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BOOK REVIEWS - ESSAYS 1. David Gray and other Essays (1868) to The Fleshly School of Poetry (1872) David Gray and other Essays, chiefly on poetry (1868) The Examiner (29 February, 1868 - Issue 3135) David Gray and other Essays, chiefly on Poetry. By Robert Buchanan. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. Mr Buchanan here brings together eight essays, of which the longest and best is a memoir of his friend David Gray. David Gray, born in 1838, was the son of a handloom weaver, in the neighbourhood of Glasgow. A clever baby and a clever boy, he was intended by his parents for the Kirk, and with that end received, at Glasgow University, such an education as peasant boys and mechanics’ sons can get only in Scotland. But he had learnt to read out of Chaucer and all the poets down to Wordsworth, and he was fascinated, as Mr Buchanan says, by “the desire to make deathless music,” and he openly declared himself to be “a foster son of Keats, the dreamily divine.” He began to write a Shakespearean play, and before his college work was over had to vex his parents’ hearts by deciding that he must serve God better than by becoming a minister. That he was a poet and a great poet he made no doubt; but how to make the world believe this? “I am so accustomed to compare my own mental progress with that of such men as Shakespeare, and Goethe, and Wordsworth,” he said, “that the dream of my life will not be fulfilled if my fame equal not, at least, that of the latter of these three!” “I tell you,” he also said, “that, if I live, my name and fame shall be second to few of any age, to none of my own. I speak this because I feel power.” In such strains he wrote to friends and strangers; but neither friends nor strangers would trouble themselves to read a pretty lyric, ‘The Luggie,’ which he had written, and which he believed to afford ample proof of his greatness. He remembered that one before him had found that a prophet was without honour in his own country, and therefore, at the age of twenty-one, he left his Nazareth of Glasgow to make himself heard in London. His ‘Luggie’ was in his carpet-bag, and a score or so of shillings were in his pocket. Those shillings were all his wealth, and, with an unpoet-like resolve to husband them, he made his bed for the first night in Hyde Park. Thereby he caught a cold which issued in consumption, and killed him in nineteen months. Before a day was over, too, a chill fell on his hopes and his ambition. “What brought me here?” he said, in one of his doleful letters. “God knows, for I don’t.” He bethought himself, thinking perhaps of the fable about Shakespeare and the horses, of trying for a place as a supernumerary in one of the playhouses. He introduced himself, however, to Mr Monckton Milnes, now Lord Houghton. Mr Milnes treated him kindly, asked Thackeray to insert ‘The Luggie’ in the Cornhill—but without success—and did as much else for him as he could.
Lord Houghton briefly and vividly describes his intercourse with the young poet in London. He had written to Gray strongly urging him not to make the hazardous experiment of a literary life, but to aim after a professional independence. “A few weeks afterwards,” he writes, “I was told that a young man wished to see me, and when he came into the room I at once saw that it could be no other than the young Scotch poet. It was a light, well-built, but somewhat stooping figure, with a countenance that at once brought strongly to my recollection a cast of the face of Shelley in his youth, which I had seen at Mr Leigh Hunt’s. There was the same full brow, out-looking eyes, and sensitive, melancholy mouth. He told me at once that he had come to London in consequence of my letter, as from the tone of it he was sure I should befriend him. I was dismayed at this unexpected result of my advice, and could do no more than press him to return home as soon as possible. I painted as darkly as I could the chances and difficulties of a literary struggle in the crowded competition of this great city, and how strong a swimmer it required to be not to sink in such a sea of tumultuous life. ‘No, he would not return.’ I determined in my own mind that he should do so before I myself left town for the country, but at the same time I believed that he might derive advantage from a short personal experience of hard realities. He had confidence in his own powers, a simple certainty of his own worth, which I saw would keep him in good heart and preserve him from base temptations. He refused to take money, saying he had enough to go on with; but I gave him some light literary work, for which he was very grateful. When he came to me again I went over some of his verse with him, and I shall not forget the passionate gratification he showed when I told him that, in my judgment, he was an undeniable poet. After this admission he was ready to submit to my criticism or correction, though he was sadly depressed at the rejection of one of his poems, over which he had evidently spent much labour and care, by the editor of a distinguished popular periodical, to whom I had sent it with a hearty recommendation. His, indeed, was not a spirit to be seriously injured by a temporary disappointment; but when he fell ill so soon afterwards, one had something of the feeling of regret that the notorious review of Keats inspires in connection with the premature loss of the author of ‘Endymion.’ It was only a few weeks after his arrival in London, that the poor boy came to my house apparently under the influence of violent fever. He said he had caught cold in the wet weather, having been insufficiently protected by clothing; but had delayed coming to me for fear of giving me unnecessary trouble. I at once sent him hack to his lodgings, which were sufficiently comfortable, and put him under good medical superintendence. It soon became apparent that pulmonary disease had set in, but there were good hopes of arresting its progress. I visited him often, and every time with increasing interest. He had somehow found out that his lungs were affected, and the image of the destiny of Keats was ever before him.”
Mr Buchanan, who had left Glasgow for London on the same day, though without meeting Gray for a week, and who knew the ways of the world a little better, helped to keep him from starving. He sought in vain for some literary employment through the summer and autumn. In November he was sent home to his parents; but there it was found that with consumption upon him he could not live many weeks. Therefore a lady’s bounty brought him back to London, there to be an inmate of Brompton Hospital. Instead of that Mr Milnes sent him to Torquay, and thence he wrote home letters like this: DEAR PARENTS,
I am coming home—home-sick. I cannot stay from home any longer. What’s the good of me being so far from home, and sick and ill? I don’t know whether I’ll be able to come back—sleeping none at night—crying out for my mother, and her so far away. O God, I wish I were home never to leave it more! Tell everybody that I’m coming back—no better—worse, worse. What’s about climate—about frost or snow or cold weather when one is at home? I wish I had never left it.
But how am I to get back without money, and my expenses for the journey newly paid yesterday? I came here yesterday scarcely able to walk. Oh, how I wish I saw my father’s face— shall I ever see it? I have no money, and I want to get home, home, home! What shall I do, O God? Father, I shall steal to see you again, because I did not use you rightly—my conduct to you all the time I was at home makes me miserable, miserable, miserable! Will you forgive me?—do I ask that? forgiven, forgiven, forgiven! If I can’t get money to pay for my box, I shall leave box and everything behind. I shall try and be at home by Saturday, January 12th. Mind the day— if I am not home—God knows were I shall be. I have come through things that would make your hearts ache for me—things which I shall never tell to anybody but you, and you shall keep them secret as the grave. Get my own little room ready, quick, quick; have it all tidy and clean and cosy against my home-coming. I wish to die there, and nobody shall nurse me, except my own dear mother, ever, ever again, O home, home, home!
I will try and write again, but mind the day. Perhaps my father will come into Glasgow, if I can tell him beforehand how, when, and where I shall be. I shall try all I can to let him know.
Mind and tell everybody that I am coming back, because I wish to be back, and cannot stay away. Tell everybody; but I shall come back in the dark, because I am so utterly unhappy. No more, no more. Mind the day,—Yours, D. G.
Don’t answer—not even think of answering. He ran away to London and thence, after the generous efforts of friends to induce him to accept shelter in some comfortable place, he was sent back to his mother. He died in December, 1861, not quite four-and-twenty, having written this epitaph for himself a few weeks before:
Below lies one whose name was traced in sand—
He died, not knowing what it was to live:
Died while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
And maiden thought electrified his soul:
Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader, pass without a sigh
In a proud sorrow! There is life with God,
In other kingdom of a sweeter air;
In Eden every flower is blown. Amen.
