Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Read online

  Furthermore, Mr Buchan’s theology, on examination, may not have been quite as unswervingly rigid as the stereotype would suggest. While there is much firm orthodoxy, there are also some tantalising suggestions of something softer, in a valedictory sermon he preached when leaving Pathhead in 188820 and in a privately printed collection of his writings and sermons.21 His tireless pastoral concern for his congregation is apparent throughout. In his family life, he was no killjoy, and this is reflected in his writing and preaching of gladness in ‘the glorious excellence of the message’. There is no reference to the application of internal Church discipline (harsh or otherwise). His reverence for Scripture is not unthinking; he is plainly aware of the liberal, especially German, strand of analysis and interpretation and is prepared to engage with it. In his Pathhead valedictory, he sought to explain that it was not due to ‘natural harshness or desire to say unpleasant things’ but because ‘knowing the terrors of the Lord, I have spoken much of hell and the retribution that will overtake the careless’. In saying so, he demonstrated an ambiguity in relation to predestination. It would take considerable theological sophistication, even sophistry, to argue that retributive punishment could be both unavoidably predetermined by God and avoidable by taking care.

  Although he could be explicit about the doctrine of election, it seems that he could not let go of the thought that the autonomous exercise of free will might play a part in salvation. He wrote of God rendering ‘unto every man according to his deeds’ (rather than ‘according to God’s predetermined decree’).22 He preached against letting ‘the opportunity slip of saving the soul’.23 How could that be if the soul was damned from the beginning of time? In a sermon entitled ‘The Teaching of Paul – the Plan of Salvation’, he admitted that he was unable to reconcile predestination and free will, ‘they must be left where scripture leaves them – side by side’. However, intriguingly, he found in St Paul’s teaching ‘bright glimpses of a universality [i.e. that all might be saved] in the plan of salvation’.24 JB much later regretted that his father had not lived to read the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, for he thought their views had much in common. While Barth’s approach to Scripture may have been closer to Mr Buchan’s than that of the German liberals, he had proposed a doctrine of predestination that could be characterised as ‘universalist’. If JB believed that his father would agree, that would cast some light on the latter’s theological openness.

  JB as an adult was not sectarian, unlike many members of the Free Kirk. As in politics, he was always sympathetic to the validity of other sincerely held views. Nor was he a Bible literalist. In The Kirk in Scotland of 1930 he criticised the view of religion as something static, ‘the forms of which have been established once and for all by a divine decree which admits of no fresh interpretation’.25 He liked to quote the fourth-century Roman statesman, Symmachus, who believed that there was no single road to so great a mystery. He was both an ordained Elder in the Church of Scotland and an Anglican churchwarden. He attacked the cruelty of seventeenth-century Presbyterian church discipline and the dangers of antinomianism (by which those who believe themselves ‘elect’ feel free from any moral law) – most vividly, in Witch Wood – but his target was plainly contemporary as well as historical.

  It would be mistaken to conclude that all this amounted to outright rejection of Calvinism. Unfortunately, it is difficult to extract from JB’s many speeches and writings in which he touched on religion a consistent, systematic account of his theology. It is better, and easier, to look at how he lived. As the story unfolds, we shall see that, far from rejecting all of that for which his father stood, in a number of ways he exemplified and developed it in a manner that is distinctively (though far from uniquely) Calvinist. As JB himself said of his time at Oxford, ‘the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed’.26 That word ‘confirmed’ is the key.

