BOOK REVIEWS - ESSAYS

2. Master-Spirits (1873) to The Coming Terror (1891)

Master-Spirits (1873)

The Examiner (6 December, 1873 - Issue 3436)

MASTER-SPIRITS.

     Master-Spirits. By Robert Buchanan. H. S. King and Co.

     “Good books,” says Milton—and Mr Buchanan quotes the remark in explanation of his title—“are like the precious life-blood of master-spirits.” Mr Buchanan has here given us a reprint of articles on literary topics from the Contemporary, the Fortnightly, St Paul’s, Good Words, and the Athenæum; but as one of these is devoted to the “Birds of the Hebrides,” and as in some of the others the spirits in question are not treated with much politeness, we suppose that the title of the book is adopted, like so many of our modern titles, faute de mieux. But, having said this, we make haste to say that Mr Buchanan has given us a very pleasant and readable book, from which a large supply of entertainment may be drawn, with here and there a morsel of entirely original criticism. Three discriminating notices of Dickens, Browning, and Tennyson, the latter of whom is compared with Heine and De Musset, and is not suffered to lose by the comparison, are of that chatty sort which we might expect from a professed poet, who himself admits it to be “desultory,” and declares that his “real work lies in another field.” It is to be hoped that he has solaced himself in his retirement at Malvern (the cause whereof we greatly regret) as much by writing these articles as others will be charmed by reading them, provided they do not expect any very strong meat. In “Scandinavian Studies” Mr Buchanan was manifestly in his element; and, indeed, he has done much to earn the gratitude of those to whom news of the old Norse heroes and the old Norse poetry is an ever-welcome pleasure. He has, in fact, laid his finger on a decided blot in the fame of English critics. At Copenhagen he found a hospitable professor who, somewhat ostentatiously, began conversation by quoting a verse of Browning’s. “What! you read Browning?” said Mr Buchanan, with artless simplicity. “I do, indeed,” replied the professor, “and so do many of my friends. Let me tell you, sir, that we in Denmark do know something of English literature, while you in England know next to nothing of the literature of the North. The only man of whom you do really know anything is Hans Christian Andersen; he represents northern poesy in your eyes, while many of us will not allow that he is a poet at all. Holberg, Evald, Baggesen, Ohlenschläger, Grundtvig, Rahbek, Ingemann, Holberg (sic), Molbech! what do you know of these?” The professor was just in his reflection, and Mr Buchanan rightly infers that Englishmen are guilty of unpardonable insularity in neglecting the Scandinavian poets, and that it is well worth his while to try and lighten our darkness.
     In only one instance does the poet attempt a subject which travels out of the domain of poetry, and that is where he discusses, under the title of “A Young English Positivist,” the ‘Critical Miscellanies’ of Mr John Morley. We cannot compliment the poet on his mode of dealing with philosophers. He is not only flippant, which might have been expected, but he too clearly displays the fact that it was impossible for him to criticise fairly a writer who has no large infusion of poetry in him. Of his flippancy we need not give many examples. He begins by saying, “The world is wrong on most subjects, and Mr John Morley, with the encyclopædic pretensions of his school, is going to set it as right as may be.” And a little further on, “Condorcet was no more a first-class intellect than is Professor Huxley,”—nothing whatever having been said to lead up to this off-hand mention of the Professor’s name. And again, a doubly objectionable sentence, because written without a word of reasoning to support it:—“Adherence to their [the Positivists’] cardinal principle of scientific procedure is quite enough to make them countenance encyclopædic pretensions in anybody; and it is with no regret that they perceive the infallible airs of men who, except from the point of view of the true faith, have no claim whatever to the title of first-class intellects.” It is manifest that, in endeavouring to criticise work like that of Mr Morley, the author of some of the prettiest songs of our day has sadly overstepped the fairy ring which should circumscribe a poet’s vagaries. We cannot consent to look upon this particular essay of Mr Buchanan’s as undertaken in a serious mood. It is true, as he himself says, that “much injustice is done to authors by criticising their works as if they were actually something else than they really profess to be;” and the book before us is avowedly published as “mere desultory notes on literary subjects of permanent interest, by one whose work lies in another field.” We thought it was by this time well understood that nothing could serve an author less than an apology in his preface. Every apology implies that, to that extent at least, the publication of the book was a mistake; and it might have been better if Mr Buchanan had not drawn our attention to the fact that he was printing 350 pages of mere desultory notes on subjects of permanent interest. The mistake is all the more inexcusable because, as Mr Buchanan informs us in a note, he has already been severely handled in spite of a still more childish apology.
                                                                                                                                               J. P.

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The Graphic (31 January, 1874 - Issue 218)

     Those readers, and their number is every day increasing, who admire and appreciate Mr. Robert Buchanan’s poetry, will not be sorry to have in a collected form some of the best of his lighter prose essays. “Master-Spirits,” by Robert Buchanan (Henry S. King), consists of some of his contributions to periodical literature, and it is in every way pleasant reading. We do not always agree with the author, but it is always worth considering the question which may be raised by the fact of our disagreement; at the same time we must deny that Gay’s humour is “shrill and wicked.” What! the humour of “The Shepherd’s Week,” or “The What d’ye Call it?” wicked! We can hardly fancy but that there is a mistake somewhere. Mr. Buchanan is at his best in speaking of Dickens, in his “Scandinavian Studies,” and in the remarks on Tennyson, but even here he manages to jar one by talking of “the loss of a mere friend” (sic) when discussing “In Memoriam.” But all the essays are more or less worth reading, and make one heartily desire the more serious work which is promised.

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The Hebrid Isles: Wanderings in the Land of Lorne and the Outer Hebrides (1882)

The Graphic (2 December, 1882 - Issue 679)

     It is now ten years since Mr. Robert Buchanan’s sketches in the “Land of Lorne and the Outer Hebrides” first appeared in book form. In republishing them now—“The Hebrid Isles” (Chatto and Windus)—the author dedicates them to the crofters of Skye, with whom he sympathises with a very “Hielan” fervour. The rising of the crofters may or may not be a “precursor of a revolution which must come.” But there can be no question of the interest of Mr. Buchanan’s volume, and there is some reason to agree with his suggestion that it has had a good deal to do with recent developments of the Scottish novel.

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The Scotsman (5 December, 1882 - p. 3)

     The Hebrid Isles. Wanderings in the Land of Lorne and the Outer Hebrides. By Robert Buchanan. A New Edition. London: Chatto & Windus.

