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BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY 8. The Devil’s Case (1896) to Complete Poetical Works (1901) The Devil’s Case (1896) The Era (15 February, 1896 - Issue 2995) MR BUCHANAN’S new poem, “The Devil’s Case: a Bank Holiday Interlude,” will, we are informed, be published next week, bearing on its title-page the name of “Robert Buchanan,” as publisher as well as author; and simultaneously will be issued a pamphlet in which the author, while dealing with the methods of publishing generally, explains his particular object in becoming his own publisher. Henceforward, we understand, all this writer’s works will be issued direct to the booksellers by himself, his contention being that the ordinary publisher is an anomaly and a nuisance—to quote his own words, “a barnacle on the bottom of the good ship Literature, yet presuming to criticise the quality of the cargo in the hold.” ___ The Scotsman (9 March, 1896 - p.3) NEW POETRY Mr Robert Buchanan’s new poem, The Devil’s Case, assumes to hold a brief for Satan, and to defend him against all the aspersions that have been thrown upon his character from time immemorial. It is written in a jingling trochaic measure that has no distinction whatever, and, when associated with the very theological subject of the work, sounds flippant and no more. So far as the matter of the poem is concerned, it must be said at the outset that if the Devil has nothing more to say for himself than is here set forth, he is most deservedly damned.
It begins by asking, and then goes on to state how he, Buchanan, walking on Hampstead Heath, met the Devil, and was taken into his confidence, and asked to publish the “Interview.” Then comes the case. Hornie claims credit for all the good things man has ever done, and blames another supernatural power for all the evil that is in the world. It was he—he, Hornie, not he, Buchanan—who put Prometheus up to bringing down fire. It was he who prompted the building of the Pyramids. It was he who invented printing. (This, by the way, explains many things known only to those intimately connected with the press—proof-readers, compositors, sub-editors, and special correspondents.) It was he, the Devil, who “upraised the drama,” which (to spurn grammar) he might upraise it a little further, for it wants him badly just now, having only Mr. Jones. Then he, the Devil, explains his sentiments. He is democratic, and, as he puts it, in what for poetry sounds uncommonly like prose, and sloppy prose too —
After he, the Devil, has done, he, Buchanan, says his, Buchanan’s, prayers in the shape of a litany which might do duty in any church service. The object of all this highly respectable euchology is probably to give the book an odour of sanctity, and dissipate the sulphurous fumes that obnubilate the work as a whole—much as is the transpontine melodramas you find the dashing young hero, who has lived a life of five acts of the most godless folly, dissipation, and crime, suddenly turn round and repent, saying, “Ah, yes, we have all sinned. We have all suffered. But let this be a warning to us all to avoid the quicksands of fast life and the fate of The Roysterer of Rutherglen,” whereat the gallery, thinking that it has assisted at a demonstration of ethical science, applauds vigorously. So it is with this poem. It is cheap melodrama where it affects sublimity. One can enjoy a tasty bit of bold blasphemy, whether in trochaics or in the more stately and more truly English iambic; but the small audacities of him, Buchanan, sound weak when one thinks of the “Man’s forgiveness give—and take” of a gentler questioner of the powers beyond. The work is a piece of perverted sentiment which poses as imagination, and seeks to cheapen the great creations of Milton and Goethe. The most obvious reflection it suggests is that, for all a writer of Mr Buchanan’s calibre can say for him, the Devil would stand a better chance if he were left to conduct the case himself; for he is not without a certain ability. ___ Reynolds’s Newspaper (15 March, 1896 - Issue 2379) BOOKS AND MAGAZINES.
_____ THE DEVIL’S CASE. (Written and published by Robert Buchanan, 36, Gerard-street, Shaftesbury-avenue, W. Price 6s.) Mr. Buchanan, has a merit rare among English writers in the present day—the courage of his opinions. Moreover, he has another qualification equally unusual he is never dull and he has always some message to convey. His latest work, “The Devil’s Case: A Bank Holiday Interlude,” is a weird and paradoxical attempt to prove that the unknown God is the author of all cruelty and evil in the world; and that all good and progress come through that mythical superstition of whom we hear so little in these days—the Devil. Prefixed to the volume is a beautiful little dedicatory poem, which we cannot refrain from quoting. It is a wholly charming, felicitous, and delicate piece of workmanship.