His ‘Luggie’ was published soon afterwards, and then the world knew that a sweet singer, perhaps one who really might have proved himself a poet, had lived and died.
Mr Buchanan’s record of his friend’s life is told with much pathos and is by far the most interesting portion of this volume. The other portions are chiefly interesting as exhibitions of Mr Buchanan’s own temper. They are essays on ‘The Poet, or Seer,’ on ‘The Student and his Vocation,’ on ‘Literary Morality,’ on ‘Walt Whitman,’ on ‘Herrick’s Hesperides,’ ‘On a Passage in Heine,’ ‘On my own Tentatives.’ Mr Buchanan speaks his opinions from a lofty height and in sonorous phrase. He denounces Mr Carlyle as one whom the world considers a liar—of course in a literary and not in a literal sense. He quarrels with Mr Mill because he has dared to place philosophy “in connection with the blatant periods of Mr Bright and the polished pithiness of Mr Lowe and the juggling insincerities of each successive Chancellor of the Exchequer.” He condemns a good many people, and on all points speaks as one having authority,—after the manner of the modern Philistines.
There is not much agreement, however, save in tone of voice, between Mr Buchanan and Mr Matthew Arnold. These essays make no great pretence, and doubtless Mr Buchanan means only to give plain utterance to some earnest thoughts. We do not question their earnestness, but they are not very profound and not very well expressed. ___ The Contemporary Review (March, 1868 - Vol. VII, p.470-472) David Gray, and other Essays, chiefly on Poetry. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co. 1868. THIS volume is quite original as a specimen of book-making. It could only have been produced by a man of fine insights, exquisite literary tact, and great shrewdness, yet in whom there is a lack of that patience which gives the last perfect prevailing touch, leaving nought to be desired. Indeed, occasional turns, abrupt, almost indelicate, reveal to us something like the absence of those higher elements which have their root in a “sublime discontent,” such as would certainly have made impossible the blunt, overweening, self-satisfied egotism of many passages we find here. Mr. Buchanan’s evil demon is a false culture, which justifies itself by unduly despising other forms of culture, and which almost makes him incapable of generously acknowledging a benefit. The result is that very often he degrades to the imagination what he is too eagerly anxious to exalt to the intellect; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he seeks to storm the one, while he ought to softly and indirectly appeal to the other. He is, in this respect, truer in his poetry than in his prose; but even his poetry witnesses to this tendency. In this volume he gives a chapter—“On my own Tentatives”—which only too clearly proves his eagerness to justify to the intellect, against critical carping, what would most certainly have been better left to justify itself in the imaginations of those who know and love his poems. For, after all, that must be the ultimate answer to the criticism he deprecates. But with respect to the poetry there cannot be the least doubt that Mr. Buchanan himself unconsciously hits at once his strong and his weak point, when he admits us to his theory about the use of dialects (p. 304). The present writer had thoughts in that direction months ago; and strangely enough chanced to re-read just at the time that surprising passage of Max Müller’s, beginning at p. 57 of his “Science of Language,” in which the professor shows the necessity written languages are ever under of being constantly fed from the streams of rude living dialects, if they would not become stagnant lakes. This suggests a great question as to the relation in which art, through language, must stand to life to recover reality, force, virility. And Mr. Buchanan, in his conscious theory, is an illustration of how a great principle may be only half applied, through being seized by the intellect alone. Of all men living, Mr. Buchanan most thoroughly realizes the power that lies in a dialect or vulgar form of speech to restore that warmth, that living glow as of very blood, which has to such an extent passed out of the pale, polished countenance of our written language, pent up as it has been so long with the proprieties. His use of the low London dialects and the Scotch, in “Liz” and other poems, is most skilful, looked at intellectually and critically. But then it has in his case been too much reduced to a system, or rather, perhaps, has never taken rise in that deepest sympathy or imaginative community which unconsciously uses language as its eager and pliant minister, transforming rude phrases and forms of speech into complete poems like diamonds, flashing out on all sides in the clear-intense lights of emotion. In one word, Mr. Buchanan loses concentration, and consequently dramatic clearness and consistency, by his conscious determination after select and intellectually-assorted phrases. His very skill in this defeats a deeper end of art, of which it should be but the servant. Mr. Buchanan has either been too timid or too bold. We do not want verisimilitude as of photography; but we do want the verisimilitude of imagination; and this Mr. Buchanan has sometimes failed to give us, with the consequent result of amplification without spiritual relief and balance. Hence the discontent generally felt with the language put into the mouth of his characters, and the complaint that the writer’s own spectacles have been put on the eyes of low and ignorant persons: the very process of conscious selection which Mr. Buchanan’s rule makes necessary, in a certain respect justifies the complaint. But Mr. Buchanan is certainly no imitator. He has tremendous power in using the mere form or body of unwritten speech which the present period supplies to the artist, and which others have neglected or despised; and it is because of this that he has received, as he deserves, such a measure of acceptance. But still the rags of a false philology hang about him; he scarcely grasps the spirit in close imaginative embrace, and only half creates the characters he presents to us. With the exception of some paragraphs in “Liz,” and portions of “Poet Andrew,” where intense sympathy seems to have given wing to touching words, the more that it was artificially restrained, all Mr. Buchanan’s later poems oppress us with a sense of incomplete sympathetic conception, proving itself by an inharmoniousness and low-lighted diffuseness of speech. The article “On my own Tentatives” has not removed, but rather confirmed these impressions independently formed. Mr. Buchanan is too conscious in his reaction against the scholastic poets, as he calls them, and does not appreciate as he ought the favour they have done him in unwittingly smoothing his road to the public ear.
But when we said the volume was an original specimen of book-making, we meant what we said. What is really of the least value we have met with somewhere or other before; and so badly, and in such a slovenly way, has the thing been put together, that we confess we felt, and still feel, that the scraps Mr. Buchanan has cut out of the newspapers looked far better in their old setting. The only paragraphs in the first essay which do not verge on ruddy rhetoric, or which have real critical value, have been thus thrown in—that on the “End of Art,” for instance, being from the review of “Dallas’s Gay Science” in the Spectator of May 25, 1867. Here Mr. Buchanan, with a proper respect to the worthy editorial powers that be, shows himself just in process of describing a circuit from his law of sincerity to that of spiritualization, in which this Review, June, 1967, too, may claim credit for having given him a further small, though unacknowledged impulse. Certain it is, that several of Mr. Buchanan’s omissions and additions in the article on “Literary Morality,” and sentences elsewhere, would seem to signify as much, even although it went no further than forcing him to the acknowledgment that “faithfulness to the [essential] tendencies of one’s time”—which are, in fact, the gathered result of the struggles and defeats of all former ages—was worthy of being taken into account along with the idea of sincerity (p. 56), now shown by Mr. Buchanan himself to be very “inexhaustive;” and in compelling him to the insertion of Goethe’s remark (pp. 244, 259), on which we said his article was hung, as a sermon on its text, where it had much better have been at first. It is hopeful to see that Mr. Buchanan is not wholly unamenable to true and fair criticism. But, by the way, why is it that he so obstinately refuses to see the beauty of the “Northern Farmer?” He admires “The Brook” and “The Grandmother,” because of the great wave of emotion on which common experience is uplifted as into cruelly-pathetic sunlight of springtide (p. 296). Is it not possible that, in the later and more powerful poem, we have the touching contrast between the weakness and unavailableness of the individual and the strong iron forces of Nature, even when restricted within the narrow bounds of the lowliest daily work? To make such an unideal character-medium as the Northern Farmer vibrate, charged with such a universal emotional current (strangely kindred, too, with the fatalistic “hopelessness of the struggle,” yet “grand by the very desire of struggling” characteristic of the Greeks themselves), and nevertheless to keep the teaching so subordinate to typical traits as even to deceive a man like Mr. Buchanan, seems to us, we confess, a very triumph of dramatic power.
