by John Buchan
And give the silly fools their will.”
Even a perverse career of action seemed to me better than a tippling of ale in the shade, for that way lay the cockney suburbanism which was my secret terror. Again, while I was very conscious of man’s littleness in face of the eternal, I believed profoundly in his high destiny. Human beings were compounded of both heavenly and hellish elements, with infinite possibilities of sorrow and joy. In consequence I had an acute sense of sin, and a strong hatred of whatever debased human nature. The conception of mankind, current in some quarters, as a herd of guzzling, lecherous little mammals seemed to me the last impiety.
Had I wished it, I could have stayed on and taught philosophy. But at the end of my fourth year I had come to feel that I was not sufficiently devoted to any branch of learning to give up my life to it, either as don or professor. I wanted a stiffer job, one with greater hazards in it, and I was not averse to one which offered bigger material rewards. The supreme advantage of Oxford to me was that it enabled me to discover what talents I had and what I really wanted to do. Horizons had extended and revealed a surprising number of things which woke my curiosity. I wanted to explore the wider stages of life. Besides, I had become attached to the study of law, and under the inspiration of a great scholar, the late A. H. J. Greenidge, had taken a lively interest in the most arid details of the Greek and Roman legal systems.
So I decided that my profession should be the Bar.
CHAPTER IV — LONDON INTERLUDE
I went to London at the beginning of 1900, in the darkest period of the South African War. At the outbreak of that war (after walking for hours one night on the Embankment) I decided that it was not my duty to volunteer for service, and presently I had almost forgotten public affairs in the excitement of a new profession.
To pass from Oxford, where one was in a modest way a personage, to the utter insignificance of a unit among metropolitan millions, was a harsh and wholesome experience. In my early weeks at Brasenose I had been lonely — I remember how the odour of tea sharpened my homesickness! — but my first weeks in London were a worse solitude. On my frequent visits to keep my terms at the Bar I had found the place friendly and gay. Now it was flat, dingy and inhospitable. It seemed to have an engrossing life of its own which had no link with my former worlds. My first rooms were in Brick Court, the ugliest part of the Temple; they were small and new, reached by a staircase of lavatory bricks, and with no prospect but chimney-pots. Later I moved to pleasant chambers in Temple Gardens, where I had a view of the river, and at night in winter could hear overhead the calling of wild birds in their flight upstream.
In a month my loneliness had gone, and I had become an ardent student of the Law. I spent some months in an office in Bedford Row with a firm of solicitors who had a large agency business, and learned there the minor details of practice. Then I went to read with John Andrew Hamilton, the future Lord Sumner, and was his last pupil before he took silk. That was a privilege for which I shall always be grateful, for it gave me the friendship of a great lawyer, who, in the evenings when the Courts had risen, would discourse cynically and most brilliantly on men and affairs. Then I passed to the chambers of the junior counsel to the Inland Revenue, who, as Sir Sydney Rowlatt, was to have a distinguished career on the Bench. From Rowlatt I learned many lessons, chief of which was that scholarship was as valuable in law as in other things. He taught me to look always for principles, and if necessary to search far back in legal history. Moreover, he stripped the subject of pedantry and dullness; he had the same boyish zest in tracking out a legal conundrum as in sailing his little yacht in the gusty Channel.
The consequence was that I became an enthusiast for the law. In those days the Bar examinations were trivial, and I succeeded in being ploughed once in my finals through treating the thing too cavalierly. But I toiled prodigiously at my own kind of study. I read the law reports avidly. I discovered an antiquary’s zeal in tracing the origins of legal doctrine. My favourite light reading was the lives of lawyers. I developed a special admiration for Mansfield, and, finding that the life of the great Chief Justice had never been written, I set myself to remedy the lack. To this day I possess three stout volumes in which I have analysed and classified every one of his decisions. I had no ambition at the time except legal success, and politics I thought of only as a step to that goal. It seemed to me that the position of a judge was the most honourable, dignified and independent of any — ease without idleness, an absorbing intellectual pursuit in which daily one became more of a master. My view was that of Weir of Hermiston: “To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement.” Moreover, another side of me loved the appurtenances of it all — the Inns of Court with their stately dining-halls and their long histories, the ritual of the Bar and Bench, the habits of mind and the ways of speech of the profession, the sense that here was the hoar-ancient intimately linked to modern uses.
