" We 'd better 'ave
this out," he said. "Lady Sevenoaks, you 're what the Americans call
a stand-patter, begging your pardon. You still think of the nation as split up
into classes each utterly different in temperament and outlook.
That's where you're wrong. You Liberals are the worst
reactionaries. You 'aven't any notion of the ordinary man. Nothing like as much
as the Tory. Why, in my old part of the world people used to 'sir ' the Liberal
member and touch their 'ats to him, while everybody called the Tory candidate
by his Christian name. There ain't much in that, but it's a parable of the way
you have got into the 'abit of cast-iron class notions. This war has shown that
all classes are much the same at bottom. Ask the soldiers. They've learned more
about the British people in the trenches than you'd learn in politics in a
hundred years."
Mr. Maldwin signified his assent. "That's true
of the two things I know anything about — sport and fighting. I always
guessed it, but I learned it pretty thoroughly in France. That's why I'm for
the ordinary man, who's the chap that won the war. I'd be for the Labour
Party to-morrow if it would buck up and reform its stable. It ain't the horses
that's to blame; it's the poor stamp of jock."
"What I say," continued Mr. Jonas, "is that
so long as we go on talking about classes as if they were things established by
'Eaven since the creation of the world, we are asking for trouble. You'll never
get to understand about folks in a different walk of life from you if you think
of them as somehow different by nature. Things are easier in America, because
they tell me that classes are fluid there and their boundaries are always
shifting. That's so, Mrs. Lavender?"
"True," said the lady. "William was raised
in a shack in Idaho, and if the present rate of taxation goes on, my boys will
be getting back to that shack."
"I'm not speaking about classes," said Lady
Sevenoaks. "I am speaking about creeds. Do you mean to deny that
Bolshevism is rampant in British Labour to-day?"
"Of course I do. It's a bad 'abit to call a thing
names when you don't understand it. Of course the workers are restless, same as
everybody else; and since they ‘ave won the war they want a square deal with
the fruits of peace. But they ain't Bolsheviks — barring a few dozen miscreants
who should be in gaol. What's Bolshevism anyhow? Judging by the Russian
specimens, apart from their liking for 'olesale 'omicide, it seems to mean a
general desire to pull things up by the roots. Well, that ain't the line of the
British working-man. He is the soundest conservative on the globe, and what he
wants is to get his roots down deeper. In other countries the poor man ‘as a
grip on the soil. In this country he 'asn't 'ad that for two hundred years. We
are over-industrialised, as the saying is; but a root's got to be found
somewhere, and he finds it in his Unions. That's why he's so jealous about
them, and quite right too. He wants to find security and continuity somewhere.
Now that's the opposite of Bolshevism. The true Bolsheviks are the
intellectuals that want to make him only a bit of scientific terminology, as
Jock Willison says, and the plutocrats that want to make him a cog in a
cold-'earted machine. They're the folk that are trying to up- turn the
foundations of things.'
"I should define Bolshevism differently,' said Sir
William. "Its chief motive seems to be the establishment of the tyranny of
a class. It's the same thing as Prussianism, only its class is the
proletariat."
"I'm dead-sick of that word 'proletariat,'" said
Mr. Jonas. "It's part of the bastard scientific jargon that's come over
from Germany. I wouldn't call my dog such an 'ard name. But you're right, Sir
William. Only what I'm arguing is that Bolshevism is a very old thing, and that
there is n't much of it in the British working-classes. I'll tell you who were
'earty Bolsheviks in their day. The Manchester School and the Utilitarians.
They wanted to run the world mainly for the benefit of one class, and they
considered only material ends. It 's true they didn't dabble in crime,
but that was because they were rich, frock-coated gents and didn't need
to."
Sir William Jacob was far from pleased at Mr. Jonas's
assent to his definition, followed as it was by this unexpected illustration.
"You misread the Manchester School very gravely, Mr. Jonas.”