     It has not been given to all to combine in a high degree the imaginative and the logical faculty. It has not, for instance, been given to Mr Robert Buchanan. He has an enthusiastic appreciation of the natural beauties of the Highlands, and can describe them with great wealth of poetic diction; but he cannot bestow sound advice on Highlanders. He has done well to republish, in a cheap form, and under another name, his Land of Lorne, which first appeared ten years ago. To such as know the West Highlands, and to those who have still that pleasure in store, there is real delight in following the “Tern” in her cruise among the islands of the Hebrides and into the recesses of the west coast firths and sounds, and to have the wailing voice of, and the spirit of, the misty mountains interpreted for us by so impassioned an admirer as Mr Buchanan, more especially when the strain of listening to his Ossianic rhapsodies is relieved by interludes, in which we have capital renderings of Highland song and legend, and snatches of conversation with shepherds, fisher folk, sailors, and pipers. It would be too much, perhaps, to grant his modest claim that, partly through the publication of these sketches, “the Scottish novel has taken a new departure, and many brialliant romances have familiarised southern readers with some of the scenes described in his Highland wanderings;” for it is, of course, open to question whether the romances in question have owed their origin to original inspiration from the scenes themselves, rather than Mr Buchanan’s description. Still, it is true, as he says, that the Outer Hebrides, with their wild scenery and associations, remain, comparatively speaking, “virgin ground for the poet and the novelist;” and, possibly, he is right in holding also that “the Celtic character is still little understood.” It may humbly be hoped that Mr Buchanan’s understanding of it is a mistaken one. In this edition he has relegated to the limbo of an appendix his former dedication to the Princess Louise—a piece of composition in such dubious taste that its appearance might have been spared altogether—and he has dedicated the book afresh to “The Crofters of the Island of Skye, whose “uprising against oppression,” he says, “is, just as surely as the might uprearing in Ireland, a precursor of a revolution which must come— when the cruel ‘clearances’ will be avenged, and when the blood shed wholesale in the glens will form the sacrifice of a new and happier dispensation.” In writing in this strain, Mr Buchanan, perhaps, like other “friends of the Highlander,” has spoken in haste, rather than from a spirit of deliberate mischief. Nevertheless, such language, addressed to ignorant and passionate men, is highly mischievous, and is the more censurable that the author of it does not expose himself to the penalties of the resistance of the law and the “bloodshed” which he commends.

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A Poet’s Sketchbook (1883)

The Pall Mall Gazette (13 November, 1883 - Issue 5832)

“A POET’S SKETCHBOOK.” *

MANY hard things have been said, and some of them very justly said, of Mr. Robert Buchanan in his literary capacity. But there is one thing which may fairly be said in his favour, and that is that he is much less shy than most men of letters in applying the scissors to his own work. A dozen years ago he brought out a huge volume called “The Drama of Kings,” and before three years were over made a frank confession, by including only a small part of it in his collected poems, that the rest was rubbish. Recently he has published selections of his own poems, to which the same modest origin may charitably be assigned, and now he appears with a similar sifting of his prose works. It is true that there is in the title something of that curious arrogance which was once described by a person who could not forgive Mr. Buchanan’s most famous and least creditable literary exploit as “cantankerous fatuity;” but that may pass. It is certain that both in poetry and in prose Mr. Buchanan is a writer exceptionally suited for excerption and revision; for he has been extremely productive, and his work has been extremely unequal. No really impartial critic can deny him at his best a considerable faculty of poetic imagination, unluckily too often combined with a complete indifference to poetic form, in verse, and a considerable command both of pathos and of description in prose. But then he is by no means always or often at his best.
     The present selection  makes, on the whole, a very readable and interesting book, and is calculated to give to those who read it without having read the works from which it is compiled in their original form an opinion of Mr. Buchanan’s literary power in prose which they certainly will not increase by consulting those originals, but which is very fairly deserved on the principle of judging an author at his best, not his worst. It is indeed impossible not to think that Mr. Buchanan has made a mistake in including any (it is fair to say that he has not included very much) of his purely critical work. For, not to mince matters, and admitting fully that to dismiss Mr. Buchanan as a bad poet or a bad writer simpliciter would be extremely unfair, he may certainly be dismissed simpliciter as a bad critic, and even a very bad one. He is rarely right except when unimportant, that is, when he agrees with the literary orbis terrarum. He seems to have taken some pains to eliminate contentious matter from these pages. It is scarcely necessary to say that “The Fleshly School” does not appear, and of his worst style of criticism there are few traces save the characteristic, but still rather astounding, description of Sydney Dobell, as “also known as a writer of verse” (where the “also” refers to David Gray) and a fling about rondels. But no one who could reprint the grotesque rhapsody about Dickens as “the good genie of fiction,”  or  say that “where lyrics should appear in the bombastic tragedies of Dryden rhetoric and rhodomontade (sic) appear instead,” or commit the pyramidal blunder of describing Thackeray’s satire as “radically unpoetical” deserves hearing as a critic.    Mr. Buchanan’s more abstract critical disquisitions, such as the essay on “The Poet or Seer,” consist of some  commonplace, much error, and a good many italics.
     He is, however, very much happier in the pieces which go to make up the bulk of the book. The longest paper, “The Memoir of David Gray,” though injured by the want of literary perspective and by an insufficient apprehension of the simple absurdity of that poor lad’s opinion of himself, is a well written and not ungraceful account of a marvellously pathetic career. The pathos, indeed, lies not in Gray’s early death, nor in his want of success, which he did very little to deserve; nor in the cutting short of his poetic promise, which, with all respect to Mr. Buchanan, we must hold to have been, except in pure imitation, of the thinnest and smallest. It is humouristic pathos—the two parts melancholy and one part mirthful spectacle of the foibles of humanity. How this half-educated stripling, with his knack of echoing Keats and Wordsworth, wrote to an entire stranger, “I am a poet, let that be understood distinctly:” how he asserted that if he lived “his name and fame should be second to few of any age and to none of his own:” how he was “accustomed to compare his own mental progress with that of Shakspeare, Wordsworth, and Goethe:” how he talked of “my biography,” and had “a completely defined consciousness of great poetical genius,”—all this makes the saddest diversion and the most diverting sadness. That this insane vanity was accompanied by the most lamentable weakness, bodily and mental, that he ran away from hospital after hospital, and moaned for help and health like a sick child, is not diverting at all, but still instructive in its sadness. Certainly, Carlyle’s dictum as to the extreme necessity of possessing, or at the first opportunity manufacturing for oneself, “a skin” in this world was never better illustrated. Mr. Buchanan’s personal reminiscences of a really great writer—Peacock—are wholly pleasant, and, though perhaps he might have told us a little more, very interesting. The descriptive section, dealing almost entirely with the Hebrides, and capped by a single short tale, “Eiradh of Canna,” which has considerable merits, may be very well spoken of for the most part. It is unlucky for Mr. Buchanan that his countryman Mr. Black has made the public rather blasé as to such things, especially in reference to this particular subject. But the present excerpts have the advantage that they interrupt no story, and cannot be felt by any reader as padding. They can also be taken up and read at odd moments; for which kind of perusal, indeed, the book is well fitted. One fault which we have to find with it, might have been easily avoided, and that is the great want of correction of the press which in a reprint is hardly justifiable. “Anavit” for “amavit,” “Tyanuilt” for “Taynuilt,” “Queen of Bembo” (Lucrezia?) instead of “Queen of Bambo,” which Peacock wrote, are a few of the things we have noted. It is curious that most of them are proper names, which usually catch the eye even of a careless proof reviser.

