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An experience, especially in youth, is quickly overlaid by others, and is not at the moment fully comprehended. But it is overlaid, not lost.
My earliest recollections are not of myself, but of my environment.
Two streams converged through "dens" to a junction below the rope-walk. Both were of small volume, and one was foul with the discards of the bleaching-works. There must have been a time when sea-trout in a spate ran up them from the Firth, but now in their lower courses they were like sewers, and finished their degraded life in a drain in the town harbour. There was no beauty in those perverted little valleys, except in spring, when the discoloured and malodorous waters flowed through a mist of blue hyacinths.
Those woods, when the other day I revisited them, seemed slender copses with fields of roots and grain within a stone's throw. But to a child they were illimitable forests.
Also I had found in the library a book of Norse mythology which strongly captured my fancy. Norns and Valkyries got into the gales that blew up the Firth, and blasting from a distant quarry was the thud of Thor's hammer.
Sin was a horrid thing, but not the Arch-Sinner.
From The Holy War I acquired my first interest in military operations, which cannot have been the intention of the author,
The woods, oddly enough, were an invitation to books.
Old folks had still stories to tell of James Hogg and Walter Scott. There was a great-uncle of ours who lived to be a friend of my own children, and who as a small boy had as his nurse an old woman who had been scared as a little girl by the clans passing in the 'Forty-five on their march to Derby.
This attachment to a corner of earth induced a love of nature in general, and from my early affection I have drawn a passion for landscapes in many parts of the globe, landscapes often little akin to the gentle Border hills.
As a student I was wholly obscure.
Men are by nature Greeks or Romans, Hellenists or Latinists. Murray was essentially a Greek; my own predilection has always been for Rome; but I owe it to him that I was able to understand something of the Greek spirit and still more to come under the spell of the classic discipline in letters and life.
This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. That is why the Oxford school of classical "Greats" seems to me so fruitful, for it compels a close study of one or two masters like Plato and Thucydides. The classics enjoined humility.
Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine—the virtue of a clean bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern.
For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal.
I came to philosophy quite naturally as a consequence of my youthful theological environment.
But the fundamentals of the Christian religion were so entwined with my nature that I never found occasion to question them. I wanted no philosophy to rationalise them, for they seemed to me completely rational. Philosophy was to me always an intellectual exercise, like mathematics, not the quest for a faith.
My interests, as I have said, lay not in the search for a creed, but in the study of the patterns which different thinkers made out of the universe. I had a tidy mind and liked to arrange things in compartments even when I did not take the arrangement too seriously. This meant that inevitably I missed much; quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis.
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.
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 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.
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.
Buchan on his early efforts at fiction. Harsh with himself but not inaccurate. The style of an early work like A Lost Lady of Old Years is leaden compared to a later book of similar setting and theme like The Blanket of the Dark, much less his thrillers.
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
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It was too self-conscious for greatness.
I found in its people what I most admired in human nature—realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence sweetened by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom.
He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.
A man is only truly intimate with the countryside which he has known as a child, for then he lived very near the ground, and knew the smell of the soil and the small humble plants and the things that live at the roots of the grasses. He explored it on all-fours, whereas he strides or gallops over later landscapes.
it is wonderful enough to see your goal on a far hill-top and travel with it in sight for hours or days, but it is more wonderful to come on it suddenly when you have wearily topped the last ridge.
Youth is inclined to political extremes, and it is small wonder that the causes which most appeal to them are the grandiloquent world-reconstructions; but the reason, I think, is not only the rhetorical turn of youth, but the fact that such causes require sacrifices and an austere discipline.
The limited outlook of my early youth had broadened. Formerly I had regarded life as a pilgrimage along a strait and steep path on which the pilgrim must keep his eyes fixed. I prided myself on a certain moral austerity, but now I came to realise that there was a good deal of self-interest in that outlook, like the Puritan who saw in his creed not only the road to Heaven but the way to worldly success. I began to be attracted by the environs as well as by the road, and I became more charitable in my judgment of things and men.
Human beings were compounded of both heavenly and hellish elements, with infinite possibilities of sorrow and joy. In consequence I had an acute sense of sin, and a strong hatred of whatever debased human nature. The conception of mankind, current in some quarters, as a herd of guzzling, lecherous little mammals seemed to me the last impiety.
I am convinced that an education in the humanities should be supplemented and corrected by a training either in law or in some exact science.
Behind all the dirt and gloom there was a wonderful cosiness, and every street corner was peopled by ghosts from literature and history. I acquired a passion for snugness, which I fancy is commoner in youth than is generally supposed. A young man, a little awed by the novelty of everything, is eager to find his own secure niche.
I had become a close student of eighteenth-century memoirs, and the fad had one good result, for it made me a devotee of Edmund Burke.
to mix with abler men than yourself is to learn humility.
He detested lies, and diplomacy demands something less than the plain truth.
The drawback to a completely rational mind is that it is apt to assume that what is flawless in logic is therefore practicable.
Long before the War ended I was travelling far and wide, often in areas where fighting was going on, and I was fairly often in difficulties. I have ridden many miles faster than I cared, to avoid losing my breeches to a commando whose clothing had given out.
"Shop," the talk of an expert on his own subject, has always seemed to me the best kind of conversation,
I had regarded the Dominions patronisingly as distant settlements of our people who were making a creditable effort under difficulties to carry on the British tradition. Now I realised that Britain had at least as much to learn from them as they had from Britain. I found something new to me, something in their outlook at once imaginative and realistic which I had never met before. They were an audacious folk, very ready, if need be, to throw rule and convention overboard, and often I was saved by their sagacious lawlessness.
Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown. But Joy is a positive thing; in Joy one does not only feel secure, but something goes out from oneself to the universe, a warm possessive effluence of love. There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness. It was Happiness that I knew in those rare moments. The world was a place of inexhaustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of something infinite, ineffable and immortal, in very truth the garment of God.
Empire might be made dawned upon certain minds with almost the force of a revelation. To-day the word is sadly tarnished. Its mislikers have managed to identify it with uglinesses like corrugated-iron roofs and raw townships, or, worse still, with a callous racial arrogance. Its dreams, once so bright, have been so pawed by unctuous hands that their glory has departed. Phrases which held a world of idealism
I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching the rest out of her culture and traditions, and the spirit of the Dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands. I saw in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home open country instead of a blind alley. I saw hope for a new afflatus in art and literature and thought. Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people. It was humanitarian and international; we believed that we were laying the basis of a
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I had now acquired a large circle of acquaintances, and had become an habitual diner-out, but it was in a society with little charm for me. The historic etiquette was breaking down; in every walk money seemed to count for more; there was a vulgar display of wealth, and a rastaquouère craze for luxury. I began to have an ugly fear that the Empire might decay at the heart.
A man who has been nourished on German metaphysics should make a point of expressing his thoughts in plain workaday English, for the technical terms of German philosophy seem to have a kind of hypnotic power; they create a world remote from common reality where reconciliations and syntheses flow as smoothly and with as little meaning as in an opiate dream.