George Buchanan

by Robert Wallace; John Campbell Smith

This latter may be a better arrangement, for anything I know to the contrary. All I say is that it is different from what was recognised in Buchanan’s day. It would never occur to Buchanan that he was doing anything inconsistent with self-respect in putting his position before people like Queen Mary, or Moray, or Lennox, and asking their temporary aid or a permanent office. They had taken over the wealth of the religious houses; did not their hospitalities pass with it? They had divided up the country among themselves and others; were they not honourably bound to see that a great civilising force like Buchanan was not extinguished? Besides, he understood his own value. A man is not six feet six inches high without being aware of it. He knew what he was, and what he had made himself, and what he was worth, and that he was giving as good as he was getting, or likely to get. In those days a great master of the New Learning was an object of the highest admiration, as a sort of intellectual Magician. Moreover, he was a power, in as far as he was a leader of contemporary thought and learning.

In these respects Buchanan was an invaluable acquisition to persons like Mary, or Moray, or Lennox, or Knox, who must have winked at a good deal in Buchanan, which he would not have stood in a less potent ally. In his prime, and even until his death, no one had an equal command over the universal ear of cultured Europe. To the rulers of his time he was worth what, say, fifty friendly editors of newspapers—including the Times and all the sixpenny weeklies, as far as they are worth anything would be to a politician of to-day. To Queen Mary especially, with her refined intellectual tastes and her ambition to be a figure in the world, it was no small matter to have the greatest and most brilliant scholar-poet of the day as a part of her court, whether he read Livy and exchanged wit with herself, or officiated as her poet-laureate on great occasions. As a mere ornament he was worth a considerable fraction of her best diamond necklace.

I am dwelling on this point because it will save time and trouble afterwards, and accordingly I ask further if Edie Ochiltree, in later times, and in a less feudalistic state of public sentiment, could beg round the district, without loss of respect, on the strength of his badge and uniform, testifying to past good service in his time and station, why should not an eminent public servant like Buchanan, in a totally different state of general feeling on such matters, ask society, through representatives of it who, he knew, should not and would not treat him roughly, to help him in prosecuting his shining and useful career? He had done a good work on the High Street of the World. He had sung it a song or played it a melody such as it would hear nowhere else. Was he not entitled to send round his hat among the listeners? Is it not what is done by every book-writer of to-day, who, when the last page is finished, sends out a confederate in the shape of a publisher to canvass the public—for a consideration—with the book in one hand and the hat in the other? Is it not what is done, inter alia, by every Parliamentary lawyer, who goes into the House of Commons to grind his axe, when the fitting occasion arises, and he says to his party leader, ‘I have fought two general elections for you. I have spoken for you unnumbered times in the House and on the platform. I have voted for you, up hill and down dale, through thick and thin, right or wrong, and now I will trouble you for that Chancellorship, or that Chief-Justiceship, or that Attorney-Generalship, or that Puisne or County Court Judgeship that has just fallen vacant’? Except that Buchanan and his work were not shams, but realities, the cases are the same.

Buchanan’s enemies say that in accepting maintenance or preferment he sold his independence to the donors, and when it is answered that he showed anything but want of independence in the case of Queen Mary and others, whom he subsequently came to oppose in the public interest, they tack about and accuse him of the basest ingratitude—in biting the hand that fed him, as they put it. It is as if in these days Sir Gorgias Midas, M.P., were to say to some editor who had noticed a speech of his unfavourably, ‘Ungrateful scribbler, have I not, over and over again, dined you and wined you with the best that larder and cellar can produce, and do you now turn and rend me?’ There have been editors who would have answered, ‘Presumptuous moneybag, I suppose I paid fully for my dinner with my company, and I am perfectly free to criticise you as you deserve.’ Buchanan stood equally free in his relations to his patrons. From the personal point of view, whether his connection were regarded as an ornament, a pleasure, or a utility, his alliance was worth his subsidy. From the public point of view it was their duty, as trustees for the public property and progress, to maintain a great civiliser like Buchanan in a position where his powers had scope, while it was Buchanan’s privilege and duty to exercise his creative and critical capacities in the public interest without fear or favour. And this, as will be seen, is what Buchanan substantially did. Knox and Melville repeatedly reminded Queen Mary and King James that there was another kingdom in the realm besides theirs—the kingdom of Christ, to wit—and suggested, or rather demanded, that their Majesties should not meddle with officials of this spiritual kingdom like themselves, the said Knox and Melville. This claim they rested on a supernatural, and therefore disputable, basis. But there could be nothing disputable about the ground Buchanan stood on. He too was a potentate—of the intellect; a king of thought, learning, and poetic might, and in that dominion, when it was necessary, bore himself with a courage and independence that have not always been successfully reproduced by his successors, when confronted with the monarchies and lordships of material power and glory.

