CHARACTERISTICS
Buchanan’s life, like the lives of most people who have done anything
worth speaking of in their time, divides itself roughly into two
sections--the period of preparation, and the period of performance.
What I shall call his period of performance, or at all events chief
performance, was from the time when he finally returned to Scotland,
after an absence abroad, with brief interruptions, of twenty-two years,
and spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life in more or less
intimate occupation with the public affairs of his country. On the
19th of August 1561, Queen Mary, then in her nineteenth year, landed
at Leith, and was escorted to Holyrood by her enthusiastic subjects,
by whom she was also serenaded at night in a style which, as the
queen’s French retinue thought, showed more heart than art. Shortly
before or after this date, Buchanan, now fifty-five years old, also
appeared in Scotland, for his final settlement there. It is a curious
coincidence that these two persons, eminent alike in their widely
divergent spheres, and destined alternately to a literary friendship
that was pleasant to both, and a political antagonism that was fatal
to one of them, should have appeared on the scene of their sympathies
and conflicts practically at the same time. I have said that the
division of Buchanan’s life into a period of preparation and a period
of performance is a rough division. By that I mean that what really
deserves to be called performance could not be absolutely excluded from
the preparation period, and that, to some extent, one stage of the
performance period was often a preparation for the next; but taken with
this qualification, the division is a sufficiently valid one.
It was, for instance, mainly during the preparation or foreign period
that Buchanan wrote those poems which stamped him not only as a man
of wit and poetic genius, but as the first Latin stylist in Europe of
his day. During this period, too, he acquired from classic and other
sources those broad and comprehensive ideas on the leading questions
of the day which made him the thinker and Humanist as contrasted with
the mere cleric or scholastic obscurantist. It was then also that,
through observation on the spot, he was able to comprehend the ‘true
inwardness’ of the struggle that was going forward between the old
order of things and the new, and often give practical advice that
was useful. In this period, too, he completed that thorough study
of the Roman and Protestant controversy which ended in determining
him to identify himself publicly with the Protestant side in the
great conflict that was on foot--in itself no inconsiderable event.
All this was undoubtedly performance of no mean order, but from the
Scottish national point of view, and from the point of view of general
history, on which the special Scottish history exerted so profound an
influence, it was preparatory to the great work he did in his native
land. His Latin and his various Continental activities are forgotten,
but his Scottish work is still memorable. Yet it was because he was
the great Humanist and unequalled Latinist, as well as the thinker and
experienced observer of affairs, that he was able to command the ear
of learned and diplomatic Europe, and through them to make the events
that were happening in his country a factor in the world’s history. His
foreign performance was therefore, in reality, a preparation for his
crowning performance at home. I shall not labour the point of one stage
of his performance being preparatory to another.
Of course I do not mean to say that Buchanan did all this consciously
and systematically; that he deliberately prepared abroad, and then
came and deliberately performed at home. Few men, especially men
of Buchanan’s type, shape their lives on such lines of exact and
exhaustive purpose. I leave out of account the unhappily large class
who foolishly, and even wickedly, throw away their lives, and have
hardly ever tried or desired to make a better of it. I confine myself
to those who do get something out of life for themselves or society,
or both. But I doubt if any, beyond a small minority even of this
class, begin life with a distinct aim at reaching what they end life
by becoming. There is, of course, the famous case of Whittington, who
set himself in cold blood to become Lord Mayor of London. But for
one Whittington there have been centuries of Lord Mayors who never
dreamt of the Mansion House when they started business in the City.
The glory and the turtle came upon them, virtually unsolicited; and
even Whittington would probably not have addressed himself as he did
to his high achievement, had it not been for the unique campanula of
inspiration caught by his ear alone. Probably Napoleon early laid his
plans for attaining the mastership of France, possibly of Europe; but
did Cæsar begin life with a determination to conquer Rome and become
its dictator, or Cromwell with a sketch-plan for cutting off his king’s
head, cashiering his country’s parliament, and making himself Lord
Protector and military despot?