“The Devil’s Case” is written in blank verse—vigorous and picturesque throughout, but rarely rising to the level of poetry. It is descriptive prose of a very high order, as may be judged from the following extract, in which the Devil is stating that sin is God’s invention, and that there is no hell but that within and around us.
“Look,” he said. “The Hell thou doubtedst
Burns for evermore around thee—
Wheresoever human creatures
Wail in anguish, is my Kingdom!” Then, methought, the moonlit houses
Everywhere became transparent,
And I saw the shapes within them
Hopeless, aimless, and despairing: Dead and dying; woeful mothers
Wailing over afflicted children;
Creatures hollow-eyed with famine
Toiling on from dark to dawn; Shapes sin-bloated from the cradle
Thrown in heaps obscene together,
While from gulfs of desolation
Rose the sound of idiot laughter! Everywhere Disease and Famine
Held their ghastly midnight revel—
Even in the darken’d palace
Rose the moan, the lamentation.
The Devil then proceeds to narrate his work for mankind since the dawn of civilization—work constantly thwarted, but ever advancing to its goal.
“Eighteen hundred years of Europe
Have been wasted spite my warning:
‘Fools, one life is all God grants you,
Sweep your houses, heed your drains! “‘Pass from knowledge on to knowledge
Ever higher and supremer,
Clothe these bones with power and pity,
Live and love, altho’ ye die! “‘Fear not, love not, and revere not
What transcends your understanding!
Keep you reverence and affection
For the brethren whom ye know!’ “Only for a day thou livest!
Make that day, so quickly fleeting,
For thyself, for all thou lovest,
Beautiful with Light and Joy!”
These extracts will give a better idea of a work in many ways remarkable, than any amount of description. The novelty of the volume lies in the audacity in saying in print what multitudes think in secret, and, terrified by the conventions of the world, have not the courage openly to express. A serious of striking illustrations add to the interest of the book. ___ The Era (28 March, 1896 - Issue 3001) [This article, ‘The Devil and the Dramatist’, which links The Devil’s Case to the ongoing discussion of plagiarism surrounding the play, The Romance of the Shopwalker, is available in the Letters to the Press section.] ___ Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (4 April, 1896 - Issue 5978) “The Devil’s Case” is stated in verse—indifferent verse, we are told by some critics—by Mr. Robert Buchanan, in a book with that title, which he has just issued as his own publisher. There is not much of a plot. Mr. Buchanan happens to meet with the Prince of Darkness on Hampstead Heath, and enters into conversation with him. His Satanic Majesty delivers a long harangue in praise of his own merits. Speaking in the character of an accused person, he avers he has a case which, rightly stated, must procure him an acquittal. Mr. Buchanan listens with great patience, and, after one or two feeble attempts to confute the Devil, succumbs to his eloquence, and bows down and blesses him.
It might have been thought (writes Mr. Alec McMillan, the reviewer of the book in the Literary World) that Satan had reached the utmost Nadir of his fall when Miss Marie Corelli turned him into a cross between a pantomime demon and a drawing-room dangler. But no! the further degradation was in store for him of being canonised in doggrel verse by his too fond adorer, Mr. Buchanan. How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Back to the Bibliography, Poetry or The Devil’s Case. _____
The New Rome: poems and ballads of our empire (1898) The Scotsman (7 December, 1898 - p.11) THE NEW ROME. Poems and Ballads of Our Empire. By Robert Buchanan. London: Walter Scott. Mr Robert Buchanan explains in a prose postscript to his new book of poems that he began the work as a satire, but was unable to keep it up in that vein. One thinks of Mr Austin Dobson’s triolet—
I intended an ode,
But it turned to a sonnet.
