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BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY 2. Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865) to Poems (1866) Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865) The Pall Mall Gazette (7 June, 1865 - Issue 103) IDYLS AND LEGENDS OF INVERBURN.* WHEN the new brightness, which in KEATS and SHELLEY had been too chromatic, passed through the steadier mind of WORDSWORTH, and laid itself in level shafts of unconfusing light across nature and human story, there was done for poetry a work the good effects of which have perhaps reached their limit, so far as our own time can recognize them. It is neither desirable nor possible for young poets to escape the influence of that tendency which Mr. TENNYSON, taking the work out of the hands of WORDSWORTH, and pursuing it with a more fastidious touch, has carried to such perfection in the enamelled manner that we can scarcely bring ourselves to think of poetry without it—the tendency, namely, to converge the light and to isolate the colour in masses. Neither is it easy for young poets to help falling into that way of looking at nature which is so very characteristic of modern poetry and so direct a consequence of modern habits—a way in which the country is looked at from the town, with the sharply discriminating eye of one who seeks out nature, asking for a sympathy which he cannot find in the city. Yet this is growing almost wearisome. We cannot help longing, now and then, for a freer, broader way of dealing with nature and life; a manner that should not draw lines so sharply; that should not separate nature, but find her, meet her, walk with her; the manner that hangs the myrtle on the sword-hilt, and drops the garland in the street. We weary, too, of this level, converging light of poetry, even when it glows and flushes as it does in a volume like that before us.
We think, indeed, that our young poets would paint better pictures if they would take less thought about the framing. To those who call to mind Mr. ALEXANDER SMITH’S early rhetoric of simile, and Mr. SWINBURNE’S quite recent superfœtation of metaphor, it may seem absurd to urge upon young poets to be a little wilder, to “let go” more. But the advice is needed. This framing of poetic picture is becoming too much of a pursuit. This studious bouquet-making leaves us ready to welcome a gypsy muse who might be surprised into letting fall a lap-full of wildings; from whose unliterary lips the music might be shaken like cherry-blooms in the wind:—
The spilt garland, the shot colour, the prismatic light—this is of the very essence of poetry. The steadying of the light is well, is excellent as a discipline, but for all that, it is “the intimate and ineradicable peculiarity of the poet to work on and on for ever in a purely ideal element, according to a law totally unlike that of rational association;” and all the set stones and framed pictures in the world, however beautiful (and those of Mr. BUCHANAN are beautiful), will not still the longing in our bosoms for that which is “simple, sensuary, and passionate.”
We might go on to say that the “passionate” element is wanting, too, in a great deal of this idyllic poetry that is so plentiful. The frequent writing of such verse is apt to take what Mr. MATTHEW ARNOLD has with such exquisite felicity called “the lyrical cry” out of the poet’s music. We once read some verses of Mr. BUCHANAN’S (“To DAVID in Heaven”) prefixed to his Undertones, in which there was the lyrical cry; but it is scarcely heard through the music in the lyrics which appear in this volume. The poet has chastised himself too severely in one direction. The lyrical cry should be here, considering what sort of man Mr. BUCHANAN has shown himself to be; and it should be of a quality all his own, not, as in SHELLEY, the scream of a fainting woman; nor the blunted moan which is heard in Mr. ARNOLD’S Faded Leaves; nor the manly appeal of BURNS against the coming tears—
but something wholly original and cognate. We cannot describe it till we hear it, but if Mr. BUCHANAN would take courage and let us hear it, he would, we dare to say, write poetry which would live in company of a high order. We should naturally expect to find, but we do not find (unless our ears are dull, which may, of course, be), the lyrical cry in the beautiful little poem called January Wind”—one of the village voices of Inverburn—of which here are two verses:—
The wind, wife, the wind; how it blows, how it blows;
It grips the latch, it shakes the house, it whistles, it screams, it crows,
It dashes on the window-pane, then rushes off with a cry,
Ye scarce can hear your own loud voice, it clatters so loud and high;
And far away upon the sea it floats with thunder-call;
The wind, wife; the wind, wife; the wind that did it all! The wind, wife, the wind; up again, up again!
It blew our David round the world, yet shrieked at our window-pane;
And ever since that time, old wife, in rain, and in sun, and in snow,
Whether I work or weary here, I hear it whistle and blow,
It moans around, it groans around, it wanders with scream and cry—
The wind, wife; the wind, wife; may it blow him home to die!
Nobody will deny the merit of this, but it does not seem to us to have the wail in it that is wanted, and that we found somewhere else, when we were not looking for it, namely, in the idyl of the “Two Babes”;—
If, wedded, I had such another child
As lies before me, and the child should die
For lack of such a love as I could give,
Would all the gold and silver in the world,
Wipe from my soul that piteous baby-face?
Would twenty thousand prayers, pray’d day and night,
Drown in the hearing of the Lord my God
The cry my babe had utter’d as it died?
This is positively faulty, but it is real, and there is in it no excess of music over emotion. Indeed, in fifty passages throughout the book, we catch accents of distinct pathetic beauty; but none so strong as these totally unlooked-for lines, which really seem rather to have fallen into the poem than to have been put there. It appears to us that Mr. BUCHANAN has a true insight into the workings of the heart, and a true and tender reverence for simple, uncultivated goodness—which may, indeed, mislead him into forgetfulness of those poetic affinities which, for some years to come, must be dominant. For, however large his emotional experience may be, and his knowledge of life, we should suppose he is much too young for that “solidarity” of experience and imagination to have been brought about which can alone make the highest kind of “human” poetry possible to even the most exquisite artist.
After all this, the patient reader will be glad to learn that Idyls and Legends of Inverburn is a volume of genuine poetry of distinguished merit, in which the homely gossip and the fairy (and other) legends of a village are sung in bright and varied measures. It is, indeed, one of the most charming volumes of poetic narrative that we know. Some people can manipulate a story in verse more or less grotesquely; but Mr. BUCHANAN can tell one, and it is a rare gift.
Among the best poems in the book are “The Two Babes,” “The Widow Mysie,” “The English Huswife’s Gossip,” and “The Legend of the Stepmother.” After considerable debate, we decide for ourselves—but endeavouring to set aside all merely personal likings—that “The Widow Mysie” comes nearer to the unity which makes a work of art than any other poem in the book. Now and then we get a little monotony in the rhythm of the blank verse (which, after Mr. BUCHANAN’S Undertones, surprises us), and there are of course faulty lines; but we believe everybody who looks into the volume will covet it for his own book-shelves. *Idyls and Legends of Inverburn. By ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of “Undertones.” (London: Strahan and Co.) ___ The Reader (17 June, 1865 - p.679-80) Mr Buchanan has here attempted to set modern life—more especially that of the lower Scotch classes— into poetry. Nor can we regard the attempt as a failure, though it is far from a complete success. To write a novel in verse requires the same great qualifications as are necessary for a dramatist. Mr Buchanan is at times excessively happy in his descriptions of local scenery; shows the power of seizing the traits of child-life; and exhibits now and then, not only humour, but a delicate pathos. Many of these rare qualities, however, are marred by a want of a severer discipline than any to which Mr Buchanan has apparently accustomed himself. The descriptions become at times over-loaded and the humour once or twice degenerates into vulgarism. But, after all, it is the poet himself who must perform the difficult task of criticism—he who without shrinking must mark his own shortcomings, and discover where his strength lies. This a critic can but partially tell him. Mr Buchanan has not only given us promise, but performance. We have purposely abstained from making any quotations from his words, hoping that our readers may be induced to read the original, especially the story of Willie Baird. ___ The Guardian (27 June, 1865 - p.6) Idyls and Legends of Inverburn. By Robert Buchanan, author of “Undertones.”
London: Strahan. 1865. The promise of excellence made in “Undertones” is not sustained in these “Idyls and Legends.” They contain much common-place writing, poetry only by courtesy, and much that is not poetry at all, despite blank verse and measured length of line. To our mind there is a certain dignity of subject and of treatment appropriate to the poet’s art. Mr. Buchanan does violence to such a feeling, and so far, we think, fails as a singer. Turn where we may, passages open to this charge face us. Take a random selection: here is an extract from “The Two Babes:”—
But Robin! .* * and the laddie’s looks were cast
Full modest on his book, his jet black hair
Was neatly comb’d behind his rabbit ears;
His poor old clothes were patch’d and cleanly brush’d,
And butter soft seem’d melting in his mouth,—
And when he met his master’s canker’d gaze,
He blush’d like any maid and seem’d ashamed. A clever lad was Robin Anderson!
