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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841-1901) |
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BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY 6. White Rose and Red (1873) to The Poetical Works (1884)
The Graphic (4 October, 1873 - Issue 201) VARIOUS VERSIFIERS AT length, the anonymous author of “St. Abe” has justified the favourable prognostications of all competent critics by a serious work, of sufficient volume and variety to enable the formation of a judgment of his real powers as a poet. The result is eminently satisfactory. In “White Rose and Red, a Love Story” (Strahan), we find all the humour which the author was already known to possess, and he has now proved himself to be an equal master of pathos; added to this, there are descriptive passages which merit the highest praise, and a command is shown over the various metres employed, together with a facility of narration, which leave little to be desired, and at once entitle the author of “St. Abe” to take a good place among modern poets. The story, something akin in idea, though, unhappily, not in its ending, to that of Becket’s wife, is of a Mexican girl and her lover, a northern trapper, one Eureka Hart; the beautiful savage loves the lout on account of his splendid animalism, and he just accepts her heart and worship until he gets tired of her, and goes away, promising to return, and leaving her his name and address. When he gets back to Maine, conventional life asserts its claims, and he very soon marries quiet little Phœbe,—the “White Rose”—and settles down amongst his own people— Thrifty Men, devout believers, Then the Great Snow, most graphically described, comes upon “Drowsietown, State of Maine,” and on a wild night of storm, when Eureka is boozing at the inn, and Phœbe is alone, the poor “Red Rose,” with her baby at her breast, staggers into their kitchen, her sorrowful quest ended, and her life at ebb. This is, in many ways, the best part of the poem; the tenderness of the good woman, alternating with the harshness of the jealous wife in Phœbe, are admirably depicted, and the stupid shame, hardly deserving the name of remorse, in her husband, is equally true to nature. “Red Rose” and her child die, and Eureka is forgiven,—his wife’s philosophy, at page 241, is one of the most humorous passages in the poem,—and all flows on in the usual course in Drowsietown. This is only a meagre outline of a tale which gives rise to all the various excellences of which we have spoken; for power of description we should specially commend the passage at page 6, introducing the sleeping heroine, the view of the tropical forest at page 22, and the whole of the canto entitled “Drowsietown;” for dramatic force “The Wanderer” must claim the palm, and for pathos, “Face to Face;” were we to particularise all the humorous lines we should far exceed the space at our disposal. Those who wish to enjoy the author’s music may read the “Song of the River” at page 113, or that which begins The swift is wheeling and gleaming. It is seldom fair to compare an original writer with some one who has gone before him, still we cannot help thinking of Hood in reading “White Rose and Red,” only that the author has a sense of colour which was wanting in the English poet. ___
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (5 October, 1873 - Issue 1611) LITERATURE. WHITE ROSE AND RED.* This work inspires us with strong feelings of admiration and regret—admiration of the poetic power that distinguishes every line, and regret that some of its finest effects should be marred by a few sentences that grate on every cultivated ear. In “St. Abe” we noticed this fault, which then was so slightly marked as to be but a peculiarity to most readers. Its intensification in the volume before us is the less apropos, as “White Rose and Red” is by no means a humorous story, while “St. Abe” was related in that semi-jocular style which is becoming so popular; and the unpleasantly realistic turn of some paragraphs partook of the comic view. Here is a specimen of the defect to which we allude. After a passage full of fine language embodying delicate fancies, come these disenchanting lines:— And, in brief, Does not the coarseness of that last epithet spoil the whole? And in passage after passage the poet makes the same fatal mistake. This is doubtless the fault of the age. The public of to-day want realism in everything. The mellifluous, classic language of the great writers and thinkers of a past generation is styled (as we ourselves heard two asinine young fops in the stalls at the Lyceum theatre declare Lytton’s Richelieu to be)—“cant” and “padding.” He who can most faithfully reproduce the most commonplace feature of our daily life, will have the greatest success. The same young man who termed Richelieu “padding,” would have been entranced at the spectacle of a hansom cab driving across the stage, or a penny steamboat puffing across a stage representation of the Thames. This fatal tendency of the times is plainly shown forth in “White Rose and Red,” and we sincerely regret it, for there is much that is able and fine in the book, appealing to every tender and cultivated instinct. Having, however, pointed out the one defect of the poet’s style, let us proceed to do justice to him on many other points. Firstly, we must pay an admiring tribute to his descriptive power. The following lines are very fair specimens of the style of the better passages of the book, and will not fail to please those among our readers who can appreciate the “true poetic mind.” The scene is laid in the “mighty land of the red and white,” on the shores of the Atlantic:— The wild wood rings, the wild wood gleams, The lines bring a gorgeous picture of those magnificent Western lands before the eyes; and the sad story that is framed in these brilliant word-paintings is only the sadder, from the strength and beauty of the surrounding nature. To the bedside, white and quaking, The White Rose wife and the unstable husband do not love each other sufficiently, to let this incident disturb the repose of their wedded life. They are happy enough together, and the man for whom the poor Indian girl walked countless miles in the cruel winter—her tender feet leaving red tracks on the snow—forgets her; or, if he remembers occasionally, thinks not of her devotion and love, but of her beauty. Round how mere a log did twine The story is a pitiful one, and the fine verse in which it is told but renders it the more pitiful and pathetic. Those among our readers who are tempted by the quotations we have given to read the whole poem, will not regret the venture. Overlooking the defect we mentioned at the beginning of our review, they will thoroughly enjoy the simple story and brilliant descriptive passages of this original volume. Let us recommend to them the two “Nuptial Festivals,” which are conspicuous for originality and delicacy of thought and language. * “White Rose and Red.” By the author of “St. Abe.” Strahan and Co., Ludgate-hill, London. ___
