dr. Johnson said, that the art of conversation does not consist in unmeaning interrogatories.” I was stricken with helpless laughter, in which he presently joined, and the ice was broken.
The charm of Oxford for me was less in the constellations than in the companionship of the ordinary man. Gradually I became one of what Mr. Pearsall Smith has called unkindly the “aborigines of Brasenose,” and a happier fellowship no man could desire. I would pay my tribute to an ancient society for which I have acquired a devout loyalty — a loyalty shared by my brother (whose memorial is in the ante-chapel), and my eldest son. It was famous, then as now, as a sporting college, with a great record of exploits on the river and in the cricket and football fields. The scholars came mostly from grammar schools and the lesser public schools; the commoners largely from the country gentry of Lancashire and the North. It had not for some generations attained great academic success; indeed there was a wicked legend that a Brasenose man who achieved honours in the Schools had been put under the pump as a mark of public disapproval! I remember that I started an Ibsen society, which got on well enough until Ghosts was read aloud, upon which the members in disgust rejected the name of Ibsen and turned themselves into a dining club called the Crocodiles. Nevertheless there was no lack of intellectual vigour, and the College which gave Lord Haig to the British army, and Lord Carnock, Lord Bradbury, Lord Askwith and Sir Arthur Salter to the public services, has little cause to be ashamed of its record. But its chief produce was the commoner, healthy, sane, adventurous, who, like Weir of Hermiston, had “no call to be bonny,” but got through his day’s work. It was a cross-section of all that was most vigorous in English society, and in distant parts of the Empire it proved its quality The average Brasenose man was very close to English soil, and from him I learned something of the secret of the English character, that hardly communicable thing which even a Scotsman born in the same island understands only by slow degrees. There is nothing in the land more English than Brasenose.
My years at Oxford were, I think, one of those boundary periods, the meaning of which is missed at the time, but is plain in the retrospect. The place was still monastic, but the clamour of the outer world was at its gates, and it was on the verge of losing many of its idioms. Very ancient customs were still remembered; for example, it was only a few years before I went up that Brasenose men had to go out of college in pairs, a relic of the mediaeval town and gown troubles. Sartorially my time was beyond doubt a turning point. On Sundays a dark suit was still obligatory; on weekdays Brasenose inclined towards tailed coats of tweed and hunting waistcoats, and the headgear was a cap or a bowler; but before I went down the fashion had arrived from Winchester of flannel “bags” and any kind of jacket at all seasons, and the modern hatless era was dawning. It was the same with our speech, which had Early Victorian, if not Regency, traces. We still called a cigar a “weed” and used the word “blood” to denote whatever was dashing and high-coloured in raiment or behaviour. When I visited my brother a year after I went down, I found that this fashion had almost disappeared.
After the years of intellectual ferment in a Scottish university Oxford was for me a stabilising influence, but still more was it a mellowing of character through friendship. In my time there was no urgent political or religious question to divide people into militant fraternities. We sought not allies in a cause but friendships for their own sake. Our creed was Mr. Belloc’s:
“From quiet homes and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.”
That happy circle has long since been broken, for the South African War took heavy toll of it, and the World War completed the tragedy.
I lived a good deal in Balliol and my closest friends were of that college; indeed, I believe that I was the sole outsider who ever became an honorary member of its principal wine club. The Balliol generation of my time was, I think, the most remarkable in Oxford, only to be paralleled by the brilliant group, containing Charles Lister and the Grenfells, which flourished on the eve of the War. It was distinguished both for its scholars and its athletes, but it made no parade of its distinction, carrying its honours lightly as if they fell to it in the ordinary process of nature. It delighted unpedantically in things of the mind, but it had an engaging youthfulness, too, and was not above highjinks and escapades.
In that circle there was no pose, unless it be a pose in youth to have no pose. The “grand manner” in the eighteenth-century sense was cultivated, which meant a deliberate lowering of key in professions, and a scrupulous avoidance of parade. A careless good breeding, an agreeable worldliness were its characteristics. It was a very English end to strive for, and by no means a common one, for urbanity of mind is rarely the aim of youth. It implied, perhaps, an undue critical sense, and a failure in certain generous foibles. Some of us were men of the world too young; humour and balance were prized too highly; a touch of Gothic extravagance was needed to correct our over-mellow Hellenism. Such a circle does not breed Quixotes or reformers, and of few of us could it be said in the phrase of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, il gardait au coeur les richesses stériles d’un grand nombre de rois oubliés. I have known men like Hugh Dawnay and Francis Grenfell wh
o would have ridden on a lost cause over the edge of the world. But our Oxford group was not of that kind; each of us would have rejoiced to ride over the world’s edge, but it would have been not for a cause but for the fun of the riding.
Yet I would not have it thought that we were worldly-wise. We reserved our chief detestation for Worldly Wisemen. To think of a career and to be prudent in laying its foundations was in our eyes the unpardonable sin — a revolt no doubt against the Jowett tradition. It was well enough to be successful if success could be achieved unostentatiously and carried lightly, but there must be no appearance of seeking it. Again, while affectionate and rather gentle with each other, we wore a swashbuckling manner to the outer world. It was our business to be regardless of consequences, to be always looking for preposterous adventures and planning crazy feats, and to be most ready for a brush with constituted authority. All this, of course, was the ordinary high spirits of young men delighting in health and strength, which happily belong to the Oxford of every generation. The peculiar features of our circle were that this physical exuberance was found among men of real intellectual power, and that it implied no corresponding abandon in their intellectual life. In the world of action we were ripe for any venture; in the things of the mind we were critical and decorous, chary of enthusiasm — revenants from the Augustan age.
One habit we had which was derived from the earlier generation of Hubert Howard and Basil Blackwood, and which bore the mysterious name of “booms.” In eighteenth-century Oxford they would have been called “schemes.” It was a “boom” to canoe an immense distance on a short winter day, or to walk to the very limits of one’s strength. The walk to London was a prosaic affair — I did it on a hot day on the eve of the Diamond Jubilee; more spectacular was the walk from Cambridge within twenty-four hours, a distance of over eighty miles, which was duly performed by some of us. One type of “boom” I remember vividly. Half a dozen of us on horseback would meet one morning at an appointed place, and each would ride a point-to-point course marked out on the map. We drew lots for our courses, which might lead us into back gardens and trackless woods, and compel us to swim rivers or canals, and sometimes brought us to the doors of the police court. In the evening we dined together and told our adventures...