Mr. Buchanan being really a man of genius, and an excellent writer, it is unnecessary to say that this book abounds in fine passages, in which we have keen glances cast sharply into deep and dark places, though, generally speaking, his attitude is unsteady and his writing without due groundwork of calm reflection. His thoughts lie like crystals thrown carelessly on marble, with prismatic lights playing over them, and alternately confusing and dazzling the eye of the onlooker. He may write such an essay on art as will last, if he will but thoroughly think out the theme: in this volume he has been but trifling, or at best playing with it, though even in playing he throws together prime materials. The essay on David Gray is simple and touching, yet spoiled a little by a self-assertive tone; which, however, the bits of poetry—and it is genuine poetry—almost satisfactorily atone for. The essay on “Walt Whitman” is a puzzle, both as respects the way in which Mr. Buchanan escapes anything like applying definite principles of criticism, and his peculiar blindness to the real genesis of that materialistico-mystical form of thought, the seeds of which, blown from the far East as if by secret winds, have found a new soil in the Western world. We do not see that Mr. Buchanan has completely grasped Whitman’s secret, but he has doubtless done something in guiding others to do it. His distinction between contemporary and eternal truth, however, is the merest figment of the brain; these two, for subtle reasons connected with the “faithfulness to one’s time,” being with the artist essentially one. On the whole, this volume might not inaptly have been titled “My own Tentatives,” inasmuch as it gives promise of perfect prose and scientific criticism, rather than in any respect attains them. It is, we regret to see, full of errors and misprints; but that fault may not be the author’s: can it be that of the Chiswick Press? ___ The Daily News (26 March, 1868 - Issue 6832) Mr. Robert Buchanan has collected in a single volume several of his prose writings, under the general title of David Gray, and other Essays, chiefly on Poetry, by Robert Buchanan (Sampson Low, Son, and Marston). David Gray was the young Scotch poet—friend and fellow-countryman of Mr. Buchanan—who a few years ago wrote some poems of considerable promise, puzzled his plain, humble, loving parents by (to them) unaccountable longings, broke his heart in feverish graspings after fame, and died of consumption at three-and-twenty, in December, 1861. We have already been made obscurely acquainted with the sad life and death of this young writer in some of the poems of Mr. Buchanan, and the substance of the present essay is in itself not new to the public, having been originally published in the Cornhill Magazine some years back; but it has been largely added to in the present volume, and a more pathetic story never was written. Poor Gray’s last moments remind one of those of Keats, as in his genius there was a certain similarity. Both died in the bloom of youth, and in the flush of half-developed genius—died with passionate desire of life, with wasting hunger of fame—perishing of consumption while yet the flower was in the bud. Mr. Buchanan has told this painful story with much feeling and emotion, and the essay devoted to David Gray is one of the most interesting in the volume. The other chapters, however, also show the hand of a thoughtful and energetic writer. The nature of poetry in general, the vocation of the student, the strange rhapsodies of Walt Whitman, Herrick’s “Hesperides,” morals in literature, the hopes of humanity, and Mr. Buchanan’s own objects and purposes in composing poetry, are the other subjects handled in the volume. They are handled well—with no little reflectiveness and insight, and with much richness of language and wealth of illustration. The fault of Mr. Buchanan’s prose, indeed, is that, as in the prose writings of poets generally, it is too ornate, too heavily brocaded with metaphor, too prone to take refuge in figures which illuminate rather than define the meaning. This is perfectly legitimate in poetry; but, in criticism, emotion should be kept more in subjection to judgment. The opinions put forth by Mr. Buchanan are of course open to canvassing on several points. Often they seem to us very just and noble; sometimes of doubtful value; occasionally quite wrong. We suspect that Mr. Buchanan knows very little about politics—a failing rather incident to poets; and when he talks with flippant audacity of “the blatant periods of Mr. bright,” we venture to tell him that he is exhibiting nothing more than his own incompetency to judge a great, though it may be a passionate, nature, who has put more of heart into politics than any man of his time. The last essay—“On my own tentatives”—is Mr. Buchanan’s exposition of his motives in choosing actual subjects of every-day life for his poems, rather than subjects distant in time and country. We cannot conceal from ourselves that this essay will expose its author to the charge of presumption and egotism. Mr. Buchanan is still a young man, and he has not written enough, nor taken a sufficiently assured or definite position with the public to assume as yet the part of his own critic. His volume would have been better for the absence of this essay. ___ Notes and Queries (Vol. 1 4th S. (21) 23 May, 1868 - p.499) David Gray and other Essays, chiefly on Poetry. By Robert Buchanan. (Sampson Low.) Essays on Robert Browning’s Poetry. By John T. Nettleship. (Macmillan.) These two volumes are very similar in their character. In the first, Mr. Buchanan, himself no mean poet, gives us his Confession of Faith, and touches briefly on several great and magnificent questions affecting the poetic personality, illustrating his views by sketches of Whitman’s writings and Notes on Herrick. But the portion of the book which will interest most readers is that in which he tells, with much sympathy and feeling, the painful story of David Gray—his struggles and his early death, and calls attention to his poem “The Luggie,” a work but little known, but clearly deserving of more notice than it has yet received.
The volume of Mr. Nettleship, who is an enthusiastic admirer of Robert Browning, is an outpouring of that admiration, and a tribute of acknowledgment of the beneficial influences which the poet has exercised over the writer—of those tender warnings and encouragements which have times out of number intensified the desire for truth and right, cheered despondencies, and sweetened triumphs. Back to the Bibliography _____ The Land of Lorne: including the cruise of the ‘Tern’ to the Outer Hebrides (1871) The Examiner (18 March, 1871 - Issue 3294) MR ROBERT BUCHANAN TO THE PRINCESS LOUISE. The Land of Lorne, including the Cruise of the “Tern” to the Outer Hebrides.
By Robert Buchanan. In Two Volumes. Chapman and Hall. As the Princess Louise is to be married next Tuesday, and as Mr Tupper and Mr Close are to sing congratulatory hymns before the wedding breakfast, and Mr Buchanan is to recite the “prologue” of his book to Her Royal Highness, the dedication of which has already been accepted by Her Royal Highness, we feel bound to call attention to it to-day, although some older books are yet waiting to be reviewed. This “prologue,” however, is not an everyday affair. It excels everything yet done in the way of patronising flunkeyism, and Mr Buchanan deserves more praise than ordinary mortal can utter for achieving such a triumph, and so “improving the occasion” for book-making, when only two months ago he had improved another occasion in his ‘Napoleon Fallen.’ Henceforth Mr Tupper and Mr Close will have to hide their diminished heads before the overwhelming greatness of Mr Buchanan.