and remembers occasions on which one has been inclined to be grateful for the caprices of poets. But Mr Buchanan is not any more successful in the lachrymose than in the satirical vein. He wanted to whip the age with Juvenal’s lash, but found himself, he says, too full of pity. He can be savage enough, however, when he is after an effect. The truth is, his book is a miscellany of poems without any sort of homogeneity, except that they may all be made to refer to modern conditions of things. It represents the British Empire as a modern Rome, and inveighs, with what seems an artificial indignation, against the subservience of religious to political ends. He parodies Mr Kipling, and goes into a rather hysterical objurgation of Nietszche. On the other hand, he extols Burns and Mr G. B. Shaw. One piece praises Maeterlinck, and another speaks of Schopenhauer as the new Buddha. Whatever is obvious about any modern man or idea is said somewhere or other in these poems, and put with restless impatience of thought and a constant appeal to the womanish of man’s sentimentalities. It is too much to appeal to the example of Juvenal in such a connection. Beside the thunders of the rhythmic indignation of the Roman, these smaller utterances sound like the ingeniously-contrived bleatings of a toy lamb; and, when a book takes up such a thesis as the vices and follies of the contemporary age, serious men want sterner stuff than this. ___ Glasgow Herald (14 December, 1898) The New Rome: Poems and Ballads of our Empire. By Robert Buchanan. (London: Walter Scott.)—
One thing may always be predicted of Robert Buchanan, and it is one of the noblest characteristics of true manhood. It is pitiful to think that there should be poets who use, and then forget, their early and best friends. Such a creature is not Mr Buchanan, who has had two special friends in life, one of whom, thirty years ago, he addressed, in a prologue to his own “Undertones,” as “David in Heaven.” The person here meant is of course David Gray, the poet, to whose memory his unforgetting friend again devotes in the Proem to the present volume a set of beautiful verses, under the same pathetic title “David in heaven.” Mr Buchanan will be the last man to object if we call his other friend the “Devil in Hell,” or out of it, as the case may be. To no possible human friend could he stick so closely or affectionately as he has stuck to his lively Majesty. Some three years ago, it may be remembered, Mr Buchanan produced a book in which he set forth “The Devil’s Case” with such ability and energy as to command the admiration, not only of the Devil himself, but of so reputable a preacher as Dr Parker of the City Temple. But his Majesty has still much good counsel to give to his vindicator, who, as the two come together again, this time in Kensington Gardens late in the evening, is quoting “Hamlet” and lamenting that ever he was born to set right the disjointed world. He is declaiming from a manuscript, and he has just declared that he will join the knightly band of satirists when a voice at his side says—
“Satan again!” says the poet, and the newcomer responds—
“I see you recognise me!
The real and only Devil, whose cause rejected
You championed ’gainst a world that vilifies me,
And so for Hell’s black laurel were selected!
Yea, Satan! Not the gruesome Deil invented
Up North by kings and ministers demented,
Not the Arch-Knave in bonnet and cock’s feather
Who scaled the Brocken peaks in windy weather,
Far less that fop of fashionable flummery
Beloved by Miss Corelli and Montgomery;
Nay, the true Æon, friend of things created,
Whom ’tis your glory to have vindicated!
“What brings you hither?” asks the poet, and the Æon answers that it is to remind him of sundry noble themes “worth your while, my son, to sing of.” He counsels him against satire, and most of all to “shun the jogtrot jungles of the pinchbeck Masters.” “And if,” says the poet, “my Muse refuses to obey you?” The reply is prompt:—
“Rome!” answers the poet,
Then he proceeds to draw a parallel between the old Rome and the British Empire, the Rome that now is, characterised by sins, sorrows, and wrongs. What is now wanted is a Bard like Juvenal of yore:—
“Fearless, free-spoken, sane, and strong,
To smite with stern and savage song
This monstrous Age of shams and lies.”
“All right,” quoth the Devil, agreeing with the justice of the poet’s parallel, while maintaining his own conception as to methods, which he thus expounds:—
“But not by hate and not by scorn,
Not by the arts of bards outworn,
I work! I conquer and confute
By Love and Pity absolute!