     * “A Poet’s Sketchbook.” Selected from the Prose Works of Robert Buchanan. (London: Chatto and Windus. 1883.)

The Graphic (17 November, 1883 - Issue 729)

     Few authors who have written much are strong enough to resist those promptings which urge them to collect from time to time all their half-forgotten fugitive pieces, and launch them once again in all the dignity of good paper and cloth binding upon the troubled waters of public criticism. No matter how slight and imperfect the workmanship, or how trivial the subject, out come the fugitive pieces from their hiding-places. “A Poet’s Sketch Book” (Chatto and Windus) is Mr. Robert Buchanan’s latest contribution to the great library of collected pieces. The title is somewhat ill-chosen (unless the poet wishes us to see that he can work in more than one medium), for these are all prose pieces. They “will be chiefly interesting,” says Mr. Buchanan, “to those who take an interest in the author as a writer of poems.” Except to these persons it will probably seem that it was not necessary to reprint more than half the contents of the present volume. The memoirs of David Gray and of Peacock and the essays on Dickens and Ossian contain solid matter, and in “The Poet or Seer; a Definition,” there is a good deal of technical study of verse which is always of interest when it is well done, as in the present case.

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A Look Round Literature (1887)

The Academy (26 February, 1887 - No. 773, p.140-141)

A Look round Literature. By Robert Buchanan. (Ward & Downey.)