The “prologue” occupies thirty-two pages, and this is its first sentence:
At a time when the air is full of rejoicings and congratulations, when gift after gift is brought to the palace by great and small, when England is preparing for one of her best loved daughters a Golden Slipper instead of the conventional Old Show, may one who never touched the robe of royalty before, and who prefers the free air of the moor and hillside to all the splendours of courts and brilliant cities, may I, a semi-barbarian, the half-civilised striker of a Celtic harp, offer to Your Royal Highness my little wedding present—“a poor thing, but mine own”—a bit of artistic work, wrought slowly and patiently, summer and winter, indoors and out of doors, amid the wildly beautiful landscape which lies on the very threshold of your future Home?
After that bold flourish, Mr Buchanan, with the insinuating modesty which your real flatterer knows how to affect, admits that “there is much in these pages which a Princess may find wearisome;” but he adds, “It is my fond hope that the affection I bear for what I paint, may communicate itself to Your Royal Highness.” Then he says, with rare delicacy of compliment for a wedding morning, “Even in the short and sunny experience of Your Royal Highness, crowns have fallen, dynasties have perished, the mighty have been hurled to the earth, the lowly exalted to Heaven.” But the Princess Louise need not fear that she will be hurled to the earth, if she will only listen to such wisdom as Mr Buchanan has already poured into the ears of a leading English peer.
Let me conjure you, in your dawn of life, to rise superior to the tone of English aristocracy, and dare to be emotional, now and always. Some years ago a leading English peer, a man of great ability and generosity, said to me, “Do you think the English public care for sentiment?” and I knew that, like others of his class, he was distinguishing between sentiment and passion. May I say to Your Royal Highness, as I said to that peer, that the English public, so far from neglecting sentiment, were only just beginning to recognise its practical uses; that they already desiderated it as a necessary ingredient in all their leading politicians; that Mr Gladstone was full of it, and used it as an agent, precisely as a man of science uses his imagination; that sentiment created the Irish Church Bill, and Mr Forster’s Education Bill; that, in a word, sentiment, though called by a thousand other names—sentiment, the emotional perception of the rights of others, the tender recognition of the divine law of human relationship—is fast being recognised as a moral obligation, and the time is not far distant when ethics will be openly acknowledged as a distinct branch of political economy?
Whether that is good philosophy or not we need not consider; but it is certainly felicitous language, as, also, is the subsequent description of the crofters, and tacksmen, and other classes of people resident in “the land of Lorne,” to which fourteen pages are devoted:
But the discussion of this question involves that of the whole enormous LAND QUESTION; and any modern politician will tell Your Royal Highness how his confrères differ about that. The Duke of Argyll, for example, who will speak to Your Royal Highness with paternal authority, has done as much to depopulate the Highlands as any man living, and it would be false delicacy to conceal my impression that he, at least, is hopelessly and wilfully wrong, simply because he is too interested for dispassionate judgment.
After thus gracefully warning the Princess against the treacherous arguments of her future father-in-law, Mr Buchanan tells her what she will see in her new home:
Doubtless you will soon become personally acquainted with the daily miseries of the islanders—cold, hunger, thirst, all the wretched accompaniments of poverty. Their food, when they get it, is unwholesome, and fearful diseases are the consequence. What, for example, does Your Royal Highness say to a daily diet of mussels and cockles, with no other variety than an occasional drink of milk from the ewe? But for the shellfish, hundreds in the remote islands would starve. When they do purchase oatmeal, or receive it in charity, it is generally the coarsest and foulest meal procurable in the market—the best material used in its adulteration being Indian corn. Anything will do to export to the Hebrides—mildewed meal, rancid cheese, weevilled biscuits.
Again Mr Buchanan becomes modest, and admits that “all this dismal recital” is “almost ungracious on a bridal morning;” but he cannot hide from himself or from the Princess whose bracelet he has been holding all this while that the book he has written for her is a very good book. “When I am descriptive,” he says, “I have unconsciously been poetical. The whole work may be relied on, so far as truth to nature is concerned.”
There is more of that sort, but we have quoted enough. Mr Buchanan has written a well-meaning book, and the purpose of it, and even of the “prologue,” is honest and praiseworthy. But purpose and meaning are spoilt by the nonsense which he pours forth, and the insufferable conceit that runs over in nearly every page. In the opening chapter, after the “prologue,” Mr Buchanan says he purposes to call himself “the Wanderer,” in order “to get rid of the perkish and impertinent first person singular.” Prudent readers will wander to other books in order “to get rid of the perkish and impertinent first person singular” that addresses them in this one. ___ The Scotsman (28 March, 1871 - p.2) THERE is a general understanding that people had better not talk of things they don’t understand, or offer instruction in matters whereof they are ignorant; and it is also understood that it is better to refrain from saying anything insulting or even disagreeable, unless in the discharge of duty, or for the attainment of some worthy and adequate end. Both of these rules of good conduct seem to have been forgotten, or at least have been violated by Mr Robert Buchanan, poet, who, in a book dedicated to the Princess Louise, “with Her Royal Highness’s express permission,” volunteers to initiate Her Royal Highness in the art and mystery of Highland farming, gives a deplorable picture of the wrongs and misery of the people among whom the royal bride is to live, and climaxes by denouncing her father-in-law as the chief of oppressors and depopulators. Now, even if all this were true, “yet we would hold it not honesty to have it thus set down”—set down in such a form and on such an occasion. But, as all this is nonsense, the offence is multiplied—it is an offence not merely in taste, but in truth, arithmetic, and common sense. Mr Buchanan has put himself in a position to realise to some extent the force of Dryden’s lamentation—
This, it is true, is no hanging matter—Mr Buchanan is not treasonable, and now-a-days they do not hang for nonsense, nor indeed for treason either. Moreover, Mr Buchanan is not a fit subject for anything like condign punishment—he writes not to make mischief, but only to make sentences; and his sentences so repeatedly rebuke one another, so making himself do justice upon himself, as to leave little scope to those whose business it is to look after transgressors.
That the Highlands, and especially Argyleshire, have suffered great depopulation; that that depopulation was quite unnecessary, there being abundant agricultural employment on Highland soil for any number of Highlanders; that it has taken the shape chiefly of emigration to foreign or colonial lands; that in Argyleshire, especially, the class of small tenants has been exterminated; that the principal exterminator has been the Duke of Argyll, who, however, is perhaps taken rather as a type or embodiment of Argyleshire proprietors than on account of his actual transgressions; and that the Argyleshire population is wretched and depressed—are the chief facts which the poet draws from his imagination for the royal bride’s delectation. It is not necessary to go into all those old stories merely because they have been recurred to by Mr Robert Buchanan, who obviously has learned and thought less about the matter than almost any of the host who, whether in prose or poetry, have preceded him in the same strain; but, though the provocation may be weak, there can be no harm in a passing glance at one ot two of the questions at the angle in which he presents them. It may, for instance, be worth while to remark that the Highland counties, taken as a whole, are more populous now than they were before. A sort of admission of this truth indeed is made by Mr Buchanan himself, when, happening to be at the moment in pursuit of some other object, he speaks of “densely-populated Ross and Inverness”—a phrase which is rather new, and considerably overstates the fact. What has happened in the Highlands generally is just what has happened in the Lowlands generally—there has been a shifting of population from one district to another, though, of course, there has also been considerable emigration, probably not more from the Highlands than from the Lowlands. Without distinction of Highlands and Lowlands, one-half of the parishes, comprising two-thirds of the area, of Scotland, have decreased in population during a period in which the population of Scotland as a whole has nearly doubled. Taking the country in counties, it happens that only two or three Lowland counties and one or two Highland counties have diminished, and among the latter is Argyleshire, which may be admitted to show the steadiest decrease, though, after all, that decrease is slight. It is obviously a matter of chance whether, when there is a shifting of population, those who move shall settle down again in a parish which is within or in one which is beyond the boundaries of the same county; and this it is which operates upon the population taken in counties, and which, as we shall see presently, accounts especially for the decrease shown by Argyleshire.