And he who earns my praise must find
The Light beyond these clouds of Fate—
By love, not Hate, for Humankind,
Must he enfranchise and unbind
The slaves whom God leaves desolate.”
“Amen!” says the poet, and the Devil resumes by declaring that in his throat he lies who, taught by tyrants, sees in him “the Evil Spirit that denies.” He declares, on the contrary, that his task is “to affirm and free.” He goes further:—
The reader will be inclined to ask—“Can this be the Devil?” So it would seem—according to Mr Buchanan, his dear friend. Then the poet goes on to complete his parallel between the ancient Rome with its horrors and cruelties of custom and the evil practices of the New Rome:—
“The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now) the tinsel’d Priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher’s sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of men!”
He then makes a dash at the New Woman, whom he denounces as a creature who, in striving with men in the arena, now as of old, forgets “her sex, her children, and her God.” The Devil defends the new woman, who, so far from being marred, is rather enfranchised. The poet of course takes a shy at newspapers—how natural in the case of the man, who has in his time earned many a precious and needful guinea through those same newspapers! He also strikes with satiric sword at the philosopher to whom there is no God, and can see no heaven, but only “the eternal, Cul de Sac!” Then there is the poet who is
“happy, and at home
In all the arts and crafts of learned Rome,
He sees the bloody pageant of despair,
All Nature moaning ’neath its load of care,
Takes off his hat, and with a bow polite
Chirps, God is in his Heaven! the world’s all right.”
These things would have made Huxley and browning laugh. One would fancy that the world was going to the Devil, but in this case the Devil checks the poet, and mends his mood by saying—
“But hark, that cry!
The hosts of Tommy Atkins passing by!
The Flag that for a thousand years has braved
The battle and the breeze is floating there!
What Shakespeare glorified and Nelson saved
Is worth, I think, some little praise and prayer!
Even I, the Devil, at that note
Seem the lump rising in my throat!
’Tis something, after all, you must agree,
To mark the old Flag float from sea to sea.”
This is curative, and the poet is at least partially pleased with the patriotic words of the Devil, who further delivers a fine eulogium on the home-bred valour of the British race.
Such is the introduction to Mr Buchanan’s “Songs of Empire,” which are vastly different from most of the Imperial “row-de-dow” odes and songs which have been showered upon the public of late. They are daring, biting, crushing, clever, and roll along with immense spirit. They are songs and ballads which only Mr Buchanan could or perhaps would write. They may not please all readers, but there cannot be the slightest doubt as to their intense readability. Two of the ablest and “rummiest” of the lot are “The Chartered Companie” and “The Ballad of Kiplingson,” which ought to delight many people without hurting the subjects of them. On the other hand, the poem on “The Grand Old Man” will produce a mixed impression of pleasure and pain, according to the reader. “The Irishman to Cromwell” is a scarifying piece of verse. Among the series under the title “Through the Great City” will be found many a masterpiece of verse—such as “The Sphinx on the Thames Embankment,” and “The Last Christians.” Among other poems, “The Gnome,” which sketches the life and character of Heine, is capital. A couple of pieces on “Burns” are also fine. In fact, the whole book is a marvel and a treasure. ___ The Guardian (27 December, 1898 - p. 6) Mr. Robert Buchanan, who rarely abandons the attitude of an Ishmael among the poets of his time, sustains that character—with talent and with energy, as always—in his last volume, The New Rome, “poems and ballads of our Empire” (Walter Scott, 8vo, pp. 387, 6s.). It will certainly displease those whom, we take it, the author intended primarily to displease—the “Jingo Jew,” the “cockney cliques,” and “the gigman,” to whom we recommend, among other items, “The Charter’d Companie” and “The Ballad of Kiplingson,” but we fear it may offend the inoffensive too. Frankly, those who read the volume through must be prepared to encounter much that is quite blasphemous, much that is indiscriminately violent, and some irony of the sort that is unconscious praise. Inspired by “The Aeon” (another name for Mr. Buchanan’s unnameable client), he has scourged some of the obvious vices of his age in Juvenalian satire and Goethian rhapsody with something of Byron’s forcible wit. It is a pity that he has attacked also things that many good men hold not only harmless but even sacred, and that since nature has not denied him the gift of verse he has relied so constantly upon a rather monotonous indignation. However, it is only just to recognise, on the æsthetic side, his dexterity and strength, and, on the moral, his perfectly sincere and passionate humanity; let those who doubt either read “Old Rome,” “The Wearing of the Green” (new style), and “The Cry for Life.” He is seldom a sweet poet, and indeed, generally, Mr. Buchanan is to be taken as medicine. Back to the Bibliography, Poetry or The New Rome _____ Complete Poetical Works (1901) The Humane Review (January, 1902 - p.302-310) ROBERT BUCHANAN.* * Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. 2 vols. Chatto and Windus. 1901. AFTER nearly forty years of ceaseless literary toil, Robert Buchanan has passed away, leaving the world in a mood of pathetic perplexity as to what it ought to have made of him or even what it is to make of him now. It could not even in its dullest moods fail to realise the tempestuous and overwhelming force of the man. But it continued hesitant whether that force represented a permanent and vital power or the self-consuming throes of a fever-fit.
Yet surely there never was poet concerning whose assured claim to that title there need have been less hesitation. To one at least of his admirers it seems that it was his very excellences which robbed him and still rob him of his due meed of appreciation. He was excellent in ways of which his time recked little or was frankly contemptuous. His genius was careless and liberal, with the carelessness and liberality of Nature. He squandered himself recklessly and with the magnificent unconsciousness of those who have much to squander. And this did not suit the mood of a time which esteems as the chief of virtues a studied aloofness from real feeling, a delicate sensitiveness of self-expenditure. Again, Buchanan was by far the most simple and natural of modern poets. He was filled with a great fervour of faith and feeling which had to find expression, and nothing was farther from his mind or bent than that study of fantastic literary grimace which passes to-day for a devotion to style. His poems have the looseness and copiousness of Nature, but they have too its life. They are not trimmed and trained to the requirements of the latest fashion in poetic parterres.
But the chief obstacle to the immediate recognition of Buchanan’s greatness may also prove to be the surest guarantee of his eventual triumph. He has defied classification, and by his own obstinate individuality of faith and feeling he must live or die. It is not indeed expected of the poet that he should rigidly conform to the respectable beliefs of his time. The world of ordinary readers has its code of literary live-and-let-live. It is graciously patient of the heresy which clothes itself in polite and well-turned phrases. It has a satisfying secrecy of delight in the heresy which wears with success a roguish mask of orthodoxy. But it must draw the line at a heresy which insists that it is heretical. And Buchanan, it must be admitted, kept it pretty busily engaged drawing lines throughout a long literary life. He could not endure to be suspected of belonging to any party or school. The moment a belief ceased to be an object of persecution, it lost some of its charm for him. He was indeed what he called himself, an “Ishmael of Song,” and the breath of his intellectual life was the belief to which men were afraid or unable to be fair.
Perhaps it is not wonderful that a man who so consistently and strenuously ranged himself against every established opinion, or proved himself fair and charitable to a belief which was passing through its time of struggle and trial only to assail it with compensating bitterness in its day of success, should have earned at last a reputation for invincible perversity. But natural, inevitable indeed, as it was, considering how superficial and impatient contemporary criticism usually is, it was nevertheless wholly unjust. There may have been a certain measure of perversity in Robert Buchanan’s nature. The circumstances of his literary life, lived at a white heat of polemical fervour, may have accentuated whatever natural perversity was his. Buchanan did not escape the defects of his qualities any more than the least of us. But intellectual perversity, so far as he suffered from it, was in him a most pardonable defect to those who recognised the true measure of the quality which it relieved. He was indeed an eclectic, and gloried in his eclecticism. But he gloried in it only because it was an expression of his sympathy with the eclecticism of humanity at large. He felt so much with the race, with the strugglings and aspirations of men as men, that he half forced himself to think with them too in all their varieties of thought. The only intellectual attitude which he rejected, but against it he launched his inexhaustible store of anathemas, was the attempt to give supremacy to any one explanation of the experiences of life. He could tolerate no Cæsar on the intellectual throne, and as men are wont to depose one only to find themselves conferring a more assured autocracy upon another, they always found in Buchanan the man who showed them what they were doing and so made it at least difficult for them to do it. He waged war with every established tyranny, and if his wars were many, it was because of the numberless tyrannies which he found men contentedly enduring and not at all because of any special delight of his own in war.
