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Title: Memory Hold-the-Door
U.S. title: Pilgrim's Way. An Essay in Recollection.
Author: Buchan, John (1875-1940)
Illustrator: Boulter, Benjamin Consitt (died 1960)
Illustrator: Douglas, Sholto Johnstone (1871-1958)
Illustrator: Gere, Charles March (1869-1957)
Illustrator: Orpen, William (1878-1931)
Photographer: Karsh, Yousuf (1908-2002)
Date of first publication: 1940
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Musson, January 1941
   [fifth printing]
Date first posted: 20 February 2014
Date last updated: 20 February 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1160

This ebook was produced by
David T. Jones, Pat McCoy, Al Haines
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






_Books by John Buchan_

  SCHOLAR-GIPSIES, 1896
  JOHN BURNET OF BARNS, 1898
  A HISTORY OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, 1898
  GREY WEATHER, 1899
  A LOST LADY OF OLD YEARS, 1899
  THE HALF-HEARTED, 1900
  THE WATCHER BY THE THRESHOLD, 1902
  THE AFRICAN COLONY, 1903
  THE TAXATION OF FOREIGN INCOME, 1905
  A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS, 1906
  SOME EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BY-WAYS, 1908
  PRESTER JOHN, 1910
  SIR WALTER RALEIGH, 1911
  THE MOON ENDURETH, 1912
  SALUTE TO ADVENTURERS, 1915
  THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS, 1915
  GREENMANTLE, 1916
  POEMS, SCOTS AND ENGLISH, 1917
  MR. STANDFAST, 1919
  THE SOUTH AFRICAN FORCES IN FRANCE, 1920
  FRANCIS AND RIVERSDALE GRENFELL, 1920
  THE PATH OF THE KING, 1921
  A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR, 1921-22
  HUNTINGTOWER, 1922
  MIDWINTER, 1923
  THE THREE HOSTAGES, 1924
  LORD MINTO: A MEMOIR, 1924
  JOHN MACNAB, 1925
  THE ROYAL SCOTS FUSILIERS, 1925
  THE DANCING FLOOR, 1926
  HOMILIES AND RECREATIONS, 1926
  WITCH WOOD, 1927
  THE RUNAGATES' CLUB, 1928
  MONTROSE, 1928
  THE COURTS OF THE MORNING, 1929
  CASTLE GAY, 1930
  THE KIRK IN SCOTLAND, 1930 (With Sir George Adam Smith)
  THE BLANKET OF THE DARK, 1931
  SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1932
  JULIUS CAESAR, 1932
  THE GAP IN THE CURTAIN, 1932
  THE MAGIC WALKING STICK, 1932
  THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE, 1933
  A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY, 1933
  GORDON AT KHARTOUM, 1934
  THE FREE FISHERS, 1934
  OLIVER CROMWELL, 1934
  THE KING'S GRACE, 1935
  THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS, 1935
  THE ISLAND OF SHEEP, 1936
  AUGUSTUS, 1937
  MEMORY HOLD-THE-DOOR, 1940
  CANADIAN OCCASIONS, 1940

_To be Published in 1941_

  SICK HEART RIVER
  THE LONG TRAVERSE




[Illustration: J. B., 1938
  (_Photo:  Karsh, Ottawa_)]




  MEMORY
  HOLD-THE-DOOR

  By
  JOHN BUCHAN


  TORONTO
  THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LTD.
  1941




  COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1940
  BY

  THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LTD.

  TORONTO


  _First printing--August, 1940_
  _Second printing--September, 1940_
  _Third printing--October, 1940_
  _Fourth printing--December, 1940_
  _Fifth Printing--January, 1941_




PREFACE


This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the
experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory. As we age, the mystery
of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present,
which no longer has the solidity that it had in youth; less in the
future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things
lie in the past, and the mind busies itself with what Henry James has
called "the irresistible reconstruction, to the all too baffled vision,
of irrevocable presences and aspects, the conscious, shining, mocking
void, sad somehow with excess of serenity."

Such a research is not a mere catalogue of memories. I have no new
theory of Time to propound, but I would declare my belief that it
preserves and quickens rather than destroys. An experience, especially
in youth, is quickly overlaid by others, and is not at the moment fully
comprehended. But it is overlaid, not lost. Time hurries it from us, but
also keeps it in store, and it can later be recaptured and amplified by
memory, so that at leisure we can interpret its meaning and enjoy its
savour.

These chapters are so brazenly egotistic that my first intention was to
have them privately printed. But I reflected that a diary of a
pilgrimage, a record of the effect upon one mind of the mutations of
life, might interest others who travel a like road. It is not a book of
reminiscences in the ordinary sense, for my purpose has been to record
only a few selected experiences. The lover of gossip will find nothing
to please him, for I have written at length only of the dead. Nor is it
an autobiography, for I cannot believe that the external incidents of
my life are important enough to be worth chronicling in detail. And it
is only in a meagre sense a confession of faith. It is a record of the
impressions made upon me by the outer world, rather than a weaving of
such impressions into a personal religion and philosophy. Some day I may
attempt the latter.

I have included one or two passages from a little book, _These for
Remembrance_, of which a few copies were printed privately in 1919.

J. B.




CONTENTS


                                                         PAGE
  PREFACE                                                   5

  CHAP.
     I. WOOD, WATER AND HILL                               11
    II. PORTA MUSARUM                                      29
   III. OXFORD                                             44
    IV. LONDON INTERLUDE                                   88
     V. FURTH FORTUNE                                      96
    VI. THE MIDDLE YEARS                                  126
   VII. INTER ARMA                                        164
  VIII. AN IVORY TOWER AND ITS PROSPECT                   182
    IX.  PARLIAMENT                                       219
     X. FIRST AND LAST THINGS                             244
    XI. MY AMERICA                                        259
   XII. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL                        275

  APPENDIX
    PILGRIM'S REST
      THE SPRINGS                                         297
      THE MIDDLE COURSES                                  307

  INDEX                                                   321




ILLUSTRATIONS


  J. B., 1938                                  _Frontispiece_
    (_Photo: Karsh, Ottawa_)
                                                         PAGE

  THE GATE OF TWEEDSMUIR                                   26

  OXFORD, 1899                                             48
    (_From a drawing by B. C. Boulter_)

  J. B., 1900                                              64
    (_From a portrait by Sholto Johnstone-Douglas_)

  SUSAN CHARLOTTE GROSVENOR                               136

  ELSFIELD MANOR                                          176

  J. N. S. B. AND HIS GOSHAWK JEZEBEL                     192
    (_From a drawing by Charles Gere, A.R.A._)

  LIEUTENANT ALASTAIR BUCHAN (Royal Scots Fusiliers)      256
    (_From a painting by Sir William Orpen_)

  J. B., 1937, Eagle Face, as a Chief of the Blood
    Indians                                               268
    (_Photo: Karsh, Ottawa_)

  THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE
  GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF CANADA, QUEBEC, 1936                272
    (_Photo: Karsh, Ottawa_)




CHAPTER I

WOOD, WATER AND HILL


I

As a child I must have differed in other things besides sanctity from
the good Bernard of Clairvaux, who we are told, could walk all day by
the Lake of Geneva and never see the lake. My earliest recollections are
not of myself, but of my environment. It is only reflection that fits my
small presence into the picture.

When a few months old I was brought by my parents to a little grey manse
on the Fife coast. It was a square, stone house standing in a big
garden, with a railway behind it, and in front, across a muddy by-road,
a linoleum factory, a coal-pit and a rope-walk, with a bleaching-works
somewhere in the rear. To-day industry no longer hems it in, but has
submerged it, and a vast factory has obliterated house and garden. The
place smelt at all times of the making of wax-cloth; not unpleasantly,
though in spring the searching odour was apt to over-power the wafts of
lilac and hawthorn.

To the north, beyond the narrow tarnished strip, lay deep country. Two
streams converged through "dens" to a junction below the rope-walk. Both
were of small volume, and one was foul with the discards of the
bleaching-works. There must have been a time when sea-trout in a spate
ran up them from the Firth, but now in their lower courses they were
like sewers, and finished their degraded life in a drain in the town
harbour. There was no beauty in those perverted little valleys, except
in spring, when the discoloured and malodorous waters flowed through a
mist of blue hyacinths.

Above the bleaching-works and the rope-walk the "dens" became woodland.
At first the trees were all beeches and oaks whose roots corrugated the
path. But presently these gave place to fir and pine with a carpet of
bracken. The "dens" were cut at right-angles by a highway, beyond which
lay the policies of an old country house. The highway was the end of one
stream, which had its source in a pond; but the other had a longer
course, coming from some distant spring through a big wood of close-set
young spruces, where notices warned against trespass. Beyond that in
turn was a wide grassy loaning where tinkers camped, and the well-tilled
haughs of central Fife, and the twin nipples of the Lomonds.

Those woods, when the other day I revisited them, seemed slender copses
with fields of roots and grain within a stone's throw. But to a child
they were illimitable forests. The "dens" of the two streams I thought
of as the White Woods, for they had sunlight and open spaces; but that
beyond the highway was the Black Wood, to enter which was an adventure.
As I grew older a passion for birds' eggs took me into its recesses, and
in spring and summer it had no mystery. Moreover, at those seasons
holidays were always in my mind, when I should go south to the Border
hills, and except that they were the home of birds the woods had little
charm for me. But in autumn and winter they recovered the spell which
they laid on my earliest childhood.

They smelt differently from the clean Borderland, where the woods were
only tiny plantings of fir and birch among the heather. To me as a
child, autumn meant the thick, close odour of rotting leaves, varied by
scents from the harvested stubble; glimpses of uncanny scarlet
toadstools, which I believed to be the work of Lapland witches; acres of
spongy ground which miraculously dried up at the first frosts. Winter
meant vistas of frozen branches with cold blue lights between, tracks
which had to be rediscovered among snowdrifts, and everywhere great pits
of darkness. In winter especially I had an authentic forest to explore,
which to me was a far more real world than the bustling town behind me,
or the wide spaces of sea and open country.

Looking back I realise that the woodlands dominated and coloured my
childish outlook. We were a noted household of fairy tales. My father
had a great collection of them, including some of the ancient Scottish
ones like _The Red Etin of Ireland_, and when we entered the woods we
felt ourselves stepping into the veritable world of faery, especially in
winter, when the snow made a forest of what in summer was only a
coppice. My memory is full of snowstorms, when no postman arrived or
milkman from the farm, and we had to dig ourselves out like hibernating
bears. In such weather a walk of a hundred yards was an enterprise, and
even in lesser falls the woods lost all their homely landmarks for us,
and became a _terra incognita_ peopled from the story-books. Witches and
warlocks, bears and wolf-packs, stolen princesses and robber lords
lurked in corners which at other times were too bare and familiar for
the mind to play with. Also I had found in the library a book of Norse
mythology which strongly captured my fancy. Norns and Valkyries got into
the gales that blew up the Firth, and blasting from a distant quarry was
the thud of Thor's hammer.

A second imaginative world overshadowed the woods, more potent even than
that of the sagas and the fairy folk. Our household was ruled by the old
Calvinistic discipline. That discipline can have had none of the
harshness against which so many have revolted, for it did not dim the
beauty and interest of the earth. My father was a man of wide culture,
to whom, in the words of the Psalms, all things were full of the
goodness of the Lord. But the regime made a solemn background to a
child's life. He was conscious of living in a world ruled by unalterable
law under the direct eye of the Almighty. He was a miserable atom as
compared with Omnipotence, but an atom, nevertheless, in which
Omnipotence took an acute interest. The words of the Bible, from daily
family prayers and long Sabbath sessions, were as familiar to him as the
story of Jack and the Beanstalk. A child has a natural love of rhetoric,
and the noble scriptural cadences had their own meaning for me, quite
apart from their proper interpretation. The consequence was that I built
up a Bible world of my own and placed it in the woods.

From it I excluded the more gracious pictures, the rejoicing "little
hills," the mountains that "clapped their hands," Elam with its wells
and palm trees, the "streams of water in the south" of the 126th Psalm.
These belonged properly to the sunny Border. But for the rest, Israel
warred in the woods, Israelitish prophets kenneled in the shale of the
burns, backsliding Judah built altars to Baal on some knoll under the
pines. I knew exactly what a heathenish "grove" was: it was a cluster of
self-sown beeches on a certain "high place." The imagery of the Psalms
haunted every sylvan corner. More, as I struggled, a confused little
mortal, with the first tangles of Calvinistic theology, I came to
identify abstractions with special localities. The Soul, a shining
cylindrical thing, was linked with a particular patch of bent and
heather, and in that theatre its struggles took place, while Sin, a
horrid substance like black salt, was intimately connected with a
certain thicket of brambles and spotted toadstools. This odd habit long
remained with me. When I began to read philosophy the processes of the
Hegelian dialectic were associated with a homely Galloway heath, and the
Socratic arguments with the upper Thames between Godstone and Eynsham.

Oddly enough, while as a child I hypostatised so many abstractions, I
left out the Calvinistic Devil. He never worried me, for I could not
take him seriously. The fatal influence of Robert Burns made me regard
him as a rather humorous jovial figure; nay more, as something of a
sportsman, dashing and debonair. I agreed with the old Scots lady who
complained that "if we were a' as eident in the pursuit o' our special
callings as the Deil, puir man, it would be better for us." I would not
have been afraid if he had risen suddenly out of the cabbage-garden at
Hallowe'en. Sin was a horrid thing, but not the Arch-Sinner.

One other book disputed the claim of the Bible to people the woods--_The
Pilgrim's Progress_. On Sundays it was a rule that secular books were
barred, but we children did not find the embargo much of a penance, for
we discovered a fruity line in missionary adventure, we wallowed in
martyrologies, we had _The Bible in Spain_, and above all we had Bunyan.
From _The Holy War_ I acquired my first interest in military operations,
which cannot have been the intention of the author, while _The Pilgrim's
Progress_ became my constant companion. Even to-day I think that, if
the text were lost, I could restore most of it from memory. My delight
in it came partly from the rhythms of its prose, which, save in King
James's Bible, have not been equalled in our literature; there are
passages, such as the death of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, which all my life
have made music in my ear. But its spell was largely due to its plain
narrative, its picture of life as a pilgrimage over hill and dale, where
surprising adventures lurked by the wayside, a hard road with now and
then long views to cheer the traveller and a great brightness at the end
of it. John Bunyan claimed our woods as his own. There was the
Wicket-gate at the back of the colliery, where one entered them; the
Hill Difficulty--more than one; the Slough of Despond--various
specimens; the Plain called Ease; Doubting Castle--a disused gravel-pit;
the Enchanted Land--a bog full of orchises; the Land of Beulah--a
pleasant grassy place where tinkers made their fires. There was no River
at the end, which was fortunate perhaps, for otherwise my brothers and I
might have been drowned in trying to ford it.

The woods, oddly enough, were an invitation to books. In summer,
especially in the Borders, I loathed the sight of the printed word, and
my ambitions were for a career of devastating bodily adventure. But the
winter woods had a quaint flavour of letters. Always in our scrambles
among them there was the prospect of a bright fire, curtains drawn, and
a long evening to read in. At such seasons I desired nothing better than
a bookish life, as scholar or divine. My aim was to be a country parson
in some place where the winters were long and snowy, and a man was
forced to spend much of his days and all his evenings in a fire-lit
library.

But presently spring came, bookishness went by the board, and the only
volume I could think of was a fly-book.


II

Our sea was the Firth of Forth. Twenty miles across, the butt-end of the
Pentlands loomed over the smoke of Leith. The island of Inchkeith lay in
the middle distance. To the east it was possible on a clear day to see
the line of the Lammermoors, North Berwick Law and the Isle of May. But
of this far prospect a child was scarcely aware. The castle of
Edinburgh, an object of romance to me as a milestone on the way to the
Borders, was not identified with the distant lump seen dimly above the
spires of the capital. The Firth was a thing of short prospects for the
eye and very long prospects for the fancy.

In the winter I was barely conscious of it, except as a fog-filled
trench, or a yeasty desert of white-caps, from which came stories of
wrecked fishing-boats. Once, when I had a notion of being a sailor, I
played truant from school and spent a delirious afternoon at the end of
the pier, buffeted by rain and drenched with spray. But in early summer
it became an absorbing thing. The shore in the neighbourhood of the town
was a foul place, smelling of drains and rotten fish, but to the east,
beyond the scarp of Ravenscraig (famous from Sir Walter Scott's ballad
of _Rosabelle_), there was a mile or two of clean coast, part of the
demesne of Dysart House. It was possible to enter this by scrambling
over rocks and scaling a wall, and we children came to regard it as our
special preserve. There a succession of low reefs enclosed little sandy
creeks, where we could bathe in a strong salt sea in the company of
jelly-fish and sea-anemones. Behind lay a sea-wood of battered elders,
and at the back of all great thickets of rhododendrons, which in May
were towers of blossoms. It was a perfect playground for children, for
we were alone except for the gulls and a passing smack. Sometimes on a
holiday we followed the coast eastward, past the once notable port of
Dysart, to the fishing hamlets of the Wemysses and Buckhaven. Dysart in
particular was a joy to us, for in its little harbour were to be found
craft from foreign ports and sailormen speaking broken English. One
especially I remember, a Dutch fore-and-aft schooner, painted green,
with a cage of singing birds and a pot of tulips in the cabin, whose
skipper gave us tea and mushrooms, and promised to all of us places in
his crew.

Those summer afternoons on the shore opened up the world for me. In my
father's congregation there were several retired ship-captains, who had
sailed to outlandish spots and had on their walls ostrich eggs, and
South Sea weapons, and ship models under glass. In such folk I had
little interest in the winter time, but in summer I cadged greedily for
invitations to tea, when I could ply them with questions and beg foreign
curios. Under their tuition I learned to carve ship models for myself,
and became learned in the matter of sails and rigging and types of
vessels. But my interest was less in seamanship than in the unknown
lands which could be reached by ships. I became aware of the largeness
of the globe. At the time I collected foreign stamps and to this day the
smell of gum, with which I plastered them in an album, brings back to me
that spacious awakening.

The woods were, on the whole, a solemn place, canopied by Calvinistic
heavens. Their world was an arena of pilgrimage, romantic, exciting,
mysterious, but governed by an inexorable law. The sea also invited to
pilgrimage, but how different! It offered a world sunlit and infinitely
varied. All things which fascinated me in books--tropic islands, forests
of strange fruits, snow mountains, ports thronged with queer shipping
and foreign faces--lay somewhere beyond the waters in which I swam with
indifferent skill. I never attempted to harmonise the two worlds--I
never wanted to. But that summer shore was a wholesome emancipation. It
seemed to slacken the bonds of destiny and enlarge the horizon. It saved
one small mortal from becoming an owlish and bookish prig.


III

Each year from early summer until some date in September we children
dwelt in the Borders. It was a complete break, for there seemed no link
between the Tweedside hills and either the woods or the beaches of Fife.
In those weeks we never gave our home a thought, and with bitter
reluctance we returned to it. The Borders were to us a holy land which
it would have been sacrilege to try to join on to our common life.

We lived with our maternal grandparents in an old farmhouse close to the
main Edinburgh-Carlisle road, where it descended from benty moorlands to
the Tweed valley. My father's family had been for the most part lawyers
in Edinburgh and in the little burgh of Peebles, and owners of a small
estate in Midlothian; my mother's had for generations been sheep-farmers
on the confines of three shires--Lanark, Midlothian and Tweeddale. The
whole countryside was dotted with our relatives. My grandmother was a
formidable old lady, who ruled her household like a grenadier. She had
the hawk nose and the bright commanding eye of her kinsman, Mr.
Gladstone, and she did not readily suffer the fool. But for us children
she had an infinite tolerance. "Never daunton youth," was her favourite
adage; a text often on her lips was "Fathers, provoke not your children
to anger, lest they be discouraged."

The farm stood at the mouth of a shallow glen bounded by high green
hills. The stream in the glen joined a "water" flowing from the west,
which three miles off entered Tweed. We were therefore at the
meeting-place of the plateau of the Scottish midlands and the main range
of the southern hills which runs from the Cheviots to Galloway. North
and west we looked to inconsiderable uplands and ploughlands; east was
an isolated knot of respectable summits; but south, beyond the trench of
Tweed, was a sea of broad, blue, heathy mountains, the highest in the
Lowlands, rolling to the fastnesses of Ettrick and Moffatdale. We had
for our playground both the desert and the sown.

Of the desert, till I had almost reached my teens, I was conscious only
as a background; my business was with the immediate environment--the
links of the burn, the fields of old pasture, certain ancient trees
which had been standing when the vale was the demesne of a Jacobite
laird, a seductive mill-dam lined with yellow flags, a water-meadow full
of corncrakes, the confluence of the burn and the "water," and the
progress of the said water by fir-clad knolls and young plantations and
brackeny downs to Tweed.

A child's imagination needs something small which it can seize and adopt
as its very own. The things I remember most vividly from those early
days are tiny nooks of meadow, woodland and hill. One was beside the
burn, where a half-moon of hill-turf fringed a pool occupied by a big
trout. An ancient beech in the background cast its shadow and its nuts
over the grass. The place strongly took our fancy, and it was a
favourite stage for our make-believe--suitable alike for playing at
keeping shop, house or castle, as the bridge of Horatius (the pool being
a satisfying end for False Sextus) or as sanctuary for a Jacobite with a
price on his head. . . . Another was a hollow in a nearby hill, from
which stone had been taken long ago. It was floored with thyme and
milkwort, and fringed with crimson bell-heather. It was, of course, the
entrance to King Arthur's sleeping-place, for Arthur and Merlin were in
every legend of the valley, and often of an afternoon we laboured with
fluttering hearts to enlarge a fox's earth, expecting momentarily that
the passage would open and the magic horn dangle before our eyes. . . .
Still a third was in a fir wood, a mossy den with a long prospect of the
valley, where cushats, plovers and curlews kept up a cheerful din, and
hunger could be sated by the largest and juiciest of blaeberries.

As I advanced in years I became less interested in those fanciful nooks
than in the hills themselves, where the shepherds lived and wrought. I
had my first introduction to an old and happy world. I would be out at
dawn to "look the hill," delighting in the task, especially if the
weather were wild. I attended every clipping, where shepherds came from
ten miles round to lend a hand. I helped to drive sheep to the local
market and sat, heavily responsible, in a corner of the auction-ring. I
became learned in the talk of the trade, and no bad judge of sheep
stock. Those Border shepherds, the men of the long stride and the clear
eye, were a great race--I have never known a greater. The narrower kinds
of fanaticism, which have run riot elsewhere in Scotland, rarely
affected the Borders. Their people were "grace livers," in Wordsworth's
phrase, God-fearing, decent in all relations of life, and supreme
masters of their craft. They were a fighting stock because of their
ancestry, and of a noble independence. As the source of the greatest
ballads in any literature they had fire and imagination, and some
aptitude for the graces of life. They lacked the dourness of the
conventional Scot, having a quick eye for comedy, and, being in
themselves wholly secure, they were aristocrats with the fine manners of
an aristocracy. By them I was admitted into the secrets of a whole lost
world of pastoral. I acquired a reverence and affection for the "plain
people," who to Walter Scott and Abraham Lincoln were what mattered most
in the world. I learned the soft, kindly, idiomatic Border speech. My
old friends, by whose side I used to quarter the hills are long ago at
rest in moorland kirkyards, and my salutation goes to them beyond the
hills of death. I have never had better friends, and I have striven to
acquire some tincture of their philosophy of life, a creed at once
mirthful and grave, stalwart and merciful.

From that countryside an older world had not quite departed. On the
green hill-roads drovers still passed with their herds of kyloes, moving
from the north to the Border, and so blocking the bridge of Peebles that
small boys could not get home from school. Falkirk Tryst still
flourished; my youngest uncle used to drive sheep there, sleeping on the
road beside his flock. Edie Ochiltree and the blue-gowns had gone, but
the tramp might still be a professional man and no wastrel, one who
peregrinated the country for seasonal jobs and could fascinate children
with outland tales. Old folks had still stories to tell of James Hogg
and Walter Scott. There was a great-uncle of ours who lived to be a
friend of my own children, and who as a small boy had as his nurse an
old woman who had been scared as a little girl by the clans passing in
the 'Forty-five on their march to Derby. And the highroad, which now
glistens with tarmac, was a thoroughfare only for sheep and vagrants and
an occasional farmer's gig or baker's cart. In all its upper stretches,
before it crossed the watershed into Annandale, the space between the
ruts was shaggy with heather.

So there were stages in our Border childhood; first the miniature world
of nooks and playgrounds; then the middle distance, the adjacent hills
and the neighbouring glens; and last, as we grew older and stronger, the
high places, adventures and explorations. In the first, I remember, a
certain straight mile of highway seemed an interminable thing, and was
broken up for me by gates--the White Yett, the Black Yett; in the
second, it was no more than a tiresome prologue; in the third it was
scarcely even an episode. From constant scrambling we children became a
clan of hardy mountaineers who could ascend a steep face faster than the
shepherds. But our staying power was limited, and after a long day we
would crawl home very weary. Our zest for the business never flagged,
for our horizon had suddenly widened. In Fife beyond the woods there was
nothing to explore except flat fields, while what lay across the magical
summer sea was in the world of dreams. But in the Borders, just outside
our narrow range, lay a great back-country, whose inhabitants we
sometimes met and about whose wonders we were abundantly informed. If we
could only cross a ridge of hill or push beyond a turning in the road
our eyes would behold it.

There were two main arenas to explore: the Hills and the Road. The first
was the tangle of uplands to the south beyond the Tweed valley. We knew
that they stretched for fifty miles to the English border. They held in
their recesses a hundred places whose names were like music to
us--Yarrow and Ettrick and Eskdalemuir; legendary streams like Manor and
Talla and Megget and Gameshope; spots famous in history and familiar to
us from Sir Walter and the Ballads. But they were all beyond our orbit.
Even to come within sight of them meant ascending one of the long
tributary glens of Tweed and crossing a formidable watershed. We could
see from our home the summits of their guardian mountains, Scrape and
Broad Law and Dollar Law and Cramalt Craig. At first it was the desire
for trout that led us to the burns on the other side of Tweed. Gradually
we passed from pools at the foot, fringed with birches and rowans, to
the upper courses where good fish could be taken in runnels a foot wide.
Then came a day when fishing was unprosperous and we boldly climbed the
ridge beyond the springs in the hope of surprising a new world. Alas!
the Tweedside hills are not a sharp "divide," and there were hours of
weary tramping over bent and bog before we got our prospect. But there
were things to draw us on--cloudberries, which only grow on the high
tops, and deep peat-haggs which were unknown on our familiar hills.
Sometimes we were rewarded with a vision, though it meant a desperate
journey back. I shall never forget one afternoon when from some ridge--I
think it was Dollar Law--I saw a far gleam of silver, and with a
beating heart knew that I was looking on St. Mary's Loch.

The Road also was an avenue for us into the unknown. It was the Great
South Road from the Scottish capital to England. Armies had marched
along it; Prince Charlie's ragged Highlanders had footed it; in my
grandparents' memory coaches had jingled down it, and horns and bugles
had woke the echoes in the furthest glens. Far more than the railway, it
was for me a link with the outer world. It followed Tweed to its source,
past places which captured my fancy--the little hamlet of Tweedsmuir
where Talla Water came down from its linns; the old coaching hostelries
of the Crook and the Bield; Tweedhopefoot, famous in Covenanting days;
Tweedshaws, where the river had its source; and then, beyond the divide,
the mysterious green chasm called the Devil's Beef Tub, and the Annan
and the Esk, and enormous half-mythical England. Those upper glens had
the general name of the "Muirs," and a shepherd from "up the water" was
to me a potent figure of romance. Many a summer afternoon my feeble legs
carried me up the valley, always a little further, till one day I had a
glimpse of the steeple of Tweedsmuir kirk.

It was my furthest effort on foot, achieved when I must have been about
twelve years of age. After that a craze for fishing took me in thrall,
and I was sixteen and the possessor of a shabby bicycle before I next
explored the Road. Now the business was easy. In a few hours I could be
at the head of the valley, and look down into the pit of the Beef Tub
and south over the blue champaign of Annandale. But a bicycle could be
put to a nobler purpose than trundling along a highway, and I used it
principally to take me to remote glens where I could fish unfrequented
streams. So my frontier shifted from the Road back again to the Hills.
It was in them that the true field for exploration lay, and I and my
fishing-rod were soon making notable journeys, starting and returning in
the small hours.

       *       *       *       *       *

Wood, sea and hill were the intimacies of my child-hood, and they have
never lost their spell for me. But the spell of each was different. The
woods and beaches were always foreign places, in which I was at best a
sojourner. But the Border hills were my own possession, a countryside in
which my roots went deep. So strong did I feel my proprietary interest
that I projected a history of our glen in the style of Gilbert White's
_Selborne_, in which every trickle of a burn would have had its
chronicle. This attachment to a corner of earth induced a love of nature
in general, and from my early affection I have drawn a passion for
landscapes in many parts of the globe, landscapes often little akin to
the gentle Border hills.

Most of us have certain childish memories which we can never repeat,
since they represent moments when life was in utter harmony and sense
and spirit perfectly attuned. Such memories for me are all of Tweedside,
and I have welcomed with delight any maturer experience which had a hint
of their magic. Three I have always cherished. One was the waking on a
hot July morning with a day of moorland wandering before me. Around me
were the subtle odours of an old house, somewhere far off the fragrance
of coffee, and the smell of new-mown hay drifting through the open
window. Through the same window came a multitude of sounds--the clank
of the neighbouring smithy, the clucking of hens, sheep fording the
burn. From my bed I could see the sky blue as deep-sea water, and
against it the bare green top of a hill. Even to-day a fine morning
gives me something of the thrill of those summer awakenings.

[Illustration: THE GATE OF TWEEDSMUIR]

Another memory is of a long tramp on a drove-road in the teeth of the
wind, with the rain in my face and mist swirling down the glens. I felt
that I was contending joyfully with something kindly at heart, something
to stir the blood and at the same time instinct with a delicate
comfort--the homely smell of sheep, the scent of peat-reek, the glimpse
of firelight from a wayside cottage.

The third was family prayers of a Sabbath evening. It was the custom to
return from church through the fields, which lay yellow in the sunset.
While our elders cast a half-ashamed sabbatical eye over the crops of
meadow hay and the kyloes in the pastures, we children, feeling the
bonds of the Sabbath ritual slackening, were hard at work planning
enterprises for the morrow. Then in the dusky parlour, with its
comforting secular aroma of tobacco, my grandfather read chapters of
both Testaments and a lengthy prayer from some forgotten _Family Altar_.
I did not follow one word, for my thoughts were busy with other things.
He read in a high liturgical manner, his voice rising and falling in
reverent cadences. It seemed to us children a benediction on the
enforced leisure of the day and a promise of a new and glorious week of
wind and sun.

All my life I have been haunted--and cheered--by these recollections:
the green summit against the unclouded blue above a populous friendly
world, the buffets of rain on the moorland road, the drone of my
grandfather's voice in the Sabbath twilight. Each was a summons to
action. But there was a fourth which spoke only of peace. This was the
coming down from the hills, very hungry and foot-sore, to a white-washed
farm on the brink of the heather, where, in a parlour looking out on a
garden of gooseberries and phloxes, with a glimpse beyond of running
water, I was stayed with tea and new-baked scones and
apple-and-rowanberry jelly. Then I demanded nothing more of life except
to be allowed to go on living in that quiet world of pastoral. The dying
shepherd asked not for the conventional Heaven, but for "Bourhope at a
reasonable rent," and, if Paradise be a renewal of what was happy and
innocent in our earthly days, mine will be some such golden afternoon
within sight and sound of Tweed.




CHAPTER II

PORTA MUSARUM


I

I never went to school in the conventional sense, for a boarding school
was beyond the narrow means of my family. But I had many academies. The
first was a dame's school, where I learned to knit, and was expelled for
upsetting a broth pot on the kitchen fire. The next was a board school
in the same Fife village. Then came the burgh school of the neighbouring
town, which meant a daily tramp of six miles. There followed the high
school of the same town, a famous institution in which I believe Thomas
Carlyle once taught. When we migrated to Glasgow I attended for several
years an ancient grammar school on the south side of the river, from
which, at the age of seventeen I passed to Glasgow University.

Had I gone to a public school I might have developed into a useful wing
three-quarter in the rugby game. Otherwise I do not think I missed much.
I and my brothers were, I fear, incapable of what is called the
public-school spirit. While devotees of the open air we lacked interest
in games, and had few of the usual boyish ambitions. We had no wish to
run with the pack, for we were absorbed in our private concerns. School
to me was therefore only a minor episode. The atmosphere I lived in was
always that of my home. I never felt the shyness and repression of the
small boy which I have read of in school stories. At my various schools
I had my ups and downs, but they mattered little and were forgotten in
an hour. My interest in the world at large was not checked by any
artificial conventions, and, though I was afraid of many things, I had
none of the social fears and resentments of the traditional schoolboy.

Yet, looking back, I seem to have enjoyed my schools enormously. There I
mixed on terms of comradeship and utter equality with children from
every kind of queer environment. At my village school my chief friend
was the son of a notorious local ne'er-do-well, and the two of us
captained a gang of barefooted ragamuffins who waged ceaseless war
against the local "gentry," the sons of well-to-do manufacturers. With
one especially, who seemed to us gigantic in height and ferocious in
temper, we avoided close combat and engaged him at a distance with bows
and arrows. I did not meet my antagonist again until one day in 1916
during the battle of the Somme--he was then a major-general and is now a
peer--when I found him of modest stature and exceeding affability.

My lack of the usual code had one serious drawback. Youthful high
spirits had to be worked off somehow, and adventures--often
unjustifiable adventures--took the place of games. As a family we were
too easily "dared," as the phrase went, to attempt things dangerous or
ridiculous. We were of Walter Bagehot's opinion that the greatest
pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do, and the
consequence was that we were an anxiety to our parents, and often, owing
to bodily damage, an affliction to ourselves. At my later schools this
foolishness abated and I fell more into the normal habits of youth, but
even then school played but a small part in my life. It was an incident,
an inconsiderable incident; a period of enforced repression which ended
daily at four in the afternoon.


II

My boyhood must have been one of the idlest on record. Except in the
last year of my Glasgow grammar school, I do not think that I ever
consciously did any work. I sat far down in my classes, absorbing
automatically the rudiments of grammar and mathematics, without
conviction and with no shadow of a desire to excel. Now and then I
shone, it is true, when I showed a surprising knowledge of things
altogether outside the curriculum, for I was always reading, except in
the Border holidays. Early in my teens I had read Scott, Dickens,
Thackeray and a host of other story-tellers; all Shakespeare; a good
deal of history, and many works of travel; essayists like Bacon and
Addison, Hazlitt and Lamb, and a vast assortment of poetry, including
Milton, Pope, Dante (in a translation), Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and
Tennyson. Matthew Arnold I knew almost by heart; Browning I still found
too difficult except in patches. My taste was for solemn gnomic verse
with a theological flavour; my special favourites were _Yesterday,
To-day and Forever_ by a former Bishop of Exeter, and the celebrated Mr.
Robert Pollok's _Course of Time_; and my earliest poetic effort was not
lyrical but epic, the first canto of a poem on Hell.

But all this was mere absorption, only half-conscious and quite
uncritical. I found my first real intellectual interest in the Latin and
Greek classics. This came to me when I was in my seventeenth year, just
before I went to Glasgow University. For the next three years I was a
most diligent student, mediaeval in my austerity. Things have changed
now, but in my day a Scottish university still smacked of the Middle
Ages. The undergraduates lived in lodgings in the city and most of them
cultivated the Muses on a slender allowance of oatmeal. 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 through 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. There was the occasional lift in the
London train, which could be caught at a suburban station, and which for
a few minutes brought one into the frowst of a third-class carriage full
of sleepy travellers from the remote and unvisited realm of England. And
at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the
glow of a West Highland sunrise.

As a student I was wholly obscure. I made few friends; I attended
infrequently one or other of the numerous societies, but I never spoke
in debate; and I acquired the corporate spirit only at a rectorial
election, when, though a professed Tory, I chose to support the Liberal
candidate, Mr. Asquith, and almost came by my end at the hands of a
red-haired savage, one Robert Horne, who has since been Chancellor of
the Exchequer. My summers were spent in blessed idleness, fishing,
tramping and bicycling up and down the Lowlands. But my winters were
periods of beaver-like toil and monkish seclusion. I returned home early
each afternoon and thereafter was at my books until midnight.

After a brief dalliance with mathematics, my subject was classics. In
Latin I was fairly proficient, thanks to my father's tuition, but my
Greek was rudimentary, and I was fortunate to find in Gilbert Murray a
great teacher. He was then a young man in his middle twenties and was
known only by his Oxford reputation. To me his lectures were, in
Wordsworth's phrase, like "kindlings of the morning." Men are by nature
Greeks or Romans, Hellenists or Latinists. Murray was essentially a
Greek; my own predilection has always been for Rome; but I owe it to him
that I was able to understand something of the Greek spirit and still
more to come under the spell of the classic discipline in letters and
life. I laboured hard to make myself a good "pure" scholar; but I was
not intended by Providence for a philologist; my slender attainments lay
rather in classical literature, in history, and presently in philosophy.
Always to direct me I had Murray's delicate critical sense, his
imaginative insight into high matters, and his gentle and scrupulous
humanism. In those years I read widely in the two literatures, covering
much ground quite unfruitful for the schools. The other day I turned up
an old paper on Claudian and was amazed at its futile erudition. I found
that in another essay I had tried to analyse the mood of that
wide-horizoned and fantastic sixth-century Ionia which made the
background for Herodotus.

If Gilbert Murray was the principal influence in shaping my interests,
another was the Border country, which I regarded as my proper home. In
the old song of _Leader Haughs and Yarrow_ Nicol Burne the Violer had
given Tweeddale an aura of classical convention, and "Pan playing on his
aiten reed" has never ceased to be a denizen of its green valleys. There
is a graciousness there, a mellow habitable charm, unlike the harsh
Gothic of most of the Scots landscape. I got it into my head that here
was the appropriate setting for pastoral, for the shepherds of
Theocritus and Virgil, for the lyrists of the Greek Anthology, and for
Horace's Sabine farm. I was wrong in fact; if you seek the true
classical landscape outside Italy and Greece you will find it rather in
the Cape Peninsula, in places like the Paarl and Stellenbosch. But my
fancy had its uses, for I never read classical poetry with such gusto as
in my Border holidays, and it served as a link between my gipsy
childhood and the new world of scholarship into which I was seeking
entrance.

This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could
have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time
close to great minds is the best kind of education. That is why the
Oxford school of classical "Greats" seems to me so fruitful, for it
compels a close study of one or two masters like Plato and Thucydides.
The classics enjoined humility. The spectacle of such magnificence was a
corrective to youthful immodesty, and, like Dr. Johnson, I lived
"entirely without my own approbation." Again, they corrected a young
man's passion for rhetoric. This was in the 'nineties, when the
Corinthian manner was more in vogue than the Attic. Faulty though my own
practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine--the virtue of a
clean bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere
pattern. Above all the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed,
and also confirmed. For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of
life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted
the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the
_aidos_ with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any
chance of being a rebel, for I became profoundly conscious of the
dominion of unalterable law. Prometheus might be a fine fellow in his
way, but Zeus was king of gods and men.

Indeed I cannot imagine a more precious viaticum than the classics of
Greece and Rome, or a happier fate than that one's youth should be
intertwined with their world of clear, mellow lights, gracious images
and fruitful thoughts. They are especially valuable to those who believe
that Time enshrines and does not destroy, and who do what I am
attempting to do in these pages, and go back upon and interpret the
past. No science or philosophy can give that colouring, for such provide
a schematic, and not a living, breathing universe. And I do not think
that the mastery of other literatures can give it in a like degree, for
they do not furnish the same totality of life--a complete world
recognisable as such, a humane world, yet one untouchable by decay and
death--

  "based on the crystalline sea
   of truth and its eternity."


III

I came to philosophy quite naturally as a consequence of my youthful
theological environment. Not that I ever had the itch of the
metaphysician to make a rational cosmos of my own, for I did not feel
the need for such a contraption. The cosmology of the elder Calvinism,
with its anthropomorphism and its material penalties and rewards, I
never consciously rejected. It simply faded out of the air, since it
meant nothing to me. I remember that an ancient relative assured me
that Sir Walter Scott, having neglected certain evangelical experiences,
was no doubt in torment; the news gave me much satisfaction, for the
prospect of such company removed for me any fear of the infernal
regions; thenceforward, like Dante's Farinata degli Uberti, I
"entertained great scorn for Hell." But the fundamentals of the
Christian religion were so entwined with my nature that I never found
occasion to question them. I wanted no philosophy to rationalise them,
for they seemed to me completely rational. Philosophy was to me always
an intellectual exercise, like mathematics, not the quest for a faith.

I had begun to read in the subject long before I took the philosophy
classes at the University, my first love being Descartes, to whom I was
introduced by our Tweeddale neighbour, Professor John Veitch, the last
of the Schoolmen. Henry Jones was the Moral Philosophy professor at
Glasgow, and with him I formed a life-long friendship, for a braver,
wiser, kinder human being never lived. But the semi-religious
Hegelianism then in vogue, first preached by Edward Caird and continued
by Jones, did not greatly attract me, and I owed allegiance to no
school. I read widely, with the consequence that when I went to Oxford I
found that I had done most of the work for the final examination, and
had leisure there to read more widely than ever.

Looking back, my industry fills me with awe. Before I left Glasgow I had
read and analysed many of the English and Scottish philosophers, most of
Kant, and a variety of lesser folk. At Oxford I read--with difficulty
and imperfect comprehension--a large part of Hegel. I kept up this
conscientious study right to the eve of the Great War. Then alas! I fell
away, for I found, like Henry James, that history began to oust
philosophy from my affections. Science, apart from what I picked up as a
field-naturalist, was practically unknown to me, though I learned a
certain amount of physics from my philosophical reading. That was the
biggest gap in my education.

My interests, as I have said, lay not in the search for a creed, but in
the study of the patterns which different thinkers made out of the
universe. I had a tidy mind and liked to arrange thing in compartments
even when I did not take the arrangement too seriously. This meant that
inevitably I missed much; _quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum
recipientis_. My quest for truth unlike Plato's, wholly "lacked the
warmth of desire." It was a mental gymnastic, for I had neither the
uneasiness nor the raptures of the true metaphysician. "Philosophy," Sir
Isaac Newton once wrote, "is such an impertinently litigious lady that a
man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her." I loved
the intricacies of argumentation. A proof is that while I am not
conscious of having ever argued about religion, or about politics except
professionally, I was always very ready to dispute about philosophy. I
would have been puzzled to set down my views as to the nature of thought
and reality, for they were constantly changing. I never considered it
necessary to harmonise my conclusions in a system. Had I been a
professed philosopher I should have been forced to crystallise my
thought, but, as it was, I could afford to keep it, so to speak, in
solution. _L'ineptie consiste , vouloir conclure._ I was of the opinion
of the Scottish metaphysician that it is more important that a
philosophy should be reasoned than that it should be true.

But two conclusions--or rather inclinations--emerged from my studies,
and still abide with me.

Plato, not the system-maker but the poet, had a profound influence on my
mind. Platonism was to me not a creed but a climate of opinion, the
atmosphere in which my thoughts moved. Such an atmosphere is largely the
consequence of temperament, and I think I was born with the same
temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century, who had
what Walter Pater has called "a sensuous love of the unseen," or, to put
it more exactly, who combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal
with a delight in the seen and the temporal. _Dieu ne dfend pas les
routes fleuries quand elles servent  revenir  lui._ If men are either
Platonists or Aristotelians then my category was certainly the first.

Again, my philosophical reading left me with certain intellectual
habits--a dislike of grandiose mechanical systems, and a distrust of
generalities. Having only one or two strong convictions, which might
well be called prejudices, I was inclined to be critical of a
superfluity of dogmas. Arthur Balfour's _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_
and _Foundations of Belief_ which fell into my hands, increased this
temperamental bias. I developed in most subjects, and notably in
politics, a kind of relativism--a belief in degrees of truth and
differing levels of reality--which made me judge systems by their
historical influence and practical efficiency rather than by their
logical perfections. I began to admire Carlyle's "swallowers of
formulas." There were eternal truths, I decided, but not very many, and
even these required frequent spring-cleanings. I became tolerant of most
human moods, except intolerance. It was a point of view which I have
since seen cause to modify, but it was perhaps a salutary one at that
stage in my life.


IV

I have used the word politics, but at this stage I was no politician,
being interested only to a small degree in theories, and not at all in
parties. In that complacent old world before the South African War youth
did not easily feel the impact of national problems. Generally speaking,
I was of a conservative cast of mind, very sensible of the past,
approving renovation but not innovation. Lord Falkland's classic
confession of faith might have been mine--"When it is not necessary to
change it is necessary not to change."

High-flying political schemes seemed to me either dangerous or slightly
ridiculous--which was Dr. Johnson's view. "So, sir," said Boswell, "you
laugh at schemes of political improvement?" "Why, sir, most schemes of
political improvement are very laughable things." In those days my
social conscience was scarcely awake.

There was little reason why it should be. I was far too absorbed in my
studies to read the newspapers, and I had no interest in the small beer
of party controversy. As for philanthropic sensibility in the face of
poverty and sickness, a minister's family had little time for such a
luxury. So far my life had been spent chiefly among the poor--the
fisher-folk and weavers of a Fife village, one of the poorest quarters
in the city. We were engaged in a perpetual fight with destitution and
suffering and had no leisure for theorising.

Again, I could never feel that emotional condescension with which the
_mes sensibles_ approach the subject. These see the pathological in any
mode of existence different from their own. I lived close to
working-class life and knew that it had its own humours and
compensations, and that it nourished many major virtues like fortitude
and charity. I respected the working classes so profoundly that, like
William Morris, I did not want to see them turned into middle classes,
as some of their patrons desired. My upbringing had made any kind of
class feeling impossible. I was one of the poor myself without a penny
behind me, compelled to make my way in the world from nearly as bare a
start as the lad from the plough-tail or the loom. I had had a better
education, came of better stock and had better health than most--these
were my sole advantages. But, except for the first, it did not seem to
me that the politicians could do much about them.

My politics were largely based on my historical reading, which gave me a
full crop of prejudices--prejudices of which I stood in a certain awe,
as Hazlitt advised. I early discovered my heroes: Julius Caesar, St.
Paul, Charlemagne, Henry of Navarre, Cromwell (of whom I acquired a
surprisingly just appreciation), Montrose, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee. I
disliked Brutus, Henry VIII, Napoleon (him intensely), most of the 1688
Whigs, all four Georges, and the whole tribe of French revolutionaries
except Mirabeau. But I was a most patchy historian, and it was not until
Oxford that I acquired a serious interest in historical science.

Meantime I was trying to teach myself to write. Having for years
wallowed and floated in the ocean of letters I now tried to learn to
swim. My attempts were chiefly flatulent little essays and homilies and
limp short stories. My models were the people who specialised in
style--Walter Pater and Stevenson principally; but my uncle, my father's
youngest brother, was a great lover of French literature, and under his
guidance I became an earnest student of Flaubert and Maupassant. There
was also Kipling, then a rising star in the firmament, but he interested
me more because of his matter than his manner. The consequence of those
diverse masters was that I developed a slightly meretricious and
"precious" style, stiff-jointed, heavily brocaded, and loaded with
philosophical terms. It took me years to supple it. But those imitative
exercises did me good in the long run, for they taught me to be
circumspect about structure and rhythm and fastidious about words. My
performance, heaven knows, was faulty enough, but the intention was
sound.

I wrote copiously, but I also read widely in English and French
literature. Certain blind spots I discovered which alas! have remained
blind. I had no taste for most of the minor Elizabethans or the
Restoration dramatists. I thought the eighteenth-century novelists on
the whole over-valued. Only a little of Shelley pleased me, and, though
I revered Emily Bront, I found it impossible to read Charlotte. While I
revelled in Alexander Dumas I could not rank him high. With Carlyle I
was easily satiated. I think my chief admiration, so far as style was
concerned, was for John Henry Newman and T. H. Huxley.

Stevenson at that time was a most potent influence over young men,
especially Scottish university students. Here was one who, though much
older than ourselves, was wonderfully young in heart. He had the same
antecedents that we had, and he thrilled as we did to those
antecedents--the lights and glooms of Scottish history; the mixed
heritage we drew from Covenanter and Cavalier; that strange compost of
contradictions, the Scottish character; the bleakness and the beauty of
the Scottish landscape. He had tramped with a pack on Lowland and
Highland roads, and had seen the dawn rise over the wet city streets,
and had filled the midnight hours with argument, and had done all the
things that we were doing. His hunger for life had not been less than
ours. And then he had taught himself to write miraculously, and for
those of us who were dabbling clumsily in letters his expertness was a
salutary model, for it meant hard and conscientious labour. He spoke our
own language as a colleague and also as a mentor, for he was a preacher
at heart, as every young Scotsman is, since we have all a craving to
edify our fellows. As a guide to northern youth in the 'nineties
Stevenson filled the bill completely. He was at once Scottish and
cosmopolitan, artist and adventurer, scholar and gipsy. Above all he was
a true companion. He took us by the hand and shared in all our
avocations. It was a profound and over-mastering influence, and I think
it was an influence wholly benign.

With me it did not last. Presently his style and manner began to mean
less to me. He seemed to me too much of a looker-on, a phrase-maker in
life, and I wanted robuster standards and more vital impulses. His
fastidiousness came to repel me. I remember some years later reading the
_Open letter to Dr. Hyde_ on Father Damien, and feeling that the great
apostle of the lepers would have had more in common with his vulgar
assailant than with his adjectival defender. Stevenson seemed to me to
have altogether too much artifice about him, and I felt a suspicion of
pose behind his optimism and masculinity--the pose of an heroic
invalidism, a variant of the bedside manner (for there may be a bedside
manner of the patient as well as of the doctor). It was too
self-conscious for greatness.

I have since returned to him with pleasure and revised that verdict. The
judgment of eighteen was juster than the judgment of forty. I do not
think that he was a great master, but he was a master, for within
certain limits he ensued, and sometimes attained, perfection. I am
convinced that in each generation he will be rediscovered by
youth--ordinary youth, not clever, precocious, paradoxical young men,
but the kind of youth that happily we shall always have with us, those
whom Sir Walter Scott called "young people of bold and active
dispositions." That is a certain passport to immortality. Sophisticated
middle age has its modes and changes, but the fashion of such youth is
eternal.


V

My chief passion in those years was for the Border countryside, and my
object in all my prentice writings was to reproduce its delicate charm,
to catch the aroma of its gracious landscape and turbulent history and
the idiom of its people. When I was absent from it I was homesick, my
memory was full of it, my happiest days were associated with it, and
some effluence from its ageless hills and waters laid a spell upon me
which has never been broken. I found in its people what I most admired
in human nature--realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence
sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. I asked for nothing
better than to spend my life by the Tweed.

But how was it to be managed? I considered sheep-farming, like my
mother's brothers; but at the moment sheep were not prosperous, and in
any case they needed capital. Then I thought of being a man of letters,
with a home among the hills! but I remembered Sir Walter's saying that
literature was a good staff but a bad crutch, and anyhow I did not fancy
the business. It should be my hobby, not profession. Meantime my
interest in scholarship was daily growing, and it seemed to me that a
Scottish professorship might offer the life I wanted. It became clear
that I must somehow contrive to go to Oxford. If the worst came to the
worst and other trades failed, I believed that I could always make a
living as a hill-shepherd or a river-gillie.




CHAPTER III

OXFORD


I

As children we lived much in the past, and, as commonly happens, we
interpreted that past by the present, and also permitted bygone ages to
colour our everyday lives. The history of Scotland, of which alone we
had much knowledge, was to us not a legend but a living memory; we took
violent sides in its disputes and attached ourselves vehemently to its
protagonists. Like most Scottish families we believed ourselves to be
gently born. A certain John Buchan, a younger son of the ancient
Aberdeenshire house of Auchmacoy, came south in the beginning of the
seventeenth century and was supposed to have founded our branch. There
was a missing link in the chain, and an austere antiquary like my uncle
would never admit that the descent had more than a high probability; but
we children accepted it as proven fact, and rejoiced that through
Auchmacoy we could count kin back to the days of William the Lion. So in
the high story of Scotland we felt a proprietary interest. A Countess of
Buchan (with whom we had no conceivable connection) had crowned Robert
Bruce; an Earl of Buchan as Constable of France had avenged Joan of Arc;
a Buchan of Auchmacoy had fallen at Flodden beside the King; another had
led the Jacobite remnant after the death of Dundee.

Brooding over Scottish history made us intense patriots of the narrowest
school. Against our little land there had always stood England, vast,
menacing and cruel. We resented the doings of Edward I, Henry VIII and
Elizabeth as personal wrongs. The brutalities of Cumberland after the
'Forty-five seemed to us unforgivable outrages which had happened
yesterday. We early decided that no Englishman could enter Heaven,
though, later, our delight in the doings of the Elizabethan seamen
forced us to make an exception of the inhabitants of Devon. Even when we
grew older and the intolerance abated, England remained for us a foreign
place, not too friendly, to be suspected and even dreaded. My interest
in London, when I first visited it, was not in its metropolitan wonders,
but in its connection with Scotland's history--that Simon Lovat had died
on Tower Hill, that Balmerino's head had been stuck up on Temple Bar,
and disguised Jacobite spies had hid themselves in Soho. I had myself
one particular reason for this suspicion. As a child I was always in
terror of being compelled to earn my bread as a clerk should my father
die. This gloomy fate I associated with some kind of English domicile,
probably a London suburb. The suburbs of the metropolis, of which I knew
nothing, became for me a synonym for a dreadful life of commercial
drudgery without daylight or hope.

I looked forward, therefore, to visiting this sinister and fascinating
land with some foreboding. The thing happened when I was seventeen,
when, on a bicycle, I crossed the bridge of Tweed at Coldstream and
explored a strip of Northumberland. I entered England with the
traveller's mingled sense of insecurity and distinction. To my surprise
I found it very like my own country-side. The people spoke with almost
my own accent. The bent and heather of the Cheviots were like my
domestic hills; the valley of Till was lusher perhaps than that of my
moorland waters, but the hill burns were in no way different . . . .
The following year I paid my first visit to London to stay with a
great-uncle. Incuriously I inspected the sights, but the place made
little impression on me, though the scents and sounds of London in the
autumn gave me a strong feeling of snugness and comfort. . . . Then a
few months later I went up to Oxford to sit for a scholarship. This was
my true first visit to England, when I came under the spell of its
ancient magnificence and discovered a new loyalty.