What has caused the diminution of population in some Highland as in many more Lowland districts? The want—the necessary want, we say—of sufficient employment in those localities, coupled with the attractions of better employment and pay in other localities, whether at home or abroad. Mr Buchanan thinks differently; he holds that “thousands and thousands of miles of waste territory in the Highlands” could be profitably cultivated if Highland lairds were not so characteristically blind to their own interests; and he is quite convinced that wheat could be more easily grown in the Hebrides than in Canada, where, he informs us, “the climate is not so good.” This startling contribution to meteorology might call for a remark were it not that, before he has talked two minutes longer, he says, not of the Canadians, but of the Highlanders, “Heaven help them in that terrible climate of theirs!”—a terribleness of which he seems to see the cause in the Duke of Argyll, and the cure in a more copious drinking of whisky. Now, look at the Lowland counties lying nearest the Highland counties. Some of them show just as little increase as the Highland counties; some of them, especially those lying next to Argyleshire, show an enormous increase in the last half-century— Lanarkshire, for instance, to the extent of fourfold. Why is this? Because, through the existence and spread of minerals and manufactures, employment has greatly increased. Yet in those very counties showing the greatest increase there are many parishes showing a decrease. These are the merely agricultural parishes — parishes actually growing the wheat which Mr Buchanan thinks could be as well grown in the Highlands. Take that most purely wheat-growing district, the Carse of Gowrie; every parish in it has decreased in population. Mr Buchanan should therefore see that, even though he were correct in his conviction that wheat could be grown in Mull and Morven, there would still ere long be room for some other poetical meteorologist, agriculturalist, and statistician to lament over depopulation. The idea in the mind of many people seems to be that population should go on increasing in this county and in that in the same ratio, without regard to the means of living supplied by nature and otherwise — which simply assumes that men are to make a fatal mistake, avoided even by birds and beasts, and refuse to seek their sustenance on any other spot than that of their birth, careless of the increased demand here and the increased supply there.
The assumption that the so-called depopulation of this or that district, especially the Highlands, and more especially Argyleshire, has been caused by emigration beyond seas under compulsion of the landowners, is for the most part a wild dream, without basis either in fact or reason. As well assume that the contemporary increase of population in counties like Lanark, Renfrew, and Ayr has been caused by immigration under the compulsion of cotton-spinners and coal-masters. There is something significant in the fact that, whilst more Lowland than Highland parishes have decreased in population, we never hear Lowland depopulation ascribed to forcible expulsion by the landowners. If anything of the nature of compulsion has been employed in the Highlands, it has been because Highlanders had shown themselves more slow to see their own interests and necessities than Lowlanders. And, though the fact is not ascertainable from the statistics of the Emigration Commissioners, we would venture a surmise that a greater proportion of Lowlanders than of Highlanders go beyond seas in search of better fortune than the district of their birth is able to supply. Of the special case of Argyleshire, we would venture to say that, though it presents in its statistics the nearest approach to something that might be called depopulation, there have been in that county less both of forced removal and of expatriation than in the other Highland counties. What has operated upon population in Argyleshire is what we may call the suction of the closely neighbouring and easily accessible regions, offering abundant employment and high pay. Mr Buchanan speaks of the landlords of Argyle, and especially the Duke thereof, sweeping away small cultivators to make large sheep farms. The statistics of the Highland and Agricultural Society show that the land of Argyleshire is held in smaller portions than that of any other county, with the single exception, or half-exception, of Shetland. It would seem to follow that, if the Argyleshire Highlanders are, as Mr Buchanan represents them, more wretched than the corresponding classes elsewhere, ti must be because the old system has in that county been not more but less broken in upon than is for the good of all concerned. ___ The Scotsman (13 April, 1871 - p. 6) Literature THE LAND OF LORN; including the Cruise of the Tern to the Outer Hebrides. By Robert Buchanan. London: Chapman & Hall. A PRELIMINARY chapter to this book which Mr Buchanan has written has already been discussed in these columns, and not favourably. It deals with the alleged depopulation of the Highlands, and charges the Duke of Argyll with having done as much as any man living to bring about that depopulation. Seeing that the book is dedicated to the Princess Louise, the taste of this might very well be questioned, and would be worth more notice, were it not that some of our young poets use habitually a strange licence not merely with regard to poetry, but to facts and other matters, including taste. But when the first chapter of the book has been read and forgotten—or, what is better, skipped—what follows can only please. Now and then, perhaps, the reader may be amused by the egotism of the writer; but it can scarcely be said to detract from the interest of the volumes. They contain a description not merely of the Land of Lorn, but of Skye and the Outer Hebrides, written by no means in the ordinary guide-book style, but with a wealth of poetic picturing and a fervour of admiration that can hardly fail to warm the imagination of even the coldest. Mr Buchanan seems to live at Oban, and he gives most delightful sketches of that gloriously beautiful spot—
as Professor Blackie sung of it the other day. Yet Mr Buchanan’s first experience of the place was not such as to create any strong liking for it. He says:—
“When he first came to dwell in Lorn, and roamed as is his wont up hill and down dale from dawn to sunset, the Wanderer (as the writer purposes to call himself in these pages, in order to get rid of the perkish and impertinent first person singular) soon grew weary of a landscape which seemed tame and colourless—of hills that, with one or two magnificent exceptions, seemed cold and unpicturesque. It was the spring-time, moreover, and such a spring-time! Day after day the rain descended, sometimes in a dreary ‘smurr,’ at others in a moaning torrent, and when the clouds did part the sun looked through with a dismal and fitful stare, like a face swollen with weeping. The conies were frisking everywhere, fancying it always twilight. The mountain loch overflowed its banks, while far beneath the surface the buds of the yellow lily were wildly struggling upward, and the over-fed burns roared day and night. Wherever one went, the farmer scowled, and the gamekeeper shook his head. Lorn seemed as weary as the Uists—weary but not eerie, and so without fascination. In a kind of dovecot perched on a hill, far from human habitation, the Wanderer dwelt and watched, while the gloomy gillie came and went, and the dogs howled from the rain-drenched kennel. The weasel bred at the very door, in some obscure corner of a drain, and the young weasels used to come fearlessly out on Sunday morning and play in the rain. Two hundred yards above the house was a mountain tarn, on the shores of which a desolate couple of teal were trying hard to hatch a brood; and all around the miserable grouse and grey-hens were sitting like stones, drenched on their eggs, hoping against hope. In the far distance, over a dreary sweep of marshes and pools, lay the little town of Oban, looking, when the mists cleared away a little, exactly like the woodcuts of the City of Destruction in popular editions of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ Now and then, too, the figure of a certain genial Edinburgh Professor, with long white hair and flowing plaid, might be seen toiling upward to Doubting Castle, exactly like Christian on his pilgrimage, but carrying, instead of a bundle on his back, the whole of Homer’s hexameters in his brain, set to such popular tunes as ‘John Brown,’ and ‘Are ye sleepin’, Maggie?’ Few others had courage to climb so high, in weather so inclement; and wonderful to add, the Professor did not in the least share the newcomer’s melancholy, but roundly vowed in good Doric that there was no sweeter spot in all the world than the ‘bonnie Land of Lorn.’ The Wanderer was for a time sceptical, but as the days lengthened, and his eyes accommodated themselves to the new prospect, his scepticism changed into faith, his faith into enthusiasm, his enthusiasm into perfect love and passionate enjoyment.”