The secret of Buchanan as man and as poet was his love of the weak, the down-trodden, the depressed. For him the key to all human duty lay in the capacity to see and to answer the claims of weakness. His own poetry is one long passionate appeal on behalf of all weak and forgotten things, a passionate protest against the self-contained unthinking march of mere strength. He arraigned the unconscious movements of nature, its careless, heartless masteries, before the tribunal of man’s heart. He elicited the deep inner pity that lurks in every heart that is beginning to be human, and set it with assurance on the throne of universal judgment. He was so sure that all who had chosen to suffer for others, all who had merged their life in a close identity with the pain and defeat of others, were the true exponents of the world’s justice. For if that were not so, then indeed was there no justice. But his surest and most abiding faith was that just this identification of strength with weakness, this sacrifice of strength for the sake of weakness, was the only solution of life’s mystery. That solution indeed was not able to justify itself to the intellect. It could not command, or even very boldly appeal to the beliefs of men. But at least it was the matter of their unconquerable hope. Only through it could the huge evil of life be faced, and that evil become the stuff of an ultimate good.
Buchanan had taught in song for twenty years before Huxley stated it in prose the great doctrine that human ethics is the reversal of the evolutionary method. That indeed was the starting-point of the poet’s faith, and on that he always laid the greatest stress. Like the Gnostics of the first Christian centuries he rejects the God of Creation as the object of human love or reverence. The God to whom his heart turns, to whom he would turn the hearts of his brothers, is the God of Redemption. And this God he finds to be working out His purposes, to be unfolding as it were His essential being, in the movement of the life of humanity. All the great myths of love and sacrifice, like the story of Balder, are the witnesses of that life which is growing within life. The lives which have most suffered defeat for the sake of men, for the sake of pity and love and helpfulness, are the martyred ministers of its growth. The process of redemption, of the eliciting of that which is enduring in life, is just the reversal of the process of natural evolution. That is the constant starting-point of all the poet’s feeling. Yet he did not by any means allow himself to harden this feeling into a rigorous logical formula. On the contrary, he revolted against every attempt which had been made in the history of human thought to lay the yoke of such a formula upon man’s mind and will. The logical outcome, in belief, of such a feeling is asceticism, and against asceticism in all its forms Buchanan protested as vehemently as he had protested against submission to the heartless evolutionary process. He felt that there was some reconciliation of hedonism and asceticism—of Paganism and Buddhism, let us say. He felt that asceticism in its extreme forms was practically a denial of life, and that the redemption in which it hoped was really a break which no consciousness could survive. With what healthy scorn Buchanan rejected this travesty of redemption, this attempt to discover or to gain a worthy life through despair of and contempt for the daily life men know, all can learn who will take the trouble to read his poem on Schopenhauer, which he calls “The New Buddha.” Buchanan looked to find the redemptive process somehow accomplished within the circle of that same evolutionary movement which in its naked pitilessness he had banned. Already he finds the life within the life committed to man. That is just the human secret. In man there is already by a more intimate guerdon of Nature the power of love, of sympathy, of helpfulness, which redeems the coarser methods of her first attempts at handing on the gift of life. It is to man that the enduring sense of Nature’s joy and beauty is entrusted, just as to him only is also given the full sense of Nature’s cruelty and ravin and ugliness. Life begins to redeem itself as soon as it is able to feel the need of redemption. And out of the strength with which it slew and wasted and lusted, it creates the force whose delight is to save and to love and make alive.
