Little Man's Burden

PILGRIM'S WAY--Lord Tweedsmuir--Houghton, Mifflin ($3).

When Novelist John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir (for his Scottish birthplace) of Elsfield (for his home in Oxford), died last February in his 66th year, his fifth as Governor General of Canada, he had already finished the autobiography his career made inevitable. This provision was of a piece with the career--workmanlike, ordered, conscientious, religiously dutiful --which the last of John Buchan's 50-odd books records.

Son of a Presbyterian parson, "the best man I have ever known," wry-faced little John Buchan grew up in the poetry and parsimony of the Scottish border, went to Oxford on Caledonian determination and a shoestring, published his first book (Scholar Gipsies) to help pay his college expenses. He was admitted to the bar, but his life work really began when he was made Private-Secretary to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner. From Milner and Kitchener he absorbed an extraordinary philosophy of empire which inspired him to the end of his days. This philosophy, which the later John Buchan found increasingly hard to talk about, may have been propagated and enforced by Kiplingesque brutality but had no spiritual kinship with it. Saluting it from the wistful distance of 40 years, Buchan remembers:

"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. . . . I saw in the Empire a means of giving to the congested masses at home open country instead of a blind alley. . . . 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 federation of the world. . . . The 'white man's burden' is now an almost meaningless phrase; then it involved a new philosophy of politics, and an ethical standard, serious and surely not ignoble."

Disappointed in his hopes of a financial post with Lord Cromer, the young proconsul returned to a lawyer's desk in London, lived through the war's disenchantments, dabbled bashfully in politics because he thought it was his duty. When his great friend and hero George V sent him to Ottawa in 1935, when he had already made an imperial name for himself as a novelist and biographer and had adjudged himself too old for a career in Parliament, John Buchan sprang into action like one of Milner's young war horses, did a difficult job as ably as his teachers did theirs a generation before.

Not for nothing do the portraits of John Buchan bear a slight resemblance to those of Calvin Coolidge. His native taciturnity reinforced by a diplomat's decision to write "at length only of the dead," Autobiographer Buchan was evidently not writing for posthumous publication. Of the mental climate in which he grew up, the architecture of his life and his world, he writes warmly and well. Of himself, he tells as little as an autobiographer decently can.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.