14 
LAND & WATER 
June 22, 1916 
The Adventures of Richard Hannay 
By S. P. B. Mais 
" It's awful Jun : you just indulge- the pleasure of your 
heart, that's all, no trouble, no strain, no writing, just drive 
along as the words come and the pen ivill scratch." 
- -RonKRT I.oris Sri- vr:\S()x. apropos of " Treasure 
Island. 
THERE is more than a little of the spirit of 
Stevenson in all Mr. Buchan's novels, and \vc 
can imagine him saying, after writing The 
Thirty-Nine Steps, just what Stevenson said on 
completing Treasure Island. We do desire books of 
adventure, romances, but no man will write them for us. 
It must be " awful fun " to sit down and indulge the 
]ilcasure of your heart for once without thought of 
accuracy and imagine yourself suddenly caught up in a 
whirlwind of adv'entnre, deciphering codes which will 
disc:lose diabolic Teuton plots directed against the heart 
of England, running wildly from a relentless foe who 
dogs your steps o'er crag and fen, o'er moor and torrent 
with aeroplane and motor car, whose secret agents seek 
to decoy you into lonesome places so that they may do 
you to death, running your head into the craftily con- 
cealed noose only to escape by a fraction of a second 
with your life and more valuable information. 
What does hfe hold in store more ecstatic than those 
moments when you confront and even converse amicably 
with those who are moving heaven and earth to find you 
in the guise of a Scots roadmcnder ? 
Mr. Buchan is a wizard with his pen, and what is more 
a Scots wizard. He makes you scent again the in- 
vigorating winds of the Highlands, he takes you back in 
the spirit to those blue-tinted mountains which even we 
iminiaginative Sassenachs cannot resist peopling with 
Brownies and Pixies, his word-pictures make you thrill 
just in the same way that the sound of the pipes played 
on the far side of a lone loch make you thrill ; in a word, he 
takes you right out of yourself so that your overstrained, 
overtired body at last begins to take rest and your soul 
is soothed as if with the touch of some cool, loving, un- 
seen hand. 
We shall not easily forget that day when we first lighted 
on the initial instalment of The Thirty-Nine Steps in 
" Blackwood's " or " Maga," as its lovers more commonly 
call it. Who on earth was " H. de V." ? In three minutes 
v/e were enthralled, in five we had forgotten war, the call of 
dinner, the work that shrieked to be done, our wives and 
famihes, our debts and duties, our multifarious troubles 
. . all the cankers and cares of a weary world : 
we had become one with that ardent traveller Richard 
Hannay, who was so bored by the monotony of London 
that he gave half-a-crown to a beggar because he yawned. 
We were back in the golden clays of youth, the time 
when we lay flat on the furze-clad Devon cliffs, over- 
looking the red loam and the sky-blue sea with our much 
be-thumbcd and battered but never-sufliciently-to-be- 
read copy of Treasure Island in front of us, dreaming of 
pirates and Black Dog, of the Black Spot and John 
Silver, of " pieces of eight " and a derelict ship while the 
waves lapped the golden sands far below to the never- 
ceasing tune of " Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum." Seldom 
indeed is it given to us to recapture even for a fleeting 
instant the first fine careless rapture of childhood's days ; 
but the more we strive to attain this happiness the more 
elusive it becomes. John Buchan in The Thirty-Nine 
Steps succeeds as no writer of romance has ever succeeded. 
All too soon was the deUcious morsel finished : the 
Editors of Ma^a had whet our appetite : we could 
scarcely beheve it possible that we must wait for 31 days 
before we could hope for another taste of this gorgeous 
story. Wc thought seriously of writing to the author 
imploring him to have mercy upon us and relieve us of 
our anxiety about Scudder and the Black Stone and the 
meaning of all those cryjitic phrases which had caused 
us shivers even to the very marrow. But no : that would 
not be playing the game : we had let ourselves in for this 
agony of expectation and we must wait. 
The second and third instalments at last came after an 
age of scarcely bearable length, and we could be seen 
with our ejcs glued to the printed page, turning over as 
if our own fate were to be sealed on the first line of the 
succeeding one. How the very titles of the chapters 
roused us to wild anticipation, " The Man Who Died," 
" The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper," " The 
Adventure of the Radical Candidate," " The Adventure 
of the Spectacled Roadman." " The Adventure of the 
Bald Archccologist," " The Coming of the Black Stone" 
. . . and not one of them but far exceeded our most 
sanguine hopes. 
Before the war we gave scant attention to any but 
the problem novels. We revelled in the artistry of 
Gilbert Cannan, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, Compton 
Mackenzie, D. H. Laurence, and all the host of younger 
novelists who were all out to smash contemporary tradi- 
tions, iconoclasts who sought to make us see that our 
gods were mere tinsel, our conception of love senti- 
mentality and only a travesty of the real thing. We 
were content to see ourselves in these feckless irresolute 
heroes and common])lace rather ugly heroines who 
fought for freedom and made a horrid mess of their lives 
in the doing of it. We admired them as brave realists 
who shunned nothing in their endeavour to depict us as 
we really were. 
Then came the war with its change of values. What 
was incredibly unreal and melodramatic in 1912, became 
the ordinary incident of evcry-day life in 1915 and con- 
\'ersely, what we had looked upon as a photographic 
representation of life in 1913 looked simply silly in the 
light of what had happened to each of us during the year 
following it. The consequence of all this was that we 
came to regard the novel as a more and more decadent 
branch of letters ; something had to conic in to take its 
place. It was not that we ceased to have a need for litera- 
ture. Rather did we require the solace of books more 
than ever. The sales of our ]X)pular novelists fell to 
almost nothing, but poetry, biography, history, and 
philosophy began to boom. 
It was at this point that John Buchan stepped into 
the breach with his new romance, " where the incidents 
defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders 
of the possible." But as in these days the wildest fictions 
are so much less improbable than the facts he " caught 
on " at once, and is now not likely to relax his hold on 
the great mass of readers. It was a daring move on his 
part. 
Except for Mary Johnston no one could claim of late 
years to have written a "romance" couched in even 
respectable Ii;nghsh. Yet John Buchan descends into 
the lists with his fine sense of style, his precise, logical, 
Swift-like command of language and declares to the 
world " Look now : I will write you a romance that 
shall hold children from their play and old men from 
their chimney corner," and beholdit is done. 
We search in vain for the secret. Whence did he 
call forth his magic wand and wave it over the dictionary 
so that he conjured up a novel that will outlast not only 
our own century, but many more centuries to come? 
There is no answer. If you asked him he would not be 
able to tell you. He would with his customary modesty 
reply, " Oh ! all 1 tried to do was to enable an honest 
man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent 
reahties with a ' dime ' a ' shocker,' a precipitous yam, 
call it what you will." By accident he has achieved 
very much more than this. 
I am the last person in the world to contend that the ob- 
ject of the novel proper is " the story for the story's sake." 
I am of those whose interest is in psychology, in the un- 
ravelling of the tangle of human life, the development and 
unfoldmg of character, but in such books as The 'Thirty-Nine 
Steps, an entirely different side of (jur nature is appealed 
to, a side which in tlicse da\'s will not be denied, a healthier 
side, one not obsessed with doubts and frets, which 
accentuates the never-altogether-dead sense of wanderlust 
and adventure which even the most sedentary of us feel 
at times to be almost ingrained in our system, a cast back 
to our pirate, free-booting ancestors who placed us in this 
island home of ours. 