MR. BUCHANAN is my intimate friend. Needs must be I set it down, if only as a possible set-off against the warmth of friendly praise, or, as the case may be, the extreme candour of friendly censure. I now feel free to say that I find Mr. Buchanan’s volume of essays fresh, vigorous, original, and full of suggestion, admirable and varied in substance, strenuous and powerful in style. The book gives abundant proof that Mr. Buchanan is an excellent critic when not too strongly under the influence of personal feeling. His knowledge of literature is broad and intimate, his insight is keen and deep, and his sympathies are catholic. As a critic of poetry he finds room enough in the world for the poetry of enchanted symbolism, and for the poetry of kicking up one’s heels and rolling with the milkmaids in the hay. Aeschylus and Victor Hugo, Goethe and Walt Whitman, Burns and Rossetti, Shelley and the author of the burlesque on the “Wicked World,” have all their points of appeal for him. Nevertheless, his opinions are clear and his aim is distinct. He is a Philistine, and he knows that the name of Philistine is the only name in modern parlance which it is possible for him to bear. To his thinking, however, and to mine also, that title of courtesy or badinage does not mean exactly what it is intended to convey when it comes from the people who have it oftenest on their lips. To them Philistinism is an equivalent for the lack of culture; to Mr. Buchanan it means power, passion, and imagination.
     Though this volume is informed and penetrated by a strong central idea and something like a central purpose, it contains several essays of independent criticism. Of these the most considerable are the essays on Thomas Love Peacock, on Rossetti, and on free thought in America. I have no space to traverse them, much as they tempt one with pregnant reflections. Of Goethe, in his character as a man, Mr. Buchanan has formulated the most deadly impeachment that I have met with outside the fragment of autobiography. A deadlier impeachment of self than Goethe’s unconscious picture of his miserable selfishness and deplorable egotism it was only reserved for his disciple Carlyle to furnish. Mr. Buchanan discusses the “affinities” that finally manufactured Goethe into a fine literary genius, and concludes that the mystery of sex was at the bottom of it all. With a little less animation Goethe might have made an acceptable parson; the amours turned the scale; the sweetheart Gretchen, the affair at Leipzig, the bad business with Frederika decided the bent of mind and heart; and nature, which, at the beginning, hardly meant Goethe for a genius at all, finished up by making the world the richer for “Ottilie,” “Clärchen” and “Mignon.” This is literary Jacobinism, indeed; and the white wrath of the Goethe-worshipper may easily be conceived. Goethe, as Mr. Buchanan says, comes to us, not like Shakspere, on his own merits only, but like a first-class master of the ceremonies with excellent credentials, which the public has yet shown no disposition to accept, even with a liberal grain of salt. We talk and write of Goethe as if he were side by side with Shakspere; but there is this difference between our acceptance of the two poets—Shakspere has mastered the popular heart and Goethe has hardly touched it. When “Hamlet” was produced in London for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time the audiences at the Lyceum Theatre thought less of the acting and the accessories than of the play. When “Faust” was produced here for the first time with any completeness or pretentions to fidelity the audiences thought less of the dramatic action than of the dramatic acting. It is true that Mr. Irving’s company gave us more of Shakspere than of Goethe, though both were given in solution; but the difference of appeal for the popular heart may be seen at any glance at the faces of any audience. Wheresoever, whensoever and howsoever “Hamlet” may be played the play must be the thing, and under no circumstances can this be true of  “Faust.” And if not in “Faust,” which by sheer genius places its author in the world’s Pantheon, where is Goethe’s native strength as a poet likely to master the world’s heart? Not in Wilhelm Meister, for that theatrical old bore is merely tolerated for his maker’s sake. Not in Werther, for the day is gone when the world could contemplate with patience such showy attitudinising. Perhaps in the ballads here and there. I have given the substance of Mr. Buchanan’s argument, and I have given it in my own words rather than his, in order to indicate a general and earnest agreement. Goethe was certainly not the Philistine poet, if Philistinism may stand for imagination. Fifty years ago it was said by an English poet who was probably more strongly in sympathy with the genius of the German mind than any Englishman of his time, that the day would come, and was near, when it would be a subject for surprise that Germany had ever placed her Goethe above her Schiller. That day has not yet come; and if we may judge by the present ardour of Goethe-worship, not only in Germany but in England, it is not yet near. But I shall not, therefore, shrink from saying that I find more passion, more imagination, and a broader outlook upon life, man, and the universe in certain scenes of “Wallenstein”—as, for instance, in the scene of the Countess’s dream—than in any part of “Faust.” And the author of the “Robbers” was a Philistine poet.
     Mr. Buchanan takes Goethe as the master of all whose sole quest in literature is what Mr. Arnold has styled the criticism of life: the master of George Eliot, of Thackeray in his different way, of Mr. Arnold himself, and of the “plague of microscopes” who produce the delicate story-less stories that come from across the water. Recognising in George Eliot not a woman of genius, but merely a “noteworthy woman,” a “woman of unexampled cleverness and veracity,” who has left works that will speedily be forgotten; and in Thackeray a hater of all imaginative revolt, a Major Pendennis of literature, a delightful flâneur, a charming exponent of the philosophy of laissez-faire, a critical novelist-essayist; and in Mr. Arnold not a poet at all, but a writer of didactic verse, whose inspiration is not of the heart, but always and only of the head, whose didacticism reaches its highest level in the verses to Overmann, and its lowest depths in prose in the manner of a literary leader in the Daily News, Mr. Buchanan holds Goethe responsible for what he regards to be the misfortune to literature that such writers have been widely read and liberally praised. I certainly shall not follow Mr. Buchanan in saying that the author of “The Strayed Reveller” was not born among the laurel-bushes of Parnassus. If that snug retreat was not the birthplace of the man who wrote “East and West,” “East London,” and the sonnet to Shakspere, it is certain that he must be the literary Jacob who has stolen the birthright blessing. I am quite as reluctant to believe that the author of that great book that tells of the shot from the field of Waterloo that found the heart of Amelia Sedley was at best the critical novelist-essayist; though I think I see clearly that, following Thackeray, some living “storytellers,” who have “no story to tell,” are able, by help of the critical journalists, to base what seem to be splendid reputations on their consummate art of suckling fools and chronicling small beer. But I am at one with Mr. Buchanan in thinking that George Eliot was far too busy in presiding over a cosmos to know much of the rapture of inspiration, too much occupied with philosophical discoveries to feel as deeply as a great artist must the simple issues of human life and death. She was a close observer, as her early novels show; but her knowledge of life was limited, as her later ones sufficiently prove. The sheer reality, the flesh and blood vitality of her Mrs. Poyser, of Hetty Sorrel, of Adam Bede, of Silas Marner, of Maggy and Tom Tulliver, and of the exquisite old aunts, give way to the vague intellectual abstractions of the waxwork figures in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch. Her plots are conventional to the utmost verge of conventionality; her grouping of character is often as mechanical as the cast of a domestic drama, with its places for the leading man, the leading lady, the comic man, the old man, the chambermaid, and so forth. She establishes her right to the old clothes of other novelists by the exquisite care with which she fits them to her own proportions. Her veracity is her originality. The old story of seduction, flight, disaster, death is now her story, because she has made it her own in the pathos and the power of the episode of Hetty Sorrel. But this is the art of the microscope. It is the perfect veracity that finds its highest exponent in Goethe. I will go farther than Mr. Buchanan, and say that this veracity which is so admirable in its way, has, in the works of George Eliot and in George Eliot’s influence, done more harm than good to imaginative literature in England. Nowadays the critic who tells you that a novel is a true picture of everyday life, that it is natural and probable, and so forth, believes that he has struck the best, if not the highest, note of praise. As if this fidelity to the pots and pans of life, this naturalness, this probability, this authenticity, could be rigidly applied to any masterpiece whatever! Of the rapture of inspiration, of the rugged power of creating ideals, I see nothing in George Eliot. Compared with such Philistines as some of Shakspere’s contemporaries, Ford, Webster, Dekker, with their lusty imagination, their virile daring, how tame and weak seems this “noteworthy woman” whom critics like Mr. Hutton have more than once found the courage to place with Shakspere! Their excess, her sanity, their mad freaks of inspiration, her tranquil sagacity—how powerful a contrast! If, as Mr. Buchanan thinks, it is a misfortune that literature in England has long ceased to pay allegiance to these rugged old masters, we cannot resist Mr. Buchanan’s conclusion that Goethe is the literary Jupiter whose self-contained culture is to blame. For my part I would rejoice to see the novelist’s art cut away from the bonds in which the critical journalist and the critical novelist-essayist have leagued together to bind it; and if we were to forsake the old story of Hetty Sorrel for some of the more full-blooded themes of Shakspere’s friends the gain would be ours. It is by no means necessary to outrage the sensibilities of the “young Person.” That dapper little body is not the lion in the way of imaginative literature. If she is left alone she will take the best of whatever is offered her. She always has done so, and I think she always will. The real obstacle is the Old Woman of both sexes. The Old Woman must have had a bad time in Shakspere’s day, when the best of Ford’s plays bore a title which she found it impossible to pronounce, and she has had many a bad bout since then. But for the last forty or fifty years in England she has had every whim consulted, every rheumatic ache and gouty pain soothed away, every jarring noise banished from her nervous ears. The Old Woman flourishes best in America, where she might have least expected peace. There she finds the humour of Dickens to be so much mere noise and buffoonery, and his pathos to be so much silly sentiment. Hence the Old Woman drives Dickens from the home of Howells back to that old country which is still known to hanker after old-fashioned ways of making people laugh and weep.
     Mr. Buchanan thinks that literature in England is in a bad way, and that what we need is to see on the wall the colossal cypher of some supreme satirist. We have too much criticism, and Mr. Buchanan writes a big book of criticism to say so. Let half the critics try their hand at creative writing, and then we shall see what their supernatural wisdom is worth. Good or bad, the result cannot be less worth having than what we get. For my part I think I see that literature is not now in such serious straits; that there are clear indications of a revival of romantic feeling, and that when one novelist can make a sensation by reproducing the treasure-seeking of Monte Christo, and another by reviving the marvels of Peter Wilkins, and a third by redressing Dekker’s masterpiece, the “plague of microscopes” is about to see its end. If it is only half true that literature is now suffering from a “plethora of genius”; and if a tithe of “our noble selves” be found worthy to assist at the revival of English romantic art, we shall soon see more of the Philistinism that means imagination. May this book help on that golden time!
                                                                                                                                HALL CAINE.

