Health and Education

But if they can do so, how much more can we of the Church of England?  As long as we go on where our medieval forefathers left off; as long as we keep to the most perfect types of their work, in waiting for the day when we shall be able to surpass them, by making our work even more naturalistic than theirs, more truly expressive of the highest aspirations of humanity: so long we are reverencing them, and that latent Protestantism in them, which produced at last the Reformation.

And if any should say—“Nevertheless, your Protestant Gothic church, though you made it ten times more beautiful, and more symbolic, than Cologne Minster itself, would still be a sham.  For where would be your images?  And still more, where would be your Host?  Do you not know that in the medieval church the vistas of its arcades, the alternations of its lights and shadows, the gradations of its colouring, and all its carefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed to, were concentrated round, one sacred spot, as a curve, however vast its sweep though space, tends at every moment toward a single focus?  And that spot, that focus, was, and is still, in every Romish church, the body of God, present upon the altar in the form of bread?  Without Him, what is all your building?  Your church is empty: your altar bare; a throne without a king; an eye-socket without an eye.”

My friends, if we be true children of those old worthies, whom Tacitus saw worshipping beneath the German oaks; we shall have but one answer to that scoff:—

We know it; and we glory in the fact.  We glory in it, as the old Jews gloried in it, when the Roman soldiers, bursting through the Temple, and into the Holy of Holies itself, paused in wonder and in awe when they beheld neither God, nor image of God, but blank yet all-suggestive—the empty mercy-seat.

Like theirs, our altar is an empty throne.  For it symbolises our worship of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain.  Our eye-socket holds no eye.  For it symbolises our worship of that Eye which is over all the earth; which is about our path, and about our bed, and spies out all our ways.  We need no artificial and material presence of Deity.  For we believe in That One Eternal and Universal Real Presence—of which it is written “He is not far from any one of us; for in God we live, and move, and have our being;” and again, “Lo, I am with you, even to the End of the World;” and again—“Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.”

He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace.  For ever He looks down on all things which He has made: and behold, they are very good.  And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cave or mountain peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly.

But Himself?—Who can see Him?  Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor quintessential diamond.

So we shall obey the sound instinct of our Christian forefathers, when they shaped their churches into forest aisles, and decked them with the boughs of the woodland, and the flowers of the field: but we shall obey too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which made them at last cast out of their own temples, as misplaced and unnatural things, the idols which they had inherited from Rome.

So we shall obey the sound instinct of our heathen forefathers, when they worshipped the unknown God beneath the oaks of the primeval forest: but we shall obey, too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which taught them this, at least, concerning God—That it was beneath His dignity to coop Him within walls; and that the grandest forms of nature, as well as the deepest consciousnesses of their own souls, revealed to them a mysterious Being, who was to be beheld by faith alone.

GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR

The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage than now.  The supply of learned men was very small, the demand for them very great.  During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful.  At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of the monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while, a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by intellect alone.

Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at least feared the “scholar,” who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degenerate modern could never equal.

If the “scholar” stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a charm against toothache or rheumatism.  The penniless knight discoursed with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the art of transmuting metals into gold.  The queen or bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the stars.  But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master’s enemies with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero.  Wherever the scholar’s steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself.  The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no more just then than such complaints are now.  Then, as now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price.  If he chose to sell himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.

Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is more notable than George Buchanan.  The poor Scotch widow’s son, by force of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of the Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind him political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his own country, but that of the civilised world.

Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps without making mistakes.  But the more we study George Buchanan’s history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more inclined to admire his worth.  A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man, with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which saved him—except on really great occasions—from bitterness, and helped him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,—he is, in many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book.7  A schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid the temptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense of the word, a courtier; “One,” says Daniel Heinsius, “who seemed not only born for a court, but born to amend it.  He brought to his queen that at which she could not wonder enough.  For, by affecting a certain liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of simplicity.”  Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap.  “Austere in face, and rustic in his looks,” says David Buchanan, “but most polished in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily.”  “Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude,” says Peacham, in his ‘Compleat Gentleman,’ speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age, “in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside and conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in verse most excellent.”  A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, he seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could afford him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited from his Stirlingshire kindred.

The story of his life is easily traced.  When an old man, he himself wrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and his sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at least erudite.  Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn—where an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century—of a family “rather ancient than rich,” his father dead in the prime of manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot—of whom one wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothers probably holds good in her case.  George gave signs, while at the village school, of future scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, his uncle James sent him to the University of Paris.  Those were hard times; and the youths, or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruel life of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and starve, either into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul.  And a cruel life George had.  Within two years he was down in a severe illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of sixteen got home, he does not tell how.  Then he tried soldiering; and was with Albany’s French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual attack on Wark Castle.  Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him in bed all winter.  Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrew’s, where he got his B.A. at nineteen.  The next summer he went to France once more; and “fell,” he says, “into the flames of the Lutheran sect, which was then spreading far and wide.”  Two years of penury followed; and then three years of schoolmastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has immortalised—at least for the few who care to read modern Latin poetry—in his elegy on ‘The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities.’  The wretched regent master, pale and suffering, sits up all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails, and thumping his desk; and falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four o’clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to truants’ names.  The class is all wrong.  “One is barefoot, another’s shoe is burst, another cries, another writes home.  Then comes the rod, the sound of blows and howls; and the day passes in tears.”  “Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows; there is hardly time to eat.”—I have no space to finish the picture of the stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while it starved his body.  However, happier days came.  Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland.

But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward, into trouble.  He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar, a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Grey Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault of being too clever, and—to judge from contemporary evidence—only too true.  The friars said nothing at first: but when King James made Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, “men professing meekness, took the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men so pious in the opinion of the people.”  So Buchanan himself puts it: but, to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them.  To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to hear and bear.  They accused him to the king of heresy: but not being then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded to repeat the castigation.  Having found out that the friars were not to be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem.  But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, the ‘Franciscans,’ a long satire, compared to which the ‘Somnium’ was bland and merciful.  The storm rose.  Cardinal Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor souls: so, knowing James’s avarice, he fled to England, through freebooters and pestilence.