A clever clever lad with fox’s eyes!
A clever clever lad in lambkin’s gear! &c.
Scarcely the stuff, we fancy, out of which to earn an “immortality of fame.” The author of “Undertones” has done, and can do, better, much better, than this. ___ The Fortnightly Review (30 June, 1865 - No. 4, p. 443-458) ROBERT BUCHANAN.1 THE good effected by Criticism is small, the evil incalculable. Nevertheless, the existence of Criticism is inevitable, and its influence daily extends wider and wider with the rapid extension of Literature and Art; for so greatly does the multiplicity of claimants surpass anypossibility of our attending to more than a small minority of them, that even for the selection of this minority we must rely to some extent on critics. The immense variety in degrees of merit, in style, and in purpose, gives rise to such conflicting judgments, that the formation of a taste at once delicate and sure, capable of rapidly discerning what is genuine from what is spurious in art, becomes so important, as to lead to the formation of a special class of critics.
Criticism is inevitable, be its influence salutary or injurious. Critics play the parts of Tasters and of Teachers. As Tasters, they are the literary sieves through which only fine material is allowed to pass, the coarser material being inexorably stayed. These are the reviewers—a much-abused, if much-abusing, class. Besides this class there are the critics: who revise the judgments of reviewers, who analyse the material which has passed through the sieve, often showing it to be thin, but not fine, and always implicitly judging it in reference to general standards of excellence, rather than to individual wants. Thus the reviewer, as taster, may pronounce that novel to be laudable which the critic will show to be detestable; the reviewer fixes his standard in the Circulating Library, the critic thinks only of Literature. I have already intimated that the influence of both is for the most part injurious; and this is an opinion which I may express with the less reticence, since I have myself been actively engaged in criticism for upwards of a quarter of a century.
The evils admitted, can there be a remedy? Can there be a mitigation? Only after a clear recognition of their origin. Those who are most eloquent against criticism usually throw all their emphasis on the pain which it inflicts, and on its depressing and misleading influence on creative minds. There is, indeed, something still to be said on these points. The world little suspects how much exquisite work is lost to it through this depressing influence, and how much false conventional work is thrown upon it through this misleading influence. What is called “fear of the critics” could seldom, under any circumstances, be a healthy restraint, because it tends to restrain originality and individuality even more than eccentricity and mannerism: critical standards being almost universally formed not according to what is eternally true and necessarily pleasing, but according to what
(1) IDYLS AND LEGENDS OF INVERBURN. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. Strahan, London.
has already pleased, and which is precipitately generalised as alone capable of pleasing. If fear of the critics meant terror at nonsense, impatience of untruth, intolerance of conventionality, it would be a wholesome and a generous fear. But it does not mean this. It means a shrinking apprehensiveness lest the known or supposed tastes of the critics should be so opposed to the feeling of the artist that a condemnation of the work will be drawn down by its very originality; and this verdict being openly expressed, and with an authoritative air, the artist trembles lest the public should see with the critic’s eyes. All experience is against such a conclusion. Original genius always makes its way because it is original, and in spite of criticism.
This subject is too large to be more than glanced at here. Another aspect also solicits attention, namely, the effect of criticism on public culture. This seems to me peculiarly injurious in its operation through two channels, the first of which is the encouragement of a listless laziness of mind, satisfied with superficial fragmentary and second-hand knowledge, contented with reviews of books instead of the books themselves; the second channel is the encouragement of that dangerous hastiness of judgment which is natural to us all, but isstrongest in the weakest minds, least active in the most cultivated. The habit of judging on evidence confessedly imperfect is a vicious habit which criticism encourages. The culture most needed by the mind is that of a patient receptiveness of impressions, and a cautioushesitation in settling conclusions. This is especially true in art. We should do our utmost to let the artist’s work sink deep into our minds; and when the impressions have been clearly received, undisturbed by any restive interference from our habits of thought, when we can saythat we have heard and understood his language as he meant it, then slowly, inevitably will the guarantee of our sympathy assure us that the work is—or is not—suited to us in our present condition. More than this we should not say. Let others speak for themselves; enough if we can speak truly for ourselves. Only by thus allowing the artist’s work to produce its genuine impression on us can we receive from it any lasting delight. We must, for awhile at least, keep our own personality in abeyance, and submit to the influence of his. Let us first learn to see with his eyes, and then look with our own. Above all things, let us try not to see with the eyes of the world, even should the world be presumably right. We shall, perhaps, in time, come round to that point of view, if we allow the work to produce a genuine impression on us; and every impression so produced will be not simply a delight in itself, but an education preparing us for the reception of other works. This, indeed, is the true meaning of culture.
The critical habit of mind is directly opposed to this patient receptiveness. Our native precipitancy of judgment is stimulated by the mass of criticism, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, thrust upon our notice. Even the most frivolous men and women criticise trenchantly, and decide on the merits of serious artists with a confidence which would be amusing were it not so distressing. The chatter of shameless nonsense which may daily be heard, even in what is called educated society, when the works of contemporaries are named, is more inexpressibly wearisome than the talk of men “whose talk is of oxen,” so little justice do the speakers show either to the artists or to their own better selves, and so thoughtlessly and flippantly do they echo the harsh and hasty judgments of the press. I sometimes hear it said that public taste is formed and the individual judgment is strengthened by this diffusion of the critical spirit. This seems to me a serious error. Surely taste is only formed by the enjoyment of excellence? The mind familiarised with the excellences of art requires no teaching to detect what is false and vicious; these it spontaneously rejects. Judgment, moreover, is not strengthened by the habit of forming off-hand opinions, but by a severe submission of its native rashness to the restraints of rational research.
Reviewing is a hasty process, which has its necessities and its inherent defects as a hasty process. The less we read of it the better; and the more we regard it as mere printed talk of very questionable authority, the less injustice we shall do to authors. Much of its inevitable evil might be remedied by a franker attitude on the reviewer’s part, in which he would relinquish the authoritative position of a judge putting forth absolute verdicts, to assume the position of a reporter who is giving his own personal impressions. A work that has, perhaps, cost the writer many anxious years of thought and research, may be reported on by a reviewer in a few days, and the report may be both honest and instructive. A work of art, every detail of which has been chosen by the fine selective instinct of the artist, may likewise be reported on by a reviewer who never gives himself time to consider whether the suggestions he urges as objections have not been already rejected by the author; or whether the obscurities and defects he charges upon the author do not lie in his own imperfect culture. But if the report be ostensibly the mere expression of a personal impression, which rather tells us what has been the effect of the work on the critic, than what is the quality of the work itself, neither author nor public would have much cause to complain. I do not affirm that all criticism is without a scientific value. There arc undoubtedly certain psychological principles to which all works must conform, and certain technical principles by which every art must be guided. Whenever a critic justifies his praise or his blame by showing a concordance with or dissidence from such general rules, his verdict rises above the mere personal impression, and approaches the character of a rational judgment, true of all minds and at all times. It only does so when he can lay bare the secret of an effect or a defect, and show its felicitous, or infelicitous, adaptation of means to ends. This, however, is rarely attempted; and it would be well if critics attempted it oftener. In every case they could plainly mark the nature of their verdict, whether they intended it to be accepted as a report or as a judgment.