  Following his father’s example, JB’s Christian faith was the foundation of his understanding of the cosmos and the motivation for his way of living. In a talk he gave to the Selkirk Public Service Association in December 1915, he described religion as meaning ‘nothing less than the government of life according to spiritual discipline’ – a view with which his father would have wholeheartedly agreed; both men lived their lives accordingly. In the same talk, JB characterised ‘carelessness’ (a favourite theme of his father’s) as irreligion. Both had a lifelong wonder and delight in the natural world, which they understood to disclose God’s glory. Both had a sense of the limitless sovereignty of God, resulting in gratitude, humility and obligation, but also an unmediated relationship with Him (the characteristic of all Protestantism). Both believed that each unforgiving minute must be filled with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, and that happiness is not to be sought, but might be hoped for as the result of achievement, following self-denial (the earthly road, as for Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, being narrow and hard). And both father and son shared the apprehension of a cosmic battle between Good and Evil being played out in the world and the urgency with which that must be recognised and engaged. JB’s life cannot properly be understood without grasping this.

  As one Scottish minister of religion succinctly put it: ‘Presbyterian Calvinism set great store on justification by grace through faith, but Old Testament legalism sometimes loomed large in practice – most obviously in Sabbatarianism.’27 Certainly, as he grew to manhood, JB found Sabbath restrictions on his reading more irksome. In Scholar Gipsies he wrote of his grandfather, John Masterton, to whom this collection of essays is dedicated: ‘One man of good character but no pretensions to piety made the writer’s boyhood a burden by forbidding the reading of any secular book on the Saturday, Sabbath, or Monday. “For,” said he, “though there’s naething in the Bible about it, I hold that the Lord’s day shall aye get plenty of room to steer in.”’28

  As a result of their ministry, JB’s parents had a large and diverse acquaintanceship and were not above giving sedate soirées, where they could embarrass their children by their catholic taste in people. The children learned how to put a variety of people at their ease, finding common ground and never showing that they were bored. Most importantly, they learned to look for the good in the most unpromising material and, by looking, often found it.

  They made their own friends mainly amongst the children of Presbyterian ministers, who understood completely what it was to be born in the shadow of the pulpit. Charles Dick, JB’s closest boyhood friend, was the son and grandson of Free Kirk ministers. Other friends, David Young Cameron and his sister, Katie, were the children of a Church of Scotland minister. The Camerons were both artists, and David later introduced JB to John Lane, who had founded the publishing company, The Bodley Head, as well as the voguish, short-lived periodical, The Yellow Book, which featured stories by well-known writers such as Edmund Gosse and Henry James, and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, its first editor. Katie Cameron seems not to have cared much for JB as a teenager, finding him too short in stature, too little prepared to fall in with social events, too little impressed by Glasgow, too quick to give offence (which the gentle Willie Buchan had then to smooth over), too obviously ambitious and single-minded, and too little inclined, as was Anna also, to fall in love with anybody.29

  He was certainly single-minded. In the school ‘session’, 1891–2, he took the Leaving Certificate Examination and passed with Honours in Higher English, Higher Latin, Higher Mathematics and Lower Greek. In October that year, aged seventeen, he enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study the general MA course, while living at home, as did most Scottish students at the time. The course consisted of seven subjects: Latin (called Humanity), Greek, History, Mathematics, Logic, Natural Philosophy (what we would call Natural Sciences) and Moral Philosophy.

  The session ran from October to April,* and every morning I had to walk four miles to the eight o’clock class through every variety of the winter weather with which Glasgow fortifies her children. My road lay thr
ough the south side of the city, across the Clyde, and so to the slopes of Gilmorehill. Most of that road is as ugly as anything you can find in Scotland, but to me in the retrospect it was all a changing panorama of romance. There was the weather – fog like soup, drenching rains, winds that swirled down the cavernous streets, mornings that dawned bright and clear over snow. There was the sight of humanity going to work and the signs of awakening industry. There was the bridge with the river starred with strange lights, the lit shipping at the Broomielaw, and odours which even at their worst spoke of the sea … And at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the glow of a West Highland sunrise.30

  Those gaunt walls had been designed by George Gilbert Scott in the mature Gothic Revival style, and enfolded a double quadrangle, between which were cloisters, entered through the base of an enormously tall tower, topped off with pinnacles. The university had moved there from the kindlier, sootier and more confining Old College in the High Street in 1870. JB thought the buildings like ‘the battlements of a celestial city’, which might have pleased Scott had he known. Gilmorehill was close to Kelvingrove Park, designed by Joseph Paxton in the 1850s, which led down to the River Kelvin. The students were thus away from the crowded, dirty streets of central Glasgow and breathing fresh air.