It was, I remember, bitter winter weather. The Oxford streets, when I
arrived late at night from the North, were deep in snow. My lodgings
were in Exeter College, and I recall the blazing fires, a particularly
succulent kind of sausage, and coffee such as I had never known in
Scotland. I wrote my examination papers in Christ Church hall, that
noblest of Tudor creations. I felt as if I had slipped through some
chink in the veil of the past and become a mediaeval student. Most
vividly I recollect walking in the late afternoon in Merton Street and
Holywell and looking at snow-laden gables which had scarcely altered
since the Middle Ages. In that hour Oxford claimed me, and her bonds
have never been loosed.


II

Brasenose as the home of Walter Pater had a special fascination for me,
and, though he had died in the spring before I sat for a scholarship, I
was glad to go to a college where he had lectured on Plato, and which
was full of his friends. My first impressions of Oxford were unhappy.
The soft autumn air did not suit my health; the lectures which I
attended seemed jejune and platitudinous, and the regime slack, after
the strenuous life of Glasgow; I played no game well enough to acquire
an absorbing interest in it. Above all, being a year older than my
contemporaries I felt that I had been pitchforked into a kindergarten.
The revels of alcoholic children offended me, and, having an unfortunate
gift of plain speech, I did not make myself popular among those
emancipated schoolboys. I must have been at that time an intolerable
prig. Consequently the friends I made at first were chiefly hard-working
students like myself, or older men in other colleges. Also I was very
poor. For two years I could not afford to dine in hall. My Oxford bills
for the first year were little over 100, for my second year about 150.
After that, what with scholarships, prizes and considerable emoluments
from books and articles, I became rather rich for an undergraduate.

One advantage of my early seclusion, and of the fact that Brasenose was
a small college situated in the heart of Oxford, was that I made friends
throughout the University. Presently the political clubs, the Union, and
Vincent's added to this circle, and I think that before I went down I
had as catholic an acquaintance as any man of my time. I came to know
well a few seniors who were either living in Oxford as dons, or came up
often on visits--men like Hilaire Belloc and F. E. Smith, John Simon and
Leo Amery. I had a large acquaintance among athletes and sportsmen,
chiefly the rowing and rugby football groups, and thus I came to know my
future partner in business, T. A. Nelson, the Oxford rugby captain, and
a Scottish international. Among younger men who overlapped my time were
Arthur Salter of Brasenose and Edward Wood (Lord Halifax) of Christ
Church.

There were many of the older generation whose friendship I enjoyed.
First, in my own college, there was the Principal, Dr. Heberden, whose
slender figure with its scholar's stoop seemed at first out of place in
the robust life of Brasenose. Slowly his gentle humanity came to be
understood, and when he died in 1922 the College mourned for him as a
close-knit family mourns for its father. There was the chaplain, Dr. F.
W. Bussell, Walter Pater's chief friend, and the nearest approach in my
acquaintance to a mediaeval polymath. He was my tutor, whom I delighted
in surprising, for from Nietzsche, whom I had just discovered, I would
quote extracts in my essays which were a little startling to a clerk in
holy orders. In Balliol there was the Master, Edward Caird, who was
always a little homesick, I think, for Scotland, as I realised at Sunday
breakfasts. There was J. A. Smith, who to philosophic profundity added
Gaelic scholarship; there was Francis Urquhart ("Sligger"), a happy
boyish figure who survived to be a link between post-war Oxford and my
own secure generation. At Trinity there was R. W. Raper, silent and
infinitely wise; at Magdalen Herbert Warren, the President; and at
Christ Church the massive bohemian figure of York Powell, and John
Phillimore, afterwards of Glasgow, one of the best Latin scholars of our
day. At Worcester there was Dr. Daniel, the intimate of a host of
literary men and a connoisseur of fine printing; and at Jesus Sir John
Rhys, who nourished my new-found Celtic enthusiasm. At All Souls there
was Sir William Anson, the Warden, lawyer and statesman; and W. P. Ker,
with a face "like an intelligent brick wall," who knew every corner of
Scotland, and whose flashes of silence were more eloquent than speech. I
had the privilege, too, of knowing some of the bachelor Fellows of the
old regime, "characters" all, who kept the monastic flag flying in
despite of the new domesticated Oxford of the Parks. One, especially, I
remember, who asked me to dinner at high table in my first year. For
three courses he spoke not a word, while I plied him with nervous
questions about the weather, the Boat-race, and what not. Then he turned
on me his formidable face. "Young man," he said, "I would remind you of
what Dr. Johnson said, that the art of conversation does not consist in
unmeaning interrogatories." I was stricken with helpless laughter, in
which he presently joined, and the ice was broken.

[Illustration: OXFORD, 1899
  (_From a drawing by B. C. Boulter_)]

The charm of Oxford for me was less in the constellations than in the
companionship of the ordinary man. Gradually I became one of what Mr.
Pearsall Smith has called unkindly the "aborigines of Brasenose," and a
happier fellowship no man could desire. I would pay my tribute to an
ancient society for which I have acquired a devout loyalty--a loyalty
shared by my brother (whose memorial is in the ante-chapel), and my
eldest son. It was famous, then as now, as a sporting college, with a
great record of exploits on the river and in the cricket and football
fields. The scholars came mostly from grammar schools and the lesser
public schools; the commoners largely from the country gentry of
Lancashire and the North. It had not for some generations attained great
academic success; indeed there was a wicked legend that a Brasenose man
who achieved honours in the Schools had been put under the pump as a
mark of public disapproval! I remember that I started an Ibsen society,
which got on well enough until _Ghosts_ was read aloud, upon which the
members in disgust rejected the name of Ibsen and turned themselves into
a dining club called the Crocodiles. Nevertheless there was no lack of
intellectual vigour, and the College which gave Lord Haig to the British
Army, and Lord Carnock, Lord Bradbury, Lord Askwith and Sir Arthur
Salter to the public services, has little cause to be ashamed of its
record. But its chief produce was the commoner, healthy, sane,
adventurous, who, like Weir of Hermiston, had "no call to be bonny," but
got through his day's work. It was a cross-section of all that was most
vigorous in English society, and in distant parts of the Empire it
proved its quality. The average Brasenose man was very close to English
soil, and from him I learned something of the secret of the English
character, that hardly communicable thing which even a Scotsman born in
the same island understands only by slow degrees. There is nothing in
the land more English than Brasenose.

My years at Oxford were, I think, one of those boundary periods, the
meaning of which is missed at the time, but is plain in the retrospect.
The place was still monastic, but the clamour of the outer world was at
its gates, and it was on the verge of losing many of its idioms. Very
ancient customs were still remembered; for example, it was only a few
years before I went up that Brasenose men had to go out of college in
pairs, a relic of the mediaeval town and gown troubles. Sartorially my
time was beyond doubt a turning point. On Sundays a dark suit was still
obligatory; on week-days Brasenose inclined towards tailed coats of
tweed and hunting waistcoats, and the headgear was a cap or a bowler;
but before I went down the fashion had arrived from Winchester of
flannel "bags" and any kind of jacket at all seasons, and the modern
hatless era was dawning. It was the same with our speech, which had
Early Victorian, if not Regency, traces. We still called a cigar a
"weed" and used the word "blood" to denote whatever was dashing and
high-coloured in raiment or behaviour. When I visited my brother a year
after I went down, I found that this fashion had almost disappeared.

After the years of intellectual ferment in a Scottish university Oxford
was for me a stabilising influence, but still more was it a mellowing of
character through friendship. In my time there was no urgent political
or religious question to divide people into militant fraternities. We
sought not allies in a cause but friendships for their own sake. Our
creed was Mr. Belloc's:

          "From quiet homes and first beginning
  Out to the undiscovered ends
  There's nothing worth the wear of winning
  But laughter and the love of friends."

That happy circle has long since been broken, for the South African War
took heavy toll of it, and the World War completed the tragedy.

I lived a good deal in Balliol and my closest friends were of that
college; indeed, I believe that I was the sole outsider who ever became
an honorary member of its principal wine club. The Balliol generation of
my time was, I think, the most remarkable in Oxford, only to be
paralleled by the brilliant group, containing Charles Lister and the
Grenfells, which flourished on the eve of the War. It was distinguished
both for its scholars and its athletes, but it made no parade of its
distinction, carrying its honours lightly as if they fell to it in the
ordinary process of nature. It delighted unpedantically in things of the
mind, but it had an engaging youthfulness, too, and was not above
high-jinks and escapades.

In that circle there was no pose, unless it be a pose in youth to have
no pose. The "grand manner" in the eighteenth-century sense was
cultivated, which meant a deliberate lowering of key in professions, and
a scrupulous avoidance of parade. A careless good-breeding, an agreeable
worldliness were its characteristics. It was a very English end to
strive for, and by no means a common one, for urbanity of mind is rarely
the aim of youth. It implied, perhaps, an undue critical sense, and a
failure in certain generous foibles. Some of us were men of the world
too young; humour and balance were prized too highly; a touch of Gothic
extravagance was needed to correct our over-mellow Hellenism. Such a
circle does not breed Quixotes or reformers, and of few of us could it
be said in the phrase of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, _il gardait au coeur
les richesses striles d'un grand nombre de rois oublis_. I have known
men like Hugh Dawnay and Francis Grenfell who would have ridden on a
lost cause over the edge of the world. But our Oxford group was not of
that kind; each of us would have rejoiced to ride over the world's edge,
but it would have been not for a cause but for the fun of the riding.

Yet I would not have it thought that we were worldly-wise. We reserved
our chief detestation for Worldly Wisemen. To think of a career and to
be prudent in laying its foundations was in our eyes the unpardonable
sin--a revolt no doubt against the Jowett tradition. It was well enough
to be successful if success could be achieved unostentatiously and
carried lightly, but there must be no appearance of seeking it. Again,
while affectionate and rather gentle with each other, we wore a
swashbuckling manner to the outer world. It was our business to be
regardless of consequences, to be always looking for preposterous
adventures and planning crazy feats, and to be most ready for a brush
with constituted authority. All this, of course, was the ordinary high
spirits of young men delighting in health and strength, which happily
belong to the Oxford of every generation. The peculiar features of our
circle were that this physical exuberance was found among men of real
intellectual power, and that it implied no corresponding _abandon_ in
their intellectual life. In the world of action we were ripe for any
venture; in the things of the mind we were critical and decorous, chary
of enthusiasm--_revenants_ from the Augustan age.

One habit we had which was derived from the earlier generation of Hubert
Howard and Basil Blackwood, and which bore the mysterious name of
"booms." In eighteenth-century Oxford they would have been called
"schemes." It was a "boom" to canoe an immense distance on a short
winter day, or to walk to the very limits of one's strength. The walk to
London was a prosaic affair--I did it on a hot day on the eve of the
Diamond Jubilee; more spectacular was the walk from Cambridge within
twenty-four hours, a distance of over eighty miles, which was duly
performed by some of us. One type of "boom" I remember vividly. Half a
dozen of us on horse-back would meet one morning at an appointed place,
and each would ride a point-to-point course marked out on the map. We
drew lots for our courses, which might lead us into back gardens and
trackless woods, and compel us to swim rivers or canals, and sometimes
brought us to the doors of the police court. In the evening we dined
together and told our adventures. . . .

There was the Horace Club which we founded and which met in summer in
the President's garden at Magdalen, when we supped on nuts and olives
and fruits, drank what we made believe was Falernian, and read our
poetical compositions. The club had outside members like Maurice Baring,
and its published collection of verses is now, I believe, a collector's
piece. . . . And there were odder fraternities, like the White Rose
Club, when we drank to the King over the Water without a notion of what
we meant. I remember my surprise in 1915 in Flanders when I found that
Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the commander opposite us, was the
gentleman whom we had been wont to salute by telegram on his birthday as
Prince Robert of Wales!


III

Father Knox, in the dedication which he never published to his
_Spiritual Aeneid_, has told of the bright company which was scattered
by the War. I hesitate to make such a survey for my own time, since it
is all so long ago, and to-day most of the names would have little
meaning. But one or two I may select from that old world where "the sun
rose over Magdalen and set over Worcester."

Cuthbert Medd, who died in 1902 just as he was about to join me in South
Africa, had in some ways the most powerful mind I have ever known in a
young man, and Lord Rosebery was of my opinion. He was a Northumbrian
and therefore in some sense a fellow Borderer, and together we tramped
over most of Scotland. Aubrey Herbert, gentle, whimsical, utterly
courageous, lived to be a Member of Parliament and to have a fantastic
record in various terrains of the War. He was taken prisoner in the
retreat from Mons, when, armed with an alpenstock, he must have
presented a figure like Don Quixote's; and, knowing Turkish, during a
truce at Gallipoli he is said to have taken command of a Turkish unit
and escorted it back to its trenches. To go tandem-driving with him at
Oxford required fortitude, for he was very blind; to mountaineer with
him deserved a Victoria Cross, for he was both blind and desperate. . . .
Then there was always with us the stalwart figure of Hilaire Belloc,
who preached exotic doctrines in his great gusty voice--a man full of
gnarled wisdom and also of a youthfulness younger than ours--who warmed
the air about him and whose kindliness and charity were of the early
Christian pattern. He founded a so-called Republican Club, and it became
necessary to correct its extravagance by starting a rival institution,
the S.G.D.F.P., or the Society for Grinding Down the Faces of the Poor!
Let me record my conviction that much of his output in letters is as
likely to live as any work of our time; no man has attained more
perfectly to the "piety of speech" of the seventeenth-century lyrists;
no man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of two friends I must write more fully. The first is Raymond Asquith.
There are some men whose brilliance in boyhood and early manhood dazzles
their contemporaries and becomes a legend. It is not that they are
precocious, for precocity rarely charms, but that for every sphere of
life they have the proper complement of gifts, and finish each stage so
that it remains behind them like a satisfying work of art. Sometimes the
curtain drops suddenly, the daylight goes out of the picture, and the
promise of youth dulls into a dreary middle-age of success, or, it may
be, of failure and cynicism. But for the chosen few, like Raymond, there
is no disillusionment. They march on into life with a boyish grace, and
their high noon keeps all the freshness of the morning. Certainly to his
cradle the good fairies brought every dower. They gave him great beauty
of person; the gift of winning speech; a mind that mastered readily
whatever it cared to master; poetry and the love of all beautiful
things; a magic to draw friends to him; a heart as tender as it was
brave. One gift only was withheld from him--length of years.

The figure of Raymond in those days stands very clear in my memory, for
he had always the complete detachment from the atmosphere which we call
distinction. He wore generally an old shooting-coat of light grey tweed
and grey flannel trousers; the laxest sumptuary law would have made
havoc of his comfort. He had rather deep-set grey eyes, and his lips
were parted as if at the beginning of a smile. He had a fine straight
figure, and bore himself with a kind of easy stateliness. His manner was
curiously self-possessed and urbane, but there was always in it
something of a pleasant aloofness, as of one who was happy in society
but did not give to it more than a fraction of himself.

He had come up from Winchester with a great reputation, and also, I
think, a little tired. His scholarship was almost too ripe for his
years, and he had already conquered so many worlds that he was little
troubled with ordinary ambition. As the son of an eminent statesman he
had seen much of distinguished people who to most of us were only awful
names, so that he seemed all his time at Oxford to have one foot in the
greater world. Not that he gave this impression by anything that he said
or did; it was rather by his whole-hearted delight in Oxford and his
lack of reverence for the standards that ruled outside it. He had the
air of having seen enough of the outer world to judge it with
detachment.

Even in those early years his great powers of mind were patent to all. I
have never met anyone so endowed with diverse talents. In sheer
intellectual strength he may have had his equals, and there were limits
to his imaginative sympathies; but for manifold and multiform gifts I
have not known his like. He was a fine classical scholar, at once
learned and precise; he was widely read in English literature; he wrote
good poetry, Greek, Latin and English; he had the most delicate and
luminous critical sense; he had an uncanny gift of exact phrase, whether
in denunciation or in praise. His ordinary conversation was chiefly
remarkable for its fantastic humour, but when he chose he was a master
of manly good sense. As a letter-writer he was easily the best of us,
but his epistles were dangerous things to leave lying about, for he had
a most unbridled pen. He could not write a sentence without making it
characteristic and imparting into it some delicate ribaldry.

As a speaker I never heard him in the political clubs; but in the Union
he was easily the most finished debater of our time. It was a hey-day of
Union oratory, for Hilaire Belloc, F. E. Smith and John Simon were our
immediate predecessors and still took part in debates. He did not seem
to seek to convince; smoothly, almost disdainfully, in his beautiful
voice flowed his fastidious satire. There were no signs of careful
preparation, and yet, had his speeches been printed verbatim, each
sentence would have stood out as finely cut as in an essay of
Stevenson's.

His politics were hereditary, not, I think, the result of any personal
enthusiasm. He had a thoroughly conservative temperament, and loathed
the worn counters of party warfare. Not greatly respecting many people
he had a profound respect for his father, and much resembled him, both
in his style of speaking and in the quality of his mind. He would not
condescend to cheap-jack argument, and he distrusted emotion in public
life. He was like his father, too, in many traits of character--his
loyalty, his hatred of intrigue, his contempt for advertisement, and his
great courage. I do not think that at that time he had any strong
political opinions (though many prejudices about political figures)
except on the question of the Church. He detested clericalism, and like
the Irishman at Donnybrook when he found its head anywhere he smote it.
I only once saw him in the Union roused to a real show of feeling. The
matter in debate was whether some work attacking the Oxford Movement
should be cast out of the library. The book was admittedly trash, but
those who opposed its rejection did so on the ground that the reason
alleged was not its literary badness but its opinions, and that such
censorship over thought was intolerable. I can remember Raymond speaking
with a white face and an unwonted passion in his voice. He asked where
such censorship would stop. There were books on the shelves, he said, by
Roman writers which poured venom upon the greatest man that ever lived.
Were these books to be expelled? "I assure you," he told the angry ranks
of Keble and St. John's, "that the fair fame of Caesar is as dear to me
as that of any dead priest can be to you."

I do not think he could ever have been called popular. He was immensely
admired, but he did not lay himself out to acquire popularity, and in
the ordinary man he inspired awe rather than liking. His courtesy was
without warmth, he was apt to be intolerant of mediocrity, and he had no
desire for facile acquaintanceships. Also--let it be admitted--there
were times when he was almost inhuman. He would destroy some piece of
honest sentiment with a jest, and he had no respect for the sacred
places of dull men. There was always a touch of scorn in him for obvious
emotion, obvious creeds, and all the accumulated lumber of prosaic
humanity. That was a defect of his great qualities. He kept himself for
his friends and refused to bother about the world. But to such as were
admitted to his friendship he would deny nothing. I have never known a
friend more considerate, and tender, and painstaking, and unfalteringly
loyal. It was the relation of all others in life for which he had been
born with a peculiar genius.

I have said that he came up to Oxford with little ambition, and he went
down with less. He stood aloof from worldly success, not from any
transcendental philosophy, but simply because the rewards of common
ambition seemed to him too trivial for a man's care. He loved the things
of the mind--good books, good talk--for their own sake; he loved, above
all, youth and the company of his friends. To such a man it was hard to
leave Oxford, for it meant a break with youth and the haunts of youth,
and he had no zest for new and commoner worlds. In looking over old
letters from him I find a constant lament that that chapter must close.

No two friends were ever more unlike than he and I. He chaffed me
unmercifully about my Calvinism, my love of rough moors in wild weather,
my growing preference for what he called the Gothic over the Greek in
life, my crude passion for romance. "You scoff at the cult of Beauty,"
he once wrote to me, "in your coarse Scotch way. I grind my teeth when I
hear people praise the machinery of Scotch education. Depend upon it, my
poor dear soul-starved pedlar, the English public-school system is the
only one which fits a man for life and ruins him for eternity. And
commendation cannot go further than that, as you know well if you had
the honesty to acknowledge it."

There was one consequence of this lack of ambition which the world may
well regret. Except in his letters, he scarcely used his great gift for
literature. A few poems are all that remain. One of these, an _Ode in
Praise of Young Girls_, written shortly before the War, is to my mind
the finest satirical poem of our day. He wrote many verses--he used to
scatter them about his letters--but he rarely finished them. He and I
once prepared a complete _Spectator_, a parody of that admirable
journal. The three middle articles, I remember, were on _God_, _Bridge_,
and _Harvest Bugs_. Raymond wrote the poem, a Tennysonian elegy,
supposed to have been written by a well-known Oxford dignitary, _On a
Viscount who died on the Morrow of a Bump Supper_.

When I went to South Africa in 1901 Raymond had just taken a first in
"Greats," and was reading law for an All Souls' Fellowship. We
maintained a regular correspondence, and the sight of his bold,
beautiful hand-writing was the pleasantest part of mail days in
Johannesburg. He wrote pages of delightful political gossip, and
unveracious accounts of the doings of our friends, and--very
rarely--news of himself. Here are two extracts:

     "Eighteenth-century methods worked well enough while we had a
     talented aristocracy, but we can't afford nowadays to limit our
     choice of Ministers to a few stuffy families, with ugly faces, bad
     manners, and a belief in the Nicene Creed. The day of the clever
     cad is at hand. I always felt it would come to this if we once let
     ourselves in for an Empire. If only Englishmen had known their
     Aeschylus a little better they wouldn't have bustled about the
     world appropriating things. A gentleman may make a large fortune,
     but only a cad can look after it. It would have been so much
     pleasanter to live in a small community who knew Greek and played
     games and washed themselves. . . . I hear you think I oughtn't to
     be up at Oxford a fifth year. You are probably right, but,
     honestly, I haven't the ambition of a louse and I don't see why I
     should pretend to it. There are a few things and people at Oxford
     that I intend to keep close to as long as I decently can, and I
     don't care a damn about the rest. If one fell in love with a woman
     or believed in the Newcastle Programme or had no dress clothes it
     might be different. But the world as I see it just now is a little
     barren of motives. . . . I suppose I may have what is called a
     spiritual awakening any day, and then I shall start to lie and make
     money with the best of them. . . . The law is a lean casuistical
     business and fills me with disgust."

       *       *       *       *       *

     "The bleak futility of our public men on both sides is a thing one
     never hoped to see outside the neo-Celtic school of poetry. The
     general effect is that of a flock of sheep playing blind man's buff
     in the distance on a foggy day. Rosebery continues to prance upon
     the moonbeam of efficiency and makes speeches at every street
     corner; but he might just as well call it the Absolute at once for
     all the meaning it has to him or anyone else. No one has the least
     idea what he wants to 'effect,' and beyond a mild bias in favour of
     good government and himself as Premier, nothing can be gleaned from
     his speeches. . . . He has started a thing called the Liberal
     League, which appears at present to consist of three
     persons--himself, my father, and Grey--backed by a squad of titled
     ladies, who believe that the snobbery of the lower classes is
     greater than their greed. I trust that may be so; they say there is
     a good spot in everyone if one knows where to find it. . . . As to
     law, I am in the position of a Danaid incessantly pouring into the
     leaky sieve of my mind the damnable details of Praetorian Edicts
     and the Custom of Gavelkind. If they didn't run out at once I think
     I should be mad by now. God knew what He was about when He provided
     me with a bad memory, and I am not the one to withhold praise where
     it is due."

In 1902 I tried to induce Raymond to come and visit us in South Africa.
Lord Milner also did his best, but nothing would make him leave England.
"What have you to offer me?" he wrote. "Certainly not those who are clad
in soft raiment (we saw them at the Coronation!), nor do I imagine that
any voice cries in your desert in a way which tends to edification." He
was now a Fellow of All Souls, and enjoying himself, as appeared from
the pictures of delights which he drew to lure me home, and his hilarity
about politics. "No two people seem to disagree about anything--except
Rosebery and C. B.; and neither of them has anything you could call an
opinion, except about each other; in which opinion, of course, they are
both right." Then suddenly he was heard of in Egypt, and we found
ourselves in the same continent. He thought meanly of the Nile, the
monuments, the scenery ("about as picturesque as a spittoon"),
everything except the climate. "The sunsets are wonderful, passing from
palest green through every shade of yellow to deepest purple with a
rapidity and precision which is more like Beerbohm Tree than the
Almighty." He rejoiced to see a land where, he said, any kind of
self-government was manifestly out of the question. At that time he was
not enamoured of what he called "middle-Victorian shibboleths."

When I came back from South Africa at the end of 1903 I found that
Raymond had cut loose from Oxford, and was already in London society
the same distinguished and slightly detached figure which he had been at
the University. He was reading for the Bar, and had plenty of leisure to
enjoy life and see his friends. At that time I lived in the Temple with
Harold Baker, and the three of us used to go for country walks of a
Sunday and have periodical dinners at which we drank claret on the old
scale. He had become even handsomer than before, and in London clothes
he had a slightly ascetic look. Oxford was behind him, and he had set
himself to make the best of his new life. He looked with a more kindly
eye upon politics, for the Tariff Reform controversy had left him a
strong Free Trader, and he began to speak a little for his party. But
till he was settled in practice at the Bar he took neither law nor
politics too seriously. He was not a whit more ambitious than at Oxford,
and had still about him the suggestion of some urbane and debonair
scholar-gipsy, who belonged to a different world from the rest of us. It
was this air of aloofness which gave him his peculiar attraction to
those who met him for the first time, and acquaintance did not stale
that charm. There was in him all the fascination of the unexpected and
unpredictable. His wit flowed as easily as a brook, and into curious
eddies. He had a great talent for acute but surprising descriptions of
people, especially those whom he did not love. His humour was oftenest
the Aristophanic [Greek: skmma para prosdokian].
I remember one instance. Someone, in one of the round games which were
then popular, propounded a stupid riddle: "What is that which God never
sees, kings rarely see, and we see every day?" The answer is "An equal."
Raymond's answer was "A joke." In the autumn of 1903 John Morley's _Life
of Gladstone_ in three bulky volumes descended upon the world. I once
heard Raymond asked the inevitable question--had he read them. "Often,"
he replied brightly.

Then he fell in love and married--in July 1907, the same month as my own
wedding. He and I gave our final bachelor dinner together at the Savoy.
Marriage did not, I think, wake his ambition, as he once prophesied it
might, but it regularised his talents: canalised, as it were, a stream
which had hitherto flowed at random. He settled down seriously to work
at the Bar, with Parliament somewhere in the future. He succeeded, of
course, up to a point. His father was now Prime Minister, and he was
naturally briefed in important cases as a junior for or against the
Crown. Of course, too, he did his work well, for he was incapable of
doing anything badly. But I question if he would ever have made one of
the resounding successes of advocacy. For one thing he did not care
enough about it; for another, he scorned the worldly wisdom which makes
smooth the steps in a career. He had no gift of deference towards
eminent solicitors or of reverence towards heavy-witted judges. He would
probably have passed, if he had lived, through the stage of Treasury
junior to a seat on the Bench, where his perfect lucidity of mind and
precision of phrase would have made him an admirable judge--a second
Bowen, perhaps, without Bowen's super-subtlety. But I do not think he
would ever have won that commanding position at the English Bar which
was due to his talents.

[Illustration: J. B., 1900
  (_From a portrait by Sholto Johnstone-Douglas_)]

Politics were a different matter. Before the War he was adopted as
Liberal candidate for Derby, and made a profound impression by his
platform speeches. He had every advantage in the business--voice,
language, manner, orderly thought, perfect nerve. The very fact that he
sat loose to party creeds would have strengthened his hands at a time
when creeds were in transition. For, though he might scoff at dogmas, he
had a great reverence for the problems behind them; and to these
problems he brought a fresh mind and a sincere good will. His colleague
at Derby, Mr. J. H. Thomas, believed, I know, most heartily in his
future, and he won golden opinions among the Labour men with whom he
came into contact. It was natural, for he was the spending type in life,
the true aristocrat who prefers to give rather than to take, and makes
no fetish of a narrow prudence. Democracy and aristocracy can co-exist,
for oligarchy is their common enemy. I am very certain, too, that in
Parliament he would have won instant fame. His manner of speaking was as
perfectly fitted for the House of Commons as that of his father. I can
imagine in some hour of high controversy Raymond's pale grace kindling
like a fire.

       *       *       *       *       *

The War did not produce a new Raymond; it only brought the real man to
light, as the removal of Byzantine ornament may reveal the grave
handiwork of a Pheidias. He disliked emotion, not because he felt
lightly but because he felt deeply. He most sincerely loved his country,
but he loved her too much to identify her with the paste-board goddess
of the music-halls and the hustings. War meant to him the shattering of
every taste and interest, but he did not hesitate. It was no sudden
sentimental fervour that swept him into the army, but the essential
nature of one who had always been shy of rhetorical professions, but was
very clear about the real thing. Austerely self-respecting, he had been
used to hide his devotions under a mask of indifference, and would never
reveal them except in deeds. Raymond, being of the spending type, when
he gave did not count the cost, and of the many who did likewise few had
so much to give.

He began his training in the Queen's Westminsters, from which after a
few months he was transferred to the Grenadier Guards. There he was
perfectly happy. He was among young men again--the same kind of
light-hearted and high-spirited companionship in which he had delighted
at Oxford. In London I think the young Guardsman had held him in some
awe, and to his friends it seemed not the least surprising result of the
War that it should have made Raymond a second-lieutenant in the
Grenadiers. He himself used to say that it was an odd trick of
Providence to send a "middle-aged and middle-class" man into the Guards.
Yet he had never found a circle where he was so much at home, and his
popularity was immediate and complete. He was an excellent battalion
officer, and so much in love with his new life that he sometimes spoke
of going on with the army as his profession. That, I think, he would not
have done, for the army in peace time would have bored him; but in the
mingled bondage and freedom of active service he was in his proper
element.

For a few months he was a member of the Intelligence Staff at General
Headquarters. It was just before I joined that section, and when I went
there the memory of him was fresh among his colleagues. But he did not
like it. He missed the close comradeship of his battalion, and he felt
that it was too cushioned a job for an active man in time of war. So he
went back to the Guards before the Somme battle began.

It is my grief that I never saw him during these months, and I was
temporarily back in England on the day when he fell. In the great
movement of the 15th of September the Guards Division advanced from
Ginchy on Lesboeufs. Their front of attack was too narrow, their
objectives were too far distant, and from the start their flanks were
enfiladed. It was not till the second advance on the 25th that Lesboeufs
was won. But on the 15th that fatal fire from the corner of Ginchy
village brought death to many in the gallant Division, and among them
was Raymond Asquith. In his letters he had often lamented the loss of
others, but his friends knew that he had neither fear nor care for
himself.

Our roll of honour is long, but it holds no nobler figure. He will stand
to those of us who are left as an incarnation of the spirit of the land
he loved. "Eld shall not make a mock of that dear head." He loved his
youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and
brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or
weariness or defeat.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other is Auberon Thomas Herbert, commonly known as Bron. I have met
a fair number of gipsies in my life, often in most unfitting
professions. Sometimes fate was kind to them and gave them scope for
vagrancy; pencilled scrawls with odd outlandish postmarks were all we
heard of them; and once in a blue moon they would turn up with brown
faces and far-regarding eyes to tantalise us homekeepers with visions of
the unattainable. Oftener their gipsyhood was repressed, and only the
old fret in spring told where their thoughts lay. But I have never known
a more whole-hearted, hard-bitten nomad than Bron. Nomad, indeed, is not
the word, for he did not crave travel and change; a Hampshire meadow
gave him all that he wanted. But he was a gipsy to the core of his
being, a creature of the wayside camp, wood-smoke and the smell of
earth. Some very ancient forbear was reborn in him; as in his cousin
Julian Grenfell, who wrote of himself as one "who every year has an
increasing desire to live in a blanket under a bush, and will soon get
bored with the bush and the blanket."

At Oxford he was the link of his Balliol with the world of sport, for
his perfect physique made him a great athlete, and he rowed for his last
two years in the University boat. But Bron had uncommonly little of the
ordinary sportsman about him, being, as I have said, a gipsy. Far better
than the ritual of games he loved his own private adventures in by-ways
of the countryside. He had an astonishing knowledge of birds and beasts
and all wild things. Most of his friends were fine scholars, but he did
not essay the thorny path of academic honours, having better things to
think about. We were all lovers of poetry and contemners of music. Bron
loved poetry, but he had also a passion for music. I once induced him to
make a speech in the Union; but after an excellent beginning he grew
bored and stopped to yawn in the middle of a sentence. For politics he
cared not at all. He was most pleasant to look at, and most gentle and
courteous in manner, but his petulant mouth and great wondering eyes
gave him a changeling air, as of one a little puzzled by life. He was
like some wild thing tamed and habituated to a garden, but still
remembering "the bright speed it had in its high mountain cradle."

On the outbreak of war in 1899 he was off at once to South Africa,
taking the first chance he got, which was that of _Times_ correspondent.
There he was abundantly happy. He was not specially interested in
military affairs, but he loved the spacious land and the adventurous
life. His letters to me at the time were one long chant of praise.
"When I think of the dull things I was doing last year," he wrote, "I am
simply staggered at the luck that has brought me here." Presently,
advancing too far forward in an action (for those were the days when the
trade of war correspondent was still an adventure) he got a rifle bullet
in his foot. The wound was badly mismanaged, and when he came back to
England his leg had to be amputated below the knee.

To a man of his tastes such a loss might well have been crippling. To
Bron it simply did not matter at all. He behaved as if nothing had
happened, and went on with the life he loved. It cannot have been an
easy job, but he never showed the strain of it. He was just as fine a
sportsman as before, and his high spirits were, if anything, more
infectious. During the later stages of his convalescence I used to stay
with him at his uncle's house of Panshanger, and catch trout with the
dry-fly in the Mimram. He was a wonderful fisherman, but that gentle art
was only one of his accomplishments. Soon he was scampering about in the
New Forest, and hunting, and playing tennis, and stalking on some of the
roughest hills in Scotland. He must have had bad hours, but he held his
head high to the world and his friends. He was not going to be depressed
even for a moment by a small thing like the loss of a leg.

His uncle, the last Lord Cowper, died in the summer of 1905, and Bron
became Lord Lucas and the owner of several great houses. He got them off
his hands as fast as he could, for the only place he really cared for
was his home at Picket Post in the New Forest. A lesser man might have
been oppressed by his possessions, but Bron was too unworldly to feel
any oppression. They mattered nothing in his scheme of life. For he was
still the gipsy, careless of a sedentary world, and with all the
belongings he needed in his wallet.

Then there befell him the most fantastic fate. In 1906 a Liberal
Government came into power, and Bron, as one of the few Liberal peers,
was marked down for preferment. He became Mr. Haldane's private
secretary at the War Office. In 1908 he was Under-Secretary for War, and
rebutting in the House of Lords Lord Roberts' plea for national service.
He was not a good speaker, but his boyish charm and gallantry pleased
people, and even his opponents wished him well. In 1911 he was for a
short time Under-Secretary for the Colonies. That same year he went as
Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, where he was a real
success, for he was a true countryman, knowing at first hand what most
politicians are only told. In 1914 he entered the Cabinet as President
of the Board of Agriculture, and held the office till the formation of
the Coalition in May 1915, when he most thankfully laid it down.

Was there ever an odder destiny for a gipsy than to be a Cabinet
Minister in spite of himself at thirty-eight? No man could have wanted
it less. He did his work well--the agricultural part extraordinarily
well--but his heart was never in it. He had no ambition, and the long
round of conferences, deputations, unmeaning speeches, idle debates, was
wholly distasteful. He disliked London, shunned ordinary society, and
was happy only in the company of his friends. At a ball, when by any
rare chance he attended one, he had the air of a hunted stag. To see him
at a party was to get some idea of how Marius looked among the ruins of
Carthage. But at Picket or in Scotland, shooting, hunting, fishing, or
bird-watching, he was the old Bron again, with the old zest and
simplicity. When I met him in London in those days I used to think that
he looked more puzzled than ever. He seemed to find the world rather
tarnished and dusty, and to be longing for a clearer air.

When he left the Cabinet in 1915 he found what he had been seeking.
Though he was many years over the age, he managed to join the Royal
Flying Corps and trained for his pilot's certificate. Here his wonderful
eye and nerve stood him in good stead, and presently he became a most
competent pilot. He was sent out to Egypt, whence stories came back to
us of strange adventures--crashing in the desert many miles from help,
and such like. He was back in England in the spring of 1916, engaged in
instructing recruits, and more than once came very near death. But Bron
had risked his neck all his days, and his friends hoped that his
standing luck might carry him through.

In May of that year to my surprise I found him at a party--almost the
last given by Count Benckendorff at the Russian Embassy. He asked me if
I thought that the old political game would ever start again. "If it
does," he said, "it will start without me." He was a picture of
weatherbeaten health, but I noticed that his eyes were different. They
had become more deeply set, as happens to airmen, and also they had lost
their puzzled look. He had found something for which he had long been
seeking. Up in the clouds he had come to his own and discovered the
secret of life. He never spoke of it, for he was as shy and elusive in
these things as a young girl, but it could be read in his eyes.

It had always been his desire to serve on the Western Front, and he went
there half-way through the battle of the Somme. I am glad to think that
I saw something of him during his last weeks on earth. His camp was
beside the road from Amiens to Doullens: his friend Maurice Baring was
at the R.F.C. Headquarters, and I was at General Headquarters at
Beauquesne; so we were all three only a few miles from each other. The
concluding days of October and the first week of November were full of
strong gales from the southwest, which gravely hampered our flying, for
our machines drifted too far over the enemy lines, and had to fight
their way back slowly against a head wind. It was an eery season on the
bleak Picardy Downs, scourged and winnowed by blasts, with the noise of
the guns from the front line coming fitfully in the pauses like the
swell of breakers on a coast. One evening, I remember, I rode over to
have tea with Bron, when the west was crimson with sunset and above me
huge clouds were scudding before the gale. They were for the most part
ragged and tawny, like wild horses, but before them went a white horse,
the leader of the unearthly cavalry. It seemed to me that I was looking
at a ride of Valkyries, the Shield Maids of Odin hasting eastward to the
battle front to choose the dead for Valhalla.

Two days later Maurice came to me and told me that Bron was missing. The
chances were about equal that he was a prisoner, and for some time we
dared to hope. Then, early in December, we heard that he was dead. When
our troops advanced to victory in the autumn of 1918 they found his
grave.

There could be no sorrow in such a death, though for his friends an
undying regret. The homely English countryside, the return of spring,
the sports which he loved are the emptier for his absence. Maurice
Baring has written of this in his beautiful elegy.

  "So when the Spring of the world shall shrive our stain
   After the winter of war,
   When the poor world awakes to peace once more,
   After such night of ravage and of rain,
   You shall not come again.
   You shall not come to taste the old Spring weather,
   To gallop through the soft untrampled heather,
   To bathe and bake your body on the grass.
   We shall be there. Alas!
   But not with you. When Spring shall wake the earth,
   And quicken the scarred fields to the new birth,
   Our grief shall grow. For what can Spring renew
   More fiercely for us than the need of you?"

But Bron had been gathered into these things, for he belonged to them.
He was not quite of this world; or, rather, he was of an earlier, fairer
world that our civilisation has overlaid. He lived close to the kindly
earth, and then he discovered the kindlier air, and that pure exultant
joy of living which he had always sought. "In the hot fit of life"--the
words are Stevenson's--"a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he
passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and
chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when,
trailing with him clouds of glory, the happy-starred, full-blooded
spirit shoots into the spiritual land." But he had never been very far
from it. Death to him was less a setting forth than a returning.


IV

On foot, on a bicycle, or on horseback I explored Oxfordshire far
afield, from the Chilterns in the east to the Cotswolds, from the
Berkshire Downs to Edge Hill field, and many a desperate rush I had to
get back to college before midnight. A man is only truly intimate with
the countryside which he has known as a child, for then he lived very
near the ground, and knew the smell of the soil and the small humble
plants and the things that live at the roots of the grasses. He explored
it on all-fours, whereas he strides or gallops over later landscapes. I
have a host of memories of places which have strongly captured my fancy,
and sometimes my affection--in Europe, in the Virginian and New England
hills, above all in South Africa and in Canada. But I have never "taken
sasine" of them as I did of the Tweedside glens and in a lesser degree
of the Oxfordshire valleys. For with the first I had the intimacy of
childhood, and with the second of youth.

No one can understand Oxford unless he knows the Oxford countryside.
Half her beauty lies in her setting. Cambridge, which has many special
lovelinesses, is a city of the plains, and over what she calls her hills
one is apt to walk without noticing them. But Oxford has a cincture of
green uplands and a multitude of little valleys. It is only from her
adjacent heights that her charms can be comprised into one picture and
the true background found to her towers. Her history, too, or much of
it, was moulded by her environs. Oxfordshire was a famous place when
there were no human dwellings on the spit of gravel between the Cherwell
and the Isis. The Romans built their villas on these uplands long before
the Double Ford was discovered. The city, as it developed, drew much
from its neighbourhood and gave back much in return, and the records of
the two are closely interwoven.

A view from one of Oxford's hills shows at a glance how her importance
came about. The site at the Double Ford was an inspiration, for it was
the meeting-place of the great routes of southern England. If we take
our stand, say, on the Elsfield ridge, we can reconstruct the past.
Here from Saxon times was a clearing, but for the Middle Ages we must
see the rest of the landscape as a great mat of forest with the only
bare patches the tops of the Berkshire Downs and the far Cotswold, and
with a much bigger Isis and Cherwell making bands of light among the
narrow meadows.

The key is the Isis itself, for from very early days the valley of the
Thames was a main route for traffic between London and the west. The
slow-flowing river, with weirs from the start, and with locks after
Henry VIII, was the cheapest and easiest way for merchandise to the
towns and abbeys of the valley, and, with a short portage, to the Severn
and Wales. Up it London wares travelled in slow barges, and down it came
the wool and stone of Cotswold, the produce of the farms, and the
craftsman's work from the religious houses. At Oxford this trunk route
was cut by a road from south to north, from Southampton and the ports to
the Midlands. Oxford, walled and castled, with the mighty house of
Oseney at her western gates, would have been a place of importance
though she had never known a collegiate foundation, for apart from her
merchants was she not the chosen resort of royalty, the centre of a
famous monastic life, and a place of strategic value in any land war?

With the coming of the university the converging roads acquired a new
meaning and discovered a new type of traveller. Turbulent, disputatious
lads journeyed along them from all quarters to cluster round the lamp of
learning. From our viewpoint on the hill we can see how they came. Over
the Berkshire ridges they flocked from the southern shires, and some of
them from beyond the Channel. From London they came by what was one of
the oldest highroads in the land, that from the capital to Worcester
(the road by which Shakespeare must have often travelled), leaving it at
Wheatley for the final stage over Shotover. From the west they had the
road through Cotswold, by which the pack-trains of the wool-staplers
travelled, descending upon Oxford either by Woodstock or by Eynsham and
the Botley causeway. From the north they also followed the skirts of
Cotswold, for the valleys were too marshy. To all such pilgrims the
first sight of Oxford must have come with a shock of delighted surprise;
it is wonderful enough to see your goal on a far hill-top and travel
with it in sight for hours or days, but it is more wonderful to come on
it suddenly when you have wearily topped the last ridge. In those days
Oxford was close and compact, with no sprawling faubourgs, for her
ancient stones rose sharply from green meadows--such a view can still be
got to-day from the Elsfield hill. The first glimpse of the spire of St.
Mary's and the tall tower of Oseney--the third greatest in the land--as
seen from Shotover or Boar's Hill or over the Campsfield moor, must to
many a foot-sore pilgrim have come like the vision of John in Patmos.

From this hill we can reconstruct another great moment in history, when
Oxford and her countryside were linked in one dream--the Civil War and
the Siege. Charles held west England, his opponents London and the east,
and the ridge on which we stand, running north to the Brill upland and
lying half-way between Cotswold and the Chilterns, was a strategic point
in the campaign, for it must be occupied before the city could be
surrounded. So for two years there was a great marching and
counter-marching here. Boarstall castle towards Brill was defended for
the King. Islip bridge and the fords of Cherwell were vital points;
Parliament had its artillery park in the Elsfield clearing, and all the
adjacent towns were drawn into the orbit of war. The last act was played
at the foot of this hill, in the manor house of Marston, when Fairfax
and Rupert agreed the terms of Oxford's surrender.

So much for the history of the city. It is a long tale half-forgotten.
But the memory of it makes the Oxford country as haunted a place as any
in our land. From Roman centurion to Norman baron, from churchman to
cavalier, much of the drama of England was staged here. These things
have passed, but there remain the rural loveliness and the

     "bright and intricate device
  Of days and seasons."

Time has brought its wrongs. Boar's Hill and Cumnor, which I remember as
downs and cornfields, are now dotted with villas; Cowley is an
industrial town, and an eruption of red brick has spread far along the
Woodstock, Banbury and Iffley roads. But much of Oxfordshire is as
unspoilt as in the Middle Ages, and some of it is lonelier to-day than
then.

The hills remain, though two of them are a little marred. Wytham is
still a sanctuary, and the tableland of Shotover has been preserved. The
Elsfield ridge is unspoilt. Further afield there is nothing to complain
of. The hill-top of Brill, from which the eye may cover half the
southern midlands, is less urban to-day than at the beginning of last
century, when it threatened to become a spa and a rival of Bath. The
Ilsley downs are still thymy sheep-walks. The hillocks of the Bicester
country have not been touched by man. The long slopes of Cotswold, which
rise slowly from Woodstock and Ditchley and Witney to end in the scarp
above the Severn, are still a pastoral upland, hiding in their nooks the
loveliest of English villages. Oxford remains a lowland city, but with
gates opening on all sides into the hills.

The forests have for the most part given place to tillage and pasture,
though the self-sown saplings in the meadows are a reminder of the old
days of oak and ash and thorn. Stowood is now only a patch, but the
newer woods, which are called the Quarters, and which stretch along the
southern side of Otmoor, enable us to picture how Oxfordshire must have
looked in earlier times. The one great forest remnant is Wychwood,
between the Evenlode and the Windrush, several thousand acres of
unspoilt coppice and glade. But though the forests have mostly gone,
much of Oxfordshire remains forest country. There are still forest
crafts among the people and much of the wild life is the same. Wherever
it is permitted, bracken resumes its old dominion. Were the hand of man
withdrawn the shire would soon go back to primeval woodland.

The key to the Oxford topography is the valleys, for they are the
natural divisions. First there is the "stripling Thames," which above
Godstow becomes a different stream from the sophisticated lower river.
It twines through its meadows like a brook in a missal, always within
sight of uplands. If a man wants to recover the Middle Ages let him go
there on a summer day when the grass is high, and he will see and hear
nothing which was not there five hundred years ago when the monks of
Eynsham caught their Friday's trout. Of the tributaries two are wholly
lowland, the little Thame which threads the vale of Aylesbury, and the
Cherwell which rises far up in the Midlands. But the latter has an
affluent which traverses one of the wildest patches of south England,
for the Ray, which enters it at Islip, flows through the great marsh of
Otmoor. Otmoor is divided by rough hedges, but it is undrained, and
perhaps undrainable. In a wet winter it is one vast lagoon; in summer it
is a waste of lush grass, and its few mud tracks are pitted and ribbed
like the _seracs_ of a glacier. Once it was the preserve of the Seven
Towns of Otmoor which pastured their geese on it, and there were riots
early in last century when it was enclosed. Now the Royal Air Force has
a bombing-station there, and by day it is apt to be a noisy place, but
at night and in wild weather it recovers its loneliness. To ride or walk
there in an autumn twilight is to find oneself in a place as remote from
man as Barra or Knoydart.

But it is the little valleys which are the glory of the Oxford
countryside--those of Coln and Leach, Windrush and Evenlode. The first
two are in Gloucestershire, but the latter two are Oxford's avenues into
Cotswold. There we have a landscape which is still unravished. The names
of the streams are in themselves a melody, and the valleys wind into the
recesses of the hills so softly that they combine upland austerity with
lowland graces. What _The Scholar Gipsy_ and Thyrsis have done for
Oxford's immediate environs Mr. Belloc's _Dedicatory Ode_ does for those
magical little streams.

  "A lovely river, all alone,
    She lingers in the hills and holds
   A hundred little towns of stone,
    Forgotten in the western wolds."

And there are slender affluents of both--the Dickler, the Glyme, and the
Dorn--which a man may trace happily to their source during a long
summer's day.

To those bred in the Scottish Borders the Oxford landscape has always
had a peculiar charm. It laid its spell on Walter Scott, as _Kenilworth_
and _Woodstock_ witness, and on Andrew Lang, and ever since my
under-graduate days I have felt it. The reason, I think, is that it
recalls my native countryside, but with an entrancing difference. It is
pastoral, but it has no "pastoral melancholy." It is haunted, but only
by idyllic things. The shallows of the Windrush are never the "wan
water" of Yarrow. It is a country wholly and exquisitely fitted for the
gentler uses of life.


V

Oxford enabled me to discover Scotland. Before I came up I had explored
a great part of the Lowlands with the prosaic purpose of catching trout;
but apart from my own Borders, the land, though I was steeped in its
history, made no special appeal. Scottish literature, except the ballads
and Sir Walter Scott, was scarcely known to me, and I had read very
little of Robert Burns. But now as a temporary exile I acquired all the
characteristics of the Scot abroad. I became a fervent admirer of Burns
and a lover of Dunbar and the other poets of the Golden Age. I
cultivated a sentiment for all things Scottish and brought the Highlands
and the Isles into the orbit of my interest. A quarter of my blood was
Highland and in that I developed a new pride, for it was a time when
people talked of the "Celtic twilight," and Mr. Yeates had just
published his _Wind among the Reeds_. Oxford was full of Scotsmen of
every type--studious Scots, orgiastic Scots, rhetorical Scots who talked
in the Union, robustious Scots from the football teams. The result was a
new Caledonian Club. An earlier institution had been suppressed some
years before by the University authorities after a carnival of special
disorder. Some of us reconstituted it on an austere basis. It was
limited to members with a proven Scots descent on both sides for at
least three generations; an English club in the University, which
adopted the same principle, could only find two who passed the test
conditions! We specialized in vintage clarets and dined in a uniform of
green and purple, intended to represent the thistle in flower. _Semel
insanivimus omnes._

But the real Scotland for me was discovered in my spring walking tours
and my summer holidays. I had been a miserable headachy little boy, but
at the age of five I had a serious carriage accident, when my skull was
fractured, and I lay for the better part of a year in bed. I arose a new
child, and throughout all my youth I was as hardy as a seal; indeed,
apart from dysentery and a slight malaria in South Africa, I scarcely
had an ailment until the War. I was lean and tough in body, accustomed
to sleep out of doors in any weather, including December frosts, and,
though never an athlete, capable of a good deal of physical endurance.
Once I walked sixty-three miles on end in the Galloway hills. It was my
custom in the long vacations to bury myself in the moorlands, taking up
my quarters in a shepherd's cottage. There I rose early, worked for five
or six hours, and then went fishing until the summer midnight. I throve
on a diet of oatmeal, mutton and strong tea, and, with the habit to
which I have already referred of linking philosophy with terrestrial
objects, the works of Aristotle are for ever bound up for me with the
smell of peat reek and certain stretches of granite and heather.

The chief episodes were the spring walking tours. Each year after much
planning I would tramp with a friend or two on a circuit north of Tweed.
We covered the Cheviots from Liddesdale to the sea, and footed it over
most of Argyll and Lochaber. Those expeditions have given me memories of
which time has not dimmed the rapture. There would be wild days among
wet or snowy hills, or on moorland roads in the teeth of a hailstorm,
and nights in inns before roaring fires, when, replete and content, we
talked the rhetoric of youth. And there would be blue days beside
western sea-lochs when oyster-catchers piped on the shingle and curlews
wailed on the bent, and April evenings when the far mountains were
etched in violet against a saffron sky. After those escapades it was
always a little hard to adjust oneself to Oxford; the call of a more
strenuous world seemed to have broken in on our academic peace.

I was little use at games, but about this time I took to field sports.
About fishing I already knew a good deal, and now I discovered the charm
of the dry-fly, to which I was introduced on some college water on the
Windrush. In the spring tours I began mountaineering, on the Buachaille
Etive Mhor, and the Glencoe peaks, and the north-east face of Ben Nevis.
I took to shooting also, especially rough shooting, for I never cared
much for a battue of pheasants or a grouse drive; my preference was for
some place like the delectable island of Colonsay where in a day it was
possible to get a dozen varieties of game. At that time the Mecca of
sport for us was the house of Ardwall in Kirkcudbrightshire, the home of
Lord Ardwall, the last of the great "characters" on the Scottish Bench
and a figure who might have stepped out of a Raeburn canvas. There
between the hills and the sea a party of us foregathered each autumn.
Those were royal days when we rode and walked and shot all over
Galloway as far as the Dungeon of Buchan, and returned in the small
hours of the morning to prodigious feasts. Looking back it is hard to
see how we escaped with our lives, for we would hunt the hare on
horseback with greyhounds among the briars and bogs and boulders of a
Galloway moor, and swim our horses over the estuary of the Fleet at high
tide. We almost came to believe that our necks were spared for the
judicial end which Lord Ardwall always predicted.


VI

It was a secure and comfortable world, that close of Victoria's reign
before the disillusion and change of the South African War. Peace
brooded over the land and we should not have believed a prophet had he
told us that most of our group would fall in battle. We were hardly
aware of the problems of the State or its demands upon our services, and
the University Volunteers had a hard time keeping up their strength. It
was the day when Mr. Chamberlain was preaching a new gospel of empire,
and Lord Milner beginning his difficult course in South Africa, but we
were scarcely conscious of their efforts, except to laugh at Raymond
Asquith's parodies of Kipling. There were political clubs--like the
Conservative Canning and Chatham, and the Liberal Palmerston and
Russell; but they were chiefly pretexts for annual dinners, when
statesmen came up to speak to audiences which were interested in their
persons but apathetic about their policies. I called myself a Tory and
belonged to the Canning, but that club at two successive meetings, after
drinking Church and King, had by a large majority disestablished the
Church and nationalised the land of England; and it had adventurous
members who belonged also to the Fabian Society. Raymond Asquith and I
at the Union usually spoke on the same side on foreign affairs and
always carried our motion. When we troubled our heads about politics we
debated questions by the cold light of reason, oblivious of party
fervours. There were, of course, busy partisans who pulled wires and
spoke at by-elections, but they were not highly regarded. The statesmen
who visited us did not greatly impress me, with one exception. I met Sir
Wilfrid Laurier at an All Souls luncheon, and began an acquaintance
which in later years I highly valued.

