John Campbell Smith

“ He was by nature somewhat of a sceptic, the teacher in Latin—and who can tell what beside?—of Montaigne—most candid and sincere of sceptics—by necessity a doubter, as true seekers of truth, especially in dark, troubled, fermenting ages, cannot help being. He was a philosopher—a Stoic probably, as most impecunious philosophers are compelled to be more or less, capable of bearing the inevitable with patience, and of waiting to solve difficulties by skill and cautious experiment rather than by violence or deceit! ”

“ If Buchanan and Morton were the great friends Melville says they were, Buchanan was not treated in a friendly manner. It takes two to make a friendship, and by the proverb it is ‘giff gaff,’ not giff and no gaff, that creates the connection. ‘Love me, love my dog,’ is one thing; but love me, and let me love your horse à la Morton, is very much another thing. Loyalty is tested by conduct in small matters, even more than in great ones, and in the circumstances stated, it would not have been wonderful if Buchanan’s feeling of personal liking for Morton, if it ever existed, underwent a change. ”

“ John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was a small man—a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious houses, ‘rooks’ nests’ requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily to blame. ”

“ That Queen Mary should have been no worse than she was in a world with her royal cousin and rival flaunting her fictitious moral and physical beauties at the head of it, and getting prematurely canonised as the Good Queen Bess, ought certainly to qualify or blot out for ever all that can be stated truly and justly in condemnation or even grave censure of Queen Mary. ”

“ Buchanan, on the intellectual side of him, was not merely a poet, but a wit and humorist—a type of mind not in itself easy to harmonise with being of ‘gud religion.’ Perhaps if the Puritans had not been in so many cases hopelessly wooden, it might have saved their cause from having so many joints in its harness open to the shafts of the satirical sharpshooter, but they would probably not have done so great and grave a work in the world. ”

“ That the vigour of the brochure itself, backed up by Buchanan’s immense reputation, went far to make Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is beyond question. To the same extent he made himself the bête noire of Mary’s friends and apologists, and very brutal and very black they certainly made him out to be. In more recent times a school of sentimental historians has arisen, who refuse to see in Mary either fault or flaw, and recognise in her a sort of spotless goddess, of irresistible charm, thrown away upon an unworthy age. ”

“ Buchanan’s lot was the common lot of unendowed, and therefore unappreciated, genius. The greatest scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, one of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe for all time, he was a rustic in dress, a plain, unpretentious, non-assertive inhabitant of the European villages called cities, known to him as St. Andrews and Edinburgh; a man pure of life in a vicious, half-decent age ”

“ For myself, I fail to find much of the theology of the Covenanters credible—although I must say I should like if we could hear Knox and Melville, or even Cameron and Cargill, on the existing state of things. I think we should get some different guidance from what we are receiving from those blind leaders of the blind who shiveringly and stammeringly attempt to fill their places. For it is almost impossible to appraise too highly the service done by the Covenanters for the cause of liberty and popular education ”

“ Buchanan was a humorist, and saw the ludicrous side of existence with a depth and keenness and enjoyment very different from the barbarian faculty which produced the ‘merry bourds’ of Knox and certain of his iconoclastic cronies. Even the prospect of having soon to leave the world could not make him utterly solemn, although the circumstances lend a grim aspect to the humour which may make it distasteful to wooden seriousness. ”

“ The Renaissance was a wakening up of the human intellect, an assertion of ‘private judgment’ in every possible sphere of its exercise, and in innumerable instances the Humanist [Pg 84] created a faith and a code of morals for himself, although for comfort and convenience he might conceal his spiritual interior from the view of the ignorant and the unenlightened. In many an instance he held that there was one law for the men who understand, and another for the ‘vulgar’ who cannot understand. ”

“ There is nothing about him of the zeal of the renegade, who often out-Herods Herod in championing his new faith—a tendency from which Knox was by no means free. In his History he evidently tries to hold the balance fair between Catholic and Protestant, and is as just to Mary of Guise as to Moray. His whole religious career points to a man who thought profoundly and inquired anxiously after truth, and was careful to give expression to his feeling of reverence for the mystery of being by outward conformity with a creed and ritual to which he could more or less reconcile his reason. ”

“ If a man would hold his peace, they would let him alone. Erasmus condemned the outbreak of Luther, whose faith in the immense amount of doctrine he left untouched he perhaps regarded as simply a huge faculty of taking things for granted, ending in straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel. For myself, as one of the crowd, I am glad that with all his blunders and shortcomings, so easy to point out at this distance, Luther took his own way, and did what he did. Truth is greater than peace. ”

“ Scotland, directed against the Hamiltons and their friends—a publication full of practical insight, good sense, and cogent argument, the work of a wise, earnest, sagacious man, who in the zeal for the good of his country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration, in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton when he too became a political pamphleteer, more rhapsodical than relevant. He suspected the Hamiltons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, whose birth he had welcomed as a star of hope for his country. ”

“ The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan with many a call of duty, and cast upon him loads of multifarious work, such as perhaps never in the history of human-kind before were thrown upon the most accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks assigned to Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon him, reflect no inconsiderable honour and credit upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised countrymen. ”