  When JB arrived, the reputation of the university was flying high, since Lord Kelvin (the great scientist of thermodynamics, after whom the Kelvin measure of temperature is named) was still, after many years, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, while other luminaries included Edward Caird, Professor of Moral Philosophy, who was succeeded by the even more eminent, and very lovable, Henry Jones in 1894. A. C. Bradley, the Shakespearean critic, was Regius Professor of English. From JB’s point of view, the most important Chair turned out to be that of Greek, which was held by Gilbert Murray, the outstanding Oxford-educated classicist who had been elevated to the post in 1889 when only twenty-three, and who was to make such an impression on the young man – and he on Murray.

  At the end of a lecture to his Middle Greek class, JB went up to ask what Murray considered a most unexpected question. The lad explained that he was editing Sir Francis Bacon’s essays for a London publisher and wanted to know why Bacon quoted a phrase from the Greek philosopher Democritus in Latin and where would he have found the translation? Murray thought the quotation was from Cicero, ‘but such a pupil in the Middle Class was obviously a treasure, and we formed a friendship which lasted through life’.31

  JB seems not to have been a ‘figure’ at Glasgow, indeed was practically anonymous in the first year. Although his friends from Hutchesons’ who had gone on to university with him – Joe Menzies, Charlie Dick and John Edgar, in particular – thought him a ‘genius’ and told anyone who would listen, he kept his talents pretty well wrapped up, working in solitude on his studies, as well as writing essays, poetry, short stories and even a novel in his spare time.

  A shadow fell over the family while JB was still in his first year at the University. His much-loved five-year-old youngest sister, Violet, was ill; indeed at the end of the ‘session’, in April 1893, he had to postpone a promised visit from Charlie Dick because of her sickness. ‘She is much weaker since we came here [Peebles] and if we cannot get her strength up soon she will not recover.’32

  Violet was a most singular little girl, who seems to have had a highly precocious moral sense. Her father wrote of her: ‘To tell her that she was grieving Jesus was sure ere long to bring a penitent confession from her lips. There was in her character a deep substratum of serious thought.’33 She also shared with her father a great interest in flowers, both wild and garden, forming thereby a close bond with him. Five years younger than Walter, she was very much the pet of the family, and a welcome companion in such a masculine environment for her older sister Anna.

  When she was about three, Violet began to suffer from periodic and sometimes painful gastric troubles, which caused her to lose weight. A family photograph taken, probably, in the summer of 1892 shows Violet sitting on her mother’s knee, looking like a wraith in comparison to her heartily healthy brothers and sister. But the family were not seriously alarmed until early the following year, when she began to decline quite fast. They took her to Broughton in April in the hope that the country air would do her good. ‘In the furnace of affliction she was chosen. Her self-will was gone and a beautiful patience took its place,’ wrote her father.34 It is hard not to recoil at the idea of a little girl discussing her imminent demise with her family, but infant death was an ever-present fact of late Victorian life and the Buchan family were, of course, firm believers in the Hereafter.

  She died on 16 June, apparently of tuberculosis of the mesenteric glands in the stomach. Who knows whether even the expensive Edinburgh doctor who was summoned to her bedside diagnosed her illness correctly? Whatever it was, he had no answer for it. She was buried in Broughton churchyard, next to her grandfather, John Masterton. Mr Buchan put together a privately published memorial volume, A Violet Wreath, which included poems that he had written about her, in both English and Scots. It is one long howl of pain for the family’s loss – impossible to read without emotion – but at the same time there is a resigned submission to the will of God. ‘The Lord has a right to the best, and we do not grudge her to Him and happiness,’35 celestial happiness being of a completely different order from the earthly variety. JB was shaken out of his profound teenage self-absorption and wrote to Charlie Dick three weeks later: ‘I must apologise for not writing to you sooner. My only excuse is that I hadn’t the heart, I was so troubled at my sister’s death. I had no idea a death in a family was such a painful thing …’36