No Notoriety Hunter

This discussion arose in our endeavour to determine Buchanan’s character so far as money-making was concerned. He was no money-maker. Contemptis opibus—‘despising wealth’—is, as we have seen, Joseph Scaliger’s account of him, meaning thereby that personally he did not care for more money than would maintain the much other than money-making career which he liked, and had set his heart on, keeping himself independent by the labour of a scholar, but not hesitating to ask payment, when he wanted it, from a society that was morally indebted to him. His indifference, however, to wealth as a life-object must not be confounded with the counsel of the ascetic preacher who urges his hearers to forget the present world in thoughts of the world to come, and wins, perhaps, a better living by an eloquent and pessimistic sermon on the text which says that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’ There is nothing to show that Buchanan did not hold, with all sensible people, that there is a sense in which the love of money is the root of all good, inasmuch as it is the men of strong cupidity who organise industry and commerce, thereby laying that foundation of material wealth without which there can be no superstructure of leisured thought, learning, or art, acting, it may be, only as the dray-horses of civilisation—some of them, of course, are a good deal more—but worthy of all the corn they consume, although were one desirous of exchanging ideas, it would not be to their sumptuous stables that he would resort.

Neither does he appear to have set his heart upon the ordinary objects of ambition, in the shape of fame or power. ‘Dear is fame to the rhyming tribe.’ ‘That dearest wish of every poetic bosom—to be distinguished,’ said Burns in his preface to the first edition of his poems, and he, if any one, was entitled to speak. But in the same preface he also says that to amuse himself amidst toil, to transcribe the feelings in his own breast, to find some counterpoise to the struggles of a world alien and uncouth to the poetic mind—‘these were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found Poetry to be its own reward.’ In other words, the poet may desire fame and distinction for what he has done, yet it need not have been the desire of fame and distinction that made him do it. Buchanan seems to have been even more self-controlled or more indifferent than this account of matters might imply. His numerous efforts had won him the highest reputation, but he had taken no pains to advertise himself. He had handed his productions here and there to friends who wished to see them, and it was only the solicitation of those friends that prevented his consigning to everlasting obscurity some of the brightest things he, or indeed any one else, ever wrote.

His most famous production as a poet, his version of the Hebrew Psalms, or rather series of poems based upon these, was certainly not written for fame. Every Humanist of eminence was expected to try his hand upon the Psalms, and when Buchanan found himself in Portugal under lock and key, at the instance of the Inquisition, among a set of monks, whom he hits off as equally good-natured and ignorant, and who had been told off to instruct him in orthodoxy, he addressed himself to a classic rendering of the Psalms with the double purpose of discharging his duty by his Humanistic Vocation, and doing something that might redeem his time and his temper from the boredom of the uncongenial society amidst which misfortune had placed him. There does not seem in all this much of that passionate desire of distinction to which Burns confesses. It is said, however, that fame was his object in commencing and carrying on his poem on the Sphere, which was undoubtedly planned on an elaborate and extensive scale. If fame was his desire, it was not a very consuming one, for he was five-and-twenty years at least over it, and left it unfinished at last, although goaded by friends to hasten its production.

What does he say on the matter himself? Writing to Tycho Brahe in 1576, six years before his death, and more than twenty after he began to work at the Sphere, he says that bad health had compelled him, spem scribendi carminis in posterum penitus abjicere,—‘completely to abandon the hope of writing a poem for posterity.’ Three years afterwards, writing to a literary friend in England, who, like many others, kept dunning him for his promised books, and even for ‘copy,’ he says, with respect to his ‘astronomical’ aims in poetry, he had not so much voluntarily abandoned them, as been obliged reluctantly to submit to the deprivation of them; neque enim aut nunc libet nugari, aut si maxime vellem per ætatem licet. Accessit eo historiæ scribendæ labor,—‘for neither am I now greatly disposed for mere trifling, nor, were I never so much disposed, will my years allow it. Then in addition to my other difficulties there is the labour of writing my History’; the plain meaning being that as his years forbade him to do both the History and the Sphere, he elected to go on with the History and give up the Sphere, as a form of nugari or ‘dilettantism.’

All this does not look very like a burning eagerness for posthumous fame, at all events of the kind that moves a certain class of people to leave money for hospitals, or almshouses, or learned foundations, to perpetuate names that would otherwise never have risen out of obscurity or escaped oblivion. As a matter of fact, Buchanan knew that he was celebrated, but no one had a poorer opinion of the work that had won him reputation than he had himself, not from the modesty of merit, as the common form carelessly puts it, but from the consciousness of merit, and because he felt that it was in him to do better. He hated the idea of having more celebrity than he deserved, and wanted to produce something that would show he was not an impostor or a quack. In short, he did not want more fame, but what he thought a better and honester title to the fame he had. That, however, is not the passion for fame, but simply self-respect, and an unselfish anxiety for the good name of those friends who had staked their reputation for taste and judgment on his ability for turning out the highest class of work. This is not the love of glory, but something better, although even if it were, it would not necessarily be either weak or wrong, provided the subject of it knew what he was doing in giving a rational scope to a natural impulse, and that he could and would give humanity something worth the prize of its praise.