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The Pall Mall Gazette (7 March, 1887 - Issue 6855)

MR. BUCHANAN’S “LOOK ROUND.” *

“SOME of these opinions,” says Mr. Buchanan, in his Prefatory Note, “will doubtless awaken animadversion in quarters self-considered authoritative; but the literary Inquisition, like its religious prototype, will soon be a thing of the past. . . . At the same time, I have quite as great a distrust of my own discernment as of that of any of my contemporaries.” In this it is clear that Mr. Buchanan either says what he does not mean or means what he fails to say. He tells us that the opinions of his contemporaries are probably every bit as good as his own, and yet he resents by anticipation the cavillings of a certain “literary Inquisition.” What is this “literary Inquisition” which Mr. Buchanan threatens with swift extinction? Can it be periodical criticism? If so, what remotest analogy has it with the Holy Office? and on what ground can Mr. Buchanan declare it moribund? As for his “distrust of his own discernment,” that is all nonsense. He is “self-considered authoritative” (as he elegantly puts it), and why should he not be? No sane critic supposes himself infallible; but, on the other hand, no critic has any right to express an opinion at all unless he heartily believes in it. Mr. Buchanan is quite as ready as any one else to “back his opinion;” indeed, he sometimes backs it with unnecessary emphasis. In the present volume he “animadverts” pretty sharply upon the opinions of a good many very respectable people; why, then, does he cry out when his own opinions “awaken animadversion”? and why menace the animadverters with sudden death?
     The essays in this volume are for the most part reprints from magazine and newspapers. The first is a parallel between Æschylus and Victor Hugo, followed by an unsympathetic study of the character of Goethe, a paper on Lucretius and Professor Tyndall, notes on Rossetti, Thomas Love Peacock, Sydney Dobell, Charles Reade, Zola, and Whitman, “A Talk with George Eliot,” three essays on the modern stage, and a good deal of padding in the shape of ephemeral magazine articles and reviews which might well have been omitted. Mr. Buchanan loves to pose as a “literary Jacobin,” and seems to consider himself in a state of chronic revolt, we know not against what. He has a vivid admiration for all that is grandiose and symbolic in literature, a hearty contempt for mere observation and analysis, and a scornful hatred of science in so far as it conflicts with a certain optimistic theism of his own, which he would probably describe as Christianity. His physico-metaphysical polemics are out of date and unprofitable. They are mere skirmishes with over-hasty pioneers of science, or rather with incautious irregulars who straggle from the main body into the marshes of metaphysics. Mr. Buchanan considers that he has scored a triumph when he has landed his opponent up to his knees in the morass; blissfully unconscious that he himself is in up to the armpits. His literary judgments, though often perverse enough, are of more value, and so are his literary reminiscences. The paper on Peacock is delightful, the essay on Sydney Dobell is full of interest, the personal sketches of Charles Reade and Walt Whitman are worth preserving. One cannot but smile to think that a book in which the “pretentious and pedagogic Talent” of George Eliot is over and over again consigned to oblivion, may perhaps itself escape oblivion in virtue of two or three authentic glimpses of the Priory drawing-room which it affords us. The papers on the drama contain a good deal of sound criticism, as well as some swashing blows at that grotesque and deplorable survival, the Censorship of the stage.
     Mr. Buchanan’s printer has played him such strange tricks both in his English and in his Greek, that we hesitate which to blame when we find Frau von Stein figuring as “Fräulein Stein” and Lord Tennyson’s patriotism described as “actual Anglophobia.” It can scarcely be the printer, however, who conceived the quaint idea of speaking of “the whole Bostonian cosmogony, from Lowell upwards.” Fancy the glee of “the Savile Club cosmogony” on catching their Jacobin reviler in such a flagrant delict as this! “It is doubtful,” says Mr. Buchanan, “whether any Frenchman will ever understand the sea”—a piece of Rule-Britannia-ism (or shall we say “Anglophobia”?) which, if it comes to the notice of the Paris Figaro, cannot fail to heighten the irritation caused by Mr. Gilbert’s wanton insult to the French marine. Lastly, let the reader listen to this Buchananade over the grave of Napoleon:—“He had mounted the popular Monster, and although he seemed to curb and drive it, it took him pretty much where it pleased; and finally, in mercy to the man’s immortal soul, God made England pitiless and consigned him to St. Helena.” If it was thus that Mr. Buchanan nourished the name of God in his Adelphi melodrama, one can scarcely wonder that the Censor intervened.

     * “A Look Round Literature.” By Robert Buchanan. (London: Ward and Downey. 1887.)

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The New York Times (17 April, 1887)

A VIGOROUS CRITIC.

A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. New York: SCRIBNER & WELFORD. 1887.

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has distinguished himself in verse, prose fiction, and the drama, so that what he has to say about the writers of his time will receive attention. As a dramatist he has failed; as a poet he has produced a number of beautiful works which have not, however, succeeded in placing him in the front of the bardic tribe. Perhaps in his romance, “The Shadow of the Sword.” a novel reflecting the spirit of Victor Hugo, he has accomplished the most vigorous and absorbing piece of work of all; certainly none of the seven other prose books and none of his books of verse have received so much appreciation. “A Look Round Literature” contains articles reprinted from the periodicals of the day, and owes most to the fact that Mr. Buchanan has the Scottish faculty of hitting hard without fearing that he makes himself disagreeable. With his quarterstaff he lays about lustily, and is never so happy as when he can hear the pates crack under his blows. There is an Irish quality in Mr. Buchanan, the Irish love of a fight, but his is a humor much less good tempered than that of the typical Irish fighter. He lacks wit and the jovial temperament. “The Character of Goethe” is an arraignment of the great German from the side of morals which will grieve all Teutons who have not placed themselves irrevocably and with bitterness on the Schiller side in the perennial discussions as to the genius of the two authors. For Mr. Buchanan has the audacity to question further the genius of Goethe, after explaining his utter selfishness and inability to appreciative love in a great sense. Thus, after jilting Frederika Briou, in order to build higher the pyramid of his existence:

     “My own belief is that this pyramid building was an afterthought, used by Goethe in fighting with his own sense of moral littleness. The simple truth, as I believe it to have been, is that Goethe’s conduct was far less owing to tremendous calculations of self-culture than to simple want of earnestness in any of the concerns of life, added to a tremendous æsthetic horror of that most unpicturesque of all things—matrimony as practiced in modern Germany. Throughout his whole career he never allowed any one feeling to strike deep root. He carefully watered his sentiments, trained his virtues, (such as they were,) daintily enjoyed his tastes—made, in fact, a sort of back garden of his affections, whither he could retire without any danger of being bored by the world, and where all was fine weather and perfect shade. * * * He loved pretty women and light women—he would even go to the length of temporarily adoring them to distraction—but his appetite was satisfied with sipping and he seemed never to desire like rasher lovers for full possession. Marriage thus repelled him on the æsthetic side and we scarcely wonder, seeing what sort of wives would have been made of any of these women typified in his heroines. * * * Then, again, he had ascertained at a preternaturally early age (and this, by the way, is a fact so unusual and strangely unnatural that it looks not only like genius but diablerie,) that every additional human tie, however delightful in the forming, is a source of anxiety and irritation. He feared responsibility not because he lacked strength, but because he was a moral coward.”