A personal character impressed on criticism would considerably mitigate the evils now justly complained of. There would still remain the evils of precipitate judgment, ignorant report, and personal animus. There would still remain the sheep-like tendency of men to leap where another leaps. The mere utterance of an opinion, although only uttered as the opinion of one man, will always bias many; for few people have any opinion of their own which could enable them to resist the bias. Any confidently expressed thought suddenly illuminates the majority, giving them confidence on a subject which, up to that time, had never engaged their thought at all. They will believe in the virtue of a hero, or the villainy of a tyrant, of whose lives they know nothing, simply because the chorus of praise or the howl of indignation reaches their ears. But I must not suffer myself to be seduced into an essay when my purpose is simply to explain how some inevitable evils may be mitigated by greater modesty and frankness on the part of critics; that is, by their making it apparent when they are speaking in the name of scientific criticism, and when they are expressing their own personal impressions. I have been led to touch on this point because I wish to express the impressions made on me by a young poet, whose “Idyls” have moved me as much after several readings as on the first, and seem to me very remarkable among modern works for quiet strength and genuine insight; and because from the nature of his genius there seems some danger of its public recognition being retarded, unless a few of those whose office it is to call public attention to works unheralded by a great name, or unaccompanied by some extrinsic attraction, take upon themselves the peril which they so generally dread—the peril of “committing” themselves.1 Robert Buchanan seems to me a man of genius. Whatever deductions may have to be made; whatever faults and short comings may limit his reputation and lower his rank, there will not long be a doubt that he deserves to rank among the poets—a small class in every age. In this volume of “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn,”
(1) It may be observed that men who have great hesitation in committing themselves to praise of an unacknowledged author, are bold enough in committing themselves to blame. For myself I would rather make a mistake in overrating than in underrating; although, as a critic, I desire to make no mistake either way.
there are pages of very indifferent quality, but there are pages of very rare quality indeed. We may find many men gifted with a greater “accomplishment of verse,” and capable of expressing more ingeniously their impressions of external nature, or the fluctuating moods of their own minds; that is to say, men of more literary culture, and more flexible talent; but it is rare to find one who has so much genuine poetic insight, who being himself deeply moved by some experience of life, has the requisite sincerity to record that experience, and the requisite art to make the record affecting. Mr. Buchanan has some literary culture, much literary ambition, and of course the young poet’s longing after ideal themes; but his strength is shown in this, that he can push aside the allurements of mere literary ambition, and obey the poetic impulse to express his own experience in music. He sings of what he has known and felt, and not of what he has read. He has seen and sympathetically lived with the weavers and dominies of a Scottish village; he has tasted of their joys, and been shaken with their sorrows. Under his meditative observation have passed the humble tragedies of peasant-life, the coarse, grim humours of Scottish life, and he has wrought them into poems.
It is not improbable that the careless reader who has long been accustomed to the glare of modern poetry, with its profuse splendour of imagery, its intricacies and embroideries of style, and its predominance of manner over matter, may at first regard as poverty the simplicity of Mr. Buchanan’s verse. Its quiet strength may be mistaken for a deficiency of imagination. I do not think that this will be felt by men of taste and insight. They may, it is true, perceive that the poet is young, and at present displays no great wealth of mind. But the very absence of poetic exuberance will bring into more distinct relief the real strength of his imagination and the genuineness of his poetic faculty. He owes nothing to manner, everything to insight. So true is this, that the most rigorous test which could be applied to these Idyls, namely, the reduction of them to simple prose, would still leave them so muchpoetic worth that every one would recognise them as poems. The music deepens the emotions; but without the music the mere succession of the pictures would be affecting, so thoroughly has he imagined them, so dramatically has he entered into the psychological conditions of the actors. I shall presently have to notice, as a drawback, that the Idyls are even too near the level of prose, and that a more exquisite workmanship would have wrought them into works of much higher value; meanwhile it is enough to say that even in prosethey would be felt to be poetical.
The opening Idyl, Willie Baird, is perhaps the one which will be generally preferred. A poor old village dominie, sad and forlorn, suffers his memory to travel back upon the days of his childhood, and then passes on to linger over one episode of his lonely life, when a little child was brought to his school.
“O well I mind the day his mother brought
Her tiny trembling tot with yellow hair,
Her tiny poor-clad tot six summers old,
And left him seated lonely on a form
Before my desk. He neither wept nor gloom’d
But waited silently, with shoeless feet
Swinging above the floor; in wonder eyed
The maps upon the walls, the big black board,
The slates and books and copies, and my own
Grey hose and clumpy boots; last, fixing gaze
Upon a monster spider’s web that fill’d
One corner of the whitewash’d ceiling, watch’d
The speckled traitor jump and jink about,
Till he forgot my unfamiliar eyes,
Weary and strange and old.”
This child soon became his pet, and every day was brought to school and fetched away by Donald, the sheep dog. The child recalled to the old man his early years. And—
“When I placed my hand on Willie’s head,
Warm sunshine tingled from the yellow hair
Thro’ trembling fingers to my blood within;
And when I look’d in Willie’s stainless eyes
I saw the empty other floating grey
O’er shadowy mountains murmuring low with winds;
And often when, in his old-fashion’d way,
He question’d me, I seem’d to hear a voice
From far away, that mingled with the cries
Haunting the regions where the round red sun
Is all alone with God among the snow.”
Little Willie was affectionate and inquiring, would ask about the stars, and—
“If I, the grey-hair’d dominie, was dug
From out a cabbage garden, such as he
Was found in? if, when bigger, he would wear
Grey homespun hose and clumsy boots like mine?”
(As a small verbal criticism, one may question whether “clumsy” is the fitting epithet here, since it carries the reader away from the feeling in the child’s mind, and substitutes the estimate which the dominie himself forms of the boots.) He also asked of heaven:—
“And was it full of flowers? and were there schools
And dominies there? and was it far away?
Then, with a look that made your eyes grow dim,
Clasping his wee white hands round Donald’s neck,
‘Do doggies gang to heaven?’ he would ask;
‘Would Donald gang?’ and keek’d in Donald’s face
While Donald blink’d with meditative gaze,
As if he knew full brawly what we said,
And ponder’d o’er it, wiser far than we.”
All this is told with perfect simplicity and force; the poet’s instinct made him feel that it would be incongruous to place in the mouth of such a speaker the luxuriant imagery of far-fetched allusions with which some poets have treated simple themes. He represses the temptation to make his dominie speak out of character. This is the true dramatic force; and as Hazlitt was wont to say, the quality most needed by the dramatist is “fortitude of mind.” Once the dominie allows the poet to speak for him, in the fine image—
As the catastrophe approaches it solemnises his language, but even then the speaker’s character is preserved.
“Three days and nights the snow had mistily fall’n.
It lay long miles along the country side,
White, awful, silent. In the keen cold air
There was a hush, a sleepless silentness,
And mid it all, upraising eyes, you felt
God’s breath upon your face. * * * * * * * *
“One day in school I saw,
Through threaded window-panes, soft, snowy flakes
Swim with unquiet motion, mistily, slowly,
At intervals; but when the boys were gone,
And in ran Donald with a dripping nose,
The air was clear and grey as glass. An hour
Sat Willie, Donald, and myself around
The murmuring fire, and then with tender hand
I wrapt a comforter round Willie’s throat,
Button’d his coat around him close and warm,
And off he ran with Donald, happy-eyed
And merry, leaving fairy prints of feet
Behind him on the snow. I watch’d them fade
Round the white curve, and, turning with a sigh,
Came in to sort the room and smoke a pipe
Before the fire. Here, dreamingly and alone,
I sat and smoked, and in the fire saw clear
The norland mountains, white and cold with snow
That crumbled silently, and moved, and changed,—
When suddenly the air grew sick and dark,
And from the distance came a hollow sound,
A murmur like the moan of far-off seas. “I started to my feet, look’d out, and knew
The winter wind was whistling from the clouds
To lash the snow-clothed plain, and to myself
I prophesied a storm before the night.
Then with an icy pain, an eldritch gleam,
I thought of Willie; but I cheer’d my heart,
‘He’s home, and with his mother, long ere this!’
While thus I stood the hollow murmur grew
Deeper, the wold grew darker, and the snow
Rush’d downward, whirling in a shadowy mist.
I walk’d to yonder door and open’d it.
Whirr! the wind swung it from me with a clang,
And in upon me with an iron-like crash
Swoop’d in the drift. With pinch’d sharp face I gazed
Out on the storm! Dark, dark was all! A mist,
A blinding, whirling mist, of chilly snow,
The falling and the driven; for the wind
Swept round and round in clouds upon the earth,
And birm’d the deathly drift aloft with moans,
Till all was swooning darkness. Far above
A voice was shrieking, like a human cry. “I closed the door, and turn’d me to the fire,
With something on my heart—a load—a sense
Of an impending pain. Down the broad lum
Came melting flakes that hiss’d upon the coal;
Under my eyelids blew the blinding smoke,
And for a time I sat like one bewitch’d,
Still as a stone. The lonely room grew dark,
The flickering fire threw phantoms of the snow
Along the floor and on the walls around;
The melancholy ticking of the clock
Was like the beating of my heart. But, hush!
