Complete fictional works.., p.1024
Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 1024
Coming at the end of the family, he had a different upbringing from the rest of us. Even in his teens he was far-travelled, having been to South Africa, to the Continent, and many times to London. He had therefore a width of interests denied to us. He steadfastly refused to be much concerned about his future, as if he had a premonition that that future would be short. Half the time he moved in a world of his own. On a moorland ramble, as a child, he would walk by himself, telling himself stories, and excitedly repeating poetry with which his memory was stored. Sir Walter Scott’s confession might have been his: “Since I was five years old I cannot remember the time when I had not some ideal part to play for my own solitary amusement.” When he grew up he was extra-ordinarily happy with children and was an adored uncle to my own brood.
He was twenty when the War broke out, and at once joined a battalion of Cameron Highlanders, where for some months, in the Hampshire mud, he cut a strange figure in all the uniform that could be provided — shocking old blue trousers, and a red tunic made in 1880 and apparently designed for a giant! Then he obtained a commission in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and went to France with them at the close of 1915. He was wounded in the spring of 1916 and did not return to duty until the autumn of that year. On Easter Monday, 1917, he was killed at Arras.
I have said that he was born for the Great War. In August 1914 he found himself, and entered upon the task to which he was dedicated. He had a remarkable gift for managing men, especially bad characters, and he endeared himself to all who served with him. He was never out of temper or depressed, and wherever he was he diffused an air of confidence and hope. I remember that when I occasionally ran across him during the last stages of the battle of the Somme I thought him the only cheerful thing in a grey world. He managed to get the best out of everybody, and won a general affection because he himself gave out so much of it. I wonder if the future historian will realise how much of the strength of the British army was due to the boys of twenty who brought the kindly ardour of youth into the business of war and died before they could lose their freshness.
When he was a child he was a devotee of Cyrano de Bergerac, and his favourite scene was that “under the walls of Arras.” I remember how he would declaim, “Who are these men that rush on death?” and thunder forth the answer, “Cadets of Gascony are we.” He did not dream that it would be his fate to fall on an April morning under the walls of Arras.
My brother William was also “to find perfection in short space.” Had he lived until the War he would probably have died in it, for he would assuredly have found some way of serving, and in that holocaust of youth his loss would not have seemed so grievous a thing as it did in the soft years of peace. Destiny struck too soon.
He was five years my junior, so it was not until we were grown up that we became in the full sense companions. As a boy he was gravely and consistently pugnacious. Without haste and without rest he fought his way through the youth of the place to an unchallenged pre-eminence. One of his fingers was permanently crooked in consequence. Yet he was the gentlest of mortals, and would take endless pains to succour a starving cat or a homeless dog.
About the age of sixteen he suddenly woke up and decided upon his profession. It must be the Indian Civil Service, about which he cherished a romance. He planned out his course — first Glasgow University with a scholarship, then Oxford with a scholarship — and, never having done a stroke of work at school, he became forthwith a most assiduous student. He won his scholarships; at Oxford got good seconds in both classics and history, and passed high into the Indian service. He also played association football with success, and made his mark in the political clubs. He was vice-secretary of the Canning, and at the annual dinner in 19’03 he had the difficult task of proposing Sir Edward Carson’s health in the midst of the controversy between that statesman and Mr. George Wyndham over the Irish Land Purchase Act. In 1902, a year before Mr. Chamberlain made his famous pronouncement, he acquired great prestige by propounding similar proposals — an episode to which a good deal of space is devoted in the published history of the club.
