by John Buchan
But the craving in its least admirable form was to grow elsewhere in the world to an extent and at a pace which no one then foresaw. Men for the sake of security and order were to barter their souls. Ironic atonement was made for feudalism and the centuries of privilege when proud nations fell into abject bondage to inflamed and loquacious peasants.
II
Elsfield was like the dwelling of Axylos, the son of Teuthras, in the Iliad, a house by the roadside. It opened on the village street, but, being built on the slope of a hill, its back view was superb, covering the Cherwell valley and all the western Cotswold. The oldest part was alleged to have twelfth-century walls, contemporary with the little church; but its form was Jacobean and the rest was Oxford gothic of the ‘seventies. The manor had had few owners since the days of the Saxon Aella: the Norman grantee, the Pudseys from Yorkshire, the Hores from East Anglia, and then until nearly the end of last century it was a kind of dower-house for the North family at Wroxton, further up the Cherwell. It was a clearing in the forest long before the Conquest, and a clearing it remained, so that at the siege of Oxford the Parliament army used it as a gun-park.
England is full of patches which the tides of modernity have somehow missed, and Elsfield was such an one. Though only fifty-five miles by road from London, and an hour’s walk from Oxford, it was as set in its ancient ways as an isle of the Hebrides. When I first went there my gamekeeper had never been in a railway train. At that time it was the only side of Oxford where there were no suburbs, for the college towers could be seen from our hill rising sheer from meadows, and there was the same moat of deep country between its mind and the outer world. Startling experiences passed from its people like water from a duck’s back. My gardener had fought through the East African campaign and nearly died of fever, and another of my men had had four years in France, but for all the effect those adventures had on them they might never have left the parish. It was the same with the neighbouring hamlets, like Noke and Wood Eaton and Beckley.
Elsfield stood on the edge of the long ridge which intervenes between the Chilterns and Cotswold, a ridge muffled in great woods, and dropping in the north to the fen of Otmoor; so our people were half-uplanders and half- woodlanders, and therefore dissociated both from the shepherd-folk of the high Cotswold and the valley-folk along Thames and Cherwell. They had their own ways, their own speech, their own pride of descent, for you will find the same names to-day in the villages as in mediaeval abbey-rolls, and they gripped like a vice on the past. From my lawn I looked over some thirty miles of woods and meadows to the dim ridges about Stow-on-the-Wold, and, except in the bareness of winter, there was not a house to be seen. That view was a symbol of our detachment.
It was a good countryside for the field naturalist. My garden soil was the coarse limestone called cornbrash, which gave place to Oxford clay in the meadows below. The flat top of the hill was sand. There was an abundance of water everywhere on the hillside. As a consequence of this geological variety the flora was notably rich; three hundred years ago Mr. Gerard of the Herball botanised in Stowood. To the bird-lover the place was a paradise. In my first summer a pair of peregrines — from Wales or the spire of Salisbury Cathedral — came every morning to hunt our fields. I have seen on the lawn at the same time pied, grey and yellow wagtails. A hobby nested in one of our spinneys. On my morning rides, when my horse’s hooves were muffled in the grass, I twice saw a golden oriole. Otmoor, a couple of miles off, was a wonderful haunt of rare birds, and anything might appear by its reedy watercourses — bitterns, cranes, one winter a pair of storks. Dr. Plot at the end of the seventeenth century recorded a hoopoe’s nest on Otmoor. I have never found the nest, but I have seen the bird there.
With one species of fowl my household became well acquainted. My eldest son from his early days was a passionate falconer. He kept hawks at Eton, for there is much latitude in that great republic, and at Oxford he was rarely without a bird on his wrist. I liked best the little kestrels who each summer sat and scolded on their perches on the lawn. He ended by becoming a real authority on the subject, and corresponded with fellow-falconers all over the world. It was the training of the birds that interested him, and he flew them only at vermin. Falcons are terribly fragile things, and we lived under the shadow of death, for the birds were always hanging themselves, or developing strange diseases. This was particularly true of his peregrines, but his goshawk, Jezebel, survived until he went to Uganda, when she was handed over to Lord Howard de Walden.