This is something like the way in which Buchanan attempts the reconciliation of the lower and the higher processes in life—the process of the conservation of the individual life by itself at all risks, and the process of the redemption of higher individual powers by the sacrifice of lower, or of the saving of the weak by the self-sacrifice of the strong. The reconciliation indeed is never complete. The poet was too honest to pretend and too sincere to invent an intellectual certainty where there is only a certainty for the high moods of feeling and of hope. He was too much of a poet and too little of a philosopher to round off his hope, however high and assured, to a logical completeness. The difficulty of this reconciliation was so present to him that he often seemed to speak with two voices—a prose voice in which he acclaimed with a kind of courageous resignation the cruel truth of Nature’s ways which physical science had revealed, and the voice of the poet with which he adhered to every implacable protest against those ways. Now he seemed to regard the protest against Nature as futile and magnificently absurd, again as the only and the assured means of a new and higher development of her life. Now in his prose mood, his mood of despair, he would say: “Jesus was a man of a beautiful temperament, carried beyond himself by a false and sentimental conception of the mechanism of life. He uttered, no one so exquisitely, the human cry for a Divine Fatherhood. But unfortunately he appealed to Nature for corroboration of his appeal. Nature never answered him. Then, as now, she kept God’s secret.” But the poet’s voice would speak anon, and speak with a largeness and fulness which shamed prose out of its cold realities. As for instance, when he gives for answer to the question:—
“Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son?”
“In Him and in my Brethren every one:
The child of Mary who was crucified,
The gods of Hellas fair and radiant-eyed,
Brahm, Balder, Gautama, and Mahomet,
All who have pledged their gains to pay my debt
Of sorrows—all who through this world of dream
Breathe mystery and ecstasy supreme;
The greater and the less: the wise, the good,
Inheritors of Nature’s godlike mood;
In these I do believe eternally,
Knowing them deathless, like the God in me.”
Or again where was the hope of a great and eternal birth, from the slow patient bitterness of humanity’s travailing, ever better expressed than here?—
“Where’er great pity is and piteousness,
Where’er great Love and Love’s strange sorrow stay,
Where’er men cease to curse, but bend to bless,
Frail brethren fashion’d like themselves of clay; “Where’er the lamb and lion side by side
Lie down in peace, where’er on land or sea
Infinite Love and Mercy heavenly-eyed
Emerge, there stirs the God that is to be! “His light is round the slaughter’d bird and beast
As round the forehead of Man crucified,—
All things that live, the greatest and the least,
Await the coming of this Lord and Guide; “And every gentle deed by mortals done,
Yea, every holy thought and loving breath,
Lighten poor Nature’s travail with this Son
Who shall be Lord and God of Life and Death!”
So that, after all, the doubt of Buchanan’s prose mood finds its answer in the certainty of Buchanan the poet. If it was unfortunate that Jesus appealed to Nature for corroboration of His appeal to a Divine Fatherhood, at least the mistake seems to have been only one of sex. For Nature is herself, the poet sees, in pangs of motherhood which have been relieved in such lives as Jesus lived and such unconquerable faith in life as He displayed.
But Buchanan’s humanist ethics, his humanitarian fervour, were no mere passionless altruism produced in an emotional vacuum. He did hot hold that men would give their lives for others because they had no share in the lives of those others, but exactly because they had. For him the solidarity of life was complete. No life could be lived to itself or for itself. It shared in all other achievement. It contributed to it. Loss or gain, salvation or damnation, were corporate experiences. They were indeed individual too, and individual primarily. For it is only the individual that feels the loss or grows by the gain. But he shares in loss and gain which seem to be beyond the range of his own making, and all he has done and been will appear as loss or gain in other life than his own. This solidarity of the deepest and most essential human fortunes is the key-note of many of Buchanan’s most characteristic poems. As early as the “Book of Orm,” written before he was thirty, he gave it mystical expression in a brief allegorical interlude which he titles “Sanitas.” It is worth quoting:—
“Dreamily, on her milk-white Ass,
Rideth the maiden Sanitas—
With zone of gold her waist is bound,
Her brows are with immortelles crowned:
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
Lower, lower, sinks the sun,
The white stars glimmer, one by one! “Who sitteth musing at his door?