It was a pleasant apprenticeship, for I had not the nervous strain of a busy lawyer who has to struggle with obtuse juries and captious judges. I had the mental interest of determining the precise significance of words, using what sailors call cross-bearings, elucidating shades of meaning and nuances of atmosphere — the interest of a mathematical proof, or a chess conundrum, or an elaborate piece of classical music. I had the historical interest of tracing doctrines back to their dim beginnings. I had the more human interest of watching the play of able minds and of seeing life vividly from a special angle. I am convinced that an education in the humanities should be supplemented and corrected by a training either in law or in some exact science. Besides, it admits one to a great and loyal brotherhood. Once a lawyer always a lawyer. Though I soon ceased to practise, for years I read the law reports first in the morning paper, and fragments of legal jargon still tend to intrude themselves in my literary style.
If I was an industrious apprentice I was also a happy one. The spell of London wove itself around me. Fleet Street and the City had still a Dickens flavour, and Holywell Street had not been destroyed. In the daytime, with my fellow solicitor’s-clerk, I penetrated into queer alleys and offices which in appearance were unchanged since Mr. Pickwick’s day. On foggy evenings I would dine beside a tavern fire on the kind of fare which Mr. Weller affected. Behind all the dirt and gloom there was a wonderful cosiness, and every street corner was peopled by ghosts from literature and history. I acquired a passion for snugness, which I fancy is commoner in youth than is generally supposed. A young man, a little awed by the novelty of everything, is eager to find his own secure niche. At any rate I, who had begun by regarding life as a strenuous pilgrimage, and at Oxford had come to interest myself in the environs of the road, was now absorbed by the wayside gardens and inclined to daily at the inns.
I had lost any wish ever to leave England, for it seemed to me that I could not exhaust the delights of my own country. I had never desired possessions, regarding them as a clog rather than a blessing, but now I toyed with the idea of a house of my own with a good library, and especially of a Scots moorland dwelling to which I could retire for the legal vacations. Unconsciously I was “ranging” myself and acquiring the habit of mind of that suburbanite who had once been my dread. The gipsy impulse which had dominated my boyhood seemed to have vanished. I saw without regret my path marked out for me, a straight and decorous highroad. My love of country life had not diminished, but I was content with a trim, habitable countryside. Andrew Lang and I shared a rod on a little dry-fly trout stream in Hertfordshire, where I spent many pleasant Saturdays, and he used to laugh at my new-found enthusiasm for lowland waters, as he jeered at my absorption in law. He thought it a sad descent from the Borderer and erstwhile Jacobite.
Another proof of the new mood was the attachment I acquired to the eighteenth century. Before, my favourite century had been the seven
teenth with occasional leanings to the sixteenth, and the age of Anne and the Georges had interested me only in their connection with the Jacobite risings. Now I found a supreme attraction in the “teacup times,” a consequence, no doubt, of my new profession, for they were a happy season for lawyers. They were also the era when urban life in England came to its flower, and I was rapidly becoming a Cit. The taste was shared by my friends, and we wrote to each other in the manner of Horace Walpole. The affectation must have sat ill on me, for I was not born with much devotion to the bric-à-brac of life. I had become a close student of eighteenth-century memoirs, and the fad had one good result, for it made me a devotee of Edmund Burke. Also it led me to appreciate many pleasant things on which I had hitherto cast a lack-lustre eye. Dr. Johnson’s is a sound philosophy: “Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.”
London at the turn of the century had not yet lost her Georgian air. Her ruling society was aristocratic till Queen Victoria’s death and preserved the modes and rites of an aristocracy. Her great houses had not disappeared or become blocks of flats. In the summer she was a true city of pleasure, every window-box gay with flowers, her streets full of splendid equipages, the Park a showground for fine horses and handsome men and women. The ritual went far down, for frock-coats and top-hats were the common wear not only for the West End, but about the Law Courts and in the City. On Sunday afternoons we dutifully paid a round of calls. Conversation was not the casual thing it has now become, but was something of an art, in which competence conferred prestige. Also clubs were still in their hey-day, their waiting lists were lengthy, and membership of the right ones was a stage in a career. I could belong, of course, to none of the famous institutions; my clubs were young men’s clubs, where I met my university friends. One was the Cocoa Tree in St. James’s Street, a place with a long and dubious history, of which the bronze cocoa-tree in the smoking-room, stuffed with ancient packs of cards, was a reminder. At that time its membership was almost confined to young men from Oxford and Cambridge. I belonged also to the Bachelors’, then situated at the foot of Hamilton Place, a pleasant resort for idle youth, from whose bay- windows one could watch the tide of fashion flowing between Hyde Park and Piccadilly.