Above the moaning of the wind I heard
A sudden scraping at the door; my heart
Stood still and listen’d; and with that there rose
An awsome howl, shrill as a dying screech,
And scrape, scrape, scrape, the sound beyond the door!
I could not think—I could not breathe—a dark,
Awful foreboding gript me like a hand,
As opening the door I gazed straight out,
Saw nothing, till I felt against my knees
Something that moved, and heard a moaning sound—
Then panting, moaning, o’er the threshold leapt
Donald the dog, alone, and white with snow.”
The child is found dead in the snow. After the funeral, the old man begs for Donald to be given to him; and henceforth the two live together, knowing each other’s sorrow.
“Yet here at nights I sit,
Reading the Book, with Donald at my side;
And stooping, with the Book upon my knee,
I sometimes gaze in Donald’s patient eyes—
So sad, so human, though he cannot speak—
And think he knows that Willie is at peace,
Far, far away beyond the norland hills,
Beyond the silence of the untrodden snow.”
There are few readers who will not recognise the strength and poetic beauty of this, even under all the disadvantages of extracts, and will see, moreover, that the poet is entirely occupied with the human life he is depicting, not at all with the presentment of his own cleverness. It is writing which relies on its intrinsic truth for effect.
The verse might be more musically varied, especially by a few double-endings, which Mr. Buchanan seems rarely prompted to use, although they would break with good effect the monosyllabic monotony. Indeed, a delicate ear will miss in these Idyls much of the charm of fine blank verse; the poet has not learned its secrets. He yields to its delusive facilities, apparently unaware that precisely because blank verse is the easiest verse to write, it is the most difficult to write exquisitely.
The form of these Idyls is not the point to which the reader’s attention is most specially directed, but rather their poetic substance, and the promise of future excellence they suggest. The large simplicity of the design, rejecting all adventitious aids, implies a consciousness of power and sincerity of aim very remarkable at all times, and particularly so in a young poet of the present day. And there is also another quality worth pointing out. A distinguished writer of our time holds the belief that the pre-eminent faculty of all the great poets is the faculty of telling a story. Unless under very considerable qualifications, I should hardly go so far as this; yet it is certain that all great poets, even lyrical poets, have manifested this power, and have set themselves very seriously to the art of telling a story, simple or complex. Only a few critics, and those who have tried to tell a story, are aware of its difficulties. It seems so easy, especially when the story is well told, when nothing superfluous or incongruous is introduced, and all the necessary elements are organically present, that men may be forgiven if they fail to wonder at it. But the intensity of imagination and the fine selective instinct, which are pre-supposed in a well-told story, are rare qualities.
I can easily suppose that the majority of readers will see nothing in the “Idyls of Inverburn” but simple stories, which demanded no great art in the telling. It is only by reflecting how well these are told, and how rarely stories are well told, that a reader will giveMr. Buchanan any credit; and it is very probable that the poet himself holds this faculty cheap, for the traces of haste in the poems suggest that they were written without much effort, and it is usually by the effort expended that men prize their own work; whereby theycome to think more of some result of culture than of instinct. Be this as it may, and whatever value be attached to the art of story telling, the art is successfully shown in these Idyls.
The legend of Lord Ronald’s Wife, which succeeds Willie Baird, is in a strain altogether removed from the homely simplicity of the Idyl, and is more like the poems of other writers; it is, however, musically and passionately written.
Each Idyl is succeeded by a Legend; the object of this arrangement was probably to give variety, but it may also have been to show that the reticence which keeps the tone of the Idyls down to one of great simplicity, was prompted by a sense of dramatic propriety, and is notto be taken as systematic.
Poet Andrew is the next Idyl. Those who have read the narrative of David Gray’s career so touchingly told by Mr. Buchanan in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine last year, will at once recognise the original of this Idyl; and it would be interesting if, in a future edition, that prose-story were reprinted as an appendix to these Idyls, when a comparison might be made between the two modes of treatment of the same theme. In the narrative we have simply the plain biographical point of view. David Gray and his story are presented to us. In the Idyl we read the story imaginatively through the father’s feelings. Andrew’s father is an old weaver who indulged in the day dream of educating his son to be a minister.
“Weel, the lad
Grew up among us, and at seventeen
His hands were genty white, and he was tall,
And slim, and narrow-shoulder’d: pale of face,
Silent, and bashful. Then we first began
To feel how muckle more he knew than we,
To eye his knowledge in a kind of fear,
As folk might look upon a crouching beast,
Bonnie, but like enough to rise and bite.
Up came the cloud between us silly folk
And the young lad that sat among his books
Amid the silence of the night; and oft
It pain’d us sore to fancy he would learn
Enough to make him look with shame and scorn
On this old dwelling.”
Instead of taking kindly to the ministry, Andrew incurred the weaver’s wrath and contempt by taking to poetry, a pursuit associated in the old man’s mind with drunkenness and dissipation.
“But Andrew flusht and never spake a word,
Yet eyed me sidelong with his beaded een,
And turn’d awa’, and, as he turn’d, his look—
Half scorn, half sorrow—stang me. After that
I felt he never heeded word of ours,
And tho’ we tried to teach him common sense
He idled as he pleased; and many a year,
After I spake him first, that look of his
Came dark between us, and I held my tongue,
And felt he scorn’d me for the poetry’s sake.
This coldness grew and grew, until at last
We sat whole nights before the fire and spoke
No word to one another.”
In brief firm touches, the picture of a life is made to stand out before us. The young poet goes to Edinburgh, and finally escapes to London, that polestar of literary ambition, that grave of so much effort and hope. The heart of the father is wrung, and—
“Night by night, these een lookt Londonways,
And saw my laddie wandering all alone
’Mid darkness, fog, and reek, growing afar
To dark proportions and gigantic shape—
Just as the figure of a sheep-herd looms,
Awful and silent, thro’ a mountain mist. “Ye aiblins ken the rest. At first, there came
Proud letters, swiftly writ, telling how folk
Now roundly call’d him ‘Poet,’ holding out
Bright pictures, which we smiled at wearily—
As people smile at pictures in a book,
Untrue but bonnie. Then the letters ceased,
There came a silence cold and still as frost,—
We sat and hearken’d to our beating hearts,
And pray’d as we had never pray’d before.
Then lastly, on the silence broke the news
That Andrew, far awa’, was sick to death,
And, weary, weary of the noisy streets,
With aching head and weary hopeless heart,
Was coming home from mist and fog and noise
To grassy lowlands and the caller air. “’Twas strange, ’twas strange!—but this, the weary end
Of all our bonnie biggins in the clouds,
Came like a tearful comfort. Love sprang up
Out of the ashes of the household fire,
Where Hope was fluttering like the loose white film;
And Andrew, our own boy, seem’d nearer now
To this old dwelling and our aching hearts
Than he had ever been since he became
Wise with book-learning. With an eager pain,
I met him at the train and brought him home;
And when we met that sunny day in hairst,
The ice that long had sunder’d us had thaw’d,
We met in silence, and our een were dim.
Och, I can see that look of his this night!
Part pain, part tenderness—a weary look
Yearning for comfort such as God the Lord
Puts into parents’ een. I brought him here.
Gently we set him here beside the fire,
And spake few words, and hush’d the noisy house;
Then eyed his hollow cheeks and lustrous een,
His clammy hueless brow and faded hands,
Blue vein’d and white like lily-flowers.”
How finely all this is observed, and how delicately touched. The boy has come home to die. The shadow of death is too soul-subduing to permit a continuance of the old estrangement.
“And as he nearer grew to God the Lord,
Nearer and dearer ilka day he grew
To Mysie and mysel,—our own to love,
The world’s no longer. For the first last time,
We twa, the lad and I, could sit and crack
With open hearts—free-spoken, at our ease;
I seem’d to know as muckle then as he,
Because I was sae sad.” * * * * * * * * “To me, it somehow seem’d
His care for lovely earthly things had changed—
Changed from the curious love it once had been,
Grown larger, bigger, holier, peacefuller;
And though he never lost the luxury
Of loving beauteous things for poetry’s sake,
His heart was God the Lord’s, and he was calm.