Millionaires are seldom so of set design. They begin, most probably,
by aiming at a competent fortune, but having got that length, the
acquired delight in pulling the strings of an extensive and possibly
adventurous undertaking, and not mere miserly greed, has kept them
at a task which they find they can perform, until the millions roll
in as a justification of their ideas and processes. In politics and
the professions men probably set out with a general aim at the best
position and the most money they can make for themselves; but very few,
I should imagine, of those who have reached the greatest eminence or
prosperity possible to them said in their youth, ‘I mean to be Prime
Minister, or Lord Chancellor, or Archbishop of Canterbury, or President
of the Royal College of Physicians, or of the Royal Academy.’ Buchanan
seems to have belonged to a type of character which does not include
either of the classes of persons just considered. Neither cupidity nor
ambition nor any of the ordinary self-aggrandising motives seems to
have had much, if any, place in his character. Apostrophising Buchanan
in his Funeral Elegy, Joseph Scaliger says:--
‘Contemptis opibus, spretis popularibus auris,
Ventosæque fugax ambitionis, obis.’
‘Despising wealth, spurning the mob’s applause, and shunning vain
ambition, thou passest away.’
This was literally true. Buchanan lived from hand to mouth during the
greater part of his career. But there is no evidence that he ever tried
to make a fortune. He might have prospered in the Church, as Dunbar was
willing to do. But he had ideas of his own on that subject, and neither
gold nor dignities could tempt him to sell his soul.
_Begging Letter-Writer_
He was often ‘hard up,’ but it does not appear to have depressed his
spirits. Indeed, he is never sprightlier, more epigrammatically witty,
or more genially humorous than when he is what some of us might call
‘begging’ from some wealthy friend who could appreciate his genius and
accomplishments. Here, for instance, is a ‘begging letter’ to Queen
Mary, in the days when they were still friends, and read Livy, and
doubtless indulged in fencing-matches of wit together:--
‘Do quod adest: opto quod abest tibi: dona darentur
Aurea, sors animo si foret æqua meo.
Hoc leve si credis, paribus me ulciscere donis:
Et quod abest, opta tu mihi: da quod adest.’
Which may be literally, or nearly so, according ‘to the best of my
knowledge and belief,’ as the affidavits say:--
‘To you I give what I do have: for you I wish what you
don’t have:
Golden, indeed, would be my gifts, were Fortune equal
to my will.
If you should chance to think this levity, in equal levities
have your revenge:
For me wish you what I don’t have: to me give you
what you do have.’
Dr. Hume Brown puts it neatly into rhyme thus:--
‘I give you what I have: I wish you what you lack:
And weightier were my gift, were fortune at my back.
Perchance you think I jest? A like jest then I crave:
Wish for me what I lack, and give me what you have.’
Take another in the same strain:--
‘Ad Jacobum, Moraviæ Comitem.
‘Si magis est, ut Christus ait, donare beatum,
Quam de munifica dona referre manu:
Aspice quam faveam tibi: sis ut dando beatus,
Non renuo fieri, te tribuente, miser.’
‘To James, Earl of Moray.
‘If, as Christ says, it is more blessed to give than to receive gifts
from a munificent hand, just see what a favour I am doing you: that
you may be blessed in giving, I am ready to play miserable receiver to
your happy donor.’
Or, to cite Dr. Brown again:--
‘It is more blest, saith Holy Writ, to give than to receive:
How great, then, is your debt to me, who take whate’er you give!’
With equally humorous familiarity he sends in an application, ‘Ad
Matthæum Leviniæ Comitem, Scotiæ Proregem’ (To Matthew, Earl of Lennox,
Regent of Scotland’). I quote only the concluding couplet:--
‘Denique da quidvis, podagram modo deprecor unam:
Munus erit medicis aptius illa suis.’
That is--
‘To be brief, give me whatever you like--only, not your gout. That
will be a more appropriate fee for the doctors who are trying to cure
it.’
