Читать книгу The Leithen Stories - Buchan John - Страница 5

Leithen/Buchan’s career is therefore something of a ‘bag-end of life’, of speculative enterprises worked out better elsewhere. But what remains is considerable. If, as Roderick Watson and Douglas Gifford have argued, a salient feature of the Scottish renaissance was a preoccupation with the socialising functions of myths and archetypes, then few writers were richer in this respect than Buchan, throughout his career concerned with ‘the causal and the casual’ in politics. This was something he gained from older contemporaries such as Andrew Lang, John Veitch and J.G. Frazer. The political was something from which they recoiled; yet perhaps the most famous line in all Buchan, Lumley’s warning to Leithen: ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass …’ could almost have been plucked directly from the second volume of The Golden Bough (1892):

It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has on the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it as otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any time be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.

This in turn related to a metaphor running back via Disraeli, Carlyle and Goethe to the geological debates of the Enlightenment. The Power-House shows the super-intellect Lumley – with more than a few resemblances to Buchan’s hero Arthur Balfour – brought down by the ‘commonplace’ Leithen, and an enthusiastic but bungling Labour MP. This was one way of saying that to Buchan the security of 1913 Britain was genuine, and not canvas painted to look like stone and stretched over a chasm. This didn’t last: by August 1914 the reign of Saturn had been resumed.