After the War I came to live near Oxford and have had the chance ever
since of studying the young entries. How shall I compare them with my
own generation? Upon them has fallen the shadow of economic disaster, so
that Oxford cannot seem an end in itself as it seemed to us, but only a
means of finding a niche in the world. Moreover, transport facilities
have made the place less of a sanctuary which devised its own life, and
more of a London suburb. The modern undergraduates are what we should
have called "banausic," with a strict utilitarian outlook. For their
virtues: they are more temperate and frugal than we were, less snobbish
about athletics, more industrious, better sons to their parents, and, I
am inclined to think, better mannered. For their defects: they lack our
disinterested curiosity about the things of the mind, and in the broad
sense they are less well-educated. Their average man lacks our average
man's general culture. They tend to fall into grooves and exclusive
cliques. The Union, for example, is a resort only for earnest
politicians, chiefly of the left wing, and its debating quality seems to
me to have declined, as has its catholicity of membership; in my time
everybody belonged to it and more than one rowing Blue was president.

But the spirit of physical adventure, I believe, is more alive to-day
than ever. A few years ago I made a list of how some of my son's
contemporaries were spending the long vacation and found the following:
as deckhand in a Hull trawler in the White Sea; working at the Canadian
harvest; as purser in a South American liner; helping Welsh miners to
cultivate the land; trading old rifles in the Arctic for walrus ivory!
It is as though they felt they were living in a hard and dangerous world
and were resolved there should be no experience they could not face. And
one characteristic they have in which we were sadly lacking. They feel
their responsibility to the State. Politics have become for them a
serious personal duty. Youth is inclined to political extremes, and it
is small wonder that the causes which most appeal to them are the
grandiloquent world-reconstructions; but the reason, I think, is not
only the rhetorical turn of youth, but the fact that such causes require
sacrifices and an austere discipline. Since most Englishmen over thirty
are inclined to compromise, it is right that some Englishmen under
thirty should redress the balance by extravagance.

During my four years at Oxford I read hard and finished with a
considerable stock of miscellaneous knowledge. That mattered little, but
the trend which my mind acquired mattered much. Generally speaking, I
accepted the brand of idealism which was then fashionable, that derived
from Thomas Hill Green, and expounded in my day by F. A. Bradley, and H.
H. Joachim. More and more I became sceptical of dogmas, looking upon
them as questions rather than answers. Philosophy did not give us
solutions, but it taught us to ask the right questions, about which we
could cheerfully go on disputing until the dawn put our candles out. The
limited outlook of my early youth had broadened. Formerly I had regarded
life as a pilgrimage along a strait and steep path on which the pilgrim
must keep his eyes fixed. I prided myself on a certain moral austerity,
but now I came to realise that there was a good deal of self-interest in
that outlook, like the Puritan who saw in his creed not only the road to
Heaven but the way to worldly success. I began to be attracted by the
environs as well as by the road, and I became more charitable in my
judgment of things and men.

I had some of my Gothic corners smoothed away, but I still had a good
many angles, and there remained a large spice of the Shorter Catechist
in my make-up. Just as my walks were not random contemplative saunters,
but attempts to get somewhere, so a worthy life seemed to me to be a
series of efforts to conquer intractable matter, to achieve something
difficult and perhaps dangerous. Much as I detested Napoleon, I was for
him, as against Thackeray in his "Ballad of the Drum":


  "Come fill me one more glass of wine
   And give the silly fools their will."

Even a perverse career of action seemed to me better than a tippling of
ale in the shade, for that way lay the cockney suburbanism which was my
secret terror. Again, while I was very conscious of man's littleness in
face of the eternal I believed profoundly in his high destiny. Human
beings were compounded of both heavenly and hellish elements, with
infinite possibilities of sorrow and joy. In consequence I had an acute
sense of sin, and a strong hatred of whatever debased human nature. The
conception of mankind, current in some quarters, as a herd of guzzling,
lecherous little mammals seemed to me the last impiety.

Had I wished it, I could have stayed on and taught philosophy. But at
the end of my fourth year I had come to feel that I was not sufficiently
devoted to any branch of learning to give up my life to it, either as
don or professor. I wanted a stiffer job, one with greater hazards in
it, and I was not averse to one which offered bigger material rewards.
The supreme advantage of Oxford to me was that it enabled me to discover
what talents I had and what I really wanted to do. Horizons had extended
and revealed a surprising number of things which woke my curiosity. I
wanted to explore the wider stages of life. Besides, I had become
attached to the study of law, and under the inspiration of a great
scholar, the late A. H. J. Greenidge, had taken a lively interest in the
most arid details of the Greek and Roman legal systems.

So I decided that my profession should be the Bar.




CHAPTER IV

LONDON INTERLUDE


I went to London at the beginning of 1900, in the darkest period of the
South African War. At the outbreak of that war (after walking for hours
one night on the Embankment) I decided that it was not my duty to
volunteer for service, and presently I had almost forgotten public
affairs in the excitement of a new profession.

To pass from Oxford, where one was in a modest way a personage, to the
utter insignificance of a unit among metropolitan millions, was a harsh
and wholesome experience. In my early weeks at Brasenose I had been
lonely--I remember how the odour of tea sharpened my homesickness!--but
my first weeks in London were a worse solitude. On my frequent visits to
keep my terms at the Bar I had found the place friendly and gay. Now it
was flat, dingy and inhospitable. It seemed to have an engrossing life
of its own which had no link with my former worlds. My first rooms were
in Brick Court, the ugliest part of the Temple; they were small and new,
reached by a staircase of lavatory bricks, and with no prospect but
chimney-pots. Later I moved to pleasant chambers in Temple Gardens,
where I had a view of the river, and at night in winter could hear
overhead the calling of wild birds in their flight upstream.

In a month my loneliness had gone, and I had become an ardent student of
the law. I spent some months in an office in Bedford Row with a firm of
solicitors who had a large agency business, and learned there the minor
details of practice. Then I went to read with John Andrew Hamilton, the
future Lord Sumner, and was his last pupil before he took silk. That was
a privilege for which I shall always be grateful, for it gave me the
friendship of a great lawyer, who, in the evenings when the Courts had
risen, would discourse cynically and most brilliantly on men and
affairs. Then I passed to the chambers of the junior counsel to the
Inland Revenue, who, as Sir Sydney Rowlatt, was to have a distinguished
career on the Bench. From Rowlatt I learned many lessons, chief of which
was that scholarship was as valuable in law as in other things. He
taught me to look always for principles, and if necessary to search far
back in legal history. Moreover he stripped the subject of pedantry and
dullness; he had the same boyish zest in tracking out a legal conundrum
as in sailing his little yacht in the gusty Channel.

The consequence was that I became an enthusiast for the law. In those
days the Bar examinations were trivial, and I succeeded in being
ploughed once in my finals through treating the thing too cavalierly.
But I toiled prodigiously at my own kind of study. I read the Law
Reports avidly. I discovered an antiquary's zeal in tracing the origins
of legal doctrine. My favourite light reading was the lives of lawyers.
I developed a special admiration for Mansfield, and, finding that the
life of the great Chief Justice had never been written, I set myself to
remedy the lack. To this day I possess three stout volumes in which I
have analysed and classified every one of his decisions. I had no
ambition at the time except legal success, and politics I thought of
only as a step to that goal. It seemed to me that the position of a
judge was the most honourable, dignified and independent of any--ease
without idleness, an absorbing intellectual pursuit in which daily one
became more of a master. My view was that of _Weir of Hermiston_: "To be
wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in
life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this
devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find
continued rewards without excitement." Moreover another side of me loved
the appurtenances of it all--the Inns of Court with their stately
dining-halls and their long histories, the ritual of the Bar and Bench,
the habits of mind and the ways of speech of the profession, the sense
that here was the hoar-ancient intimately linked to modern uses.

It was a pleasant apprenticeship, for I had not the nervous strain of a
busy lawyer who has to struggle with obtuse juries and captious judges.
I had the mental interest of determining the precise significance of
words, using what sailors call cross-bearings, elucidating shades of
meaning and _nuances_ of atmosphere--the interest of a mathematical
proof, or a chess conundrum, or an elaborate piece of classical music. I
had the historical interest of tracing doctrines back to their dim
beginnings. I had the more human interest of watching the play of able
minds and of seeing life vividly from a special angle. I am convinced
that an education in the humanities should be supplemented and corrected
by a training either in law or in some exact science. Besides it admits
one to a great and loyal brotherhood. Once a lawyer always a lawyer.
Though I soon ceased to practice, for years I read the law reports first
in the morning paper, and fragments of legal jargon still tend to
intrude themselves in my literary style.

If I was an industrious apprentice I was also a happy one. The spell of
London wove itself around me. Fleet Street and the City had still a
Dickens flavour, and Hollywell Street had not been destroyed. In the
daytime, with my fellow solicitors'-clerk, I penetrated into queer
alleys and offices which in appearance were unchanged since Mr.
Pickwick's day. On foggy evenings I would dine beside a tavern fire on
the kind of fare which Mr. Weller affected. Behind all the dirt and
gloom there was a wonderful cosiness, and every street corner was
peopled by ghosts from literature and history. I acquired a passion for
snugness, which I fancy is commoner in youth than is generally supposed.
A young man, a little awed by the novelty of everything, is eager to
find his own secure niche. At any rate I, who had begun by regarding
life as a strenuous pilgrimage, and at Oxford had come to interest
myself in the environs of the road, was now absorbed by the wayside
gardens and inclined to dally at the inns.

I had lost any wish ever to leave England, for it seemed to me that I
could not exhaust the delights of my own country. I had never desired
possessions, regarding them as a clog rather than a blessing, but now I
toyed with the idea of a house of my own with a good library, and
especially of a Scots moorland dwelling to which I could retire for the
legal vacations. Unconsciously I was "ranging" myself and acquiring the
habit of mind of that suburbanite who had once been my dread. The gipsy
impulse which had dominated my boyhood seemed to have vanished. I saw
without regret my path marked out for me, a straight and decorous
highroad. My love of country life had not diminished, but I was content
with a trim, habitable countryside. Andrew Lang and I shared a rod on a
little dry-fly trout stream in Hertfordshire, where I spent many
pleasant Saturdays, and he used to laugh at my new-found enthusiasm for
lowland waters, as he jeered at my absorption in law. He thought it a
sad descent from the Borderer and erstwhile Jacobite.

Another proof of the new mood was the attachment I acquired to the
eighteenth century. Before, my favourite century had been the
seventeenth with occasional leanings to the sixteenth, and the age of
Anne and the Georges had interested me only in their connection with the
Jacobite risings. Now I found a supreme attraction in the "teacup
times," a consequence, no doubt, of my new profession, for they were a
happy season for lawyers. They were also the era when urban life in
England came to its flower, and I was rapidly becoming a Cit. The taste
was shared by my friends, and we wrote to each other in the manner of
Horace Walpole. The affectation must have sat ill on me, for I was not
born with much devotion to the bric--brac of life. I had become a close
student of eighteenth-century memoirs, and the fad had one good result,
for it made me a devotee of Edmund Burke. Also it led me to appreciate
many pleasant things on which I had hitherto cast a lack-lustre eye. Dr.
Johnson's is a sound philosophy: "Life is barren enough surely with all
her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her."

London at the turn of the century had not yet lost her Georgian air. Her
ruling society was aristocratic till Queen Victoria's death and
preserved the modes and rites of an aristocracy. Her great houses had
not disappeared or become blocks of flats. In the summer she was a true
city of pleasure, every window-box gay with flowers, her streets full of
splendid equipages, the Park a showground for fine horses and handsome
men and women. The ritual went far down, for frock-coats and top-hats
were the common wear not only for the West End, but about the Law Courts
and in the City. On Sunday afternoons we dutifully paid a round of
calls. Conversation was not the casual thing it has now become, but was
something of an art, in which competence conferred prestige. Also clubs
were still in their hey-day, their waiting lists were lengthy, and
membership of the right ones was a stage in a career. I could belong, of
course, to none of the famous institutions; my clubs were young men's
clubs, where I met my university friends. One was the Cocoa Tree in St.
James's Street, a place with a long and dubious history, of which the
bronze cocoa-tree in the smoking-room, stuffed with ancient packs of
cards, was a reminder. At that time its membership was almost confined
to young men from Oxford and Cambridge. I belonged also to the
Bachelors', then situated at the foot of Hamilton Place, a pleasant
resort for idle youth, from whose bay-windows one could watch the tide
of fashion flowing between Hyde Park and Piccadilly.

Now I made my first real entry into the society of my elders. Youth and
age were not segregated then as they tend to be to-day, and a young man
had the chance of meeting and talking with his seniors and betters--an
excellent thing, for to mix with abler men than yourself is to learn
humility. It was an era of big dinner parties, where there was far too
much to eat, but where the men sat long at table and there was plenty of
good talk. Those dinners must have been a heavy imposition on tired folk
with feeble digestions, but they were fascinating things for the
eupeptic newcomer. I had the opportunity of meeting people whose careers
stretched, it seemed to me, far back into history--Lord Rowton, who
talked to me of Disraeli; judges like Lord Halsbury, who remembered the
days before the Judicature Acts; elder statesmen like Lord Goschen on
one side and Lord Rosebery on the other. With Canon Ainger, who was then
Master of the Temple, I dined nearly every week. I frankly enjoyed
dining out. For a minnow like myself there was the chance of meeting new
and agreeable minnows, and the pleasure of gazing with awe up the table
where at the hostess's side was some veritable triton.

Then there were the week-ends, when for the first time I saw the inside
of great English dwellings, my visits having been hitherto confined to
modest Scottish country houses. I must have been an unsatisfactory
week-end guest, for after long confinement in London the sight of the
countryside intoxicated me, and I would disappear early on the Sunday
morning and return late at night, sometimes--to the disgust of my
hostess--taking with me some guest whose company was more desired than
my own.

Looking back, that time seems to me unbelievably secure and
self-satisfied. The world was friendly and well-bred, as I remember it,
without the vulgarity and the worship of wealth which appeared with the
new century. Its strength was its steadiness of nerve, its foible its
complacence--both soon to be rudely shattered. Public affairs were
pretty much left to the professionals, and except among them there was
no strong interest in politics. The South African War affected only
those who had kin in the fighting ranks. I supplemented my income by
articles in the _Spectator_, of which I came to be a sort of
assistant-editor. Usually I wrote on foreign affairs, sometimes on legal
points, but I cannot remember having a strong interest in any of my
subjects. My kind colleagues were in the same case. Both St. Loe
Strachey and Meredith Townsend were by nature prophets and
propagandists, but the first had to content himself with amateur
military criticism, and the second with apocalyptic murmurings about the
Far East. Nowhere on the surface, as I remember the time, could one
discern any strong movement of popular emotion of thought.

Then one day early in the August of 1901 I was suddenly jolted out of my
comfortable rut, for I accepted the invitation of Lord Milner, who was
home on leave, to go with him to South Africa.




CHAPTER V

FURTH FORTUNE


It was a change with a vengeance. Hitherto I had lived among books and
in a society where books were a major interest. My approach to practical
life had been from the side of theory. My colleagues had been people
with the same background as myself. Now my duties were to be concerned
with things for which my education had in no way prepared me, and my
daily associates were to be for the most part drawn from worlds of which
I had no experience. But in my new vocation I had two advantages. My
Oxford circle had had a notable culture, but we did not make too much of
it. We cherished it as a private delight, and did not exaggerate its
value. We were modest people, anxious to learn, and disposed perhaps to
be over-humble in face of an unbookish world. Again, educated society
had not absorbed my time, for I had spent long parts of each year among
shepherds, gillies, keepers, fishermen, poachers, and other men of their
hands, and had a great liking for such company.

I had never been out of Britain--indeed I had never wanted to. In London
I had slipped into a sort of spiritual middle-age. Now, at the age of
twenty-five, youth came back to me like a spring tide, and every day on
the voyage to the Cape saw me growing younger. As soon as we had passed
the Bay of Biscay I seemed to be in a new world, with new scents, new
sounds, new sights. I was intoxicated with novelties of which hitherto I
had only had glimpses in books. The blue days in tropical waters were a
revelation of bodily and mental ease. I recovered the same exhilaration
which long ago, as a boy on the Fife coast, I had got from the summer
sea. This mood continued until the morning when I looked out of a
port-hole and saw Table Mountain rising into the clouds; it was not
broken by a week's jolting in a slow train through the Karroo and the
dusty Free State; its exhilaration even survived the decanting of a very
homesick youth in an unlovely Johannesburg street at what I suppose to
have been the most comfortless hotel in the world.


I

I had only met Lord Milner once before, but the name had been long
familiar to me, for at Oxford men spoke it reverentially. He had won
every kind of academic honour and had impressed Jowett as the ablest man
of his time. He had risen fast in the public service in Egypt and
Whitehall; had gone to South Africa with the good-will of all parties;
had there become the most controversial figure in the Empire, applauded
by many as the strong man in a crisis, bitterly criticised by others as
bearing the chief responsibility of the war. Here was Plato's
philosopher-turned-king, a scholar who in his middle forties had made
history.

The first impression I had was that there was very few signs of the
scholar, except in the fastidious rationalism of his thought. In his
speaking and writing he had none of the literary graces, except order
and lucidity. Though deeply versed in the classics I never knew him
quote Latin or Greek. A small, well-thumbed library accompanied him
about the world, but he seemed to read little, and he had no taste for
new books. Mr. Asquith overflowed with literary interests and was always
reading; Lord Cromer, who had more or less educated himself, loved
dearly a learned reference; even Lord Curzon could unbend joyfully and
talk books. But I do not remember that Milner ever showed a craving for
literature or for any of the arts, any more than for games and sports.
One of the finest scholars of his age, he had put away his scholarship
on a high shelf.

I believe that this was done deliberately. Early in life he became aware
that he had a limited stock of vitality, bodily and mental. He could do
some things superbly, but not many at the same time. He had none of the
overflowing, boisterous facility of certain types. He had
received--chiefly from Arnold Toynbee--an inspiration which centred all
his interests on the service of the State. He had the instincts of a
radical reformer joined to a close-textured intellect which reformers
rarely possess. He had a vision of the Good Life spread in a wide
commonalty; and when his imagination apprehended the Empire his field of
vision was marvellously enlarged. So at the outset of his career he
dedicated himself to a cause, putting things like leisure, domestic
happiness and money-making behind him. In Bacon's phrase he espoused the
State. On the intellectual side he found that which wholly satisfied him
in the problems of administration, when he confronted them as Goschen's
secretary, and in Egypt and at Somerset House. He had a mind remarkable
both for its scope and its mastery over details--the most powerful
administrative intelligence, I think, which Britain has produced in our
day. If I may compare him with others, he was as infallible as Cromer in
detecting the centre of gravity in a situation, as brilliant as Alfred
Beit in bringing order out of tangled finances, and he had Curzon's
power of keeping a big organisation steadily at work. He was no
fanatic--his intellect was too supreme for that, but in the noblest
sense of the word he was an enthusiast.

He narrowed his interests of set purpose, and this absorption meant a
certain rigidity. He had cut himself off from some of the emollients of
life. Consequently the perfect administrator was a less perfect
diplomatist. When I went to South Africa I was aware that he had been
much criticised for what happened before the outbreak of war, but that
subject did not concern me. My business was with the future, not with
the past, about which I did not trouble to form an opinion. To-day,
after more than a quarter of a century's friendship, I can see that
Milner was bound to have certain limits in negotiation. He was not very
good at envisaging a world wholly different from his own, and his world
and Kruger's at no point intersected. There was a gnarled magnificence
in the old Transvaal President, but he saw only a snuffy, mendacious
savage. It was the fashion among his critics to believe that a little
geniality on Milner's part, something of the hail-fellow,
masonic-lodge atmosphere, would have brought the Bloemfontein conference
to a successful conclusion. Such a view seems to me to do justice
neither to Kruger nor to Milner, men deeply in earnest who were striving
for things wholly incompatible, an Old Testament patriarchal regime and
a modern democracy. I doubt if a compromise was ever possible, though a
delay might have been contrived which would have given a chance to the
more liberal elements in the Transvaal, like Joubert and Louis Botha.
Anyhow I am certain that Milner was the last man for the task. He
detested lies, and diplomacy demands something less than the plain
truth. He was nothing of the countryman, and could not understand the
tortuosities of the peasant mind. His spiritual integrity made it
difficult for him, when he had studied a problem, to temporise about the
solution which he thought inevitable. Such a course seemed to him to
involve some intellectual cowardice, some dereliction of duty, and to
duty he had a Roman faithfulness.

It is easy to see that he could never have been a popular leader. He
profoundly distrusted rhetoric. He had no means of getting his
personality across to masses of people, and, even if he had had the
means, that personality could never have attracted the multitude; it was
insufficiently coloured, too austere, too subtle. Gold must have some
alloy in it before it can become coinage in circulation. But as an
administrator he had no equal. In South Africa in a year or two he had
rebuilt the land from its foundations and given it the apparatus of
civilisation. The impress of his strong hand is still on its
institutions. In the Great War, from 1916 to 1918, he was the executant
of the War Cabinet who separated the sense from the nonsense in the
deliberations of that body, and was responsible for its chief practical
achievements. To him were largely due the fruitful things which emerged
from the struggle, the new status of the Dominions and the notable
advances in British social policy. Sometimes he was overruled, and he
has been credited with schemes to which he was strongly opposed. In
South Africa, for example, he differed about some of the more
contentious measures dictated by military policy. In 1918 he advocated a
liberal attitude towards the conquered Powers and protested in vain
against certain extravagances of Versailles.

In what precisely lay his administrative genius? I can only give the
impressions of a humble fellow-worker. In the first place he had in a
high degree what Cavour called the _tact des choses possibles_. The
drawback to a completely rational mind is that it is apt to assume that
what is flawless in logic is therefore practicable. Milner never made
that mistake; he knew too well the stubborn illogicality of facts. But
he seemed to have an instinct for what was possible, an extra sense
which must have been due to nature and not to experience, for he had not
direct knowledge of very many walks in life. How often he would study a
scheme of mine with knitted brows, and lay it down with a smile. "Very
pretty; but it won't work!"

Next I should put the orderliness of his mind and his capacious memory.
He could control any number of wires at once, for he had all the
terminals in his hand. Things, too, were kept in their proper
perspective; recollection did not amplify some and lessen others, for
his mind did not make pictures, but did what Napoleon recommended, and
saw facts in their true proportions as if through a telescope. Hence it
was not necessary for him to concentrate on one matter rather than on
another; he could keep a score steadily moving under his hand. For
finance he had a peculiar genius. Figures to him were real counters of
thought, and a balance sheet as lucid as a page of print. A good
accountant no doubt has this gift, but Milner supplemented it with a
rarer endowment, the power of divining the item on which everything
hung. He could do what the lumberman does in a log-jam, and pick out the
key log which, once moved, sets the rest going. He was thorough, too,
scamping no detail, and not easily satisfied. I have gone over with him
trivial contracts in connection with land settlement to which he gave
all the diligence of a conveyancing counsel.

But his greatest administrative gift was his courage. He had what the
French know as _courage de tte_, the boldness to trust his reason. When
he had satisfied himself about a particular course--and he took long to
satisfy--his mind seemed to lock down on it, and after that there was
no going back. Doubts were done with, faced and resolved; he moved with
the confident freedom of a force of nature. It was a dangerous gift for
a statesman in a democracy where policy to the end must often be kept
fluid, but, for the maker of a new country or the restorer of a broken
one, it was an endowment beyond price.

For the better part of three years I had the privilege of watching this
strong mind at work. But a higher privilege was that I was brought into
close touch with a great character. Milner was the most selfless man I
have ever known. He thought of his work and his cause, much of his
colleagues, never of himself. He simply was not interested in what
attracts common ambition. He could not be bribed, for there was nothing
on the globe wherewith to bribe him; or deterred by personal criticism,
for he cared not at all for fame; and it would have been as easy to
bully the solar system, since he did not know the meaning of fear. He
was a solitary man; but his loneliness never made him aloof and chilly,
and in his manner there was always a gentle, considerate courtesy. I
have worked with him often when he was desperately tired, but I never
remember an impatient or querulous word. He was a stern judge of
himself, but lenient to other people. Once I was involved in an
unpleasant and rather dangerous business, for which I was not to blame,
but the burden of which I was compelled to shoulder. I consulted Milner
and he gave me the advice which he would have given himself, to go
through with it whatever happened; it was the highest compliment I have
ever been paid. For the humble and unfortunate he had infinite charity,
and out of small resources he was always helping lame dogs. Often he got
little gratitude, and when I would remonstrate he had the same answer:
"The man's miserable, and misery has no manners."


II

Milner's friends were his own college contemporaries and the young men
whom he gathered round him. In those days we were a very young company,
which Johannesburg, not unkindly, labelled the "Kindergarten." Our
_doyen_ was Patrick Duncan, who had been brought out from Somerset House
to take charge of the Transvaal's finances. Milner himself and his
personal staff lived in a red brick villa, called Sunnyside, in the
suburbs. His military secretary was Major William Lambton of the
Coldstream Guards, and his aides-de-camp were Lord Brooke (afterwards
Lord Warwick) and Lord Henry Seymour. Among the secretaries were
Geoffrey Dawson, Lord Basil Blackwood, Hugh Wyndham and Gerard Craig
Sellar. There was also a group who had special tasks assigned to them;
it included Lionel Curtis, R. H. Brand, Lionel Hichens and Philip Kerr.
Hugh Wyndham and I shared a staff cottage at the gate of Sunnyside, but
most of my time was spent ranging the country from the Cape to the
Limpopo.

It was a pleasant and most varied company, wonderfully well agreed, for,
having a great deal to do, we did not get in each other's way. Loyalty
to Milner and his creed was a strong cement which endured long after our
South African service ended, since the _Round Table_ coterie in England
continued the Kindergarten. When I look back upon that companionship my
feelings are like those in Thackeray's _Bouillabaisse_ ballad and
Praed's poem on his Eton contemporaries, for since those days "the world
hath waged apace." Lionel Curtis, having arranged the affairs of South
Africa, India, China and Ireland, is a philosopher on the banks of the
Cherwell; Lionel Hichens is head of a great shipbuilding firm, and
Robert Brand an illustrious London banker; Philip Kerr is Lord Lothian,
a political thinker of international repute, and now British Ambassador
at Washington; Patrick Duncan is the present Governor-General of South
Africa; Geoffrey Dawson has for many years controlled _The Times_.

Most are dead. Billy Lambton (whom I held in affectionate awe, for he
used to take me riding before breakfast and expound my shortcomings)
commanded the 4th Division at the battle of the Somme and shortly
afterwards had a riding accident which made him a cripple for life.
Henry Seymour had a distinguished War record, finishing as a
brigadier-general, commanded his own regiment, the Grenadier Guards, and
died in 1939. Guy Brooke, after adventures in many parts of the globe,
had a Canadian brigade in the War and died in the first decade of peace.
Gerard Sellar succeeded to great wealth, and his Highland home,
Ardtornish, was the meeting place for all of us till his sudden death in
1929. With him something very rare and fine, generosity without limit
and the kindliest, most whimsical humour, was lost to the world.

Of Basil Blackwood I had heard much at Oxford, but he was so often out
of England on hunting trips and other ventures that I had never met him
until I found him in South Africa. He was precisely such a figure as I
had expected from his reputation. I remember him as he first appeared in
that ugly office in Johannesburg, where we occupied adjacent rooms.
Slight in build, with a beautifully shaped head and soft, dark sleepy
eyes, everything about him--voice, manner, frame--was fine and delicate.
His air was full of a quiet cheerfulness, with a suggestion of
devilment in the background as if he were only playing at decorum. I can
see him with his dog Gyp, walking with his light foot on the dusty red
roads; or cantering among the blue gums, for he was never long out of
the saddle. With his pointed face and neat black moustache he had the
air of a Spanish hidalgo, and there was always about him a certain
silken foreign grace. Once I saw the hidalgo capering down the road on
an elegant mule; but a mule's shoulders are precarious things, and the
next I knew was that rider and saddle had gone over the beast's head
into the dust.

It was Basil who introduced the fantastic element that kept us from the
usual ennui of a staff. His serene good temper was unshakable, and I do
not think he was ever bored in his life. He had the expectant mood and
was always waiting for adventure to turn up. In his official work he had
some difficulty in restraining his propensity to make fun of things. He
drafted despatches for Milner to sign, and I remember one which began:
"With reference to my able despatch of such and such a date,"--an
opening which, had it been sent in that form, would have startled the
Colonial Office.

He was always drawing in that brilliant manner he had discovered for
himself, for he had never been taught by anybody. I recollect hundreds
of sketches, some of which I possess, admirable in wit and bold
draftsmanship. He used to illustrate despatches for our private
edification. One contained the information that "The Land Board is
empowered to make advances to settlers." Basil drew a picture of a gross
and sentimental Land Board making advances to a coy settler. He and I
projected a Child's History of South Africa, for which he was to do the
drawings and I the verses. The work had perforce to stop, having become
too scandalous. My rhymes were bad enough, but Basil's pictures of
Dingaan's Day and of some of the semitic kings of the Rand were an
outrage.

Most of us returned from South Africa to our different professions, but
Basil scorned his proper trade of the law, and preferred a life of
interest to a career of success. The truth is he was not the kind of man
who falls easily into a groove. He was too versatile, too much in love
with the coloured aspects of life, and too careless of worldly wisdom.
For one calling, indeed, he had the highest talent. Not for nothing was
he the son of Lord Dufferin, Viceroy and Ambassador. He had an
hereditary instinct for administration and diplomacy, and his gift of
winning popularity, his charm of manner, his fine sense of atmosphere,
his imagination and his very real love of his fellow creatures would
have made him the perfect colonial governor. He should have begun at the
top, for he was better fitted for that than for any intermediate stage.

In one thing he was wholly successful. He was the most cherished and
welcome of friends. Whenever he appeared he brought warmth and colour
into the air. It is difficult to describe the fascination of his company
because it depended on so many subtle things--a peculiar grace and
gentleness of manner; a perpetual expectation, as if the world were
enormously bigger and more interesting than people thought; a spice,
too, of devil-may-careness, which made havoc of weary partition walls.
He was an incomparable letter-writer, the best I have ever known save
Raymond Asquith and T. E. Lawrence, and he had the extra advantage of
being able to illustrate his epistles.

To him the first hint of war was like the first waft of scent to a pack
of hounds. He was off like an arrow on the old search for adventure. He
began by being attached to the 9th Lancers, and in October 1914 was
badly wounded at Messines. After some time in Ireland he received a
commission in the Grenadiers, and went to France early in 1917. In July
of that year the British armies were beginning to get into position for
the third Battle of Ypres, and all along the front there was a
succession of raids on the enemy lines. On the night of the 3rd Basil
led one of these forays and did not return. It was of a piece with the
anomalies of the War that a man of such varied powers and rich
experience should fall at the age of forty-six as a second-lieutenant.

The phrase "Elizabethan," too casually applied, can be used with truth
of Basil. He was of the same breed as the slender gallants who singed
the beard of the King of Spain and, like Essex, tossed their plumed hats
into the sea in joy of the enterprise, or who sold their swords to
whatever cause had daylight and honour in it. His like had left their
bones in farther spaces than any race on earth, and from their
unchartered wanderings our empire was born. He did not seek to do things
so much as to see them, to be among them and to live in the atmosphere
of wonder and gay achievement. He was not like Bron Lucas, a gipsy, for
he was a creature of civilisation, but of another civilisation than
ours. If spirits return into human shape perhaps his once belonged to a
young grandee of the Lisbon court who stormed with Albuquerque the
citadels of the Indies and died in the quest for Prester John. He had
the streak of Ariel in him, and his fancy had always wings. "For to
admire and for to see" was his motto. In a pedestrian world he held to
the old cavalier grace, and wherever romance called he followed with
careless gallantry.


III

My nominal post was that of assistant private secretary, but, apart from
drafting a certain number of despatches, I had none of the ordinary
secretarial duties. In that strenuous time it was a case of all hands to
the pump, and I was given a series of emergency tasks which were
intended to prepare the ground for a normal administration. Since the
War had smashed the old machine it meant starting at the beginning and
dealing in bold improvisations. Not many young men with an academic past
are given such a chance of grappling with the raw facts of life.
Mistakes were many, for the road was largely unmapped and we had to
proceed by trial and error. But the worst blunder would have been
supineness, and we were not supine.

My first job was to take over on behalf of the civilian government the
concentration camps for women and children established by the army.
These at the start, in spite of the best intentions, were no better than
lazar-houses, for to bring into close contact people accustomed to
living far apart was to invite epidemics. When we took charge the worst
was over, and in our period of administration we turned them into health
resorts, with the assistance of officers seconded from the Indian
Medical service and a committee of English ladies under Dame Millicent
Fawcett. The camps gave us a chance, too, of laying the foundations of a
new system of elementary education. It was a queer job for a young man,
whose notions of hygiene to begin with were of the sketchiest, and to
whom infantile diseases were as much a mystery as hyper-space. The word
of a bachelor carried no weight with the Boer mothers, so, in order to
speak with authority. I had to invent a wife and a numerous progeny.

Next, with the end of the war in sight, we had to prepare for the
repatriation of the Boer inhabitants from the commandos, the
concentration camps, and the prisoner-of-war camps overseas. This was a
heavy business, and it had to be done at racing speed. Since so much of
the land was devastated, huts and tents and building material had to be
provided in vast quantities; transport, too; horses and mules and
cattle; seeds and every kind of agricultural implement; as well as
rations for many months. We had the help of people with an intimate
knowledge of the country, and the task was duly accomplished, though at
a high cost owing to the necessity for speed. I have always considered
repatriation a really creditable achievement. We had no luck, for the
first year of peace saw a serious drought. Nevertheless, within a year
from the treaty of Vereeniging burgher families to the extent of nearly
a quarter of a million souls had been settled on their farms and
equipped with the means of livelihood.

Simultaneously with this work I was instructed to prepare schemes of
land settlement for newcomers, and the nucleus of a department of
scientific agriculture. The hope of breaking down the racial barrier
between town and country was always very near to Milner's heart. He
wanted to see the Dutch share in the urban industries, and men of
British stock farming beside the Boers on the veld. For settlement we
had a considerable amount of crown land, and we bought more in places
where new farming methods could be tried. We looked forward to an era of
mining prosperity, when the overspill from the cities would go to the
land, and we also hoped to place in farms many soldiers from Britain and
the Dominions who had fallen under the spell of South Africa. As for
agriculture, it was clear that we must have the best advice that science
could offer. The existing quality of stock was poor, and the whole
country was plagued by pests and honeycombed with disease. We needed
first-class experts to advise us in every branch of husbandry.

So before I had been many months in the country I had the problem of the
land fairly on my shoulders, and had to spend much of my time on the
road. Long before the War ended I was travelling far and wide, often in
areas where fighting was going on, and I was fairly often in
difficulties. I have ridden many miles faster than I cared, to avoid
losing my breeches to a commando whose clothing had given out. As soon
as peace came an agricultural department was started and we engaged
experts from all over the world at high salaries--to the disgust of
certain sections in Johannesburg, who regarded as misspent all public
monies which did not go to the mines. For some reason or other I was
selected as the scapegoat by these critics, and even the farmers, whom
we were trying to benefit, were suspicious. Yet I believe--and I have
Louis Botha's word for it--that no part of Milner's reconstruction so
amply justified itself as his agricultural policy. But our hopes of land
settlement were disappointed. There came lean years in the mining
industry which spoilt the market for farm produce; we had under-rated,
too, the difficulties of South African farming when higher standards
were aimed at than the simple pastoralism of the veld. My chief interest
was in co-operative settlements, which would have sold and bought in
bulk and had their own factories to work up their products, but I found
that the men of our race are not easily induced to co-operate.

Those were wonderful years for me, years of bodily and mental activity,
of zeal and hope not yet dashed by failure. I learned perforce a little
about a great many things and a good deal about one or two things.
Having always been something of a farmer I plunged happily into a dozen
new kinds of farming. I had to be in some degree a jack-of-all-trades--
transport-rider, seedsman, stockman, horsecoper, merchant, lawyer, not
to speak of diplomatist. By and by we had proper departments with chiefs
and staffs, but at first it was almost a one-man show, and I tried to
avoid worrying Milner more than I could help. I trust that my work was
of some benefit to the country; it was beyond doubt of enormous benefit
to myself. For I came to know and value a great variety of human beings,
and to know and love one of the most fascinating lands on earth.


IV

My first group of new friends came from the British army, of which
hitherto I had known nothing. I made the acquaintance of some of the
High Command, who were to be famous figures in the Great War, but my
knowledge was chiefly of junior officers and the rank and file. In this
way I learned something of that wonderful brotherhood, the old regular
army, which came to an end at First Ypres. Many of the troops had been
in India and they opened up for me a new world of experience. It was now
that I acquired an interest in military history and the art of war which
has never left me. "Shop," the talk of an expert on his own subject, has
always seemed to me the best kind of conversation, and my appetite for
military "shop" was prodigious.

Also I first came in touch with the men of the Dominions--South Africans
of the various irregular corps, Canadians, Australians and New
Zealanders. Batches of them were seconded to assist me in various jobs,
and I had their company in many starlit bivouacs. At Oxford we had had
a few colonials, but they were soon absorbed into the atmosphere of the
place and seemed to lose their idiom. I had regarded the Dominions
patronisingly as distant settlements of our people who were making a
creditable effort under difficulties to carry on the British tradition.
Now I realised that Britain had at least as much to learn from them as
they had from Britain. I found something new to me, something in their
outlook at once imaginative and realistic which I had never met before.
They were an audacious folk, very ready, if need be, to throw rule and
convention overboard, and often I was saved by their sagacious
lawlessness. Yet in a sense they were stiffer traditionalists than the
British. They combined a passionate devotion to their own countries with
the vision of a great brotherhood based on race and a common culture, a
vision none the less real because they rarely tried to put it into
words. I began to see that the Empire, which had hitherto been only a
phrase to me, might be a potent and beneficent force in the world.

The civilian population of Johannesburg was the whipping-boy of the
anti-government press and politicians. It scarcely deserved this malign
pre-eminence. Those of British stock were the ordinary mercantile
community to be found in any English city, worthy people, many of whom
had fought gallantly in regiments like the Imperial Light Horse. Some of
them, like Percy FitzPatrick, George Farrar and Abe Bailey, were
far-sighted and patriotic citizens. There was a big cosmopolitan
admixture, inevitable in a mining centre, which has its proportion of
riff-raff, but also its able and honest element. Johannesburg, both on
its good and bad side, was like any new urban growth in the British
Empire or the United States, where individual wealth has come before a
civic tradition could be established. But it had one unique feature
which has never been repeated--the over-shadowing influence of a great
personality.

I had met Cecil Rhodes several times in England. He knew that he was
dying, and he did not want to die. He asked me my age. "You will see it
all," he said bitterly, "and I won't, for I am going out." He gave me
various pieces of advice. One was to beware of the vain man. "You can
make your book with roguery," he said, "but vanity is incalculable--it
will always let you down." He died at his cottage near Cape Town during
my first months in Africa, and his funeral in the Matoppo hills and the
publication of his will were events which for the moment switched our
attention away from the War. He impressed me greatly--the sense he gave
one of huge but crippled power, the reedy voice and the banal words in
which he tried to express ideas which represented for him a whole world
of incoherent poetry. I did not know him well enough to like him or
dislike him, but I felt him as one feels the imminence of a
thunderstorm. But I did not realise the greatness of his personality
until I had been some time in the country. Then I found that in all
sorts of people--simple farmers and transport-riders, common-place
business men, Jewish financiers who otherwise would have had no thought
but for their bank accounts, even trivial, intriguing politicians--he
had kindled some spark of his own idealism. He had made them take long
views. Common as their minds might be, some window had been opened which
gave them a prospect. They had acquired at least a fragment of a soul.
If it be not genius thus to brood over a land and have this power over
the human spirit, then I do not understand the meaning of the word.

Very slowly I came to know something of the Dutch. While the War lasted,
of course, I saw nothing of them except a few National Scouts. The army
was in the habit of praising the Boer at the expense of the uitlander;
he was a good fighter and a sportsman with the virtues of a squirearchy,
and not the get-rich-quick offscourings of European capitals. This
attitude was so manifestly unfair that in my revolt against it I was in
danger of acquiring an anti-Dutch prejudice. At Vereeniging I saw Boer
generals, lean men browned by the sun and wind, whose ragged clothes
seemed to enhance their dignity. It was my privilege later to know some
of them well; Louis Botha, built on lines of a primitive simplicity and
wise with an elemental wisdom; Smuts, the acute legal intelligence and
the philosophic mind who saw the problems of the day in the light of
eternal principles--the two statesmen who between them made the early
grant of responsible government to the new colonies a success, when
otherwise it might have been a fiasco. De la Rey had a face which I have
never seen equalled for antique patriarchal dignity. He offered to take
me on his staff in the next war, which in his view was to be fought by
the British and Dutch against the Jews; it would have been a real
Armageddon, for among the Jews I think he classed all foreigners except
Americans!

After Vereeniging in my repatriation and land settlement work I lived
much among the country Boers. I had little love for the slick Afrikander
of the towns, but for the veld farmer I acquired a sincere liking and
respect. He had many of the traits of my Lowland Scots, keen at a
bargain and prepared to imperil his immortal soul for a threepenny bit,
but ready to squander pounds in hospitality. When I spent the night at a
farm and at family worship listened to Dutch psalms sung to familiar
Scottish psalm-tunes, I might have fancied myself in Tweedsmuir. I knew
all types: progressives who were pioneers in dry farming; the old
_takhaar_ of the back-veld who was a remnant of a vanished world; and I
think I must have met the last of the great Boer hunters, whose lives
were spent far beyond the edge of civilisation and to whom the War
signified nothing.[1] I was a Scot, a Presbyterian, and a countryman,
and therefore was half-way to being a kinsman.

    [Footnote 1: In Peter Pienaar, a character who appears in several of
    my romances, I have tried to draw the picture of one of those
    heroes.]

It happened that I met some of my friends again. In the Great War I was
much with the South African Infantry Brigade, and at the request of
General Smuts I wrote its history. That brigade was a superb fighting
unit; three times it was annihilated, and each time--at Delville Wood,
at Marrires Wood and on the Lys--its sacrifice saved the British Front.
About one-third of its members were Dutch and most of them had fought
against Britain; some indeed had been in revolt against the peace terms
and had long refused the oath of allegiance. Now they were fighting with
complete conviction beside their old antagonists. History has seen many
fine stocks brought within the pale of our Empire, but none stronger and
finer than this one which turned defeat into victory and led captivity
captive.


V

But it is the land itself which holds my memory.

Wordsworth had long been my favorite poet. This was partly on
intellectual grounds, for he seemed to me to rank very high in the
hierarchy of literature, and partly because he was the authentic voice
of my own Borderland. His mild pantheism suited a landscape instinct
with human traditions and wholly fitted for human life. His Nature was
Natura Benigna, austere, with moments of an awful sublimity, but not
inimical to the hopes and habits of men--a half-tame, habitable world
built on the human scale, interpenetrated with human history, and
readily taking the colour of human dreams. But, as Mr. Aldous Huxley has
pointed out in one of his essays, there is also Natura Maligna, where
the Wordsworthian philosophy means nothing. Mr. Huxley's instance is the
cruel, obscene superabundance of a tropical forest. I have had the same
feeling of malevolence in a place like the delta of the Mackenzie, where
the river pours its billions of tons of foul water through bottomless
mires scummed with coarse vegetation; or on a mountain range like the
Alaskan, which is not passive like the Alps under man's efforts but
seems to react savagely against him.

In South Africa one does not feel the malevolence of Nature, not even in
the Limpopo or Zambesi swamps or the Kalahari desert, so much as its
utter aloofness from human life. Snug little homes may be carved out of
the wilds, but a thousand of them have no effect upon the wilds, which
are waiting to swallow them up as soon as our efforts slacken. A hundred
Johannesburgs would not change the country's character. It seems not to
take the impress of man. Its history--and South Africa has a long
history--the story of the ancient earth-dwellers, of the great Bantu
migrations, of generations of adventurers from the Sabaeans to the
Chartered Company, is as evanescent as a cloud shadow. You will find it
in the books, but somehow it is not in the atmosphere and never will be.
There is nothing cruel in the blue days and starry nights, the tempests
and droughts and summer heats, but there is something eternally aloof.

  "Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses
   Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
   Only winds and rivers,
   Life and death."

It was a refreshment to be in a world so superbly impersonal, so
divinely inhuman, and I found Wordsworth irrelevant. Indeed, I
discovered that I did not want any sort of literature, with one curious
exception. This was Euripides. I had never greatly cared for him, but
for some obscure reason I took to reading him on the veld.

The country is like an inverted pie-dish, a high tableland sloping
steeply to the ocean on south and east, less steeply to the Zambesi in
the north. Its selvedge of coast land is temperate in the south, and as
it sweeps north becomes sandy desert or tropical flats. The pie-dish
contains every variety of landscape. In the Cape peninsula you have the
classic graces of Italy, stony, sun-baked hills rising from orchards and
vineyards and water-meadows. On the high veld you have grey-green
plains, which carry the eye to an immense distance. The mountain rim
from the Drakensberg to the Rhodesian scarp breaks down in wild kloofs
and pinnacles to the bushveld; and the streams, which begin as strings
of pools on the veld, are transformed first into torrents and then into
sluggish tropical rivers. That is the general configuration, but there
are a thousand hidden nooks which recall to every traveller his own
home, for it is the most versatile of lands. Yet there is a certain
subtle unity in the landscape, something indefinable which we know to be
South African. This has much to do with the climate, which I take to be
the best in the world, not because there are no discomforts--for there
are many--but because no climate that I know produces so keen a sense of
well-being. One could go supperless to bed in the rain on the bare veld,
and awake whistling from pure light-heartedness. Whoever has once drunk
Vaal water, says the proverb, will always return, and for certain the
old enchantress lays a spell which is ill to loose. The scent of a dung
fire or wood smoke or mimosa, the creak of a wagon axle, a mule coughing
in the dust, and a dozen other little things are still to me as
evocative of memories as the "smell of the wattles in Lichtenburg" was
to Mr. Kipling's Australian.

There was little of the country which I did not see, from the Cape
peninsula, where from shining seas the staircase of the hills climbs to
the many-coloured Karroo, to the dull green forests of the Zambesi. But
it was the northern plateau which I explored intensively: the castled
summits of Mont aux Sources and Basutoland, where the streams descend in
sheer veils of lawn to Natal; the scarp whence one looks into the
Swaziland and Zululand glens, and, further north, across a hundred miles
of bush to the dim outline of the Lebombo; the ridges which huddle
behind Lydenburg into the sunset; the lake country of Ermelo; the
endless spaces of the high veld; the Zoutpansberg and other ranges of
the north, honey-combed with caves and secret waters; the Limpopo
running its fantastic course from its springs on the edge of the Rand
through high veld and bushveld to the lush flats of Mozambique. I used
every kind of transport--Cape cart, mule wagon, horses of all kinds from
half-broken Argentines and Texans to handy little Boer ponies--anything
Remounts provided, for in those days we could not be particular. Often I
had company, but often I had lonely rides and solitary bivouacs. There
is something to be said for leaving youth a good deal alone that it may
discover itself.

Two pictures I have always carried to cheer me in dismal places. One is
of a baking noon on the high veld, the sky a merciless blue, the brown
earth shimmering in a heat haze. I am looking into a wide hollow where a
red road like a scar descends and disappears over the next ridge. In the
bottom there is a white farm with a clump of gum trees, a blue dam, and
blue water-furrows threading a patch of bright green alfalfa. An outspan
fire is sending up spirals of milky blue smoke. A hawk is hovering far
above, but there are no sounds except the drone of insects, and very far
off the jar of an ungreased axle. The air is hot but not very heavy,
pungent and aromatic. I have never had such a sense of brooding primeval
peace, as from that sun-drenched bowl brimming with essential light.

The other picture is the Wood Bush in the North Transvaal which lies
between Pietersburg and the eastern flats. You climb to it through bare
foothills where the only vegetation is the wait-a-bit thorn, and then
suddenly you cross a ridge and enter a garden. The woods of big timber
trees are as shapely as the copses in a park laid out by a
landscape-gardener. The land between them is rich meadow, with, instead
of buttercups and daisies, the white arum lily and the tall blue
agapanthus. In each cup is a stream of clear grey-blue water, swirling
in pools and rapids like a Highland salmon river. These unite to form
the Bruderstroom which, after hurling itself over the plateau's edge,
becomes a feeder of the Olifants. Here is a true lodge in the
wilderness, with on the one side the stony Pietersburg uplands, and on
the other the malarial bushveld. The contrast makes a profound
impression, since the Wood Bush itself is the extreme of richness and
beauty. The winds blow as clean as in mid-ocean, soil and vegetation are
as wholesome as an English down. I have entered the place from different
sides--by the precipitous road up the Bruderstroom, by the Pietersburg
highway, from the north along the scarp, and once from the bushveld by a
tributary glen where my Afrikaner pony had to do some rock-climbing; and
on each occasion I seemed to be crossing the borders of a _temenos_, a
place enchanted and consecrate. I resolved to go back in my old age,
build a dwelling, and leave my bones there.


VI

In South Africa I recovered an experience which I had not known since my
childhood, moments, even hours, of intense exhilaration, when one seemed
to be a happy part of a friendly universe. The cause, no doubt, was
largely physical, for my long treks made me very fit in body; but not
wholly, for I have had the same experiences much later in life when my
health was far from perfect. They came usually in the early morning or
at sunset. I seemed to acquire a wonderful clearness of mind and to find
harmony in discords and unity in diversity, but to find these things not
as conclusions of thought, but in a sudden revelation, as in poetry or
music. For a little, beauty peeped from the most unlikely wrappings and
everything had a secret purpose of joy. It was the mood for poetry had I
been anything of a poet.

                          "I was all ear
  And took in strains that might create a soul
  Under the ribs of death."

Looking back I find my South African memories studded with those high
moments. One especially stands out. I had been ploughing all day in the
black dust of the Lichtenburg roads, and had come very late to a place
called the Eye of Malmani--Malmani Oog--the spring of a river which
presently loses itself in the sands of the Kalahari. We watered our
horses and went supperless to bed. Next morning I bathed in one of the
Malmani pools--and icy cold it was--and then basked in the early
sunshine while breakfast was cooking. The water made a pleasant music,
and nearby was a covert of willows filled with singing birds. Then and
there came on me the hour of revelation, when, though savagely hungry, I
forgot about breakfast. Scents, sights and sounds blended into a harmony
so perfect that it transcended human expression, even human thought. It
was like a glimpse of the peace of eternity.

There are no more comfortable words in the language than Peace and Joy,
which Richard Hooker has conjoined in a famous sentence. Peace is that
state in which fear of any kind is unknown. But Joy is a positive thing;
in Joy one does not only feel secure, but something goes out from
oneself to the universe, a warm possessive effluence of love. There may
be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make
Happiness. It was Happiness that I knew in those rare moments. The world
was a place of inexhaustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of
something infinite, ineffable and immortal, in very truth the garment of
God.

I had one experience in South Africa which has since been twice
repeated. We all know the sensation of doing something or seeing
something which is strangely familiar, as if we had done or seen it
before. The usual explanation is that we have had the experience in our
dreams. My version is slightly different. I find myself in some scene
which I cannot have visited before, and which yet is perfectly familiar;
I know that it was the stage of an action in which I once took part, and
am about to take part again; I await developments with an almost
unbearable sense of anticipation. And then nothing happens; something
appears which breaks the spell. . . .

I was in the bushveld going from one native village to another by a road
which was just passable, and which followed a sedgy stream. I was
walking ahead, and my mules and boys were about two hundred yards
behind. Suddenly I found myself in a glade where the brook opened into a
wide clear pool. The place was a little amphitheatre; on my left was a
thicket of wild bananas, with beyond them a big baobab, and on my right
a clump of tall stinkwood trees laced together with creepers. The floor
was red earth with tufts of coarse grass, and on the edge of the pool
was a mat of ferns. . . . I stopped in my tracks, for I had been here
before. Something happened to me here, and was about to happen again;
something had come out of the banana thicket. I knew the place as well
as I knew my own doorstep. I was not exactly frightened, only curious
and excited, and I stood waiting with my heart in my mouth. And then the
spell broke, for my mules clattered up behind me.

Twice since I have had the same feeling. Just before the War I was
staying at a house on a sea-loch in the West Highlands. I was about to
stalk a distant beat of the forest which could only be reached by sea,
so it was arranged that after dinner I should go down to the yacht and
sleep there so as to be ready to start very early next morning. A
boatman ferried me out to the yacht. I had dressed for dinner in a kilt,
and suddenly in the midst of the shadowy loch I got a glimpse of my
shoe-buckles protruding from beneath my ulster. . . . I was switched
back two centuries. I had been here before on these moonlit waters in
this circle of dark mountains. I had been rowed out to a ship by a
boatman who muffled his strokes, for danger was everywhere. Something
fateful awaited me when I got aboard that hull which loomed above the
heathery islet. . . . I sat with my hands clenched in suspense. I leaped
at the ship's ladder as if I had been a castaway. . . . But nothing
happened; only the skipper was waiting to offer me a whisky and soda!

The third occasion was during my first year of office as Lord High
Commissioner in Edinburgh. I had gone out to read in the garden of
Holyroodhouse and had chosen a spot close to a shrubbery, where one
looked over a piece of unshorn lawn to the old pile. It was a balmy May
morning with the air blowing free from the Firth, and great cloud
galleons cruising in the sky. The grass in front of me was starred with
daisies, and a little further on were blossoming fruit trees, and then
the _tourelles_ of the most ancient part of the Palace. There seemed to
be a flight of white doves somewhere near, but they may have been
seagulls from Musselburgh. . . . I lifted my eyes from my book and was
suddenly transported to another age. I was in France at some chteau of
Touraine. I was looking at the marguerites and apple blossom of which
Ronsard sang. Once this stage had been set for high drama in which I had
had a share, and now it was set again. In a moment I should be summoned.
. . . But alas! it was only an aide-de-camp come to remind me that
seventy provosts and bailies were invited to luncheon!


VII

I learned a good deal in South Africa, and the chief lesson was that I
had still much to learn about the material world and about human nature.
I was given a glimpse into many fascinating tracts of experience which I
longed to explore. I discovered that there was a fine practical wisdom
which owed nothing to books and academies. My taste in letters was
winnowed and purged, for the spirit of the veld is an austere thing. I
learned to be at home in societies utterly alien to my own kind of
upbringing.