His three years at Oxford were a happy time. He spent them in rooms in college, first in a top storey in the New Quad, and then in the rooms which I had before him (and my eldest son after me) on the first floor in the north- eastern corner of the Old Quad, the rooms where Bishop Heber entertained Sir Walter Scott, and where on a summer’s day the sunlight filters softly through the chequered greenery of the great chestnut in Exeter gardens. For all his passion for wet moorlands and windswept hills he fell deeply in love with the beauty of an Oxford summer, when, in long days among the lilied reaches of the Cherwell, a boy may dream of the untravelled road which lies before him. Oxford, for those with no clear outlook on the future, is apt to be a lotus- eating land from which there comes a rude awakening. But to one whose path in life is determined it is a place of pure delight, the consummation of a happy youth. Such an one leaves it with regret, but it is a regret untinged with melancholy. He carries with him into the and places of the East the memory of a cool and fragrant world, the shrine of his boyish memories, the epitome of that homeland in whose cause he spends his strength.
In India he certainly spent his strength. After holding various administrative posts in Bengal, he became the registrar of agricultural banks and a pioneer of rural co-operation. There was a chivalrous strain in him which arrayed him on the side of anything which was distressed. At Glasgow he had been a conspicuous partisan of a professor who became unpopular during the South African War, and in India his sympathies went out to the peasant who seemed to have a hard deal in life. He made it his mission to save him from the moneylender, and in the few years of work permitted to him he laid lasting foundations.
In the early summer of 1912 he came home on his first long leave. The autumn before he had gone on a lengthy trek in the Sikkim Himalayas — he wrote an admirable account of it in Blackwood’s Magazine — and there he may have picked up some infection which slowly poisoned his blood. At any rate he seemed a changed man, easily tired and complaining of odd pains. The doctors could make nothing of him, but daily he lost strength until in October he was in a nursing home. There his life slowly ebbed:
“through long days of labouring breath
He watched the world grow small and far
And met the constant eyes of death,
And haply knew how kind they are.”
It is a bitter thing, when mind and spirit are strong and ambition high, to surrender youth and the hope of achievement. My brother faced the sacrifice with a splendid fortitude.
I have known many brave men, but I have never known a braver. I have seen many devout servants of their country, but none more single-hearted. I have known many gentle hearts, but none more filled with the supreme Christian virtue of courtesy. There is a tablet to his memory in the ante-chapel of Brasenose on which is inscribed a sentence adapted from Landor:
“Patriae quaesivit gloriam, videt Dei.”
CHAPTER XI — MY AMERICA
I
The title of this chapter exactly defines its contents. It presents the American scene as it appears to one observer — a point of view which does not claim to be that mysterious thing, objective truth. There will be no attempt to portray the “typical” American, for I have never known one. I have met a multitude of individuals, but I should not dare to take any one of them as representing his country — of being that other mysterious thing, the average man. You can point to certain qualities which are more widely distributed in America than elsewhere, but you will scarcely find human beings who possess all these qualities. One good American will have most of them; another, equally good and not less representative, may have few or none. So I shall eschew generalities. If you cannot indict a nation, no more can you label it like a museum piece.
Half the misunderstandings between Britain and America are due to the fact that neither will regard the other as what it is — in an important sense of the word — a foreign country. Each thinks of the other as a part of itself which has somehow gone off the lines. An Englishman is always inclined to resent the unfamiliar when it is found under conditions for which he thinks he has some responsibility. He can appreciate complete and utter strangeness, and indeed show himself highly sympathetic towards it; but for variations upon his own ways — divergencies in speech, food, clothes, social habits — he has little tolerance.. He is not very happy even in his own colonies and dominions, and in America he can be uncommonly ill at ease.
On a higher level, when it comes to assessing spiritual values, he often shows the same mixture of surprise and disappointment. America has lapsed from the family tradition; what would have been pardonable and even commendable in a foreigner is blameworthy in a cousin. Matthew Arnold, for example, was critical of certain American traits, not on their merits but because they were out of tune with that essential European tradition of which he considered himself the guardian. The American critic can be not less intolerant, and for much the same reason. His expositions of England are often like sermons preached in a Home for Fallen Women, the point being that she has fallen, that her defects are a discredit to her relations, that she has let down her kin, and suffered the old home to fall into disrepute. This fretfulness can only be cured, I think, by a frank recognition of the real foreignness of the two peoples. No doubt they had a common ancestor, but he is of little avail against the passage of time and the estranging seas.