Silas, the Leper, gaunt and hoar;
Though he is curst in every limb,
Full whitely Time hath snowed on him—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
The Leper, drinking in the air,
Sits like a beast, with idiot stare. “How pale! how wondrous! doth she pass,
The heavenly maiden Sanitas;
She looketh, and she shuddereth,
She passeth on with bated breath—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
His mind is like a stagnant pool,
She passeth o’er it, beautiful! “Brighter, whiter, in the skies,
Open innumerable eyes;
The Leper looketh up and sees,
His aching heart is soothed by these—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
He looketh up with heart astir,
And every star hath eyes like her! “Onward on her milk-white Ass
Rideth the maiden Sanitas.
The boughs are green, the grain is pearled,
But ’tis a miserable world—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
All o’er the blue above her, she
Beholds bright spots of Leprosy.”
Again in his very latest volume of poems, published three years ago, he gives expression again and again to this community of the deeper human fortunes. Of the victims of human lust whom we contemptuously dismiss as “lost women” the passionate indignation of his heart utters the truth which ought to ensure them a refuge in every heart that still knows how to feel or to be just.
“How? Thou be saved, and one of these be lost?
The least of these be spent, and thou soar free!
Nay! for these things are thou—these tempest-tost
Waves of the darkness are but forms of thee. “Shall these be cast away? Then rest thou sure
No hopes abide for thee if none for these.
Would’st thou be healed? Then hast thou these to cure;
Thine is their shame, their foulness, their disease.”
And then in the poem which he calls “These Voices” he proclaims the identity of all human experience with himself. So far as he is failing to make it his own, he is losing his life. So far as he is powerless through failure of heart, or of knowledge, or of will, to enter into the stress of any living joy or sorrow, to penetrate the mystery of any living soul, he feels that it is his own life which is suffering failure and defeat.
“Hear the strong man in the dark for pity crying,
Hear the foul man’s word of hate as he goes by thee;
Hear the shriek of trampled women, vainly flying
From the phantoms that appal thee and defy thee!
. . . . . . . . . “All the foul things God would seem to put his ban on,
All the fair things that would seem to have his blessing—
Without thee, yet within thee, O Buchanan,
They are thronging, with a riddle for thy guessing.
. . . . . . . . . “Ah! the Voices! and the Faces!—wild and wan, on
They are rushing, to destroy or to renew thee!
Like a foam-flake shalt thou vanish, O Buchanan,
If but one of these is lost that cry unto thee!”
It seems a pitiable futility of criticism that the one great poet of human hope and redemption who is at all worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with Robert Browning should have been relegated to a worse punishment than literary annihilation, viz., summary and impatient dismissal to the limbo of the second-rate singers of our time. Buchanan is sure of his rescue from this abode of darkness. In its own defence the new time will call to its aid, in the throes of spiritual pain through which it has to pass, one of the most strenuous, the most believing, and the most loving singers that the England of the second half of the nineteenth century knew. He foresaw its need better than most. He forefelt its pain better than any. He was free from the great vice of his own time, the cowardice that worshipped the tyrant of the actual until its indifference to all ideals became the creed by which it proposed to live. Because he believed in man’s divine struggle against the actual as the real key to the mystery of human life, because he believed that the growing and waning fortunes of that struggle were stuff for the noblest poetry, because he made of his own superb imagination a mint for this true coinage, he was depreciated and defamed by a narrow literary clique. But because he did all these things, the broad needs of human life in the coming years will claim him and justify him as a poet of prophetic vision and of enduring right to fame. A. L. LILLEY. Back to the Bibliography or Poetry |
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