Buchanan himself tells us why he gave up the Sphere and took up the History. It was primarily to gratify his friends, who thought that such a work was a want of the time, more useful and more suitable to Buchanan’s years than poetry; while he himself assures us, and there is no reason to doubt his declaration, that he desired to set before his royal pupil, James VI., the warnings and the encouragements derivable from the story of his predecessors on the throne, including his own ill-advised and ill-fated mother. It was no fault of Buchanan’s if James despised his teacher’s counsel, and, listening to flatterers, took up with the Divine Right doctrine, by impressing which on his unhappy son, both through precept and example, he virtually destined him to jump the life to come from the scaffold of Whitehall.
Buchanan’s friends seem to have tried to tempt him to undertake the History by representing that no subject was aut uberius ad laudem, aut firmius ad memoriæ conservandam diuturnitatem,—‘better fitted to win him renown or prolong his memory.’ It is not on the strength of such hopes, however, that he describes himself as working. It was, by his own account, only the shame of leaving unfinished a task he had engaged himself to his friends to perform that made him persevere at a labour which, he says, in ætate integra permolestus, nunc vero in hac meditatione mortis, inter mortalitatis metum, et desinendi pudorem, non potest non lentus esse et ingratus, quando nec cessare licet, nec progredi lubet,—‘would, even in the flower of my age, have been a burden, but now, in contemplation of my end, what between the dread of death interrupting me before I am done, and the shame there would be in abandoning my undertaking, I neither find myself free to stop, nor feel any pleasure in going on.’ Not much there of glory for himself, although something of an heroic devotion to the claims of friendship and the call of duty!
CHAPTER III
CHARACTERISTICS—(continued)
Did not seek power
Scaliger’s ascription to Buchanan of a spirit superior to the temptations of wealth and fame seems thus fairly well justified; but what of his further claim that he was insensible to ambition? He rose to be the foremost Latin poet and man of letters, or indeed poet and man of letters of any kind in his day, and to the highest positions, political, ecclesiastical, educational, in his native land. Did he reach all this without aiming at it? Did it all come upon him unsolicited? Substantially, it would seem, that was so. The key to his plan of life, I believe, is to be found in the beginning of the short autobiography which he wrote (1580) in the third person, two years before his death, not from motives of egotism, but at the request of friends. He is stating how he came to be sent to the University of Paris when about fourteen, and then he says, ibi cum studiis literarum, maxime carminibus scribendis, operam dedisset, partim naturæ impulsu, partim necessitate (quod hoc unum studiorum genus adolescentiæ proponebatur), etc.,—‘devoting himself there to literary studies, and chiefly to writing verses, partly from natural impulse and partly from necessity, that being the only sort of study open to youthful learners.’
That is really Buchanan in a nutshell. He followed the bent of his genius, and did not pick and choose his work, but performed, to the best of his ability, the task placed before him by Destiny. He lived up to his nature and his Fate, did with his might what his hand found to do, then took up the next undertaking that came along, and handled it in the same fashion. He waited upon ‘time and the hour’ rather than sought to force its hand—a very good way, if not indeed the best way, to confront life and its problems, for those who are wise enough and strong enough to do it. He made himself master of the spirit, ideas, and style of the great writers and thinkers of classic antiquity, because it was the work that lay nearest to his hand, and because he liked it—passionately—and could not rest until it was all and easily his own, and not because he thought he could make it pay, whether in money or reputation, or both. Except in the case of the unlucky and unfinished Sphere, he did not sit down to compose poetry deliberately and in cold blood, at the rate of so many scores or hundreds of lines before breakfast or dinner, as certain ‘poets’ are said to have done, or do. His best work of this kind was struck out of him like the fire from the flint, by the demand of the occasion, or the suggestion of friends, or an inspiration or impulse that came upon him at the moment.
It was the request of James V. (1537) that led to his becoming the most powerful satirist of his time and country, much above Lyndsay, at least on a level with Dunbar, and second only to Burns. His ‘Psalms’ were written (1550-51) to kill time while imprisoned in a Portuguese monastery. His Elegies, Epigrams, Tragedies, Masques, Addresses (1530-66) were thrown off in answer to the call of the moment and the circumstances. The Detectio Reginæ (1569-71) was composed at the desire of the great anti-despotic and reforming party to which he belonged. The ‘Admonition to the Trew Lordis’ and the ‘Chameleon’ were political tracts for the times designed to stimulate the flagging zeal of the friends of freedom. The De Jure (1570-79) was inspired by a present and a foreseen necessity of making Liberty impregnable as against the reactionaries of Absolutism. The History was undertaken and completed (1569-82) less for a scientific than for a patriotic and politico-paideutic purpose, to set his country and its constitution in a true light before the world, and to help in moulding its future king into the constitutional ruler of a free people.