     Superficial because incomplete criticism of this kind on the character of Goethe is oftener seen in French than in English because the conservatism of English-speaking people has kept up the impetus given by Coleridge, Carlyle, and other worshippers of German literature earlier in the century. It is well to hear it as representative of the other side of the medal. “A note on Lucretius” is aimed especially at Dr. Tyndall, but is more effective in recalling the ancient and mediaeval guesses at the truths to which we have come a little nearer in this century with doctrines of evolution than in gainsaying anything written or said by Darwin, Huxley, and Company. “The Irish National Poet” takes up that charming little butterfly Tom Moore on the tip of the spear of Goliath, and leaves nothing of him—very pleasant reading, doubtless, to rabid Nationalists, who cannot forget that Moore exiled himself from the island whose champion in verse and prose he attempted to be, but not a remarkably fair statement of his case. Very charming, on the other hand, is the account of an interview with Shelley’s friend, the novelist Thomas Love Peacock, author of “Headlong Hall,” “Crotchet Castle,” and other satirical books which foreran Mr. Mallock and his “New Republic.” In “Flotsam and Jetsam” the eye catches an amusing bit of naïveté from Mr. Buchanan like this, showing that he does not suspect that the mirror might be turned his way and his own portrait take that of Mr. Anthony Trollope. “Yet I read in a newspaper the other day that Trollope considered Reade (Charles) almost a genius! *** Trollope, whose art was the art of Count Smorltork plus the pathos of vestrydom, Trollope, who could write a book about the West Indies without putting into it one poetical thought or line, passes judgment on a literary giant and pronounces him a genius—almost!” The articles which will give most enjoyment are those on “The Modern Stage,” for Mr. Buchanan has had parlous adventures in that field, and lays on with Scottish claymore like a true descendant of Roderick Dhu. Whatever may be said of the imperishability of the judgments given ex cathedra in this collection, whatever may be said regarding the English in which they are conveyed, nobody can deny liveliness and extreme “readableness” to Mr. Buchanan’s formulation of his likes and dislikes, his whims, literary opinions and religious views.

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The Graphic (4 June, 1887 - Issue 914)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, in “A Look Round Literature” (Ward and Downey), offers varied fare. The book consists of a series of papers contributed to magazines, and now reprinted. If there is some padding in the volume, most of the papers bear reprinting. They range from a comparison between Æschylus and Victor Hugo and a study of the character of Goethe, to “Freethought in America,” “The Literature of Spiritualism,” and “A Talk With George Eliot.” The last-named, and another paper on Peacock are, to our mind, the most interesting in the volume. “A Note on D. G. Rossetti” is interesting as a complete retractation of all that “Thomas Maitland” once wrote. So closes an episode in modern letters which was interesting on account of the eminence of the man attacked, by no means on account of the position of the attacker. Mr. Buchanan has some good notes on modern playwrights, and a slashing attack on the censorship of plays.

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Catholic World (Vol. 45, Issue 267, June 1887 - pp. 418-419)

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS

     Mr. Robert Buchanan’s A Look Round Literature (Scribner & Welford) is, as might have been expected from the author’s previous reputation, impudent, superficial, and impertinent. Inflated rhetoric is necessary, in Mr. Buchanan’s opinion, to divert the reader’s attention from the fact that he has nothing to say. Prometheus is as quickly coated with Mr. Buchanan’s wash of words as Victor Hugo, Ouida, Æschylus, and George Eliot! A talk with the latter is included in the volume. To report the conversation of a dead person, one ought to have a thoroughly reliable memory and a thoroughly unimpeachable reputation. The dead are always wrong in a dialogue with the man who lives to report it. How few of us could resist the temptation to make ourselves more clever than we were in the presence of a celebrity! How easy it is to polish a repartee that might have been uttered, had we thought of it! It will be seen how in this dialogue —which is a good sample of the turgidity of the book—“myself” shines. Miss Evans, Mr. Lewes, and Mr. Buchanan were the persons present:

     “George Eliot. We are absolutely the creatures of our secretions. So true is this that the slightest disturbance of the cerebral circulation, say a temporary congestion, will pervert the entire stream of moral sentiment.
     “Myself. All this is doubtless very correct. I hold, nevertheless, that the soul, the ego, is invulnerable, despite all temporary aberrations—clouds obscuring the moon’s disc, so to speak.
     “George Eliot. Say rather disintegrations with the very substance of the moon herself. Where the very substance of the luminary is decaying, what hope is there for the permanence of your moonlight?
     “Myself. The analogy is imperfect; but, to pursue it, the lunar elements remain indestructible, and after transformation may cohere again into some splendid identity.
     “George Eliot. Moonlight is sunlight reflected on a material mirror: thought, consciousness, life itself, are conditions dependent upon the physical medium, and on the brightness of the external development. Cogito, ergo sum should be transposed and altered: Sum materies, ergo cogito.
     “Lewes. And yet, after all, there are psychic phenomena which seem to evade the material definition.
     “George Eliot. Not one. And science has established clearly that while functional disturbance may be evanescent, structural destruction is absolute and irremediable. An organism once destroyed is incapable of resurrection.
     “Myself. Then life is merely mechanism, after all?
     “George Eliot. Undoubtedly. It is very pitiful, but absolutely true.”

     It is very pitiful, if George Eliot said it. But, notwithstanding what the spicy Mrs. Carlyle calls her masquerading as an “improper woman” and her hopeless theories, the expression “absolutely true” seems to be a positive touch of Mr. Buchanan’s. George Eliot, so far as we can judge from her books, did not refuse at least to acknowledge the inexplicable “psychic phenomena” of which Lewes is made to speak. A Look Round Literature is a book to be avoided. Evil communications corrupt good manners. We have lately heard of a scholar who has permission to read his breviary in Greek, to prevent any injury to his Ciceronian style. Similarly A Look Round Literature should be avoided, for fear that a good literary taste should be even slightly injured by the influence of Mr. Robert Buchanan.