“ It may be objected that men like Buchanan and Erasmus did not act honestly in remaining silent and conforming members of a system which they secretly regarded as in many vital respects false, and an imposture upon the world. Of course, it is to be said for Buchanan that he did ultimately come out of it; but then, why not sooner? Why did he not earlier follow the lead of Luther and Calvin and Knox? [Pg 103] For one thing, it must be remembered that even these great heroes of veracity had probably their reticences. At all events, they have left to us the legacy of an incompletely performed work. ”

“ Scaliger’s ascription to Buchanan of a spirit superior to the temptations of wealth and fame seems thus fairly well justified; but what of his further claim that he was insensible to ambition? He rose to be the foremost Latin poet and man of letters, or indeed poet and man of letters of any kind in his day, and to the highest positions, political, ecclesiastical, educational, in his native land. ”

“ The rebellion against Scholasticism, the resuscitation of the old Pagan spirit in thought and art and science, involved a staggering blow to Ecclesiastical Faith. Men whose minds were steeped in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome could not take sympathetically, I will not say, to Christianity, but to the dogmatic system of the Church, and even to much of its ethical teaching. ‘Humanity,’ in the sense of ‘the humanities,’ really meant the antithesis of Divinity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The whole thing broke poor Knox’s heart. It did not ruffle Buchanan, although he was probably the greatest educational enthusiast in Europe at the moment. But he was really a greater intelligence and a calmer master of himself than Knox, and probably knew that any one who expects to find more than twenty-five per cent.—if [Pg 115] so much—of the race as existing at any given moment worthy of intellectual or moral respect, must either have had little experience of life, or possess a very low standard of human excellence. ”

“ Bearing in mind that Buchanan carried his life in his hand, and that he had never undertaken the function of religious teacher, only a very heroic person could afford to say that he had not done all he dared, and that he showed himself deeply in earnest about Truth, when at last he had the opportunity, and really ‘was of gud religion for a poet,’ and even for a more hopeful character. ”

“ He may not have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and courage, the like of which will never be exhibited by his traducers to the end of time. Those who can believe him guilty of base ingratitude and malicious falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best from the worst in human nature and in human history.
Buchanan’s truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be best inferred in our time from his History of Scotland, at which he had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from his boyhood. ”

“ Wallace has left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace’s ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. ”

“ Probably, too, he had noticed the habitual doctrine of Epictetus, ‘this is the great task of life also, to discern things and divide them, and say, “Outward things are not in my power; to will is in my power. Where shall I seek the Good, and where the Evil? ”

“ Of course, comparison of things or people generically distinct is scarcely possible. You can hardly compare a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems less difficult to ask whether Cæsar or Shakespeare, Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater man. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intellectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an unsurpassed European reputation among the Renaissance magnates of his day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 [Pg 37] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He made himself master of the spirit, ideas, and style of the great writers and thinkers of classic antiquity, because it was the work that lay nearest to his hand, and because he liked it—passionately—and could not rest until it was all and easily his own, and not because he thought he could make it pay, whether in money or reputation, or both. ”

“ Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the man to be a cautious, judicious reformer, not the man to be an impetuous, frantic destroyer, too rash and unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some of them profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords skilled in few arts except the arts of war and theft. ”

“ I do not think that Buchanan suffered much in this way—certainly not so much as many others among the leaders and supporters of the Reformation; while any damage he sustained was amply compensated by his gains. Knox and other Reformers—I speak of Scotland—were driven by the violence of the recoil involved in their assault on the Catholic and Feudal system into extreme positions, necessarily harmful to themselves, and bequeathing legacies of disadvantage to their successors. ”

“ Dryden, indeed, declared that Milton stole his Defence of the People of England from Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos; but that was only ‘Glorious John’s’ inglorious way of making himself controversially disagreeable. Milton put his own genius and experience into Buchanan’s idea, and produced an essentially original work. But what although he had not? Milton was fighting a great battle, and was entitled, or rather bound, to use the best weapons, wherever he could get them. The anti-plagiarising spirit is often a mere form of vanity. ”

“ A Stoic Philosopher We are now, perhaps, in a better position to face Melville’s further characterisation of him as a ‘Stoik philosopher, of gud religion for a poet.’ That Sir James knew something about Stoicism, although perhaps not very deeply, is shown by his apparent familiarity with the Seneca, whom he quotes in that remarkable preface of his, although only for a sarcastic comment upon those foolish political Stoics who, like Sir James himself, throw away their Stoical honesty upon unappreciative ‘Princes,’ and repent of their Stoicism when too late. ”

“ Renaissance Morals Part of the price paid for the enlightenment of the Renaissance was that in too many instances its breadth of ethical as well as intellectual outlook was allowed by its possessor to sink into a practical licentiousness, open or concealed, that corrupted, or even totally destroyed, the moral and spiritual faculties. I cannot see proof of any such results in Buchanan’s case. ”

“ 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 deliber [Pg 29] ately 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. ”