later Solemn League and Covenant (1643) by which the Kirk allied with the English parliament to impose presbyterianism south of the Border—the occasion of Montrose’s breach with the Scots Kirk—could also be seen as an effort to ‘export revolution’. The idea of the Covenant, moreover, went beyond politics as it also comprehended an ideal of Divine justice in which man must continue to live out God’s will on earth, even although he is already judged for good or ill under Heaven. The life of Montrose, like that of Buchan’s David Sempill, was fully caught up in this mixture of revolutionary ardour and legalistic theology.
Like Scott and Stendhal, Buchan chooses to pitch his personal drama in a precise historical context but at the fringe of great events. In so doing he opts for a mis en scène recurrent in Scottish fiction: the minister and the parish. David Sempill is a typical ‘man-in-the-middle’ like the heroes of the Waverley Novels: a classicist, a humanitarian, a man of some means in a society pervaded by dogma and desperately poor. He is impulsive, romantic, inept, and although, in the person and argument of Montrose, he encounters a polity which could serve his ideals, he cannot cope with the complex political manoeuvres of the time, or with the moral sickness which afflicts his parish.
The diagnosis of this more intimate drama falls to the dyspeptic James Fordyce, one of a choric group of ministers whose periodic confrontations with David comment on the action. To Fordyce the dogmatics of Covenant theology have tilted the balance too far in the direction of the ‘unco guid’. This corrupting, fanatical spirit, so alive in Fordyce’s confreres, the politic Muirhead and the fanatic Proudfoot, perverts the older, innocently pagan usages of Woodilee into the obscene and vindictive rites of its coven. Ephraim Caird, the Covenanter of 1639, is also Woodilee’s ‘Heid Deil’.
It is here that we can trace not only Buchan’s political Via Media but his anthropological interests: the concern with ritual and folk-tale that he derived from J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890) and his friendship with Andrew Lang. Buchan’s Christianity was of the ‘modernist’ Scoto-Oxford-Hegelian son which saw God incarnate in man’s capacity to reason. But the traditional and the customary nevertheless remained important. In a poem of the 1900s ‘Wood Magic’ he wrote of a peasant warily respecting an old altar, in a style which echoes Frazer:
Wherefore to God the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost,
Mary the Blessed Mother, and the kindly Saints
as well,
I will give glory and praise, and them I cherish the most,
For they have the keys of Heaven, and save the soul
from Hell.
But likewise I will spare for the lord Apollo a grace,
And a bow for the Lady Venus—as a friend but not
as a thrall.
’Tis true they are out of Heaven, but some day they may
win the place;
For gods are kittle cattle, and a wise man honours
them all.
The rituals around the Roman altar in the wood could have been innocent; the place is nigh to the Paradise of Katrine Yester (a figure, as Janet Adam Smith rightly points out, of the ballads, not of flesh and blood), but the ‘divided self’ of Calvinism has created the Cairds who make them evil. In this context both David and Montrose are men destroyed by the society they wish to purify: personifications of the Christian atonement and Temporary Kings out of the Frazerian ritual: guardians of the shrine whose fate is to be killed. ‘The madness of Scotland’ stems from the fact that Calvinism broke the continuity of this ritual, and left the country bereft of spiritual self-understanding.
Anthropological influence also accounts for another, more controversial, aspect of Buchan’s style: the domination of plot and description over character and psychology. Witch Wood is about love and devilish lust, but Katrine is so completely the fairy princess that she seems to have no quality in common with what the Woodilee folk get up to. Buchan’s son William put this down to a low sex-drive in the Buchan family, yet Buchan’s other women characters—particularly Isobel Veitch and Grizel Saintserf—are positive enough to meet most feminist criteria, and his sympathy for the poor victims of the soldiers and the witch-pricker is full-hearted and without prurience. But in Frazerian terms, Katrine Yester’s ‘soul’ inheres in her earthly ‘Paradise’ more than in her character. Thus she represents an ideal of love—‘Agape’ more than ‘Eros’—which could become the archetype underlying an achievable society. As much as his friend Edwin Muir, Buchan had derived therapeutic insights from that other son of a Calvinist manse, C. J. Jung, his exact contemporary.
It is when we appreciate this ‘re-ifying’ possibility that the tragic element floods the whole novel, not only in Katrine’s death but in the destruction throughout of the good and the well-intentioned. When the robust mercenary Mark Kerr gets David to leave Woodilee for the wars in Germany his comment, ‘I have helped to open for him the gates of Paradise’, is the grimmest of jokes. Paradise will be a bullet in the brain on some Bavarian battlefield, in the war whose desolations would produce that Germanic reliance on ‘blood and iron’ which irrupted in 1914. When Katrine Yester dies, she leaves behind a ‘waste land’ indeed. In this respect Buchan had as full a command of the mythology of post-rationalism as T. S. Eliot, a man of more contorted politics who addressed a much smaller audience in oracular verse. If Buchan styled himself more modestly as a storyteller, he still remained greatly concerned to educate, as M. R. Ridley has pointed out. In the breadth of its canvas, the ‘representative’ nature of its characters, and in the primacy of its didactics, Witch Wood invites comparison with Bertolt Brecht’s great drama of the Thirty Years’ War, Mother Courage (1941). Brecht saw his play as something which should goad the audience into thought. Witch Wood, even when read for the third or fourth time, has this same active force.
Christopher Harvie
Time, my grandfather used to say, stood still in that glen of his. But the truth of the saying did not survive his death, and the first daisies had scarcely withered on his grave before a new world was knocking at the gate. That was thirty years ago, and today the revolution is complete. The parish name has been changed; the white box of a kirk which served the glen for more than two centuries has been rebuilt in red suburban gothic; a main railway line now runs down the Aller and the excellent summer service brings holiday-makers from a hundred miles distant: houses and shops have clustered under the Hill of Deer; there may be found a well-reputed boarding school for youth, two inns—both of them reformed—a garage, and a bank agent. The centre of importance has moved from the old village to the new town by the station, and even the old village is no more a clachan of thatched roofs straggling by a burnside. Some enemy of the human race has taught the burn to run straight like a sewer and has spanned it with a concrete bridge, while the thatch of the houses has been replaced by slates of a metallic green. Only the ruins of the old kirkton have not been meddled with; these stand as I remember them, knee-deep in docks and nettles, defended by a crumbling dry-stone dyke against inquisitive cattle from Crossbasket.
The old folk are gone, too, and their very names are passing from the countryside. Long before my day the Hawkshaws had disappeared from Calidon, but there was a respectable Edinburgh burgess family who had come there in the seventeenth century; now these have given place to a rawer burgess graft from the West. The farmers are mostly new men, and even the peasant, who should be the enduring