Now I made my first real entry into the society of my elders. Youth and age were not segregated then as they tend to be to-day, and a young man had the chance of meeting and talking with his seniors and betters — an excellent thing, for to mix with abler men than yourself is to learn humility. It was an era of big dinner parties, where there was far too much to eat, but where the men sat long at table and there was plenty of good talk. Those dinners must have been a heavy imposition on tired folk with feeble digestions, but they were fascinating things for the eupeptic newcomer. I had the opportunity of meeting people whose careers stretched, it seemed to me, far back into history — Lord Rowton, who talked to me of Disraeli; judges like Lord Halsbury, who remembered the days before the Judicature Acts; elder statesmen like Lord Goschen on one side and Lord Rosebery on the other. With Canon Ainger, who was then Master of the Temple, I dined nearly every week. I frankly enjoyed dining out. For a minnow like myself there was the chance of meeting new and agreeable minnows, and the pleasure of gazing with awe up the table where at the hostess’s side was some veritable triton.
Then there were the week-ends, when for the first time I saw the inside of great English dwellings, my visits having been hitherto confined to modest Scottish country houses. I must have been an unsatisfactory week-end guest, for after long confinement in London the sight of the countryside intoxicated me, and I would disappear early on the Sunday morning and return late at night, sometimes — to the disgust of my hostess — taking with me some guest whose company was more desired than my own.
Looking back, that time seems to me unbelievably secure and self- satisfied. The world was friendly and well-bred, as I remember it, without the vulgarity and the worship of wealth which appeared with the new century. Its strength was its steadiness of nerve, its foible its complacence — both soon to be rudely shattered. Public affairs were pretty much left to the professionals, and except among them there was no strong interest in politics. The South African War affected only those who had kin in the fighting ranks. I supplemented my income by articles in the Spectator, of which I came to be a sort of assistant-editor. Usually I wrote on foreign affairs, sometimes on legal points, but I cannot remember having a strong interest in any of my subjects. My kind colleagues were in the same case. Both St. Loe Strachey and Meredith Townsend were by nature prophets and propagandists, but the first had to content himself with amateur military criticism, and the second with apocalyptic murmurings about the Far East. Nowhere on the surface, as I remember the time, could one discern any strong movement of popular emotion or thought.
Then one day early in the August of 1901 I was suddenly jolted out of my comfortable rut, for I accepted the invitation of Lord Milner, who was home on leave, to go with him to South Africa.
CHAPTER V — FURTH FORTUNE
It was a change with a vengeance. Hitherto I had lived among books and in a society where books were a major interest. My approach to practical life had been from the side of theory. My colleagues had been people with the same background as myself. Now my duties were to be concerned with things for which my education had in no way prepared me, and my daily associates were to be for the most part drawn from worlds of which I had no experience. But in my new vocation I had two advantages. My Oxford circle had had a notable culture, but we did not make too much of it. We cherished it as a private delight, and did not exaggerate its value. We were modest people, anxious to learn, and disposed perhaps to be over-humble in face of an unbookish world. Again, educated society had not absorbed my time, for I had spent long parts of each year among shepherds, gillies, keepers, fishermen, poachers, and other men of their hands, and had a great liking for such company.
I had never been out of Britain — indeed I had never wanted to. In London I had slipped into a sort of spiritual middle-age. Now, at the age of twenty-five, youth came back to me like a spring tide, and every day on the voyage to the Cape saw me growing younger. As soon as we had passed the Bay of Biscay I seemed to be in a new world, with new scents, new sounds, new sights. I was intoxicated with novelties of which hitherto I had only had glimpses in books. The blue days in tropical waters were a revelation of bodily and mental ease. I recovered the same exhilaration which long ago, as a boy on the Fife coast, I had got from the summer sea. This mood continued until the morning when I looked out of a port-hole and saw Table Mountain rising into the clouds; it was not broken by a week’s jolting in a slow train through the Karroo and the dusty Free State; its exhilaration even survived the decanting of a very homesick youth in an unlovely Johannesburg Street at what I suppose to have been the most comfortless hotel in the world.