In my leisure at Elsfield I came under the spell which makes men local antiquaries. A predecessor had set the example, for Francis Wise, Radcliffe librarian and Dr. Johnson’s friend, had once lived in the house. He had filled the garderf with dubious antiques, including a Roman altar, which was examined by no less a person than Mommsen, and had designed a gardener’s cottage in the style of a mediaeval chantry. Everything in that countryside is long-descended. Follow the ridge northward and you pass at Beckley the ruins of a hunting-lodge of the kings of England, and presently tread the floor of a Roman villa. Cross Otmoor by what at most seasons is the only practicable way, and you are traversing a Roman road, while in the hollow of one of our meadows are the remains of a fibula factory. Every one of our quaintly named little fields has appeared in deeds and chartularies for nine hundred years. The past came so close to the present that it was inevitable that I should delve happily and unskilfully in its corners. I was especially fascinated by the Civil War, in which Oxfordshire had been a famous terrain — with the actions at Islip bridge, Bletchingdon, Cropredy and Edgehill, and Charles’s wild ride on that June evening when he slipped out from the city between Waller and Essex.
I resumed my walking habits, and of a Saturday would disappear on a lengthy tramp. My favourite course was the circuit of Otmoor, taking in its Seven Towns. That was the low-level route; the high-level route was longer — about thirty miles — and covered the circumjacent hills, Brill, Arncote, Gravelhill, and the rise of Wood Eaton. There was also an infinite variety of shorter courses up and down the Cherwell valley, and east and north into Bucks. In time I became more ambitious and used the motor-car to get me far afield, so that a day’s walk might take me into distant shires and over the water-shed of Severn.
Our ridge was old forest land and it provided one of the two types of landscape which have always had a special charm for me. These types are the mountain-meadow and the woodland clearing. By the first I do not mean the Swiss alp or the Norwegian saeter pasture, for these are on too large a scale. I mean rather the little meadows which one stumbles across in certain upland places — the “mountain lawns” of the poets — which have the charm of a garden in the wilderness. I can think of a hundred such — in Wales especially, and throughout the whole hill chain which runs from Vermont to the Carolinas. The other is the island of pasture, made by man’s hands, in a sea of forest, and of such I have memories in south Germany, in New England, and above all in eastern Canada — places where the turf is greener by contrast with the inky pines, and which make a sanctuary for birds and flowers. Elsfield was rich in those secret glades, sometimes only an acre wide, but all ancient clearings whose turf had been cropped for centuries. Summer never dulled their verdure, for there was water in most of them, and in autumn their fringes were a riot of berries. One could find primroses there every month of the year.
Now I “took sasine” of English soil, and learned to know intimately what I had hitherto only admired. Especially I came to respect the English countryman who had been the backbone of our army in the War, and has always been the backbone of the nation. I delighted in his slow idiomatic speech, his firm hold on the past, his fortitude and kindliness. Indeed, I think those early years at Elsfield were the happiest in my life, for I acquired a new loyalty and a new heritage, having added the southern Midlands to the Scottish Borders. I loved
“with equal mind
The southern sun, the northern wind,
The lilied lowland watermead,
; And the grey hills that cradle Tweed”;
and felt amazingly rich in consequence. The procession of the seasons was now part of my life, as it could not be for a town-dweller, and to watch it gave me a keener sense of the rhythm of things. I enjoyed every type of scene and weather — autumn gales which blew down Thames from the Bristol Channel, the first snow clouds from the Chilterns, the long-lighted midsummer days when sunrise trod on the heels of sunset, the woods bathed in the clear radiance of April and alive with bird-song. Riding on winter mornings I would see the lights go out one by one in the villages of the plain, or, returning in the twilight, watch them kindle, and reflect that I lived apart from, and yet within hail of, the sounding, glittering world.
On most days I went to my office in London, a longish daily journey, but it was worth while getting back late, even in winter, to the smell of wood smoke and the hooting of owls. Later, when I had given up business and entered Parliament, I arranged my life differently. From Monday afternoon until Friday I was in town and concerned exclusively with business and politics. From Friday evening until Monday at noon I was in sanctuary at Elsfield, a minor country gentleman with a taste for letters.