The Pall Mall Gazette (21 October, 1873 - Issue 2709) “WHITE ROSE AND RED.” * IF the fresh and vigorous aspects of nature in the New World have not yet stirred with any adequate result the spirit of an American poet, there are signs, nevertheless, of their influence upon poetic minds both native and foreign. The roughness and want of culture distinguishing that part of the American character which is most susceptible to the peculiar charms of the strange landscapes and the rude life of the Great West are passing away, and as the home-bred mood of mind becomes articulate and ceases to be unpolished, the intellectual domination of the cultivated and sensitive Bostonian imitators of European art declines. In spite of his affectations, his obscenities, and his limited range of thought, Walt Whitman has exercised a profound influence over his countrymen by virtue of his energetic rejection of old-world forms and notions. The writer of “St. Abe and his Seven Wives”—that remarkable attempt to rear an edifice of poetic fiction upon the commonplace impostures of Mormonism—had manifestly received the impress of Whitman’s largeness and freedom of touch. In the present volume a dedication “to Walt Whitman and Alexander Gardiner, with all friends in Washington,” confesses the author’s literary kinship. It must not be supposed, however, that “White Rose and Red” is distinguished by either that contempt for recognized literary forms or that incoherence of idea which deform the best work of the author of “Leaves of Grass.” From Whitman, this other poet of America—we do not call him, for reasons we shall presently specify, an American poet—derives an impatience of conventionalism in art and morals, a luxurious sense of the grandeur and charm of nature in the New World, a conscious revelling in the physical aspects of life. But he has other gifts, and greater ones, of his own: a mastery of rich, varied, musical verse, adapting itself easily and flexibly to the changing moods of the poet and the reader; an extraordinary command of descriptive power held well within control; capacity for constructing and carrying out within the limitations necessary to poetry a full dramatic plot; and, lastly, a faculty for delineating human character in its humorous and pathetic aspects alike, broad, subtle, swift, and penetrating. We hope to justify some of this praise by two or three extracts; but the impression of power that is left by the work as a whole must not be measured by the pleasure of reading a few isolated passages. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the diction is not a little disfigured by affectation. Some of the finest descriptions and most pathetic situations are spoilt by the intrusion of far-fetched words and too-quaint phrases. There is a manifest effort to assimilate the language to the subject, and to make the poem seem a tale that might be naturally told by some uncultured observer of the tragi-comedy it contains. The same endeavour was visible—with the same ill-success—in “St. Abe,” but it is more obtrusive and more vain in “White Rose and Red.” In other cases the affected diction has not even the excuse of such a purpose, and it is vexatious to be disturbed in the enjoyment of some noble lines by the recurrence of obsolete and unpoetic locutions, such as “prinkt,” “embryoation” “silhouetted,” “civilisee,” and the like. Making all deductions, however, for these deficiencies in finish, the poem is a very fine piece of work; and its obvious veracity of delineation is the more remarkable because the writer is evidently not an American by birth. This fact, indeed, may be gathered from the invocation prefixed to the book—an unpleasing parody of Mignon’s world-famous song in “Meister.” But it is sufficiently manifest from the style and even the cautious elaboration with which the local colour is worked in. Thro’ the transparent roof of shining leaves, The sleeper wakens, and, pursuing her way through the wood, comes upon another sleeper of a very different type, Eureka Hart, a pioneer from the Atlantic coast, “civilisee with beaver brain,” a rough giant without a gleam of “spiritual light.” We are bidden to contemplate the contrasted figures; the rich nature of the Indian girl, with its passion and freshness, the cold and narrow character of the white man. How they meet afterwards, how Eureka is made captive, how kindly his captors treat him, how he abides with them in their quiet life, how he wins the love of the Indian girl, how her fervid passion kindles something like responsive warmth in his soul, how and where the “Nuptial Song” was sung, how soon Eureka wearied of his happiness, how he began to pine for the limited peaceful life of his native Maine, how the parting was determined, and what record of his future the “human beaver with a wandering craze” left with his bride the Red Rose—all these phases of the first part of the tale are told in a series of cantos, varying in tone and melody with the rise and fall of emotion, the ebb and flow of action, but all pervaded with a glow felt alike in light and shadow that is the very essence of the fierce life of the tropics. This is the portrait of the Red Rose:— Shapely as deers are—finely fair The next book takes us into a different world. We breathe among the “human beavers” of “Drowsietown, State of Maine,” an atmosphere most unlike that of the forest where the Red Rose dwelt. The steady life, drowsy, not idle, of the place, is comforting to Eureka, fatigued with the tropical heat, moral and material, of the world from which he had shaken himself free. How he fell under the spell of the