Maurice F. Egan

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On Descending into Hell: a letter addressed to the Right Hon. Henry Matthews, Q.C., Home Secretary, concerning the proposed suppression of literature (1889)

The New York Times (4 August, 1889)

LITERATURE IN CHAINS

ROBERT BUCHANAN’S PLEA FOR VIZITELLY.

A NEW PHASE OF THE MOVEMENT FOR FREEDOM IN LITERARY MATTERS—
ARGUMENT WHICH HELPS LITTLE.

     LONDON, July 24.—It is a familiar saying that the English are neither an artistic nor a literary people. All the Continental races hurl this commonplace of reproach at their British cousins on the slenderest provocation. Even Taine, whose study of English literature is a monument alike to himself and his subject, somehow manages to suggest an inner consciousness that English writers have been a species apart from their fellows, an alien and exotic growth in the garden of conventional and pharisaical dullness. The Englishman, as a type, in turn rather regards this foreign view of him in the light of a compliment. He is proud of a good many possessions, tangible and otherwise, and in truth it must be admitted that he has more to be proud of than most of his neighbors; but deep down in his heart he values most of all the universally conceded fact that he is a practical, slow-going, tenacious, conservative sort of man, with no tendencies to flippancy and very little nonsense about him. He likes to think of himself as always fighting against odds. He smiles when caustic visitors comment on the stupidity of this, that, and the other thing they find in England—and the smile is meant to convey his satisfaction at the thought that, in spite of this historic stupidity, England has gone up to the top of the tree and maintained her place there against all comers. The despairing gibe of the foreigner, “Those English haven’t intelligence enough to know when they are beaten,” has the place of honor in his national scrap book of comments on him by outsiders. His pride is to be the one man in the world who guides his actions by common sense. Other peoples—less substantial races—are ruled by perception, by logic, by feeling, by their impulses, their likes and dislikes, but the Englishman believes that he has a monopoly of common sense, just as he has of Burton ales and mixed pickles and machine guns that jam when they get into action.

* *
*

Naturally, the literary temperament does not flourish on this hard-baked soil. The Englishman, still speaking of the race type, has no desire to be regarded as literary. His great-grandfathers thought. that Johnson, Goldsmith, Nat Lee, and the rest were low pothouse scribblers, whose lives were one long device to get along without respectable employment—just as their ancestors in turn saw nothing in Shakespeare but a play-acting fellow, of whose goings and comings it was not worth any sensible man;s while to take note. So to-day this proud islander acquiesces in the existence of a writing class in his midst, but does not care to know more about them, and values the printing press chiefly as the agency which supplies him with news about the cricket matches and the horse races and the designs of the Russians upon his Indian Empire. When Matthew Arnold dies not an additional paper is sold in London. But the death of Archer the jockey throws every English town into a state of excitement, and extra editions race hot from a hundred presses in  the vain effort to supply the popular dumand.

* *
*

     This much by way of preface to a curious agitation now working its way slowly through what may be called the literary circles of London. There are very many of these little circles, revolving each on its own axis in a semi-covert way, but their motive power is more often the jealousy of exclusiveness than any impersonal desire to keep a sacred flame ablaze. The chances of contact among these various circles are
extremely limited. If fortune casts you in one the prospect of your ever having anything to do with the others is small. Only accident brings people of one group into touch with those of another, and when they separate it is for good. I saw yesterday, for example, three English novelists of established reputation gathered with other visitors in the drawing-room of an American authoress here in London. Each of these three looked with curiosity when they heard who the other two were. They had never seen one another before. I gathered no hint that any of them was occupied with the desire that they might meet again. Under such conditions of reserve—part diffidence, part the inborn sense of exclusiveness which prompts every landed Englishman to build as high a wall as he can between himself and the general public and cover the top of it with broken glass—it is very difficult to unite the writing class upon any given line of action, or even to interest them in any common grievance.

* *
*

     There is now a first-class misdemeanant in Holloway Jail, a venerable man whose offense is that he has published English translations of Emile Zola’s books. Henry Vizitelly, now seventy years of age, has spent his whole life in the service of art, journalism, and literature. His father was a book printer, and Henry, as a boy, learned the trade of wood engraving. He was in at the beginning of the Illustrated London News, and after some years of good work there, started publishing on his own account.He introduced “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the works of Poe to English readers. He brought out the famous illustrated editions of Longfellow’s “Evangeline” and “Hyperion,” with the now world-familiar pictures by Sir John Gilbert and Birket Foster. He founded a weekly illustrated paper, and personally bore the brunt of the fight which ended in the abolition of the newspaper stamp impost. He went through the Franco-German war, the siege of Paris, and the Commune as the correspondent of the Illustrated London News. He has written several admirable books, and now again for nearly ten years has been one of the well-established publishers of London. He is in prison, as I have said, on a three months’ sentence for including in his publications some fairly literal and extremely clever translations from Zola.

* *
*

     Of the extensively-signed memorial for his release I cabled last week. A more recent development of the movement is a pamphlet of some forty pages, written by Robert Buchanan and printed by Redway, but not, of course, issued to the trade in the ordinary commercial channels. W. H. Smith & Sons, who control the railway and general minor bookstalls, and Mudie, who rules over the libraries, would not dream. of countenancing its circulation. The pamphlet is called “On Descending Into Hell,” and is in the form of a letter addressed to Henry Matthews, the present Tory Home Secretary. Mr. Buchanan is very much in earnest, and here and there throughout his long diatribe against “the proposed suppression of literature,” it is possible to pick out effective arguments expressed tersely and with vigor. But the pamphlet as a whole is a somewhat melancholy comment on the “literature” which its author is supposed to represent. He had a strong case, and he muddles it into a meaningless one. He begins by addressing the Home Secretary thus: “You are, I understand, a Roman Catholic; I am a Catholic plus an eclectic. I have the highest respect for the creed in which you believe, since it is perhaps the most logically constructed of all human creeds; but while I admire the logic, I do not admit all the premises, and cannot consequently follow you to all the conclusions.” There are two more pages of this sort of thing, with allusions to the Church having burned Bruno, and some obscure talk about Calvin. What the Catholic communion has to do with Zola and Vizitelly, in the mind of the author, one does not learn for fifteen pages. Then Mr. Buchanan develops the theory that Rome, while intolerant toward spiritual schismatics, has always been very complacent in the matter of secular pornography. To quote again: “One of her most logical postulates, indeed, has been that man is evil by inheritance and by predisposition, and that only by faith, by spiritual knowledge, can he be saved. Hence her gentleness to the literature of heathendom, her complacency in dealing with purely human art and letters. While preserving the Christian documents, she was quite content to leave humanity its Sappho, its Lucretius, its Juvenal, its Catullus, even its Aristophanes. For though she was persuaded to make short work of schismatics, who after all have little knowledge of life, she was ever kindly to the poets, the most incontinent of whom knew life thoroughly. She went with Dante into hell, and she ascended with Calderon up to Heaven, but loving also her cakes and ale, she preserved the gaudriole (Anglice; smutty joke) for the amusement of her monks.  *  *  *  Far less human and sympathetic has been her gloomy half-sister, Protestantism,” &c.