Above all I ceased to be an individualist and became a citizen. I
acquired a political faith. Those were the days when a vision of what
the Empire might be made dawned upon certain minds with almost the force
of a revelation. To-day the word is sadly tarnished. Its mislikers have
managed to identify it with ugliness like corrugated iron roofs and raw
townships, or, worse still, with a callous racial arrogance. Its dreams,
once so bright, have been so pawed by unctuous hands that their glory
has departed. Phrases which held a world of idealism and poetry have
been spoilt by their use in bad verse and in after-dinner perorations.
Even that which is generally accepted has become a platitude. Something
like the sober, merchandising Jacobean colonial policy has replaced the
high Elizabethan dreams. But in those days things were different. It was
an inspiration for youth to realise the magnitude of its material
heritage, and to think how it might be turned to spiritual issues.
Milner, like most imperialists of that day, believed in imperial
federation. So did I at the start; but before I left South Africa I had
come to distrust any large scheme of formal organisation. I had begun to
accept the doctrine which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was later to expound; that
the Dominions were not ready for such a union and must be allowed full
freedom to follow their own destinies. But, on the main question I was
more than a convert, I was a fanatic.

I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common
race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching
the rest out of her culture and traditions, and the spirit of the
Dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands.
I saw in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home
open country instead of a blind alley. I saw hope for a new afflatus in
art and literature and thought. Our creed was not based on antagonism to
any other people. It was humanitarian and international; we believed
that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world. As for the
native races under our rule, we had a high conscientiousness; Milner and
Rhodes had a far-sighted native policy. The "white man's burden" is now
an almost meaningless phrase; then it involved a new philosophy of
politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble.

The result was that my notion of a career was radically changed. I
thought no more of being a dignified judge with a taste for letters, or
a figure in British politics. I wanted some administrative task, some
share in the making of this splendid commonwealth. I hoped to spend most
of my life out of Britain. I had no desire to be a pro-consul or any
kind of grandee. I would have been content with any job however
thankless, in any quarter however remote, if I had a chance of making a
corner of the desert blossom and the solitary place glad.




CHAPTER VI

THE MIDDLE YEARS


I

The years from 1903 to 1914, a truce for Britain between two campaigns,
are for the historian the germinal period of the Great War, but to some
of those who lived through them they seemed rather an empty
patch--_confusae sonus urbis et inlaetabile murmur_.

I had looked forward in South Africa to spending the next decade in
foreign service. When I returned to England late in 1903 it was in the
expectation of going soon to Egypt, where Lord Cromer had selected me
for an important financial post; but the home authorities declined to
ratify his choice, no doubt rightly, on the ground of my youth and
inexperience. So I was compelled to go back to the Bar, where, with much
restlessness and distaste, I continued for the next three years. Though
I hoped daily for an appointment abroad, I realised that I must behave
as if the Law were to be my life's profession. I went back to Rowlatt's
chambers, had an occasional brief of my own, and "noted" cases for the
Attorney-General, my old friend Sir Robert Finlay.

But my chief work was the preparation of a law book. I asked Lord
Haldane's advice and he suggested a study of that intricate and evasive
topic, the liability to the British tax of income earned abroad. So I
published in 1905 a monograph on the taxation of foreign income, which
for many years was the only work on the subject, and which I am proud to
think that great man, F. W. Maitland, pronounced a workmanlike
performance. When the Balfour Government fell and the Attorney-General
went out of office, I had a year of private practice, in which, because
of my book and my South African connections, I made a fair income. But I
found it a dull job, for I rarely had the chance of going into court,
and in any case the business of waiting to be hired compared
unfavourably with the steady rhythm of administrative work. So, when it
became clear that there was no immediate hope of service abroad, I
seized a chance which offered and went into business. I left the Bar
with sincere regret. There was no more honourable and expert profession,
none in which the sinews of the mind are kept in better trim, as there
is no more loyal and kindly fraternity. And I believe that there are few
callings in which success is more certain for anyone with reasonable
talents and the requisite industry and patience.

Those years were not the pleasantest in my life. South Africa had
completely unsettled me. I did not want to make money or a reputation at
home; I wanted a particular kind of work which was denied me. I had lost
my former catholicity of interests. I had no longer any impulse to
write. I was distressed by British politics, for it seemed to me that
both the great parties were blind to the true meaning of empire. London
had ceased to have its old glamour. The eighteenth-century flavour,
which entranced me on coming down from Oxford, had wholly departed,
leaving a dull mercantile modern place, very different from the
strenuous, coloured land I had left. I sat in my semi-underground
chambers in Middle Temple Lane, feeling as if I were in Plato's Cave,
conversant not with mankind but with their shadows. Something, too,
seemed to have happened to London society. I had now acquired a large
circle of acquaintances, and had become an habitual diner-out, but it
was in a society with little charm for me. The historic etiquette was
breaking down; in every walk money seemed to count for more; there was a
vulgar display of wealth, and a _rastaquoure_ craze for luxury. I began
to have an ugly fear that the Empire might decay at the heart.

But I had my consolations. The first was new friends, and of these the
chief was Richard Haldane, then enjoying a huge practice at the Bar and
much prestige in Liberal circles. Some time earlier I had got to know
what was left of that pleasant esoteric group which their critics called
the "Souls," and through them I met Haldane. With him, besides, I had
many Scottish connections. We both came of Presbyterian stock, and we
had a strong interest in philosophy. As a young lawyer I revered a
counsel who had cast his shoe over the House of Lords and made the
Judicial Committee his wash-pot. We were both hardy walkers. In his
younger days at the Bar, Haldane, after a busy week, would take a
Saturday evening train to Brighton and tramp the fifty-odd miles to
London on the Sunday. But what chiefly attracted me to him was his
loyalty to Milner. Milner thought him the ablest man in public life,
abler even than Arthur Balfour, and alone of his former Liberal allies
Haldane stood by him on every count.

How can I hope to reproduce my old friend for those who did not know
him, or knew only his public form? To the ordinary man he was a
reputation rather than a person. His large smooth face, with the kindly
wrinkles round the eyes, suggested a benevolent sphinx; his manner of
speech was that of an oracle declaiming wisdom from some cloudy tripod,
an impression enhanced by his small toneless voice. His appearance was
that of some bland ecclesiastic of the Middle Ages, as if his true
vocation were not legal or judicial, but priestly. One could picture
him at midnight conclaves in an archiepiscopal palace, or splitting
hairs at some high Church Council. There is a story that in his early
days in London he was present at a dinner in an evangelical household,
at which two famous American preachers were the principal guests. Before
leaving, the evangelists spoke to each of the company privately on
spiritual affairs. When they reached Haldane and saw his smile they left
him alone. "No need, dear brother," they said, "to ask how it is with
_your_ soul."

His personality was so unlike those of other public men that he became
the centre of myth. The impression got abroad that his methods were of a
subtlety which was almost devious. It was wholly false. He was a
practical man, and was always prepared "by indirections to find
directions out," but he was eminently single-minded and sincere. As a
friend said of him, you could hear him "tramping up the back stairs."
What he had in a full degree was the gift of persuasion, the power of
wearing down opposition by sheer patience and reasonableness; and he had
also that chief of diplomatic talents, the ability to read an opponent's
mind and shape his argument accordingly. His old affection for Germany
made him slow to give up hope of peace, but it never blinded him, and he
probably understood the German spirit better than any man in Britain.

This persuasiveness made him a tremendous figure at the Bar. He was a
learned lawyer, but there were many legal pundits. Where he differed
from his rivals was in his power of getting back to principles and
presenting his argument as an inevitable deduction from any sane
conception of the universe. To differ from him seemed to be denying the
existence of God. He could dignify the most prosaic case by giving it a
philosophic background. This was no mere forensic trick; it was the
consequence of sincere conviction, of a habit of mind which saw
everything in organic relations.

It made him a most formidable advocate, especially in questions of
constitutional law, but now and then it led to disaster. The Scottish
Church case was an example. The point there was whether the United Free
Church could alter certain ecclesiastical and doctrinal tenets without
forfeiting endowments which had been given while these tenets were held
in their unchanged form. Haldane led for that Church, and his argument
fell into two parts--one historical and the other philosophical. The
historical argument was simply that a Scottish Church, looking at the
historical growth and the traditional conception of a kirk in Scotland,
must be assumed to have the right to change its tenets within certain
broad limits and to retain its endowments, unless the instruments
creating such endowments contained specific words to the contrary. To
that argument I believe there was no answer, and had it been really
pressed the Court could not have resisted it. But Haldane was not an
historian, and he concentrated on the philosophical argument based on
the familiar Hegelian formulas--that identity exists through change and
difference, that a thing is itself only because it is also in some sense
its opposite, and so forth. It was a remarkable piece of dialectic, but
it was an impossible argument to present to a court of justice, and it
had the most disastrous effect upon various members of the House of
Lords. One, I remember, became fatally confused between the philosophic
term "antinomy" and the metal "antimony." Lord Halsbury's masculine
intelligence dealt harshly with Haldane's metaphysics, and the
Court--wrongly I think--decided against the United Free Church.

His gift of philosophical synthesis and of adequate language in which to
expound it had, of course, its very real dangers. He had great
speculative ability, and his Gifford Lectures, _The Pathway to Reality_,
composed while walking between his flat and the Law Courts and delivered
extempore, are a wonderful instance of a popular philosophical
exposition in clear and graceful language. But I used to feel that his
facility tended to blunt the edge of his mind. A man who has been
nourished on German metaphysics should make a point of expressing his
thoughts in plain workaday English, for the technical terms of German
philosophy seems to have a kind of hypnotic power; they create a world
remote from common reality where reconciliations and syntheses flow as
smoothly and with as little meaning as in an opiate dream. I remember
that once, while staying with him at Cloan, a Scottish professor and I
consulted him about a difficult passage in Hegel's _Phenomenology_, and
received a fluent explanation which apparently satisfied him, but which
seemed to us to leave the difficulty untouched. In later years he became
deeply interested in those questions where metaphysics, physics and
mathematics have a common frontier, but experts in such matters have
told me that he never quite grasped the points at issue, though he was
always ready to expound them. There were moments when his impressive
words seemed to mean nothing in particular. I once accompanied him
through his constituency of East Lothian when he was defending Milner's
policy, including Chinese labour on the Rand. I came out of the hall
with two old farmers. "Was he for it or against it?" one asked. Said the
other, "I'm damned if I ken." Also his brand of Hegelianism inclined him
to be a little too optimistic about the friendliness of the universe.
He was apt to ante-date the higher unity in which contraries were to be
reconciled.

There was another side to him, not often found in a philosopher. He had
a genius for practical work, for construction and administration.
Britain never had a greater War Minister, for he made the army which
triumphed in 1918, though the mischances of politics did not permit him
to direct it in the campaigns. This is now universally acknowledged, and
the best authority, Lord Haig, has paid his work a tribute which I do
not think any civilian War Minister in history ever received before from
a Commander-in-Chief. But his labours also in the cause of national
education should not be forgotten. There is no subject on which it is so
easy for the mind to ossify and general ideals to end in stale
platitudes. Haldane was never the slave of a dogma, and could look at a
question freshly on its merits. It was this matter more than any other
which alienated him from the traditional parties, who seemed to him to
lack imagination and to be slavishly bound to formulas. He was never a
socialist in the Marxian sense, but on the question of education the
Labour party seemed to him more open-minded than the others, and readier
to kindle to a new vision.

His positive work belongs to history. So long as his friends live the
man himself will be held in affectionate memory, for it would not be
easy to overrate his essential goodness. He lived most fully the creed
which he preached. Whoever sought his advice was given the full benefit
of his great powers of mind. There was nothing slipshod in his
benevolence. He loved humanity and loved the State, not as an
abstraction but as a community of lovable and fallible human beings. He
had a religion in the deepest sense. I think he was one of the least
worldly men I have ever known, almost as unworldly as Milner. He enjoyed
the various comforts vouchsafed to us in this melancholy vale-good food,
good wine, good talk; he was devoted to his friends and happy in their
society; but he always seemed to me to sit loose to the things of Time.
When friends failed him he had no reproaches. He bore unjust attacks and
popular distrust with a noble magnanimity. He lived his life as one who
had a continuing vision of the unseen.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another of my consolations was mountaineering. In South Africa I had
scrambled among the kloofs of the Drakensberg and the ranges of the
Northern Transvaal, and, long before, I had climbed in the Highlands,
but it was not until 1904 that I paid my first visit to the Alps. There
I did a number of the usual courses, my chief resorts being Chamonix and
Zermatt, and in 1906 I became a member of the Alpine Club. But my
favourite ground was the Scots hills, especially Skye and the Coolins.
In them it was still possible to make first ascents, and I came to know
every crack and cranny from Garbsheinn to Sgurr-nan-Gillian. It was my
ambition to be the first to traverse the whole range in a summer's day,
but I put off the enterprise too long and others got in before me.

We have many confessions of faith from those who have lifted their eyes
to the hills. I like best Mr. Belloc's in his _Path to Rome_. "Up there,
the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great
peaks made communion between that homing, creeping part of me which
loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that
other part which is only properly at home in Heaven." The wittiest thing
ever said about mountaineering, I think, was by George Meredith, that
"every step is a debate between what you are and what you might become."
For myself, it brought me again into touch with the wild nature with
which I had lived intimately in South Africa. My other sport, fishing,
did not do that in the same degree; it was essentially a "slow movement
among pastures," even when it was pursued in March on the Helmsdale
among scurries of snow. Just as sailing a small boat brings one close to
the sea so mountaineering lays one alongside the bones of mother earth.
One meets her on equal terms and matches one's skill and endurance
against something which has no care for human life. There is also the
joy of technical accomplishment. I never took kindly to snow and ice
work but I found a strong fascination in rock climbing, whether on the
granite slabs of the Chamonix _aiguilles_, or the sheer fissured
precipices of the Dolomites, or the gabbro of the Coolins. A long rock
climb is a series of problems each one different from the rest, which
have to be solved by ingenuity of mind and versatility of body. I was
fortunate to have the opposite of vertigo, for I found a physical
comfort in looking down from great heights. Bodily fitness is essential,
for there are always courses which you must have the strength to
complete or court disaster. In any mountaineering holiday there are
miserable days when the muscles are being got in order by training
walks; but when these are over I know no physical well-being so perfect
as that enjoyed by the mountaineer.

Then there are the moments of illumination. On a snow mountain there is
the miserable getting up in the small hours, coffee in a bleak
dining-room by the light of a single candle, a long stumble through dark
pine woods and over dusky alpine pastures, a slow ascent among the
crevasses of the glacier, and then--the second breakfast high up on a
snow ridge when the world seems to heave itself out of night into day.
Or on a rock mountain, when after hours spent hugging the framework of
the earth in cracks and chimneys, one comes out at the top to a spacious
sunlit universe. I always felt the drama of the transition most sharply
in Skye when, after a course among difficult chimneys or over faces with
exiguous holds, one reached the ridge and saw the Minch, incredibly far
below, stretching its bright waters to the sunset and the ultimate
isles. Such moments gave me the impression of somehow being outside the
world in the ether to which clouds and birds belong, of being very
nearly pure spirit--until hunger reminded me that I had still a body.

I never had an accident mountaineering, or anything like one, though I
often got into trouble, and once or twice came so near the limits of my
strength that the mountains seemed to be leaping like the Scriptural
rams. But I had one experience which I shall not soon forget. It was in
1910 in the Bavarian Wettersteingebirge above Partenkirchen. There is a
small rock peak in the neighbourhood called the Alpspitze which I set
out to climb about 2 a.m. one June morning, with, as my companion, a
young forester called Sebastian. We duly reached the summit, and about 9
a.m., after breakfast at a little mountain inn, began our walk of six
miles or so to the valley. It was a brilliant summer day with a promise
of great heat, but our road lay through pleasant shady pine woods and
flowery meadows. I noticed that my companion had fallen silent, and,
glancing at him, was amazed to see that his face was dead-white, that
sweat stood in beads on his forehead, and that his eyes were staring
ahead as if he were in an agony of fear, as if terror were all around me
so that he dared not look one way rather than another. Suddenly he
began to run, and I ran too, some power not myself constraining me.
Terror had seized me also, but I did not know what I dreaded; it was
like the epidemic of giggling which overcomes children who have no wish
to laugh. We ran--we ran like demented bacchanals, tearing down the
glades, leaping rocks, bursting through thickets, colliding with trees,
sometimes colliding with each other, and all the time we never uttered a
sound. At last we fetched up beside the much frequented valley highway,
where we lay for a time utterly exhausted. For the rest of the road home
we did not speak; we did not even dare to look at each other.

What was the cause? I suppose it was Panic. Sebastian had seen the
goat-foot god, or something of the kind--he was forest born, and
Bavarian peasants are very near primeval things--and he had made me feel
his terror. I have never had any similar experience, but a friend of
mine had something like it in Norway. He was alone, climbing in the
Jotunheim, and suddenly in a wild upland glen the terror of space and
solitude came upon him. He ran for dear life, crossed a considerable
range of mountains, and at last reached a saeter. There was no one in
the place, but there were cattle, and he found sanctuary in a byre,
where he nuzzled his face into the neck of a most astonished cow!


II

In the autumn of 1906 my unsettled years came happily to an end, for I
became engaged to Susan Grosvenor, and we were married in the following
July. I had no longer any craving for a solitary life at some extremity
of the Empire, for England was once more for me an enchanted land, and
London a magical city. I think that, in spite of my many friends and
interests, I had been suffering from loneliness, since my family were
four hundred miles away. Now I acquired a vast new
relationship--Grosvenors, Wellesleys, Stuart-Wortleys, Lytteltons,
Talbots--and above all I found the perfect comrade. I have been happy in
many things, but all my other good fortune has been as dust in the
balance compared with the blessing of an incomparable wife.

[Illustration: SUSAN CHARLOTTE GROSVENOR]

Just before my marriage I changed my profession, and at the invitation
of my Oxford friend, Thomas Arthur Nelson, became a partner in his
publishing firm, one of the oldest in Britain, which had its
headquarters and its printing works in Edinburgh, and branches in
London, New York and throughout the Empire.

It is not easy to draw on a little canvas the man whose nature is large
and central and human, without cranks or oddities. The very simplicity
and wholesomeness of such souls defy an easy summary, for they are as
spacious in their effect as daylight or summer. Often we remember
friends by a gesture, or a trick of expression, or by a favourite
phrase, or some nicety of manner. These were trivial things in our
friendship, but they spring first to the mind in the act of
recollection. But with Tommie Nelson I do not find myself thinking of
such idiosyncrasies. I can recall many mannerisms of his, but it is only
by an effort of thought, for they do not run to meet the memory. His
presence warmed and lit up so big a region of life that in thinking of
him one is overwhelmed by the multitude of things that he made better by
simply existing among them. If you remove a fire from a hearth, you will
remember the look, not so much of the blaze itself, as of the whole room
in its pleasant glow.

At Oxford he and I were exactly contemporary. He was in some ways the
most conspicuous figure of our academic generation, as president of
Vincent's, a rugby "Blue" and an "Internationalist," and I think that,
if at any time of our four years' residence a poll had been taken for
the most popular man in the University, he would have headed it. When I
joined his firm in the autumn of 1906 I found that he had changed very
little, except that his hair was slightly grizzled. He always looked
fit, with a clear brown skin and the untroubled eyes of a boy. I never
saw him haggard except at the Front. He was an adept in all Scottish
sports--a good shot with gun and rifle, a bold rider to hounds, and a
fisherman of the first order. He was a fine sportsman, not merely
because he did everything well and with immense gusto, but because he
had in his bones a love of wild life and adventure and contest. He was
very serious too. He looked upon all classes of men with friendliness
and understanding, and some response was won from the most angular. For
all his abounding zest he had a rather grave, reflecting mind, natural
in one who kept so fine a mental balance; and as time went on this
seriousness increased. Yet he was very shy of talking about his creed,
for he had a horror of anything like rhetoric and grandiosity. He could
never forget what Carlyle has put into famous words: "It is a sad but
sure truth that every time you speak of a fine purpose, especially if
with eloquence and to the admiration of by-standers, there is the less
chance of your ever making a fact of it in your own poor life."

For ten years I was associated with him in business, and I cannot
imagine a happier companionship. But, looking back, I can see that I was
never quite at ease about him. I felt that he was fitted for greater
things than anything I could foresee. About some people one has that
consciousness of powers too big for their environment. A life of great
domestic happiness, innumerable friends, a world enlivened and comforted
by his presence--it would have seemed enough for most people, but it
seemed too little for Tommie. . . . Then came the War and the old life
passed away in a night.

At first I saw nothing of him and we did not meet until the autumn of
1916, during the later stages of the battle of the Somme. He was having
a trying time, with a number of observation posts to look after, and no
kind of home anywhere. He was happier when, in early 1917, he entered
the Tank service. When I used to visit Hugh Elle's mess at Bermicourt I
found that he had recovered his youth. But that youth was near its
close, for in the last day of the battle of Arras he was killed
instantaneously by a long-distance shell. I had to do a good deal of
searching before I found and identified his grave.

His death made a bigger hole in the life of Scotland than that of any
other man of his years. _Heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam
tui meminisse._ He was a rare being because he was so superbly normal,
so wholly in tune with ordinary humanity, and therefore fitted to help
in the "difficult but not desperate life of man." In the case of others
we might regret the premature loss to the world of some peculiar talent;
with Tommie we mourned especially the loss of a talent for living
worthily and helping others to do likewise. It is the kind of loss least
easy to forget, and yet one which soon comes to be contemplated without
pain, for he had succeeded most fully in life.


III

In business I found that I had a reasonable amount of leisure, for my
firm was well organised and I had able colleagues. We were a progressive
concern, and in our standardised Edinburgh factories we began the
publication of cheap books in many tongues. On the eve of the War we
must have been one of the largest businesses of the kind in the world,
issuing cheap editions of every kind of literature, not only in England,
but in French, German, Magyar and Spanish, and being about to start in
Russian. I had opportunities for European travel, and, when our children
were young, my wife and I visited the Balkans and Constantinople, Spain,
Portugal, the Canaries and the Azores; we had a wonderful yachting trip
in the Aegean and along the Dalmatian coast; we went to Norway to fish;
and we had part of a summer in the Bavarian highlands. But most of our
holidays were spent in Scotland.

On my marriage I gave up mountaineering as scarcely a married man's
game. I still fished whenever and wherever I got the chance, and I
discovered a new sport in deer-stalking. About that time I ceased to
shoot with a gun, for my love for birds was so great that I disliked
killing them. I had never been much of a gun shot at my best, like the
Ancient Mariner, "stopping one of three," but I was fairly good on my
day with a rifle. Stalking supplied the hunting element, and also took
me to the high tops as much as in my old climbing days. In my time I
have stalked in over twenty deer forests, and I have always had a clear
view of how the game should be played. I like best those forests in
which long experience gave me some knowledge of the ground, so that I
was not the slave of the stalker. I was a professed scavenger, and shot
only for the sake of the forest. I wanted to kill freaks like hummels
and switch-horns and old back-going beasts that would perish in the next
winter. I would gladly stalk a young royal, but when I got my sights
behind his shoulder I would take off my cap to him and go home--a habit
popular with owners but not so popular with stalkers and gillies. Then I
was in terror of wounding, and in the days of my pride, when I could
trust myself, I generally took neck shots, which meant a dead kill or a
clean miss. I only once wounded a stag, and after a sleepless night I
got him the following day.

Stalking gave me a host of pleasures. In the first place, like Duncan
Ban Macintyre. I loved the dun deer and was never tired of watching them
and studying their ways. Those beautiful wild things were my chief link
with the natural world. This love of the deer is common among stalkers
and gillies, but in my experience it is rare among the "gentlemen," who
are too apt to regard them like the targets on a rifle range. Hence the
talk in a lodge smoking-room in the evening is apt to be a dreary
business: the steepness of the hills is cursed, weather and wind
anathematised, and the shot, the least important part, described in
weary detail. Such sportsmen recapitulate their dull experiences until
they grow old and die, like the shade of Orion which Odysseus saw in
Hades chasing the wraiths of the beasts which he once hunted on the
hills.

Then there was the technical interest of the stalk, of which the shot is
only the conventional finale. The red deer is by nature a woodland
animal, but in Scotland he inhabits mountains which are for the most
part tree-less, and he has had to develop a new technique of defence.
Living under conditions which are more or less artificial, he has become
far more wary than, say, the African kudu or the Canadian wapiti. His
sense of smell and hearing are acute; but his eyesight is indifferent,
for though he can see things far off he is not clever at recognising
them. I found endless interest in devising new ways of circumventing
him, devices which every professional stalker knows, but which he does
not usually communicate to his "gentlemen." For example, if you are
looking down on a glen with stags in the bottom and the wind is wrong,
it is often possible to have your scent carried by the wind so that it
ricochets off the opposite wall of the glen, and, coming up behind the
stags, makes them move towards you. Camouflage, too, is important. I
always believed in breaking up my costume, for, whatever the forest, its
colour will not be uniform, and I would wear, say, a checked jacket,
grey flannel knickerbockers and grey-blue stockings. The ground often
consists of a ribbon of turf bounded by heather and shingle, and by
crawling along the border-line between the green and the rough, keeping
half of the body in each, if the wind is right it is possible to get
within shot, though you are in full view of the deer.

I enjoyed greatly the company of the gillies, whether Highland or
Lowland--and some of the best were Lowlanders. From them I heard many
tales of the ancient world of the hills. The old type of gillie is fast
disappearing--the type with a beard like Moses and little English, who
always lit the dottle in a foul pipe before starting on a steep ascent.
The new kind of gillie, who has usually served in the War, can point out
a stag with the precision of an artillery observer. The old type used to
labour heavily. "D'ye see yon white stone?"--"I see a million white
stones." "Ah, but d'ye see another?" But he had often wonderful phrases.
"Gang quiet, sir," I remember one telling me. "Gang as if ye was
something growing." Gaelic, unfortunately, was the true key to their
world, and I used to lament that I had no Gaelic, having, like my father
before me, tried in vain to learn the tongue. For that you must have had
a Gaelic-speaking nurse.

But especially I rejoiced in the companionship of the hills. I have
stalked in every kind of forest--the _machairs_ of the Isles, the great
round shoulders of the Cairngorms, the splintered peaks of Torridon and
Glencoe and Dalness, which are almost mountaineering ground, the varied
rock and bent of the Black Mount. What I liked best was to get to the
heights early in the morning--and early in the season when the stags
feed high--and spend the day exploring the corries from above. The sport
had not the sustained tension of mountaineering; indeed, much of its
charm lay in the long spells of idle waiting, one's nose in thyme or
heather, when the mind was gathered into the mountain peace. The high
moments were the start in the freshness of morning, when the dew was on
the birches, and one had the first spy from a hillock in the glen; the
sunny hours on the tops when cloud shadows patterned the corries; the
return in the evening in a flaming sunset with--or without--a lumpish
hill pony carrying a stag. Such a day could not be blank even if one
never saw a shootable beast, or missed him when seen, for, as Sir Walter
Scott said of himself when he watched Tom Purdie at work, "one's fancy
could be running its ain riggs in another world."


IV

I found another way of using my leisure. In the spring of 1911 I became
the Conservative candidate for the counties of Peebles and Selkirk, a
constituency which then stretched from within a dozen miles of Edinburgh
to within twenty miles of the Border.

My motives were mixed. I had always felt that it was a citizen's duty to
find some form of public service, but I had no strong parliamentary
ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment which I felt
impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party
loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my
friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party's defects, and
uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent. Like Montaigne I could
forgive "neither the commendable qualities of my adversaries nor the
reproachful of those I followed." I was apt to fall into the mood which
Macaulay attributes to Halifax:

     "His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile
     divisions of the community and he never wandered far beyond the
     frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged
     was the party to which, at that moment, he liked least, because it
     was the party of which he had, at that moment, the nearest view. He
     was therefore always severe upon his violent associates and was
     always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every
     faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred
     his censure; and every faction when vanquished and persecuted,
     found in him a protector."

My political experience at the time was nil, and my views were shallow
and ill-informed--inclinations rather than principles. I believed
profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world
peace, and as a factor in the solution of all our domestic problems, but
I no longer accepted imperial federation, and I had little confidence in
Mr. Chamberlain's tariff policy. For socialism I had the distrust that I
felt for all absolute creeds, and Marxism, to which I had given some
attention, seemed to me to have an insecure speculative basis and to be
purblind as a reading of history. On the other hand I wanted the
community to use its communal strength when the facts justified it, and
I believed in the progressive socialisation of the State provided the
freedom of the personality were assured. I had more sympathy with
socialism than with orthodox liberalism, which I thought a barren strife
about dogmas that at that time had only an antiquarian interest. But I
was a Tory in the sense that I disliked change unless the need for it
was amply proved, and that I desired to preserve continuity with the
past and keep whatever of the old foundations were sound. As I used to
put it in a fisherman's simile, if your back cast is poor your forward
cast will be a mess.

So I went into politics with a queer assortment of interests. I hoped to
see the Empire developed on the right lines; the Dominions enabled to
grow into self-conscious nations; emigration undertaken as a reasoned
policy, fully planned at each end, and not as a mere overspill of
population. Then I wanted something done about resettling the land of
Scotland. Since my boyhood I had seen land slipping out of cultivation
into pasture, and glens where once a dozen hearths smoked now inhabited
only by a shepherd and his dog. For the rest I was critical of the
details of Mr. Asquith's policy, but approved its purpose--old-age
pensions, health and unemployment insurance, and most of the famous 1910
Budget. In the quarrel with the House of Lords I was on the Government's
side. By 1914 I had come to differ violently from them on the matter of
Ulster, for though a federal home-ruler, after the fashion of my friend,
F. S. Oliver, their blundering in the treatment of Ulster roused some
ancient Covenanting devil in my blood.

I came of a Liberal family, most of my friends were Liberals, I agreed
with nine-tenths of the party's creed. Indeed, I think that my
political faith was always liberalism--or rather "liberality," as
Gilbert Murray has interpreted the word. But when I stood for Parliament
it had to be the other side.

Now that the once omnipotent Liberal party has so declined, it is hard
to realise how formidable it was in 1911--especially in Scotland. Its
dogmas were so completely taken for granted that their presentation
partook less of argument than of a tribal incantation. Mr. Gladstone had
given it an aura of earnest morality, so that its platforms were also
pulpits and its harangues had the weight of sermons. Its members seemed
to assume that their opponents must be lacking either in morals or mind.
The Tories were the "stupid" party; Liberals alone understood and
sympathised with the poor; a working man who was not a Liberal was
inaccessible to reason, or morally corrupt, or intimidated by laird or
employer. I remember a lady summing up the attitude thus: Tories may
think they are better born, but Liberals know that they are born better.

All this was a little trying to the natural man, and he longed to breach
the complacency. It had small justification. In the old bad days of the
early nineteenth century the Whigs were probably more intellectually
alive than the Tories; but the situation had wholly changed. A youth in
Scotland who called himself a Tory was almost certain to be thinking
about politics, and not merely cherishing a family loyalty. I got
together a fine group of young men, and we refused no challenge, but
argued any question anywhere with anyone; my public meetings frequently
ended in a discussion at a street corner or in a public-house. That
brave band is now scattered; many of them fell in the War; some are now
ornaments of the Labour party. We were crude enough, but at any rate we
tried to get down to realities, on which our opponents for the most part
maintained a conspiracy of silence. Their strength lay partly in what
remained of Mr. Gladstone's Sinaitic authority, and partly in a
stubborn, almost feudal, conservatism. Their sires and grandsires had
been Liberal, and it would be treason to desert the standard. It was a
moral question; not reason but loyalty was at issue. I had innumerable
Liberal friends, who would speed me from the door with "I'd dae onything
for ye but vote for ye."

It was hard to fight against this family compact. But we steadily made
way, and we certainly gave the place a fairly thorough political
education. For example, I find that I once discoursed for an hour and a
half on the taxation of land values and had a keen discussion
afterwards. I brought eminent speakers into the constituency, such as F.
E. Smith, Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Robert Finlay, Alfred Lyttelton and
Robert Horne, and that was a delicate business, for in many matters I
differed from my party. In 1914 my energy declined, I began to feel that
the ordinary matters of debate were falling out of the picture as I saw
creeping towards us the shadow of war.

Old electioneering tactics can interest nobody, and they never greatly
interested me. What made my work as a candidate a delight was the people
I moved among. I did not want to be just any kind of Member of
Parliament; I wanted to represent my own folk of the Border. I have
written of them in an earlier chapter that they had the qualities I most
admired in human nature; realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart
independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom. To the first
quality the ballads bear witness, to the second the history of Scotland.
As examples of the third let me tell two stories.

Mr. Gladstone once paid a visit to a Tweedside country, and in the
afternoon went out for a walk and came to a gate which gave upon the
glen. It was late in November, a snowstorm was threatening, and the
sheep, as is their custom, were drawing out from the burn-side to the
barer hill where drifts could not lie. An old shepherd was leaning on
the gate, and to him Mr. Gladstone spoke in his high manner. "Are not
the sheep the most foolish of all animals? Here is a storm pending, and
instead of remaining in shelter they are courting the fury of the blast.
If I were a sheep I should remain in the hollows." To which the shepherd
replied: "Sir, if ye were a sheep ye'd have mair sense."

The second belongs to my own candidature. Heckling in the Borders is
carried, I think, to a higher pitch of art than anywhere else in
Britain. It is pursued for the pure love of the game, and I have known a
candidate heckled to a standstill by his own supporters. Mr. Lloyd
George's Insurance Act had just been introduced, and at a meeting at
remote Ettrickhead the speaker was defending it on the ground that it
was a practical application of the Sermon on the Mount. A long-legged
shepherd rose to question him, and the following dialogue ensued:

"Ye believe in the Bible, sir?"

"With all my heart."

"And ye consider that this Insurance Act is in keepin' with the Bible?"

"I do."

"Is it true that under the Act there's a maternity benefit, and that a
woman gets the benefit whether she's married or no?"

"That is right."

"D'ye approve of that?"

"With all my heart."

"Well, sir, how d'ye explain this? The Bible says the wages of sin is
death and the Act says thirty shillin's."

For three years my wife and I spent most of our leisure in getting
acquainted with my possible constituents. We visited twice every hamlet,
farm and cottage in the two shires. That involved lengthy journeys in
wintry weather, but it meant also halcyon summer days in the long glens
of Tweed and Ettrick and Yarrow. It was not canvassing, for I rarely
mentioned politics. Since I spoke their own tongue and knew most men by
their Christian names, those visits gave me a chance of entering into
the pastoral life of the uplands, as Sir Walter Scott entered into it in
his quest for ballads. I learned many things that do not come usually
within the orbit of a politician. I cannot tell how my friends regarded
me in that capacity, but I think that they came to consider me as one of
themselves with whom they need not stand on ceremony. Once at a lamb
fair a shepherd paid me what I believe was a sincere though left-handed
compliment. "We've gotten the richt sort of candidate in you this time,"
he said. "Your predecessor was an awfu' nice man, but he was far ower
much of a gentleman and far ower honest!"


V

During those years I moved among a good many social groups. I had
friends in commerce and finance, in the army and navy and civil service,
in most branches of science and scholarship, and especially in the law
and politics. But as a writer it was my misfortune to be too little in
the society of writers. This was partly due to my preoccupation with
other interests. My upbringing never gave me the chance of the pleasant
bohemianism associated with the writer's craft. As a publisher I came
to know many authors, English and French, but it was only a nodding
acquaintance. I must confess, too, I fear, that I rarely found a man of
letters who interested me as much as members of other callings. A writer
must inevitably keep the best of himself for his own secret creative
world. I had no appetite for studio talk. I never knew the enthusiasm
which is given by membership of a coterie designed to preach some new
gospel in art. My taste was for things old and shabby and unpopular, and
I regarded with scepticism whatever was acclaimed as the Spirit of the
Age. I was born to be always out of fashion.

Also I felt--no doubt wrongly--that the author in social life was rarely
the natural creature that God intended. His public form inclined to be
an innocent pose forced on him by his admirers--robustious, cynical,
forward-looking, elfin, wistful--something, anyhow, that could not be
sustained without artifice. A man who as a longshoreman or a mason would
have been a pleasant companionable fellow, became as a writer as
restless as a grasshopper and apt, like the grasshopper, to be a burden.

Andrew Lang was a close friend, and after his death Henry Newbolt, but
these friendships were based on other things than literature. With G. K.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring I never
differed--except in opinion. I was fascinated by Rudyard Kipling's
devouring interest in every detail of the human comedy, the way in which
in conversation he used to raven the heart out of a subject. I knew
Thomas Hardy fairly well and revered his wonderful old age "like a
Lapland night," and what T. E. Lawrence called "his unbelievable dignity
and ripeness of spirit." Stephen Reynolds, who wrote _A Poor Man's
House_, and who chose to live as a Devon fisherman, was an intimate
friend.

Of the greatest figures I saw most of Henry James. Would that I had seen
more of him, for I loved the man, and revelled in the idioms of his
wonderful talk, which Mr. Percy Lubbock has admirably described--"his
grandiose courtesy, his luxuriant phraseology, his relish for some
extravagantly colloquial term embedded in a Ciceronian period, his
humour at once so majestic and so burly." I have two vivid memories of
him. Once I had to act as host in a relative's country house where he
was a guest. A New Englander knows something about Madeira and the house
had a wonderful cellar of that wine, so at the end of the dinner I
called his attention to what he was about to drink, promising him a new
experience. He sipped his glass, and his large benign face remained
impassive while he gave his verdict. I wish I could remember his
epithets; they were a masterpiece of the intricate, evasive and
non-committal, and yet of an exquisite politeness. Then I tasted the
wine and found it swipes. It was the old story of a dishonest butler who
was selling the famous vintages and replacing them by cheap stuff from a
neighbouring public-house. The other occasion was when an aunt of my
wife's, who was the widow of Byron's grandson, asked Henry James and
myself to examine her archives in order to reach some conclusion on the
merits of the quarrel between Byron and his wife. She thought that those
particular papers might be destroyed by some successor and she wanted a
statement of their contents deposited in the British Museum. So, during
a summer week-end, Henry James and I waded through masses of ancient
indecency, and duly wrote an opinion. The thing nearly made me sick, but
my colleague never turned a hair. His only words for some special
vileness were "singular"--"most curious"--"nauseating, perhaps, but how
quite inexpressibly significant."

The people I saw most of were the politicians. The pre-War years
witnessed the end of a fashion which had continued since the 1688
Revolution, and which made politics the chief interest of the educated
classes. To-day, when they are the uneasy preoccupation of everybody, it
is hard to recapture the precise atmosphere of that decade when to many
they were still a game ruled by all kinds of social and family
etiquettes. Controversy was not so sharp as to prevent the different
sides mixing pleasantly, and I still remember the surprise of
old-fashioned people when in 1913 the Parliament Act and the Ulster
question led to breaches of private friendship. There was a good deal to
be said for the fashion, since Britain's traditional policy is always
compromise. Its drawback was that it handicapped fresh and sincere
thinking on public affairs. The Government party, with the exception of
a few rebels, was content to stand in the ancient ways; Mr. Lloyd
George's social experiments were rather the development of an old, than
the inception of a new, creed, and his much-criticised finance was cuts
off the standard joints. The Opposition confined itself to opposing,
though a few younger men, like Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert, stood for
something more than a negation. One turned to the new Labour party to
find people who were trying to strike out new paths--and rarely found
them.

Politics in the circles in which I dwelt were an absorbing topic, at
least the small change of politics. A by-election woke a spate of
gossip; a general election had the sporting interest of a struggle
between counties for the cricket championship. The bitterness caused by
Mr. Lloyd George's platform manners has been much exaggerated; I have
heard aged Tories describe him as "varminty" with unwilling admiration
in their voices. The assumption seemed to be that the fundamentals of
politics were fixed and much the same as they had always been, and that
disputes were only about pace and emphasis. To many they were a
drawing-room game, almost a drawing-room comedy. In certain circles
there was, of course, discussion about principles and theories, and the
traditional creeds were always being analysed and defined. But they
remained the traditional creeds. The social and economic fabric was
assumed to be what it had been at the close of the nineteenth century,
with a few novel elements which could easily be adjusted. There was
little consciousness that new facts were emerging in all quarters,
social, political, economic, religious, which required a new
interpretation, that all our problems needed a fresh analysis, and that
the most venerated principles must be re-thought and restated. The world
was undergoing chemical combinations in which no element was left
unchanged. The constituents of society were being altered, both in
proportion and quality. The old economics were going out of date since
they were deductions from a state of things which had ceased to be.
Current beliefs in every department were imperceptibly changing, and
what was true of Britain was not less true of the world at large.

The imperception of the nation was reflected in the Government. That
Government contained, I think, as high an average of ability as was ever
found in a British Cabinet. Its members were admirably fitted to carry
on; they were not so well fitted to foresee and originate. Haldane was
different, but he was absorbed in his department, and Mr. Churchill,
too, had definitely become a specialist. Two men, Edward Grey and
Asquith, set the tone of the administration. Both were in the great
tradition of our public life. Grey had some of the qualities of the Lord
Althorp of the first Reform Bill, and as Foreign Secretary something of
the patient sagacity of Lord Salisbury. Half a century earlier he would
have been a very great Foreign Minister, but he was a man of an era, and
that era had passed. The position of Britain in Europe had radically
changed, and the old business of wise compromise and nice adjustment was
out of date. New, strange, inconsequent forces were at work to upset the
old balances. He felt these forces but he did not understand
them--perhaps no man did. When the crisis came he was in my belief as
adequate to it as was possible for any British statesman cast in his
mould. What was needed was a different mould, something like the
desperate boldness of Cromwell or Chatham.

The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, had in his character every traditional
virtue--dignity, honour, courage, and a fine selflessness. In
temperament he was equable and generous. He was a most competent head of
a traditional Government and a brilliant leader of a traditional party.
But he was firmly set in the old ways, and the master of an _expertise_
which was fast losing its meaning. Like his colleagues he was immensely
intelligent, but he was impercipient. New facts made little impression
on his capacious but insensitive mind. His Irish policy ignored the
changed situation both in the south and north of Ireland, and was a
score of years out of date. He had no serious philosophy to meet the new
phenomena in the world of labour and in the national economy. He was
most at home in the cause which had always engaged his party, the
furtherance of political freedom, but it was a cause which had become
for the moment of lesser importance. He was a man of wide knowledge and
many intellectual interests, but he was essentially the Balliol type of
the 'seventies, rational, sceptical, a devotee of a liberty which he
left half-comprehended, as a School-man left the mysteries of his
Church. Whatever ran counter to his bland libertarianism seemed an
impiety. I remember, when the audacities of Lytton Strachey's Victorian
studies were delighting the world, suggesting to Mr. Asquith that the
time was ripe for a return match. It was easy, I said, to make fun of
the household of faith, but I thought that just as much fun could be
made out of the other side, even with the most respectful and accurate
presentation. I suggested a book to be called _Three Saints of
Rationalism_ on the lines of _Eminent Victorians_, and proposed for the
chapters John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and John Morley. He was
really shocked, as shocked as a High Churchman would be who was invited
to consider the comic side of the Oxford Movement.

Let me take three figures of the time who were not impercipient. I did
not know Ramsay MacDonald intimately until after the War, and I was not
greatly impressed by the ordinary Labour intellectual, who seemed to be
threshing and rethreshing the thin crops of Fabianism and Marxism. But I
knew Philip Snowden, to whom I was introduced by Charles Masterman, who
married my wife's cousin. I have rarely met a man whose character was so
four-square and compact, so wholly without loose fringes. He was like
one of his own stony, grey Yorkshire moors, grim at first sight, but
hiding in its folds nooks of a rare beauty. The austere face could break
into the kindliest and tenderest of smiles. He had a corrosive irony in
handling opponents, but he was bitter only about creeds, never about
human beings.

His faith, I think, was more radicalism than any form of socialism, for
he fought shy of theories and was never happy with abstractions. To his
radicalism he joined something of the old nonconformist missionary fire.
He knew the life of the poor at first hand, and laboured to better it,
but he had no sentimentality about the transcendent virtues of the
working classes, and would talk to them as firmly as to their masters.
In discussion I have never known a more candid mind. He put all his
cards on the table, and had none of the intellectual vanity which
worships a false consistency. He realised the new forces which had come
into being and faced them with perfect courage. For at the back of all
he had a kind of rugged, ultimate optimism. He deeply loved his country
and reverenced his countrymen, and believed that there was no problem
which Englishmen could not solve if only they were true to themselves
and to sound reason. It was this fine union of candour and optimism
about human nature--at least English human nature--which endeared him to
a man like Arthur Balfour, otherwise so different in mind and
antecedents.

Lord Rosebery was also a realist who recognized that the old world was
passing away. I had met him occasionally ever since my Oxford days, and
in the years immediately preceding the War we used to forgather every
autumn at his moorland house of Rosebery and walk the green confines of
Lothian and Tweeddale. I have written elsewhere[2] of his career in
politics and letters which had by that time virtually come to an end. He
had lost nearly all the aristocratic radicalism which had made him Mr.
Gladstone's chief lieutenant in Scotland, and had adopted something very
like old-fashioned Toryism, with occasional outbursts against
individual Tories. His creed was based largely on Burke, and, like
Burke, he distrusted anything in the nature of plebiscitary democracy.
He disliked the new type of demogogic statesmen. He regarded the
_entente_ with France as a menace which must end in a European War. Like
Philip Snowden he believed in his countrymen, but unlike him he had also
an enthusiasm for the Empire, about which he knew a great deal and
Snowden nothing. But he had none of the latter's stalwart optimism about
human nature, for his cosseted life had limited his knowledge of it. In
our talks he was deeply pessimistic. Britain, he held, was on a razor
edge internationally, and in domestic affairs was losing her former
dignity and discipline. Had he written letters they would have been as
devastating forecasts of calamity as those of Henry Adams--him of _The
Education_. It was a melancholy experience for me after the War--I
visited him almost every month--to see this former Prime Minister of
Britain crushed by bodily weakness, sorrowing over the departing world
and contemptuous of the new. It was sadly reminiscent of the old age of
Chateaubriand. I went for a drive with him, I remember, at the Durdans
on an April day in 1929, just before starting out for the elections in
Scotland. I had never seen Surrey more green and flowery, but he was
unconscious of the spring glories and was sunk in sad and silent
meditations. When news of his death came a fortnight later I could not
regret that my old friend was free of his bondage.

    [Footnote 2: In "Proceedings of the British Academy," reprinted in
    _Men and Deeds_, 1935.]

If it be a statesman's first duty to see facts clearly and to make the
proper deductions from them then I think that Arthur Balfour was the
greatest public figure of that time. He was the only man in public life
for whom I felt a disciple's loyalty. When he retired from the
leadership of the Conservative party in 1911 the glamour went out of
politics for me, and my feeling was that of the current parody of the
Prayer Book: "Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to Bonar
Law."

A statesman should not be judged by his policy alone, since much of that
may be the work of others; to get at the real man we must have
cross-bearings from different angles. One key to the understanding of
Arthur Balfour was his conversation. Unhesitatingly I should put him
down as the best talker I have ever known, one whose talk was not a
brilliant monologue or a string of epigrams, but a communal effort which
quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best of
other people. He would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and
discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it
until its author felt that he had really made some contribution to human
wisdom. In the last year of the War he permitted me to take American
visitors occasionally to lunch with him in Carlton Gardens, and I
remember with what admiration I watched him feel his way with the
guests, seize on some chance word and make it the pivot of speculations
until the speaker was not only encouraged to give his best but that best
was infinitely enlarged by his host's contribution. Such guests would
leave walking on air, feeling no special obligation to Arthur
Balfour--that was his cunning--but convinced that they were bigger men
than they had thought.

In conversation, as in parliamentary debate, he had a delicate courtesy,
which was without a suspicion of patronage. Hence he had friends of
every type and of all parties, and the only grumblers were the small fry
who considered that a leader should chain his soul to party
headquarters. The personalities of our friends shift and change as they
are lighted up differently by a change of circumstances; but Arthur
Balfour seemed independent of his environment; the lighting changed, but
the light seemed to be in himself as in an opal or a star-sapphire.
There was nothing slack-lipped in his geniality. He could be a stern
critic of incompetence and make devastating comments; as, for instance,
his remark about a certain politician that if he had a little more
brains he would be half-witted. Also he had strict moral standards. In
the graver matters of conduct people were surprised to find that this
urbane man of the world had a stiff knuckle of puritanism, the stiffer
because it was so completely intelligent.

Another angle of approach was his prose, which to my mind must rank in
its dry purity with the best of our time--the prose most in consonance
with the peculiar qualities of our English speech. It has an easy
colloquial pitch, which hardens now and then into a delicate
eighteenth-century formalism. Above all it is notable for its exquisite
logic, rare in these high-coloured days, a logic which interpenetrates
the sequence of sentences, the choice of illustrations and the selection
of epithets. Its clarity is crystalline not watery, and it offers
perfect aptness and coherence in place of flowers and tears.

From his prose style and his talk one could gather something about
Arthur Balfour. A strong critical mind and a fastidious taste; but also
a reverence for the plain man and the plain man's modes of thought. The
argument in his writings is usually directed against the pedant with his
specious generalities. He believes in and reverences the human reason,
but that reason is not the contorted visionary thing of the
metaphysician; it is common sense, the ordinary consciousness, a wise
appreciation of the working rules of human society--the free play of
the intellect, but an intellect which can understand the intractable
subject matter it works with. Just as Rosebery was a seventeenth-century
type, so there was much of the eighteenth century in Balfour, for he had
its aversion to too roseate dreams about humanity, but also its profound
consciousness of homely worth and homely wisdom. His enthusiasm, slow to
kindle, was for what was practicable, for the business of carrying on
the work of the world, and his hero was the man who was willing to take
a hand.

He had few of the attributes of a popular leader since he was
unrhetorical and fastidious and hated all that was showy and glossy, and
his mental processes were often too subtle for popular comprehension.
Yet he was a great party leader because of his overwhelming power in
debate, and a moral elevation of which the nation became increasingly
aware.

His character will be a puzzle to future historians, and it sometimes
puzzled even his friends, since it united so many assumed
contradictories. For example, he combined a real earnestness and a
thorough-going scepticism. We find it in his philosophy. He approaches
the world of simple faiths with reverence, and will never heedlessly
disturb them, since he not only sees their practical values but shares
in their spiritual appeal. He is sceptical chiefly of conventional
scepticism. He has none of the poetry and the sudden high visions of the
great system-makers; he is never _exalt_, his metaphors are never
grandiose, he builds no cloud cities. But he does provide a rational
basis for belief, and, speculatively, he clears the air and defines the
problems which he leaves for later and more fortunate philosophers to
solve. Nor is his exposition without emotional fervour, and sometimes
his austere style can kindle into eloquence. Take this from _The
Religion of Humanity_. I could quote better examples of his prose, but
none more typical of his essential faith.

     "The 'religion of humanity' seems specially fitted to meet the
     tastes of that comparatively small and prosperous class, who are
     unwilling to leave the dry bones of Agnosticism wholly unclothed
     with any living tissue of religious emotion, and who are at the
     same time fortunate enough to be able to persuade themselves that
     they are contributing, or may contribute, by their individual
     efforts to the attainment of some great ideal for mankind. But what
     has it to say to the more obscure multitude who are absorbed, and
     well-nigh overwhelmed, in the constant struggle with daily needs
     and narrow cares; who have but little leisure or inclination to
     consider the precise role they are called on to play in the great
     drama of 'humanity,' and who might in any case be puzzled to
     discover its interest or its importance? Can it assure them that
     there is no human being so insignificant as not to be of infinite
     worth in the eyes of Him who created the Heavens, or so feeble but
     that his actions may have consequences of infinite moment long
     after this material system shall have crumbled into nothingness?
     Does it offer consolation to those who are in grief, hope to those
     who are bereaved, strength to the weak, forgiveness to the sinful,
     rest to those who are weary and heavy laden? If not, then, whatever
     its merits, it is no rival to Christianity. It cannot penetrate and
     vivify the inmost life of ordinary humanity. There is in it no
     nourishment for ordinary human souls, no comfort for ordinary human
     sorrow, no help for ordinary human weakness. Not less than the
     crudest irreligion does it leave us men divorced from all communion
     with God, face to face with the unthinking energies of nature which
     gave us birth, and into which, if supernatural religion indeed be a
     dream, we must after a few fruitless struggles be again dissolved."

Still another rare combination was his pessimism and optimism. He had
none of the Victorian belief in progress. He saw no golden age in the
future, and he doubted the existence of any in the past. Hope and dream,
he seemed to say, but if you are wise do not look for too much; this
world is a bridge to pass over, not to build upon. But at the same time
he revered the fortitude of human nature, the courage with which men
stumbled up the steep ascent of life. It was the business of a leader,
he thought, not so much to put quality into his following as to elicit
it, since the quality was already there. Above all he trusted his
countrymen. After the battle of Jutland he held that they were
stout-hearted enough to hear the plain truth. He revised the doctrine of
the Empire so as to shift the emphasis from constitutional bonds to
human loyalties.

But the most remarkable union of opposites was his devotion to what was
old and his aliveness to what was new. He had the eighteenth-century
sense of living in a world which was not made yesterday and emphatically
would not be remade to-morrow, and he saw the long descent of the most
novel problems. Like Burke, he would not destroy what many generations
had built merely because some of the plasterwork was shaky. At the same
time he was wholly in tune with his age and aware of every _nuance_ of
the modern world. He would never admit that there was any merit in a
thing merely because it was new, but he gave it a judicial examination.
We see this spirit in his philosophy. In his essay on "Berkeley" he
observes that it is essential for a philosopher to possess "the instinct
which tells him where, along the line of contemporary speculation, that
point is to be found from which the next advance may best be made." This
instinct he had in a remarkable degree, and his channel of thought,
which when he produced his first book was a backwater, became presently,
under the guidance of Bergson and others, the fashionable stream. He saw
deeper into labour problems than most of the Labour leaders. He was a
far more prescient economist than either the practical business men or
the academic expositors. He early saw the inevitable development of the
Empire and it was his hand in 1926 that wrote its new charter.