Or to fall back on Dr. Brown’s translation once more:--
‘Since I am poor and you are rich, what happy chance is thine!
My modest wishes, too, you know--one nugget from your mine!
Only, whatever be your gift, let it not be your gout:
_That_, a meet present for your leech, I’d rather go without.’
These are merely samples of many communications, similar in object and
style, which he addressed, at various periods of his life, to quarters
where he thought they would not be ill-taken. As a rule, he supported
himself by ‘regenting’ in colleges, or acting as tutor in royal or
noble families. It was only when he could not make a better of it
that he asked Society, through its most likely magnates, to give him
something ‘to go on with.’ What else could he do? Carlyle’s description
of Thackeray as ‘writing for his life’ could never have applied to
Buchanan. Literature was not yet a profession or ‘bread-study.’ It
was not till next century that Milton got £5 for _Paradise Lost_; and
even Shakespeare made his money less as a writer than as a showman.
The idea of Buchanan or Erasmus--a much more importunate beggar than
Buchanan--going into business, say the wine or the wool trade, would
have been absurd. They would have ruined any house that adopted them
in two or three years, to say nothing of the indecency of allowing
intellectual leaders of high genius to be lost in work which could be
much better done by humbler men. There was nothing else for it, in
Buchanan’s case, but to do as he did.
Of course, in this age of contract and commerce, we are apt to
associate an idea of meanness and pitifulness with the conduct of
Buchanan and Erasmus and others in this matter. Our first feeling is
that nobody should give any other body anything except according to
bargain. Every man should be independent, and if he asks anything
outside a contract, he might as well go bankrupt at once. He must
clearly be a weakling, and the weak must go to the wall. The feudal
sentiment, however, amidst which Buchanan lived, was entirely
different, and had a nobler side than ours, although one does not want
feudalism back merely on that account. Kings and lords took everything
to themselves, in the shape of power and possession, that they could
lay their hands on; but it was on the understanding that they were to
make a generous use of what they had appropriated. _Noblesse oblige_
was still a maxim with vitality in it. The right men acknowledged it,
and acted on it; the ruffians, as their manner is, wherever they are
placed in life, ignored it. Patronage was not an act of grace: it was
a duty. It was part of the honourable service to society, by which the
patron’s tenure of his prosperity was conditioned. More particularly
must this duty have been recognised by right-minded possessors of
power and wealth who had felt the influence of the Renaissance, that
mighty and far-reaching effort of the human intellect to assert its
freedom and its varied energies against the narrowing and obscurantist
influences of scholasticism, reduced to its then existing state of
enslavement, often against its better knowledge and attempts at
self-emancipation, by Ecclesiastical authority, wielding the weapon of
Papal and Conciliar decree, sanctioned by fire and faggot.
Then there was still the tradition of hospitality which the Old Church,
with all its faults, had kept up. In these contractual days of ours,
there is very little hospitality, as it was defined by the Author of
Christianity. A modern dinner is generally a meeting of creditors,
or a combination of clever or stupid epicureans, the better to amuse
or otherwise enjoy themselves, according to their tastes in meat
and drink, or even conversation. It is often a case of undisguised
‘treating’ on the part of the so-called host, who wants to use his
so-called guests for a purpose, and whose performance might very
appropriately go into a schedule to some of the Bribery and Corruption
Acts. But in the days of the Old Church, a wandering or needy scholar
would have been welcomed at many, if not all, of the religious houses,
and treated on a very different footing from our applicants for relief
at the casual wards of one of our workhouses, probably the only
institution resembling Christian hospitality authorised by modern
organised society.
This latter may be a better arrangement, for anything I know to the
contrary. All I say is that it is different from what was recognised
in Buchanan’s day. It would never occur to Buchanan that he was doing
anything inconsistent with self-respect in putting his position
before people like Queen Mary, or Moray, or Lennox, and asking their
temporary aid or a permanent office. They had taken over the wealth
of the religious houses; did not their hospitalities pass with it?