There he found, he says, “men of both factions being burned on the same day and in the same fire”—a pardonable exaggeration—“by Henry VIII., in his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of religion.”  So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy Beaton ambassador at Paris.  The capital was too hot to hold him; and he fled south to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the College of Gruienne.  As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which was then—when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars—a serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit.  Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—the ‘Baptist,’ the ‘Medea,’ the ‘Jephtha,’ and the ‘Alcestis’—there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the ‘Baptist’ against tyranny and priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to veneration.  When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once; and—as his Scots biographers love to record—“three of the most learned men in the world taught humanity in the same college,” viz., Turnebus, Muretus, and Buchanan.

Then followed a strange episode in his life.  A university had been founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited to bring thither what French savans he could collect.  Buchanan went to Portugal with his brother Patrick; two more Scotsmen, Dempster and Ramsay: and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise.  All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so.  Then its high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those days and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated, unwillingly, from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in the Inquisition.

Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheran than a Catholic on the question of the mass.  He and his friends had eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did.  But he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Grey Friars formed but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelled surely if not fast: so that the story of the satire written in Scotland had reached Portugal.  The culprits were imprisoned, examined, bullied—but not tortured—for a year and a half.  At the end of that time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest—says Buchanan with honest pride—“they should get the reputation of having vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown,” they sent him for some months to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks.  “The men,” he says, “were neither inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;” and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions, by beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms.

At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain.  Wearied out at last, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, and escaped to England.  But England, he says, during the anarchy of Edward VI.’s reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to his beloved France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in his charming ‘Desiderium Lutitiæ,’ and the still more charming, because more simple, ‘Adventus in Galliam,’ in which he bids farewell, in most melodious verse, to “the hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods fertile in naught but penury.”

Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing:—The Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the ‘Alcestis’ of Euripides; an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; “Pomps,” too, for her wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all the heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much of which latter productions he would have consigned to the dust-heap in his old age, had not his too fond friends persuaded him to republish the follies and coarsenesses of his youth.  He was now one of the most famous scholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great literary men.  Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more?  Was he to sink into the mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the mere court versifier?

The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble soul, from that degradation.  The events of 1560-1-2 forced Buchanan, as they forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would be a child of light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettante classicist, or a preacher—it might be a martyr—of the Gospel.  Buchanan may have left France in “the troubles” merely to enjoy in his own country elegant and learned repose.  He may have fancied that he had found it, when he saw himself, in spite of his public profession of adherence to the Reformed Kirk, reading Livy every afternoon with his exquisite young sovereign; master, by her favour, of the temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey, and by the favour of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard’s College in St. Andrew’s.  Perhaps he fancied at times that “to-morrow was to be as to-day, and much more abundant;” that thenceforth he might read his folio, and write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor Wishart had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking up to the castle tower from whence his enemy Beaton’s corpse had been hung out; with the comfortable reflection that quietier times had come, and that whatever evil deeds Archbishop Hamilton might dare, he would not dare to put the Principal of St. Leonard’s into the “bottle dungeon.”

If such hopes ever crossed Geordie’s keen fancy, they were disappointed suddenly and fearfully.  The fire which had been kindled in France was to reach to Scotland likewise.  “Revolutions are not made with rose-water;” and the time was at hand when all good spirits in Scotland, and George Buchanan among them, had to choose, once and for all, amid danger, confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or Mammon; for to serve both would be soon impossible.

Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, is notorious.  He saw then, as others have seen since, that the two men in Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife were Knox and Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart and soul.

This is the critical epoch in Buchanan’s life.  By his conduct to Queen Mary he must stand or fall.  It is my belief that he will stand.  It is not my intention to enter into the details of a matter so painful, so shocking, so prodigious; and now that that question is finally set at rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, there is no need to allude to it further, save where Buchanan’s name is concerned.  One may now have every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a figure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic,—for she reminds one rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by some irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and of our modern and Christian times.  One may sympathise with the great womanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed, in later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence, and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their devotion to one who seemed to them an ideal being.  So far from regarding her as a hateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom God may have loved, and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishment so swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted.  At least, he must so believe who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most dreadful of all dooms is impunity.  Nay, more, those “casket” letters and sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt on other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness, a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced, which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland, had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by an education so abominable, that any one who knows what words she must have heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up, will wonder that she sinned so little: not that she sinned so much.  One may feel, in a word, that there is every excuse for those who have asserted Mary’s innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank from believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may have felt as deeply that he could do no otherwise than he did.

The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well, may be reduced to two heads.  1st. The letters and sonnets were forgeries.  Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan, according to some, the sonnets.  Whoever forged them, Buchanan made use of them in his Detection, knowing them to be forged.  2nd. Whether Mary was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in putting himself in the forefront amongst her accusers.  He had been her tutor, her pensioner.  She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory.

Now as to the “casket” letters.  I should have thought they bore in themselves the best evidence of being genuine.  I can add nothing to the arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one clever enough to be a forger, would have put together documents so incoherent, and so incomplete.  For the evidence of guilt which they contain is, after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether; seeing that Mary’s guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had any knowledge of the facts.  As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards.  But if these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh argument for their authenticity.  Mary, writing in agony and confusion, might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care to make none.

But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spite of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is to be found in their tone.  A forger in those coarse days would have made Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to the tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters, to those who—as I do—believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which poets could invent.  More than one touch, indeed, of utter self-abasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and yet so true to the heart of woman, that—as has been well said—if it was invented there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who yet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his dramatic genius.