So unique a combination of qualities rarely combined made him a major
force in public life, whether in or out of office. As I have said, he
had none of the gifts which attract an easy popularity. He had his
short-comings too. Sometimes he used his powers on behalf of an
obscurantism which was not his true creed. But he was a very great
servant of the State and a great human being. To many there was
something chilly in his aloofness from the passions of the market-place,
something not quite human. Could he suffer and rejoice like an ordinary
creature? Assuredly he could, I have seen him in old age show the
light-heartedness of a boy, and he could mourn long and deeply, though
silently, for the loss of friends. As the phrase goes, he "maximised"
life, getting and giving of the best, and on his death-bed he looked
forward to the end calmly and hopefully as the gateway to an ampler
world.




CHAPTER VII

INTER ARMA


The outbreak of War in 1914 found me a sick man. A combination of family
anxieties and public activities had played havoc with my digestion, and
the remedy was either a major operation or a long spell of rest. I was
thirty-nine and consequently well over the age for enlistment, and in
any case no recruiting office would accept me. So I went to bed for the
better part of three miserable months, while every day brought news of
the deaths of my friends. In the spring of 1915 I was convalescent and
was able to act as _The Times_ correspondent at the Front until after
the battle of Loos. Then I was annexed for a short season by the Foreign
Office. In 1916 I was at last commissioned as an officer in the
Intelligence Corps, and was in France until the early part of 1917, when
I was recalled to a post under the War Cabinet. I obtained leave to have
the necessary operation, and thereafter was engaged in intelligence work
at home until the Armistice.

Such was my undistinguished record of service. That it was so meagre may
be partly set down to my health. Compared with most men I had but a
small share in the dangers of campaigning, but I had a full measure of
its discomforts, since for the four years of war, and for some time
afterwards, I was almost continuously unwell. The battle of the Somme
was one long nightmare, when ill weather and fatigue had to be endured
by a body which was nearly always in pain and was steadily declining in
strength. My time in France was purgatorial, for though I had few of the
hardships of the actual trenches, lengthy journeys in the drizzling
autumn and winter of 1916, damp billets, and irregular meals reduced me
to such a state of physical wretchedness that even to-day a kind of
nausea seizes me when some smell recalls the festering odour of the
front line, made up of incinerators, latrines and mud. When I was
brought home I had more in the way of bodily comforts, but excessive
busyness soon undid the good effects of the operation, and all my work
was a struggle against the collar.

The attitude of the detached observer was always difficult for me. To
achieve any peace of mind I had to have some share, however small, in
the business itself. The years of war were like a trough into which I
found myself flung, in company with several million others. Life seemed
to stand uneasily still, and in no direction was there any prospect.
Much of my pleasure in the past had been due to the gift of reacting
quickly to stimuli, and regarding each new day as a new creation. But
now there were no stimuli, only a leaden routine of duties. The science
of war had always been one of my hobbies, but it was hard for a minor
cog to find interest in the operations of a huge impersonal machine
which seemed to move with little intelligent purpose.

At first my ailments hid the world from me. By and by they also became a
matter of routine, a background against which other objects stood out,
and I could observe things and people. These ailments did me one
service; they blunted my feeling about the sufferings of my friends, who
had to face a far harder lot than mine. I felt dully that I had myself
got quite as much as I could bear. In that grey hollow into which the
universe had shrunk there were some--usually young men--who enjoyed it
all, and breathed continually the air of adventure. The ordinary man
went through it with fortitude and good humour as if it had been a kind
of school, finding comfort in a new fellowship. To a few with exposed
nerves and inward-turning eyes it was all an agony. To those who had had
some taste of the rich variousness of the old life it meant bitter
disappointment and a deadly _ennui_. But those who suffered most were, I
think, the men who had already found their niche, who were approaching
middle age, and whose bodies had not the resilience of youth. They felt
acutely the physical strain; their minds were full of private anxieties;
above all they saw the shattering of the house of life they had made for
themselves, and despaired of building another.

From the start of the War it was clear that an old regime was passing
away. That I did not regret, for the radicalism which is part of the
Tory creed was coming uppermost, and I looked forward to a clearing out
of much rubbish. But I realised that we were at the point of contact of
a world vanishing and a world arriving, and that such a situation was
apt to crush those who had to meet it. A new world would have to be
made, and who would be left to make it? No man can have more than
perhaps a score of intimate friends, and most of mine had gone, or were
going. My youngest brother and my partner in business fell at Arras.
Hugh Dawnay, whom I put first among the younger soldiers, died at First
Ypres; Cecil Rawling, with whom, before the War, I had made plans for an
attempt on Everest, fell as a brigadier at Passchendaele; my wife's
cousin, Jack Stuart-Wortley, disappeared in the German advance of March
1918; Oxford contemporaries like Raymond Asquith and Bron Lucas, and
younger friends like Charles Lister and the Grenfell twins, all were
dead. Losses, which a few years before would have seemed cataclysmal,
became a matter of course. One acquiesced in tragedy, but it was an
acquiescence without hope or philosophy. There was no uplift of the
spirit, such as is traditionally associated with battle.

I acquired a bitter detestation of war, less for its horrors than for
its boredom and futility, and a contempt for its _panache_. To speak of
glory seemed a horrid impiety. That was perhaps why I could not open
Homer. I found that I could read very little, and that many things which
used to charm me seemed meaningless, since they belonged to a dead
world. My reading was chiefly in the Latin and Greek classics, which
were beyond the caprice of time. I read and re-read Thucydides, for he
also had lived among crumbling institutions; Virgil, for he had known
both the cruelty and the mercy of life; Plato, above all, for he was
seraphically free from the pettinesses which were at the root of our
sorrows.

When I returned to England I gradually won a happier outlook. While in
bed during the autumn months of 1914 I had begun a popular history of
the war in monthly volumes, designed to keep my work-people in
employment, and its wide circulation induced the authorities to advise
its continuance. This was a hard job in France, but it was easier in
London--indeed, my difficulty was that I now knew too much and was often
perplexed as to what I could print. Slowly I began to see the War as a
gigantic cosmic drama, embracing every quarter of the globe and the
whole orbit of man's life. Though it lacked the epic fervour and
simplicity it had an apocalyptic splendour of design. This prospect, and
my work, which lay largely in the study of the mind of other nations,
gave me a new intellectual interest. Also I was acquiring a boundless
admiration for human nature. It was a war, as I have written elsewhere,
won not by the genius of the few but by the faithfulness of the many.
There was no leader, civil or military, to whom I felt I could give
unreasoned trust, but I could confide implicitly in the mass of my own
people.

Consequently many of my pre-War interests revived, but, so to speak, on
sufferance, for I felt that they had become terribly fragile. Would
anything remain of the innocencies of the old life? I was reassured by
two short holidays. One was a tramp in the Cotswolds, from which I
returned with the conviction that the essential England could not
perish. This field had sent bowmen to Agincourt; down that hill Rupert's
men, swaying in their saddles, had fled after Naseby; this village had
given Wellington a general; and from another the parson's son had helped
to turn the tide in the Indian Mutiny. To-day the land was as quiet as
in the beginning, and mowers were busy in the hay. A second holiday took
me to my Tweedside hills. There, far up in the glens, I found a
shepherd's wife who had four sons serving. Jock, she told me cheerfully,
was in France with the Royal Scots; Jamie was in "a bit ca'd
Sammythrace"; Tam was somewhere on the Arctic shore and "sair troubled
wi' his teeth"; and Davie was outside the walls of Jerusalem. Her kind
old eyes were infinitely comforting. I felt that Jock and Jamie and Tam
and Davie would return and would take up their shepherd's trade as
dutifully as their father. Samothrace and Murmansk and Palestine would
be absorbed, as Otterburn and Flodden had been, into the ageless world
of pastoral.

It was our freedom from melodrama, our national gift of meiosis, our
steady nerves which convinced me that we could build up the world anew
and embody in it the best of the old. And something more--our power of
domesticating the strange and the terrible and making portents homely.
A friend, visiting wounded soldiers back from Mesopotamia, asked one man
where he got his wound. "It was twa miles," he replied, "on the
Rothiemurchus side o' Baghdad." His native parish under the knees of the
Cairngorms was the point from which he adjusted himself in a fantastic
world, and the city of the Caliphs was only an adjunct. Such a race
could never be rootless or homeless. No experience can be too strange
and no task too formidable if a man can link it up with what he knows
and loves.


II

There was little solitude for me during those years. I seemed to live
among crowds both in France and in London, and, though, I missed the
intimate comradeship of regimental service, I rubbed shoulders with a
great variety of human beings. I added to my already extensive military
acquaintance, and in London I had to concern myself with every variety
of social and political groups, while one side of my duties brought me
into touch with the queer subterranean world of the Secret Service. No
man had ever more loyal and competent colleagues, men like Lord Edward
Gleichen, Charles Masterman, Geoffrey Butler, Reginald Farrer, Ernest
Hodder-Williams, Henry Newbolt--to name only those who are dead . . . I
was occasionally summoned to the War Cabinet and renewed old friendships
with Milner and Carson. I met every foreigner of importance who came to
London. I saw something of the veiled prophets who are behind the scenes
in a crisis--Colonel House, and Lord Esher, and especially Northcliffe.
Northcliffe I had known for many years, and our friendship had no
breaches in it since we were wholly independent of each other. At
Christmas 1916 he paid a visit to G.H.Q. and for a week, on Haig's
instructions, I took him for an elaborate tour of the British Front. He
talked much during those long cold journeys, brilliantly, persuasively,
sometimes almost with inspiration. Had he had a more normal education
and discipline he might have been a great man, for when unswayed by
vanity he had sound judgment and a penetrating insight . . . I saw at
close quarters the intricate mechanism which directed the War at home,
one of the strangest mixtures of amateur and professional talent and
charlatanry, the patriot and the _arriviste_ which history has known,
with behind it the dynamic figure of the Prime Minister, generating heat
and somehow turning it into power. Of Mr. Lloyd George I have written
elsewhere[3]; _proximus ardebat Eucalegon_; he was the flame at which
all warmed, and many scorched, their hands.

    [Footnote 3: In _The King's Grace_, 1935.]

I would pay tribute to one of the most brilliant, misunderstood, and
tragically fated men of our time. Charles Masterman began by being
overestimated, or rather estimated on the wrong lines, and he ended by
being most unjustly decried. He came into Parliament at the election of
1906 in the van of the triumphant Liberals, a young Moses who was to
lead the people to a new way of life. He had the idealist's ardour and a
remarkable oratorical gift, and his sensitiveness to suffering was not
mere rhetoric but a profound emotion. Then came his apprenticeship to
the ordinary tasks of administration, and wholly different talents were
revealed. Older members of his party spoke of him as having a heart of
gold and a head full of feathers. It was a complete misunderstanding;
much, but not all, of his idealism disappeared in the rut of office and
was replaced by a mild cynicism, but he developed notable
administrative gifts, and did invaluable work for the Government in
piloting some of their most controversial measures through the House.
When we worked together during the War I found his judgment shrewd and
bold and his mastery of detail impeccable. But I would stress above all
things his loyalty. In his parliamentary career he was more faithful to
his colleagues than they were to him. In his fidelity to principles and
persons he put to shame the brittle loyalties of party.

I have some queer _macabre_ recollections of those years--of meetings
with odd people in odd places, of fantastic duties which a romancer
would have rejected as beyond probability. I remember a dinner at my
house in the spring of 1916, when I happened to be on leave, and a
delegation from the Russian Duma was visiting England. I have forgotten
some of the guests, but Arthur Balfour was present, and Maurice Baring,
and Milyukov, the leader of the Cadets, and Protopopov. The last was a
sick man and slept so badly in his hotel that I invited him to stay with
me. He had great personal charm, but I think that even then he was a
little mad. He professed to have learned some English poetry from his
nurse, and as examples he repeated with tremendous gusto various nursery
rhymes like "A Frog he would a-wooing go." A few months later he became
the henchman of the Empress and Rasputin, and the proximate cause of the
Russian Revolution, and in a year the Bolsheviks had him shot in
prison.[4]

[Footnote 4: I have other fantastic experiences in my recollection, and
two of the most unpredictable belong to recent years and the American
continent. In April 1937 I addressed the crowded sessions of the Senate
and the House of Representatives in Washington without having had the
opportunity to prepare speeches. In September 1939 at Ottawa I was got
out of bed in the small hours of a Sunday morning to declare war on
Germany on Canada's behalf, and had staying in the house at the time a
son of the late Emperor of Austria!]

I have said that my academic interest in the art and science of war
declined sadly during the campaign. What I wanted was something like
Uncle Toby's bowling-green, where he and Corporal Trim, guided by the
daily news-sheet, could study at leisure Marlborough's doings in
Flanders. A very different affair was this tragic business of armies
clinched in a dull grapple. But I never lost my interest in the human
side. Mr. Gladstone used to say that the politician was of all types the
most difficult to understand; but the politician is child's play
compared to the regular soldier. For the military profession gives its
members a new artificial personality, so that only at rare intervals
does the real man emerge from the ritualism of long tradition.

Of the French commanders I had only a surface knowledge. I met most of
them, and, like everybody else, was impressed by Foch's flaming spirit,
and Petain's calm mastery of his craft, and the paladin-like dignity of
Gouraud. At Chantilly, too, I saw some of the younger staff officers and
admired their professional competence. Many of the senior British
Commanders I had known from South African days. Then Lord Kitchener had
been the colossus that shadowed all our paths. I was fortunate enough in
my infrequent dealings with him to discover early how little he liked
the colossus attitude. He was a shy man who did not mix easily with his
fellows, and this shyness, combined with his formidable presence and
immense reputation, used to scare those who entered his company. But
nothing annoyed him more than to have people gibber before him. He liked
those who stood up squarely in his presence, and the staff officers to
whom he was most attached used to make him the subject of outrageous
practical jokes. The last years of his life, I fear, were not the
happiest. He was a man who saw the long distance more clearly than the
foreground, and his work lay with the foreground. He found himself in
company which was uncongenial because unfamiliar, and whose language he
did not talk, for politics meant to him about as much as the Quantum
theory. His friends were beginning to dread that a great career might
close in an anti-climax, until that June night when the Orkney seas put
an end to such forebodings.

Two others whom I had long known were Sir John French and Sir Henry
Wilson. The first was the best type of the old British regular, kindly,
dutiful, sagacious, winning readily the confidence and love of his men.
When I used to meet him with Haldane he seemed to be not only highly
trained but notably broad-minded and free from pedantry, and to have
something of Wellington's strong practical intelligence. But in supreme
command he appeared to age and lose something of his vigour and
perspective. It looked as if he felt his task too big and too novel for
him, and, being puzzled, he relapsed too easily upon ancient
conventions. Of Henry Wilson the opposite was true. The Ulster
difficulties had brought us together, and I came under the charm of his
swift and audacious mind. As the only British senior officer who was in
close touch at the start with the French General Staff, he was a most
valuable _trait d'union_; but this association made him adopt too
readily the French cult of the offensive, and he was a vehement advocate
of French ideas, even when their authors had begun to doubt them. There
was something loose in his habits of thought, and his imagination made
no proper contact with realities. I remember how at St. Omer in the
summer of 1915 he used to prophesy. I wrote his prophecies down in a
little book and most were wildly wrong. The whole man lacked discipline,
both intellectual and moral. Sometimes he was dangerous, for he was
very vain; he had a gift, too, of making a situation more clear than God
intended it to be, and therefore he had an undue influence upon civilian
minds at home. More often he was simply futile, a brilliant child
bombinating in the void. But if his defects were obvious so were his
qualities, his courage, his humour, his unflagging gusto. He used to
tell how he once overheard some Frenchmen discussing his appearance and
trying to find the _mot juste_. _Ce monsieur_, said one at last, _a une
physionomie  part_. The whole man was _ part_. I never met anyone in
the least like him, and that long, lean, whimsical face, like a
good-natured pike, will not soon be forgotten by his friends.

The soldiers whom I have known best in my life were Julian Byng and
Douglas Haig. One evening in the year 1902 I found myself sitting on my
haversack at a derelict station in the South African veld wondering
where I should find a meal and a bed. A cloud of dust appeared on the
horizon, and presently a mounted column arrived with Byng in command. He
gave me supper, and from that hour dated a close friendship. His nature
was compounded of a child-like delight in simple things, a resolute and
clear-sighted sagacity, infinite kindness and a profound religion. He
had that best sort of humour which sees and rejoices in the homely
whimsicalities of life. In the War he was a centre of legend, and most
of the stories about him have the merit of being true. The most familiar
tells how during the German advance in March 1918, when he was in
command of the Third Army, he was sitting in his headquarters at Albert
and was visited by a staff officer from G.H.Q. Every five minutes a
telephone message was handed to him, with news of the retreat of one of
his divisions. Julian studied the messages, and then, laying his hand
on the pile, turned to the staff officer. "Did you ever hear," he asked,
"of an admiral of my name?" Another belongs to the early days of the
campaign when he commanded a cavalry division in the neighbourhood of
Ypres. One evening, accompanied by a young A.D.C., he went for a walk in
an unsalubrious bit of ground somewhere near Klein Zillebeke. Apparently
in deep thought, he strolled unconcernedly among the craters, while
shells fell unpleasantly close, and the A.D.C. became nervous for the
safety of his charge and himself. "But I must not say a word," he
thought. "He is working out some tremendous scheme." At last they
reached a sunken road, and Julian beckoned the A.D.C. to him. "What do
you think?" he asked. "Wouldn't the partridges come over here nicely?"

There can have been few commanders who were more rapturously adored by
their men, and it was because of his rich, understanding humanity, what
in Scotland is called "innerliness," and not because of any genial
slackness, for he kept a tight rein on discipline. To whatever he
commanded he gave his own "tone," whether a cavalry division, or the
Canadian Corps, or the Third Army, or the Metropolitan Police. Like Sir
Walter Scott, he talked to every man as if he were a blood relation. As
Governor-General of Canada he met again the men who had served under
him, and there is a Byng legend in the Dominion to-day which will always
be part of its tradition. The tall figure in very old clothes, with a
short pipe in his mouth, sitting on a gate talking to a prairie farmer
is a picture which Canada will long cherish. He had the key which
instantaneously unlocks men's hearts.

Haig was a different and a far more complex being. He was a member of my
own Oxford college, and he was descended from one of the most famous of
Border families; so he and I had a ready-made basis for friendship. Once
in South Africa I carried despatches to him, and, over-sleeping myself,
was decanted at Colesberg platform on a bitter winter morning indecently
clad in pyjamas and a British-warm. He received my apologies with the
remark that Brasenose had never been a dressy college! I was for a time
attached to G.H.Q. and saw a good deal of him there, and after the War,
when he was settled at Bemersyde, I had ample opportunity for the study
of a mind and character which no neat formula could assess. He became so
much the subject of controversy that those who loved him, as I did, were
inclined to a mere defiant eulogy. But eulogy was the last thing that so
rare a personality sought or desired.

He was first and foremost a highly competent professional soldier. Now a
soldier's professionalism differs from that of other crafts. He acquires
a body of knowledge which may be varied and enlarged by new conditions,
such as new weapons and new modes of transport, but which in essence is
a closed technique. The reason is that, unlike art, law and medicine,
there has in the past been little in the way of a philosophy of first
principles behind it to stimulate evolution; a powerful mind might work
brilliantly inside its limits with little impulse to alter the
fundamentals. Change and expansion were consequently in the nature of a
revolution, and were brought about either by a great genius, or--slowly
and grudgingly--by some cataclysmic pressure of facts. Hence the more
competent and better trained a soldier was, the more averse he would be
to alter his traditional creed till its failure had been proven with
utter finality.

[Illustration: ELSFIELD MANOR]

This was the attitude of all the principal commanders, British,
French and German, at the beginning of the War. The campaign produced in
the high command no military genius of the first order, no Napoleon,
Marlborough or Lee, scarcely even a Wellington, a Stonewall Jackson or a
Sherman. Its type was Grant. Hence changes of method had to come by
sheer pressure of events after much tragic trial and error. Haig was as
slow to learn as any of his colleagues, and he made grave mistakes. But
he did learn. Take one point, the use of cavalry; having once opened his
mind, he showed himself notably receptive and prescient. Most of the
tactics of the final advance to victory were his, and in the last great
movement he leaned upon Foch no more than Foch leaned upon him. It is
fair to say, I think, that his mind developed fast as soon as
circumstances permitted it to develop at all.

But in a soldier character is at least as vital as intellect, and there
can be no question about the quality of his character. He had none of
the lesser graces which make a general popular with troops, and it took
four years for his armies to feel his personality.[5] To his friends
that personality in war was a revelation. They had known him as an able,
ambitious and industrious soldier, handsome and fashionable, a good
sportsman, the type certain to succeed under normal conditions--in a
word, a conventional type. But in command a new man appeared. For one
thing he spoke with a broader accent--of the Borders, oddly enough,
instead of his native Fife. The religion of his childhood was
recaptured, and a spirit naturally kind and genial was braced by a kind
of Covenanting fervour to an austere discipline and a constant sense of
the divine foreordering of life. He had found deep wells from which to
draw comfort. The self was obliterated, for I do not think that he ever
thought of his own reputation. Unrhetorically, almost unconsciously, his
country and what he held to be God's purpose became for him the
transcendent realities.

    [Footnote 5: He had not Sir John French's gift of speaking to the
    chance-met soldier. Once, I remember, he tried it. There was a
    solitary private by the roadside, whom he forced himself to address.
    _Haig_: "Well, my man, where did you start the war?" _Private_ (pale
    to the teeth): "I swear to God, sir, I never started no war." It was
    his last attempt.]

This character, thus toughened and elevated, was highly tried. He had to
feel his way in his task and was often conscious of blunders, more
acutely conscious, I think, than most of his critics. He had
difficulties with his allies, with his colleagues, with the home
Government, though, let it be said, he had far less to complain of on
the latter score than most soldiers of a democracy--Wellington in the
Peninsula, for example, or Lee. He had repeated bitter disappointments.
He had the wolf by the ears, and at first he clung to traditional
methods, when a smaller man might have tried fantastic experiments which
would have assuredly spelt disaster. He did not revise his plans until
the old ones had been fully tested, and a new one had emerged of which
his reason could approve. Under him we incurred heavy losses, but I
believe that these losses would have been greater had he been the
brilliant empiric like Nivelle or Henry Wilson. When the last great
enemy attack came he took the main shock with a quiet resolution; when
the moment arrived for the advance he never fumbled. He broke through
the Hindenburg line in spite of the doubts of the British Cabinet,
because he believed that only thus could the War be ended in time to
save civilisation. He made the decision alone--one of the finest proofs
of moral courage in the history of war. Haig cannot enter the small
circle of the great captains, but it may be argued that in special
circumstances of the campaign his special qualities were the ones most
needed--patience, sobriety, balance of temper, unshakable fortitude. His
best epitaph is the sentence which Pope wrote of Harley: "He was a
steady man and a great firmness of soul."

There were no strong colours in his nature, but he diffused a gentle
compelling radiance. As I have said, he was incapable of rhetoric and
his addresses to his troops, as in April 1918, were of a hodden-grey
simplicity. His interests were limited. When eminent and cultivated
guests came on a visit to G.H.Q., to prevent the Commander-in-Chief
sitting tongue-tied, a kind of conversational _menu_ had to be arranged.
For example, Walter Pater, who had been his tutor, had once said
something to him about style which he remembered, and it was desirable
to lead the talk up to that. After the War he led the pleasant life of a
Border country gentleman in the home of his ancestors, and a stranger,
meeting him on the hunting-field or at a covert side, could never have
guessed the storms he had ridden. His end came too soon--but happily,
for there was no decline in his mental powers. On the very morning when
I read of his death I received from him a copy of his "appreciation" of
the War, now in the British Museum, to which he had added new and
illuminating passages. In peace his main interest was in the future of
the men who had fought under him, and he refused all rewards until he
had convinced himself that they were not forgotten. "He will go to
Heaven for that," said Corporal Trim.


III

The Armistice found me at the end of my tether and I straightway
collapsed into bed. I was not fit to stand for Parliament at the ensuing
election, nor did I want to, for the pre-War party labels seemed to me
meaningless, so I withdrew from my candidature and induced my
supporters to vote for my former opponent. It was not until the early
spring of 1919 that I could crawl out of cover and survey the post-War
scene.

To my surprise I found that I had recovered something of the
exhilaration of youth. I was forty-three, but I seemed to have "found
again my twentieth year." My reason indeed warned me that there was
little cause for optimism. The War, the vastest disordering since the
breakdown of the Pax Romana, must be followed by decades of suffering
and penury. Many familiar things had gone, and many more would go.
Britain had lost for good her old security in the world, and, like other
peoples, she would have to struggle to preserve stability at home. I
hoped for something from the League of Nations, but with diffidence, for
the mechanism seemed to me futile without the appropriate spirit, and I
did not find that spirit in the world. But I had a new confidence in
human nature, in the plain man who for four years had carried the globe
on his shoulders, with no gift of expression, unperplexed by
philosophies, but infinitely loyal, enduring and unconquerable. I
believed that, though it would be a slow business, he might be trusted
somehow to remake the world, for he was eternally, in Shelley's words,
"at enmity with nothingness and dissolution."

As the weeks passed I realized that that was happening which Canning
noted after the Napoleonic wars; "the spires and turrets of ancient
establishments began to reappear above the subsiding wave." There were
times when one had the impression, soon alas! dispelled by reflection,
that nothing had been lost except one's friends. The world had not
become the drab wilderness that I had feared, and I felt again Bruno's
_visibilium aeternus, immensus et innumerabilis affectus_.

I shall never forget my first visit to the country, to Warwickshire and
Oxfordshire, in April 1919. In the early years of the War natural beauty
had been to me a forbidden fruit. I was in the Salient during the second
battle of Ypres, and the scent of hawthorn and lilac battling with the
stink of poison-gas, and bird-song in the coverts heard in the pauses of
the great guns, seemed to underline grimly the indifference of nature to
human ills. I remember a June morning, too, in the Chilterns, the beauty
of which seemed to me only a savage irony. Experiences in France, which
at another time would have entranced me--flaming Picardy sunsets, fresh
windy dawns, little towns dumb with snow under the winter moon--were
things to which I had no title. I acquired a saner temper when my duties
brought me back to England, but still felt a brittleness in life and a
profound insecurity, a sense that the treasures of the past and the joys
of the natural world had become "too dear for my possessing." I walked
warily, as if the ground under me were mined. I used to admire the
detachment of Edward Grey, who would have observed the ways of wild duck
though the skies were falling; indeed we sometimes did it together in
St. James's Park when the outlook was black as Erebus. But on that April
journey I recovered the past, and with it hope for the future. The War
after all was only what Henry James called it, a "great interruption." I
was almost back in Keats's Chamber of Maiden Thought. I felt like a man
recovering from a fever, or like the mediaeval poet who, going into the
fields after his frozen winter's vigil, abased himself before the
miracle of spring.

                       "Tears
  Are in his eyes, and in his ears
  The murmur of a thousand years."




CHAPTER VIII

AN IVORY TOWER AND ITS PROSPECT


I

The War left me with an intense craving for a country life. It was
partly that I wanted quiet after turmoil, the instinct that in the
Middle Ages took men into monasteries. But it was also a new-found
delight in the rhythm of nature, and in small homely things after so
many alien immensities. In all times of public strife there has been
this longing for rural peace; Chaucer had it, and Dunbar, and Izaak
Walton:

  "Far from acquaintance kest thee
   Where country may digest thee . . .
   Thank God that so hath blest thee,
   And sit down, Robin, and rest thee."

So I sold my house in London and purchased the little manor house of
Elsfield, four miles from the city of Oxford.

The house and the countryside were rich in history, and I had become
most historically minded. My old interest in philosophy was ebbing. I
had had enough for the moment of theories and speculations, and I had
certainly had enough of changes. When the future is uncertain the mind
turns naturally to the certainties of the past, and finds comfort in
what is beyond the peril of change. History might be only what Napoleon
called it, "agreed fiction," but at any rate it was agreed, and had the
dignity of repose. I wanted the sense of continuity, the assurance that
our contemporary blunders were endemic in human nature, that our new
fads were very ancient heresies, that beloved things which were
threatened had rocked not less heavily in the past.

In common with most of my countrymen I felt that for the time I had done
with civic duty, and might reasonably return to my own affairs. That
feeling, I think, explains the lack of public servants to-day, even more
than the "lost generation." No doubt a great number of able young men
died, but of those who survived only a small proportion took to public
life; the majority turned resolutely to private business and stayed
there. They refused to bury themselves in what T. E. Lawrence used to
describe as the "shallow grave of public duty."

The intellectual atmosphere of the immediate post-War period was enough
to drive the ordinary man into privacy. While plain folk everywhere set
themselves sturdily to rebuild their world, the interpreting class,
which Coleridge called the "clerisy," the people who should have
influenced opinion, ran round their cages in vigorous pursuit of their
tails. If they were futile they were also arrogant, and it was an odd
kind of arrogance, for they had no creed to preach. The same type before
the War had prostrated themselves in gaping admiration of the advance of
physical science and the improvements in the material apparatus of life.
There was little of that left. The War had shown that our mastery over
physical forces might end in a nightmare, that mankind was becoming like
an overgrown child armed with deadly weapons, a child with immense limbs
and a tiny head. But this belated enlightenment seemed to drain their
vitality. Just as many of the boys then leaving school, who had escaped
war service, suffered from a kind of _accidie_ and were inclined to look
for "soft options" in life, so the interpreting class plumed themselves
wearily on being hollow men living in a waste land. "A man may dwell so
long upon a thought," Halifax wrote, "that it may take him prisoner";
and they had made a picture of the world and themselves from which they
could not escape. They had no philosophy, if Plato's definition in the
_Theaetetus_ be right--"the mood of the philosopher is wonder; there is
no other source of philosophy than this"--for wonder involves some
vigour of spirit. They would admit no absolute values, being by
profession atomisers, engaged in reducing the laborious structure of
civilised life to a whirling nebula.

It was a difficult time for those who called themselves intellectuals.
They found themselves living among the fears and uncertainties of the
Middle Ages, without the support of the mediaeval faith. The belief in
the perfectibility of man, the omnipotence of reason, and the certainty
of progress, which began with the French Encyclopaedists and flourished
among the brisk dogmatists of the nineteenth century, had more or less
ended with the War. It was very clear that reason could be enchained,
that human nature was showing no desire to be perfected, and that the
pillars of civilisation were cracking and tilting. The inerrancy of
science, too, which had sustained the Victorians, was proving a broken
reed, for science was going back upon itself, cultivating doubts and
substituting probabilities for certainties. The world of sense and time
had become distressingly insecure, and they had no other world.

One section of this class, very vocal in speech and writing, cherished
modernity as its peculiar grace, regarding the world as descriptive of
quality, and not merely as denoting a stage in time. These people, who
were usually young, had few of the genial characteristics of youth, and
their extravagances were not Plato's agreeable impertinences of juniors
to seniors.[6] They were a haunted race, who seemed to labour under
perpetual fear. Like a tenth-century monk who expected the world soon to
end, they had ruled out of their lives many normal human interests on
the ground that the times were too precarious for trifling. They seemed
to be eager to get rid of personal responsibility, and therefore in
politics--and in religion if they had any--were inclined to extremes,
and readily surrendered their souls to an ancient church or a new
prophet, an International or a dictator. They were owlishly in earnest
and wholly humourless; and, lacking moral and intellectual balance, they
were prone to violent changes. It was the old story of the debauchee
turned flagellant, and a man who had made a name by raking in the
garbage heaps would suddenly become a precision in manners and morals.
They had a limitless contempt for whatever did not conform to their
creed of the moment and expressed it loudly, but their voices would
suddenly crack, and what began as a sneer would end as a sob.

[Footnote 6: [Greek: neanieumata idioton
eis archontas]. _Republic_, iii. 390.]

Another section gave their minds to historical portraiture--which might
be more accurately described as historical fiction, for they were
without the scholar's discipline and conscience. Lytton Strachey, their
fugleman, was an accomplished man of letters, but in his followers his
faults became monstrous and his virtues disappeared. With slender
talents, callow and arrogant, their "facetious and rejoicing ignorance"
made a strange spectacle of the past. They were much concerned with sex,
and found sexual interest in unusual places, dwelling upon it with a sly
titter. They were sansculottes who sought to deflate majestic
reputations, and reduce the great to a drab level of mediocrity, like
the Jacobins who would have destroyed Chartres Cathedral because it
dominated offensively their foolish city.

There was also a curious deterioration in literary manners--it had
nothing to do with morals. Frankness in literature is an admirable thing
if, as at various times in our history, it keeps step with social habit;
but when it strives to advance beyond it, it becomes a disagreeable
pose. Among civilised people after the War the ordinary conventions
held, but in literature, especially in fiction, a dull farmyard candour
became fashionable, an insistence upon the functions of the body which
had rarely artistic value.

  "No crab more active in the dirty dance,
   Downward to climb, and backward to advance."

These dull salacities had their comic as well as their offensive side,
for novelists, who had been noted for their virginal decorum, would now
interpolate little bits of irrelevant coarseness to show that Master
Slender was also a man of mettle.

It all spelled a revolt against humanism, a return to the sourness of
puritanism without its discipline and majesty. The old humanism was a
revulsion from mediaeval doctrine of original sin and salvation by
divine grace. It placed the centre of gravity in man and believed in
progress and the perfectibility of the world. Against such a view, which
was essentially un-Christian, there were bound to be many rebels, and
its opponents, the great Puritans like Cromwell, found refuge in
abasement before God. The new rebels did not greatly admire humanity,
seeing chiefly its animal grossness, they did not believe in progress,
and they had no high-pitched dreams of a coming golden age. Therefore
they were rootless and unhappy, for they had not Cromwell's refuge. But
gradually one seemed to discern the beginnings of a return to religion.
There was not that spiritual awakening after the War which some had
foreseen, but as the years passed there was a steady drift towards some
form of faith. A proof was the number of distinguished converts to the
Catholic Church; at the other end of the scale the Calvinism of Karl
Barth; the revival of Thomism; the embittered puritanism of certain men
of letters; and a variety of new evangels, some of them foolish enough,
but all involving a stumbling quest for God. The glib agnostic had gone
out of fashion.

In the prevalent intellectual anarchy there was also a craving for order
and law. It was inevitable that this purpose would in certain circles be
crudely interpreted, and order identified with uniformity on the
communist pattern. The dream of a classless society was never very
potent in Britain, for our people had Shakespeare's belief in the virtue
of a rich heterogeneity.

  "Take but degree away, untune that string,
   And hark what discord follows."

But the craving in its least admirable form was to grow elsewhere in the
world to an extent and at a pace which no one then foresaw. Men for the
sake of security and order were to barter their souls. Ironic atonement
was made for feudalism and the centuries of privilege when proud nations
fell into abject bondage to inflamed and loquacious peasants.


II

Elsfield was like the dwelling of Axylos, the son of Teuthras, in the
_Iliad_, a house by the roadside. It opened on the village street, but,
being built on the slope of a hill, its back view was superb, covering
the Cherwell valley and all the western Cotswold. The oldest part was
alleged to have twelfth-century walls, contemporary with the little
church; but its form was Jacobean and the rest was Oxford gothic of the
seventies. The manor had had few owners since the days of the Saxon
Aella: the Norman grantee, the Pudseys from Yorkshire, the Hores from
East Anglia, and then until nearly the end of last century it was a kind
of dower-house for the North family at Wroxton, further up the
Cherwell.[7] It was a clearing in the forest long before the Conquest,
and a clearing it remained, so that at the siege of Oxford the
Parliament army used it as a gun-park.

[Footnote 7: The history of the parish has been written by Professor G.
N. Clark of Oxford.]

England is full of patches which the tides of modernity have somehow
missed, and Elsfield was such an one. Though only fifty-five miles by
road from London, and an hour's walk from Oxford, it was as set in its
ancient ways as an isle of the Hebrides. When I first went there my
gamekeeper had never been in a railway train. At that time it was the
only side of Oxford where there were no suburbs, for the college towers
could be seen from our hill rising sheer from meadows, and there was the
same moat of deep country between its mind and the outer world.
Startling experiences passed from its people like water from a duck's
back. My gardener had fought through the East African campaign and
nearly died of fever, and another of my men had had four years in
France, but for all the effect those adventures had on them they might
never have left the parish. It was the same with the neighbouring
hamlets, like Noke and Wood Eaton and Beckley.

Elsfield stood on the edge of the long ridge which intervenes between
the Chilterns and Cotswold, a ridge muffled in great woods, and
dropping in the north to the fen of Otmoor; so our people were
half-uplanders and half-woodlanders, and therefore dissociated both from
the shepherd-folk of the high Cotswold and the valley-folk along Thames
and Cherwell. They had their own ways, their own speech, their own pride
of descent, for you will find the same names to-day in the villages as
in mediaeval abbey-rolls, and they gripped like a vice on the past. From
my lawn I looked over some thirty miles of woods and meadows to the dim
ridges about Stow-on-the-Wold, and, except in the bareness of winter,
there was not a house to be seen. That view was a symbol of our
detachment.

It was a good countryside for the field naturalist. My garden soil was
the coarse limestone called cornbrash, which gave place to Oxford clay
in the meadows below. The flat top of the hill was sand. There was an
abundance of water everywhere on the hillside. As a consequence of this
geological variety the flora was notably rich; three hundred years ago
Mr. Gerard of the _Herball_ botanised in Stowood. To the bird-lover the
place was a paradise. In my first summer a pair of peregrines--from
Wales or the spire of Salisbury Cathedral--came every morning to hunt
our fields. I have seen on the lawn at the same time pied, grey and
yellow wagtails. A hobby nested in one of our spinneys. On my morning
rides, when my horse's hooves were muffled in the grass, I twice saw a
golden oriole. Otmoor, a couple of miles off, was a wonderful haunt of
rare birds, and anything might appear by its reedy
watercourses--bitterns, cranes, one winter a pair of storks. Dr. Plot at
the end of the seventeenth century recorded a hoopoe's nest on Otmoor. I
have never found the nest, but I have seen the bird there.

With one species of fowl my household became well acquainted. My eldest
son from his early days was a passionate falconer. He kept hawks at
Eton, for there is much latitude in that great republic, and at Oxford
he was rarely without a bird on his wrist. I liked best the little
kestrels who each summer sat and scolded on their perches on the lawn.
He ended by becoming a real authority on the subject, and corresponded
with fellow-falconers all over the world. It was the training of the
birds that interested him, and he flew them only at vermin. Falcons are
terribly fragile things, and we lived under the shadow of death, for the
birds were always hanging themselves, or developing strange diseases.
This was particularly true of his peregrines, but his goshawk, Jezebel,
survived until he went to Uganda, when she was handed over to Lord
Howard de Walden.

In my leisure at Elsfield I came under the spell which makes men local
antiquaries. A predecessor had set the example, for Francis Wise,
Radcliffe librarian and Dr. Johnson's friend, had once lived in the
house. He had filled the garden with dubious antiques, including a Roman
altar, which was examined by no less a person than Mommsen, and had
designed a gardener's cottage in the style of a mediaeval chantry.
Everything in that countryside is long-descended. Follow the ridge
northward and you pass at Beckley the ruins of a hunting-lodge of the
kings of England, and presently tread the floor of a Roman villa. Cross
Otmoor by what at most seasons is the only practicable way, and you are
traversing a Roman road, while in the hollow of one of our meadows are
the remains of a fibula factory. Every one of our quaintly named little
fields has appeared in deeds and chartularies for nine hundred years.
The past came so close to the present that it was inevitable that I
should delve happily and unskilfully in its corners. I was especially
fascinated by the Civil War, in which Oxfordshire had been a famous
terrain--with the actions at Islip bridge, Bletchingdon, Cropredy and
Edgehill, and Charles's wild ride on that June evening when he slipped
out from the city between Waller and Essex.

I resumed my walking habits, and of a Saturday would disappear on a
lengthy tramp. My favourite course was the circuit of Otmoor, taking in
its Seven Towns. That was the low-level route; the high-level route was
longer--about thirty miles--and covered the circumjacent hills, Brill,
Arncote, Gravelhill, and the rise of Wood Eaton. There was also an
infinite variety of shorter courses up and down the Cherwell valley, and
east and north into Bucks. In time I became more ambitious and used the
motor-car to get me far afield, so that a day's walk might take me into
distant shires and over the water-shed of Severn.

Our ridge was old forest land and it provided one of the two types of
landscape which have always had a special charm for me. These types are
the mountain-meadow and the woodland clearing. By the first I do not
mean the Swiss alp or the Norwegian saeter pasture, for these are on too
large a scale. I mean rather the little meadows which one stumbles
across in certain upland places--the "mountain lawns" of the
poets--which have the charm of a garden in the wilderness. I can think
of a hundred such--in Wales especially, and throughout the whole hill
chain which runs from Vermont to the Carolinas. The other is the island
of pasture, made by man's hands, in a sea of forest, and of such I have
memories in South Germany, in New England, and above all in eastern
Canada--places where the turf is greener by contrast with the inky
pines, and which make a sanctuary for birds and flowers. Elsfield was
rich in those secret glades, sometimes only an acre wide, but all
ancient clearings whose turf had been cropped for centuries. Summer
never dulled their verdure, for there was water in most of them, and in
autumn their fringes were a riot of berries. One could find primroses
there every month of the year.

Now I "took sasine" of English soil, and learned to know intimately what
I had hitherto only admired. Especially I came to respect the English
countryman who had been the backbone of our army in the War, and has
always been the backbone of the nation. I delighted in his slow
idiomatic speech, his firm hold on the past, his fortitude and
kindliness. Indeed, I think those early years at Elsfield were the
happiest in my life, for I acquired a new loyalty and a new heritage,
having added the southern Midlands to the Scottish Borders. I loved

                    "with equal mind
  The southern sun, the northern wind,
  The lilied lowland watermead,
  And the grey hills that cradle Tweed";

and felt amazingly rich in consequence. The procession of the seasons
was now part of my life, as it could not be for a town-dweller, and to
watch it gave me a keener sense of the rhythm of things. I enjoyed every
type of scene and weather--autumn gales which blew down Thames from the
Bristol Channel, the first snow clouds from the Chilterns, the
long-lighted midsummer days when sunrise trod on the heels of sunset,
the woods bathed in the clear radiance of April and alive with
bird-song. Riding on winter mornings I would see the lights go out one
by one in the villages of the plain, or, returning in the twilight,
watch them kindle, and reflect that I lived apart from, and yet within
hail of, the sounding, glittering world.

[Illustration: J. N. S. B. AND HIS GOSHAWK JEZEBEL
  (_From a drawing by Charles Gere, A.R.A._)]

On most days I went to my office in London, a longish daily journey, but
it was worth while getting back late, even in winter, to the smell of
wood smoke and the hooting of owls. Later, when I had given up business
and entered Parliament, I arranged my life differently. From Monday
afternoon until Friday I was in town and concerned exclusively with
business and politics. From Friday evening until Monday at noon I was in
sanctuary at Elsfield, a minor country gentleman with a taste for
letters.


III

I was beginning to deserve the name of man of letters. As an author I
was a link with the past, for in my extreme youth in the 'nineties I had
contributed to the old _Yellow Book_. As an impecunious undergraduate I
read manuscripts for John Lane, who was a good friend to me, and had the
privilege of accepting Arnold Bennett's first book, _A Man from the
North_. Then for a little my literary activities flagged, but in the
post-War years I was responsible for a good deal of military
history--the story of my family regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers; a
record of the doings of the South African Infantry Brigade in France;
and a memoir of my friends, the Grenfell twins, Francis and Riversdale,
who fell in the first year of war. Meantime I had become a copious
romancer. I suppose I was a natural story-teller, the kind of man who
for the sake of his yarns would in prehistoric days have been given a
seat by the fire and a special chunk of mammoth. I was always telling
myself stories when I had nothing else to do--or rather, being told
stories, for they seemed to work themselves out independently. I
generally thought of a character or two, and then of a set of incidents,
and the question was how my people would behave. They had the knack of
just squeezing out of unpleasant places and of bringing their doings to
a rousing climax.

I was especially fascinated by the notion of hurried journeys. In the
great romances of literature they provide some of the chief dramatic
moments, and since the theme is common to Homer and the penny reciter it
must appeal to a very ancient instinct in human nature. We live our
lives under the twin categories of time and space, and when the two come
into conflict we get the great moment. Whether failure or success is the
result, life is sharpened, intensified, idealised. A long journey, even
with the most lofty purpose, may be a dull thing to read of if it is
made at leisure; but a hundred yards may be a breathless business if
only a few seconds are granted to complete it. For then it becomes a
sporting event, a race; and the interest which makes millions read of
the Derby is the same, in a grosser form, as when we follow an
expedition straining to relieve a beleaguered fort, or a man fleeing to
a sanctuary with the avenger behind him.

In my undergraduate days I had tried my hand at historical novels, and
had then some ambition to write fiction in the grand manner, by
interpreting and clarifying a large piece of life. This ambition waned,
and, apart from a few short stories I let fiction alone until 1910,
when, being appalled as a publisher by the dullness of most boys' books,
I thought I would attempt one of my own, based on my African experience.
The result was _Prester John_, which has since become a school-reader in
many languages. Early in 1914 I wrote _Salute to Adventurers_, the fruit
of my enthusiasm for American history. In that book I described places
in Virginia which I had never seen, and I was amazed when I visited them
later, to find how accurate had been my guesses.

Then, while pinned to my bed during the first months of war and
compelled to keep my mind off too tragic realities, I gave myself to
stories of adventure. I invented a young South African called Richard
Hannay, who had traits copied from my friends, and I amused myself with
considering what he would do in various emergencies. In _The Thirty-Nine
Steps_ he was spy-hunting in Britain; in _Greenmantle_ he was on a
mission to the East; and in _Mr. Standfast_, published in 1919, he was
busy in Scotland and France. The first had an immediate success, and,
since that kind of thing seemed to amuse my friends in the trenches, I
was encouraged to continue. I gave Hannay certain companions--Peter
Pienaar, a Dutch hunter; Sandy Arbuthnot, who was reminiscent of Aubrey
Herbert; and an American gentleman, Mr. John S. Blenkiron. Soon these
people became so real to me that I had to keep a constant eye on their
doings. They slowly aged in my hands, and the tale of their more recent
deeds will be found in _The Three Hostages_, _The Courts of the Morning_
and _The Island of Sheep_.

I added others to my group of musketeers. There was Dickson McCunn, the
retired grocer, and his ragamuffin boys from the Gorbals, whose saga is
written in _Hunting-tower_, _Castle Gay_ and _The House of the Four
Winds_. There was Sir Edward Leithen, an eminent lawyer, who is
protagonist or narrator in _The Power House_, _John Macnab_, _The
Dancing Floor_ and _The Gap in the Curtain_; and in his particular group
were the politician, Lord Lamancha, and Sir Archibald Roylance, airman,
ornithologist and Scots laird. It was huge fun playing with my puppets,
and to me they soon became very real flesh and blood. I never
consciously invented with a pen in my hand; I waited until the story had
told itself and then wrote it down, and, since it was already a finished
thing, I wrote it fast. The books had a wide sale, both in English and
in translations, and I always felt a little ashamed that profit should
accrue from what had given me so much amusement. I had no purpose in
such writing except to please myself, and even if my books had not found
a single reader I would have felt amply repaid.

Besides these forthright tales of adventure I was busy with a very
different kind of romance. The desire to recover the sense of
continuity, which had brought me to Elsfield, prompted my first serious
piece of fiction. It was called _The Path of the King_, and was based on
the notion that no man knows his ancestry, and that kingly blood may lie
dormant for centuries until the appointed time. The chapters began with
a Viking's son lost in a raid, and ended audaciously with Abraham
Lincoln.

After that I varied my tales of adventure with this kind of romance,
over which I took a great deal of pains, and which seems to me the most
successful of my attempts at imaginative creation. Being equally
sensitive to the spells of time and of space, to a tract of years and a
tract of landscape, I tried to discover the historical moment which best
interpreted the _ethos_ of a particular countryside, and to devise the
appropriate legend. Just as certain old houses, like the inns at Burford
and Queensferry, cried out to Robert Louis Stevenson to tell their
tales, so I felt that clamour of certain scenes for an interpreter.

The best, I think, is _Witch Wood_, in which I wrote of the Tweedside
parish of my youth at the time when the Old Wood of Caledon had not
wholly disappeared, and when the rigours of the new Calvinism were
contending with the ancient secret rites of Diana. I believe that my
picture is historically true, and I could have documented almost every
sentence from my researches on Montrose. In _The Free Fishers_ I tried
to catch the flavour of the windy shores of Fife at a time when
smuggling and vagabondage were still rife. I had always felt keenly the
romance of the Jacobite venture, but less in its familiar Scottish
episodes than in the dreary ebb of the march to Derby, so I took that
period for my attempt in _Midwinter_ to catch the spell of the great
midland forests and the Old England which lay everywhere just beyond the
highroads and the ploughlands. Finally, in _The Blanket of the Dark_ I
chose the time when the monasteries fell and the enclosures began, and I
brought all the valleys of the Cotswold into the picture.

These were serious books and they must have puzzled many of the readers
who were eager to follow the doings of Richard Hannay or Dickson McCunn.
That is the trouble with an author who only writes to please himself;
his product is not standardised, and the purchaser is often
disappointed. I once had a letter from an Eton boy who, having a taste
for a bustling yarn, was indignant at anything of mine which did not
conform to that pattern. He earnestly begged me to "pull myself
together."

Though my hand is vile and scribing has always bored me, I found the
writing of my romances almost a relaxation. Less so my excursions in
biography. The subject of my first was Montrose. From my Oxford days I
had been fascinated by his military genius and the sorrows of his life,
and I gradually began to read myself into his period. I found that the
Whig historians had dismissed him as at the best a bandit of genius, and
had beatified the theocrats who opposed him. To this view I could not
assent, and as my studies progressed I came to the conclusion that he
was the most balanced and prescient mind in Scotland at the time, as
well as the greatest of Scottish soldiers. Materials for his life had
been collected by Mark Napier with an enthusiasm which was not always
critical, and I decided to go over them again, and try to present an
authentic picture of a very great man. In 1913 I published a short
sketch, which presently went out of print, and after the War, when my
military histories had been completed, I set myself to elaborate the
portrait. The book was issued in 1928 and I am happy to think that my
view of Montrose, foreshadowed by Carlyle and presented briefly in their
histories by S. R. Gardiner and Andrew Lang, is now generally accepted.
I could ask for no greater honour than to help to restore to his
country's pantheon the hero of my youth.

Cromwell was bound to follow. I had long shared Lord Rosebery's view of
him as the greatest of Englishmen, and, when I began to study his
campaigns, I felt that as a soldier he was very near the first rank. I
had the supreme advantage of having been brought up in a Calvinistic
atmosphere, so I was able to write of his religious life with some
understanding. For several years I lived chiefly in the seventeenth
century, reading acres of its divinity and many hundreds of its
pamphlets. Cromwell with all his imperfections seemed to me not only
admirable but lovable, and I tried in my book to present the warm human
side of him. I cannot claim that there was anything in my work which
could not be found in Gardiner and Firth, but I think I elaborated
certain neglected aspects and I took special pains with the back
ground.

When _Cromwell_ was published in 1934 the subject had been acutely
topical, for dictators were arising in Europe who claimed, without
warrant, to follow in his steps. This made me return to what had been an
undergraduate ambition, a portrait of Augustus. I had already done a
good deal of work on the subject, and my first two winters in Canada
gave me leisure to reread the Latin and Greek texts. I have rarely found
more enjoyment in a task, for I was going over again carefully the
ground which I had scampered across in my youth. Augustus seemed to me
to embody all the virtues of a dictator, when a dictator was needed, and
to have tried valiantly to provide against the perils. The book was
kindly received by scholars in Britain, America and on the Continent,
though my Italian friends jibbed at some of my political deductions.

In my book on Sir Walter Scott, published in the centenary year of his
death, I tried not only to pay tribute to the best-loved of Borderers,
but to repeat my literary _credo_. All these four books were, indeed, in
a sense a confession of faith, for they enabled me to define my own
creed on many matters of doctrine and practice, and thereby cleared my
mind. They were a kind of diary, too, a chronicle of my successive
interests and occupations. They were laborious affairs compared to my
facile novels, but they were also a relaxation, for they gave me a
background into which I could escape from contemporary futilities, a
watch-tower from which I had a long prospect, and could see modern
problems in juster proportions. That is the supreme value of history.
The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.


IV

Reading has always filled so large a part of my life that for a page or
two I may be allowed to set down my literary vicissitudes. It is a sad
tale, for it records a steady narrowing of interests. In the 'nineties,
when I first discovered the world of books, I had a most catholic taste
in them. I was attracted by every new venture, I had few dislikes, my
purpose was exploration rather than judgment, orthodoxy had no claims on
me, and I identified appreciation with enjoyment. I was Montaigne's
_ondoyant et divers_ reader, undulating and diverse.

Then--some time in my early twenties--the arteries of my taste seemed to
narrow and harden. I became more fastidious, but with an eye less on
eternal canons of excellence than on my own pleasure. I was now a
critic, but on a purely subjective basis. Certain things satisfied me
and certain things did not, and I was inclined to limit myself to the
former. Since I knew what these were in the older literature and had no
certainty of finding them in the new, I became conservative in my
reading. As a publisher I had to keep a watchful eye on contemporary
letters, but there my motive was commercial; for my pleasure I went to
old fields. I speak, of course, of imaginative work. I was an assiduous
student of the moderns in philosophy and history.

Not being a critic I was not called upon to formulate the reasons for my
preferences, but I was conscious that I had standards of a sort. One was
a belief in what the French call _ordonnance_, the supreme importance of
an ordered discipline both in matter and style. Another was a certain
austerity--I disliked writing which was luscious and overripe. A third
was a distrust of extreme facility; a work of art, I thought, should be
carved in marble, not in soapstone. There were other half-conscious
principles, and the whole batch constituted a strict, dry and rather
priggish canon, which kept me from taking any real interest in the
literature of my own day. One or two Romans (Virgil especially),
Shakespeare and Wordsworth pretty well contented me among the poets, and
in prose, apart from history and philosophy, I had recourse chiefly to
the seventeenth-century writers. I had become what Dr. Johnson called
Gray, a "barren rascal."

During the War my general reading was confined to a few classics, but
after 1918, feeling rejuvenated and enterprising, I did my best to get
on terms with my contemporaries. Alas I had put it off too long. My ear
simply could not attune itself to their rhythms, or lack of rhythms.
Much of the verse seemed to me unmelodious journalism. Often it was a
pastiche of Donne, but it seemed to reproduce only his tortured
conceits, and not his sudden flute notes and moments of shattering
profundity. I have always been a poor reader of fiction--perhaps because
I could tell myself my own stories--and I was baffled by the immense,
shambling novels that poured steadily from the press in Britain and
America.