How he found out the beauties of the place Mr Buchanan describes; and how he made himself a home there, and the difficulties he had in doing it. But the great secret of his affection for the Land of Lorn is the way in which its many changeful aspects appeal to a mind that can see and appreciate the beautiful, even when it does not come in glowing guise. He says truly:—
“The visitor to the west coast of Scotland is doubtless often disappointed by the absence of bright colours and brilliant contrasts, such as he has been accustomed to in Italy and in Switzerland; and he goes away too often with a malediction on the mist and the rain, and an under-murmur of contempt for Scottish scenery, such as poor Montalembert sadly expressed in his life of the Saint of Iona. But what many chance visitors despise, becomes to the living resident a constant source of joy. Those infinitely varied grays—those melting, melodious, dimmest of browns—those silvery gleams through the fine neutral tint of cloud! One gets to like strong sunlight least; it dwarfs the mountains so, and destroys the beautiful distance. Dark, dreamy days, with the clouds clear and high, and the wind hushed; or wild days, with the dark heavens blowing past like the rush of a sea, and the shadows driving like mad things over the long grass and the marshy pool; or sad days of rain, with dim pathetic glimpses of the white and weeping orb; or nights of the round moon, when the air throbs with strange electric light, and the hill is mirrored dark as ebony in the glittering sheet of the loch; or nights of the aurora and the lunar rainbow; on days and nights like those is the Land of Lorn beheld in its glory. Even during those superb sunsets for which its coasts are famed—sunsets of fire divine, with all the tints of the prism—only west and east kindle to great brightness, while the landscape between reflects the glorious light dimly and gently, interposing mists and vapours, with dreamy shadows of the hills. These bright moments are exceptional; yet is it quite fair to say so when, a dozen times during the rainy day, the heart of the grayness bursts open, and the rainbow issues forth in complete semicircle, glittering in glorious evanescence, with its dim ghost fluttering faintly above it on the dark heaven—
The Iris comes and goes, and is indeed, like the sunlight, ‘a glorious birth’ wherever it appears; but for rainbows of all degrees of beauty, from the superb arch of delicately-defined lines that spans a complete landscape for minutes together, to the delicate dying thing that flutters for a moment on the skirt of the storm-cloud and dies to the sudden sob of the rain, the wanderer knows no corner of the earth to equal Lorn and the adjacent isles.”
Somewhere in the book Mr Buchanan speaks of himself as possessing a receptive mind, upon which the poetic splendour of natural scenery does not make an instantly perceptible impression. Is not that the case with all minds that have a real sense of the solemnity, beauty, or grandeur of mountain scenery? The people who go into ecstacies at once over a sunset on the hills, or the grey sublimity of Glencoe, are not really touched. Their’s is but a sort of electro-plate enthusiasm in which the pure silver is very very thin. He who is most impressed drinks in the spirit of scene: he is more induced to quiet than to gushes of admiration; and it is only afterwards that the full force and appreciation of what he has seen comes to him. Anybody who visits Oban, and who will walk along the banks of the Firth of Lorn and Loch Linnhe to Ballachulish, crossing, as he must, Loch Elive and Loch Creran, may look on scenery now wildly grand now softly beautiful; now a strip of bog, now craggy and precipitous hills, now a stretch of green pasture land, now a patch of corn, now thick pine woods, now an avenue of beeches; and during most of the time there will be on his left hand, and once on his right, the sea, murmuring as it breaks on a pebbly shore, or carving out great hollows in the land. If it be autumn, there will be the fragrance and the beauty of wild flowers in addition, and with all and as result of all, a sense of pleasure not the less deep that it is quiet. But the full realisation of the charms of the scenery will only come after a time, and then the walk will be ever remembered as one of pure delight. Those people who spend holidays at meaningless English watering-places would be startled out of themselves as, going by the route just mentioned, they came upon bay after bay seemingly made for the enjoyment and rest of the weary people of great towns. There is no wonder that Mr Buchanan becomes enthusiastic about the district. He is right in his praise, even though it may seem rather showy.
The chief part of the two volumes is taken up with the story of a “Cruise of the Tern,” a little yacht, in which Mr Buchanan sailed among the Hebrides, going as far as Loch Maddy. This part of the book has, almost more than the other, the fault of self-satisfaction; but no one can be angry with it for that reason. Mr Buchanan is a pleasant companion to Coll, and Muck, and Eigg, and Canna, and there is a good deal of interesting information in what he has to say about Loch Boisdale, Loch Maddy, and some of the smaller fjords in Uist and Benbecula. Skye he only touches, until he comes to Glen Sligachan and Loch Coruisk. He pays a compliment, which we can certify is well-deserved, to the neat and clean inn at Sligachan, though once upon a time it had not so good a reputation; and he does not say a word too much for the ponies which are there furnished to travellers who distrust their own walking powers, along what is, by way of sarcasm, called a path through Glen Sligachan. Nothing that he says about that savage pass, hyperbolical though it may appear, conveys a full sense of what it is. Scaur-na-Gillean, the Hart-o’-Corry, and Blaven cannot be described. Nor can the wondrous awe of Loch Coruisk, upon whose dark waters the sun at noon scarcely casts a beam, and upon whose shores no green thing grows, except on the neck of land that severs the Loch from the sea. Loch Coruisk is an appalling and fascinating spectacle; to a man capable of poetic imagining it must have been a trial to bivouac, as Mr Buchanan did, for a night on its bare margin. It may be doubted whether those who take the usual tourists’ track to Coruisk do wisely. If they go along Glen Sligachan to Camasunary, and there take a boat, they will be rowed into Loch Scavaig, itself grandly beautiful, and landed at the south end of Loch Coruisk, from which point they may look upon a scene that can never be forgotten. Any one who has seen Loch Coruisk will read what Mr Buchanan says of it with avidity, though he will be sure to come to the conclusion that the description fails to convey a full idea of the reality, simply because words could not describe the scene.