White Rose, little Phœbe Anna, the quiet, dainty little Puritan, untouched by passion, yet with a distinct notion that Eureka would make a good husband; how she “wound our vacillating giant round her dimpled little finger;” the welcome home, the lovemaking, the wedding, the whole of the old, old story that has been painted for us in the fiery colours of the sunny savage life and the blaze of a perfect passion is depicted in the cold grey shade of Drowsietown existence and the tender coolness of Phœbe Anna’s temperate affection. Here the subtle mingling of moral and physical contrasts is admirably worked out. Many a night, many a day, We have a pleasant warm picture of Phœbe Anna keeping house in Eureka’s home when the weary wanderer finds her way through the drifts to the door. How the Red Rose is received by her unwitting rival; how Phœbe reads on the scrap of paper the record of her husband’s unworthiness; how Eureka meets in dazed dismay his dying victim—for the winter has struck the warm life of the Indian girl a deadly blow; how she fades away, still loving and unrepining;—these closing scenes are narrated without an unnecessary word: it is, indeed, almost perfect description. The Epilogue, sadly, grimly humorous, records the reconciliation of Phœbe and her lord, her condonation of his offence, the patched peace of their commonplace lives, the rare sensations of remorse and regret that stir the beaver nature of Eureka. This is the whole story; and, simple as it is, gives room for more versatility of treatment than we find in threescore of the more elaborate novels of the day. The author of “White Rose and Red” has written a fine dramatic poem: his powers of humour, observation, construction, and character-painting ought to give him, if he pleased, a distinguished place as a writer of prose fiction. * “White Rose and Red: a Love Story.” By the Author of “St. Abe.” (London: Strahan and Co. 1873.) ___
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1873 - p.928) The White Rose and Red (J. R. Osgood and Co.) is certainly sufficiently worthy of existence to merit mention among the books of poetry of the day. It is a long poem—this love-story—running through nearly 250 pages; and it is rarely that an American reads a poem of that length unless he is a book critic, and not often then. But the music, the rapid movement, the picturesque descriptions, and a certain fascination somewhat akin to that of Moore’s poetry, which we should judge our author had read and studied, if not accepted as a model, carry the reader who once begins this book rapidly through its pages. The plot is very simple—so simple that we shall not attempt to repeat it, since the reader would declare it to be nothing, and would be substantially correct. It turns upon the love of an Indian girl for Eureka Hart, a man with a splendid physique, which charmed the imagination of Red Rose, but whose “nature was as surely His marriage to her, desertion of her, remarriage to Phœbe Anna of Drowsietown, Red Rose’s following and finding of him, and her pathetic death, make up the threads of which the story is woven. They are deftly woven, and the story is well worth the reading, and would give the author a rank among true American poets, though not among the highest, if he were to suffer his name to be known. Back to the Bibliography or Poetry _____
The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan (1874)
The Graphic (21 February, 1874 - Issue 221) “The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan,” Vol. I. (Henry S. King), is a welcome instalment of the collected edition of the author’s poems. It contains some of the best of his earlier writings—notably “Meg Blane,” one of the best things he ever wrote, and, amongst the ballads, we are glad to meet again with “Judas Iscariot,” which, in spite of some slight wilfulness in point of metre, has always struck us as unusually grand, both in conception and execution. We shall look forward with interest for the remaining volumes of the series. ___
The Examiner (2 May, 1874 - Issue 3457) MR BUCHANAN AS SELF-CRITIC AND AS POET. The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. Vol. I. Ballads and Romances; Ballads and Poems of Life. Vol. II. Ballads and Poems of Life; Lyrical Poems, &c. H. S. King. When a man says that he is no metaphysician, the disclaimer is usually followed by some outrageous dogma concerning the deepest problems of metaphysics. No metaphysics as a rule means bad metaphysics. And the same holds true of all sciences or departments of study relating to the actions, productions, and destinies of man. We may not study these scientifically or methodically, but we cannot avoid thinking about them, and forming and expressing our opinions; and it gives no additional authority to our conclusions in one particular department to say that we know nothing about it systematically. Some such reflection as this must occur to everybody who knows anything about Mr Robert Buchanan; for Mr Buchanan is constantly protesting that he abhors criticism and at the same time scattering criticisms on every hand, even in his own name. And although this reflection might have come in more appositely in a review of Mr Buchanan’s prose works, it is not out of place here; because Mr Buchanan is so delightfully inconsistent that he cannot keep criticism out of his poetry; he must be playing the critic, and so he takes to exercising the faculty on himself. Of course he goes absurdly wrong. Let me not be misunderstood: I am speaking now not of Thomas Maitland—it is time that that unfortunate pseudonym were forgotten—but of Robert Buchanan under his own name and as he appears in these two volumes. To the second division of his poetry, which he entitles “Ballads and Poems of Life,” Mr Buchanan prefixes the following octosyllables:— By mother’s side I draw descent A flippant reader, without being very eager to laugh at this, might be put in mind of Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s reflection—“I am a fellow o’ the strangest mind i’ the world; I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether;” or of the “foolish extravagant spirit” of Holofernes, “full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions.” In one point of view this self-dissection of Mr Buchanan’s is of the very essence of the provincial spirit as apprehended and