The trouble was that my intelligence admitted the merit of much that
filled the rest of me with _ennui_. Proust, for example. I disliked his
hothouse world, but it was idle to deny his supreme skill in
disentangling subtle threads of thought and emotion. It was what Henry
James had striven to do, and partially succeeded in, before he fell into
the tortuous arabesques of his later manner. There may be limits to the
value of hitting a nail on the head, but it is better than fumbling with
an evasive tin-tack. Again, I had read as a duty the principal works of
the Russian novelists, and--with the exception of _War and Peace_ and
one or two of Tourgeniev's--was resolved never to attempt them again. I
suffered from a radical defeat of sympathy. Their merits were beyond
doubt, but their method and the whole of the world which they presented
seemed to me ineffably dismal.

Not that I did not admire much contemporary work. I thought Virginia
Woolf, as a critic, the best since Matthew Arnold--wiser and juster,
indeed, than Arnold. I esteemed certain writers (principally American,
like Sinclair Lewis and Booth Tarkington) who seemed to have the
visualising power and the gift of absorbing, torrential narrative which
mark the good novelist. To go a little further back, Mr. H. G. Wells'
studies of certain phases of English life, in books like _Kipps_, _The
Wheels of Chance_ and _Mr. Polly_, were destined, I thought, to live as
long as the English tradition endured. But the rebels and
experimentalists for the most part left me cold. "The life of reason,"
Santayana has written, "is our heritage and exists only through
tradition. Now the misfortune of revolutionists is that they are
disinherited, and their folly is that they wish to be disinherited even
more than they are."

My serious preferences I was always ready to defend. But I could also
take pleasure in the second-, third- and even the fourth-rate on purely
sentimental grounds. I believe that the taste in literature of most
people sets fairly early in life, and in essentials does not alter,
except in the case of a few superior minds which remain always receptive
and yet anchored to eternal values. What delights in an impressionable
youth gives inevitably a lasting bias to the judgment. A music lover who
can appreciate the austerest merits may have also an irrational liking
for ditties which have no artistic credentials. So, in literature,
oddments are carried over from youth and continue to please, not because
of their intrinsic quality but because they were first read or heard on
happy occasions, and the memory of them recalls those blessed moments.
It is pure sentimentality, but how many of us are free from it? My
memory is full of such light baggage. Stanzas of Swinburne, whom I do
not greatly admire, remind me of summer mornings when I shouted them on
a hill-top, and still please because of the hill-top, not the poetry. In
the 'nineties Austin Dobson and others had made popular various
exercises in old French metrical forms like the ballade, the rondeau and
the villanelle; even Robert Bridges succumbed to the fashion. There was
no great value in such confections, but I have a lingering taste for
them, since they are entwined with memories of golden afternoons in
cool, green Oxfordshire backwaters. Some of W. E. Henley's lyrics are
often in my mind because they were the viaticum of an unforgettable
spring walking tour. I have the same feeling about certain songs of R.
L. Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling's early work. So I am in this
position:--I believe I can judge fairly the greater books which all my
life have been my companions; I am attached to certain things produced
in my youth which, but for their sentimental associations, would
probably not appeal to me; the modern work most loudly acclaimed my
traditionalist mind is simply not competent to judge at all.

Apart from what our fathers called _belles-lettres_ I have continued to
be a voracious reader. In my day there have been no books, no _Das
Kapital_ or _Origin of Species_, which have opened up new avenues of
thought. There has been no Hegel to attempt a new system of
world-philosophy. Except for F. H. Bradley's _Appearance and Reality_ I
do not think any book has been published which our descendants will
regard as a philosophical classic. But there have been seminal works in
various related branches of thought, such as Freud's in psychology, and
those of Einstein and his colleagues in a type of physics which almost
fulfils Pope's prophecy and "of metaphysics begs defence." This latter
subject I regard with a fascinated awe, but from afar off, for I have
not the key with which to enter the city. My knowledge of mathematics
stops with a desperate finality just when the difficulties begin. The
new physicist has a grammar of his own, of his substantives are
equations with which the reader must be familiar before he can follow
the argument.

For some years I have found my chief interest in history, since in the
fog in which we live I get comfort from tracing the puzzled lives of
those who traversed the same road. As in philosophy, so in history; we
have had no venture on the grand scale; Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's _England
under Queen Anne_ is the nearest approach to it. Perhaps such work is
now less easy, because of a more scientific view of evidence and an
austerer conscience in the historian. The work of the quarriers and
masons has become so intricate that the architects have been compelled
to limit the scale of their buildings. But I have seen one heresy
relinquished. Few historians would now assent without qualification to
J. B. Bury's famous dogma, "History is a science--no less and no more."
It is a science, but it is a great deal more. It is an art, a synthesis
rather than a compilation, an interpretation as well as a chronicle. The
historian, if he is to do justice to the past, must have a constructive
imagination and a reasonable mastery of words. The scientist must be
joined to the man-of-letters.

One heartening movement I can detect--a greater consideration for the
average man. There have been brilliant specimens of synoptic history,
which summarises a long tract of time, such as Mr. Herbert Fisher's
_Europe_, Mr. George Trevelyan's _England_, and Mr. S. E. Morison's
_United States_. The philosophies have made an honest attempt to descend
from the schools to the market-place. All the principal thinkers of the
last thirty years have a more or less popular appeal: Bergson in France,
Croce in Italy, William James and Santayana in America; sometimes indeed
the literary graces are so luxuriant as to obscure the thought. Valiant
attempts have even been made to expound the cloudy trophies of the new
physics. It has been pre-eminently the age of the _vulgarisateur_ in the
best sense of that word. I think the tendency wholly admirable. Lord
Rutherford used to say that no conclusion which he ever reached was of
any use to him until he could put it into plain English, into language
understood by the ordinary man. Attempts to present the history of the
world as an inter-related intelligible process, or to give a bird's-eye
view of the long march of the sciences, may be faulty in detail, with
many arbitrary judgments, but they do furnish principles of
interpretation which enable the reader to find at any rate _one_ was in
the world of thought--perhaps a little later to make his _own_ way.[8]
In this task the _vulgarisateur_ may be preparing the soil for a rich
future harvest, just as the work of the Sophists cleared the ground for
Plato.

[Footnote 8: I would instance not only Mr. H. G. Wells' celebrated
compilation, but also Mr. S. E. M. Joad's various guides to philosophy.
They seem to me remarkable achievements, for not only are the different
creeds outlined with a notable fairness, but the emphasis is put on the
questions asked rather than the solutions, and that is the right kind of
introduction.]


V

Living in the country I escaped the close social intercourse of London.
Apart from Oxford and country neighbours, I was dependent for society on
friends whom I visited and who visited me. Of these, fortunately, many
are still alive, but I would pay my tribute to four who have gone.

  "How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?"

After his short ambassadorial term in Washington, Edward Grey came
little to London. His health had become a serious business, since to his
failing eyesight other bodily ailments were added. When I first knew him
in my undergraduate days I thought him the most fortunate of mortals,
for he had everything--health, beauty, easy means, a great reputation,
innumerable friends, the gift of succeeding in whatever he tried,
whether in sport or public affairs. Before he died I was often reminded
of those eerie words which Herodotus puts into the mouth of Amasis: "I
know that the gods are jealous, for I cannot remember that I ever heard
of any man who, having been constantly successful, did not at last
utterly perish." One by one his sources of happiness vanished. He lost a
beloved wife; he saw his work as peacemaker close in the bloodiest of
wars; his eyesight and his general health failed; his country home was
burnt down; his intimate friends died before their time; a second
marriage gave him only short-lived comfort, for it soon ended with his
wife's death.

Yet he did not cease to be happy, for he built a new life out of the
wreckage of the old. He could no longer browse among books, but he took
to writing them, and learned the satisfaction of being explicit in print
as well as in speech. Trout fishing was no more for him, but for a time
he could still fish for salmon with his friend, Frank Pember, the Warden
of All Souls, in certain convenient Highland rivers. He could not watch
birds at a distance, but he had his colony of ducks at Fallodon, and he
became a wizard in detecting birds' song. In what seemed to me to be a
single note he could discern a blend of several birds.

Under the buffetings of life he never winced or complained, and the
spectacle of his gentle fortitude was both a heartbreak and an
inspiration. More than any man I know he possessed his soul. Most of us
have some friend whom above all others we would wish our sons to
resemble. I have no doubt as to my choice, and I am glad to think that I
was able to associate him with a memorable occasion in the life of my
eldest boy. When John, who was an ardent bird-lover and fisherman, came
of age, I gave a small dinner for him at the House of Commons, and
Edward Grey came down from Northumberland to take the chair and propose
his health. It was a happy chance that a boy should be speeded on his
journey in life by the man whom in all the world he most revered.

       *       *       *       *       *

Henry Newbolt died when he was well on in the seventies, but he never
became middle-aged. Everything about him remained boyish--his slim
figure, his lean alert face, his endearing, almost ingenuous, ardour,
everything except his grey hair. I had known him a little before 1914,
and in the last year of the War I found in him a most able colleague.
But though he did well by his generation he never quite belonged to it.
Providence had cast him for a bard, a companion of men-at-arms and the
chronicler of their deeds. He found his niche in letters in a kind of
half-lyric, half-ballad, the best of which must live since they are
enshrined in the popular memory. But for him that was only half of a
life. He would have liked, himself, to move in the thick of great deeds.
It seems ungenerous to say of one who had so much happiness in the world
that he was not quite at home in it, but I think it is true that, apart
from his poetry, he never found work which wholly satisfied him. I can
picture him more easily as a minstrel singing of Border raids in which
he had shared, or a _jongleur_ in the trail of a crusade, or, like
Volcker of Alsace in the _Niebelungenlied_, with his sword-fiddle-bow
whose every stroke was a note of music.

In conversation he had few superiors. He was not a great architect of
talk like Arthur Balfour, but a contributor, always in perfect tune with
the occasion. In this also he was a little outside of his age, belonging
rather to the era of breakfasts, when busy men began their day with
scholarly talk. I do not mean the solemn meals of that deposit of the
glacial age, the Philosophic Radicals, or the scarcely less solemn feats
at which Macaulay pontificated--a character in _Sybil_ complains
bitterly that only Liberals ever breakfasted out!--but the later and
gentler affairs which did not wholly go out of fashion until the close
of last century. Their place has been taken by dining-clubs, like
Grillons, the Literary Society, and The Club, and there Henry was at his
best. He was happiest on literary topics, and of the three men of
letters I have known who could talk well I should put him first. Edmund
Gosse had moments of petulance and uncertain temper; St. Loe Strachey
was too copious, apt to drown a topic with a spate of words; but Henry
Newbolt had always a nice sense of the relevant and unfailing
intellectual courtesy. I liked to hear him quote poetry in his low
crooning recitative; it was like overhearing a delightful child
repeating to himself his favourite pieces.

I first came to know Frederick Scott Oliver just after the publication
of his book on Alexander Hamilton. He was engaged, like myself, in
trying to work out a reasonable philosophy of empire, and I was
attracted to him by his freedom from party bias and his acute historical
sense. Also he was a fellow Borderer. His health was poor, but his ruddy
complexion and clear eyes gave him the look of a Border shepherd. His
strong, finely modelled face was not unlike Alexander Hamilton's. In a
peruke he would have been the model of some eighteenth-century gentleman
from a canvas of Sir Joshua.

For a decade he was the ablest pamphleteer in Britain. His _Alexander
Hamilton_ was in a sense a pamphlet, for it had a direct topical moral.
His writings on the Ulster question and his _Ordeal by Battle_ were real
pamphlets, in which political views were set out with an eloquence and a
precision long absent from the literature of politics. After the
Armistice his health worsened, and he gradually withdrew from business,
in which he had been very successful, and gave up his remaining years to
the study of British policy in the first half of the eighteenth
century--a task which combined political philosophy and history proper.
He had bought the estate of Edgerston, which lies at the top of the Jed
valley and runs up to the watershed of Cheviot. In that beautiful place
he united the life of the scholar and of the country gentleman, and it
is in that environment that I shall always think of him, striding about
in his rough clothes to examine his young trees, or sitting in the
circular library upstairs, which was scented with tobacco and old calf,
and looked out over gardens to the bent of the hills.

Oliver's mind had two sides--one strictly logical, delighting in close
and compact argument, and the other imaginative and intuitive. He was
not one who over-valued ratiocination, for he held that in the greater
matters of life the mind must fling itself forward beyond its data, and
that the possession of this instinct was what constituted the difference
between the great and the less great among mankind. Such a power he
believed to be found chiefly in simple souls, and this explained his
admiration for soldiers. He was contemptuous of the hyper-subtle and the
intellectually arrogant; the clever fool seemed to him the worst of all
fools. He believed that the ordinary man was the best judge of most
things, and might, if lawyers and pendants could be kept out of the way,
be trusted to govern the country. The worst vice was seeing the trees
and missing the wood, but it was a vice of clever, not of plain, people.

He used to attribute this conviction to his business experience, but it
came from something deeper, something far back in his Border ancestry.
There was a good deal in him of the mystic and the poet. He transfigured
every political subject he wrote on--tariff reform, Ireland, military
training--by opening up imaginative vistas. He might start with the pose
of a commonplace man wearily repeating truisms, but he ended startlingly
as a seer. History became his favourite study because it gave his
imagination room for the reconstruction of men's souls, and because it
showed truth in action. Principles he valued high, but he saw them not
as dogmas but as pictures and deeds.

This conjoint power of visualising and divining made him a brilliant
writer, and at moments almost a great one. He was an admirable painter
of historical portraits, and he was skilled in tracking the progress of
a doctrine. His style was eminently simple and clear, but capable also
of a strong eloquence; his general urbanity had its moments of
tenderness, but it could harden, too, into deadly satire.

His published writings, owing partly to his ill-health and partly to a
fastidiousness which made him produce slowly, give no real impression of
the fertility and originality of his mind and the delightfulness of his
society. He had the Border quality, of which Sir Walter Scott is the
great example, of intellectual generosity and geniality. His
conversation was a joy to his friends. He had all the Baconian
requirements; he was a full man from wide reading and much thought; an
exact man from his scrupulous logic; and a ready man from his native
wit. And behind the colour and light there was a friendly warmth which
made it good to be with him. He never dogmatised; his sharp dialectic
made him a noted pricker of bubbles; he had the gift of impromptu
perfection of phrase, so that his talk was as finished as his prose. His
humour, though, irony and satire were among his weapons, was for the
most part tolerant and debonair, and he had an acute sense of farce and
fun.

Oliver did not write because he liked writing, but because he had causes
to plead. A preacher at heart, he testified at all times to the truth
that was in him. He loved his country deeply, and strove to serve her by
lifting contemporary disputes into a larger air, and to seek guidance
for the future by a patient diagnosis of the present and a wise reading
of the past. He never wrote merely for artistic effect, but always to
convince--to break down some lie or to establish some verity. That is
why he wrote so well. That is why he has had, I think, a real and
enduring influence on political thought. He made out of politics a
philosophy--though he disliked the word--and his wisdom will not die,
though the causes which he served may change.

       *       *       *       *       *

I do not profess to have understood T. E. Lawrence fully, still less to
be able to portray him; there is no brush fine enough to catch the
subtleties of his mind, no aerial viewpoint high enough to bring into
one picture the manifold of his character.

Before the War I had heard of him from D. G. Hogarth, and so many of my
friends, like Alan Dawnay, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert, served with
him in the East that he became a familiar name to me; but I do not think
that I met him before the summer of 1920. Then we found that we had much
in common besides Hogarth's friendship--an admiration for the work of C.
E. Doughty, including his epics; similar tastes in literature; the same
philosophy of empire.[9]

Until his death I saw him perhaps half a dozen times a year while he was
in England. He had gathered round him a pleasant coterie, most of whom I
knew. But we never worked together, though we once projected a
joint-editing of the Gadarene poets--there were others from Gadara
besides Meleager. He would turn up without warning at Elsfield at any
time of the day or night on his motor-cycle Boanerges, and depart as
swiftly and mysteriously as he came.

[Footnote 9: "I think there's a great future for the British Empire as a
voluntary association, and I'd like to have Treaty States on a big scale
attached to it. . . . We are so big a firm that we can offer unique
conditions to small businesses to associate with us." _Letters_, p.
578.]

Yet in a sense I knew him better than many people whom I met daily. If
you were once admitted to his intimacy you became one of his family, and
he of yours; he used you and expected to be used by you; he gave of
himself with the liberality of a good child. There was always much of
the child in him. He spoke and wrote to children as a coeval. He had a
delightful impishness. Even when he was miserable and suffering, he
could rejoice in a comic situation, and he found many in the ranks of
the R.A.F. and the Tank Corps. What better comedy than for a fine
scholar to be examined as to his literacy by the ordinary education
officer? And the game of hide-and-seek which he played with the
newspapers amused him as much as it annoyed him.

When I first knew him he was in the trough of depression owing to what
he thought to be the failure of his work for the Arabs, which involved
for him a breach of honour. Mr. Churchill's policy eventually comforted
him, but it could not heal the wound. Physically he looked slight, but,
as boxers say, he stripped well, and he was as strong as many people
twice his size, while he had a bodily toughness and endurance far beyond
anything I have ever met. In 1920 his whole being was in grave
disequilibrium. You cannot in any case be nine times wounded, four times
in an air crash, have many bouts of fever and dysentery, and finally at
the age of twenty-nine take Damascus at the head of an Arab army,
without living pretty near the edge of your strength. But he had been
endowed also with a highly keyed nervous system which gave him an
infinite capacity for both pleasure and pain, but never gave him ease.
There was a fissure in his nature--eternal war between what might be
called the Desert and the Sown--on the one side art and books and
friends and leisure and a modest cosiness; on the other action,
leadership, the austerity of space.

His character had been a quarry for the analysts and I would not add to
their number. It is simplest to say that he was a mixture of
contradictories which never were--perhaps could never have
been--harmonised. His qualities lacked integration. He had moods of
vanity and moods of abasement; immense self-confidence and immense
diffidence. He had a fastidious taste which was often faulty. The
gentlest and most lovable of beings with his chivalry and
considerateness, he could also be ruthless. I can imagine him, though
the possessor of an austere conscience, crashing through all the minor
moralities to win his end. That is to say, he was a great man of action
with some "sedition in his powers."

For the better part of three years he was a leader of men and a maker of
nations. Military students have done ample justice to his gifts as a
soldier. Perhaps his contribution to the art of war has been a little
overstated, but beyond question he foreshadowed a new strategy and
tactics--audacity in surprise, the destruction of material rather than
of men, blows at the enemy's nerve centre and therefore at his will to
resist. And he could put his doctrine into effect with speed and
precision. If he had come out of the War with a sound nervous system and
his vitality unimpaired, he might have led the nation to a new way of
life. For he had a magnetic power which made people follow him blindly,
and I have seen that in his eye which could have made, or quelled, a
revolution. He had also an astonishing gift for detail. He knew more
about the history and the technique of war than any general I have ever
met. He understood down to the last decimal every weapon he employed and
every tool he used. He was a master both of the vision and of the fact.

What deflected him from his natural career of action? For deflected he
was; he made deliberately _lo gran rifiuto_; he cut himself off from
the sphere in which he was born to excel. It is idle to speculate on
what would have happened if he had ended the War with perfect balance
and undamaged nerves; if he had he would not have been Lawrence. There
was a fissure in him from the start; the dream and the business did not
march together; his will was not always the servant of his intelligence;
he was an agonist, a self-tormentor, who ran to meet suffering halfway.
This was due, I think, partly to a twist of puritanism, partly to the
fact that, as he often confessed, pain stimulated his mind; but it was
abnormal and unwholesome. He was a great analyst of himself, but he
never probed the secret of this crack in the firing. Sometimes he put it
down to his war experiences, sometimes to his post-War disillusionment,
when he was inclined to talk the familiar nonsense about youth having
been betrayed by age. But I think it was always there, and it tended to
gape under stress. When there was no call to action he was torn by his
divided thoughts. "The War was good," he once wrote, "by drawing over
our depths that hot surface wish to do or win something."

He was disillusioned, too, about mundane glory, disillusioned too early.
"I wasn't a King or Prime Minister, but I made 'em and played with 'em,
and after that there was not much more in that direction for me to do."
The man of action in him gave him an appetite for fame, even for
publicity, and the other side of him made him despise himself for the
craving. His conscience forbade him to take any reward for his War
services, but there were times when he thought it a morbid conscience.
So, pulled hither and thither by noble and contradictory impulses, he
had moods when he hated life. "Oh, Lord, I am so tired! I want so much
to lie down, to sleep and die. Die is best because there is no
rveill. I want to forget my sins and the world's weariness."

He craved, like a mediaeval monk, for discipline and seclusion. To use a
phrase of his own, he was done with trying to blow up trains and
bridges, and was thinking of the Well at the World's End. He wanted
padlocks, as Hogarth said, and that was why he enlisted in the R.A.F. as
a mechanic. It was a true instinct, for, unless after 1922 he had found
mechanical work under discipline, the fissure might have become a gulf.
I remember that at that time I came across some words written by the Sir
Walter Raleigh of our day about the Elizabethan Raleigh, who was a
collateral kinsman of Lawrence. "The irony of human affairs possesses
his contemplation. . . . The business of man on this earth seems trivial
and insignificant against the vast desert of eternity."

He had found refuge from the life of action in another kind of activity,
for he had always an itch to write. He was contemplating the _Seven
Pillars_ as early as September, 1917, and he had no sooner entered the
Air Force than he planned a book on his experiences. "Writing has been
my inmost self all my life," he wrote in his last years, "and I can
never put my full strength into anything else." This interest brought
him after the War into literary and artistic circles. In one way this
was very good for him, since it gave him a host of new interests and
much welcome companionship, but I fear that it also increased his
tendency to introspection. What was an intellectual past-time to those
cultivated ingenious friends of his might to him be deadly serious. But
one thing it did--it made him write.

To me he seems to be a great writer who never quite wrote a great book.
All his writing was a sort of purgation, a clearing from his mind of
perilous stuff, and consequently the artistic purpose was often diverted
by personal needs. The _Seven Pillars_ is ostensibly the story of a
campaign and it contains brilliant pieces of story-telling; but, as he
said of it himself, it is "intensely sophisticated." It is a shapeless
book and it lacks the compulsion of the best narrative for he is always
wandering off down the corridors of his own mind. The style has its
great moments, but it has also its lapses into adjectival rhetoric. The
_Mint_ is a _tour de force_, an astonishing achievement in exact
photography; no rhetoric here, but everything hard, cold, metallic and
cruel. His power of depicting squalor is uncanny, though there is
nothing in the _Mint_, I think, which equals a later passage describing
a troop-ship on its way to India[10]; that fairly takes the breath away
by its sheer brutality. In the _Mint_ he weaves words and phrases from
the gutter--_les gros mots_--into a most artful pattern. But I cannot
think the book a success. It lacks relief and half-tones; also shape. In
his own phrase it is a "case-book; not a work of art but a document."

    [Footnote 10: _Letters_, p. 502.]

I never cared for his version of the _Odyssey_, for I did not share his
view that that poem was Wardour Street. Lawrence had had the ideal
experience for an Homeric scholar. "For years we were digging up a city
of roughly the Odysseus period. I have handled the weapons, armour,
utensils of those times, explored their houses, planned their cities. I
have hunted wild boars and watched wild lions, sailed the Aegean (and
sailed ships), bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles,
built boats and killed many men." But he was not simple-souled enough to
translate Homer, so he invented a pre-Raphaelite Homer whom he could
translate. I believe that the _Letters_ will rank as high as any of his
books, because they show nearly all the facets of his character; and he
never wrote better prose than his description of the bleak sea coast of
Buchan.[11]

    [Footnote 11: _Ibid._, p. 699.]

His fame will endure, and as time goes on the world may understand him
better; as he wrote of Thomas Hardy, "a generation will pass before the
sky will be perfectly clear of clouds for his shining." I last saw him
at the end of March, 1935, when on a push-bike he turned up at Elsfield
one Sunday morning and spent a long day with me. He was on his way from
Bridlington to his Dorsetshire cottage. He looked brilliantly well, with
a weather-beaten skin, a clear eye, and a forearm like a blacksmith's.
His nerves, too, seemed to be completely at ease. He had no plans and
described himself as like a leaf fallen from a tree in autumn, but he
was looking forward avidly to leisure. He spoke of public affairs and
his friends with perfect wisdom and charity. When he left I told my wife
that at last I was happy about him and believed that he might become
again the great man of action--might organise, perhaps, our imperfect
national defences. She shook her head. "He is looking at the world as
God must look at it," she said, "and a man cannot do that and live."
. . . A few weeks later he was dead.

I am not a very tractable person or much of a hero-worshipper, but I
could have followed Lawrence over the edge of the world. I loved him for
himself, and also because there seemed to be reborn in him all the lost
friends of my youth. If genius be, in Emerson's phrase a "stellar and
undiminishable something," whose origin is a mystery and whose essence
cannot be defined, then he was the only man of genius I have ever known.




CHAPTER IX

PARLIAMENT


After some six years of my ivory tower I grew restless. I rejoiced as
much as ever in the prospect from it, but I came to feel that it should
be a sanctuary to return to and not a heritage for continuous
habitation. In addition to the work of my firm I held several
directorships, but I did not find that business absorbed all my
energies; while my writing, which gave me enormous pleasure, would have
lost its charm for me unless kept as a relaxation. The fatigue of the
War, moral and mental, was passing, and my bodily ailments could be kept
within bounds. The truth is that in my late forties I experienced a
ridiculous resurgence of youth. In Scotland I was as active as ever on
the hill, and in my early morning rides in Oxfordshire I seemed to
recapture the precise emotions of twenty-one. The very tunes I had
hummed then were back on my lips. Reason told me that it was folly, that
I was only Donne's "aged childe and grey-headed Infant"; but I had not a
single grey hair, and I was unfeignedly grateful for this return, even
if illusory, of what had been a most happy youth.

That horrid possession, a social conscience, also began to prick me. My
forecast of the grim consequences of the War had not been quite
realised, but I believed that they were only retarded. I clung to a hope
in the League of Nations and expounded it to many audiences, but my
confidence was declining; I did not believe that such an institution
could be effective straight from its birth, and I did not find the
spirit abroad in the world which would encourage an organic growth. I
had an ugly fear that its foundations were on sand, and that the first
storm would overthrow it.

When I examined my political faith I found that my strongest belief was
in democracy according to my own definition. Democracy--the essential
thing as distinguished from this or that democratic government--was
primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament, and not an
economic structure or a political machine. The testament involved
certain basic beliefs--that the personality was sacrosanct, which was
the meaning of liberty; that policy should be settled by free
discussions; that normally a minority should be ready to yield to a
majority, which in turn should respect a minority's sacred things. It
seemed to me that democracy had been in the past too narrowly defined
and had been identified illogically with some particular economic or
political system such as _laissez-faire_ or British parliamentaryism. I
could imagine a democracy which economically was largely socialist and
which had not our constitutional pattern.

Believing this, I had come to feel that the faith, if it were to
continue, must set its house in order. Its essential value was not
questioned, but its efficiency had declined, since it had been clogged
by irrelevancies. There was a great deal of false democracy about, the
kind of thing dreaded by the great American federalists like Alexander
Hamilton and John Adams. Also I feared another war, for force is
democracy's eternal foe. Seor de Madariaga seemed to me to have written
wise words: "a democracy that goes to war, if beaten, loses its liberty
at the hands of its adversary; if victorious it loses its liberty at its
own hands." But most of all I was alarmed lest the creed should lose its
glamour. It was too much taken for granted; and I thought that it might
perish from the sheer _ennui_ of its votaries. I could not guess that in
a year or two it would become once again the oriflamme of a crusade, a
cause to be fought for against odds.

For the democracies, which then included Germany, it was a dull world.
The grandiose experiment in Russia had taken away all interest from the
socialism which was merely academic. Except in America, which seemed to
be in a fair way to rake in the wealth of the globe, the ordinary man
was struggling with private problems so difficult that he had not time
for public affairs. The high post-War visions had gone, and the
prevalent mood was, at the best, a stoical resolution.

                                  "Life still
  Leaves human efforts scope.
  But, since life teems with ill,
  Nurse no extravagant hope;
  Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then despair."


I

In those six years I did not quite rid myself of political interests. I
had some office or other in many of the Oxford undergraduate clubs, and
on Sunday afternoons a multitude of young men used to come to tea. There
was a legend in the family that wherever one went on the globe one would
meet somebody who had been to Elsfield. These guests were of every
type--Blues, hunting men, scholars, Union orators, economists,
poets--and of every creed from Jacobitism to communism. We discussed
politics, and I was often asked to advise about careers, so perforce I
had to keep in touch with the political world. More than once I was
offered a constituency, and when it was proposed that I should follow
Mr. Bonar Law in Central Glasgow I had to give the matter serious
thought. Early in 1927 Sir Henry Craik, the senior Member for the
Scottish Universities, died, and I was invited to succeed him. It was
the kind of constituency which suited me, for I was warned that my
health would not stand the ordinary business of electioneering. In the
election which ensued I was opposed by a socialist who forfeited his
deposit. In the eight years of my membership I had only to face one
other contested election, when I was returned by a very large majority.

It would be hard to imagine a more perfect seat. The electors were
graduates of the four Universities, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and
Edinburgh. The method was proportional representation, the voting was by
post, and the constituents were scattered all over the world. I was
never asked for a favour--rarely even to procure a seat in the Members'
Gallery. Except on the Prayer Book question no constituent ever cavilled
at my doings. They gave me perfect confidence and the amplest freedom. I
was elected as a Conservative, for, believing in party government, I
disliked the name of Independent. But I held that a university member
should sit a little loose to parties, and I was independent in fact if
not in name.

I had often listened to parliamentary debates, but it is one thing to be
in the gallery and quite another to be on the floor of the House. My
historical reading had given me a reverence for parliamentary tradition,
and I was not disillusioned. On paper the whole lay-out is absurd. There
are seats for only about three-fourths of the members, and these seats
are uncomfortable; the ventilation leaves the head hot and the feet
cold; half the time is spent in dragging wearily into and out of
lobbies, voting on matters about which few members know anything;
advertising mountebanks can waste a deal of time; debates can be as
dull as a social science congress in the provinces, which, according to
Matthew Arnold, filled the soul with "an unutterable sense of
lamentation and mourning and woe." But speeches are shorter and of a far
higher quality than in any other legislative assembly with which I am
acquainted, and, while many members recite pieces for the benefit of
their local papers, there are hours of close debating, and now and then
a high emotional scene.

But I was puzzled at first to account for its repute. The practical
business of law-making and administration would have been better and
more speedily done by a committee of civil servants or industrialists,
or, for that matter, by the notable experts to be found in the House of
Lords. On the side of general policy and principles a group of
professors would have provided more illuminating discussions. There are
few real experts, and these few were not regarded too respectfully,
except now and then on service questions. The debates were confessedly
and intentionally the work of amateurs. What made it all so impressive
and, in its way, effective? Partly the long tradition behind it. As one
looked round the members one reflected that men just like them, no
better informed or abler, had preserved our liberties and helped to
build our Empire. The House wrought under the august canopy of its past.
Partly the tremendous practical importance of those often limp debates.
A decision set a huge machine in motion and influenced the lives of
millions. But chiefly, I think, the fact that the House was truly
representative. It was the people of Britain who were governing, not a
batch of supermen. Those halting dogmas, those shy heroics, those sudden
outbursts of hard sense were precisely the thoughts and emotions of the
ordinary man, whom Burke believed to be in the long run wiser than his
leaders. Beyond doubt the House was a microcosm of the people.

Nevertheless I have seldom disliked anything so much as speaking in it.
It was like addressing a gathering of shades, who might at any moment
disappear into limbo unless they were clutched by the hair. I felt that
nobody wanted to listen to me, that I was only tolerated out of
courtesy, and that each of my hearers was longing for me to sit down
that he might himself be called. Only on rare occasions did I have an
audience with which I felt at ease. On public platforms I was fairly
happy, but not often in Parliament.

Yet I was fortunate, and was always well treated. My maiden speech,
delivered two months after my election, was something of an occasion.
The Lord Chancellor had introduced in the Lords a bill to amend the
Parliament Act, which proposed a reformed Second Chamber and the
restoration of certain powers lost in 1911. To me and to many of the
younger Conservatives this seemed to be a policy which would rouse
endless controversy in the country. The Parliament Act was working well
enough, and we did not believe in the cry about the need for barriers
against revolution; if the people really wanted revolution no paper
safeguards could stop them. I arranged to make my debut in the Commons
on Lord Cave's proposal, and to my consternation my purpose was
advertised beforehand in the Press, so that I had a double reason for
nervousness. I lunched that day, I remember, with Mr. Neville
Chamberlain, who said he thanked heaven that no such fate had befallen
him.

When the moment came it was worse even than I had feared. I spoke
fourth, in the tea hour, and rose in an almost empty House. I had
prepared a careful speech, but my first sentences sounded duller than
human nature could bear, and my voice a hideous croak. Then my
nervousness departed and boredom succeeded. I feared that I might have
to stop and yawn. But suddenly I realised, from the surprised look of
the only occupant of the Treasury bench, that I was speaking against the
Government and my own party, and that gave me a slight fillip. Then I
perceived that the House was filling up, and presently that it was
packed, with a crowd below the Bar. After that I began to enjoy myself
and, greatly daring, I ventured to conclude with a solemn rhetorical
appeal to respect the spirit of the constitution. Mr. Lloyd George, who
followed, did me the honour to repeat my arguments in his own words. No
more was heard of the Lord Chancellor's scheme, for the Whips knew that
if it had been pressed several hundred Conservatives would have joined
me in the Opposition lobby.

That was an occasion to me of great personal interest, but a far more
dramatic one was the first Prayer Book debate in December 1927. The
revised book had been accepted by the House of Lords, where it was
believed to be most in danger, and it was generally assumed that it
would have an easy passage in the Commons. On the contrary it was
rejected by a large majority, after a debate which showed the House at
its best; it was defeated by Irish and Scottish votes, just as the
proposal whose failure caused the Disruption of 1843 in the Scottish
Church was defeated by English votes. The chief Government spokesman
made the mistake of treating the subject in a jocose man-of-the-world
style, and he was met by earnest evangelical appeals which stirred up
the latent protestantism of the most careless members. I knew a good
deal about the subject and I laboured to expound what seemed to me the
true Reformation spirit of freedom. My effort was futile, for argument
had no chance against the emotional power of a very old tradition. But I
enjoyed speaking in the tense atmosphere, with many friends regarding me
with white faces and angry eyes.

When I entered the House I decided that I had no desire for the ordinary
_cursus honorum_. A minor post would only have complicated my life, and
I was too senior to begin to try for Cabinet office. So I had no reason
to put myself forward, and I spoke only on subjects where I had special
knowledge or a special interest. These were most Scottish questions;
anything to do with education; certain problems of Empire; and the
Zionist experiment, for which Arthur Balfour had aroused my enthusiasm.
I attempted two private bills, one to regulate greyhound racing, which
failed, and another to prevent the sale of British song-birds, which
succeeded. I rarely spoke more than half a dozen times in a session, for
I had no wish to make set speeches, while to intervene effectively in a
debate meant a long wait for an opportunity for which I had simply not
the time. Outside the House my most successful effort was the movement
to raise the limit of the school age.

Though I was an undistinguished Member of Parliament, I was a contented
one, and I enjoyed every moment of my eight years there. The customary
platitudes about the House of Commons happen to be true. Individual
members may be ill-bred; the House itself has a fine taste and breeding,
and a sure instinct in matters of conduct. It will always include people
who are foolish, hasty, humourless; but collectively it is rarely other
than patient, urbane and wise. It is nicely discriminating, for while
it will tolerate an agreeable buffoon and an honest donkey, it will not
give its confidence except to sterling character and talent. _Securus
judicat._ The flashy platform demagogue has to change his methods if he
is to win its favour. It demands specific qualities--a certain decency
in debate and a certain respect for itself and its ancient ritual. The
sansculotte who refuses its demands is speedily silenced, for the House
has immense powers of neglect and disapproval. The man who has won fame
in some other walk of life, like the public service, business, science
or literature, is given a respectful hearing, but he has to show the
specific House of Commons gifts before he is accepted. It is a friendly
body, but as a judge of what it likes it is unbending; it will never
forsake him whom it once accepts, or accept one who has been weighed and
found wanting.

In my time, as I have said, there were no great political storms
blowing. We had the eternal problems of unemployment and poverty, the
business of adjusting the relations of master and man, polishing up the
educational apparatus, and giving sops to distressed agriculture. Some
reforms were effected, occasional squalls ruffled the political calm,
stolid aspirants climbed the ladder of office, and the world jogged
along not very comfortably but without any great to-do. In 1931 came the
depression which jostled Britain off the gold standard and brought a
National Government into being. After that politics were duller than
ever. The ordinary citizen was behaving heroically, but the drama was
outside the Palace of Westminster. I remember being puzzled by the
flatness of everything and wondering uneasily if it were not the calm
before the storm. Something monstrous seemed about to emerge from the
economic pit into which the world was slipping. I longed for someone of
prophetic strain, someone like Mr. Gladstone, to trouble the waters even
at the expense of our peace of mind. I would have been happier if I
could have found a leader, whose creed I fully shared and whom I could
devoutly follow.

But if political life was stagnant, I found a perpetual interest in the
House itself, and I acquired that respect for it as a body which Oliver
Cromwell learned during the Short Parliament. My own party was full of
young or youngish men who might have led a life of amusement, but who,
instead, sat till all hours through dull debates and gave laborious days
to their constituencies. Such members were for the most part liberal,
often radical, in their political views, and they seemed to me to be the
most valuable element in public life--holding to what was worth holding
to in the legacy of the past, but always prepared to jettison lumber.
There were a few genuine reactionaries, not country gentlemen but
business magnates, who were not much liked, and who woke to life only in
the Budget season. The most futile type were the Labour intellectuals, a
batch of whom came in at the election of 1929. They were not quite able
enough to be impressive, they were drearily dogmatic, and they were
regarded with suspicion by the ordinary Labour member, with whom they
had simply no points of contact. That seemed to me a pity, for they had
something to give the trade unionists, and much to get from them. As for
the latter, I found them the most interesting section of the House. They
might be clumsy in handling dogmas, but all their lives they had been in
contact with realities, and each of them was a master of a special
knowledge. They were the most genuinely English thing in public life,
with all the English foibles and virtues. Also they spoke racily and
idiomatically. It was a delight to me, after the ordinary clipped talk
of the public school and universities, to hear speech which had a relish
of country nooks and long-descended provincial ways.

Their Scottish colleagues were different--more speculative and
impulsive, better educated and better read. All of them were my friends,
but especially the Glasgow contingent, who, deeply suspect at first,
soon won a distinguished place in the House's esteem, and greatly
enlivened its debates. No members more fully represented their
constituencies, for they knew every man, woman and child in them, and
gave up laborious week-ends to the study on the spot of the problems of
poverty. Woe to him who spoke loosely on the subject and was pounced
upon by those experts! James Maxton, too, with his beautiful husky
voice, seemed more able than any other member to capture at will the
attention and the affection of the House. When I resigned my seat in
April 1935 I had many regrets, but the chief, I think, was that, while I
was likely to meet most of my colleagues elsewhere, I would find it less
easy to see my Glasgow friends.

My years in Parliament left me a more convinced believer than ever in
democracy, but convinced too, that the democratic technique wanted
overhauling. I remembered Burke's words: "There ever is within
Parliament itself a power of renovating its principles and effecting a
self-reformation which no other place of government has ever contained.
. . . Public troubles have often called upon this country to look into
its constitution. It has ever been bettered by such a revision." I was
not an advocate of stronger checks on hasty legislation; these seemed to
me strong enough already, for we had not one Second Chamber, but
many--the House of Lords, the Civil Service, the City, the great local
Government machine. I accepted adult suffrage, but I felt that votes
should be weighted--that of the married man as against the bachelor, of
the man with a family as against the childless; I thought that the
voting power of inexperienced youth if left unbalanced might compel
undue oscillations in the body politic. Again, I thought that the rigid
territorial basis for elections was out of date. It might continue in
part as a framework, but the Universities' precedent should be followed,
and there should be additional representation for great economic,
cultural and professional interests; as it was, a trade unionist had
virtually a double vote. But my strongest conviction was that the area
of public service should be extended, and that the ordinary citizen
should be given the chance of an active share in the work of
administration. I believed that the policy represented by organisations
like the B.B.C., the Port of London Authority, and the Central
Electricity Board, was our natural line of development--public utilities
privately administered but authorised and ultimately controlled by the
Government.

Happily we do not idolise our public men. They are St. Sebastians stuck
up aloft for critical arrows; even when we admire them we treat them
irreverently; we show our gratitude by a friendly ribaldry, and in
moments of annoyance they are our first cock-shies. Owen Seaman once
told me that he had to come back to London early on a Monday morning,
and was compelled to take a workman's train. It was the year when
Crippen, the murderer, had been arrested in Canada, and that and the
Ulster troubles filled the columns of the Press. He found himself in a
compartment full of honest men smoking their pipes and reading their
halfpenny papers. At last one of them flung down his journal in disgust.
"Wot I says," he exclaimed, "is to 'ell with the lot of 'em--Asquith
and Lloyd George and Carson and Crippen--the 'ole bleedin' lot!" Upon
which there was a general protest. "'Ere, wot 'arm's old Crippen done?"
You will find in France, in the United States, and even in parts of the
Dominions a real cynicism about the value of their type of government, a
distrust of all engaged in it, and a general boredom with the whole
business. It is different in Britain. Here our surface ribaldry covers a
sincere respect, and in recent years, when parliamentary government has
been overthrown elsewhere, I think we have come to cherish ours more
than ever. Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to
young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest
and the most honourable adventure.


II

During my years in Parliament I had one curious interlude. In 1933 and
1934 I was Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church
of Scotland in succession to Sir Ian Colquhoun. The King's Commissioner
opens and closes the Assembly, appears daily at its meetings, and
fulfils a multitude of other engagements; for a fortnight he lives in
the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where he entertains the Church and the
World according to his means and his inclination.

I gladly accepted the office, for the Scottish Church had always been a
principal part of my background. I was born and brought up in a manse. I
was an elder of the Kirk, my historical studies had lain to some extent
in Scottish church history, and I had had a small part in bringing about
the union of the United Free Church (of which my father had been a
minister) with the Church of Scotland. It was an office thickly
encrusted with history. In the seventeenth century the Lord High
Commissioner presided over the Scottish Parliament as well as the
General Assembly, and a stormy time he had of it. (I remembered Hamilton
at the epoch-making Glasgow Assembly of 1639.) Since the Union of 1707
he presides at the Assembly alone. But memories of early sturt and
strife still cling to him. On the night of his arrival, when the Scots
nobility are invited to a state dinner, he receives from the Lord
Provost the keys of the city of Edinburgh; he himself chooses the
password for the Palace guards; the Lord Provost and the Sheriff of the
Lothians are given the highest precedence;--all relics of the past when
the King's Commissioner took his life in his hands and had at any cost
to mollify the local dignitaries. The same atmosphere hangs over the
Assembly itself. The proceedings are opened with an historic ritual, and
the close has in it the whole history of the Scottish Kirk, which has
always claimed, and is now admitted by statute, to be completely
self-governing. The High Commissioner formally declares the sederunt
closed and promises to report to the King that everything has been done
decently and in order. The Moderator then rises and has the last word,
appointing the date of the next Assembly, "in the name of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, _the only Head of this Church_."

The Lord High Commissioner is the sole subject in Great Britain who on
occasion represents His Majesty, and he must therefore conduct himself
high and disposedly. Holyroodhouse used to be the last word in shabby
discomfort; the High Commissioner had to bring his own plate, linen and
other accessories, and bivouac in windy chambers where the rats
scampered. Now it is like a well-appointed country house, and I think
the west drawing-room, which looks out on Arthur's Seat, one of the
pleasantest rooms I have ever entered. The High Commissioner and his
wife are for a fortnight Their Graces, and, besides the Purse Bearer,
are attended by a lady-in-waiting, by several maids-of-honour, and by
four A.D.C.'s. During my two years of office I had as my A.D.C.'s
representatives of ancient Scottish houses--Lord Clydesdale and his
brother, Lord Nigel Douglas Hamilton; Captain Duncan Macrae of Eilean
Donan; and my future son-in-law Captain Brian Fairfax-Lucy (a Cameron of
Mamore). They all wore kilts of the old pattern, and made the most
impressive bodyguard. I shall not soon forget those dinners in the great
gallery of the Palace, where sometimes a hundred sat at table--the
lingering spring sunshine competing with the candles, the dark walls
covered with the portraits of the Kings of Scotland (daubs two hundred
years old, but impressive in the twilight), the toast of the King,
followed by the National Anthem, and that of the Church of Scotland,
followed by Old Hundred, the four pipers of the Argylls, who strutted
round the table and then played a pibroch for my special delectation. On
those nights old ghosts came out of secret places.


III

Between 1927 and 1935 the stage was emptied of most of the figures who
had been prominent when I first became interested in politics. Milner
and Curzon died before I entered the House; Asquith and Arthur Balfour,
Finlay and Sumner and Buckmaster while I was a member. All of them were
in the Lords; only Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Lloyd George, of the
pre-War statesmen, still sat in the Commons, and the latter spent much
of his time at his Sutton farm in his new role of Cincinnatus.

One friend of my youth was in the Cabinet when I came to St. Stephen's,
and three years later all parties mourned his untimely death. When I
went up to Oxford F. E. Smith was a law don at Merton, imping his wings
for the most brilliant legal flight of our day. When he spoke in the
Union he swept away opposition like a river in spate. I met him in the
political clubs, and I had the benefit of his advocacy when, with other
unfortunates, I had some trouble with the police during the visit of
King Edward VII (then Prince of Wales) to Blenheim. When I returned from
South Africa I found that he had settled as a "local" at Liverpool and
had already built up a large practice. On the northern circuit I used to
stay with him at his house in the Wirral, and spend a cheerful week-end
among dogs and horses. I remember how deeply I was impressed by his
appearances in court. Disregarding the folly of solicitors, he refused
to argue each and every point, but concentrated on the vital ones;
wherefore he was beloved by judges, whose time he never wasted.

He entered Parliament in the 1906 election, migrated to London, and
presently was a resplendent figure both in the Law Courts and the House
of Commons. Everything he undertook he did easily, as if with his left
hand, and with a superb gesture of unconcern. He was Aristotle's
Magnificent Man, the last exponent of the eighteenth-century Grand
Manner. He was consciously shaping his career according to a
long-settled plan, and he took a boyish pleasure in the masterful way in
which he made stage follow stage. Wholly incapable of pretence and
humbug and time-serving, he had strong views on public questions which
he candidly avowed and faithfully acted upon. He liked the good things
of life and made no bones about it; ginger remained for him hot in the
mouth, and he refused to relinquish cakes or ale because of the frowns
of the anaemic. He had his own strict code of honour, hard as stone and
plain as a pike-staff, and he never departed from it. One of its
articles was loyalty to friendship. At the start he imperilled his
chances at the Bar because he stood by an unpopular acquaintance. He
would go out of his way at his busiest to help a friend. He used to
speak for me in my Border constituency before the War, and arrive at the
last possible moment, when I had given up hope. I had a house far up in
the moors, from whose door one could see four miles of road, and I ought
to have contracted heart disease from my Sister-Anne watches on that
doorstep!

He was in every sense an extraordinary man according to Sydney Smith's
definition: "The meaning of an extraordinary man is that he is eight men
in one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much
sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he
were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if
he were irretrievably ruined." F. E. had plenty of foibles and plenty of
critics, but, as has been well said, it is only at the tree loaded with
fruit that people throw stones. He had talents of the first order, and
in a dazzling variety. First and foremost he was a great lawyer--a great
advocate and a great judge. He had an intellect of remarkable range and
power, capable of the nicest subtleties and the broadest and most
luminous common sense. He could embody his conclusions, too, in clear,
nervous prose. I do not think that he was a very good writer in the
general way, he had too few notes in his scale; but he was a master of
judicial statement. Then he was a great orator. Not in the highest
rank, perhaps, for here, too, he had a limited range, and I was never
much moved by his solemnities; but in supple argument and devastating
controversial skill he had no equal in our time. He had a beautiful
voice and his sentences seemed to flow with a contemptuous ease. The
fluency of the ordinary man suggests the shallow and the ineffective,
but his proclaimed an insolent mastery. I have more than once been with
him on election platforms, and his handling of interrupters and hecklers
was a cruel piece of artistry; it must have taken them weeks to recover.

The Magnificent Man is apt to lack the small prudential virtues. F. E.
took no thought for the morrow; he was resolved to get what he sought by
the sheer weight of brains and will, and not by any tactical adroitness.
I question whether, if he had lived, he would have gone much further;
certainly he would never have been Prime Minister, for he was too much
the brilliant individualist for our queer synthetic polity. There has
been no one quite like him in our history, for audacious figures like
Thurlow had usually something rotten and cankered about them, whereas F.
E. had the most wholesome virtues. Sometimes he seemed to cultivate a
kind of Regency grossness, but the coarseness of grain was superficial;
he was capable of the most delicate consideration and chivalry. Above
all he had magnanimity; next to a stout ally he loved a stout opponent.
No architect of a career was ever less jealous of other builders. An
ambition very near his heart was to be Chancellor of Oxford University,
but when Lord Cave died it seemed to the committee of Conservatives who
were concerned with the nomination that F. E. was not a possible
candidate. I was given the unpleasant task of breaking the news to him.
"My dear John," he said, "I wholly agree. What Oxford needs in the
present crisis of her fortunes is a decorous faade, and that unhappily
I cannot provide." To some he seemed to play the game of life for common
and earthy stakes, but who among us can on this account cast a
stone?--and in any case the triviality of the stakes was redeemed by the
brilliance and the humanity of the player.

       *       *       *       *       *

I knew Ramsay MacDonald long before I entered Parliament. Indeed, before
I took that step I had some talk with him as to what room there was for
anybody like myself in public life. I was in the House when he led the
Opposition; during the Labour Government of 1929-1931; and from the day
when he became Prime Minister of a National Government to the day he
retired. In the last two years of his premiership I saw much of him, for
during the session we walked together round St. James's Park on several
mornings in the week, and I frequently breakfasted with him and did my
best to help a very tired man to arrange his difficult days.

He will be a hard personality for historians to judge, since the
evidence, to a writer a hundred years hence, will seem a mass of
contradictions. He was the chief maker of the Labour party, and
according to his critics he did his best to destroy it--_suarum legum
auctor ac subversor_. Before he took office he preached an emotional
socialism, but in his later years he tended towards a creed scarcely
distinguishable from left-centre conservatism. In 1914, at the outbreak
of War, he was in opposition to the bulk of his party and to the vast
majority of the British people, but no man was less of a pacifist. There
were moments when he was Jacobin and sansculotte, and moments when his
affections were with an _ancien rgime_. Most of his life was spent
with very plain folk, but his taste was fastidious, his courtesy of an
old-fashioned elaboration, and--to quote from some novel whose title I
have forgotten--he "had the so-called aristocratic appearance which is
common in England among the middle classes, but unknown among the old
nobility."

I think that some of these contradictions can be explained. He had the
starkest kind of courage, and if he were challenged or coerced he was
apt to be forced into an opposition which did not represent his real
views. That is certainly true of his behaviour in the War. Again, his
critics said that, though his business was to succour the under-dog, he
disliked the breed. That is not true. His sympathies were always with
the under-dog, and he disliked it only when it became smug and
patronising and talked bad economics. Yet I think that here lay his
great limitation. In one of his letters Rupert Brooke wrote that he
could "watch a dirty, middle-aged tradesman in a railway carriage for
hours, and love every dirty, greasy, sulky wrinkle in his weak chin, and
every button on his spotted, unclean waistcoat." Ramsay MacDonald lacked
this catholic, enjoying zest for human nature, this kindly affection for
the commonplace, which may be called benevolence, or, better still,
loving-kindness, the quality of Shakespeare and Walter Scott. It may
have been due to some harsh experience in his youth, but he had
developed what seemed to me to be an undue fastidiousness. He was too
ready to despise. He loved plain folk, but they must be his own kind of
plain folk with his own background. Of the ordinary stupid stuff of
democracy he could be as intolerant as Coriolanus.

He had all the qualities of a leader, fearlessness, decision, a
temperamental mastery; but it was the irony of fate which made him
leader of the Labour party. There he had to deal with honest men most of
whom had drab backgrounds and narrow outlooks, people with whom he could
share nothing. Worse, he had to deal with the half-baked, the minor
intellectuals, and he knew too well the dismal shallows of their minds.
With the really able men of the Left he made no contact. He used to
profess an admiration for science and scientists, but his own mind had
nothing of the scientific bent. He simply did not understand the
language of modern economics.

I can only speak of him as I knew him and that was in his decline. I
never heard him in his great days when he was a famous platform orator
and a formidable debater. He had still the oratorical habit, and would
drift into rhetorical cadences, but he had lost his old copiousness and
had to drag his thoughts and words from a deep well, so that the result
was often a sad anti-climax. His alleged vanity seemed to me to be
largely sensitiveness. The struggle of his early years had made him
suspicious and too quick to imagine affronts. Also he had a queer
romantic kink which made him see melodrama in perfectly humdrum affairs.
He could not help picturing himself in dramatic parts. To the end there
was an endearing innocence about him.

Indeed if I had to choose one epithet for him it would be "endearing."
There was a sombre gentleness which fascinated me. In his last years
when mind and body were almost worn out, two things never failed
him--courage and courtesy. The whole man was a romance, almost an
anachronism. To understand him one had to understand the Scottish Celt,
with his ferocious pride, his love of pageantry and poetry, his
sentiment about the past, his odd contradictory loyalties. He would
have made an excellent Highland chief three hundred years ago, and a
heroic Jacobite refugee. That is why he was a successful Foreign
Secretary, for his imagination enabled him to understand large grandiose
things, the conflict of nations, the strife of continents. Now and then
the curtain would be drawn back and something would be revealed of a
lonely inward-looking soul. I remember that when the National Government
was formed in 1931, the Scots in London gave him a dinner, and in his
speech he let his recollection wander back to his boyhood and told of
his happiness when a harvest-worker had been kind to him long ago. I
shall not soon forget the wistfulness with which he revived that old,
dim memory.