Death came to lengthen out his solemn thoughts
Like shadows to the sunset. So no more
We wonder’d. What is folly in a lad
Healthy and heartsome, one with work to do,
Befits the freedom of a dying man . . .
Mother, who chided loud the idle lad
Of old, now sat her sadly by his side,
And read from out the Bible soft and low,
Or lilted lowly, keeking in his face,
The old Scots songs that made his een so dim.
I went about my daily work as one
Who waits to hear a knocking at the door,
Ere Death creeps in and shadows those that watch;
And seated here at e’en i’ the ingleside,
I watch’d the pictures in the fire and smoked
My pipe in silence; for my head was fu’
Of many rhymes the lad had made of old
(Rhymes I had read in secret, as I said),
No one of which I minded till they came
Unsummon’d, buzzing-buzzing in my ears
Like bees among the leaves.
He dies. The forlorn father finds a certain sad comfort in the thoughtthat his boy was a poet.
“. . And you think weel of Andrew’s book? You think
That folk will love him, for the poetry’s sake,
Many a year to come? We take it kind
You speak so well of Andrew!—As for me,
I can make naething of the printed book;
I am no scholar, sir, as I have said,
And Mysie there can just read print a wee.
Ay! we are feckless, ignorant of the world!
And though ’twere joy to have our boy again
And place him far above our lowly house,
We like to think of Andrew as he was
When, dumb and wee, he hung his gold and gems
Round Mysie’s neck; or—as he is this night—
Lying asleep, his face to heaven,—asleep,
Near to our hearts, as when he was a bairn,
Without the poetry and human pride
That came between us, to our grief, langsyne.”
As far as my judgment goes this is genuine poetry, very sweet and noble in its feeling, very true and simple in expression. I think Wordsworth would have delighted in it, and recognised the writer as a younger brother. But it is very doubtful to me whether he wouldhave felt anything of the kind for the White Lily of Weardale Head. Certainly I do not; although nothing would surprise me less than to find many critics and readers prizing it above the Idyls, on the ground of its being more “poetical and imaginative.” It has undoubtedly more of what may be called the “properties” and “scenery” of poetic invention, and will be thought poetical, because these belong to what is vulgarly identified with poetry. But to my thinking, there is infinitely less imagination shown among the elves and greenwood glades of Weardale than in the fields and cottages of the Scottish peasants and weavers. Mr. Buchanan is here an echo, and not a very exquisite echo. He writes of elves and monks because he has read of elves and monks, not because some clear vision of them has haunted him, and compelled him to picture what he has vividly seen.
Nor does he rise above commonplace in the attempt; and this very mediocrity is, to my mind, the prophecy of future excellence, and the confirmation of his powers: for it significantly shows, that when obeying a genuine instinct, singing real emotions, he has the secrets of poetic power at command; but that when he is writing, and not singing, he is weak, where mere imitative talent would be ingenious and effective. This is but saying, in other words, that Mr. Buchanan is a man of original genius; such faculty as he has is independent, individual. And if we look closely into his poems we shall be struck with the fact that, although quite free from mannerism or eccentricity, which could call attention to any marked peculiarity isolating him from contemporaries, his style and thought are distinctively his own. This was not the case in his first volume of “Undertones;” it is remarkably the case with the volume of Idyls. Of course, even here he does not wholly escape the influence of predecessors and contemporaries: no man except Robert Browning does that; but still the voice which speaks in these verses is the voice of the man himself, and does not recall the tones of another. The very limitations of his style are thus negative merits. If there is a certainmonotony of music, a certain homely economy which may look like poverty, it shows that, at any rate, he is not “trading on borrowed capital." As his soul grows larger his style will become richer; and at all times the wealth will be genuine. I call attention to this unobtrusive originality because its very reticence may be a source of misconception. He has none of the showy graces which make inconsiderate readers exclaim “How clever! how poetical!” He presents the poetic material without any blare of trumpets and drums, and hoarse shouts of “Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, walk up and see the wonderful, the miraculous, the stupendous . . . . .” While reading the poems you never think of the poet. It is only in the afterglow of emotion that you think of him; and then you see what rare power was needed to produce so genuine an effect.
The English Huswife’s Gossip is the Idyl which succeeds the legend of Weardale. The woman herself is charmingly indicated with brief dramatic touches; but the subject of the poem is the character and love story of a “natural”—
“Man-bodied, but in many things a child;
Unfinish’d somewhere—where, the Lord knows best
Who made and guards him; wiser, craftier,
Than Tom, or any other man I know,
In tiny things few men perceive at all;
No fool at cooking, clever at his work,
Thoughtful when Tom is senseless and unkind,
Kind with a grace that sweetens silentness,—
But weak where other working-men are strong,
And strong where they are weak. An angry word
From one he loves,—and off he creeps in pain—
Perhaps to ease his tender heart in tears.
But easy sadden’d, sir, is easy-pleased!
Give him the babe to nurse, he sits him down,
Smiles like a woman, and is glad at heart.”
The subtle psychological truth and power of imagination displayed in this poem cannot be exhibited in an extract. There are many felicitous touches and some suggestive pictures in The Two Babes, the longest of the Idyls; but the disagreeable element is too predominant, and the treatment keeps it within the region of the disagreeable without raising it into savage sarcasm or memorable satire. Hugh Sutherland’s Pansies strikes me as the feeblest of the series, conventional in sentiment and unreal in treatment. The idea of a man passionately attached to his flowers is an obviously poetical subject; but it is here treated too much in the “Keepsake” style.
At the end of the volume are four little poems, called Village Voices, which, like the rest, are dramatic, and full of picture. One of them may be given here:—
“Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, across the west you fly,
You gaze on half the earth at once with sweet and steadfast eye;
Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, were I aloft with thee,
I know that I could look upon my boy who sails at sea. “Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, you throw your silver showers
Upon a glassy sea that lies round shores of fruit and flowers,
The blue tide trembles on the shore, with murmuring as of bees,
And the shadow of the ship lies dark near shades of orange trees. “Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, now wind and storm have fled,
Your light creeps thro’ a cabin-pane and lights a flaxen head:
He tosses with his lips apart, lies smiling in your gleam,
For underneath his folded lids you put a gentle dream. “Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, his head is on his arm,
He stirs with balmy breath and sees the moonlight on the Farm,
He stirs and breathes his mother’s name, he smiles and sees once more
The Moon above, the fields below, the shadow at the door. “Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, across the lift you go,
Far south you gaze and see my Boy, where groves of orange grow!
Summer Moon, O Summer Moon, you turn again to me,
And seem to have the smile of him who sleeps upon the sea.”
The one bad line in this poem,
leads me to remark on the manifest want of revision which the poems betray. Mr. Buchanan can hardly have had the sound of the quiet wash of the sea present to his mind when he compared it with the murmuring of bees; nor can he have lingered over his poems with the poet’s impatience at imperfection, and desire for exquisite precision, or he would not have left so many weak and insignificant lines. He is too frequently satisfied with mere earthenware, forgetting that poetry is porcelain. He employs poetic clay, but it often wants baking in the white-heat furnace. No doubt it is excessively difficult to be at once musical, exquisite, and yet so near the level of familiar speech as not to seem inflated; difficult to avoid the colloquial without becoming conventional; but it is a difficulty the poet must overcome; and he is bound above all things to be exquisite, to ravish the ear with music and the mind with delicate precision. Instead of this, the verse of Mr. Buchanan is sometimes almost as languid as prose. He may plead the example of Wordsworth; but that great meditative writer never gained his influence by these languid moods, he gained it in spite of them.