III
I was beginning to deserve the name of man of letters. As an author I was a link with the past, for in my extreme youth in the ‘nineties I had contributed to the old Yellow Book. As an impecunious undergraduate I read manuscripts for John Lane, who was a good friend to me, and had the privilege of accepting Arnold Bennett’s first book, A Man from the North. Then for a little my literary activities flagged, but in the post- War years I was responsible for a good deal of military history — the story of my family regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers; a record of the doings of the South African Infantry Brigade in France; and a memoir of my friends, the Grenfell twins, Francis and Riversdale, who fell in the first year of war. Meantime I had become a copious romancer. I suppose I was a natural story-teller, the kind of man who for the sake of his yarns would in prehistoric days have been given a seat by the fire and a special chunk of mammoth. I was always telling myself stories when I had nothing else to door rather, being told stories, for they seemed to work themselves out independently. I generally thought of a character or two, and then of a set of incidents, and the question was how my people would behave. They had the knack of just squeezing out of unpleasant places and of bringing their doings to a rousing climax.
I was especially fascinated by the notion of hurried journeys. In the great romances of literature they provide some of the chief dramatic moments, and since the theme is common to Homer and the penny reciter it must appeal to a very ancient instinct in human nature. We live our lives under the twin categories of time and space, and when the two come into conflict we get the great moment. Whether failure or success is the result, life is sharpened, intensified, idealised. A long journey, even with the most lofty purpose, may be a dull thing to read of if it is made at leisure; but a hundred yards may be a breathless business if only a few seconds are granted to complete it. For then it becomes a sporting event, a race; and the interest which makes millions read of the Derby is the same, in a grosser form, as when we follow an expedition straining to relieve a beleaguered fort, or a man fleeing to a sanctuary with the avenger behind him.
In my undergraduate days I had tried my hand at historical novels, and had then some ambition to write fiction in the grand manner, by interpreting and clarifying a large piece of life. This ambition waned and, apart from a few short stories, I let fiction alone until 1910, when, being appalled as a publisher by the dullness of most boys’ books, I thought I would attempt one of my own, based on my African experience. The result was Prester John, which has since become a school-reader in many languages. Early in 1914 I wrote Salute to Adventurers, the fruit of my enthusiasm for American history. In that book I described places in Virginia which I had never seen, and I was amazed, when I visited them later, to find how accurate had been my guesses.
Then, while pinned to my bed during the first months of war and compelled to keep my mind off too tragic realities, I gave myself to stories of adventure. I invented a young South African called Richard Hannay, who had traits copied from my friends, and I amused myself with considering what he would do in various emergencies. In The Thirty-Nine Steps he was spy- hunting in Britain; in Greenmantle he was on a mission to the East; and in Mr. Standfast, published in 1919, he was busy in Scotland and France. The first had an immediate success, and, since that kind of thing seemed to amuse my friends in the trenches, I was encouraged to continue. I gave Hannay certain companions — Peter Pienaar, a Dutch hunter; Sandy Arbuthnot, who was reminiscent of Aubrey Herbert; and an American gentleman, Mr. John S. Blenkiron. Soon these people became so real to me that I had to keep a constant eye on their doings. They slowly aged in my hands, and the tale of their more recent deeds will be found in The Three Hostages, The Courts of the Morning and The Island of Sheep.
I added others to my group of musketeers. There was Dickson McCunn, the retired grocer, and his ragamuffin boys from the Gorbals, whose saga is written in Huntingtower, Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds. There was Sir Edward Leithen, an eminent lawyer, who is protagonist or narrator in The Power House, John Macnab, The Dancing Floor and The Gap in the Curtain; and in his particular group were the politician, Lord Lamancha, and Sir Archibald Roylance, airman, ornithologist and Scots laird. It was huge fun playing with my puppets, and to me they soon became very real flesh and blood. I never consciously invented with a pen in my hand; I waited until the story had told itself and then wrote it down, and, since it was already a finished thing, I wrote it fast. The books had a wide sale, both in English and in translations, and I always felt a little ashamed that profit should accrue from what had given me so much amusement. I had no purpose in such writing except to please myself, and even if my books had not found a single reader I would have felt amply repaid.