The man was principally a poet--a poet who, like Cecil Rhodes, had not
the gift of song. When his days of struggle were over and he found
himself in a high place, he did not quite know what to do with his
power, for his was a kingdom of dreams, not of things and men. The
silliest charge levelled against him was snobbishness. He liked
cultivated, long-descended people and beautiful things, and had the
honesty to admit it. But the true definition of a snob is one who craves
for what separates men rather than for what unites them, and of that
type Ramsay MacDonald was the extreme opposite. He had no real wish to
be any kind of grandee. The things which were dearest to him were the
things which are happily found in the widest commonalty--old friends,
the folk of his native parish, the songs and tales of his youth, the
seasonal beauties of nature. He had tramped all over my Border hills and
knew every shepherd by name, and once, when he was the most talked of
man in Europe, he suggested that he and I should go off for a week's
walking there. "I want some pleasure," he said, "before the lean years
begin."

       *       *       *       *       *

It is fitting to pass from Ramsay MacDonald to King George V for between
the two there was a sincere friendship. I was first brought into
association with the King in the latter part of the War when, as part of
my official duties, I was occasionally summoned to discuss with him
public opinion in foreign nations. What struck me was his eager
interest, his quick apprehension and his capacious memory. As with many
royal personages, what to the ordinary man was abstract history was to
him a personal affair, like a family chronicle, and he was
extraordinarily quick in detecting historical parallels. I was not less
impressed by his courage. He never lost heart, and his fortitude was not
a dead, stolid thing, for there was always something about it of the
buoyant and the debonair.

He had a ready sense of humour, of the kind often found among good
sportsmen. Verbal wit did not interest him, but he had a robust
appreciation of the comedies of life. He was a great reader, reading
rather for substance than for style. He did me the honour to be amused
by my romances, and used to make acute criticisms on questions of fact.
Of one, a poaching story of the Highlands, he gave me a penetrating
analysis, but he approved of it sufficiently to present many copies of
it to his friends.

The sportsman was always strong in him, for he loved not only the
practice of an art in which he excelled, but the whole out-of-doors
world and the pageant of nature. Akin to this taste was his liking for
those who lived close to nature. Like Walter Scott, he rejoiced that
"nothing worth having or caring about in this world is uncommon." He
understood plain people and was in turn understood by them, and that was
the secret of his strength. Few things pleased or moved him more than to
be told of the pithy sayings of simple folks, and of episodes which
revealed the divine spark in them. In 1923 when he visited the Borders
and passed through Peebles, an old shepherd's wife tramped ten miles
from a hill glen to greet him. When I asked her why she had undertaken
such a journey her reply was "We maun boo to the buss that bields
us."[12] I told this to the King, and it stuck in his memory, for he
often quoted it.

    [Footnote 12: "We must bow to the bush that shields us."]

He had one key of access to all hearts, his sincere love of his fellows.
He could be explosive and denunciatory, but always with a twinkle in his
eye. He had in a full degree what Clarendon attributed to England, "its
old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature." Soberly
and unrhetorically it can be written of him that he loved humanity.
Therefore he was a shrewd judge of character, which no cynic can ever
be. He never rode rough-shod over anyone's feelings, and he was tender
even to prejudices. He was immensely considerate of all those who served
him. When he summoned a Minister to his presence, he endeavoured not to
overburden the days of a busy man. In his long illness of 1928-1929 he
was constantly thinking of the comfort of his doctors and nurses.

After that illness his health was a guarded flame, and sometimes the
need for restrictions irked him. But to the world he always presented a
smiling front. If anything, he became more gentle, and there was perhaps
a greater benignity in his kind, worn face and frosty blue eyes. He
was, if possible, more charitable in his judgments, more thoughtful for
others. When I received at his hands an appointment to a great imperial
post, he gave me wise advice. One thing he impressed upon me was to be
sympathetic to the French people of Canada, and jealously to respect
their traditions and their language. On the very day of his death I
received a message from him bidding me remember that ski-ing was not a
safe pursuit for a middle-aged man!

It will be for the historian of the future to expound the work he did in
the world. In this brief note I am concerned only with the personality
of the man, a personality greater perhaps than any of his achievements,
a personality which was in itself an achievement. His simplicity,
honesty, and warm human sympathy made themselves felt not only in the
Empire, but throughout the globe, so that millions who owed him no
allegiance seemed to know and love him. For he was a pillar of all that
was stable and honourable and of good report in a distracted world. In
the United States he was never, in conversation or in the Press, called
the "king of England," but the "king"; for them there was only one King;
the Throne of Britain long ago lost their allegiance, but not their
hearts. The same was true of almost every nation. It is to the credit of
mankind that it responds to what is best in itself, when that
best--which rarely happens--is so pinnacled that none can miss it. He
feared God and loved and served his people, and, through them, all
peoples. In Carlyle's phrase about Scott, no sounder piece of manhood
was fashioned in our generation, for he had in him both warmth and
light.

                          "Blest are those
  Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled."




CHAPTER X

FIRST AND LAST THINGS


I

To anyone whose imagination has been caught by ancient Rome one picture
must keep recurring. It is the living-room of a country house--farm or
villa--in which, among objects of domestic use, a space was reserved for
the images of the dead. I do not mean the grandiose _lararium_ of the
rich, but the modest household where there was no room to segregate the
family busts. I picture those wax memorials, often rude and discoloured,
lit by the glow of the hearth-fire when the storm howled without,
catching the sun on a bright morning, and drawing the wondering eyes of
the children when an elder spoke of the past and jerked a thumb upwards
towards some ancestor. In such a life the dead remained in a real sense
within the family circle. Piety was nourished not by the memory only but
by the eye.

So among these chapters it may be permitted to allot one to the pictures
which, as we grow older, acquire a sharper outline than the contemporary
scene--those family recollections which are the first, and also, I
think, the last, things in a man's memory. As one ages, the memory seems
to be inverted, and recent events to grow dim in the same proportion as
ancient happenings become clear. To-day, for instance, I am a little
hazy about the Great War but very clear about the South African
campaign. And I seem to live more intimately with those who died long
ago than with men and women whom I see every day. Lockhart's lines are
less a precept for conduct than the recognition of a fact in human
psychology:

  "Be constant to the dead,
   The dead cannot deceive."

My father died in his early sixties when I was in my thirty-seventh
year. His strong physique was worn out by unceasing toil in a slum
parish, an endless round of sermons and addresses, and visits at all
hours to the sick and sorrowful. He had retired to his native Tweeddale,
where he had a brief leisure among the scenes of his youth before he
died peacefully in his sleep. For the last dozen years of his life I saw
less of him, for my own life was spent in London or abroad. The picture
in my memory belongs to my childhood, amplified a little by the
reflections of adolescence.

As a young man he had bushy whiskers and must have looked very much like
Matthew Arnold, but as time passed these grew smaller until they
vanished altogether. He had the ruddy complexion of a countryman, and
that air of gentle, wondering cheerfulness which God sometimes gives to
His servants:

  "The good are always the merry,
   Save by an evil chance."

When I first met Charles Gore I observed in him the same benign,
surprised enjoyment of the mere fact of living.

My father had been a good classical scholar, and he remained a voracious
reader. He had a notable memory for poetry and could repeat every Border
ballad that was ever printed and many still unpublished. He had a
profound knowledge of Scottish songs, both words and tunes, and I could
wish that I had taken down from him some of the traditional fragments.
He was also an excellent field botanist. He had read much history and
was an unashamed partisan. The past to him was a design in snow and ink,
one long contest between villains of admitted villainy and honest men.
His dividing line was oddly drawn. In the eighteenth century the
Jacobites were for him the children of light; in the seventeenth the
Covenanters. For the latter indeed he cherished a fervent private cult,
admitting no flaw in their perfection. But his children observed that
his special admiration was reserved for those among the Covenanters who
had something of the Cavalier romance--Hackstoun of Rathillet, the Black
MacMichael, Paton of Meadowhead--and he would permit no criticism of
Montrose.

It was odd that he should have been by profession a theologian, for he
was wholly lacking in philosophical interest or aptitude. But a stalwart
theologian of the old school he was, rejoicing in the clamped and
riveted Calvinistic logic and eager to defend it against all comers. In
church politics he belonged to the extreme Conservative wing, and it was
his delight, when a member of the Annual Assembly, to stir up all the
strife he could by indicting for heresy some popular preacher or
professor. There was no ill-feeling in the matter, and he might
profoundly respect the heretic, but he conceived it his duty to defend
the faith of his fathers against every innovator. Partly the interest
was intellectual. He liked a clear pattern and a clean logic, however
austere. He greatly admired the Puritan divine and he had a special
liking for the later Jonathan Edwards. Partly it was sentimental love--a
love of old ways and a fast-vanishing world. Partly it was the reaction
against two things which he whole-heartedly disliked--a glib modernism
and the worship of fashion. He had no belief in compromises and a
facile liberalism; he never cherished the illusion that the Christian
life was an easy thing, and on this score he had to testify against many
false prophets. He had a complete distrust of current fashions and the
worship of the "voice of the people" and the "spirit of the age" and
such fetishes. He believed that a majority was usually wrong, and he
would have been terrified to find himself on a side which was superior
in numbers. He had the same taste as his children for things old and
unpopular and shabby.

But, except as regards dogma, he had little of the conventional
Calvinistic temper. He had no sympathy with the legalism of that creed,
the notion of a contract between God and man drawn up by some celestial
conveyancer. I could wish that he had lived to read Karl Barth, for
their views had much in common. In the beleaguered city of the Faith he
thought it his duty now and then to man a gun on the dogmatic ramparts,
but more of his time was devoted to easing the life of the civilians and
strengthening their hope. What he preached for forty years was a very
simple and comforting gospel. His evangel had neither the hysteria nor
the smugness of ordinary revivalism. He believed profoundly in the fact
of "conversion," the turning of the face to a new course. But, the first
step having been taken, he would insist upon the arduousness of the
pilgrimage as well as upon its moments of high vision and its ultimate
reward. His religion was tender and humane, but it was also well-girded.
He had no love for those who took their ease in Zion.

To his children he was a companion rather than a mentor; or, to put it
otherwise, his life was the example, not his precepts, for he rarely
preached to us. He could judge sternly but never harshly. He hated
lying and cowardice, and he was distrustful of large professions. He was
nervous about the value of youthful piety and used to rejoice that his
family, bad as they were, were not prigs. For cant, and indeed for all
rhetoric, he had a strong distaste. Beginning life as a Liberal he lost
his confidence in Mr. Gladstone after Gordon's death in Khartoum, and
the Home Rule question drove him to the Unionist side. He detected in
Ulster some kinship with his beloved Covenanters.

My father was an instance of what I think was commoner among the
Puritans than is generally supposed--a stiff dogmatic theology which in
practice was mellowed by common sense and kindliness and was conjoined
with a perpetual delight in the innocent pleasures of life. He was like
that seventeenth-century Scots minister who besought his flock to thank
God, if for nothing else, for a good day for the lambs. He could preach
a tough doctrinal sermon with anybody; but his discourses which remain
in my memory were those spoken at the close of the half-yearly
Communions, when he invited his hearers, very simply and solemnly, to
share his own happiness.

For he was above all things a happy man. Straitened means and a
laborious life did not weaken his relish for common joys. He found acute
delight in the simplest things, for he savoured them with a clean
palate. Like the old preacher he could exclaim, "All this--and Heaven
too." He had always the background of an assured faith to correct man's
sense of the fragility of his hopes. Also he had none of the little
fears and frustrations which are apt to cloud enjoyment. I do not think
that he was afraid of anything--except of finding himself in a majority.
He was wholly without ambition. He did not know the meaning of
class-consciousness; he would have stood confidently before kings, and
was quite incapable of deferring to anybody except the very old and the
very poor. He was not, I suppose, the conventional saint, for he was not
overmuch interested in his own soul. But he was something of the
apostle, and if it be virtue to diffuse a healing grace and to lighten
the load of all who cross your path, then he was the best man I have
ever known.


II

My father was a true son of Mary; my mother own daughter to Martha. Had
she had his character the household must have crashed, and if he had
been like her, childhood would have been a less wonderful thing for all
of us.

Not many sons and mothers can have understood each other better than she
and I; indeed, in my adolescence we sometimes arrived at that point of
complete comprehension known as a misunderstanding. We had no quarrels,
for to each of us that would have been like quarrelling with oneself,
but we had many arguments. Instinctively we seemed to grasp the
undisclosed and hardly realised things which were at the back of the
other's mind. As I grew older what had been a little frightening became
an immense comfort, for we were aware that in seeking sympathy there was
no need for elaborate explanations. We knew each other too well.

My mother was married at seventeen, and had at once to take charge of a
kirk and a manse, to which was soon added a family. A Scots minister
must be something of a diplomat if he is to keep his congregation in
good temper; my father had about as much diplomacy as a rhinoceros, for
he was utterly regardless of popular opinion, so my mother had to be
ceaselessly observant, and an habitual smoother of ruffled feathers. The
family income was small, and my father had no sense of homely realities.
We children used to say that he might have been a great general, for it
would have been impossible for an opponent to guess what he was going to
do next. So the management of the household fell wholly on my mother.
Both tasks she willingly undertook and--against great odds--succeeded
in. She brought up her family in comfort, and saw to it that they lacked
no reasonable opportunities. Successive congregations were handled so
adroitly that my father's defects in tact were covered, and the charm of
his personality given full play.

Having found her task in life my mother became a rigid specialist. Her
world was the Church, or rather a little section of the Church. Her
ambitions were narrowly ecclesiastical. A popular preacher, a famous
theologian seemed to her the height of human greatness--a view which was
not shared by her family. My father's lack of such ambitions was to her,
I think, a sorrow. Yet in theology she had no real interest, and her
religion depended little upon dogma and much on her generous human
instincts. The Church to her was like a secular profession, a field for
administrative talent, not a mystic brotherhood. She had a passion for
church services, which were to her a form of ritual; so many in the week
were a proper recognition of the claims of religion. So was the reading
of the requisite number of chapters from the Bible and other devotional
literature. My father rarely spoke of religious matters outside the
pulpit; from my mother's conversation they were never absent; such
references were in her eyes a testimony, a proper acknowledgment of
man's frailty and dependence. She would have been very happy in the
Church of Rome, with its clear schedule of duties, or in any faith where
merit could be acquired by an infinity of small devotional acts. Her
clear practical intelligence was at ease only among things concrete and
defined. She was as little of a mystic as a Scotswoman can be.

She was a possessive mother and fiercely maternal. The bodily and
spiritual well-being of her flock was never out of her mind. She nursed
its members devotedly through their illnesses, and my carriage accident,
which involved nearly a year in bed, must have taken severe toll of her
strength. She lived in a perpetual expectation of disaster, not to
herself but to her children, and wore out her strength with needless
anxieties; but when disaster did come she faced it with coolness and
courage. She must have had a remarkable talent for administration to
make a tiny income go so far, and to steer my father among the pitfalls
of his profession. Her success was largely due, as I have said, to a
rigid specialisation on two things, family and Church. In a bookish
household she alone was totally uninterested in literature. Public
affairs only affected her if they affected her kirk.

But her passionate possessiveness was never allowed to become a vice.
She had no desire to mollycoddle us. As children we were given much
liberty of action, though it cost her anxious hours, and as we grew
older and had to shape our careers she never tried to interfere with our
decisions. She longed to keep us near her, but she did not complain when
we scattered like woodcock over the globe. Her view seems to have been
that, while humanity was a frail thing, at the mercy of the Devil and
wholly dependent upon God, the particular specimens that belonged to her
were as much to be trusted as any other, and a lack of trust would have
meant a lack of faith in the Almighty.

About the middle of her life she fell into bad health, and pernicious
anaemia brought her to death's door. For four years she was a very sick
woman until she was cured by the genius of Sir Almroth Wright. This time
of ill-health was also a time of sorrow. In 1911 my father died, my
brother William in 1912, and five years later her youngest son,
Alastair, fell in the Great War. For a little it looked as if she would
sink under the double burden of bereavement and sickness.

But a miracle happened. She rose above her sorrows and her frailty, and
the last twenty years of her life were not only, I think, the happiest,
but the most active. She died in her eighty-first year, having been
about her usual avocations almost up to the last day. She had become
very small and slight, but her bodily energy put youth to shame, and it
was matched by a like activity of mind. While church affairs were still
her chief preoccupation, she developed a new interest in secular
politics. Her preferences in human nature had once been circumscribed,
except where there was a call for charity, but now they covered all
sorts of conditions. She made intimate friends of devout Catholics, and
of people with no religion at all. The old house at Peebles, above the
bridge of Tweed, where she lived with my sister and brother, became a
port of call for the whole shire, indeed for the whole Lowlands. Young
people came to her for counsel and their elders for sympathy, and none
went empty away.

Only then I began to realise how remarkable were my mother's powers of
mind as well as of heart. She had a really penetrating intelligence. In
the ordinary business of life she was apt to deal in moral and
religious platitudes and in the prudential maxims, which the Scots call
"owercomes" and which flourished especially in her family. But when
things became serious all this went by the board, and she judged a
situation with a mathematical clarity. She had a mild subtlety of her
own which gave her a wide prospect over human nature, and she could
assess character with an acumen none the less infallible because charity
was never absent. My one complaint was that in practice she was too
charitable. No tramp was ever turned away from her door, and her
tenderness towards bores was the despair of her family.

In these last years, as I have said, her interests broadened. Literature
was no longer despised, nor politics, and she condescended to read some
of my own speeches and romances. She longed to travel, and when well
over seventy she was always imploring me to take her by air to
Palestine. In her eightieth year she visited me in Canada and covered a
large part of the Canadian East. The truth is that the world which had
once been a bug-bear, was now regarded more kindly. She discovered a
surprising number of unexpected "temples of the Holy Ghost." Her great
moments, I think, were my tenures of the office of Lord High
Commissioner in Edinburgh, where she found the Church and the World in
the friendliest accord.

To the end she remained a countrywoman--a Border countrywoman. She had
the country dislike of overstatement and the country love of pricking
bubbles. She feared praise as the Greeks feared Nemesis. Lord Baldwin
once said kind things to her about a speech of mine, to which she
replied that at any rate it was short! She had the robust humour of the
Border glens, robust and yet subtle. Like most country folk she scarcely
knew the name of a bird or a plant, but she was entirely at home with
nature and talked to dogs, cattle and horses as if they were blood
relations. She had the lovable country habit of going nowhere without
carrying gifts, generally some simple kind of country produce. If her
beloved little ghost should ever visit its familiar places I think that
it will have a basket on its arm--fresh eggs, perhaps, or new churned
butter, or a picking of gooseberries.


III

Two of my brothers died in their early youth.

Alastair, the youngest, fell at the head of his company of Royal Scots
Fusiliers on the first morning of the battle of Arras. He was one of
those people who seemed to have been born especially for the Great War.
Cheerful, dreamy, absent-minded, he went creditably through the stages
of school and college, and decided on chartered accountancy as his
profession. But he never seemed to take any of these things quite
seriously, as if he were waiting for another kind of summons.

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 the 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 Water 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
extraordinarily 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.

[Illustration: LIEUTENANT ALASTAIR BUCHAN (ROYAL SCOTS FUSILIERS)
  (_From a painting by Sir William Orpen_)]

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 1903 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
wind-swept 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 arid places of the
East the memory of a cool 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 of 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 become 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 came
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 watch-tower. 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 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 coloured 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 most 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.

As I have said, I have a liking for almost every kind of American
(except the kind who decry their country). I have even a sneaking
fondness for Georgie Babbitt, which I fancy is shared by his creator.
But there are two types which I value especially, and which I have never
met elsewhere in quite the same form. One is the pioneer. No doubt the
physical frontier of the United States is now closed, but the pioneer
still lives, though the day of the covered wagon is over. I have met him
in the New England hills, where he is grave, sardonic, deliberate in
speech; in the South, where he has a ready smile and a soft caressing
way of talking; in the ranges of the West, the cow-puncher with his
gentle voice and his clear, friendly eyes which have not been dulled by
reading print--the real thing, far removed from the vulgarities of film
and fiction. At his best, I think, I have found him as a newcomer in
Canada, where he is pushing north into districts like the Peace River,
pioneering in the old sense. By what signs is he to be known?
Principally by the fact that he is wholly secure, that he possesses his
soul, that he is the true philosopher. He is one of the few aristocrats
left in the world. He has a right sense of the values of life, because
his cosmos embraces both nature and man. I think he is the most
steadfast human being now alive.

The other type is at the opposite end of the social scale, the creature
of a complex society who at the same time is not dominated by it, but,
while reaping its benefits, stands a little aloof. In the older
countries culture, as a rule, leaves some irregularity like an
excrescence in a shapely tree-trunk, some irrational bias, some
petulance or prejudice. You have to go to America, I think, for the
wholly civilised man who has not lost his natural vigour or agreeable
idiosyncrasies, but who sees life in its true proportions and he has a
fine balance of mind and spirit. It is a character hard to define, but
anyone with a wide American acquaintance will know what I mean. They are
people in whom education has not stunted any natural growth or fostered
any abnormality. They are Greek in their justness of outlook, but
Northern in their gusto. Their eyes are shrewd and candid, but always
friendly. As examples I would cite, among friends who are dead, the
names of Robert Bacon, Walter Page, Newton Baker and Dwight Morrow.

But I am less concerned with special types than with the American people
as a whole. Let me try to set down certain qualities, which seem to me
to flourish more lustily in the United States than elsewhere. Again, let
me repeat, I speak of America only as I know it; an observer with a
different experience might not agree with my conclusions.

First I would select what, for want of a better word, I should call
homeliness. It is significant that the ordinary dwelling, though it be
only a shack in the woods, is called not a house, but a home. This means
that the family, the ultimate social unit, is given its proper status as
the foundation of society. Even among the richer classes I seem to find
a certain pleasing domesticity. English people of the same rank are
separated by layers of servants from the basic work of the household,
and know very little about it. In America the kitchen is not too far
away from the drawing-room, and it is recognised, as Heraclitus said,
that the gods may dwell there. But I am thinking chiefly of the ordinary
folk, especially those of narrow means. It is often said that Americans
are a nomad race, and it is true that they are very ready to shift their
camp; but the camp, however bare, is always a home.[13] The cohesion of
the family is close, even when its members are scattered. This is due
partly to the tradition of the first settlers, a handful in an unknown
land; partly to the history of the frontier, where the hearth-fire burnt
brighter when all around was cold and darkness. The later immigrants
from Europe, feeling at last secure, were able for the first time to
establish a family base, and they cherished it zealously. This ardent
domesticity has had its bad effects on American literature, inducing a
sentimentality which makes a too crude frontal attack on the emotions,
and which has produced as a reaction a not less sentimental "toughness."
But as a social cement it is beyond price. There have been many to laugh
at the dullness and pettiness of the "small town." From what I know of
small-town life elsewhere, I suspect obtuseness in the satirists.

    [Footnote 13: In the Civil War homesickness was so serious a malady
    that the "printed forms for medical reports contained an entry for
    nostalgia precisely as for pneumonia." Douglas Freeman, _The South
    to Posterity_, 4.]

[Illustration: J. B., 1937, EAGLE FACE, AS A CHIEF OF THE BLOOD INDIANS
  (_Photo: Karsh, Ottawa_)]

Second, I would choose the sincere and widespread friendliness of the
people. Americans are interested in the human race, and in each other.
Deriving doubtless from the old frontier days, there is a general
helpfulness, which I have not found in the same degree elsewhere. A
homesteader in Dakota will accompany a traveller for miles to set him on
the right road. The neighbours will rally round one of their number in
distress with the loyalty of a Highland clan. This friendliness is not a
self-conscious duty so much as an instinct. A squatter in a cabin will
share his scanty provender and never dream that he is doing anything
unusual.

American hospitality, long as I have enjoyed it, still leaves me
breathless. The lavishness with which a busy man will give up precious
time to entertain a stranger to whom he is in no way bound, remains for
me one of the wonders of the world. No doubt this friendliness, since it
is an established custom, has its fake side. The endless brotherhoods
and sodalities into which people brigade themselves encourage a
geniality which is more a mannerism than an index of character, a
tiresome, noisy, back-slapping heartiness. But that is the exception,
not the rule. Americans like company, but though they are gregarious
they do not lose themselves in the crowd. Waves of mass-emotion may
sweep the country, but they are transient things and do not submerge for
long the stubborn rock of individualism. That is to say, people can be
led but they will not be driven. Their love of human companionship is
based not on self-distrust, but on a genuine liking for their kind. With
them the sense of a common humanity is a warm and constant instinct and
not a doctrine of the schools or a slogan of the hustings.

Lastly--and this may seem a paradox--I maintain that they are
fundamentally modest. Their interest in others is a proof of it; the
Aristotelian Magnificent Man was interested in nobody but himself. As a
nation they are said to be sensitive to criticism; that surely is
modesty, for the truly arrogant care nothing for the opinion of other
people. Above all they can laugh at themselves, which is not possible
for the immodest. They are their own shrewdest and most ribald critics.
It is charged against them that they are inclined to boast unduly about
those achievements and about the greatness of their country, but a smug
glorying in them is found only in the American of the caricaturist. They
rejoice in showing their marvels to a visitor with the gusto of children
exhibiting their toys to a stranger, an innocent desire, without any
unfriendly gloating, to make others partakers in their satisfaction. If
now and then they are guilty of bombast it is surely a venial fault. The
excited American talks of his land very much, I suspect, as the
Elizabethans in their cups talked of England. The foreigner who strayed
into the Mermaid tavern must often have listened to heroics which upset
his temper.

The native genius, in humour, and in many of the public and private
relations of life, is for overstatement, a high-coloured, imaginative,
paradoxical extravagance. The British gift is for understatement. Both
are legitimate figures of speech. They serve the same purpose, for they
call attention to a fact by startling the hearer, since manifestly they
are not the plain truth. Personally I delight in both mannerisms and
would not for the world have their possessors reject them. They serve
the same purpose in another and a subtler sense, for they can be used to
bring novel and terrible things within the pale of homely experience. I
remember on the Western Front in 1918 that two divisions, British and
American, aligned side by side, suffered a heavy shelling. An American
sergeant described it in racy and imaginative speech which would have
been appropriate to the Day of Judgment. A British sergeant merely
observed that "Kaiser 'ad been a bit 'asty." Each had a twinkle in his
eye; each in his national idiom was making frightfulness endurable by
domesticating it.


IV

The United States is the richest, and, both actually and potentially,
the most powerful State on the globe. She has much, I believe, to give
to the world; indeed, to her hands is chiefly entrusted the shaping of
the future. If democracy in the broadest and truest sense is to survive,
it will be mainly because of her guardianship. For, with all her
imperfections, she has a clearer view than any other people of the
democratic fundamentals.

She starts from the right basis, for she combines a firm grip on the
past with a quick sense of present needs and a bold outlook on the
future. This she owes to her history; the combination of the British
tradition with the necessities of a new land; the New England township
and the Virginian manor _plus_ the Frontier. Much of that tradition was
relinquished as irrelevant to her needs, but much remains: a talent for
law which is not incompatible with a lawless practice; respect for a
certain type of excellence in character which has made her great men
uncommonly like our own; a disposition to compromise, but only after a
good deal of arguing; an intense dislike of dictation. To these
instincts the long frontier struggles added courage in the face of
novelties, adaptability, enterprise, a doggedness which was never
lumpish, but alert and expectant.

That is the historic basis of America's democracy, and to-day she is the
chief exponent of a creed which I believe on the whole to be the best in
this imperfect world. She is the chief exponent for two reasons. The
first is her size; she exhibits its technique in large type, so that he
who runs may read. More important, she exhibits it in its most
intelligible form, so that its constituents are obvious. Democracy has
become with many an unpleasing parrot-cry, and, as I have urged
elsewhere in this book, it is well to be clear what it means. It is
primarily a spiritual testament, from which certain political and
economic orders naturally follow. But the essence is the testament; the
orders may change while the testament stands. This testament, this ideal
of citizenship, she owes to no one teacher. There was a time when I
fervently admired Alexander Hamilton and could not away with Jefferson;
the latter only began to interest me, I think, after I had seen the
University of Virginia which he created. But I deprecate partisanship in
those ultimate matters. The democratic testament derives from Hamilton
as well as from Jefferson.

It has two main characteristics. The first is that the ordinary man
believes in himself and in his ability, along with his fellows, to
govern his country. It is when a people loses its self-confidence that
it surrenders its soul to a dictator or an oligarchy. In Mr. Walter
Lippmann's tremendous metaphor, it welcomes manacles to prevent its
hands shaking. The second is the belief, which is fundamental also in
Christianity, of the worth of every human soul--the worth, not the
equality. This is partly an honest emotion, and partly a reasoned
principle--that something may be made out of anybody, and that there is
something likeable about everybody if you look for it--or, in
canonical words, that ultimately there is nothing common or unclean.

[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL
  OF CANADA, QUEBEC, 1936
  (_Photo: Karsh, Ottawa_)]

The democratic testament is one lesson that America has to teach the
world. A second is a new reading of nationalism. Some day and somehow
the people must discover a way to brigade themselves for peace. Now
there are on the globe only two proven large-scale organisations of
social units, the United States and the British Empire. The latter is
not for export, and could not be duplicated; its strength depends upon a
thousand-year-old monarchy and a store of unformulated traditions. But
the United States was the conscious work of men's hands, and a task
which has once been performed can be performed again. She is the supreme
example of a federation in being, a federation which recognises the
rights and individuality of the parts, but accepts the overriding
interests of the whole. To achieve this compromise she fought a
desperate war. If the world is ever to have prosperity and peace, there
must be some kind of federation--I will not say of democracies, but of
States which accept the reign of Law. In such a task she seems to me to
be the predestined leader. Vigorous as her patriotism is, she has
escaped the jealous, barricadoed nationalism of the Old World. Disraeli,
so often a prophet in spite of himself, in 1863, at a critical moment of
the Civil War, spoke memorable words:

     "There is a grave misapprehension both in the ranks of Her
     Majesty's Government and of Her Majesty's Opposition, as to what
     constitutes the true meaning of the American democracy. The
     American democracy is not made up of the scum of the great
     industrial cities of the United States, nor of an exhausted middle
     class that speculates in stocks and calls that progress. The
     American democracy is made up of something far more stable, that
     may ultimately decide the fate of the two Americas and of Europe."

For forty years I have regarded America not only with a student's
interest in a fascinating problem, but with the affection of one to whom
she has become almost a second motherland. Among her citizens I count
many of my closest friends; I have known all her presidents, save one,
since Theodore Roosevelt, and all her ambassadors to the Court of St.
James's since John Hay; for four and a half years I have been her
neighbour in Canada. But I am not blind to the grave problems which
confront her. Democracy, after all, is a negative thing. It provides a
fair field for the Good Life, but it is not in itself the Good Life. In
these days when lovers of freedom may have to fight for their cause, the
hope is that the ideal of the Good Life, in which alone freedom has any
meaning, will acquire a stronger potency. It is the task of civilisation
to raise every citizen above want, but in so doing to permit a free
development and avoid the slavery of the beehive and the ant-heap. A
humane economic policy must not be allowed to diminish the stature of
man's spirit. It is because I believe that in the American people the
two impulses are of equal strength that I see in her the vanguard of
that slow upward trend, undulant or spiral, which to-day is our modest
definition of progress. Her major prophet is still Whitman. "Everything
comes out of the dirt--everything; everything comes out of the people,
everyday people, the people as you find them and leave them; people,
people, just people!"

It is only out of the dirt that things grow.




CHAPTER XII

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL


I

Sir Walter Scott had a pleasant phrase for middle life; he called it
reaching the other side of the hill. It is a stage which no doubt has
its drawbacks. The wind is not so good, the limbs are not so tireless as
in the ascent; the stride is shortened, and since we are descending we
must be careful in placing the feet. But on the upward road the view was
blocked by the slopes and there was no far prospect to be had except by
looking backwards. Now the course is mercifully adapted to failing legs,
we can rest and reflect since the summit has been passed, and there is a
wide country before us, though the horizon is mist and shadow.

These chapters have been written several thousand miles from England, in
a country of new problems and hopes, where the mind has, none the less,
been clouded by the secular anxieties of Europe. Half-detached and
half-embroiled, Canada's position seems to me much like my own. I have
in my lifetime passed from an era of peace through various unsettled
stages into a world which, in Sir Thomas More's phrase, is "ruffled and
fallen into a wilderness," but I retain enough of the disengagement of
the earlier world to refuse to surrender my right to cheerfulness. I was
brought up in times when one was not ashamed to be happy, and I have
never learned the art of discontent. I preserve my devotion to things
"afar from the sphere of our sorrow." It seems to me that those who
loudly proclaim their disenchantment with life have never been really
enchanted by it. Their complaints about the low levels they dwell in
ring hollow, for they have not known the uplands.

The memories of a happy past are in themselves a solid possession:

  "Is it so small a thing
   To have enjoy'd the sun,
   To have lived light in the spring?"

The possession is the more valuable if such memories are readily evoked,
so that past and present dwell in friendly proximity. This gift has
always been mine. I cannot recover the vigour of youth for my limbs, but
through memory I can recapture something of its ardour for my mind. The
smell of wood-smoke and heather, for instance, or a whiff of salt will
recall shining morning-lands of the spirit.

But this world of recollection demands gentle handling. It is brittle,
like all spiritual things. If too coarsely approached the bloom will be
rubbed off it like the down on a butterfly's wing. It will endure only
in clear and bracing weather. If used as an opiate for the mind it
becomes a vulgar drug of commerce. Moreover, "we receive but what we
give." It demands a certain tolerant, charitable, enjoying habit of
thought, quick to observe and to distil the soul of goodness. The rhetor
Dio of Prusa said of Homer that he "praised almost everything--animals
and plants, water and earth, weapons and horses. He passed over nothing
without somehow honouring and glorifying it. Even the one man whom he
abused, Thersites, he called 'a clear-voiced speaker.'"

I have small patience with the antiquarian habit which magnifies the
past and belittles the present. It is a vicious business to look
backward unless the feet are set steadfastly on a forward road. Change
is inevitable, at once a penalty and a privilege. The greatest of the
Ionian philosophers wrote: "It is necessary that things should pass away
into that from which they are born. For things must pay one another the
penalty of compensation for their injustice according to the ordinances
of time." An open and flexible mind, which recognises the need of
transformation and faithfully sets itself to apprehend new conditions,
is a prerequisite of man's usefulness. But those who take my point of
view will try to bring all change into harmony with the fundamentals
drawn from the past. If the past to a man is nothing but a dead hand,
then in common honesty he must be an advocate of revolution. But if it
is regarded as the matrix of present and future, whose potency takes
many forms but is not diminished, then he will cherish it scrupulously
and labour to read its lessons, and shun the heady short-cuts which end
only in blank walls. He will realise that in the cycle to which we
belong we can see only a fraction of the curve, and that properly to
appraise the curve and therefore to look ahead, we may have to look back
a few centuries to its beginning.

Regard for the past has been therefore both an article of my creed and a
principal source of my pleasure in life. But I realise that, while the
philosophical doctrine is inexpugnable, connoisseurship in memories is a
more debatable business. They are brittle, as I have said, and clumsy
hands can destroy them. They may conduct to a maudlin sentimentality.
They are also not without disruptive power, for storms can be brewed by
delicious things like salt air and sunshine. If I have escaped these
perils (as I trust I have) it is because my life has been so much more
one of action than of contemplation. If I philosophized it had to be
done like the Athenians of Pericles [Greek: aneu
magakis]. I am very conscious of the pathos of lost things. It is only
human to regret the passing of even the shadow of what once was great;
we shall always hear the voice along the Aegean capes announcing the
death of Pan, and the one eye-ancient, who was Odin, telling King Olaf
Tryggvason tales of a vanished world. But I suppose I have a prosaic
fibre in me, and though I sigh I do not sigh too deeply or too long.
Devotion to the past should be like a salad with vinegar; it should have
just enough melancholy in it to keep it from cloying.

My lifetime has included more drastic changes in manners and customs and
modes of thought than can be shown, I think, by any similar period in
history. The mechanical apparatus of living has been transformed. At
twenty I thought it an adventure to take a bicycle over certain Highland
hill-roads; at sixty I was flying across the pack-ice in the Arctic!
Creeds in politics, in economics, in many branches of science have gone
into the melting-pot, and it is not yet clear what is to succeed them.
The old classes have been levelled down, and new class distinctions have
appeared in many lands based on something much crueller and coarser than
the former inequalities.

It is an ugly and comfortless world, but it is a world not without
hope--a better world in spite of its confusion than the one in
despondent moods I have foreseen. The things which we value may be
overlaid and obscured, but I do not think they will be destroyed at the
root. My worst nightmare has removed itself. Let me set down the points
of that fearsome wild-fowl.


II

All of us in the last War had moments when we felt the stable universe
dissolving about us. We were like pilgrims who, journeying on a road to
an assured and desirable goal, suddenly found themselves on the edge of
a precipice with nothing beyond but a great void. The common way of
describing such moods was to say that our civilisation had become
insecure and was in danger of perishing.

What did we mean by civilisation? The little comforts which made life
easy and pleasant and gave us leisure; an ordered ritual which enabled
us to plan for the future? But our dread was based upon something deeper
than the loss of such amenities. By civilisation we meant especially the
rule of law which gave us freedom to possess our souls. We defined
civilisation as something more than the cushioned life made possible by
science. It was not a mechanical apparatus but a spirit. The Greeks of
the fifth century before Christ had an existence so simple that to our
modern appetites it seems almost brutish. They lived chiefly on fruits
and vegetables, their clothes were plain, their amusements were few,
their transport was rudimentary, but no one can deny their high
civilisation. So most of us came to define civilisation as the free
development of the personality. That involved physical conditions of
life lifted above the primitive man's struggle for bread. It involved an
ordered society and the rule of law. But, since these things are
negative only, it involved also a soul to develop, a mind which could
rejoice in the things of the mind, an impulse towards spiritual
perfection.

Clearly such an inner life would not be possible if our whole complex
material apparatus were wrecked and we returned to primitive conditions.
It demanded an existence raised above the level of urgent bodily wants.
What mind prehistoric man possessed must have been wholly engrossed in
getting food for himself and his family, in sheltering from the weather,
and in saving his skin from the clutches of a sabre-toothed tiger or the
malevolence of a neighbour with a club. We can all remember expeditions
in the wilds when we were reduced to the extremes of bodily fatigue and
could think of nothing except food and rest. For most of us the urgency
of physical needs puts an effective damper on any mental activity.
Primeval man cannot have had much of an intellectual life. Beyond doubt
a return to barbarism, to primitive physical conditions, would play
havoc with civilisation.

I was never really afraid that this would happen. The modern
appurtenances of life seemed to be too firmly established, and the face
of the world had been too fully remodelled to meet human needs. I found
it impossible to conceive that those inventions on which our community
rests could suddenly vanish and reduce us to the days of flint and steel
and wooden spades and mud cabins. But imaginative novelists bemused
themselves with this conception, and pictured a war which laid the whole
world waste and left the few survivors in the condition of the cave man.
They called it a return to the Dark Ages, by which they meant that epoch
in our history which lasted from the fifth century, when the Roman
Empire was crumbling, to the eleventh, when the Middle Ages began to
develop their own culture.

What were those Dark Ages, those six centuries during which a curtain
seemed to descend upon Europe? The invasion of the wild Germanic and
Slavonic peoples destroyed the civic life of the western world, the writ
of Rome ceased to run, and her central authority crumbled. She had
devised a host of inventions which made life comfortable and intercourse
between nations easy; clothes and fine furniture and pictures and books
and statuary; a noble architecture, and a plumbing system unsurpassed
until modern America; methods of transport unmatched until a century or
so ago; a legal fabric which is still largely our code; a civil service
which at its best was probably as efficient as anything the world has
known. All this went, and in most parts of Europe the forests
over-powered the vineyards and corn-lands, the famous cities lost half
their people, and the public buildings fell into ruins. Instead of the
imperial law and the imperial bureaucracy new governments were formed by
shaggy warriors, who either held to their own customs or gave the Roman
code a tribal twist. There was little security for life and property,
since the Pax Romana was no more. A man's hand had once again to keep
his head. The world shrank into little pockets of humanity which knew
nothing about their neighbours. Food and drink and housing were reduced
to their beggarly elements, and clothes to a barbaric bareness or a
barbaric gaudiness. Civilisation, remember, is a complex thing, or
rather a thing which attains simplicity through complexity. The life of
the Dark Ages was rudimentary, and being rudimentary, ended in being
unbelievably complex.

A curtain of darkness seemed to have settled upon a world which had once
been so shining and varied. But there were many points of light in that
darkness. There was first of all the Christian Church which, behind all
its political caprices and theological pedantries, did preserve a
continuous tradition of civilisation and the spiritual life. Throughout
those centuries it produced saints and missionaries whose names we still
honour. It produced poets whose hymns we still sing, and in many a
monastery tucked away in the forests there were scholars who studied
more than the Church Fathers. Much of the literature of Greece and Rome
survived in obscure places. Aristotle, or a part of him, was not
forgotten, and men could get Plato through St. Augustine. Moreover some
subtle impact of the old classical tradition was inciting the new
masters of the world to a kind of intellectual activity. The invaders
who had wrecked the Roman Empire were beginning to devise a law, a
poetry, a political philosophy of their own.

Therefore I think that the right way to look at the Dark Ages is as a
time of darkness indeed, but with lights cherished in many places which
in the end were to combine into a new dawn. The great Mediterranean
tradition was obscured but not destroyed; or, to change the metaphor,
the world was a field lying fallow, the soil was rich, the seed had been
preserved, and one day there was to be a wide sowing and a bountiful
harvest.

So I did not dread a return of the Dark Ages. For one thing I did not
believe that that particular kind of retrogression was possible; for
another I did not think that it would be such a terrible thing after
all. My nightmare, when I was afflicted by nightmares, was of something
very different. My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation
submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation
gone rotten.

       *       *       *       *       *

A certain type of flimsy romantic has been too ready with abuse of a
mechanical age, just as a certain type of imaginative writer with a
smattering of science has been too gross in his adulation. The machine,
when mastered and directed by the human spirit, may lead to a noble
enlargement of life. Enterprises which make roads across pathless
mountains, collect the waters over a hundred thousand miles to set the
desert blossoming, build harbours on countless harbourless coasts, tame
the elements to man's uses--these are the equivalent to-day of the great
explorations and adventures of the past. So, too, the patient work of
research laboratories, where to the student a new and startling truth
may leap at any moment from the void. Those who achieve such things are
as much imaginative creators as any poet, as much conquerors as any
king. If a man so dominates a machine that it becomes part of him he may
thereby pass out of a narrow world to an ampler ether. The true airman
is one of the freest of God's creatures, for he has used a machine to
carry him beyond the pale of the Machine. He is a creator and not a
mechanic, a master and not a slave.

But suppose that science has gained all its major victories, and that
there remain only little polishings and adjustments. It has wrested from
nature a full provision for human life, so that there is no longer need
for long spells of monotonous toil and a bitter struggle for bread.
Victory having been won, the impulse to construct has gone. The world
has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Would that be the
perfecting of civilisation? Would it not rather mean de-civilisation, a
loss of the supreme values of life?

In my nightmare I could picture such a world. I assumed--no doubt an
impossible assumption--that mankind was as amply provided for as the
inmates of a well-managed orphanage. New inventions and a perfecting of
transport had caused the whole earth to huddle together. There was no
corner of the globe left unexplored and unexploited, no geographical
mysteries to fire the imagination. Broad highways crowded with
automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners
carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere
there were guest-houses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and
filling-stations. What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and
Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought
from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of
pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own
climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be
restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind
of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody
would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be
comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual
exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds
would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be
largely a quest for amusement. The raffish existence led to-day by
certain groups would have become the normal existence of large sections
of society.

Some kind of intellectual life no doubt would remain, though the old
political disputes would have cancelled each other out, and the world
would not have the stimulus of a contest of political ideals, which is,
after all, a spiritual thing. Scientists and philosophers would still
spin theories about the universe. Art would be in the hands of coteries,
and literature dominated by _petites chapelles_. There would be
religion, too, of a kind, in glossy upholstered churches with elaborate
music. It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet
malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at
the heart. The soil of human nature, which in the Dark Ages lay fallow,
would now be worked out. Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know
everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there
would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz
existence what hope would there be for the still small voices of the
prophets and the philosophers and poets? A world which claimed to be a
triumph of the human personality, would in truth have killed that
personality. In such a bagman's paradise, where life would be
rationalised and added with every material comfort, there would be
little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new
Vanity Fair with Mr. Talkative as the chief figure on the town council.
The essence of civilisation lies in man's defiance of an impersonal
universe. It makes no difference that a mechanised universe may be his
own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the
first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its
own ends become its master.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is a nightmare which may well terrify us, and sometimes I have
thought that it was not altogether a nightmare, for it was the logical
culmination of certain tendencies which were strong amongst us. It was
not the return of the Dark Ages that I feared, but the coming of a too
garish age, when life would be lived in the glare of neon lamps and the
spirit would have no solitude.

But something has happened. A civilisation bemused by an opulent
materialism has been met by a rude challenge. The free peoples have been
challenged by the serfs. The gutters have exuded a poison which bids
fair to infect the world. The beggar-on-horseback rides more rough-shod
over the helpless than the cavalier. A combination of multitudes who
have lost their nerve and a junta of arrogant demagogues has shattered
the comity of nations. The European tradition has been confronted with
an Asiatic revolt, with its historic accompaniment of janissaries and
assassins. There is in it all, too, an ugly pathological savour, as if a
mature society were being assailed by diseased and vicious children.

For centuries we have enjoyed certain blessings; a stable law, before
which the poor man and the rich man were equal; freedom within that law
to believe what we pleased, to write what we pleased, to say what we
pleased; a system of government which gave the ultimate power to the
ordinary man. We have lived by toleration, rational compromise and
freely expressed opinion, and we have lived very well. But we had come
to take these blessings for granted, like the air we breathed. They had
lost all glamour for us since they had become too familiar. Indeed, it
was a mark of the intellectual to be rather critical and contemptuous of
them. Paradoxical young men acquired a cheap reputation by sneering at
the liberal spirit in politics, and questioning the value of free
discussion, toleration and compromise.

To-day we have seen those principles challenged in the fundamentals, not
by a few arm-chair theorists, but by great Powers supported by great
armies. We have suddenly discovered that what we took for the enduring
presuppositions of our life are in danger of being destroyed. To-day we
value freedom, I think, as we have not valued it before. Just as a man
never appreciates his home so much as when he is compelled to leave it,
so now we realise our inestimable blessings when they are threatened. We
have been shaken out of our smugness and warned of a great peril, and in
that warning lies our salvation. The dictators have done us a marvellous
service in reminding us of the true values of life.


III

These chapters are meant as a record of how the surface of life has
appeared to one pilgrim at different stages. They do not contain a
confession of faith, in religion, philosophy, or the business of
government. I admit an undercurrent of optimism, which, it has been
said, is in good times a luxury but in bad times a necessity. With me
such cheerfulness, as I prefer to call it, is not a creed to adopt or
reject, but a habit of mind, a temperamental bias, a pre-condition of
perception and thought. And it in turn derives from the kind of youth I
had. For youth to continue, so that it illumines middle life and old age
and pleasantly binds the years together, it must have been spacious,
with wide horizons and a tonic air; happy, too, in spite of all the
heart-breaks of adolescence. For what it can give to the later phases of
life are zest and freedom, and such gifts are impossible if it was
itself bound and frustrate.

In my lifetime I seem to note a change which is a graver thing than our
other discontents, which, indeed, is in a large measure the cause of
them. The outlook of youth has been narrowed, doors have been sealed,
channels have silted up, there is less choice of routes at the
cross-roads.

This affects principally the middle class. Let me define that odious
word. At one end of the social scale is the plutocracy, whose sons will
be sufficiently well dowered to indulge their fancy. If they enter a
profession they have the security of means behind them. At the other end
are the wage-earning classes, who in their health and wealth are largely
the care of the State. Between come the "middling folk" in many
gradations; their characteristics are that they have to earn their
living, since they have no accumulated fortunes, that the State has
little responsibility for them, that they have a reasonable average of
culture and certain strong traditions in customs, manners and conduct.
The class contains most of the knowledge and skill in the nation. Also,
since our nominal aristocracy has been so copiously diluted, it contains
most of the older stocks, the people with the longest proven descent.

For this great class the world has become more rigid than I remember it.
A young man seems to me to have fewer avenues open to him, and fewer
chances in these avenues. I leave out of account the pre-eminence of
mind or character which we call genius, for that will always hew out a
course. I am speaking of youth of reasonable capacity and moderate
ambitions, which seeks a calling with hope and daylight in it, which is
capable of a great effort of patience but must have a glimpse of some
attainable goal.

Wherever I look I seem to detect a deepening and narrowing of ruts.
Technological progress, to be sure, has increased their number, but too
few emerge into open country. The older universities have now returned
to the mediaeval practice, and by way of new scholarships are far more
accessible to those of scanty means. But what lies at the end of a
university course? A high standard of attainment will no doubt take one
into the upper walks of the teaching profession, and a moderate standard
perhaps into the civil service, but besides that--what? Too often the
only choice is some minor scholastic or clerical job in which a man is
apt to stick fast for the rest of his days. Business is now accepted as
a calling for those who have received a liberal education. But does
business to-day give an active man without capital the chances it
offered a couple of generations ago? Has it not become so desperately
specialised that an ambitious entrant may all his life be condemned to
be a minor cog in a huge machine? At the bottom of the class the
position is worse. The clerk who begins on a pittance may have nothing
to look forward to except small yearly increases till he reaches in
middle age an income which will just support a household. He has, too, a
haunting sense of economic insecurity, for the State takes no interest
in his troubles.

The difficulty is not that the path from the log cabin to the White
House is not made easy; that will always need vigorous axework and a
stout heart. It is that society has become so rigid that average youth
is deprived of those modest hopes which are its peculiar grace and the
source of its value. And this narrowing of opportunity has come about
when its mental outlook has been infinitely broadened. A dozen new means
of enlightenment have opened up the world to it and vastly stimulated
its interests. The clerk of fifty years ago had no ambition beyond a
little house in the suburbs, and was content if he saw himself on the
way to its attainment; the same man to-day, educated, open-eyed,
imaginative, chafes bitterly at his confinement in a groove which may be
far narrower than that of his predecessors.

The result in the end must be revolution, the most dangerous kind, a
revolution of the middle classes. It is on their discontent that the
dictators to-day have based their power. The working classes do not come
into the picture; partly because, being nearer the margin of
subsistence, they are more likely to be content with what meets their
immediate needs and gives them present security; partly because, having
less education, they do not suffer from the unsatisfied cravings of the
educated. The dictators have won their power largely by an appeal, not
to a suffering proletariat but to the forgotten "little man" of the
middle classes whom reformers in the past have accountably neglected.
They have given him a sense of dignity and importance, and opened vistas
for him. They have brought him into the inner fold of the State when
hitherto he has been a disconsidered outsider. Black and execrable as is
most of their work, they have this to their credit; they have restored
pride and confidence to large sections of a class which had begun to
despair. There lies their strength--and also their doom, when it is
realised that the horizon they have revealed to youth is no more than a
painted back-cloth.

I have had much to do with young men on several continents and in many
countries, and I regard this shrinking of opportunity as one of the
gravest facts of our age. It will remain an urgent matter long after the
guns are silent. Somehow or other we must make our social and economic
world more fluid. We must widen the approaches so that honest ambition
and honourable discontent may have elbow-room. The world must remain an
oyster for youth to open. If not, youth will cease to be young, and that
will be the end of everything.

There is another side to the problem. With all our reservoir of skill
and knowledge there is a lamentable dearth to-day of the higher talent.
Or rather, while this talent must exist, it is uncommonly difficult to
lay one's hand on it. Anyone who has had experience in such matters
knows how hard it often is to find men for the higher posts in finance,
industry, journalism and academic and political life. Admittedly the
talent is somewhere, if we have any confidence in our fellow-men, but
how to find it? The Miltons may remain for ever mute and inglorious,
the Hampdens only village worthies. If our society were more open-meshed
and elastic it should be possible for a shining gift to reveal itself
before it is too late. Were I a multi-millionaire I would devote my
fortune to making an inquisition for the discovery of genius, so that
those fitted to be our leaders should get their feet out of the mire in
time to help the world. For in the last resort it is not the machine
that matters, but the man.


IV

The dominant thought of youth is the bigness of the world, of age its
smallness. As we grow older we escape from the tyranny of matter and
recognise that the true centre of gravity is in the mind. Also we lose
that sense of relativity, which is so useful in normal life, provided it
does not sour into cynicism, and come more and more to acclaim
things--goodness, truth, beauty. From a wise American scholar I take
this sentence: "The tragedy of man is that he has developed an
intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to
penetrate them. With minds but slightly evolved beyond those of our
animal relations, we are tortured with precocious desires, and pose
questions, which we are sometimes capable of asking but rarely are able
to answer." With the recognition of our limitations comes a glimpse of
the majesty of the "Power not ourselves." Religion is born when we
accept the ultimate frustration of mere human effort, and at the same
time realise the strength which comes from union with superhuman
reality.

To-day the quality of our religion is being put to the test. The
conflict is not only between the graces of civilisation and the rawness
of barbarism. More is being challenged than the system of ethics which
we believe to be the basis of our laws and liberties. I am of Blake's
view: "Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion
of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect a synagogue
of Satan." There have been high civilisations in the past which have not
been Christian, but in the world as we know it I believe that
civilisation must have a Christian basis, and must ultimately rest on
the Christian Church. To-day the Faith is being attacked, and the attack
is succeeding. Thirty years ago Europe was nominally a Christian
continent. It is no longer so. In Europe, as in the era before
Constantine, Christianity is in a minority. What Gladstone wrote seventy
years ago, in a moment of depression, has become a shattering truth: "I
am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the
State and the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the
world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of
purpose and over a wide field upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the
belief in God and the Gospel of Christ."

The Christian in name has in recent years been growing cold in his
devotion. Our achievement in perfecting life's material apparatus has
produced a mood of self-confidence and pride. Our peril has been
indifference, and that is a grave peril, for rust will crumble a metal
when hammer blows will only harden it. I believe--and this is my
crowning optimism--that the challenge with which we are now faced may
restore to us that manly humility which alone gives power. It may bring
us back to God. In that case our victory is assured. The Faith is an
anvil which has worn out many hammers.