The reader whom this notice may induce to take up the “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn” is entreated to pass over, without looking at it, the “Preamble,” or poetical preface, and to recur to it only after the volume is finished, and then only out of a critical impulse to see how badly a poet can write. It is another and more striking illustration of what was said just now respecting Mr. Buchanan’s inefficiency when not writing from a genuine impulse—the weakness of his talent as contrasted with the strength of his genius. When he is singing his voice is clear, penetrating, sympathetic; if its compass is not great, if its voluble flexibility is slight, its tones are true and musical. He has no tawdry graces, no insincerities. But when he is writing as in this preamble, more because he fancies that some preface was needed for his poems than because anything urged him to speak, he falls into the common affectations of the day. He who is simple sometimes even to baldness, and true with quiet reliance on truth, when speaking of what has really moved him, can open his volume with such stuff as this:—
And because there was really nothing in his mind, no clear vision he was striving to express, he was wholly indifferent to the simple facts that glory is not what is breathed in air, and that blood does not pant. The phrases sufficed. So, again, when he speaks of
and when he requests spring to tip his tongue
he is not only talking nonsense, but nonsense of the most meretricious kind, which delights half the silly verse-writers of our day, because, consisting in unusual collocation of words, it is held to be original and imaginative.
The “Preamble” is not, one is happy to say, made up of such trash as this; but it bears the same sort of relation to poems as newspaper leaders bear to literature. Any one, without warning, opening the volume and beginning to read this Preamble, will be excused if hethrow it down with impatience at such improvisation mingled with such defects. As I said before, the clumsy inefficiency of Mr. Buchanan’s muse when she is not sincere is to me a prophecy of her future vigour; she will learn in time only to write in obedience to some inward impulse; if she were better able to ape the airs and graces of another, there might be danger of her never finding out her real strength.
When I have said that the poems need severe revision, and especially need to have at least two-thirds of the references to honey blotted out, I have said all that is necessary in the way of general fault-finding. The other shortcomings and errors are mainly such as may fairly be set down to the writer’s youth, or to the natural limitations of his genius. He has no tricks to be warned against. He has nothing to unlearn, though much, of course, to learn. Such as he is,I believe him to be a genuine poet, who may one day become a distinguished poet. Even if his stature never enlarges, his place among the pastoral poets will be undisputed.
That is in substance the report I have to make, the opinion to which I stand “committed.” Whether others agree in my estimate or not is a matter of far less importance than that each should consider his judgment as one entirely personal, except where he can reduce it to scientific law; as merely representing the condition of his own sensibility and culture, except where he can show that the excellences or defects conform to or violate certain established psychological and technical conditions.
EDITOR. [Note: The editor of The Fortnightly Review at this time was G. H. Lewes.] ___ Glasgow Herald (5 August, 1865 - Issue 7981) WORDSWORTH, DAVID GRAY, ROBERT BUCHANAN. The Spectator, in reviewing Mr. Robt. Buchanan’s “Inverburn,” says:—Wordsworth has often been spoken of as a poet completely outside the direct line of poetic tradition, as standing apart in a still backwater, as it were, from the great stream of our national poetry—as being without parent and without offspring. Whatever may be the truth as to the former point—and we readily admit that we know of nothing like Wordsworth before Wordsworth—it certainly cannot be said since the publication of David Gray’s lyrics and Mr. Buchanan’s fresh idyls that he is without poetical offspring. The former of the two indeed, the brilliant young poet whose pale sweet light rose only to set before its brightness had been seen except by the eyes of the few, had much more in him of Wordsworth than has Mr. Buchanan. His genius was fed from the lyrical side of Wordsworth, while Mr. Buchanan’s has been fed from that perhaps less striking side of his genius which delighted in the meditative delineation of simple village characters and of natural griefs or joys. Not that even Wordsworth’s genius was eminently lyrical. He kept the themes of his poetry too steadily at the focus of his own meditative thought, as an astronomer steadily keeps the image of the star he is observing in the centre of his reflecting mirror, to give the full involuntary rush of lyric emotion to his verse. If the adjective “lyrical” implies perfect spontaneousness, as to a large degree we think it does, David Gray’s poetry is even more lyrical than his master’s. Its rhythm suggests the musical lapse of falling waters more distinctly to our ears. Wordsworth’s deepest and fullest lyrics suggest the strong and rapturous plunges of a mind swimming freely and alone in the infinite ocean of Nature, David Gray’s far thinner and fainter but yet sweeter strains, the flowing away of the very essence of his own nature in streams of melody. But if David Gray took his inspiration from the most lyrical side of Wordsworth’s genius, Mr. Buchanan takes his from the most dramatic—perhaps we ought to say the least undramatic—side. In such poems as the very fine ones on “Michael,” “The Mad Mother,” “The Idiot Boy,” and some others, Wordsworth showed a very considerable power of entering up to a certain point into the emotions of other minds, though he never failed to steep them with something of his own meditative rapture. It is from this side of his poetry that Mr. Buchanan seems to have fed his own mind,—such poems as “Willie Baird” and “Poet Andrew,” for instance, reminding us in their type of Wordsworth’s “Michael,” though showing less meditative genius than Wordsworth, and borrowing just a shade of the long-drawn dramatic sketches of Browning. The chief characteristic in which David Gray and Robert Buchanan alike resemble Wordsworth is the cool, white, transparent tone of their thoughts, the absence of prismatic colour, of multiplex ornament, in their workmanship,—the complete predominance of the single conception which runs through the whole, over the various elements which constitute the parts. Tennyson’s workmanship is all rich,—Browning’s is all grotesque and singular; in both, the whole is sometimes forgotten in the richness or the odd emphasis of the parts. But in Wordsworth every picture is imaged on the cool surface of deep still water, which mellows the colours, softens the lines, and gives each a wholeness of effect. And here both David Gray and Mr. Buchanan resemble their master. Theirs is not the poetry of metaphor, simile, or imaginative tours de force. There is always some single thought or mood of which the poem is an embodiment, and which is as simple and transparent in structure as a crystal. There is nothing tropical in either of them. The mountaineer poet has been succeeded by other mountaineer poets. The mountain stream ripples audibly in both; the “power of hills” is on both; in both the wild flower is a deeper passion than the garden flower.
But though true of Mr. Buchanan, it is less true of him than of his helpless brother poet. Mr. Buchanan’s poems, as we have already hinted, are less simple in structure, less crystalline, less entire, partly perhaps because they are less lyrical and enter deeper into the minds of others, than David Gray’s. Their form is less perfect, their rhythm less musical, their breath of inspiration less pure, and less free from half assimilated materials, but the materials which Mr. Buchanan strives to assimilate are more various and rich than those of David Gray’s clear, thrilling, and delicate musings on the beauty of Nature. On the other hand, also, it is quite possible that Mr. Buchanan’s poems promise for his genius a fuller and more vigorous growth. He has been advised by an able and friendly critic—and no critic who has any true feeling for poetry can do anything but echo that advice—to abstain in future from his little legendary fancies, his elves, and fays, and trolls, and the rest of them, and stick to real and simple life, in the semi-dramatic delineation of which his true power lies. There is as broad a gulf between the poetry of “Poet Andrew,” or “Willie Baird,” or the beautiful “London Idyl” he recently published in the Fortnightly Review, as there is between Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and his “Airy, Fairy Lilian”—between the pleasure which sinks deep into the imagination and the heart, and the pleasure, if there be any, in a gentle tickling of the fancy. Back to the Bibliography, Poetry or Idyls and Legends of Inverburn _____ Poems (1866 - American edition only) The Round Table (New York) (23 December, 1865) REVIEWS.
_____ ROBERT BUCHANAN. * A LITTLE more than five years ago two friends, both young, both poor in money and connections, went up from Glasgow to London to try their fortunes in the literary world. One of them, David Gray, has since died, and the story of his life has been given to us by kind hands; the other was Robert Buchanan, who is, fortunately, not yet a subject for biography, but only for criticism.
And yet we may say of Mr. Buchanan that a young man who, as a stranger in a strange land, has managed not only to win bread, but to publish two such volumes as he has given us, is entitled to the praise of extraordinary industry. Living, as Gray characterized it, in a “dear old ghostly bankrupt garret,” harassed by want, dependence, and uncertainty, the successful publication, within three years, of the “Undertones” might seem almost incredible, were it not that literary history tells of many like cases. Judged upon its merits only, the “Undertones” is valuable chiefly for its promise of better things; how rich that promise is may be inferred from the fact that the book has already passed to a second edition. Perhaps we shall do well not to press this consideration in view of the market that is often found for what Holmes calls “intellectual green fruit.” Still it is something that a book treating upon subjects for which the ordinary reading public care little or nothing, coming modestly from a youth unknown and unconnected, should meet with so ready a recognition. The themes are from Greek mythology, and are, for the most part (the longer poems, without exception), of a grave, even pathetic, character. These motives somehow give the name to the volume, contemplating
“That ideal hight
Where, in low undertones, those spirits plain’d,
Each full of special glory unattain’d.”
