Читать книгу Memory Hold-the-Door - John Buchan - Страница 13

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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 âmes 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 Brontë, 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.