JOHN BUCHAN’S UNCOLLECTED JOURNALISM A CRITICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION APPENDIX ANNOTATED ARTICLES APPENDIX ANNOTATED ARTICLES CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 ARTICLE 1: ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’……………………………………………………...... 7 ARTICLE 2: ‘Nonconformity in Literature’…………………………………………………. 15 ARTICLE 3: ‘The National “Malaise”’…………………………………………………………. 22 ARTICLE 4: ‘The Celtic Spirit in Literature’………………………………………………… 28 ARTICLE 5: ‘An Imperial Club for London’…………………………………………………. 32 ARTICLE 6: ‘The Glamour of High Altitudes’……………………………………………… 36 ARTICLE 7: ‘The Life of the Kaffir’……………………………………………………………… 41 ARTICLE 8: ‘The Practical Mystic’……………………………………………………………… 47 ARTICLE 9: ‘Sir Richard Burton’………………………………………………………………… 52 ARTICLE 10: ‘The Urban Sentiment’…………………………………………………………. 58 ARTICLE 11: ‘Local Colour’……………………………………………………………………….. 63 ARTICLE 12: ‘History and Life’………………………………………………………………….. 68 ARTICLE 13: ‘George Meredith’……………………………………………………………….. 73 ARTICLE 14: ‘The Poetics of Aristotle’………………………………………………………. 80 ARTICLE 15: ‘Greek Religion and Modern Folk-Lore’……………………………….. 86 ARTICLE 16: ‘The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’………………………. 92 ARTICLE 17: ‘African Secret History’………………………………………………………… 98 ARTICLE 18: ‘Montrose’………………………………………………………………………….. 105 ARTICLE 19: ‘Ypres To-day’……………………………………………………………………… 112 ARTICLE 20: ‘A New Defence of Poetry’………………………………………………….. 119 ARTICLE 21: ‘This Freedom’……………………………………………………………………. 125 ARTICLE 22: ‘Adventure Stories: From Defoe to Stevenson’………………….. 128 ARTICLE 23: ‘The Most Difficult Form of Fiction’……………………………………. 133 ARTICLE 24: ‘Conservatism and Progress’……………………………………………… 138 ARTICLE 25: ‘England’s Changing Face’……………………………………………….... 143 APPENDIX ANNOTATED ARTICLES INTRODUCTION Despite the growing interest in Buchan’s work during recent years, as outlined in the review of Buchan scholarship in Chapter One, relatively little attention has been paid to the uncollected essays represented by his journalism. His biographers, Janet Adam Smith and Andrew Lownie, have used the essays sparingly to illustrate some aspects of Buchan’s life, for example his university days (’Oxford and Her Influence’ (K1) in Smith, Biography 48-49; ‘Some College Memories’ (C117) in Lownie, Presbyterian Cavalier 33) and his time at the Spectator (‘“Spectator” Memories’ (C119) in Smith 81 and Lownie 67). Both also use Buchan’s first published article, ‘Angling in Still Waters’ (N1), to illustrate his early, rather arty and flowery ‘Stevensonian’ style (Smith 37-38, Lownie 33), but Smith goes a little further in discussing Buchan’s appreciation of Stevenson’s ‘gospel of life’ (33) in his obituary article on Stevenson (Article 1 in this Appendix), his criticism of the Kailyard school (86-87) in ‘Nonconformity in Literature’ (Article 2), and his war reporting for the Times, quoting from ‘Ypres To-day’ (Article 19) and two of his other Times despatches (194-96). However, these are rare and brief instances of attempts to analyse Buchan’s journalism; more often, Smith merely quotes from his articles to illustrate Buchan’s views on certain topics, such as his support for Lord Milner (133) in ‘Lord Milner’s High Commissionership: An Appreciation’ (H58), and his growing interest in Zionism after he became a Member of Parliament (316) in ‘Ourselves and the Jews’ (H175). At one point, after listing some of the topics covered by Buchan in his early articles for the Spectator, she is content to provide five long quotations from different essays as examples of his journalism without any further comment (82-83). Other Buchan critics have tended to adopt a similar approach to Buchan’s journalism as his biographers by using his articles to illustrate and support the specific arguments they are making, rather than attempting to analyse the essays themselves or link them with other aspects and themes in Buchan’s literary writing. Juanita Kruse follows this approach in her book John Buchan and the Idea of Empire (1989). She makes reference, for example, to some of Buchan’s articles for the Spectator (H8, H48) and the Quarterly Review (H62, H91) in discussing Buchan’s attitudes to racial problems in South Africa and the wider Empire (48-53), and uses two of his Graphic articles (H181, H182) to illustrate his views on the League of Nations (172-73). In the only other full-length studies of Buchan’s work, David 1 Daniell’s The Interpreter’s House (1975) quotes from the same article in appreciation of Lord Milner (H58) as Janet Adam Smith (105), but otherwise makes no use of Buchan’s essays; while Nathan Waddell’s Modern John Buchan alludes only to ‘The Most Difficult Form of Fiction’ (Article 23) from Buchan’s uncollected journalism (82, 85). However, Waddell makes use of several essays