They had divided up the country among themselves and others; were
they not honourably bound to see that a great civilising force like
Buchanan was not extinguished? Besides, he understood his own value.
A man is not six feet six inches high without being aware of it. He
knew what he was, and what he had made himself, and what he was worth,
and that he was giving as good as he was getting, or likely to get.
In those days a great master of the New Learning was an object of the
highest admiration, as a sort of intellectual Magician. Moreover, he
was a power, in as far as he was a leader of contemporary thought and
learning.
In these respects Buchanan was an invaluable acquisition to persons
like Mary, or Moray, or Lennox, or Knox, who must have winked at a good
deal in Buchanan, which he would not have stood in a less potent ally.
In his prime, and even until his death, no one had an equal command
over the universal ear of cultured Europe. To the rulers of his time he
was worth what, say, fifty friendly editors of newspapers--including
the _Times_ and all the sixpenny weeklies, as far as they are worth
anything would be to a politician of to-day. To Queen Mary especially,
with her refined intellectual tastes and her ambition to be a figure
in the world, it was no small matter to have the greatest and most
brilliant scholar-poet of the day as a part of her court, whether
he read Livy and exchanged wit with herself, or officiated as her
poet-laureate on great occasions. As a mere ornament he was worth a
considerable fraction of her best diamond necklace.
I am dwelling on this point because it will save time and trouble
afterwards, and accordingly I ask further if Edie Ochiltree, in later
times, and in a less feudalistic state of public sentiment, could
beg round the district, without loss of respect, on the strength of
his badge and uniform, testifying to past good service in his time
and station, why should not an eminent public servant like Buchanan,
in a totally different state of general feeling on such matters, ask
society, through representatives of it who, he knew, should not and
would not treat him roughly, to help him in prosecuting his shining
and useful career? He had done a good work on the High Street of the
World. He had sung it a song or played it a melody such as it would
hear nowhere else. Was he not entitled to send round his hat among the
listeners? Is it not what is done by every book-writer of to-day,
who, when the last page is finished, sends out a confederate in the
shape of a publisher to canvass the public--for a consideration--with
the book in one hand and the hat in the other? Is it not what is done,
_inter alia_, by every Parliamentary lawyer, who goes into the House of
Commons to grind his axe, when the fitting occasion arises, and he says
to his party leader, ‘I have fought two general elections for you. I
have spoken for you unnumbered times in the House and on the platform.
I have voted for you, up hill and down dale, through thick and thin,
right or wrong, and now I will trouble you for that Chancellorship, or
that Chief-Justiceship, or that Attorney-Generalship, or that Puisne
or County Court Judgeship that has just fallen vacant’? Except that
Buchanan and his work were not shams, but realities, the cases are the
same.
Buchanan’s enemies say that in accepting maintenance or preferment he
sold his independence to the donors, and when it is answered that he
showed anything but want of independence in the case of Queen Mary and
others, whom he subsequently came to oppose in the public interest,
they tack about and accuse him of the basest ingratitude--in biting
the hand that fed him, as they put it. It is as if in these days Sir
Gorgias Midas, M.P., were to say to some editor who had noticed a
speech of his unfavourably, ‘Ungrateful scribbler, have I not, over
and over again, dined you and wined you with the best that larder and
cellar can produce, and do you now turn and rend me?’ There have been
editors who would have answered, ‘Presumptuous moneybag, I suppose
I paid fully for my dinner with my company, and I am perfectly free
to criticise you as you deserve.’ Buchanan stood equally free in his
relations to his patrons. From the personal point of view, whether his
connection were regarded as an ornament, a pleasure, or a utility,
his alliance was worth his subsidy. From the public point of view it
was their duty, as trustees for the public property and progress, to
maintain a great civiliser like Buchanan in a position where his powers
had scope, while it was Buchanan’s privilege and duty to exercise his
creative and critical capacities in the public interest without fear
or favour. And this, as will be seen, is what Buchanan substantially
did. Knox and Melville repeatedly reminded Queen Mary and King James
that there was another kingdom in the realm besides theirs--the kingdom
of Christ, to wit--and suggested, or rather demanded, that their
Majesties should not meddle with officials of this spiritual kingdom
like themselves, the said Knox and Melville. This claim they rested
on a supernatural, and therefore disputable, basis. But there could be
nothing disputable about the ground Buchanan stood on. He too was a
potentate--of the intellect; a king of thought, learning, and poetic
might, and in that dominion, when it was necessary, bore himself with
a courage and independence that have not always been successfully
reproduced by his successors, when confronted with the monarchies and
lordships of material power and glory.