II
I first discovered America through books. Not the tales of Indians and the Wild West which entranced my boyhood; those seemed to belong to no particular quarter of the globe, but to an indefinable land of romance, and I was not cognisant of any nation behind them. But when I became interested in literature I came strongly under the spell of New England. Its culture seemed to me to include what was best in Europe’s, winnowed and clarified. Perhaps it was especially fitted to attract youth, for it was not too difficult or too recondite, but followed the “main march of the human affections,” and it had the morning freshness of a young people. Its cheerfulness atoned for its occasional bleakness and anaemia. Lowell was the kind of critic I wanted, learned, rational, never freakish, always intelligible. Emerson’s gnomic wisdom was a sound manual for adolescence, and of Thoreau I became — and for long remained — an ardent disciple. To a Scot of my upbringing there was something congenial in the simplicity, the mild austerity and the girded discipline of the New England tradition. I felt that it had been derived from the same sources as our own.
Then, while I was at Oxford, I read Colonel Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson and became a student of the American Civil War. I cannot say what especially attracted me to that campaign: partly, no doubt, the romance of it, the chivalry and the supreme heroism; partly its extraordinary technical interest, both military and political; but chiefly, I think, because I fell in love with the protagonists. I had found the kind of man that I could whole-heartedly admire. Since those days my study of the Civil War has continued, I have visited most of its battlefields, I have followed the trail of its great marches, I have read widely in its literature; indeed, my memory has become so stored with its details that I have often found myself able to tell the descendants of its leaders facts about their forebears of which they had never heard.
My interest soon extended from the soldiers to the civilians, and I acquired a new admiration for Abraham Lincoln. Then it was enlarged to include the rest of America’s history — the first settlements, the crossing of the Appalachians, the Revolution, the building of the West. Soon America, instead of being the unstoried land which it appears to most English travellers, became for me the home of a long tradition and studded with sacred places. I dare to say that no American was ever more thrilled by the prospect of seeing Westminster Abbey and the Tower, Winchester and Oxford, than I was by the thought of Valley Forge and the Shenandoah and the Wilderness.
I came first into the United States by way of Canada, a good way to enter, for English eyes are already habituated to the shagginess of the landscape and can begin to realise its beauties. My first reflection was that no one had told me how lovely the country was. I mean lovely, not vast and magnificent. I am not thinking of the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite and the Pacific coast, but of the ordinary rural landscape. There is much of the land which I have not seen, but in the east and the south and the north-west I have collected a gallery of delectable pictures. I think of the farms which are clearings in the Vermont and New Hampshire hills, the flowery summer meadows, the lush cow-pastures with an occasional stump to remind one that it is old forest land, the quiet lakes and the singing streams, the friendly accessible mountains; the little country towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut with their village greens and elms and two-century-old churches and court-houses; the secret glens of the Adirondacks and the mountain-meadows of the Blue Ridge; the long-settled champaign of Maryland and Pennsylvania; Virginian manors more old-England perhaps than anything we have at home; the exquisite links with the past like much of Boston and Charleston and all of Annapolis; the sun-burnt aromatic ranges of Montana and Wyoming; the Pacific shores where from snow mountains fishable streams descend through some of the noblest timber on earth to an enchanted sea.
It is a country most of which I feel to be in a special sense “habitable,” designed for homes, adapted to human uses, a friendly land. I like, too, the way in which the nomenclature reflects its history, its racial varieties, its odd cultural mixtures, the grandiose and the homespun rubbing shoulders. That is how places should be named. I have no objection to Mechanicsville and Higginsville and Utica and Syracuse. They are a legitimate part of the record. And behind are the hoar-ancient memorials of the first dwellers, names like symphonies — Susquehanna, Ticonderoga, Shenandoah, Wyoming.