There is Ades, who has won Persephone to his ghostly realm only to find, after all, that she is no bride for him; Pan, who mourns that he was made a god, yet not endowed with the presence of a god; Penelope, grown old in waiting for Ulysses, and still constant and watching; Pygmalion, who has forgotten his pure love of art in a lower passion, and who finds a scourge in the seeming answer of his desire; and, best of all, that wherein a story of one Eumolpus and the Siren is made to repeat the old lesson of Ecclesiastes, “Vanitas vanitatum” being pronounced as the legend written at the bottom of every cup, not only of joy, but of love as well, and hope and fame. These are all pleasing poems; there are passages of great beauty in nearly every one of them; yet, putting aside from consideration “Penelope” and the “Siren,” our judgment of these and of others in the volume would be thus: enjoyable as they are, they somehow escape being Greek. It is not that sometimes, as in “Pygmalion,” the author takes liberties with the legend. That might be passed over in an isolated case as not affecting more than one poem. It is not that he sometimes gives us the Greek form of a name, sometimes the Latin; nor even is it that the frequent over-luxuriance of his language contrasts with the tempered grace of the classic models which have come down to us. The young Bion, or the young Theocritus, may have needed pruning as well as he. It is partly what we find and partly what we miss that persuades us that these are but Birmingham-Chinese wares; good enough in themselves, but not exactly what they seem. We miss the frequent patronymics and curt ancestries of classic poetry—the all-pervading presence of divinities and heroes, the directness of expression; we miss the characteristics of Greek landscape as painted by the Greeks themselves, where everything was valuable as it ministered to man. The shade-giving trees, the herbage good for flocks, the vines which yielded grapes, and the running streams that kept the meadows green. These were the things they loved. The feeling of beauty in nature aside from things whose use they knew seems to have been exceptional and rare. In Mr. Buchanan, however, the modern feeling for landscape, a love for its beauty quite aside from any usefulness there may be in it, crops out continually even in passages where he has chosen each feature of his scene as a Greek might have chosen. And somehow or other, the careful reader will easily perceive it, the heroes of Mr. Buchanan are not the heroes of antique fable. They are not so bad, they are not so good, and, above all, the old spirit has gone out of them, as, indeed, might have been expected after so long lapse of time. For the sake of contrast we were tempted to give here the passage where Polyphemus woos Galatea in Mr. Buchanan’s book side by side with a similar passage from the eleventh idyl of Theocritus. But, as our limits forbid, we must ask the reader to do so for himself, and then consider whether the difference is so much between one man and another as between two ages far apart in time, in faith, and in feeling. In fact, the sources of Mr. Buchanan’s inspiration would seem to be not the real masters of ancient song, but the authors of “Hyperion” and “The Lotus Eaters.” Yet from whatever source he drew, he could not draw the Greek spirit. It may be acknowledged that Keats and Tennyson have not really succeeded when they have attempted like subjects, but we can forgive more to “Hyperion” and “The Lotus Eaters,” for the sake of what they are, than we can to “Pan” and “Pygmalion.” These poems, it is true, have many of the characteristics of real poetry, and often seem as if they were just about to rise into indisputable excellence; but Mr. Buchanan is a man with whom we may insist that he shall not be the echo of anybody else, no matter who may be that other.
The right to be thus exacting with our author is given us by this very volume. We have before said that “Undertones” is valuable chiefly as a work of promise. There are indications scattered all through the book that better things were to be expected when the author should have become matured and more skilled in the ways of composition. But, as we have hinted, there are two poems where this promise is so strikingly displayed as almost to become fulfillment. The first of these is “Penelope.” The poem is simple, dignified, touching; perhaps, too, the most purely “classic” thing in the volume. The reason seems to be that the subject is within the range of human sympathy for human sorrow, and that Mr. Buchanan is strong where his heart is engaged, and weak where it is not. His mind only is interested in Polyphemus and Galatea with much the same regard that any man of nice feeling and sufficient education has for that story. But in the wifely affection and longing of Penelope he has more than a common interest. Where his heart is touched he sees more than common men—not as much more as we shall find he can see when trusting more entirely to his own feeling and experience and less to his reading, but still enough more to raise this poem above all which have gone before, and to show us what kind of excellence we may expect from the poet hereafter. “The Siren” exhibits quite a different sort of promise. The promise of Penelope is fulfilled in the “Idyls,” that of the Siren, which indeed is a later work than the other and only included in the second edition of the “Undertones,” looks toward the future. We have already somewhat indicated the treatment of this subject. It is only necessary to say further that the story is the usual one of the Siren, with such difference in character as would naturally be given to it by its transformation into an allegory. It is but a slender thread of a story. Eumolpus, who borrows his name from the mythical good singer of Thrace, is lured by a voice to wander for years over the sea—the melody always receding—until, in his old age, he finds the Siren, only to die in her arms. It is told in the form of a dialogue between Eumolpus and the Siren, and derives its chief interest from the fact that Eumolpus stands for a poet pursuing his ideal. The beautiful vision is always before him and always distant, until in the moment of realization he finds that attainment is but death. Under one shape or another the idea of this poem is old enough, and we fear that our bald synopsis of it does Mr. Buchanan injustice. Its faults are in manner, not in the subject; yet, despite an occasional blemish, the “Siren” is a beautiful whole. The versification is by far the most melodious that Mr. Buchanan has given us, while the beauty of the imagery, the passion and pathos of this poem, are to us a token of earnest and tender feeling that may surpass even the beautiful work of the “Idyls.”
It is, however, in his second book that our author gives the full measure of his strength. Here, in the “Idyls,” he is writing from his own experience. These people he has truly and thoroughly known. And what a difference! We find him, when writing of what he has merely read, uniformly commonplace, and continually suggesting some one who has done the same thing better (to save us from adding anything more about them hereafter, we will say now that the legends of the second book are, to the fullest extent, open to this objection against the classic poems); while, whenever he writes from his heart and personal knowledge, he is as uniformly clear, straightforward, and forcible. He is not always beautiful. “Indeed,” as Mr. Lewes has said, “a delicate ear will miss in these ‘Idyls’ much of the charm of fine blank verse.” But he is always interesting. The people of the little Scottish weaving village live before us. Not only do we know their stories, but we know all about them, so truthfully and delicately are their characters drawn. The village, Inverburn, may be fixed, from on of the poems, as Kirkintilloch, a town about eight miles from Glasgow, the Edinglass of the book; though it may be that the actual scenes of one idyl should not be insisted on as those of all. The stories may have been gathered in many places and the scene made one merely for the poet’s convenience.
The first idyl, “Willie Baird,” seems as likely as any to attain a general popularity. The characters are slightly yet sufficiently defined, the story is striking and picturesquely told. The narrator is the gray-haired dominie, a lonely old man, and the subject of his story is a little pupil of his who had once won his heart, and who was lost in a snow-storm on his way home from school. The story is told with force, truth, and tenderness. The pictures are beautiful and vivid, yet the speaker never loses character as a plain, and even rude, old man; never is betrayed into elegant sentiments or fine language, unless one should except the image, so good that it may be forgiven,
Indeed, in all these idyls, the firm evenness with which the characters are maintained is a noticeable excellence. Mr. Buchanan has the reticence of true dramatic force. He can keep himself out of sight, and trust to the genuineness of his subjects for effect.
“Poet Andrew” is the sad story of David Gray’s life, as told by his father. There are, doubtless, some among our readers who remember this story, told by Robert Buchanan himself, in the “Cornhill,” last year, revealing, as connected with Gray, all that we know of his own life. The poem, however, leaves out all that London struggle, with its flickering hopes—the father, an unlettered weaver in a Scotch village, could not be supposed to tell that—and confines the story to its home aspects. The task is done with exquisite grace and insight. The father destines his studious boy to college and the ministry. Money was hard to get, but he held to his purpose until the lad
“Grew up among us, and at seventeen
His hands were genty white, and he was tall
And slim and narrow-shouldered: pale of face,
Silent and bashful. Then we first began
To feel how muckle more he knew than we;
To eye his knowledge in a kind of fear,
As folk might look upon a crouching beast—
Bonnie, but like enough to rise and bite.