Besides these forthright tales of adventure I was busy with a very different kind of romance. The desire to recover the sense of continuity, which had brought me to Elsfield, prompted my first serious piece of fiction. It was called The Path of the King, and was based on the notion that no man knows his ancestry, and that kingly blood may lie dormant for centuries until the appointed time. The chapters began with a Viking’s son lost in a raid, and ended audaciously with Abraham Lincoln.
After that I varied my tales of adventure with this kind of romance, over which I took a great deal of pains, and which seems to me the most successful of my attempts at imaginative creation. Being equally sensitive to the spells of time and of space, to a tract of years and a tract of landscape, I tried to discover the historical moment which best interpreted the ethos of a particular countryside, and to devise the appropriate legend. Just as certain old houses, like the inns at Burford and Queensferry, cried out to Robert Louis Stevenson to tell their tales, so I felt the clamour of certain scenes for an interpreter.
The best, I think, is Witch Wood, in which I wrote of the Tweedside parish of my youth at the time when the old Wood of Caledon had not wholly disappeared, and when the rigours of the new Calvinism were contending with the ancient secret rites of Diana. I believe that my picture is historically true, and I could have documented almost every sentence from my researches on Montrose. In The Free Fishers I tried to catch the flavour of the windy shores of Fife at a time when smuggling and vagabondage were still rife. I had always felt keenly the romance of the Jacobite venture, but less in its familiar Scottish episodes than in the dreary ebb of the march to Derby, so I took that period for my attempt in Midwinter to catch the spell of the great midland forests and the Old England which lay everywhere just beyond the highroads and the plough-lands. Finally, in The Blanket of the Dark I chose the time when the monasteries fell and the enclosures began, and I brought all the valleys of Cotswold into the picture.
These were serious books and they must have puzzled many of the readers who were eager to follow the doings of Richard Hannay or Dickson
McCunn. That is the trouble with an author who only writes to please himself; his product is not standardised, and the purchaser is often disappointed. I once had a letter from an Eton boy who, having a taste for a bustling yarn, was indignant at anything of mine which did not conform to that pattern. He earnestly begged me to “pull myself together.”
Though my hand is vile and scribing has always bored me, I found the writing of my romances almost a relaxation. Less so my excursions in biography. The subject of my first was Montrose. From my Oxford days I had been fascinated by his military genius and the sorrows of his life, and I gradually began to read myself into his period. I found that the Whig historians had dismissed him as at the best a bandit of genius, and had beatified the theocrats who opposed him. To this view I could not assent, and as my studies progressed I came to the conclusion that he was the most balanced and prescient mind in Scotland at the time, as well as the greatest of Scottish soldiers. Materials for his life had been collected by Mark Napier with an enthusiasm which was not always critical, and I decided to go over them again, and try to present an authentic picture of a very great man. In 1913 I published a short sketch, which presently went out of print, and after the War, when my military histories had been completed, I set myself to elaborate the portrait. The book was issued in 1928 and I am happy to think that my view of Montrose, foreshadowed by Carlyle and presented briefly in their histories by S. R. Gardiner and Andrew Lang, is now generally accepted. I could ask for no greater honour than to help to restore to his country’s pantheon the hero of my youth.
Cromwell was bound to follow. I had long shared Lord Rosebery’s view of him as the greatest of Englishmen, and, when I began to study his campaigns, I felt that as a soldier he was very near the first rank. I had the supreme advantage of having been brought up in a Calvinistic atmosphere, so I was able to write of his religious life with some understanding. For several years I lived chiefly in the seventeenth century, reading acres of its divinity and many hundreds of its pamphlets. Cromwell with all his imperfections seemed to me not only admirable but lovable, and I tried in my book to present the warm human side of him. I cannot claim that there was anything in my work which could not be found in Gardiner and Firth, but I think I elaborated certain neglected aspects and I took special pains with the background.