incarnated by Shakespeare. But from every point of view it is criticism, a crude attempt at the most ambitious kind of scientific criticism, an endeavour to get at the characteristics of poetic work by studying the evolution of the author. And although Mr Buchanan would probably say that he is no physiologist, the passage involves a crude hypothesis of hereditary transmission, stated with a confidence that few physiologists would venture to assume. I. As I lay asleep, as I lay asleep, II. I awoke from sleep, I awoke from sleep, The austere, heart-crushing pathos of this ballad runs through all the best of Mr Buchanan’s poetry. His most characteristic and distinctive work is in this key. It is the redeeming side of Mr Buchanan’s rough self-assertion, and want of openness to sensuous beauty and soft genial influences, that he has constituted himself the sympathetic champion of the overlooked, the despised, the rejected, the uncared-for children of humanity. One is safe to predict that it is by “Meg Blane,” “Nell,” “The Scaith o’ Bartle,” “Liz,” “Tom Dunstan, or the Politician,” “Jane Lewson,” and one or two more poems and ballads in the same key, that Mr Buchanan will be longest remembered; they constitute, at least, his best title to remembrance, as being in the vein most distinctively and individually his. All Mr Buchanan’s work out of this vein is more or less imitative and artificial. In this vein he is powerful, puts a spell upon our hearts, and makes us feel that he is really and truly a poet, and not merely an ambitious versifier. There is no resisting his hold upon us as, line by line, he reveals to us, with penetrating sympathy, the deep heart’s suffering of some poor victim of personal cruelty, or social neglect, or pitiless world-forces. In his sketches of “De Berny” and “Kitty Kemble,” whose lives were not without a certain sunshine, he delineates with great skill, although he seems to struggle throughout with half-suppressed contempt for his subjects; but he enters the most obscure nooks and recesses of the tangled minds and strangely-pained hearts of such subjects as “Meg Blane” and “Nell” with wonderful imaginative power, and lays bare the story of their lives with most fascinating art. This championship of wronged, bruised, down-trodden lives, is the animating principle of Mr Buchanan’s best work. It directs his choice of subjects as much in classical mythology as in London streets, or on the Scottish coast; wherever he goes, whether in observation or in imagination, he is drawn, as by natural affinity, towards unregarded sufferings and the heart-eating sense of injustice and oppression. Uncouth Polypheme, hopelessly exiled by his indivestible monstrosity from the love of Galatea; Pan, with the soul of a God, cursed by the ruling powers of the world with a goatish shape; Hades, hungering for a ray of beauty to cheer his gloomy kingdom—such are the subjects on which Mr Buchanan’s imagination fixes when he reads the rich mythology of the Greeks. He detects, and brings into strong light, the possibilities of unhappiness in that fair polytheism; his sympathies go naturally with the degraded, ill-starred, mis-shapen gods outside the circle of the Olympians and their favourites. There is no inconsistency between this humane side of Mr Buchanan’s work and his less amiable manifestations; criticism may be sure that it is far from the foundations of a man’s being when it cannot find a unity of spirit in all his work, whether in prose or in verse. The spirit that leads a man to become the champion of neglected causes wears quite another look when it prompts him to fiery assertion of what he conceives to be his own just claims, or dogmatic and bitter detraction of men whom he conceives to be unduly exalted in public esteem. Yet it is throughout essentially the same spirit; and the highest testimony to Mr Buchanan’s power is that his tales of despised and oppressed lives fascinate us and win our admiration, even when we are filled with hostility to his narrow dogmatism in other directions. ___
The Graphic (11 July, 1874 - Issue 241) The second volume of the collected edition of “The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan” (Henry S. King) is fully as good as the first. Amongst the contents we are glad to recognise our old favourites, “Willie Baird” and “Liz.” The “Songs of the Terrible Year” are included amongst the other pieces: everybody must remember that ghastly “Dialogue in the Snow.” ___
The London Quarterly Review (October, 1874 - p. 212-214) The Poetical Works of David Gray. A New and Enlarged Edition. Edited by Henry Glassford Bell. Glasgow: James Maclehose, Publisher to the University. London: Macmillan and Co. 1874. THE name of David Gray seems to be doomed to connection with sorrowful issues. Snatched away himself at the early age of twenty-three, his works have at length fallen under the editorial care of Mr. Henry Glassford Bell, who “passed away in the vigorous fulness of his years,” within a week after he had been correcting the proofs of the present volume. That this new edition of the young Scot’s verses has lost much by the death of the editor we have no doubt; for although he had already selected what new pieces he thought worthy of being added to the former collected edition, had rearranged the whole, and had finally revised the greater part of the volume, it was, we are told, his intention to prefix a memoir and criticism. Instead of this intended prefatory matter, the publishers have given, as an appendix, a speech delivered by Mr. Bell in July, 1865, at the inauguration of the monument erected to David Gray’s memory in the “Auld Aisle” burying-ground at Kirkintilloch. We think Mr. Bell, like Lord Houghton and some others, much overrates David Gray, who, though he has left behind him some pretty enough verses, does not appear to us to have been a man of unmistakable genius. He might, if he had lived, have written fine poetry; but equally he might not; and his observation that, if he lived, he meant to be buried in Westminster Abbey, has always struck us as the conceit of a weakling rather than the strong confidence of a genius. However, we are glad to see his works collected again into a pretty volume, such as will help to keep them in mind if the public mean to adopt his latest editor’s view, that they are worth keeping in mind.