We are condemned to fumble in these times, for the mist is too thick to
see far down the road. But in all our uncertainty we can have Cromwell's
hope. "To be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next to a Finder, and
such an one shall every faithful, humble Seeker be at the end." So, as a
tail-piece to this book I would transcribe a sentence of Henry Adams:
"After all, man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of
his own ignorance to fall down and pray." Dogmatism gives place to
questioning, and questioning in the end to prayer.


THE END


     This valediction ends _Memory Hold-the-Door_ as its author left it
     ready for publication. The next work he planned was to be a book
     about fishing. Only the two chapters that follow were completed and
     were found among his papers with the pencilled title: _Pilgrim's
     Rest_.




PILGRIM'S REST


VALLEYS OF SPRINGS OF RIVERS

     "Praised art Thou, my Lord, of Sister Water, for manifold is her
     use, and humble is she, and precious and pure."

     ST. FRANCIS.




CHAPTER I

THE SPRINGS


I

If fishing, as I maintain, be not only a craft but a way of life, then a
fisherman must begin young. A small boy desires some tangible reward for
his adventures. He has the British soldier's innocent passion for loot.
So in the spring he will collect eggs, and in the autumn bring back
mushrooms, and nuts and berries, and if he live in a land of streams he
will begin early to try and catch fish. When about the age of nine I
first plied a rod I was confined by my lack of skill to a narrow arena.
The sophisticated trout of Tweed and the lower reaches of the burns were
beyond me, and my hope lay in the slender runlets far up in the heather.

Those runlets were a long way off, so I only reached them in the brisk
spring weather, when even short legs could manage a half-score of miles.
Now this is the way of the upper Tweedside hills. Their tops which are
commonly in the neighbourhood of 2500 feet, are not peaks but a
tableland. The plateau may be pitted with peat haggs or be a field of
coarse bent, but always in its hollows there are stretches of mountain
gravel, the milk-white debris of quartz. In those hollows there is also
stagnant water, sometimes a true bog hole, sometimes only a moisture in
the shingle. This water, drawn from the rains and the snows, sinks into
the soil and feeds the eternal springs, ice-cold and diamond bright,
which a few hundred feet below the summit begin to well out of the
hill-sides.

The well-heads take different forms. Sometimes there is a little ravine
where patches of old snowdrifts linger until early summer, and there the
fountain is commonly a pool in the rocks. More often it is the centre of
a patch of bright green moss on the open hill, a tiny cup of water
haunted by water beetles, whence a trickle seeps downward through
sphagnum and rush, sundew and butterwort and grass of Parnassus.
Presently both types have found their destined channel and a miniature
glen is the consequence, where at first the water spouts at a steep
angle and the pools are precarious things on the lip of cascades. But
soon the ground flattens and the runlet has become a burn, less
dependent on the law of gravity, and picking its course among bent and
blaeberries and heather, the habitation of small dark trout, a fishable
water.

To reach this kind of stream as a child I had usually to cross a
watershed, and therefore the bald summits appear in all my
recollections. There grew cloudberries, which are not found below the
2000-feet line, bright red at first, but ripening to amber, the material
of the best jam in the world. There also one met the graceful little
blue hawk, the merlin. I frequented the place chiefly in April, when the
skies were often grey and the air sharp, but when a mild west wind blew
and the world leaped suddenly into spring. Down in the little glens
there was a turmoil of nesting birds--ring ouzels and water ouzels, an
infinity of meadow pipits, grouse and black game, and above all the
curlew. The spring cry of the last was the true voice of the
wilderness--_pooeeli, pooeeli--kirlew--wha-up_. It was eerie, fantastic,
untamable, but it had none of the savagery of the buzzard's mew or the
raven's croak. It was the voice of a habitable wilderness not wholly
inimical to man.

At the age of nine my only lure was the worm. I could not cast a fly
properly, and on the lower waters I made myself too conspicuous. But in
those little hill runlets rush and heather provided a natural cover, and
the fish were innocent things. I would drop my worm in a pool and let it
float down the hidden stream until there came a check and a small trout
was swung high over my head. If it came off the hook it was as often as
not lost in the thick herbage. Now and then it was too heavy for such
treatment--half a pound in weight perhaps--in which case it was dragged
clumsily ashore. This was the beggarly element of fishing, but both
exciting and satisfying. I have had as many as four dozen in a day, to
be fried for breakfast in oatmeal and eaten bones and all. To call such
takings a "basket" would be a misnomer, for I did not possess a creel,
but carried my catch in my pockets or threaded through the gills on
rushes.

In April and May I never felt lonely, for the birds were cheerful
companions. But when the summer quiet fell on them I used to have fits
of panic in the silence and solitude. The worst places for this were the
glens where there was no heather, but only moss and bent and turf, for
heather, especially when charred in patches by moor-burn, was to me a
half-human thing. Greenness, utter, absolute greenness, has all my life
seemed to me uncanny, and the places which in my memory are infested
with a certain awe are the green places. Take the Devil's Beef Tub, the
green pit in the hills on the road from Tweed to the head of Annan.
Rudyard Kipling once told me that, far as he had wandered, and much as
he had seen, this uncanny hollow seemed more than any other spot to be
consecrated to the old gods. The haunted chasm in _Kubla Khan_ was in a
green hill. There was a song popular on the Border called _The wild
glen sae green_. It was in such green "hopes," as we called them, that
sometimes I came to the edge of fear. If there were sheep in sight I was
never afraid. But if there were no sheep about, and a shoulder of hill
shut out the world, I became conscious that I was alone in an _enclosed_
place without the company of bird or beast. Then the terror of solitude
laid hold of me, and I fled incontinent until I reached a herd's
cottage.

It was in one of those childish expeditions that I first realised the
wonders of dawn. Someone had told me that the trout in summer took best
in the dark before sunrise, and one day I crept out of bed, dressed in
the mirk, and slipped from the house when everyone was asleep. Having no
watch I had miscalculated the time, and had started far too soon, for I
seemed to be walking for hours before, from the watershed ridge I saw
the first flush in the east. The journey was achieved with a quaking
heart, for I had heard tales of midnight gatherings of weasels which to
anyone who fell in with them meant death. However, there were no
weasels, and when I sat on a rock and watched the east turn from grey to
rose-pink and then to banded crimson, and the great golden orb spring
from beyond the furthest hills, I felt like Cortez staring at the
Pacific. Fishing was impossible for me that morning, for I had had all
the adventure I wanted for the day. The glory of the spectacle and a
gnawing hunger sent me home forthwith, a small being both entranced and
awed.

Since then I have seen the sun rise in many places--West Highland dawns
over the wintry Glasgow streets as I plodded to college; moorland dawns
when I awoke chilled and famished beside some Galloway loch; the superb
pageants which greet the mountaineer when he breakfasts on some high
saddle of rock or snow; dawns in the African bush or on the high veld,
when the dew lay heavy and the morning scents were like spices; eerie
dawns in Flanders and Picardy when the sun sprang out of enemy country
to the sound of enemy guns; dawns over ocean and prairie and desert. One
of the misfortunes of advancing age is that you get out of touch with
the sunrise. You take it for granted, and it is over and done with
before you settle yourself for the daily routine. That is one reason, I
think, why, as we grow older, the days seem shorter. We miss the high
moments of their beginning.


II

Below the clefts of their source and the round cups of the "hopes" begin
the glens which the burns have sculptured out of the _massif_ of the
hills. Now the streams become important, for they are the key of the
landscape.

From my earliest youth I have been what the Greeks called a
"nympholept," one who was under the spell of running waters. It was in
terms of them that I read the countryside. My topography was a scheme of
glens and valleys and watersheds. I would walk miles to see the
debouchment of some burn with whose head-waters I was familiar, or track
to its source some affluent whose lowland career I had followed. There
was no tributary of the upper Tweed that I could not name, and, when I
came to possess a bicycle, the same was true of the adjacent waters of
Clyde and Annan, Ettrick and Yarrow. At any time in my childhood I could
have drawn a map of my neighbourhood, which, so far as the streams went,
would have been scrupulously exact.

Ever since then I have translated, like Michael Drayton in _Polyolbion_,
every land with which I was connected into the speech of its rivers. A
hill country was simple enough, but the flat English lowlands were at
first a little puzzling, and I have never found it easy in places where
the valleys were ill-defined. But even there I was true to my fad. South
Africa to me was not the Cape peninsula and the Karroo and the high veld
and the bush-veld, but the valleys of the Orange, the Vaal, the Caledon,
the Tugela, the Limpopo and the Zambesi, and I could never rest there
till I knew what exiguous streams drained what arid places. Even
Switzerland was not pictured as mountain ranges, but as river valleys
shadowed by clusters of peaks. The eastern seaboard of America is for me
not a group of states and cities, but the courses of the Kennebec, the
Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac and
the James. Canada I found most satisfying, with the superb trough of the
St. Lawrence, the streams that radiate into Hudson's bay from east,
south and west, the gigantic Mackenzie seaming the North with its
tributaries, and the fierce rivers that cut their way through the
Rockies and the Coast range to the western sea.

       *       *       *       *       *

The streams are now past their infancy and in their first youth. In my
experience I have found them of two types, the "highland" and the
"lowland." In the first the waters fall steeply in pools, which are
often long dark slits in little rock canyons. Dwarf birch and alder and
mountain ash stud the rock walls, and now and then draw together into
copses. Such streams are a genus by themselves and not miniature rivers,
as are the second type, the more languid "lowland" waters. In the latter
type, fall is slight, and many yards of almost motionless current may
intervene between the pools. Such pools are commonly long and shallow,
with a stream at the head and tail, and their shores are often shelves
of gravel. They imitate exactly, on a small scale, the habits of the
larger rivers. The first kind is to be found in any mountain land, like
the Highlands, or Galloway, or Wales, and now and then in the gentler
Tweedside hills, wherever these are rough and heathery. The second is
the more familiar, and I have fished many scores of the type from
Galloway to Berwick, and from the Cheviots to Devon.

The worm was useful in exploring the deeper pools after rain, but it was
now that I first took to the fly. I began in the "highland" type, the
lovely Powsail which joins Tweed at Merlin's Grave below Drummelzier
village. Its pools were deep and clear, and into each tumbled a small
cataract, so I found it easier to fish up than down stream--a valuable
lesson for the fly-fisher. It was an elementary business with little art
in it, for the casts were perforce short, and the configuration of the
land enabled the angler to keep well in cover. My flies never varied
from a couple of plain black hackles (which we called "black spiders"),
on coarsish gut. From April to August the pools were the best chance, in
September the little runs and stickles. The fish averaged three or four
to the pound, and I had never anything beyond a pound weight.

This was in the "highland" type. In the "lowland" the prospects of good
fish were greater, but there was also an excellent chance of no fish at
all. For such streams would sink in dry weather to the slenderest
trickles. Then, I regret to say, I would altogether abandon the rod and
take to my naked hands, having behind me the authority of John Bunyan:

  "Yet fish there be that neither Hook, nor Line,
   Nor Snare, nor Net, nor Engine can make thine;
   They must be grop't for, and be tickled too,
   Or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do."

I was an expert "guddler," scooping up trout from below stones in the
channel and under the deep-cut banks. These "lowland" burns could become
degraded indeed, choked with rubbish in passing a farmyard, or at the
outlet of a village. But sometimes, when they looped through a broad
pasture-land, they afforded pools and streams from which trout could
only be taken by casting fine and far. They had occasional big fish,
too, for, though it was never my luck, I have seen trout of two pounds
and more taken from them. I was ill-equipped for fly-fishing, since my
rod was the two upper joints of my grandfather's salmon rod, my reel and
line were indifferent, and my gut was far too coarse for slender waters
and bright weather. But it was there and then that the possibilities of
the art began to dawn on me, and fly-fishing became for me a necessity
of life.

I liked those hobbledehoy waters best in the early spring. The
"highland" ones were wonderful in autumn when the heather was still in
flower and the bracken was yellowing, and the rowans flamed scarlet from
the rocks. Beautiful were the "lowland" streams in high summer when the
banks were feathered with meadowsweet and the pastures bright with
rock-rose and thyme. But I liked them best when the turf was still
yellow, like old court velvet, or just beginning to green after the
winter:

  "A month before the month of May,
   And the spring comes slowly up this way."

In April there was an ineffable freshness and purity in the cold grey
waters and the austere shores. Also one had more generously than at any
other season the companionship of birds. In a glen in Morvern I have
looked down from the edge of a little ravine at the nest and eggs of a
golden eagle in a sprawling birch. In the grassy glens the angler could
scarcely avoid stumbling on the nests of lapwing and grouse, snipe and
sandpiper; with a little trouble he could find those of the redshank and
the curlew, and one notable day in Sutherland I added a greenshank to my
list. Also spring is the time when the hill lambs are born, and one day
there is a bleating in the valleys and presently the hillsides are
sprinkled with vociferous younglings which, if of the Cheviots breed,
are white as a snowdrift.

In such places I have never felt the awesome solitude that belonged to
the uppermost green "hopes." There was evidence of human occupation
everywhere--a drove road, a field of roots in the midst of heather, a
moorland farm-town with horses and cows at graze, a farm road with a
postman on it, even a hamlet where old women washed the family clothes
in the burn. Yet they were quiet places and in their own fashion very
lonely--lonely because the world had never known them, or had forgotten
them. There were no fields, as in England, each called by an ancient
name; the slender tributaries were often innominate, or described in the
large-scale maps as "Ugly Grain" or "Middle Grain"; they mattered only
to the farmer as the feeding-ground for his hirsels. They were
unvisited, except by a rare angler or a shepherd "looking" his sheep. No
legend was intertwined with them, and no ballad gave them fame, or if
they had a ballad the local application was forgotten. The Douglas Burn
in Yarrow is the reputed scene of a famous ballad story, but I never
thought of that when I fished its waters. In Tweedsmuir Kingledores Burn
saw the slaying of Lord Fleming by those red-handed bandits, the
Tweedies of Drummelzier, but it is a tale known only to the antiquary.
Those moorland waters have to flow down the haughs before they enter
human life.

My time for the "hopes" was the morning, for at that distance I had to
put up my rod in the early afternoon to be home for tea. But to many of
the burns the journey was short, and with them I associated especially
the summer twilights when the dew had begun to fall and the hill
pastures were incense-breaking like Araby, with mint and meadowsweet and
thyme and heather. I noticed then something which I have often since
observed, that there was a short spell just before the dark when no fish
would take. I have caught trout when the pools were red and gold with
the pageant in the west, and I have caught them when dusk had fallen and
there was scarcely light enough to cast by. But there would come a time
when there seemed to be a sudden hush in the world, when nature was
"breathless with adoration" and the trout had halted to reflect on their
sins. It was a time which I associated with that magical word
[Greek: euphmia] which Plato uses in the _Phaedo_ when he
describes Socrates making ready for death.[14] It was the hour to which
Wordsworth no doubt referred as the "light of setting suns" which was
the dwelling of "something far more deeply interfused." It was the time
when in earlier ages devout men in the Hebrides would see far in the
western sea the shadowy outline of St. Brandan's isles. When that hour
came I would lay down my rod until the flop of a rising fish told me
that the wheels of the world were going round again. With salmon it made
no difference, they being brazen creatures from the outer seas, but the
humble and pious trout observe the holy season. It was not for nothing
that in the Sixteenth _Iliad_ Homer applied the epithet [Greek:
hieros] to fish.

    [Footnote 14:  65.]




CHAPTER II

THE MIDDLE COURSES


I

By the middle courses I mean what in Scotland and northern England is
described as a "water." It may be the middle course of a considerable
stream which presently reaches the dignity of a river. Old folk in
Tweedsmuir used to speak of the "water of Tweed." So in the ballads:

  "Annan waters wadin' deep,
   And my love Annie's wondrous bonny."
          . . . . . .
  "The roar of the Clyde water
   Wad hae dar'd a hundred men."

Or it may be only a substantial tributary, like Ettrick or Teviot. Or it
may be a river on its own account, finding its end in sea or lake, but a
river on a modest scale, no bigger than those affluents I have named.
Such are the Lune and the Coquet, the Usk in Wales, and those pleasant
streams of the west which derive from Exmoor and Dartmoor. My measure is
not only by size, for in this chapter I do not take account of the
smaller Highland rivers like the Brora and the Helmsdale, the Thurso and
the Laxford, whose business is with salmon, or the famous dry-fly
streams of the south. I am still concerned with trout, and with waters
which have not lost the scent of the hills.

It is in this class that I find the river of my dreams. I have two
landscapes in my mind which have always ravished my fancy. One is a
morning scene. It is spring--say mid-April; a small fresh wind is
blowing; my viewpoint is somewhere among the foothills where a mountain
land breaks down to the plains. Below me is a glen with green fields and
the smoke of hearth-fires and running water, and a far-off echo of human
bustle, including the clack of a mill wheel. The glen runs out into the
blue dimness of a great champaign, with the spires of cities in it, and
on the far rim a silver belt of sea. A white road winds down the valley
and into the plain, and I know that it will take me past a hundred
blessed nooks into an April world of adventure and youth.

The other scene belongs to the afternoon, not the languorous afternoon
of the poets, but a season which is only the mellowing of the freshness
of morning. It is a wide tract of pasture, backed by little wooded
hills, mostly oaks and beeches, but with clumps of tall Scots firs.
Behind, fading into the sunset, are round-shouldered blue mountains. In
the pasture there are shapely little coverts, as in the park of a great
mansion. Through it winds a little river, very clear and very quiet,
with long smooth streams and pools edged with fine gravel. The banks are
open so that there is nothing to impede the angler. There are cattle at
graze, and a faithful company of birds and bees. It is a place
long-settled and cared for, with the flavour of a demesne, a place in
close contact with human life.

My little rivers are also in touch with history. It is along their
courses that you will find the chief memorials of the past. In the
Borders it is rare to find a famous castle in the glen of a
burn--Hermitage is one of the few I can call to mind--but the valleys of
the "waters" are strewn with shards of old masonry, each on its
promontory of hill, and each linked with some resounding name. In some
parts these ruins are in sight of each other, for in their day of pride
it was their business by lit beacons to pass the news that the enemy was
marching. Rede and Coquet and Till, Esk and Eden, Liddel and Teviot,
Ettrick and Yarrow and Leader; Lyne and Manor and Tweed itself--each
mile almost of their course has its tower, now mostly a jagged stone
tooth hung with ivy; and it is the same with the tributaries of Tay and
the streams of Angus, and northern waters like the Don (the Scottish
Loire), the Ythan and the Findhorn. With the castles go the ballads, the
most famous are strung on a thread of little streams.

I like a place where history can be easily reconstructed, and except for
a few dry-stone dykes and some planting, those glens have not greatly
changed since the ancient days of sturt and strife. The peel-tower had a
massy stone foundation which could not be destroyed, but the roof-tree
and thatch and wooden outbuildings must have been constantly flaming to
heaven. We can picture stormy dawns when the plenishing of a farm moved
southward under the prick of raiders' spears, and moonlit nights when in
the "hot-trod" men died for half a dozen lean cattle. It was a life
which bred hardy fighters and fine poets, for from it came some of the
world's greatest ballads, and it taught a stiff creed of honour and
loyalty. But it had few of the gentler graces, and neither Roman Pope
nor Scottish King could teach it decorum. Archbishops might lay on the
malefactors their most terrible curse--"I condemn them perpetually to
the deep pit of hell, to remain with Lucifer and all his fellows, and
their bodies to the gallows on the Barrow Mure, first to be hangit, syne
riven and ruggit with dogs, swine, and other wild beasts abominable to
all the world." But to hang a Borderer you had first to catch him--no
easy matter, and for the thunders of the Church he and his kind cared
not a straw.

I have called those valleys my favourite kind of landscape, and they are
also the places linked with my happiest fishing memories. But I have in
mind one tract of country where the prospect is most pleasing but the
fishing is vile. It is the land which lies roughly between Llandovery in
the south and the Plinlimmon in the north, Rhayader in the east and the
valley of Teify in the west. Giraldus Cambrensis, who travelled in those
parts with Archbishop Baldwin at the end of the twelfth century, and
incidentally found beavers in the Teify, called it the "mountains of
Elanydd." It is a land of sheep-walks rising at one point to a height of
two thousand feet, with shallow vales, and wide stretches of bent and
bog. There are no highways, no villages, no inns, and the postman visits
the moorland farms perhaps twice a week. Especially it is the cradle of
rivers, Elan, Towey, Teify, Ystwyth, and a dozen lesser ones, and their
vales are the very flower of moorland peace. But there are few fish in
those bright waters till they have left the uplands. Take the Towey,
which in its lower reaches is a respectable sea-trout river. In its
upper valley, above the cave of Tom Tym Katti, it flows in noble streams
and long deep pools through a pastoral paradise. There you will find air
like mid-ocean, and curious bog plants, and if you are fortunate you may
see the honey buzzard and the last kites left in Britain. But you will
be luckier than me if you get more than a few meagre trout.


II

In the middle courses I have done most of my fishing for trout and my
'prentice days were spent on streams which ran swift and open and very
clear. It was wet-fly fishing, though, after I had been entered to the
dry-fly, I often tried that mode with success on waters very unlike the
Hampshire chalk streams. On two occasions only have I forsaken the
artificial fly. In low water, fishing upstream. I have sometimes in my
youth had good baskets with the red worm. In the may-fly season I
followed the local practice, and in the small hours just before the dawn
had considerable success dapping with the natural fly.

These chapters are not a practical manual, for I have no special arts to
expound or secrets to reveal. Also in my attitude to the sport I am
lamentably unscientific. I admire the shooter who has theories about the
ballistics of his craft, but I have no wish to imitate him. Nor am I
inclined to follow the angler who has elaborate views on optics--how the
light strikes the fish's eye, and at what angle the fly is seen--or on
entomology, for insects are a part of nature for which I have no
taste--or on ichthyology--or on that mysterious subject, the working of
a fish's mind. Some even connect the habits of fish with the phases of
the moon; which seems to me a more promising line, for astrology may
well be relevant, since the Fishes are a sign of the zodiac. I do not
want to know too much about trout, for I like to leave some room for
mystery. Indeed, I should prefer to keep science out of the business
altogether. Izaak Walton gave us reams of the variety, popular in his
day, but they are not his best chapters. I am not interested either in
the elaborate gadgets with which the angler is now fitted out. Indeed,
my disinclination to fish with bait, natural or artificial, is largely
due to my dislike of its complex apparatus. I have few theories, and I
want only a modest equipment. For trout, wet-fly or dry-fly. I do not
use more than a dozen patterns, though I believe in varying the size;
for salmon about the same. I like old and well-tried rods and
reels--everything old except the gut. When I see the bursting fly-books
and tackle boxes of my friends I do not envy them:

  "Perish the wish, for inly satisfied,
   Above their pomps I hold my ragged pride."

I have few maxims, and they are all deductions from experience. Keep
well back from the water, for trout are extraordinarily susceptible, not
to noise but to vibration. Trout are voracious; a very young trout will
eat its own weight every ten days--and therefore, though there is no
rise apparent, they are probably somehow and somewhere on the feed. Your
fly must show signs of life, for a trout does not feed on dead meat. A
fish cannot detect delicate shades of colour and must see a fly as more
or less a grey silhouette against the background of the sky. Therefore
to achieve this silhouette, you must use a light-coloured fly on a dark
day and a dark fly on a bright one. But what may matter a great deal is
the size of the fly and the fineness of your tackle. Finally, when you
are fishing for a rising trout, do not cast at him but at some point in
the air above him. These are a few of the rules which I believe I have
proved by experience, but I am ready to admit that they all have their
exceptions. Indeed, except for the "dark day, light fly and _vice
versa_" principle, I am very chary of dogmatising.

What makes the difference between a successful and a less successful
angler? Scarcely the length and delicacy of his casting. In salmon
fishing the length of a cast may be important, and in certain Welsh,
Devonian and Highland streams, where the banks are thickly wooded and
one must wade up the channel, it may be necessary to cast fine and far.
But generally speaking, most fishermen of experience attain to a fair
level of expert casting. Nor is it the ability to select the
appropriate fly. I do not believe there is ever any completely
appropriate fly, except on the broad principle I have stated above, with
the rider that in the twilight, when moths are glimmering, a little
fantasy may be permitted. Nor is it any extra skill in striking and
playing a fish. The _differentia_ in my view is knowledge of the
particular water and the habits of the trout in it--where and at what
season are the likeliest lies. In the bare pasturelands of my youth that
was all important. I have had a good basket on a stream where my
companion not only caught no fish but saw none. If a man knows his
stream he will know that the haunts of fish will be different in April
and in August, in low water and in full water. So, both for trout and
salmon, I would maintain that, after a certain standard of technique has
been attained, what makes the difference among anglers is just
knowledge, local knowledge--as Alan Breck defined courage, "great
penetration and knowledge of affairs."

To-day, in Britain at any rate, one has to work hard for one's fish,
except in jealously preserved and fully stocked waters. Most Scottish
and north-country streams are free to the public, and new methods of
transport have made them accessible to the dwellers in distant cities.
When I was a boy I must have fished burns which did not see an angler
once in a decade. Andrew Lang used to say that you might be certain you
had found your happy valley when the shepherd begged the bit of daily
paper which wrapped your luncheon that he might learn the news. To-day
you might as well look in the same countryside for the nest of the
sea-eagle which used to haunt it. The Ettrick Shepherd tells of filling
a cart with trout out of Megget of about the size of a herring; the
angler would be lucky now if out of Megget on most days he got a dozen
half-pounders. On a once famous Lowland stream I have seen on a Bank
Holiday anglers as thick as the gudgeon fishers on Thames.


III

I do not regret it. I would be glad to see angling clubs more widely
organised, so that there was a certain amount of restocking, a decent
limit to a day's catch, and an insistence on lawful lures. But I am glad
to think that so many of my fellow mortals have the chance of this
honest sport.

In my youth I formed a deep attachment to the democracy of the
waterside. There was the ragged weaver out of work, with his ancient
home-made rod, who was out to catch his dinner and kept the smallest
fingerlings. He was partial to lures like salmon-roe, and was not above
"sniggling" a fish. But he knew his job, for he knew where trout were to
be had, and often he was an expert practitioner in the orthodox parts.
But the commonest objects of the waterside were miners from the Lothian
and Lanarkshire coalfields. They would come by train on a summer evening
to some wayside station on Tweed or Clyde, fish all night and get back
to their work in the early morning. Somehow or other they never left
with an empty creel. Most were unorthodox in their methods, but not all.
I remember one man whose casting with an indifferent rod first taught me
what fly-fishing could be. I had many friends among them, and I have
shared their supper of bread and cheese, and exchanged a respectable gut
cast for one of their strange home-made contraptions, designed for the
"parr-tail," that deadliest of lawless devices. I think pleasantly of my
old comrades, who were kind to an inquisitive boy. Like the Black
Douglas, they preferred to hear the lark sing rather than to hear the
mouse cheep, and there must have been a strong passion for sport and
wild nature in their hearts to drive them to spend laborious nights
after laborious days. I remember hearing Andrew Lang say that some of
Theocritus could best be rendered in Lowland Scots, so I tried my hand
at it and turned the twenty-first Idyll into a tale of two such anglers.
Here is the result--a sketch of two of the clan.

  "'Tis puirtith sooples heid and hand
   And gars inventions fill the land;
   And dreams come fast to folk that lie
   Wi' nocht atween them and the sky.

   Twae collier lads frae near Lasswade,
   Auld skeely fishers, fand their bed
   Ae simmer's nicht aside the shaw
   Whaur Manor rins by Cademuir Law.
   Dry flowe-moss made them pillows fine,
   And, for a bield to kep the win',
   A muckle craig owerhung the burn,
   A' thacked wi' blaeberry and fern.
   Aside them lay their rods and reels,
   Their flee-books and their auncient creels.
   The pooches o' their moleskin breeks
   Contained unlawfu' things like cleeks,
   For folk that fish to fill their waume
   Are no fasteedious at the game.

   The twae aye took their jaunts thegither;
   Geordie was ane and Tam the ither.
   Their chaumer was the mune-bricht sky,
   The siller stream their lullaby."

Then there were the local poachers. For them trout were small beer;
their quarry was the salmon out of season. They would net or spear the
big red fish in the autumn streams, and salt them down for winter use.
The thing was in defiance of the law, and the water-bailiffs were always
on their trail, so that there were many affrays by the waterside which
ended in broken heads. I have assisted in "burning the water," which was
a favourite pursuit of Sir Walter Scott's, and apparently in his day
not illegal. It was an exciting business, for the shallows would be
reddened by torches made of barrel staves dipped in tar, and wild
figures with a three-pronged fork, called a leister, speared the fish as
they blundered upstream. Once I was arrested by the bailiffs along with
the others, but in consideration of my youth was released with a hearty
kick! The story got about and was remembered many years after when I
stood as parliamentary candidate for the county. I was assured that I
had the poaching vote to a man! Dour, sardonic folk they were, but with
their own dry humour. I once met one of them tramping the highroad on a
very hot day and greeted him with an enquiry after his health. "Bearin'
up," was the reply, "in the hope that if I can thole[15] it here I'll be
able to thole it Yonder."

    [Footnote 15: Stand.]

But the true angling democracy were the local anglers who fished
legitimately. They were generally small tradesmen from the little
burghs. But it was rare that a countryman became an expert. I have only
known two, the son of a schoolmaster and the son of an innkeeper.
Angling was the breath of their life; every hour they could spare they
were on a stream, and they attained often a remarkable skill. They would
fill a basket in the tiniest runlets among the heather, and they would
catch fish from a low water, in an east wind, in a thunder-storm, and in
drifting snow. Angling to such was not only a sport, but a social
institution, for they had their little fraternities, their suppers and
their songs. Meg Dods in _St. Ronan's Well_ has spoken their _apologia_:

     "Pawky auld carles, that kend whilk side their bread was buttered
     upon. . . . They were up in the morning--had their parritch, wi'
     maybe a thimble-full of brandy, and then awa' up into the hills;
     eat their bit cauld meat on the heather, and cam' hame at e'en wi'
     their creel full of caller trouts, and had them to their dinner,
     and their quiet cogue of ale, and their drap punch, and were set
     singing their catches and glees, as they ca'd them, till ten
     o'clock, and then to bed wi' God bless ye--and what for no?"

Sometimes they ventured into verse. There is a little piscatorial
eclogue which I used to hear repeated in my youth, but the source of
which I have never been able to trace. The Kips mentioned in it are the
Shielgreen Kips to the north-east of Peebles which look down on the head
of Leithen Water.

     JUVENUS AND PISCATOR

  JUV.   Canny Fisher Jamie, comin' hame at e'en,
         Canny Fisher Jamie, whaur hae ye been?

  PISC.  Mony lang miles, laddie, ower the Kips sae green.

  JUV.   Fishin' Leithen Water?

  PISC.                                  Nay, laddie, nay,
         Just a wee burnie rinnin' doun a brae,
         Fishin' a wee burnie bigger than a sheugh.

  JUV.   Gat ye mony troots, Jamie?

  PISC.                                  I gat eneugh--
         Eneugh to buy my baccy, snuff, and pickle tea,
         And lea' me tippence for a gill, and that's eneugh for me.


IV

_Piscator non solum piscatur._ The motto of the Fly-fishers' Club has
always been true. Other sports have their text-books, but angling
produces not only practical manuals but a great quantity of discursive
literature in which many things are dealt with besides the technique of
fishing. Of all sports it has the most bookish flavour.

Such literature is not only great in bulk but often high in quality. Why
is it that the one undisputed classic of British sport is a fishing
book? Not Beckford, or Whyte-Melville, or Scrope, or St. John can vie in
assured immortality with Izaak Walton. One reason is that angling is a
leisurely business and permits of meditation and the culture of the
literary graces. The angler has a better chance to be a philosopher than
the anxious mortal in a butt on a grouse moor, or the deer-stalker, who
crawls breathlessly in the lee of a morose gillie. He can have an ear
for Coridon's song as well as for the plash of trout below the willows.
Angling, as I have already argued, is more than a sport or a craft; it
is a mode of life, an attitude of mind.

As a boy my approach to this literature was what the Greeks would have
called _banausic_. I wanted advice, instruction, not aids to reflection.
Therefore I put Cotton above Walton for he had something to tell me. It
was before the day when expert treatises flowed monthly from the Press,
but I am very certain that if such had come my way I should have greatly
preferred them to any seventeenth-century rigmarole. But in one way
Walton strongly took my fancy. He was fortunate in being able, in a
single stream, to catch a great variety of fish. In our Border waters
there were trout and salmon, an occasional grayling and the despised
eel. I longed for rivers where to these could be added in one basket
tench, bream and dace, and chub and perch and pike and all the rest of
them, not realising that for such variousness I must sacrifice my
beloved trout. Only in some of the Welsh borderland streams, like the
Teme, can one never be certain what next will rise to the fly or how one
ought to strike. There you have both quality and variety; commonly one
or the other must be sacrificed.

I was well on in my teens and a voracious reader before I came under
Walton's spell. But I still considered about three-fourths of _The
Compleat Angler_ wearisome, and even to-day I am impatient with Gesner,
Dubravius, and the divine Du Bartas, and all his host of mediaeval
gossips. I have always had a liking for books on sport with
out-of-the-way scholarship, even when most of it is fantastic. Burton's
_Anatomy of Melancholy_ is the model. In piscatorial literature Mr.
William Radcliffe's _Fishing from the Earliest Times_ has long been a
favourite bedside book. But Izaak's learning is dull, because it is not
sufficiently select and curious. It is derived too brazenly from certain
accessible folios. We can follow with interest Gilbert White's
speculations about the birds and beasts of Selborne, for we see the
honest parson laboriously poking his nose into every cranny. But Izaak
only gets down a tome or two from a dusty bookshelf.

There is no question about his rank in our letters. The literary
classics of angling after all are few in number, for who is there
besides Walton? I should select part of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_, and
some of Andrew Lang's _Angling Sketches_, but that may be a Borderer's
bias; Lord Grey of Fallodon's _Fly-fishing_ beyond doubt; and two
Canadian books, Stewart Edward White's _The Forest_ and W. H. Blake's
_Brown Waters_. But Walton must always head the list. When he describes
a spring meadow he writes almost the best cheerful prose in our
literature, prose which is all air and dew and light. His
seventeenth-century rival is John Bunyan when he tells of the rare
amenities of the Pilgrim's Way.

I say "cheerful" advisedly, for it is notable that most of our great
prose is solemn prose, the prose of mortality. Instances crowd in on the
mind. There is Bunyan when he talks of the passing of Mr.
Valiant-for-Truth, and Walton when he writes of Donne:

     "that body which was once the temple of the Holy Ghost and is now
     become a small quantity of Christian dust."

There is the Authorised Version of the Bible. There are a dozen passages
in Sir Thomas Browne. There is Sir William Temple, a passage which
Goldsmith in _The Good-natured Man_ puts into the mouth of the
preposterous Croaker:

     "When all is done human life is, at the greatest and best, but like
     a froward child that must be played with and humoured a little till
     it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

There is the famous passage from the "sop and Rhodope" chapter in
Landor's _Imaginary Conversations_. There is Lockhart on the death of
Scott, and Colonel Henderson on the death of Stonewall Jackson. There is
the last paragraph of Thomas Hardy's _Woodlanders_. And not least there
is Emily Bront:

     "I lingered round them under that benign sky; watched the moths
     fluttering among the heath and the harebells, listened to the soft
     wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could
     ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet
     earth."




INDEX


  Adams, Henry, 263, 293
  Addison, 31
  Adirondacks, 262
  Ainger, Canon, 94
  All Souls, 48
  American Civil War, 261
  Amery, L. S., 47
  Angus, 309
  Annan, 25, 301
  Annandale, 23, 25
  Annapolis, 262
  Anson, Sir William, 48
  Ardtornish, 104
  Ardwall, Lord, 82
  Argyll, 82
  Aristotle, 81
  Arncote, 191
  Arnold, Matthew, 31, 260, 264
  Askwith, Lord, 49
  Asquith, H. H., 32, 97, 145, 154, 155
  Asquith, Raymond, 55-67, 83, 106
  Auchmacoy, 44
  _Augustus_, 199

  Bachelors' Club, 93
  Bacon, Robert, 31, 267
  Bailey, Abe, 112
  Baker, Newton, 267
  Baldwin, Lord, 253
  Balfour, Arthur, 38, 128, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 171
  Balliol, 48, 51, 52, 68, 155
  Bar, the, 88
  Baring, Maurice, 53, 72, 73, 150, 171
  Barrow, Mure, 309
  Beckley, 188, 190
  Beit, Alfred, 98
  Belloc, 47, 51, 54, 57, 133, 150
  Benckendorff, Count, 71
  Bennett, 193
  Ben Nevis, 82
  Bergson, 205
  Berkshire Downs, 73, 75
  _Bible in Spain, The_, 15
  Bicester, 77
  Birkenhead, Lord, (_see_ Smith, F. E.)
  Blackwood, Lord Basil, 53, 103, 104-107
  Blake, W. H., 319
  _Blanket of the Dark, The_, 197
  Bletchingdon, 191
  Blue Ridge, 262, 263
  Boar's Hill, 76, 77
  Border hills, 26;
    Borders, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 43, 308;
    Border shepherds, 22, 23, 149
  Boston, 262
  Boswell, 39
  Botha, Louis, 99, 110, 114
  Botley, 76
  Boyhood and early education, 1-35
  Bradbury, Lord, 49
  Bradley, F. H., 85, 203
  Brand, R. H., 103, 104
  Brasenose, 46-48, 49, 50, 51, 88
  Bridges, Robert, 203
  Brill, 76, 77, 191
  Broad Law, 24
  Bront, Charlotte, 41;
    Emily, 41, 320
  Brooke, Lord, (Lord Warwick), 103, 104
  Brooke, Rupert, 238
  Broomielaw, 32
  Brora, the, 307
  Browne, Sir Thomas, 320
  Browning, 31
  Brutus, 40
  Buachaille, Etive Mhor, 82
  Buchan, Mrs., 249-254;
    Alastair, 252, 254-256;
    Rev. John, 13, 14, 245-249, 252;
    William, 252, 256-258
  Bunyan, John, 303, 319
  Burke, Edmund, 92
  Burns, Robert, 80
  Burton, 319
  Bussell, Dr. F. W., 48
  Butler, Geoffrey, 169
  Byng, Julian (Lord Byng), 174, 175
  Byron, 151

  Caesar, Julius, 40
  Caird, Edward, 36, 48
  Caledon, the, 302
  Cambridge, 53, 74
  Campsfield, Moor, 76
  Canning Club, 83
  Carlyle, 38, 41, 138
  Carnock, Lord, 49
  Carson, Lord, 169
  _Castle Gay_, 195
  Cave, Lord, 224
  Cecil, Lord Robert (Viscount Cecil of Chelwood), 147
  Chamberlain, Austen, 233;
    Joseph, 83, 144;
    Neville, 224
  Charleston, 262
  Cherwell, the, 74, 78, 257;
    Valley, 187, 191
  Chesterton, G. K., 150
  Cheviots, 20, 45, 82, 303
  Chilterns, 76
  Christ Church, 46, 48
  Christianity, 292
  Churchill, Winston, 153
  Clairvaux, Bernard of, 11
  Clyde, 301
  Clydesdale, Lord, 233
  Cocoa Tree, the, 93
  Coln, the, 79
  Colquhoun, Sir Iain, 231
  Connecticut, 262, 302
  Cotswold, 75, 76, 77, 79, 168
  Cotton, 318
  _Course of Time, The_, 31
  _Courts of the Morning, The_, 195
  Cowley, 77
  Cowper, Lord, 69
  Craik, Sir Henry, 222
  Cramalt Craig, 24
  Croce, 205
  Crocodiles, 49
  Cromer, Lord, 97, 98, 126
  _Cromwell_ (_Life of_), 40, 198, 292
  Cropredy, 191
  Cumnor, 77
  Curtis, Lionel, 103, 104
  Curzon, Lord, 97

  Dakota, 269
  Damien, Father, 42
  _Dancing Floor, The_, 195
  Daniel, Dr., 48
  Dante, 31, 36
  Dark Ages, the, 280-282, 284
  Dawnay, Alan, 212;
    Hugh, 52, 166
  Dawson, Geoffrey, 103, 104
  Deer-stalking, 140, 141, 142, 143
  _Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, 38
  De la Rey, 114
  Delaware, the, 302
  Descartes, 36
  Devil's Beef Tub, 25, 299
  Devon, 303
  Dickens, 31
  Dickler, 79
  Ditchley, 77
  Dobson, Austin, 203
  Dollar Law, 25
  Don, the, 309
  Dorn, 79
  Double Ford, 74
  Doughty, C. E., 212
  Douglas Burn, 305
  Douglas-Hamilton, Lord Nigel, 233
  Drummelzier, 303
  Dumas, Alex., 41
  Dunbar, 80
  Duncan, Sir Patrick, 103, 104
  Dungeon of Buchan, 83
  Dysart, 18;
    house, 17

  Eden, the, 309
  Edgehill, 191
  Edinburgh Castle, 17, 19
  Einstein, 204
  Elan, the, 310
  Elsfield, 74, 76, 77, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193
  Emerson, 261
  Esher, Lord, 169
  Esk, the, 25, 309
  Eskdalemuir, 24
  Ettrick, 20, 24, 149, 301, 307;
    the, 309;
    Shepherd, 313
  Euripides, 117
  Evenlode, the, 78, 79
  Exeter, College, 46
  Eynsham, 76, 78

  Fairfax-Lucy, Captain Brian, 233
  Falkirk Tryst, 22
  Falkland, Lord, 39
  Farrar, George, 112
  Farrer, Reginald, 169
  Fawcett, Dame Millicent, 108
  Fife, 11, 12, 23
  Findhorn, the, 309
  Finlay, Sir Robert, 126, 147
  Firth of Forth, 11, 17
  Fisher, H. A. L., 205
  FitzPatrick, Percy, 112
  Flaubert, 40
  Fleet, the, 83
  Fleming, Lord, 305
  Foch, 172
  _Free Fishers, The_, 197
  French, Sir John, 173

  Galloway, 20, 81, 83, 303
  Gameshope, 24
  _Gap in the Curtain, The_, 195
  George V, King, 241-243
  George, Lloyd, 148, 152, 153, 170, 225, 233
  _Ghosts_, 49
  Gladstone, Mr., 20, 146, 147, 148, 156, 172, 292
  Glasgow, 29-33
  Gleichen, Lord Edward, 169
  Glencoe peaks, 82
  Glyme, 79
  Godstow, 78
  Gore, 245
  Goschen, Lord, 94
  Gosse, 208
  Gravelhill, 191
  Great War years, 164-179
  Green, Thomas Hill, 85
  Greenidge, A. H. J., 87
  _Greenmantle_, 195
  Grenfell Twins, 51;
    Francis, 52;
    _Francis and Riversdale Grenfell: A Memoir_, 193;
    Julian, 68
  Grey, of Fallodon, Lord, 61, 153, 181, 206, 207, 319

  Haig, Lord, 49, 132, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179
  Haldane, Lord, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 153
  Halifax, Lord, 47
  Halsbury, 93, 130
  Hamilton, John Andrew (Lord Sumner), 89
  _Hannay, Richard_, (see _Richard Hanney_), 195
  Hardy, Thomas, 150, 218, 320
  Hazlitt, 31, 40
  Heberden, Dr., 47
  Hegel, 36
  Helmsdale, the, 307
  Henderson, Col., 320
  Henley, W. E., 203
  Henry of Navarre, 40
  Herbert, Auberon Thomas (Lord Lucas), 67-73
  Herbert, Aubrey, 54, 152, 212
  Hermitage, the, 308
  Hichens, Lionel, 103, 104
  Higginsville, 263
  Hodder-Williams, Ernest, 169
  Hogarth, D. G., 212
  Hogg, James, 23
  Holyroodhouse, Palace of, 123, 231
  _Holy War, The_, 15
  Hooker, Richard, 121
  Horace Club, 53
  Horne, Sir Robert, 32, 147
  House, Colonel, 169
  _House of the Four Winds, The_, 195
  Howard, Hubert, 53
  Hudson, the, 302
  _Huntingtower_, 195
  Huxley, Aldous, 116
  Huxley, T. H., 41

  Ibsen, 49
  Ilsley downs, 77
  Isis, 75
  _Island of Sheep, The_, 195
  Islip, 79, 191

  James, the, 302
  James, Henry, 151, 152, 264
  James, William, 205
  Jesus College, 48
  Joachim, H. H., 85
  _John Macnab_, 195
  Johnson, Dr., 39, 49, 92
  Jones, Henry, 36
  Joubert, 99
  Jowett, 52, 97

  Kant, 36
  Keats, 31
  Kennebec, the, 302
  Ker, W. P., 48
  Kerr, Philip (Lord Lothian), 103, 104
  Kingledores Burn, 305
  Kipling, Rudyard, 40, 150, 203, 299
  Kitchener, 172, 173
  Knox, Father, 54
  Kruger, President, 99

  Lamb, 31
  Lambton, Major William, 103, 104
  Lanark, 19
  Landor, 320
  Lane, John, 193
  Lang, Andrew, 80, 91, 150, 313, 315, 319
  Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 84, 124
  Law, Bonar, 158
  Lawrence, T. E., 106, 150, 183, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218
  Laxford, the, 307
  Leach, 79
  Leader, the, 309
  Lee, Robert E., 40
  _Leithen, Sir Edward_, 195
  Leithen Water, 317
  Lewis, Sinclair, 202
  Liberal League, 61
  Liddel, the, 309
  Liddesdale, 82
  Limpopo, 302
  Lincoln, Abraham, 40, 261
  Lippmann, Walter, 272
  Lister, Charles, 51
  Llandovery, 310
  Lloyd, George, 212
  Lochaber, 82
  Lockhart, 320
  London, 45, 88-95
  Lord High Commissioner, 231-233, 253
  Lothian, Lord (_see_ Kerr, Philip)
  Lowell, 261
  Lubbock, Percy, 151
  Lucas, Lord (_see_ Herbert, A. T.)
  Lune, the, 307
  Lyne, the, 309
  Lyttelton, Alfred, 147

  Macdonald, J. Ramsay, 155, 237, 238, 239, 240
  Mackenzie delta (Canada), 116;
    river, 302
  Macrae, Capt. Duncan, of Eilean Donan, 233
  Madariaga, Seor de, 220
  Magdalen, 48, 53, 54
  Maitland, F. W., 126
  Manor, the, 24, 309
  Mansfield, Lord, 89
  Marston, 77
  Maryland, 262
  Massachusetts, 262
  Masterman, C. F. G., 155, 169, 170, 171
  Maupassant, 40
  Maxton, James, 229
  Mechanicsville, 263
  Medd, Cuthbert, 54
  Megget, 24, 313
  Meredith, George, 133
  Merlin's Grave, 303
  Midlothian, 19
  _Midwinter_, 197
  Mill, John Stuart, 155
  Milner, Lord, 83, 95, 97-103, 125, 128, 133, 169
  Milton, 31
  Mirabeau, 40
  Moffatdale, 20
  Mommsen, 190
  Montrose, Marquis of, 40;
    _Montrose_, 197
  Montana, 262
  Morison, S. E., 205
  Morley, John, 155
  Morris, William, 39
  Morrow, Dwight, 267
  Morvern, 304
  Mountaineering, 133, 134, 135, 136
  _Mr. Standfast_, 195
  Murray, Gilbert, 33

  Napoleon, 40, 86, 101
  Nelson, T. A., 47, 137, 138, 139
  Newbolt, Henry, 150, 169, 207, 208
  New England hills, 266
  New Hampshire hills, 262
  Newman, John Henry, 41
  Newton, Sir Isaac, 37
  Noke, 188
  Northcliffe, Lord, 169, 170
  Northumberland, 45

  Oliver, F. S., 145, 209, 210, 211
  Orange river, 302
  Oseney, 75, 76
  Otmoor, 78, 79, 190
  Oxford, 44-87
  Oxford and Asquith, Lord (_see_ Asquith, H. H.)

  Page, Walter, 267
  Parliament Act debate, 224
  Pater, Walter, 38, 40, 46, 48, 179
  _Path of the King, The_, 196
  Peebles, 19, 22, 252
  Pember, Frank, 207
  Pennsylvania, 262
  Petain, 172
  Phillimore, John, 48
  Philosophy, 35-38
  _Pilgrim's Progress, The_, 15, 16
  Plato, 37, 167
  Platonists, 38
  Plinlimmon, 310
  Politics, 39-40, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152-163
  Pollok, Robert, 31
  Pope, 31
  Potomac, 302
  Powell, York, 48
  _Power House, The_, 195
  Powsail, 303
  Prayer Book debate, 222,
  _Prester John_, 194
  Protopopov, 171
  Proust, 201

  Radcliffe, William, 319
  Raper, R. W., 48
  Rawling, Cecil, 166
  Ray, the, 79
  Rede, the, 309
  Rhayader, 310
  Rhodes, Cecil, 113, 125
  Rhys, Sir John, 48
  _Richard Hannay_, 195
  Rosebery, Lord, 54, 61, 62, 156, 157, 160
  _Round Table_, 103
  Rowlatt, Sir Sydney, 89, 126
  Rowton, Lord, 93
  _Royal Scots Fusiliers, History of_, 193
  Rupprecht of Bavaria, Prince, 54
  Rutherford, Lord, 205

  St. Lawrence, the, 302
  St. Mary's Loch, 25
  Salter, Sir Arthur, 47, 49
  _Salute to Adventurers_, 194
  Santayana, 202, 205
  Scott, Sir Walter, 17, 22, 31, 36, 43, 80, 199, 315
  Scrape, 24
  Seaman, Owen, 230
  Sellar, Gerard Craig, 103, 104
  Severn, 75
  Seymour, Lord Henry, 103, 104
  Shakespeare, 31, 76, 201
  Shelley, 31, 41
  Shenandoah, 262, 263
  Shielgreen Kips, 317
  Shotover, 76, 77
  Simon, Sir John, 47, 57
  _Sir Edward Leithen_ (_see_ Leithen), 195
  Smith, F. E. (Lord Birkenhead), 47, 57, 147, 234, 235, 236
  Smith, J. A., 48
  Smith, Pearsall, 49
  Smuts, 114, 115
  Snowden, Philip, 155, 156, 157
  South Africa, 96-122, 302
  _South African Infantry Brigade in France, Record of_, 193
  _Spectator_, 94
  Spencer, Herbert, 155
  Stevenson, R. L., 40, 41-42, 203
  Stow-on-the-Wold, 189
  Stowood, 78
  Strachey, Lytton, 155, 185
  Strachey, St. Loe, 94, 208
  Stuart-Wortley, Jack, 166
  Sumner, Lord (_see_ Hamilton, John Andrew), 89
  Susquehanna, the, 263, 302
  Swinburne, 203
  Switzerland, 302
  Sykes, Mark, 152
  Syracuse, 263

  Talla Water, 24, 25
  Tarkington, Booth, 202
  Tay, the, 309
  Teify, the, 310
  Teme, the, 318
  Temple Gardens, 88
  Tennyson, 31
  Teviot, the, 307, 309
  Thackeray, 31
  Thames, 78
  Thames, the, 75, 78
  _Thirty-Nine Steps, The_, 195
  Thomas, J. H., 65
  Thoreau, 261
  _Three Hostages, The_, 195
  Thucydides, 167
  Thurso, the, 307
  Ticonderoga, 263
  Till, the, 309
  Tom Tym Katti, 310
  Towey, the, 310
  Townsend, Meredith, 94
  Toynbee, Arnold, 98
  Trevelyan, G. M., 204
  Trinity, 48
  Tugela, the, 302
  Tweed, 20, 24, 28, 43, 149, 301, 303, 309
  Tweeddale, 19, 34, 245
  Tweedhopefoot, 25
  Tweedies of Drummelzier, 305
  Tweedshaws, 25
  Tweedside, 26, 74, 196;
    hills, 24, 168, 297, 303
  Tweedsmuir, 25, 305, 307

  Union, Oxford, 84
  Urquhart, Francis, 48
  Usk, the, 307
  Utica, 263

  Vaal, the, 302
  Valley Forge, 262
  Veitch, Prof. John, 36
  Vermont, 262
  Vincent's, 47
  Virgil, 167, 201

  Wales, 303
  Walton, Izaak, 311, 318, 319, 320
  Warren, Herbert, 48
  Wells, H. G., 202
  Wheatley, 76
  White Rose Club, 53
  White, Gilbert, 319
  White, Stewart Edward, 319
  Whitman, Walt, 264, 274
  Wilson, Sir Henry, 173, 174
  Wilderness, 262
  Windrush, the, 78, 79, 80, 82
  Wise, Francis, 190
  _Witch Wood_, 196
  Witney, 78
  Wood, Edward (Lord Halifax), 47
  Wood Eaton, 188, 191
  Woodstock, 76, 77
  Woolf, Virginia, 202
  Worcester, 48, 54
  Wordsworth, 31, 115, 117, 201
  Wright, Sir Almroth, 252
  Wychwood, 78
  Wyndham, 103
  Wyoming, 262, 263
  Wytham, 77

  Yarrow, 24, 149, 301, 305, 309
  _Yesterday, To-day and Forever_, 31
  Ystwyth, the, 310
  Ythan, the, 309

  Zambesi, the, 302


       *       *       *       *       *


TRANSCRIBER NOTES:


     Archaic and mis-spelled words have been retained with the exception
     of those listed below.

     Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.

     Illustrations have been moved to allow for the smooth flow of the
     text.

     Footnotes have been moved closer to their reference points as an
     aid to the reader.

     Page 31: favourities => favourites (my special favourites were
     _Yesterday, To-day and Forever_ by a former Bishop of Exeter)

     Page 77: its => it (But the memory of it makes the Oxford country).

     Page 99: the the ==> the (something of the hail-fellow)

     Page 112: passsionate => passionate (They combined a passionate
     devotion to their countries).

     Page 140: where-ever => wherever (I still fished whenever and
     wherever I got the chance).

     Page 162: doctine => doctrine ( He revised the doctrine of the
     Empire).

     Page 179: straighway => straightway (I straightway collapsed into
     bed.)

     Page 188: seige => siege (so that at the siege of Oxford the
     Parliament army used it as a gun-park.)

     Page 213: dysentry => dysentery (have many bouts of fever and
     dysentery).

     Page 262: thing => think (I think of the farms which are clearings
     in the Vermont and New Hampshire hills).

     Page 283: mystries => mysteries (no geographical mysteries to fire
     the imagination.)






[End of Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan]