III
“Ah, my cabbages!” Henry Adams wrote, “when will you ever fathom the American? Never in your sweet lives.” He proceeds in his genial way to make epigrams about his own New Englanders: “Improvised Europeans we were and — Lord God! — how thin!”—”Thank God I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.” Where an Adams scrupled to tread it is not for a stranger to rush in. But I would humbly suggest a correction to one reading which, I think, has the authority of Robert Louis Stevenson. America is, no doubt, a vast country, though it can be comfortably put inside Canada. But it is not in every part a country of wide horizons. Dwellers on the Blue Ridge, on the prairies, and on the Western ranges may indeed live habitually with huge spaces of land and sky, but most of America, and some of its most famous parts, is pockety, snug and cosy, a sanctuary rather than a watchtower. To people so domiciled its vastness must be like the mathematicians’ space-time, a concept apprehended by the mind and not a percept of the eye. “The largeness of Nature and of this nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen.” That is one of Walt Whitman’s best-known sayings, but let us remember that the bigness of their country is for most Americans something to be learned and imaginatively understood, and not a natural deduction from cohabiting with physical immensities.
Racially they are the most variegated people on earth. The preponderance of the Anglo-Saxon stock disappeared in the Civil War. Look to-day at any list of names in a society or a profession and you will find that, except in the navy, the bulk are from the continent of Europe. In his day Matthew Arnold thought that the chief source of the strength of the American people lay in their homogeneity and the absence of sharply defined classes, which made revolution unthinkable. Other observers, like Henry James, have deplored the lack of such homogeneity and wished for their country the “close and complete consciousness of the Scots.” (I pause to note that I cannot imagine a more nightmare conception. What would happen to the world if 130,000,000 Scotsmen, with their tight, compact nationalism, were living in the same country?) I am inclined to query the alleged absence of classes, for I have never been in any part of the United States where class distinctions did not hold. There is an easy friendliness of manner which conceals a strong class pride, and the basis of that pride is not always, or oftenest, plutocratic. Apart from the social snobbery of the big cities there seems to be everywhere an innocent love of grades and distinctions which is enough to make a communist weep. I have known places in the South where there was a magnificent aristocratic egalitarianism. Inside a charmed circle all were equal. The village postmistress, having had the right kind of great-great-grandmother, was an honoured member of society, while the immigrant millionaire, who had built himself a palace, might as well have been dead. And this is true not only of the New England F.F.M.’s and the Virginian F.F.V.’s, the districts with long traditions, but of the raw little townships in the Middle West. They, too, have their “best” people who had ancestors, though the family tree may only have sprouted for two generations.
No country can show such a wide range of type and character, and I am so constituted that in nearly all I find something to interest and attract me. This is more than a temperamental bias, for I am very ready to give reasons for my liking. I am as much alive as anyone to the weak and ugly things in American life: areas, both urban and rural, where the human economy has gone rotten; the melting-pot which does not always melt; the eternal colour problem; a constitutional machine which I cannot think adequately represents the efficient good sense of the American people; a brand of journalism which fatigues with its ruthless snappiness and uses a speech so disintegrated that it is incapable of expressing any serious thought or emotion; the imbecile patter of high-pressure salesmanship; an academic jargon, used chiefly by psychologists and sociologists, which is hideous and almost meaningless. Honest Americans do not deny these blemishes; indeed they are apt to exaggerate them, for they are by far the sternest critics of their own country. For myself I would make a double plea in extenuation. These are defects from which to-day no nation is exempt, for they are the fruits of a mechanical civilisation, which perhaps are more patent in America, since everything there is on a large scale. Again, you can set an achievement very much the same in kind against nearly every failure. If her historic apparatus of government is cranky she is capable of meeting the “instant need of things” with brilliant improvisations. Against economic plague-spots she can set great experiments in charity; against journalistic baby-talk a standard of popular writing in her best papers which is a model of idiom and perspicuity; against catch-penny trade methods many solidly founded, perfectly organised commercial enterprises; against the jargon of the half-educated professor much noble English prose in the great tradition. That is why it is so foolish to generalise about America. You no sooner construct a rule than it is shattered by the exceptions.
