by John Buchan
The Lord High Commissioner is the sole subject in Great Britain who on occasion represents His Majesty, and he must therefore conduct himself high and disposedly. Holyroodhouse used to be the last word in shabby discomfort; the High Commissioner had to bring his own plate, linen and other accessories, and bivouac in windy chambers where the rats scampered. Now it is like a well-appointed country house, and I think the west drawing-room, which looks out on Arthur’s Seat, one of the pleasantest rooms I have ever entered. The High Commissioner and his wife are for a fortnight Their Graces, and, besides the Purse Bearer, are attended by a lady-in-waiting, by several maids-of-honour, and by four A.D.C.’s. During my two years of office I had as my A.D.C.’s representatives of ancient Scottish houses — Lord Clydesdale and his brother, Lord Nigel Douglas-Hamilton; Captain Duncan Macrae of Eilean Donan; and my future son-in-law Captain Brian Fairfax-Lucy (a Cameron of Mamore). They all wore kilts of the old pattern, and made a most impressive bodyguard. I shall not soon forget those dinners in the great gallery of the Palace, where sometimes a hundred sat at table — the lingering spring sunshine competing with the candles, the dark walls covered with the portraits of the Kings of Scotland (daubs two hundred years old, but impressive in the twilight), the toast of the King, followed by the National Anthem, and that of the Church of Scotland, followed by Old Hundred, the four pipers of the Argylls, who strutted round the table and then played a pibroch for my special delectation. On those nights old ghosts came out of secret places.
III
Between 1927 and 1935 the stage was emptied of most of the figures who had been prominent when I first became interested in’ politics. Milner and Curzon died before I entered the House; Asquith and Arthur Balfour, Finlay and Sumner and Buckmaster while I was a member. All of them were in the Lords; only Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Lloyd George, of the pre-War statesmen, still sat in the Commons, and the latter spent much of his time at his Sutton farm in his new role of Cincinnatus.
One friend of my youth was in the Cabinet when I. came to St. Stephen’s, and three years later all parties mourned his untimely death. When I went up to Oxford F. E. Smith was a law don at Merton, imping his wings for the most brilliant legal flight of our day. When he spoke in the Union he swept away opposition like a river in spate. I met him in the political clubs, and I had the benefit of his advocacy when, with other unfortunates, I had some trouble with the police during the visit of King Edward VII (then Prince of Wales) to Blenheim. When I returned from South Africa I found that he had settled as a “local” at Liverpool and had already built up a large practice. On the northern circuit I used to stay with him at his house in the Wirral, and spend a cheerful week-end among dogs and horses. I remember how deeply I was impressed by his appearances in court. Disregarding the folly of solicitors, he refused to argue each and every point, but concentrated on the vital ones; wherefore he was beloved by judges, whose time he never wasted.
He entered Parliament in the 1906 election, migrated to London, and presently was a resplendent figure both in the Law Courts and the House of Commons. Everything he undertook he did easily, as if with his left hand, and with a superb gesture of unconcern. He was Aristotle’s Magnificent Man, the last exponent of the eighteenth-century Grand Manner. He was consciously shaping his career according to a long-settled plan, and he took a boyish pleasure in the masterful way in which he made stage follow stage. Wholly incapable of pretence and humbug and time-serving, he had strong views on public questions which he candidly avowed and faithfully acted upon. He liked the good things of life and made no bones about it; ginger remained for him hot in the mouth, and he refused to relinquish cakes and ale because of the frowns of the anaemic. He had his own strict code of honour, hard as stone and plain as a pikestaff, and he never departed from it. One of its articles was loyalty to friendship. At the start he imperilled his chances at the Bar because he stood by an unpopular acquaintance. He would go out of his way at his busiest to help a friend. He used to speak for me in my Border constituency before the War, and arrive at the last possible moment, when I had given up hope. I had a house far up in the moors, from whose door one could see four miles of road, and I ought to have contracted heart disease from my Sister-Anne watches on that doorstep!
He was in every sense an extraordinary man according to Sydney Smith’s definition: “The meaning of an extraordinary man is that he is eight men in one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined.” F. E. had plenty of foibles and plenty of critics, but, as has been well said, it is only at the tree loaded with fruit that people throw stones. He had talents of the first order, and in a dazzling variety. First and foremost he was a great lawyer — a great advocate and a great judge. He had an intellect of remarkable range and power, capable of the nicest subtleties and the broadest and most luminous common sense. He could embody his conclusions, too, in clear, nervous prose. I do not think that he was a very good writer in the general way, he had too few notes in his scale; but he was a master of judicial statement. Then he was a great orator. Not in the highest rank, perhaps, for here, too, he had a limited range, and I was never much moved by his solemnities; but in supple argument and devastating controversial skill he had no equal in our time. He had a beautiful voice and his sentences seemed to flow with a contemptuous ease. The fluency of the ordinary man suggests the shallow and the ineffective, but his proclaimed an insolent mastery. I have more than once been with him on election platforms, and his handling of interrupters and hecklers was a cruel piece of artistry; it must have taken them weeks to recover.