from the three published collections detailed in the Bibliography at the end of Part I1, thus reflecting the general tendency of Buchan critics to confine themselves to these editions as they are more readily available than his uncollected journalism. This trend is followed in the two volumes of critical essays published to date2, in which the only significant use of Buchan’s uncollected journalism is contained in the essays by Michael Redley and Peter Henshaw in Reassessing John Buchan (2009). Redley’s essay, ‘John Buchan and the South African War’, refers to a dozen examples of Buchan’s journalism to illustrate his views on South Africa, including racial policy in the gold mines (71-72), citing H19 and H71, and the treatment of native Africans (73-74, citing C113, H85, H139, and H168). Henshaw’s essay on ‘John Buchan, America and the “British World”, 1904-40’, refers to five of Buchan’s Spectator articles (110) which considered America’s status as a colonial power and her relations with Britain (H34, H38, H60, H116, H128), and draws attention (110-11) to his reviews for the Spectator in 1914 of books about Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War (C101 and D78). There are also very few references to Buchan’s uncollected journalism in academic sub- disciplines other than Buchan scholarship, or by critics who are not usually regarded as Buchan specialists. Joseph Kestner in his 2000 survey The Edwardian Detective links Buchan’s definitions of the adventure tale and the detective story in his ‘Adventure Stories: From Defoe to Stevenson’ (Article 22) with his use of elements from both genres in The Thirty-Nine Steps (363), later expanding on this in his Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction (2010) to argue that Buchan’s essay on adventure stories ‘signals a transition from the adventure text to the spy text’ (173) which is exemplified by The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). The historian David Stafford had earlier referred to Buchan’s opinion in the same essay that Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1902) was the best adventure story published in the first quarter of the twentieth century (‘John Buchan’s Tales of Espionage’ 12), while another historian, Colin Storer, references Buchan’s 1915 article for Land and Water on ‘The German Mind’ (I 85) in his discussion of ‘German Stereotypes in John 1 Briefly, these are: Some Eighteenth Century Byways (1908); Homilies and Recreations (1926); and Comments and Characters (1940). 2 Reassessing John Buchan (2009), edited by Kate Macdonald; and John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (2013), edited by Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell. 2 Buchan’s Greenmantle’ (2009: 44-45). JP Parry, in a 1993 article on Buchan’s personal philosophies and religious thought, makes good use of a number of Buchan’s essays for the Graphic, while Bryan Cheyette employs only a single reference to Buchan’s Graphic article ‘Ourselves and the Jews’ (H175) in his 1993 study Constructions of ‘The Jew’ in English Literature and Society (69). Finally, Andrew Nash references and quotes from Buchan’s attack on Robertson Nicoll’s promotion of the Kailyard school in ‘Nonconformity in Literature’ (Article 2) as part of his detailed 2007 examination of Kailyard and Scottish Literature (194-95). This summary of scholarship to date relating specifically to Buchan’s uncollected journalism reveals the limited use which has been made of his essays by biographers, scholars and non-Buchan specialists. Their approach has generally been to search for a small number of essays to provide subsidiary support for certain aspects of Buchan’s life or for preconceived views and themes they have found in Buchan’s writing. By way of contrast, my approach has been to consider the whole range of Buchan’s uncollected journalism, foregrounding the essays themselves, and examining the ways in which they might throw light on his career as a journalist, his roles as a literary critic and cultural commentator, the themes and sources which he employed in his fiction and non-fiction, and inter-textual connections between his essays and his literary writing. The results are set out in Chapters Two to Five in Part I of the thesis. My findings may overlap in certain minor respects with other Buchan scholars, for example in discussing Buchan’s early writing style or in considering his career at the Spectator or as a war reporter for the Times. However, I have endeavoured wherever possible to concentrate on areas not previously covered by Buchan critics. This more open- ended approach has resulted in a number of original findings, such as the connections between ‘An Imperial Club for London’ and the opening of The Thirty-Nine Steps (Part I, 82- 83) and Buchan’s borrowings from John Cuthbert Lawson in The Dancing Floor