  He wrote a lot to Dick that summer, sometimes in the arch and mannered style common amongst well-read, precocious teenagers in every age. In September, for example, he was (reluctantly) on holiday with his family on the Isle of Arran and Dick received this:

  I am coming up, perchance next week for more books, when, if the gods be propitious, I may see thy face once more. Yet, (as is likely) if I come not back any more at all, but leave my bones (os, ossis, a bone) on this desolate island, the following is my will (testamentum, saith Cicero)…37

  Charlie Dick seems to have been JB’s closest friend at Glasgow, their interests coinciding and their personalities complementary. (Katie Cameron called Charlie Dick ‘vague’.) In the vacations, they bicycled to see each other in Tweeddale, since Dick’s grandfather was a minister in Coldstream, and they walked long distances in Galloway. When in South Africa in 1902, JB wrote to Dick saying how ‘deplorably sentimental’ he was about ‘those old madcap days of ours’.38 Other friends at Glasgow included H. N. Brailsford, to whom Professor Murray gave a revolver when Brailsford said he wanted to fight for the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, and who became a well-known left-wing journalist. There was also Robert (Bertie) Horne, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, as well as Alexander MacCallum Scott MP, who has left us a pen-portrait of JB at this time:

  He seemed to step into an inheritance. Everything he put his hand to prospered and people accepted him on every hand. He had an air of simple and convincing assurance. He believed in himself, not offensively, but with a quiet reserve. His whole manner inspired trust and confidence and respect. He could depend on himself and others felt that they could depend on him too. His judgment was sane and was therefore listened to. The fact was that he made himself indispensable to people. They knew him for a man who could order and systematise.39

  Two days before Violet died, JB had finished editing Sir Francis Bacon’s essays and apothegms that he had mentioned to Gilbert Murray in the first session. Almost certainly, he was introduced to Walter Scott (a publisher with both Newcastle and London offices) by D. Y. Cameron, who had illustrated several books for him, since there is no reason otherwise why the former should have picked out an unknown University of Glasgow student to edit one of the volumes of his popular series of classics, The Scott Library. But it shows a great deal of perspic
acity on Scott’s part.

  The first paragraph of the Introduction, which contained biographical and critical notes, shows both JB’s sure historical sense and his ability to tell a story:

  The two decades between 1550 and 1570 are marked, perhaps, more than any other in the history of our literature by the birth of famous men. In the Devonshire farmhouse Raleigh saw the light; Shakespeare in the home of the wool merchant of Stratford; Sidney in the manor-house of Penshurst; Spenser under the shadow of the Tower of London. Mary was dead, and her sister Elizabeth had mounted the throne; and by her wise and generous policy had given great hopes to her people of a peaceful and prosperous reign. The times seemed fit for the birth of a man who should be great alike in the worlds of politics and letters.40

  For his own amusement, JB wrote poetry. There are, extant, a number of unpublished early poems dating from his late teens: they are, as can be expected, derivative, consciously archaic, conveying conventional sentiments. They are pale versions of his father’s ‘musings’. They are concerned with nature, the seasons, landscape, death, and some are classically inspired.

  One example will suffice:

  When the fairy-footed Spring,

  Rising like a maiden,

  Cometh swift on airy wing,

  With her bounties laden;

  When the dainty lips have kissed

  Darkness from the hollow –

  Clothed in mist of amethyst –

  Rise and let us follow.41

  His most successful poems were experiments with different verse forms, such as the kyrielle and triolet. In one poem, in trochaic tetrameter (like Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha), he manages very cleverly to rhyme ‘boat is’ and ‘note is’ with ‘myosotis’, the botanical name for forget-me-not: