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PARTISAN REVIEW
conviction that the world was his province. Firmly rooted in his club, his
county and his nation, he put his courage and resourcefulness at the
service of Right, that is of the English cause, which always happened to
be identical with that of the sounder elements abroad. This led to many
delightful dream sequences, in which the Gentleman, far from being
insular and hidebound, dashed across foreign landscapes, gabbled strange
tongues in distant bazaars and thought nothing of studying some branch
of Oriental philosophy in order to outwit the villain. Buchan is excep–
tionally good at this mixture of exoticism and pseudo-intellectualism. I
wonder how many people set about learning Russian, as I did, partly
because it was the language of the Revolution and therefore had an
obvious interest for anyone who had seen the General Strike from under–
neath, and partly because it occurred in
Huntingtower,
which I thought
a splendid story, although all my sympathies were with the principal
Bolshevik villain-a Jewish hunchback, if I remember rightly. Buchan
was acceptable because he did not put forward too coarse a version of
the Imperial myth. In origin not a true Gentleman himself, he had
a marked sympathy for the less important races, whom he somehow pre–
sented as existing in their own right. It has been said that he annexed
the Middle East to St. James's. This is true, but he did it in the correct,
sporting fashion. The Middle East was full of jolly good fellows–
gentlemen with rather darker skins, in fact-and there was no greater
fun than helping them to stamp out the unpleasantness that occurred
from time to time within their borders. I feel that Yates and Sapper are
not quite so broadminded. From the account that Mr. Usborne gives,
it would seem that they leave almost everything to the Englishman, who
simply uses 'abroad' as a theater for his miraculous exploits. Buchan's
heroes are miraculous, too; they can always remember the native lan–
guage or the bit of back-woodsmanship that will get them out of each
particular scrape; but their 'abroad,' even when quite imaginary, is full
of solid, attractive figures. They are the true heirs of all the aristocratic
adventurers of the past, tainted at most with slight anti-Semitism.
The assumption in all these books is that England is a base or
starting point. The Gentleman is always traveling, exploring or roughing
it. He may even live abroad for long stretches at Pau or Dinan, or on
the shores of the Caspian or in the mountains of South America. He will
buy an island in the Hebrides or build himself a house in Greece or on
the high African plateaux. The best-sellers have, in a more easily as–
similable form, something of the interest of
Eothen, Travels in Arabia
Deserta, The Bible in Spain, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
or of the
dozens of other good English books
in
this tradition. I do not think
there is any other literature which ranges so naturally over the whole
