A Man’s Courage

And the fire divine

The Pilgrim Fathers by John Buchan

This is the puritan’s prayer, the puritan’s poem.

If there’s one thing we can say about John Buchan’s novels, even the apparently fluffy ones, it’s that to some extent or other, they’re all about the enduring of suffering and the saving of civilisation and the souls of men. Saving souls and civilisation from Germans, doubtless. Not necessarily from Satan and his armies. But it’s one and the same thing, at least to Buchan. At least in war.

It’s all risking life and limb, with the near-certainty of bodily annihilation, to spare humanity a worse fate.

This poem is a prize-winner from Buchan’s Oxford days, and it, too, is about the narrow path traversed by the righteous, the winding road, via of course the quiet grave, to eternal reward.

It’s a stern and unbending work. A work I’d have guessed was by a Scot even if I didn’t know the author. (And even if I’d not read the epigraph. The colophon is another little lyric about the genius of the north and the benefits it confers on men of energy, genius and hardihood.)

But what is this poem about? It’s about the struggle, of course, the struggle that is life. The knowledge that the path will always be treacherous, will always be specked with unkind stones, will never go straight. Its idea is that civilisation is a small and fragile thing and worse, far worse, lies shallow-buried beneath it.

And that though, of course, all men fall — all fail — the fight is worth the fighting. It is worthwhile to struggle. To face odds. It simply must be. The alternative is too terrifying to contemplate. The fight is worth the fighting: in essence, this is the story of Buchan’s writing life. It’s almost all he thought about the business of living.

In some ways, this is a poem directed at the young by the old. An address from one generation to the next. That’s not quite apt; Buchan was very young when he wrote it. But at least the idea supplies the poem a conceit, and a title. This is the voice of the ages talking, almost beyond time. And it is not a comforting voice. The only comfort possible is the comfort of knowing that one is winning a place in glory. Everything else is indulgence, a footnote, not worth the words or time.

After all, what did you expect? Buchan’s voice asks. What did you expect when you were born, when you left those ignorant and blissful fields of childhood? Was it praise — or worldly success — or contentment, all of it to be passed on down to you in due time?

Did you expect an idle existence? Buchan’s narrator demands of the reader. Poems and flowers. All green fields and soft grass and loafing. Is all this mere manna from heaven, something offered without cost to all who go and ask after it? Did you expect your inheritance, the great benisons of your race, to be merely handed to you?

Not if you had any sense, he says. Not if you had any heart. You surely knew that there was only one way to make the game worth the candle, to make the life worth living. And you must have known it from the moment you became fully adult, fully aware, fully a man.

What can this all tell us, for instance, of Buchan’s fiction? I’ve said some of what I think above. And it’s mediocre — insufficient. It doesn’t solve everything. Buchan wasn’t all dour; he did not have every mystery set in a peel tower on the borders, or in the grey and mossy stones of some imagined Stirling or Inverness. No, he wrote quite fantastical books about chases across much of the world. The Thirty-Nine Steps, of course, culminates in Scotland. It was published first in an Edinburgh magazine. But Greenmantle ends in the Near East, via a Constantinople Buchan can barely describe, so febrile is his imagination.

Richard Hannay must risk his life, of course, against fearful odds and for his country, for his fellow soldiers. But he must also see a good deal of life, he must enjoy his life, and he must quit it — if quitting it he simply cannot escape — with some regret.

Oh, a glorious death sounds like a great laugh, Buchan says, when you’re asking the enemy to bring all their guns against you in your hopeless last stand upon a mountain, but — assuming you survive to see the dawn — in the cold light of day, it begins to lose some of its charm.

Is any of that irony, intended or not, visible here?

I don’t think so.

In this poem, the smile never dawns on the set, iron-hard face. There is no wink or glimmer in the eye. No small opening in the amour. Perhaps Buchan, solid a workman though he was at this young age, was just too inexperienced, and too sure of himself, for irony. This industrious little man whose whole life — legal, literary, military — was like turning up to a series of shifts in a factory run not exactly for his benefit.

But I doubt it. Read the later books. They have just enough irony — more than a cigarette paper’s thickness — to permit a reader to prize apart the plates of black steel. To give life some of its colour, its flavour, its joy.