Up came the cloud between us silly folk
And the young lad that sat among his books
Amid the silence of the night, and oft
It pained us sore to fancy he would learn
Enough to make him look with shame and scorn
On this old dwelling.”
The cloud deepened when the weaver found that Andrew was reading and writing poetry—a mere vagabond amusement in his sight—and when his displeasure found vent in words, the estrangement between the two became broad and painful. Still the college scheme was not given up, and the lad went on further and further from his father, until the end of his London career brought him home to die. We wish we had room for the exquisite passage recounting the change of feeling that came over the old man when hope was given up, and nothing was left but the love of child and father for each other. We can only give a part:
“And as he nearer grew to God the Lord,
Nearer and dearer ilka day he grew
To Mysie and mysel; our own to love,
The world’s no longer. For the first, last time
We twa, the lad and I, could sit and crack
With open hearts, free spoken at our ease;
I seemed to know as muckle then as he,
Because I was sae sad.”
* * * * * * *
“To me it somehow seemed
His care for lovely earthly things had changed—
Changed from the curious love it once had been,
Grown larger, bigger, holier, peacefuler;
And though he never lost the luxury
Of loving beauteous things for poetry’s sake,
His heart was God the Lord’s, and he was calm.
Death came to lengthen out his solemn thoughts
Like shadows to the sunset. So no more
We wonder’d. What is folly in a lad
Healthy and heartsome, one with work to do,
Befits the freedom of a dying man.
Mother, who chided loud the idle lad
Of old, now sat her sadly by his side,
And read from out the Bible soft and low,
Or lilted lowly, keeking in his face,
The old Scots songs that made his een so dim.
I went about my daily work as one
Who waits to hear a knocking at the door,
Ere Death creeps in and shadows those that watch;
And seated here at e’en i’ the ingleside,
I watched the pictures in the fire and smoked
My pipe in silence; for my head was fu’
Of many rhymes the lad had made of old
(Rhymes I had read in secret, as I said),
No one of which I minded till they came
Unsummoned, buzzing—buzzing in my ears
Like bees among the leaves.”
And after death the father remembers with pride even the poetry he could not understand, but loves best to think of his son asleep,
“Near to our hearts as when he was a bairn,
Without the poetry and human pride
That came between us, to our grief, langsyne.”
We think that these extracts, even cut away as they are from their belongings, cannot fail to make themselves felt by all lovers of true poetry.
Of equal delicacy of delineation, and of nearly equal interest, is the “English Huswife’s Gossip.” The truth with which the character of the subject is drawn, and the manner in which the talker reveals herself, are worthy of study. “The Two Babes,” and “Hugh Sutherland’s Pansies,” though abounding in pleasant passages, are not so forcible or so interesting as those which go before, nor as the one which follows. “Widow Mysie: An Idyl of Love and Whisky,” is a charming story of a coquettish landlady who allowed herself to be wooed by the narrator, and finally became his mother-in-law.
The often-quoted line of Terence,
seems to us to exhibit the range and the truth of Mr. Buchanan’s genius. That it shows the range of his power is evident from the fact that he is weak when he echoes his reading, but strong when writing from his genuine impulses of human sympathy. And this fact need not be considered long to make it show the truth of his genius, if, indeed, that acknowledgment is not involved in its statement. Mr. Buchanan’s sympathies are quick and delicate, and his peculiar strength is in the keenness of his insight wherever his heart is concerned. As a single example of the subtlety of his observation, we may be allowed to give one more extract from “Poet Andrew,” chosen from this poem rather than from any other because we have already made the unfamiliar reader better acquainted with it than with the rest:
“He was born with love
For things both great and small; yet seem’d to prize
The small things best. To me, it seem’d, indeed,
The callant cared for nothing for itsel’,
But for some special quality it had
To set him thinking, thinking, or bestow
A tearful sense he took for luxury.
He loved us in his silent fashion weel;
But in our feckless ignorance we knew
’Twas when the humour seized him—with a sense
Of some queer power we had to waken up
The poetry—ay, and help him in his rhyme!
A kind of patronizing tenderness,
A pitying pleasure in our Scottish speech
And homely ways, a love that made him note
Both ways and speech with the same curious joy
As fill’d him when he watch’d the birds and flowers.”
This passage alone would seem to justify our praise of Mr. Buchanan, for no man bent merely on exhibiting himself and writing a fine poem could ever have seen deeply and truly enough to have written it.
These two volumes are very neatly published by Mr. Strahan, and at a price which renders a reprint unnecessary. Nevertheless they have been reprinted by Roberts Brothers in one handsome volume, which includes, besides two other poems which are to be included in the new volume, “London Idyls.”
J. S. F. ____________________ * “Undertones,” by Robert Buchanan. Second edition, enlarged and revised. London: Alexander Strahan. 1865. Pp. 235.
“Idyls and Legends of Inverburn,” by Robert Buchanan, author of “Undertones.” London: Alexander Strahan. 1865. Pp. 206.
“Poems,” by Robert Buchanan. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1866. ___ The North American Review (Vol. 102, Issue 211, April 1866 - p. 555-556) Poems by ROBERT BUCHANAN. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1866. 12mo. pp.311. THE invasion of ancient Hellas from the East by force of arms seems to have been no less distinctly a failure, than the modern attack from the West by force of imagination. Her new strategy is a masterly inactivity; strangers may come to her shores and she makes no resistance; they may climb her hills, may listen to her brooks, may peer into her caves, but the Gods and Muses are not there, and no invader can find the living source of the old poetry. When men worshipped, the Gods fought side by side with them in native strength and thunder; but they scoff at those who ransack their temples and kneel at their shrines for spoils, and remain veiled.
We doubt if it be possible for a modern to treat classical literary subjects in the classical manner; for it is not by the power of imitation, but of total change in mind and heart, that such a triumph of genius can be attained. For how shall a gentleman of the last half of the nineteenth century, who moves by steam, learns by gas, writes by telegraph, fights with gunpowder, reads print, sails by the needle, knows of political economy, electricity, and comparative philology, teaches his children that the sun does not rise in the east, that the moon is a mirror, and that the whole universe is an illusion, conceive of the world without these things? To reproduce the first Olympiad he must have a mind capable of believing the earth supported by a tortoise, of peopling the trees, rivers, and winds with gods and demigods, and a heart so formed that it can worship beings combining divine power with the meanest and most brutal passions, for it is to worshippers, not sceptical philosophers, that the Muses sing.
If Mr. Buchanan has not done this, he has done the next best thing, and, feeling the impossibility, has abandoned the attempt. A Scotch Eumolpus, in the clutches of the Siren, he says,
and with better fortune than Eumolpus, has the luck to be able to bid the Siren firmly, though politely, farewell, and return to the land of his birth. Not but that he has brought back some very pretty poetry, but it is not Grecian poetry.
Indeed, now that Mr. Buchanan has got back to Scotland, he must himself wonder how he could ever have been such a gad-about; for he belongs peculiarly to Britain, and the Britain too of our day. In his poetry may be continually traced the effect upon English literature of his predecessors and contemporaries. He has studied the expression of simplicity under Wordsworth, of force under Browning, of sentiment under Tennyson, while he shows the delicate dramatic power in the portraiture of character which an age of analytic novel-writing has produced. We do not speak of him as a copyist,—he apes no one; but he is limited as yet by those bounds of time and space which original and greatest genius does not know; and the die of his age has left its impress on him,—a die making him current for the time. His poems are not the pure nuggets of gold as they come from the mine, but after they have passed through the mint, and become national by having a little home-made alloy put in them.
Mr. Buchanan has imagination and humor, a great deal of very pretty fancy, and has shown in one or two poems—as, for example, “Hugh Sutherland’s Pansies”—an excellent perception of form. He has genuine faith, tenderness, and manliness, and shows self-command in his choice of dramatic rather than lyrical forms. The great genius which can use to the highest purpose all these qualities he has not yet shown; but let those who doubt whether he may show it at least give him the benefit of their doubt. Back to the Bibliography or Poetry _____ Book Reviews - Poetry continued London Poems (1866) to The Book of Orm (1871) |
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