NOTE:
The excerpt above is
from The Island Of Sheep, a largely unknown
book written and published by the famous Scottish novelist, politician, statesman,
international taxation expert and publisher John Buchan in 1919 under the
pseudonym “Cadmus and Harmonia.” I
encountered it for the first time earlier this week in a digitized copy
available through the New York Public Library website.
In 2001, John Buchan
scholar Michael Redley of Oxford University, described the book as follows:
“At the Armistice in
1918 the most productive period of John Buchan's life lay just ahead. Leaving
the civil service aged 44 after war service in propaganda, he settled quickly
into his peacetime stride, not just as the popular writer we know and love but
as one of the most creative and energetic political activists of his
generation.
The foundation for
Buchan's extraordinary outlay of energy and ideas in this period lay in a
little book. It appeared in late 1919 under the pseudonym 'Cadmus and
Harmonia'. Buchan told his American publisher that it had generated 'a good
deal of interest among political people'. However sales were disappointing when
the book appeared early the following year in the United States. There was wry
amusement when a magazine called The Butcher's
Advocate
asked for a review copy in the mistaken belief that it had to do with the meat
business. This was The Island of Sheep.
The book uses a
late-Victorian style of literary entertainment which was already well out of
date by the 1920s. A house party of characters from all walks of life gathers
to discuss the issues of the day. Buchan had used a similar device, which he
called an apologue, a political statement dressed up as an entertainment, in The Lodge in the Wilderness,
an imperialist tract which had appeared in 1907. Half the fun of it - innocent
it seems in our more worldly times - is to spot the semi-portraits of famous
contemporaries, many of them Buchan's own friends and acquaintances from the
war years. The Island of Sheep worries away at
the problems of the post-war world, the collapse of Liberalism, the rise of
working class politics, how international relations will work under the League
of Nations, and the role and definition of democracy in the modern world.
The book has no
pretensions as literature. It is occasionally charming and amusing, but no
more. The lack of that polished finish which generally characterises Buchan's
published writing is what I particularly like about the book. Buchan never wrote
anything which reveals so directly the moral and intellectual basis of his own
beliefs. He claimed that the book was written largely by Susan, his wife, and
that his contribution had been 'joining the flats'. Susan said in her own
autobiography that they worked on the book together. This is almost certainly
true, but that Buchan had nothing to do with the main ideas in the book does
not stand up to serious scrutiny.”
Buchan allowed The Island of Sheep to go out of print and later refused requests for further reprintings. Redley
believes that this indicated a desire to eradicate his previous critique of American
isolationism, which was inconsistent with his current intentions, while serving as
Great Britain’s Governor-General of Canada, to close the gap between American
and British views of the world. Buchan completed the book’s “burial” by actually re-using its title for the fifth and final
Richard Hannay novel (which I highly recommend for its remarkable descriptions of maritime Norway).
I agree that the book’s
directness and its lack of “polished
finish,” something readers might normally
experience as a negative quality, make this an unusual curio in the Buchan
canon. However, the lack of burnished style and classic “Buchan
pace” doesn’t mean the volume lacks Buchan vigor and sinew, and the book speaks the
author's political mind and views clearly and forcefully.
Redley again: “Fundamental to the conclusions of the book
is the belief, which was anathema to most people of his class at the time, that
the Labour Party must quickly gain experience of power. The instincts of the
people should be trusted, and at the same time broadened by making higher
education and culture accessible to all.
It was a radical prospectus for its times, but one with a future. The
most successful political ideology in Britain between the wars, 'Baldwinism',
was a compound of these very ideas. The Island of Sheep was one of its
earliest tracts, and Buchan went on to be one of its main architects.”
It’s good and bracing to discover, to be taken by surprise and captured, by books you never knew
existed. That is what happened to me tumbling on the "original" of The Island of Sheep, looking both ancient and fresh in its facsimile electronic digital format. Thinking about John Buchan's life and career, I re-imagine the time before television and videogame distraction and abstraction, when energetic polymaths really used their minds to go to town.
