George Buchanan. Robert Wallace
had a sincere and unbounded admiration of Buchanan—an admiration abundantly shown while he lived, and when he was gone, expressed, especially by the younger Scaliger, with a tenderness and beauty which stamp the tribute with authority and value. His epitaphium on Buchanan concluded thus:—
‘Namque ad supremum perducta Poetica culmen
In te stat, nec quo progrediatur habet.
Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia limes;
Romani eloquii Scotia finis erit.’
Anybody with a fair understanding of Latin and a full understanding of epigram, who reads the last couplet here, will know that Scaliger was perfectly qualified to pronounce a judgment in the matter. For the benefit of the man in the street, it may be stated that what Scaliger was driving at was that Buchanan had brought poetry to a pitch of perfection beyond which it could not go; and that as Scotland had in the past been the last line of expansion for the Roman Empire, so in the future it would, in the person of Buchanan, be found to have given the highest note of Roman eloquence. Of course it may be said that this was only the customary and privileged lie of the epitaph; but that it was really Scaliger’s deliberate opinion appears from a well-known quotation from his table-talk, that ‘in Latin poetry Buchanan stands alone in Europe, and leaves everybody else behind.’ Coming to more modern times, it will probably be admitted that Wordsworth knew good poetry when he saw it, and he says of one of Buchanan’s poems—by no means his best—that it was equal in sentiment, if not in elegance, to anything in Horace.
This he said before a pedantic relative pointed out a false quantity. What he would have felt had he known this before he read the poem, Schoolmaster only knows. What the latter potentate would have done we may partly surmise from what Porson actually did when some one got him to commence reading Buchanan’s poetry and he stumbled up against a false quantity, or what he regarded as such. He at once got up and pitched the volume across the room in disgust, probably with an accompaniment of expressions not loud but deep. Regarding which behaviour, two remarks seem natural. The first is that possibly Buchanan was right and Porson wrong. At Eton, as is well known, Porson was a poor quantitarian, and fell behind in consequence. He may have made up his leeway afterwards, but not likely, and certainly his line of scholarship was not in the direction of Latin Prosody.
But suppose Buchanan were wrong, what then? Is Shakespeare to be flung into the corner because many of his lines will not scan? An indignant critic of the Agamemnon has discovered, what I believe is the fact, that in that play Æschylus has violated Dawes’s canon. Yet everybody that can reads the Agamemnon. Dr. Johnson points out that Milton uses the hideous solecism vapulandum. Only think of it! And yet we read Paradise Lost. Perhaps Porson did too, knowing nothing of vapulandum! Johnson was no such stickler, for he read and enjoyed Milton, vapulandum notwithstanding. He had also the highest opinion of Buchanan, both as a Latinist and as ‘a great poetical genius,’ and his authority on such matters, being both poet and critic himself, is much greater than Porson’s, great though the latter was in his own department of research. Hallam is inclined to qualify the almost universal admiration of Buchanan’s poetry, but one begins to doubt Hallam’s judgment in this matter when he finds him preferring Buchanan’s De Sphæra to the rest of his poetry. The Sphere may contain exquisite isolated passages ‘equal to Virgil,’ as the enthusiastic Guy Patin maintained, but it is not properly a poem at all. It is really a versified and very lame defence of the exploded Ptolemaic Astronomy, totally destitute of the human interest which inspires so much else that Buchanan wrote. On his own field of history Hallam is more of an authority, and here his admiration of Buchanan is unstinted and unequivocal. He extols the ‘perspicuity and power’ of the History of Scottish Affairs, recognises the ‘purity’ of its diction, and affirms that few writings of the Latinists are ‘more redolent of the antique air,’ and is almost as emphatic in his eulogy as Dryden, when the latter says of Buchanan, ‘our isle may justly boast in him a writer comparable to any of the moderns, and excelled by few of the ancients.’ Froude might be cited to the same effect, but enough has been said to establish Buchanan’s fame and power in the world of letters.