The Magnificent Man is apt to lack the small prudential virtues. F. E. took no thought for the morrow; he was resolved to get what he sought by the sheer weight of brains and will, and not by any tactical adroitness. I question whether, if he had lived, he would have gone much further; certainly he would never have been Prime Minister, for he was too much the brilliant individualist for our queer synthetic polity. There has been no one quite like him in our history, for audacious figures like Thurlow had usually something rotten and cankered about them, whereas F. E. had most of the wholesome virtues. Sometimes he seemed to cultivate a kind of Regency grossness, but the coarseness of grain was superficial; he was capable of the most delicate consideration and chivalry. Above all he had magnanimity; next to a stout ally he loved a stout opponent. No architect of a career was ever less jealous of other builders. An ambition very near his heart was to be Chancellor of Oxford University, but when Lord Cave died it seemed to the committee of Conservatives who were concerned with the nomination that F. E. was not a possible candidate. I was given the unpleasant task of breaking the news to him. “My dear John,” he said, “I wholly agree. What Oxford needs in the present crisis of her fortunes is a decorous façade, and that unhappily I cannot provide.” To some he seemed to play the game of life for common and earthy stakes, but who among us can on this account cast a stone? — and in any case the triviality of the stakes was redeemed by the brilliance and the humanity of the player.
I knew Ramsay Macdonald long before I entered Parliament. Indeed, before I took that step I had some talk with him as to what room there was for anybody like myself in public life. I was in the House when he led the Opposition; during the Labour Government of 1929-1931; and from the day when he became Prime Minister of a National Government to the day he retired. In the last two years of his premiership I saw much of him, for during the session we walked together round St. James’s Park on several mornings in the week, and I frequently breakfasted with him and did my best to help a very tired man to arrange his difficult days.
He will be a hard personality for historians to judge, since the evidence, to a writer a hundred years hence, will seem a mass of contradictions. He was the chief maker of the Labour party, and according to his critics he did his best to destroy it — suarum legum
auctor ac subversor. Before he took office he preached an emotional socialism, but in his later years he tended towards a creed scarcely distinguishable from left-centre conservatism. In 1914, at the outbreak of War, he was in opposition to the bulk of his party and to the vast majority of the British people, but no man was less of a pacifist. There were moments when he was Jacobin and sansculotte, and moments when his affections were with an ancien régime. Most of his life was spent with very plain folk, but his taste was fastidious, his courtesy of an old-fashioned elaboration, and — to quote from some novel whose title I have forgotten — he “had the so-called aristocratic appearance which is common in England among the middle classes, but unknown among the old nobility.”
I think that some of these contradictions can be explained. He had the starkest kind of courage, and if he were challenged or coerced he was apt to be forced into an opposition which did not represent his real views. That is certainly true of his behaviour in the War. Again, his critics said that, though his business was to succour the under-dog, he disliked the breed. That is not true. His sympathies were always with the under-dog, and he disliked it only when it became smug and patronising and talked bad economics. Yet I think that here lay his great limitation. In one of his letters Rupert Brooke wrote that he could “watch a dirty, middle-aged tradesman in a railway carriage for hours, and love every dirty, greasy, sulky wrinkle in his weak chin, and every button on his spotted, unclean waistcoat.” Ramsay Macdonald lacked this catholic, enjoying zest for human nature, this kindly affection for the commonplace, which may be called benevolence, or, better still, loving-kindness, the quality of Shakespeare and Walter Scott. It may have been due to some harsh experience in his youth, but he had developed what seemed to me to be an undue fastidiousness. He was too ready to despise. He loved plain folk, but they must be his own kind of plain folk with his own background. Of the ordinary stupid stuff of democracy he could be as intolerant as Coriolanus.
He had all the qualities of a leader, fearlessness, decision, a temperamental mastery; but it was the irony of fate which made him leader of the Labour party. There he had to deal with honest men most of whom had drab backgrounds and narrow outlooks, people with whom he could share nothing. Worse, he had to deal with the half-baked, the minor intellectuals, and he knew too well the dismal shallows of their minds. With the really able men of the Left he made no contact. He used to profess an admiration for science and scientists, but his own mind had nothing of the scientific bent. He simply did not understand the language of modern economics.
I can only speak of him as I knew him, and that was in his decline. I never heard him in his great days when he was a famous platform orator and a formidable debater. He had still the oratorical habit, and would drift into rhetorical cadences, but he had lost his old copiousness and had to drag his thoughts and words from a deep well, so that the result was often a sad anti- climax. His alleged vanity seemed to me to be largely sensitiveness. The struggle of his early years had made him suspicious and too quick to imagine affronts. Also he had a queer romantic kink which made him see melodrama in perfectly humdrum affairs. He could not help picturing himself in dramatic parts. To the end there was an endearing innocence about him.