I
I had only met Lord Milner once before, but the name had been long familiar to me, for at Oxford men spoke it reverentially. He had won every kind of academic honour and had impressed Jowett as the ablest man of his time. He had risen fast in the public service in Egypt and Whitehall; had gone to South Africa with the goodwill of all parties; had there become the most controversial figure in the Empire, applauded by many as the strong man in a crisis, bitterly criticised by others as bearing the chief responsibility of the war. Here was Plato’s philosopher-turned-king, a scholar who in his middle forties had made history.
The first impression I had was that there were very few signs of the scholar, except in the fastidious rationalism of his thought. In his speaking and writing he had none of the literary graces, except order and lucidity. Though deeply versed in the classics I never knew him quote Latin or Greek. A small, well-thumbed library accompanied him about the world, but he seemed to read little, and he had no taste for new books. Mr. Asquith overflowed with literary interests and was always reading; Lord Cromer, who had more or less educated himself, lo
ved dearly a learned reference; even Lord Curzon could unbend joyfully and talk books. But I do not remember that Milner ever showed a craving for literature or for any of the arts, any more than for games and sports. One of the finest scholars of his age, he had put away his scholarship on a high shelf.
I believe that this was done deliberately. Early in life he became aware that he had a limited stock of vitality, bodily and mental. He could do some things superbly, but not many at the same time. He had none of the overflowing, boisterous facility of certain types. He had received — chiefly from Arnold Toynbee — an inspiration which centred all his interests on the service of the State. He had the instincts of a radical reformer joined to a close-textured intellect which reformers rarely possess. He had a vision of the Good Life spread in a wide commonalty; and when his imagination apprehended the Empire his field of vision was marvellously enlarged. So at the outset of his career he dedicated himself to a cause, putting things like leisure, domestic happiness and money-making behind him. In Bacon’s phrase he espoused the State. On the intellectual side he found that which wholly satisfied him in the problems of administration, when he confronted them as Goschen’s secretary, and in Egypt and at Somerset House. He had a mind remarkable both for its scope and its mastery over details — the most powerful administrative intelligence, I think, which Britain has produced in our day. If I may compare him with others, he was as infallible as Cromer in detecting the centre of gravity in a situation, as brilliant as Alfred Beit in bringing order out of tangled finances, and he had Curzon’s power of keeping a big organisation steadily at work. He was no fanatic — his intellect was too supreme for that, but in the noblest sense of the word he was an enthusiast.
He narrowed his interests of set purpose, and this absorption meant a certain rigidity. He had cut himself off from some of the emollients of life. Consequently the perfect administrator was a less perfect diplomatist. When I went to South Africa I was aware that he had been much criticised for what happened before the outbreak of war, but that subject did not concern me. My business was with the future, not with the past, about which I did not trouble to form an opinion. To-day, after more than a quarter of a century’s friendship, I can see that Milner was bound to have certain limits in negotiation. He was not very good at envisaging a world wholly different from his own, and his world and Kruger’s at no point intersected. There was a gnarled magnificence in the old Transvaal President, but he saw only a snuffy, mendacious savage. It was the fashion among his critics to believe that a little geniality on Milner’s part, something of the hail-fellow, masonic-lodge atmosphere, would have brought the Bloemfontein conference to a successful conclusion. Such a view seems to me to do justice neither to Kruger nor to Milner, men deeply in earnest who were striving for things wholly incompatible, an Old Testament patriarchal regime and a modern democracy. I doubt if a compromise was ever possible, though a delay might have been contrived which would have given a chance to the more liberal elements in the Transvaal, like Joubert and Louis Botha. Anyhow I am certain that Milner was the last man for the task. He detested lies, and diplomacy demands something less than the plain truth. He was nothing of the countryman, and could not understand the tortuosities of the peasant mind. His spiritual integrity made it difficult for him, when he had studied a problem, to temporise about the solution which he thought inevitable. Such a course seemed to him to involve some intellectual cowardice, some dereliction of duty, and to duty he had a Roman faithfulness.