There are two interpolations in the book—one the story of “Eiradh of Canna,” and the other the “Saga of King Haco.” The latter is very admirably done into English; but “Eiradh of Canna” is unique in its touching simplicity. It is a tale told by a Gael of Canna of the wreck of a family in that island. Homeliness and poetry are strangely blended in it; and it has a charm which goes direct to the heart. If there were nothing more in the two volumes than this one tale, it would redeem them from dulness. But Mr Buchanan, apart from his sentimental economy, has written brightly and enthusiastically; and these two qualities would have made even a less worthy subject than the Land of Lorn and the Hebrides attractive. He may well wonder that so much beauty at home is neglected; though that charge is year by year becoming less just. The facilities which Messrs Hutchison’s steam service affords are getting more and more known and used. “The Iona” is almost a household word. Yet those who would see more of the jagged western coast and the many islands “set in the silver sea,” should take the so-called slow boats, and double the Mull of Kintyre, and dare the swell of Ardnamurclian. The sea voyage is indispensable; but it is not all. Ashore there are places innumerable where tourists rarely tread, and yet where nature is to be seen in her grandest and best. If Mr Buchanan’s book, as it may, should stir up a desire to visit the Land of Lorn and the country thereabout, the impulse should not be checked. There is real and pure delight in store for those who spend a holiday in that region. ___ The New York Times (8 November, 1871) THE LAND OF LORNE. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. New York; FRANCIS B. FELT & CO. While Englishmen, with the restless energy peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race, are searching in almost every country under the sun for pleasure and adventure, they have oddly enough, it seems, neglected their own island; for Mr. BUCHANAN says: “How little do men know of the wonders lying at their own thresholds! Within two days’ journey of the Great City lie these Hebrides, comparatively unknown, yet abounding in shapes of beauty and forms of life as fresh and new as those met with in the remotest islands of the Pacific.” We must make due allowance for Mr. BUCHANAN’S enthusiasm, however; whatever he is brought in contact with he sees with a poetical insight, and his prose is as rich and imaginative as his verse. The volume before us is a detailed account of a trip in a very small yacht through the islands on the west coast of Scotland, of which but little has been written since Dr. JOHNSON visited them, if we except the account given in SCOTT’S Lord of the Isles. Difficult of access, and on this account out of the beaten track of commercial intercourse, these islands still retain the customs and manners of life of two centuries ago. In the Outer Hebrides nearly every house has a spinning-wheel or loom, and it is by means of these that the entire community are supplied with clothing; yet this is within 500 miles of the greatest manufacturing centre in the world. The houses in which all but a few of the wealthier inhabitants live, are of the rudest description, being built of turf, and divided into two rooms, and held in common by the family and animals. The people, though staunch Catholics, are, like all the half-civilised races of the North, firm believers in witchcraft and its attendant superstitions, which has given a sad cheerlessness even to the expression on their faces. Nothing can be more vivid than Mr. BUCHANAN’S descriptions of Northern scenery. Back to the Bibliography _____ The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (1872) The Examiner (18 May, 1872 - Issue 3355) MR BUCHANAN’S PAMPHLET. The Fleshly School of Poetry and other Phenomena of the Day. By Robert Buchanan. Strahan. It is not likely that anything Mr Buchanan says will have the smallest effect upon those whom he attacks. Mr Rossetti and Mr Swinburne will not hide their heads from his fury, or, moved by his admonitions, confess their sins in sackcloth and ashes, and burn their books in the orthodox Ephesian manner. Nor can we imagine the sale of their works being in any way affected by the same cause, unless, indeed, persecution should produce its frequent result, and enhance the value of the things persecuted. And, therefore, to attempt a defence of Mr Buchanan’s enemies is the very last thing we should think of doing.
But though ineffective in one sense, Mr Buchanan’s republication of his exploit against what he is pleased to call the “fleshly school of poetry” is very effective in another. We have been accused of being a nation of shopkeepers, and have lately been haunted with misgivings that such may be the case in some respects. The sale of Church livings, of political interests, or of national influence may not be pleasant things to think about; still such transactions have generally possessed the redeeming feature of honesty; we have known the value of what we gave, and we have received its equivalent. The reproach intended in the word shopkeeper certainly did not originally contain any idea of fraud. Latterly, however, even this consolation is beginning to slip away from us. The word shopkeeper has ceased to be invariably associated with the idea of unquestioned integrity. We have grown only too much accustomed to cunningly-dressed windows, artificial lights, substitutions of an article inferior to that which we purchased; and every one who is at all initiated into the mysteries of social economy knows that such advertisements are not the symbols of legitimate trade, that those who are attracted by them are really those who pay for them, that, though they may attract unwary and simple-minded persons, they are passed by unnoticed by all who are really experienced in business and who desire to receive good value for their outlay.
Regarded in this light, Mr Buchanan’s great advertisement is effective; for though it may, like other advertisements, ensnare the innocent and unsuspecting, to the experienced it affords a very exact means of estimating Mr Buchanan himself. What he is not he tells us very plainly; what he is may be gathered by inference. “There is,” he says, “on the fringe of real English society, and chiefly, if not altogether, in London here, a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and æsthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel-writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to mouth. These persons ‘write for the papers.’ They publish books, often at their own expense. They, some of them, have titles. They belong to clubs, and they go to dinner-parties. . . . They are clever, refined, Interesting, able, querulous. Nothing delights them more than to tear a reputation to pieces, or to diagnose the seeds of moral disease in the healthiest subjects. Their religion is called culture, their narrowmindedness is called insight.” Such is Mr Buchanan’s description of his antagonists; and we are perfectly willing to take his own word for it, that he himself is the reverse of all this. Indeed, we were quite ready to be convinced, even without Mr Buchanan’s own word for it, that he is neither a man of genius nor a man of talent; that he does not publish books at his own expense; that he neither belongs to clubs nor goes to dinner-parties; that he is neither clever, refined, interesting, able, nor querulous; that his religion (and of these last items we are more sure than any) will never be called culture, nor his narrowmindedness insight.
If this, then, is what Mr Buchanan is not, it might well be asked what he is. This, we said, might be gathered by inference; and inference leads us to a conclusion by no means pleasant. It may be well for the vendor of a quack medicine to endeavour to get a market by attacking an established profession: it may be well for manufacturers of starch or of patent sauce to warn the public against all manufactures except their own—though we confess that we could easily dispense with such practices. But the spectacle of a man who professes to be a poet endeavouring to attract attention to himself by crying down the works of his contemporaries, praising his own work by implication in the contempt he seeks to cast upon the work of others, is less common, and is a spectacle which, if it became frequent, would justly lay us open to the charge of being a nation of shopkeepers, not only in the old sense of placing a monetary value on our every act, but in the new and far more degraded sense of endeavouring to make a market for inferior goods at the expense of truthfulness and self-respect. Were Mr Buchanan a poet of more assured reputation and wider fame than those two whom he chiefly attacks, his act would be disagreeable enough; were he even their equal we might be better content to let him rail at pleasure; but, having regard to the fact that by all cultivated people he is estimated as infinitely inferior to either of them, the impertinence and indelicacy of his proceeding are really intolerable. The only explanation which can be offered is that Mr Buchanan (to employ his own phrases with regard to the Elizabethan poets), not having been sufficiently admired in his generation, not having received his full of the spikenard of praise and the nard of flattery, has been compelled to have recourse to the unworthy means of paragraph advertisements (for his pamphlet is nothing else) and libels on his competitors.
