“A Man of Good Heart”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21645, 4 May 1940, Page 10

“A Man of Good Heart”

WALPOLE’S TRIBUTE TO BUCHAN

J\ the opinion of Sir Hugh Walpole the late John Buchan wrote a number of good hooks and one great

one. The following estimate of a man who had been his friend was written by Sir Hugh Walpole for the Observer, London.

I am here concerned with John Buchan as a writer, as a creative arttet. I should like to say something about him as a friend, the first writerIriend I ever made over thirty years ago, or: of the most faithful and generous from first to last. But that is not my purpose here. I would sum up Buchan’s achievements as an author by saying that, *n my judgment, he wrote a numoer of good books and one great one.

He was so versatile and so naturally creative that he published three books during one year while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. I believe that, while an Oxford undergraduate, he earned £l,OOO a year as journalist. One of his novels, published in the ’nineties, John Burnet of Barnes, is still reprinted, and. what is more important, still readable. This brings me to one of the essential bases of Buchan’s fiction. He was at the start a ’Nineties writer—not at all of the

“languor and lilies” variety—but of the very opposite—of the Kipling. Stevenson, Stephens school, the school that was always in the open air, shooting, fishing, or fighting, resting on a hill overlooking the sea with a pocket Horace in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Buchan was rooted in the classics and in his passionate devotion to his native Scotland. There Is nothing perhaps in life that gives a man a more lasting reward and satisfaction thn his love of some stony fraction of the earth’s surface. So Buchan loved Scotland with every breath that he drew, and all the lasting worth of his stories lies in his love for it, even when he is writing of other countries far away. I am a heretic enough to maintain that his narrative gift was not a great one. Or. perhaps, I should more truthfully say that it might have been a great one had he taken more time and trouble with it.

I read somewhere that he wrote The Thirty Nine Steps in a fortnight during a bout of sickness. I can believe it. I have always thought it an incredible story, and Greenmantle only a thought less incredible. In even the best of them, Mid-Winter for example, he never bothered to join his flats. And. as he once laughingly admitted to me, "his women were wooden dolls." JThe fact was that he told his stories

with so engaging an air that you did not care whether they were true or no. Compare them, however, with the early A. E. W. Manson’s The Watchers, Miranda of the Balcony— novels of the same school and tradition—and in this one thing Buchan seems an amateur beside a master.

Buchan, very wisely, chose for his heroes men whom his readers could very easily be. Granted that you were fond of fishing, sound of limb, and acquainted with Scotland, Hannay and yourself are one and the same man! The normality of these heroes Is very refreshing, for. as in the Victorian days, the reader is sure that he will not mistake the sheep for the goats or be dismayed by a suddenly revealed Freudian complex in the hero that he has identified with himself! Nevertheless, there was one thing more in all this: a quality very rare to-day in contemporary fiction. That quality was one of grace and courtesy. This grace came partly from the classical foundations of his prose. He could on occasion write magnificently, but always. even when he was most hurried, there was a rhythm and richness that came from his early and enduring Greek and Latin affections. Child and Philosopher But by grace I mean more than this. Every writer, whether he wishes it or no, betrays his personality with every page of his book. So Buchan always betrayed himself—betrayed the eager child, the excited schoolboy, the mature philosopher, the scholar, the humanitarian, the believer in God. but, above and beyond them all. the generous heart, the lover of his fellowmen. Had any of these been a pose in him his stories, so spontaneous and honest and careless, would have betrayed him. Bit there was no pose. Even as Ulysses returned home at last and bent the Giant Bow, so Buchan again and again discovered where his heart really was, and his joy was for everyone to see.

Many critics consider his Montrose, his finest work. A good and worthy book it-is. and yet, for myself, it never comes quite alive. The fault there may well be in me. I am still waiting for my perfect Montrose. The Cromwell is excellent, but not so excellent as Morley’s. Even Buchan could not make Augustus human, and I am not sure that he tried very hard. No, though it be but one man’s verdict let it be proclaimed that John Buchan wrote one great and enduring work, and one great work is enough for any man. Buchan’s great work is his Life of Walter Scott.

.Tliis was Lie hardest of all his tasks, for in it he had to follow one of "the

world’s finest biographies. Lockhart’s Scott. Lockhart’s book is not magnificent because of its accuracy; it is often mendacious, and its omissions are almost criminal. But it offers us the magnificent spectacle of a defeatist cynic surrendering to a magnificent unstudied nobility. No other life of Scott has approached it for this. Then came Buchan and he writes as though Scott’s hand were on his shoulder. They are alike indeed in many qualities, and it is agreeable to fancy that now in the shades they are walking the immortal woods and capping Scottish tales with a happy intimacy.

It is this same intimacy that gives Buchan’s Scott its greatness. He restored, moreover, something of the

critical balance that is Scott’s due. He emphasised the difference between the genius of the Scottish novels and the lively talent of Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, and the others. No writer has ever been so good as Buchan at that most difficult of tasks, the summaries of the novels and the quick estimation of their qualities. This is a double biography—a biography of two sons of Scotland who because of their love of mankind and their passion for their country lived worthily with joy and excitement and courage—men of their hands, men of good heart who told tales, whether there was anyone to listen or no, because of the vitality and energy that came vzith every breath of life that they spread.