_No Notoriety Hunter_
This discussion arose in our endeavour to determine Buchanan’s
character so far as money-making was concerned. He was no money-maker.
_Contemptis opibus_--‘despising wealth’--is, as we have seen, Joseph
Scaliger’s account of him, meaning thereby that personally he did
not care for more money than would maintain the much other than
money-making career which he liked, and had set his heart on, keeping
himself independent by the labour of a scholar, but not hesitating
to ask payment, when he wanted it, from a society that was morally
indebted to him. His indifference, however, to wealth as a life-object
must not be confounded with the counsel of the ascetic preacher who
urges his hearers to forget the present world in thoughts of the
world to come, and wins, perhaps, a better living by an eloquent and
pessimistic sermon on the text which says that ‘the love of money is
the root of all evil.’ There is nothing to show that Buchanan did not
hold, with all sensible people, that there is a sense in which the
love of money is the root of all good, inasmuch as it is the men of
strong cupidity who organise industry and commerce, thereby laying
that foundation of material wealth without which there can be no
superstructure of leisured thought, learning, or art, acting, it may
be, only as the dray-horses of civilisation--some of them, of course,
are a good deal more--but worthy of all the corn they consume, although
were one desirous of exchanging ideas, it would not be to their
sumptuous stables that he would resort.
Neither does he appear to have set his heart upon the ordinary
objects of ambition, in the shape of fame or power. ‘Dear is fame to
the rhyming tribe.’ ‘That dearest wish of every poetic bosom--to be
distinguished,’ said Burns in his preface to the first edition of his
poems, and he, if any one, was entitled to speak. But in the same
preface he also says that to amuse himself amidst toil, to transcribe
the feelings in his own breast, to find some counterpoise to the
struggles of a world alien and uncouth to the poetic mind--‘these
were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found Poetry
to be its own reward.’ In other words, the poet may desire fame and
distinction for what he has done, yet it need not have been the desire
of fame and distinction that made him do it. Buchanan seems to have
been even more self-controlled or more indifferent than this account
of matters might imply. His numerous efforts had won him the highest
reputation, but he had taken no pains to advertise himself. He had
handed his productions here and there to friends who wished to see
them, and it was only the solicitation of those friends that prevented
his consigning to everlasting obscurity some of the brightest things
he, or indeed any one else, ever wrote.
His most famous production as a poet, his version of the Hebrew Psalms,
or rather series of poems based upon these, was certainly not written
for fame. Every Humanist of eminence was expected to try his hand upon
the Psalms, and when Buchanan found himself in Portugal under lock and
key, at the instance of the Inquisition, among a set of monks, whom he
hits off as equally good-natured and ignorant, and who had been told
off to instruct him in orthodoxy, he addressed himself to a classic
rendering of the Psalms with the double purpose of discharging his duty
by his Humanistic Vocation, and doing something that might redeem his
time and his temper from the boredom of the uncongenial society amidst
which misfortune had placed him. There does not seem in all this much
of that passionate desire of distinction to which Burns confesses. It
is said, however, that fame was his object in commencing and carrying
on his poem on the _Sphere_, which was undoubtedly planned on an
elaborate and extensive scale. If fame was his desire, it was not a
very consuming one, for he was five-and-twenty years at least over it,
and left it unfinished at last, although goaded by friends to hasten
its production.