The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. Vol. I., Ballads and Romances; Ballads and Poems of Life. London: Henry S. King and Co., 65, Cornhill, and 12, Paternoster-row. 1874. ONE of the best known pieces in the first volume of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s Poetical Works is the address “To David in Heaven,” the David of which is none other than poor David Gray. But though these verses are among the best known they are also among the least worth knowing,—their chief value being the witness they bear that Mr. Buchanan is not the only person who is over-estimated by Mr. Buchanan. The issue of a collected, classified, remodelled edition of the works in verse and prose of a barely-recognised fourth-rate writer like Mr. Buchanan is of itself somewhat ludicrous; but when supplemented by an engraved portrait and particulars of the writer’s family history, it becomes more decidedly ludicrous; and one almost marvels at the self-assertion even of one whose antecedents scarcely left room to marvel at anything which his egotism and bad taste might bring about. A selection from the best things of Mr. Buchanan’s works might well find a place in our collection of contemporary poetry; but he has done nothing (at least nothing published under his name) of any importance, and the air of importance he endeavours to give to his verses by classification, new “tags,” and so on, results only in larger failure. To pick the best of the wheat out of many volumes mainly made up of chaff were wise enough; but to try to persuade us that all this chaff is wheat and of a good quality, is simply foolishness; and we are really sorry to see Mr. Buchanan giving so bad a chance to what is really worth reading in his work of the past few years. “I have come from a mystical Land of Light It is not long since, in acting the part of “Thomas Maitland,” Mr. Buchanan poked a good deal of fun at certain better-known authors than himself, on account of the necessity to depart from ordinary prose pronunciation in verses of similar construction; but his “maturer judgment,” brought to bear on the productions of his own mind, sees nothing ludicrous in the old ballad style of the line— |
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as it must be scanned and pronounced here. We note, moreover, that in the two divisions of Volume I., under the heads of “Ballads and Romances” and “Ballads and Poems of Life,” the leniency of “maturer judgment” is extended throughout to this and other characteristics found specially objectionable by “Thomas Maitland,” attacking the poetic rivals of Robert Buchanan. Back to the Bibliography or Poetry _____
The Graphic (21 July, 1877 - Issue 399) RECENT POETRY AND VERSE MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN, in his later works, has shown one special phase of the poet-nature which, more than anything else, entitles him to the respect, and we may add the love, of all kindred natures, viz., intense and true sympathy. Everybody already knew how great was his metrical facility—shown significantly, to those who can judge, by the fact that he is one of the few modern poets who can write a new ballad that reads like an old one. His power of description was also known of old, as were other excellencies too many to number; but it seems to us that only of late years has he himself become sensible of the full existence of that Humanity which must always lie at the depths of the highest poetry. “Balder the Beautiful: a Song of Divine Death,” by Robert Buchanan (W. Mullan and Son), is the latest and most triumphant outcome of this awakening. It is possible—nay, highly probable—that it will not be as universally admired as, for instance, “Red Rose and White,” for the very simple reason that its perfect appreciation involves an amount of serious thought and study such as, in this railway age, people are too often unwilling to give. Yet none the less is it a noble poem, to be cherished by those who can appreciate high thoughts wedded to almost faultless music. The lovers of Scandinavian mythology may regret—as we must own to doing—the alteration of the old legend; but if we, according to the author’s warning, disabuse our minds of ancient prejudice, there remains nothing but admiration for a delicate and wonderfully imaginative allegory. The key note of the poem lies, we think, in three stanzas from the finest portion of the work, “The Coming of the Other”:— “But whosoe’er shall conquer Death, And whosoe’er loves mortals most The White Christ raised His shining face In short, it is the sublimity of self-sacrifice that is preached—a lesson only too sorely needed,—and taught in such flowing lyric measures, such stately rhythm of blank verse, that surely some will hear the teacher. Did space permit we could gladly give long extracts from other portions of the work; but we must content ourselves with an indication of some of the most striking passages. Such are the description of morning on the lake at page 26; Balder’s dream, and, later on, his pursuit of Death; the scene where the sea-beasts nestle at the feet of the Sun-God, and, which is perhaps the grandest of all, “The Bridge of Ghosts.” Balder’s prayer, fine as it is, strikes us as being written in a metre unfortunately suggestive of lighter subjects—this is a mere matter of taste. The poem, as a whole, remains a sublime one. Back to the Bibliography, Poetry or Balder The Beautiful. _____
Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour (1882)
[In the spring of 1882 Chatto & Windus published two collections of Buchanan’s poetry. Some of the reviews below deal with both, although the majority concentrate on the new material in Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour.]