Indeed if I had to choose one epithet for him it would be “endearing.” There was a sombre gentleness which fascinated me. In his last years when mind and body were almost worn out, two things never failed him — courage and courtesy. The whole man was a romance, almost an anachronism. To understand him one had to understand the Scottish Celt, with his ferocious pride, his love of pageantry and poetry, his sentiment about the past, his odd contradictory loyalties. He would have made an excellent Highland chief three hundred years ago, and a heroic Jacobite refugee. That is why he was a successful Foreign Secretary, for his imagination enabled him to understand large grandiose things, the conflict of nations, the strife of continents. Now and then the curtain would be drawn back and something would be revealed of a lonely inward-looking soul. I remember that when the National Government was formed in 1931, the Scots in London gave him a dinner, and in his speech he let his recollection wander back to his boyhood and told of his happiness when a harvest-worker had been kind to him long ago. I shall not soon forget the wistfulness with which he revived that old, dim memory.
The man was principally a poet — a poet who, like Cecil Rhodes, had not the gift of song. When his days of struggle were over and he found himself in a high place, he did not quite know what to do with his power, for his was a kingdom of dreams, not of things and men. The silliest charge levelled against him was snobbishness. He liked cultivated, long-descended people and beautiful things, and had the honesty to admit it. But the true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them, and of that type Ramsay Macdonald was the extreme opposite. He had no real wish to be any kind of grandee. The things which were dearest to him were the things which are happily found in the widest commonalty — old friends, the folk of his native parish, the songs and tales of his youth, the seasonal beauties of nature. He had tramped over all my Border hills and knew every shepherd by name, and once, when he was the most talked of man in Europe, he suggested that he and I should go off for a week’s walking there. “I want some pleasure,” he said, “before the lean years begin.”
It is fitting to pass from Ramsay Macdonald to King George V, for between the two there was a sincere friendship. I was first brought into association with the King in the latter part of the War when, as part of my official duties, I was occasionally summoned to discuss with him public opinion in foreign nations. What struck me was his eager interest, his quick apprehension and his capacious memory. As with many royal personages, what to the ordinary man was abstract history was to him a personal affair, like a family chronicle, and he was extraordinarily quick in detecting historical parallels. I was not less impressed by his courage. He never lost heart, and his fortitude was not a dead, stolid thing, for there was always something about it of the buoyant and the debonair.
He had a ready sense of humour, of the kind often found among good sportsmen. Verbal wit did not interest him, but he had a robust appreciation of the comedies of life. He was a great reader, reading rather for substance than for style. He did me the honour to be amused by my romances, and used to make acute criticisms on questions of fact. Of one, a poaching story of the Highlands, he gave me a penetrating analysis, but he approved of it sufficiently to present many copies of it to his friends.
The sportsman was always strong in him, for he loved not only the practice of an art in which he excelled, but the whole out-of-doors world and the pageant of nature. Akin to this taste was his liking for those who lived close to nature. Like Walter Scott, he rejoiced that “nothing worth having or caring about in this world is uncommon.” He understood plain people and was in turn understood by them, and that was the secret of his strength. Few things pleased or moved him more than to be told of the pithy sayings of simple folk, and of episodes which revealed the divine spark in them. In 1923 when he visited the Borders and passed through Peebles, an old shepherd’s wife tramped ten miles from a hill glen to greet him. When I asked her why she had undertaken such a journey her reply was “We maun boo to the buss that bields us.”
I told this to the King, and it stuck in his memory, for he often quoted it.
He had one key of access to all hearts, his sincere love of his fellows. He could be explosive and denunciatory, but always with a twinkle in his eye. He had in a full degree what Clarendon attributed to England, “its old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature.” Soberly and unrhetorically it can be written of him that he loved humanity. Therefore he was a shrewd judge of character, which no cynic can ever be. He never rode rough-shod over anyone’s feelings, and he was tender even to prejudices. He was immensely considerate of all those who served him. When he summoned a Minister to his presence, he endeavoured not to overburden the days of a busy man. In his long illness of
1928-1929 he was constantly thinking of the comfort of his doctors and nurses.
After that illness his health was a guarded flame, and sometimes the need for restrictions irked him. But to the world he always presented a smiling front. If anything, he became more gentle, and there was perhaps a greater benignity in his kind, worn face and frosty blue eyes. He was, if possible, more charitable in his judgments, more thoughtful for others. When I received at his hands an appointment to a great imperial post, he gave me wise advice. One thing he impressed upon me was to be sympathetic to the French people in Canada, and jealously to respect their traditions and their language. On the very day of his death I received a message from him bidding me remember that ski-ing was not a safe pursuit for a middle-aged man!