What does he say on the matter himself? Writing to Tycho Brahe in
1576, six years before his death, and more than twenty after he began
to work at the _Sphere_, he says that bad health had compelled him,
_spem scribendi carminis in posterum penitus abjicere_,--‘completely
to abandon the hope of writing a poem for posterity.’ Three years
afterwards, writing to a literary friend in England, who, like many
others, kept dunning him for his promised books, and even for ‘copy,’
he says, with respect to his ‘astronomical’ aims in poetry, he had not
so much voluntarily abandoned them, as been obliged reluctantly to
submit to the deprivation of them; _neque enim aut nunc libet nugari,
aut si maxime vellem per ætatem licet. Accessit eo historiæ scribendæ
labor_,--‘for neither am I now greatly disposed for mere trifling,
nor, were I never so much disposed, will my years allow it. Then in
addition to my other difficulties there is the labour of writing my
_History_’; the plain meaning being that as his years forbade him
to do both the _History_ and the _Sphere_, he elected to go on with
the _History_ and give up the _Sphere_, as a form of _nugari_ or
‘dilettantism.’
All this does not look very like a burning eagerness for posthumous
fame, at all events of the kind that moves a certain class of people to
leave money for hospitals, or almshouses, or learned foundations, to
perpetuate names that would otherwise never have risen out of obscurity
or escaped oblivion. As a matter of fact, Buchanan knew that he was
celebrated, but no one had a poorer opinion of the work that had won
him reputation than he had himself, not from the modesty of merit,
as the common form carelessly puts it, but from the consciousness of
merit, and because he felt that it was in him to do better. He hated
the idea of having more celebrity than he deserved, and wanted to
produce something that would show he was not an impostor or a quack.
In short, he did not want more fame, but what he thought a better and
honester title to the fame he had. That, however, is not the passion
for fame, but simply self-respect, and an unselfish anxiety for the
good name of those friends who had staked their reputation for taste
and judgment on his ability for turning out the highest class of work.
This is not the love of glory, but something better, although even if
it were, it would not necessarily be either weak or wrong, provided the
subject of it knew what he was doing in giving a rational scope to a
natural impulse, and that he could and would give humanity something
worth the prize of its praise.
Buchanan himself tells us why he gave up the _Sphere_ and took up the
_History_. It was primarily to gratify his friends, who thought that
such a work was a want of the time, more useful and more suitable to
Buchanan’s years than poetry; while he himself assures us, and there is
no reason to doubt his declaration, that he desired to set before his
royal pupil, James VI., the warnings and the encouragements derivable
from the story of his predecessors on the throne, including his own
ill-advised and ill-fated mother. It was no fault of Buchanan’s if
James despised his teacher’s counsel, and, listening to flatterers,
took up with the Divine Right doctrine, by impressing which on his
unhappy son, both through precept and example, he virtually destined
him to jump the life to come from the scaffold of Whitehall.
Buchanan’s friends seem to have tried to tempt him to undertake the
_History_ by representing that no subject was _aut uberius ad laudem,
aut firmius ad memoriæ conservandam diuturnitatem_,--‘better fitted to
win him renown or prolong his memory.’ It is not on the strength of
such hopes, however, that he describes himself as working. It was, by
his own account, only the shame of leaving unfinished a task he had
engaged himself to his friends to perform that made him persevere at a
labour which, he says, _in ætate integra permolestus, nunc vero in hac
meditatione mortis, inter mortalitatis metum, et desinendi pudorem,
non potest non lentus esse et ingratus, quando nec cessare licet, nec
progredi lubet_,--‘would, even in the flower of my age, have been a
burden, but now, in contemplation of my end, what between the dread of
death interrupting me before I am done, and the shame there would be
in abandoning my undertaking, I neither find myself free to stop, nor
feel any pleasure in going on.’ Not much there of glory for himself,
although something of an heroic devotion to the claims of friendship
and the call of duty!