The Pall Mall Gazette (8 April, 1882 - Issue 5339) “BALLADS OF LIFE, LOVE, AND HUMOUR.”* IT is, if we mistake it not, something like eight years since Mr. Robert Buchanan published a volume of verse under his own name. He has, indeed, produced what are oddly called in the present volume on a fly-leaf “Anonymous Poems by Robert Buchanan;” and he has taken to novel-writing; but, whereas for about fifteen years he used to issue volumes of verse one upon the other’s heels, he seems now to have taken to the practice of recueillement. It is fortunate for his own reputation. Although we cannot at all agree with the absurd phrases quoted on the afore-mentioned fly-leaves, that he has “an exalted rank among poets of this century”—mind, not the English poets of the day, but the poets of the century, Shelley and Wordsworth, and Keats and Byron, and Coleridge and Goethe, and Heine and Musset and Hugo; that his work is “among the masterpieces of English literature,” or that he himself is “one of our greatest living poets,” there is no doubt that Mr. Buchanan possesses remarkable literary faculty of the poetic kind. If acknowledgment of this has been but partial, he has only to thank a certain too famous manœuvre of his some ten years ago. But at the same time his poetical faculty, though certainly remarkable, has been always prejudicially affected partly by certain defects of knowledge and education, and still more by imperfect attention to the necessity of labour in poetry as in everything else. No human being could take a writer who talked of “epiludes” and described a man as “prone upon his back,” altogether seriously; nor was it possible to take seriously an author who, after putting out a big octavo, and that not in his earliest youth, acknowledged a year or two later that it was written “in a state of feverish and evanescent excitement,” and that most of it was worth nothing. The confession was candid, but at the same time damaging.
He.—Seest thou two waifs of cloud on the dim blue, This is not extraordinarily good, but it has the poetical differentia: it presents the common with due uncommonness and suggestiveness as well as with not a little beauty of expression. But it is not often that anything so complete in itself and so well finished is separable from Mr. Buchanan’s work. “The Mountain Well” is another good piece of picture poetry, but too long for extraction; and “The Secret of the Mere,” which is somewhat in the vein of the “Coruisken Sonnets” and the “Book of Orm,” but less extravagant, is also good. In this last the rising of the waterlilies in the sullen lonely lake makes not merely a dramatic incident but a good moral and a picturesque point. The pieces which in some sort begin and end this section, “Euphrosyne” and “Mnemosyne,” are also worth mention. * “Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour.” By Robert Buchanan. (London: Chatto and Windus. 1882.) ___
The Scotsman (11 May, 1882 - p. 6) The right of Mr Robert Buchanan to a high place among living poets has long since been recognised. This volume of Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour, if it will not do much to exalt the reputation of the author of “White Rose and Red,” serves to show that his hand has lost nothing of its cunning, and that he has at command the same fertility and glow of conception, the airy imaginativeness, the power of emotional expression, and the felicity of epithet which won favour for his earlier efforts. The first half of the volume is occupied with what Mr Buchanan calls “Dramatic Ballads and Romances,” and in these his peculiar gifts of fancy and expression find their fullest display. In some of them—”The Lights of Leith” and “Fra Giacomo,” for example—we have pure tragedy, embodied in verses of befitting force and intensity. “The Wedding of Shon Maclean,” which first appeared several years ago in one of the magazines, is an example of Mr Buchanan’s mastery of form; it is like the blast of the bagpipes put into verse, and is irradiated by genuine humour. In “Phil Blood’s Leap” we have the poet in another mood; it is an episode of the rough life and violent passions of the Western mining communities, told with all Bret Harte’s graphic strength, and with more than his metrical power. The most remarkable poem in the volume, however, is “The Devil’s Peepshow”—not only because of its quaint and catching rhythm, but also because of the subtlety with which its inner meaning is suggested. It proclaims, in allegorical fashion, the revolt of modern thought and belief against the old sulphureous doctrines with which for ages the Churches have striven to terrify mankind into submission. The lyrical ballads, which form the second part of the volume are for the most part picturesque in form and thought; but they do not possess the strength or the originality of the longer poems, and do not impress the reader as the natural expression of Mr Buchanan’s inspiration. ___
Liverpool Mercury (26 May, 1882 - Issue 10726) After what may be called a “poetic silence” of some eight years, Mr. Robert Buchanan, who has meantime been closely occupied with romance and dramatic literature, has again made a two-fold appearance as a poet. He has published a beautiful selection from his poetic writings, including “Meg Blane,” “The Ballad of Judas Iscariot,” “The Great Snow” (from the “White Rose and Red”), “Nell” (From “London Poems”), and “The Vision of the Man Accurst” (from “The Book of Orm”). The selection is an admirable one, and will be found to contain nearly everything which ten or more years ago produced so powerful an impression on many minds as to afford Mr. Buchanan poetic rank second only to that then occupied by Tennyson. In addition to this, Mr. Buchanan has published another volume, under title of “Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour,” and this contains, besides “Phil Blood’s Leap” and other poems equally familiar but never previously collected, a number of hitherto unpublished poems, and among them a very fine ballad entitled the “Lights of Leith.” The story is a thrilling one, and must not be mangled in an epitome, but it may suffice to say that it turns upon the infamous statute against witchcraft which that superstitious pedant James I. of England procured upon his accession to the English throne. Humour, broad if not too subtly refined, is of course the distinguishing note of Mr. Buchanan’s poetry, and among the more