But here is enough to show that Buchan need not think he is demonstrating his Scottish practicality by going in for publishing. As a fact, I have always felt that publishing should be properly classed as a sport. It is more speculative than racing and I do not see how any man on the Turf can get so much excitement and uncertainty by backing a horse as he could get by backing a new book. You can form a pretty reliable idea of what a horse is capable of before you put your money on it, but for the publisher, more often than not, it is all a game of chance, since whether he wins or loses depends less on the quality of the book than on the taste of the public, which is uncalculable. So when Buchan went publishing he was merely starting to live romance as well as to write it.
A son of the manse, he was born in 1875, and going from Edinburgh University to Brasenose, Oxford, he took the Newdigate Prize there, with other more scholarly distinctions, and became President of the Union. Even in those early days he developed a love of sport, and found recreation in mountaineering, deer-stalking and fishing. His enthusiasm for the latter expressed itself in the delightful verses of “Musa Piscatrix,” which appeared in 1896, while he was still at Oxford, his first novel, “Sir Quixote,” a vigorous romance somewhat in the manner of Stevenson, who was then at the height of his career, having given him prominence among new authors a year earlier. I recollect the glowing things that were said of one of his finest, most brilliantly imaginative romances, “John Burnet of Barns,” in 1898, and with the fame of that going before him he came to London. There he studied law in the Middle Temple, and was called to the Bar, but seems to have been busier with literary and journalistic than with legal affairs, for two more books, “Grey Weather” and “A Lost Lady of Old Years” came in 1889; “The Half-Hearted” in 1900, and meanwhile he was occupied with journalism and contributing stories to the magazines.
Then for two years he sojourned in South Africa as private secretary to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner. Two books about the present and future of the Colony were the outcome of that excursion into diplomacy; and better still, his South African experiences prompted him a little later to write that remarkable romance of “Prester John,” the cunning, clever Zulu who, turned Christian evangelist, professes to be the old legendary Prester John reincarnate, and while he is ostensibly bent on converting the natives, is fanning a flame of patriotism in their chiefs and stirring them to rise against the English and create again a great African empire. Here, and in “John Burnet of Barns,” and in some of the short stories of “The Watcher by the Threshold” and “The Moon Endureth,” John Buchan reaches, I think, his high-water mark as a weaver of romance.
After his return from South Africa he joined the staff of the Spectator, reviewing and writing essays for it and doing a certain amount of editorial work. At least, I deduce the latter fact from the statement of one who had the best means of knowing. If you look up “The Brain of the Nation,” by Charles L. Graves, who was then assistant editor of the Spectator, you will find among the witty and humorous poems in that volume a complete biography of John Buchan in neat and lively verse, telling how he came up to town from Oxford, settled down to the law, went to Africa, returned and became a familiar figure in the Spectator’s old offices in Wellington Street:
“Ev’ry Tuesday morn careering
Up the stairs with flying feet,
You’d burst in upon us, cheering
Wellington’s funereal street....
Pundit, publicist and jurist;
Statistician and divine;
Mystic, mountaineer, and purist
In the high financial line;
Prince of journalistic sprinters—
Swiftest that I ever knew—
Never did you keep the printers
Longer than an hour or two.
Then, too, when the final stages
Of our weekly task drew nigh,
You would come and pass the pages
With a magisterial eye,
Seldom pausing, save to smoke a
Cigarette at half past one,
When you quaffed a cup of Mocha
And devoured a penny bun.”
The War turned those activities into other channels, and after being rejected by the army as beyond the age limit, he worked strenuously in Kitchener’s recruiting campaign, then served as Lieutenant-Colonel on the British Headquarters Staff in France, and subsequently as Director of Information. The novels he wrote in those years, “The Power House,” “The Thirty-nine Steps,” “Greenmantle,” and “Mr. Standfast,” were written as a relief from heavier duties. They are stories of mystery and intrigue as able and exciting as any of their kind. “Greenmantle,” he says in a preface, was “scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment—in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half hours between graver tasks.” He was present throughout the heroic fighting on the Somme, and his official positions at the front and at home gave him exceptional opportunities of seeing things for himself and obtaining first-hand information for his masterly “History of the War,” which will give him rank as a historian beside Kinglake and Napier.
With “The Path of the King,” and more so with “Huntingtower,” he is back in his native air of romance, and one hopes he will leave the story of plot and sensation to other artists and stay there.
Like all romancists, he is no unqualified lover of the democracy; it is too lacking in picturesqueness, in grace and glamor to be in harmony with his temperament. He belongs in spirit to the days when heroism walked in splendor and war was glorious. He has laid it down that the “denunciation of war rests at bottom upon a gross materialism. The horrors of war are obvious enough; but it may reasonably be argued that they are not greater than the horrors of peace ... the true way in which to ennoble war is not to declare it in all its forms the work of the devil, but to emphasize the spiritual and idealist element which it contains. It is a kind of national sacrament, a grave matter into which no one can enter lightly and for which all are responsible, more especially in these days when wars are not the creation of princes and statesmen but of peoples. War, on such a view, can only be banished from the world by debasing human nature.”
That is the purely romantic vision. Since 1914, Buchan’s experiences of War and the horrors of peace that result from it may have modified his earlier opinions.
Anyhow, it is a wonderful theme for romance when it is far enough away. It shows at its best in such chivalrous tales of adventure and self-sacrifice as have gathered round the gallant figure of the Young Pretender. You know from his books that John Buchan is steeped in the lore of the Jacobites and sensitive to the spell of “old songs and lost romances.” Dedicating “The Watcher by the Threshold” to Stair Agnew Gillon, he says, “It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passengers but easy for the maker of stories.” One owns to a wish that the author of “John Barnet of Barns” would now set his genius free from the squabble and squalor of present-day politics (by the way, he once put up for Parliament but fortunately did not get in) and write that great story of the ’45 which he hints elsewhere has never yet been written.