Of course, care must be taken to distinguish the precise character of Buchanan’s scholarship. He was not a scholar in the sense that Casaubon, or Porson, or Liddell and Scott were scholars. That is to say, he was not a classical antiquarian, or philologist, or grammarian, although he knew antiquities and such philology as was going, and had refurbished or even made a grammar or two as he went along. But he used these simply as instruments to his main aim as a scholar, which was to write as good Latin as Virgil, or Livy, or Horace, or Tacitus. There is nothing absurd or impossible in such an aim. I have heard ardent Aberdonians maintain that the late Dr. Melvin of their city wrote better Latin than Cicero, and, apart from the matter, I am quite ready to believe it. That Buchanan as good as accomplished his purpose we have already seen.
And be it remembered that all this cultivation of a Latin style was not mere dilettante work on his part. He and one Sturm of Strasbourg, along with other Humanists, had formed the design of making Latin the vernacular of Europe, and actually believed that it would ultimately become such. Hence they had a twofold purpose in writing Latin. They desired to forward this reform of a universal language, and they wished to be intelligible to a Latin-speaking posterity. I state this on the authority of Dr. P. Hume Brown, the well-known author of George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer, and I should not advise any one rashly to contradict Dr. Brown on any Buchanan matter. He seems to me to have mastered the entire subject, and to have left very little for subsequent research to do, unless some lucky ‘find’ of new sources should occur. I have been able to glean nothing from any quarter that I have not found already known to Dr. Brown, and recorded by him, unless it be some such small fact as the presence of Joseph Scaliger in Edinburgh in 1566, along with his friend Chastaigner, but not expressly to see Buchanan; and other little things of that sort. I do not pretend to contribute any fresh Buchanan materials. My object is the humble, but not, I hope, useless one of boiling down Dr. Brown and the other scientific biographers, and attempting a brief popular presentation of what Buchanan was and did.
Another proof of the varied power of Buchanan is found in the storm he raised as a controversialist, in the still burning question as to the guilt or innocence of Mary Queen of Scots. In 1571, four years after the Scottish people had deposed their sovereign, Buchanan published a pamphlet, or what in these days would probably have taken the shape of a magazine article, with the title Detectio Mariæ Reginæ, i.e. The Detection or Exposure of Queen Mary, or as an editor of to-day would have been sure to head it, The Truth about the Queen. Buchanan’s object in this publication is to vindicate the Scottish people and their leaders before the public opinion of Europe for having, after the murder of Darnley, brought Mary’s career as sovereign to a close, as being not only a public danger, but a public scandal. That the vigour of the brochure itself, backed up by Buchanan’s immense reputation, went far to make Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is beyond question. To the same extent he made himself the bête noire of Mary’s friends and apologists, and very brutal and very black they certainly made him out to be. In more recent times a school of sentimental historians has arisen, who refuse to see in Mary either fault or flaw, and recognise in her a sort of spotless goddess, of irresistible charm, thrown away upon an unworthy age. Not content with pity—it would be inhuman not to feel it in any case—they show how true it is that pity is akin to love, and falling victims in some degree to the spell which ruined the unhappy and love-maddened Chastelard, they conduct a necessarily Platonic flirtation with their idol’s romantic and fascinating memory, across the separating interval of three hundred years. Had Mary been ugly, or even plain, she would have had fewer champions.
In vituperation of Buchanan they are not a whit behind his contemporary assailants. Mr. Hosack, for instance, one of the most ingenious of Mary’s modern defenders, calmly says, ‘Buchanan was without doubt the most venal and unscrupulous of men.’ His usual way of alluding to the Detectio is ‘Buchanan’s famous libel,’ varied occasionally by ‘the highly coloured narrative of Buchanan,’ or ‘the subsequently invented slanders of Buchanan,’ or ‘the slanderous narrative of Buchanan,’ or ‘the atrocious libel of Buchanan.’ Sir John Skelton,