successful efforts in the new volume is a ballad entitled “O’Connor’s Wake,” which for downright sport of the grim yet not ghastly sort it would be very hard to match in modern literature. On the whole, Mr. Buchanan’s is poetry with a fundamental body of stuff in it, marked by a right instinct of aspiration and by purity of motive. We feel as we read that Mr. Buchanan’s poetry comes from some one, and that in this respect it has an advantage over the great part of modern verse, which, coming from nobody in particular, can scarcely hope to appeal to any one. The career of this author is not without a peculiar pathos. The few friends with whom Mr. Buchanan started in life—David Gray, Alexander Smith, and Sidney Dobell—were very soon removed by death. He had never joined any other literary coterie, and very soon he had the misfortune (not unmerited) to acquire the reputation of a sort of literary Ishmael, whose hand was against every man and every man’s hand against him. He attacked wantonly all round, more perhaps from fear than malice, and with a desire to retain his own place rather than to deprive other people of theirs. The effect was disastrous, and he felt his position keenly. Then domestic misfortunes have of late fallen heavily upon him, and we cannot but feel moved at the beautiful and pathetic dedication in which he speaks of himself as almost a broken-hearted man. Another day may come for him yet, for he is a man of great gifts. His “Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man” are very noble performances. ___
The British Quarterly Review (Vol. 76, July/October, 1882 - p.225) Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. Mr. Robert Buchanan has in this volume reprinted a collection of his poems which have appeared here and there since his last collection saw the light. We are not sure that he has written anything superior to what went before even in the lines that are more specially his own—nothing to surpass ‘The Ballad of Judas Iscariot’ in the way of weird fantasy; nothing superior to ‘Drumliemoor’ in the way of realism. We cannot conscientiously say that ‘O’Connor’s Wake’ is more powerful and characteristic than the ‘Wake of Tim O’Hara,’ to which it is evidently a complement; or that the ‘Ballad of the Wayfarer’ indicates a higher watermark than the ballad of ‘The Dead Mother,’ which, in its own way, was one of the most effective things he had produced. But everywhere we have the tokens of growing power, of a fine imagination, and an active fantasy, united to great power of expression; passing from the sweet simplicity of the simplest lyric to the grandeur of the impassioned and serio-dramatic dialogue: as in ‘The Garden’ and ‘The Devil’s Peepshow,’ which is full of quaint and weird suggestiveness, and in which Mr. Buchanan’s mystic moralizing has full play. In the lyric pure and simple, the best specimens are the ‘Highland Lament,’ which is truly musical from first line to last; and so is ‘April Rain’ and ‘The Cuckoo’s Song.’ On the whole, though the volume contains no individual poem of transcendent interest, it exhibits Mr. Buchanan’s great versatility and power. His muse can traverse a wide range—walk the earth with firm foot, and yet can soar pretty freely into the empyrean of fancy, giving to ‘airy nothings a local habitation and a name.’ ___
Glasgow Herald (6 October, 1882) Poems by Robert Buchanan. In his “Selected Poems” Mr Buchanan has done for his own works what it has now become the fashion to do for the works of the singers who have departed from our midst. It is scarcely to be expected that an editor can succeed in satisfying the tastes of all sorts and conditions of men, and possibly those who are familiar with Mr Buchanan’s writings will miss in this selection several poems, for the absence of which it will seem difficult to account. The imaginative reader, for instance, who has been spellbound by the lurid fascination of “Tiger Bay,” or he who has been charmed with the exquisite workmanship of “The Scottish Eclogue,” may wonder why the space that might have been accorded to them is filled with “Mark Antony” or “Up in an Attic.” While, therefore, Mr Buchanan may not have succeeded in gathering from his poems the best possible selection that might be made, he has at least presented us with one which is interesting as indicating his own estimate of his work, and one which is certainly typical of the peculiarities and range of his genius. In the study of contemporary poetry Mr Buchanan cannot be overlooked, and those who cannot afford to possess themselves of his complete works will in this volume find an excellent “picture in little” of his poetic individuality. “Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour” is Mr Buchanan’s latest volume of verse. With the exception of the first poem, “The Lights of Leith,” the volume, if we mistake not, is a collection of poems which have appeared in various periodicals during the last ten or twelve years. If they are accordingly wanting in novelty, happily they have in several instances acquired so wide a popularity as to render their publication in book form more than usually welcome. “The Wedding of Shon Maclean,” “Phil Blood’s Leap,” and “O’Connor’s Wake” are among the best known of the poems in the volume, and these alone, while they are by no means instances of Mr Buchanan’s highest or most powerful writing, are of sufficient excellence to ensure the book a popularity which will suffer no diminution from the strange and suggestive conception of “The Devil’s Peepshow,” or the plaintive beauty of “The Faery Reaper” and “The Midian Mara.” Of “The Lights of Leith” it need only be said that Mr Buchanan has hit on a fine picturesque subject, which he has treated with strong dramatic effect. The poem opens with the glimmer of the Leith lights through a gale of snow and hail, and the flaming of what seem merry bonfires on the quay. A ship is struggling in through the storm, and on board is a sailor who left his mother twenty years ago and who is now coming home, a penitent prodigal, “with siller to mak’ her glad.” When the reader learns that the bonfires on the quay are the blazing faggots piled about three witches, and that the sailor’s mother is one of the three, he can readily conceive the powerful and pathetic manner in which the poet works up to the ghastly denouement. While Mr Buchanan has written loftier and more perfectly artistic poems than any contained in this volume, “Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour” are a distinct increment to the poetic region which he has annexed. Selected Poems of Robert Buchanan. London: Chatto & Windus. Back to the Bibliography or Poetry _____