We can assure Mr Buchanan, in conclusion, that if society is rotten, this pamphlet of his is much more a sign of its rottenness than would be ten times the existing taste for such poetry as he presumes to criticise. It is, no doubt, true that a too exclusive contemplation of such subjects as are treated by Mr Swinburne, is not unattended with danger; but, on the other hand, we venture to say, that even the most pronounced poem he ever wrote exhibits, to those who are capable of appreciating such things, a tragic force and an imaginative power which, far from encouraging the accession of sensual ideas, repel them and hold them in check. It would be misleading were we to quote the well-worn saying, that to the pure all things are pure; but we do say, most emphatically, that this pamphlet is a striking instance of the manner in which coarse and uncleanly minds can only extract from their environment that which is coarse and uncleanly. There may be better things in the world than flesh; but flesh that is living and beautiful is better than the same flesh after it has been subjected to the decomposing process of writers like Mr Buchanan, and in acknowledgment of his invention of the expression “fleshly poetry,” we would recommend him to consider whether there may not be such a thing as “dunghill criticism.” ___ The Graphic (29 June, 1872 - Issue 135) We are the more forcibly impressed by the possibility of such treatment, after reading “The Fleshly School of Poetry, and other Phenomena of the Day,” by Robert Buchanan (Strahan), in which there is, to our thinking, more objectionable stuff than in anything we have seen lately. The pamphlet is an amplification of the magazine article by which the writer made himself slightly conspicuous some time ago. It is almost a pity that he was found out, as there is undoubtedly room for wise and thoughtful admonition to some of our modern poets, and failing such a warning, even the remarks of “Thomas Maitland” might have been of some use; but who will regard the dicta of a man who can find “a radically absurd line of thought” in the “Vita Nuova,” who calls Gower a “nonsense-writer,” sneers at Surrey, Wyatt, Carew, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Suckling; pretends to detect indecency in one of Crashaw’s most beautiful religious poems, and winds up his precious dissertation by a eulogium on Walt. Whitman and—Paul de Kock. As Touching the value of his criticism in other matters pertaining to poetry, we may mention that Mr. Buchanan seems to think that rhyme depends entirely upon identity of accent, and that he objects to burdens in songs! We wonder if he ever read any Scottish ballads! Of what the author has to say respecting Mr. Rossetti it is not our purpose to speak; there is, as we have already said, some truth in his strictures, but its value is almost negatived when it is put forward by one who cannot find “one single note of sorrow” (sic.) in “The Blessed Damozel,” and who can find any impurity in “Willow-wood.” ___ The Galaxy (Vol. 14, Issue 3, September 1872 - p. 421-423) “THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY,” By Robert Buchanan. London: Strahan. The literary career of Mr. Robert Buchanan has certainly not been lacking in variety, nor has his choice of themes been so limited as to afford distress to those who delight in myriad-minded men. He has depicted with some success the simple life of the Scottish peasantry; he has made friendly calls, in the search for poetical subjects, upon the heroes of Norseland; he has dabbled in the “purely antique”; and when other topics have failed, he has printed some new panegyric of his friend David Gray, a young poet of some promise, who, because be was poor, poetical, and consumptive, has always been lauded by Mr. Buchanan as a second Keats. Scarcely had Napoleon reached Chiselhurst before the versatile Scotchman published a poem about the Man of Sedan, which was hastily written and hurriedly published while the author’s mind was in mortal dread lest he be anticipated in so good a subject; and now, when “Napoleon Fallen” has faded into the obscurity enjoyed by its illustrious hero, Mr. Buchanan has turned his attention to Swinburne, Morris, Rossetti, and their companions, to whose literary castigation the present volume is devoted.
Mr. Buchanan is right in supposing that a new poetical school has arisen, and one of sufficient prominence to attract the careful attention of critics. To be sure, the old “pre-Raphaelite” movement among the artists of London has now become a rather tiresome topic, nor have its effects upon art been as marked as was once hoped. The general public dimly suspects, perhaps, that the socialistic fellows, who in the days of the “Germ” were about to revolutionize art, had no very clear idea of their object or of the means of its attainment, and that they accordingly took refuge in slouch hats, big beards, and lofty observations about King Arthur, “meres,” “wolds,” “ emprise,” etc. And thus, like our own Transcendentalists, the members of the “P. R. B.” shortly found themselves without much common sympathy and without any marked success, either as iconoclasts or reformers.
But despite their partial failure, they have, like their New England prototypes, exerted a very marked and probably permanent influence upon literature. Mr. Swinburne is unlike Mr. Rossetti; Mr. Morris is still more widely removed from iMr. Swinburne; while among the minor bards Philip Bourke Marston and John Payne do not adopt the precise literary methods of Mr. O’Shaughnessy, who has apparently studied Baudelaire with something of the diligence devoted by Swinburne to Victor Hugo and Walter Savage Landor. And yet these authors have many points in common—a love of the mediæval and antique, a straightforward simplicity of diction, a deliberate hatred of philosophizers and preachers in verse, and an undisguised fondness for splashes of color and threads of music; so that it becomes far easier to class them together as a separate guild in literature than to unite poets so dissimilar as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, or even dramatists so closely resembling each other as Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, and Massinger.
Against this whole company Mr. Buchanan wages bitter war. His essay, which first appeared under an assumed name in the “Contemporary Review,” and gave rise to some unpleasant equivocations on the part of his publishers, would naturally demand attention simply as a poet’s criticism upon his contemporaries; but since Mr. Buchanan’s attacks are based upon grounds of morality and literary ethics, it becomes still more necessary to give them consideration. Mr. Buchanan’s criticisms are more especially directed against Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but include the other poets as well; and he charges Rossetti and Swinburne with a deliberate choice of the worst subjects and an objectionable treatment of them, asserting that their books are so disfigured throughout by a glamour of impropriety, as to be wholly indefensible and dangerous. Besides this, he thinks that his rivals have made unnecessary attempts to revive and popularize an antiquated and useless poetical style.
In defence of these charges, which are certainly sufficiently serious to warrant the trouble, Mr. Buchanan applies himself to the work of hunting up objectionable passages in the books of his fellow poets, and succeeds in discovering certain lines to which, aided by his annotations, an objectionable meaning can be attached; and, besides these, he prints other excerpts which are unquestionably indelicate. Having accomplished this congenial task, Mr. Buchanan imagines his work completed, without reflecting that a much larger collection could be made from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Marlowe, to say nothing of Byron, Shelley, and Moore, authors whom he would not wish to banish from our libraries. That the literary tastes of the present day are different from those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very true; but that Rossetti and the rest have written, in our time, books similar in moral tone to those of Congreve, Wycherley, or Mrs. Behn, is not true.
The simple fact is, as Mr. Swinburne urged six years ago, that nearly all of his own and Mr. Rossetti’s poems are dramatic in character, and that their authors are no more responsible for the sentiments of their men and women than Shakespeare for Shylock, Marlowe for Dr. Faustus, or Milton for Satan. The controversy thus returns to questions which have been frequently discussed before, and to a line of argument which, years ago, made Byron responsible alike for the inconsistent characters of Don Juan and Childe Harold, and which to-day endeavors to discover in the hero of the last novel the true sentiments and character of its author. Mr. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” for instance, is no whit more objectionable than Mr. Buchanan’s own “Liz”; but the latter gentleman would hardly care to be held responsible for the ideas held by his heroine, or to be accused of searching for subjects in the slums of London, while the good qualities of the aristocratic neighbors of St. James’s Park yet remained unsung.
We will not speak of the singular lack of taste which led Mr. Buchanan to make, originally under an assumed name, a bitter and partisan attack upon poets whose literary position, whose artistic faithfulness, and whose quiet isolation entitled them to fairer treatment. Mr. Buchanan, indeed, is not above the suspicion of having initiated in his own writings the very men at whose immodesty he is now greatly shocked; and it was with some idea of his own position, probably, that among the authors flayed in his first masked attack, signed “Thomas Maitland,” was Mr. Robert Buchanan himself. That his essay, with its innuendoes and its forced catalogue of isolated quotations, will render service to literature or to his own reputation, can well be doubted; and its publication is, to say the least, singularly unfortunate. Back to the Bibliography or The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day _____ Book Reviews - Essays etc. continued Master-Spirits (1873) to The Coming Terror (1891) |
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