Aberdeen Weekly Journal (8 January, 1885 - Issue 9332) THE POETICAL WORKS OF ROBERT BUCHANAN. If a literary man were asked whom he considered to be the foremost living Scottish poet, the name he would probably select would be that of Robert Buchanan. There is, doubtless, many a worthy writer of poetry still among us who in his special sphere would take no second place beneath the fiery Glasgow bard; but viewing the word all round and considering the many kinds of it that Robert Buchanan has written, and written well, we think him fully entitled to stand as the most eminent living poet of Scotland. The name Buchanan arouses in us many strange memories. It takes us back to the early days of Glasgow journalism, when the future singer of balder was a wild and pranky boy in his father’s newspaper office, pestering the miserable sub-editor, till in sheer desperation that irate and bewildered journalist hurled the inkpot at his head. A year or two further on the name Buchanan recalls to us one of yet sweeter and more romantic memory, and one which, to the loss of Scottish literature, is a memory and nothing more. It recalls the name of David Gray. Of the friendship that existed between Buchanan and Gray there are many touching tokens. There are on Gray’s side the affectionate and graphic letters he wrote to his friend, as published in his life. On Buchanan’s side there is the pathetic little poem, “Up in an Attic,” in which the poet dreams wistfully over some little memorials that we know had reference to Gray only from the prefacial sentence extracted from one of his letters. And much stronger and more beautiful and direct in sentiment, as well as far more melodious in versification, there is the eloquent dirge, “To David in Heaven,” in which the poet mourns, as Milton did for his “Lycidas,” over the sweet singer of the Luggie, the “marvellous boy” whose ethereally beautiful form, an old friend of his tells us, made people turn and look at him as he moodily paced the streets of Glasgow, and who after yearning for a fame he was never to enjoy in life, sobbed and gasped out his young life in sonnets of a passionate and transcendent beauty. It was to the memory of that poet friend of his youth that Mr Buchanan in 1864 dedicated the prologue of his “Undertones.” There is no need to recount all its stirring and happy ideas. No better praise could be given to it than to say it is an elegy worthy of so sweet and beautiful a spirit as David Gray’s:— Poet, gentle-hearted Some years later on we find the name of Robert Buchanan prominently connected with one of the most violent literary controversies of recent days. It was he who, through a magazine article, attacked Mr Swinburne and his poetic followers, and invented for them the now famous nickname of “the fleshly school.” The hubbub that severe epithet aroused was terrible. The school so libelled took up the cudgels in defence of their master, and every poetaster in the land who twanged the Swinburnian lyre abandoned his amorous dallying with metres and alliterations, and flung himself tooth and nail upon the rash maligner. Mr Buchanan, however, survived. He still lives to tell the tale, and his record of work done wince that doughty warfare was waged is a long and honourable one. He has lately chiefly devoted himself to writing novels—in some instances it cannot be said with pre-eminent success—and he has also tried his hand at recasting them in dramatic form. It cannot be urged that the story of “God and the Man” and the parallel play of “Storm-beaten” will have an enduring reputation. Quite otherwise is it with Mr Buchanan’s poems which he has produced from time to time up till the present hour, and which now, by the timely enterprise of Messrs Chatto & Windus, have entered the quiet haven of an edition in collected form. As has been already said, there are among them many poems that are sure to live. They touch with masterly hand upon nearly every chord in the gamut of human emotion. They run through pathos, horror, humour; they deal with high life and low; and depict minds wild and unrestrained, or trimmed down to the orthodox cut of civilised society. And upon that wide range of feeling Mr Buchanan brings to bear the light of a strong, vigorous, and even fiery intellect. He is master of vivid powers of description; he has the poet’s eye for the natural beauties about him, and warms often into a white heat of enthusiasm for them. He has, moreover, at times a certain rugged dramatic force that is especially effective, and that give his lines an energy and rush and fire sufficient of themselves to make the reputation of many a meaner versifier. A very good instance of that swift dramatic turn of the thought is to be found in “Phil Blood’s Leap.” That is a poem which has attained a deserved popularity, and it is hardly going too far to say that it has done so by merit of the quality mentioned. In other ways Mr Buchanan has done equally well. The horror of “The Lights o’ Leith,” with its weird, awesome, musical refrain, and its pure ballad simplicity, is unsurpassed by any poet of the time. In humour also Robert Buchanan shines with a light all his own. The “Wedding of Shon Maclean” is inimitable, and is fully worthy of its universal popularity. There are not many men in the country with any claim to an intelligent knowledge of literature who have never heard of the “twenty pipers at break of day” who came across the heather to honour by their presence the wedding of the great Shon:— And every piper was fou, And as examples of exquisite sentiment and melodious versification in poems of a different stamp we may point to “Charmian,” “Kitty Bell,” and “Spring Song in the City.” Altogether Messrs Chatto & Windus have done a public service by collecting into one compact, handy, cheap, and handsome volume the poetical works of a writer who, through sheer force of merit, has raised himself to a high place among contemporary singers, and whose name is certain to stand well with posterity. Back to the Bibliography or Poetry _____
Book Reviews - Poetry continued 6. The Earthquake (1885) to The Wandering Jew (1893)
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