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*

     The idea of seriously appealing to the Home Secretary to step forward as a Catholic and vindicate the historic claim of his Church to be the protector of indecent literature could surely have occurred to no one but a Scotchman. And he really seems to pin more faith upon this phase of his argument than on the intelligent plea that Zola is an earnest worker in the field of social analysis, and has as much right to be printed, translated, read, as any preacher of them all. This is the ground which English writers who have expressed an opinion seem to take, and it is quite conceivable that out of this prosecution, covering as it does a period during which the ferment of Ibsen’s strange, strong work has begun visibly to work upon the English literary mind, some definite advance may come in the direction of English literary freedom. But this advance, if it does come, will scarcely have been assisted by Robert Buchanan’s pamphlet.

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*

     Speaking of Buchanan, although he has been in evidence here for a long time, writing poems and novels and producing plays with more or less success, he is still most frequently thought of as the subject of one of Edmund Yates’s most characteristically savage attacks. When Buchanan first came down from Scotland and looked about for friends and employment, he was taken up by Yates, who is the best-hearted man alive to those he likes, and the enemy most to be feared in Christendom. Years later, Buchanan in some way failed to requite the kindness he had experienced and managed, I forget just how, to anger his whilom benefactor. The scoring which he received in the World is still a sort of text-book of complete and merciless excoriation among London journalists. One sentence only lingers in my memory. Edmund Yates, after recounting how his midday meal was interrupted by the arrival of the needy Scotchman, and detailing his earliest impressions of his visitor, wrote: “I gave him food for his belly and sulphur for his back.” These words will be remembered when everything Buchanan ever wrote is dead.

                                                                               HAROLD FREDERIC.

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The Coming Terror, and other essays and letters (1891)

The Times (16 April, 1891 - p.10)

     THE COMING TERROR, and other Essays and Letters, by Robert Buchanan (Heinemann). The strength of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s opinion is well known—better known, indeed, than his opinions themselves. His own account is that he is a moderate individualist, who defends freedom with one hand and the reasonable conventions of society with the other—a very commendable attitude, in principle. How far this principle accounts for all his furious onslaughts upon things and persons it would take some time to discuss; but there is certainly something in Mr. Buchanan’s rather cross-grained mood which suggests the idea of a bull which lives in a phantasmagoria of red rags. All that can be affirmed is that some of the objects of this critic’s aversion—Socialist levellers, mouchard journalists, municipal meddlers, Ibsenite emancipators of society, and others—well deserve the caustic things he says of them; while in one and all of his sallies, whether extravagant or not, he displays an exuberance of pungent expression that is itself enough to secure the amused attention of the reader.

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The Graphic (30 May, 1891 - Issue 1122)

THE COMING TERROR

     UNDER this title Mr. Robert Buchanan has published a volume of essays and letters on topics of the day, in which he lays about him as with a flail, affording rare sport to the onlookers who are out of the reach of his arm. The first essay, though it takes the objectionable form of a dialogue between Mr. Buchanan and a dummy figure, is worth study for the timely warning it holds out as to the future the tyranny of the odd man is preparing for us. But Mr. Buchanan is strangely unequal; he is in such a hurry to score his points that he frequently overstates his case, and weakens his argument where a little discretion and reticence would have strengthened it. The same fault runs through all the other essays. No one will object to Mr. Buchanan dancing upon the prostrate body of the Young Man, though even here he is more than a little unjust; but the lust of battle is so strong in him that whenever he sees a head he cannot refrain from hitting it, even though it be a reverend or an able one. Mr. Buchanan battling with strong words for things which are noble and pure and of good report is altogether admirable, but he should beware of excess of zeal, and remember that he himself is not infallible, and has written works for the stage which do not conform exactly to the severest canons of Art for Art’s sake only. Still it is good to see a man wield his pen vigorously, even though there is occasionally more force than direction in his blows. Mr. Heinemann is the publisher of the volume.

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The Theatre (1 August, 1891)

     “The Coming Terror,” by Robert Buchanan. (Heinemann).

     From the first moment Mr. Buchanan began to write, he has been endeavouring, he assures us, to vindicate the freedom of human personality, the equality of the sexes, and the right of revolt against arbitrary social laws conflicting with the happiness of human nature. It would appear, then, that his aims and Ibsen’s are identical. Yet, strange to say, Ibsen is singled out, in this second essay upon “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” for the weightiest missiles of contumely and wrath! This fact is the key to Mr. Buchanan’s seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. He must and will stand alone. His foot is on his native heath and he’ll hack and slash at all, till the crack of doom. His Individualism shall be actual. There shall be none like unto him, neither in the heavens above, nor on the earth beneath, nor across the waters of Acheron that are under the earth. For this the man is to be admired. The splendid audacity of the challenge, the glove flung down by one to millions, reconciles us to a hundred worthless foibles, and a thousand unjust and hasty verdicts. The spirit Macaulay breathed into Horatius stirs within us still. “For how can man die better than facing fearful odds For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods.” The sentiment which leads us to canonise Robert Bruce, and to accept Rider Haggard as a novelist, now urges us to read every page of “The Coming Terror,” and thank its author for having written it. Within its covers we find a literary Umslopogaas, and the play he makes with that deadly axe of his is worthy of Mr. Haggard in his most Homeric vein. No odds are too great. The Home Secretary, “the new Pilate Punchinello;” ex-Justice Stephen, “the Caiaphas of the Bench;” Mr. Labouchere, “the Paul Pry of journalism, and the Scapin of politics;” Professor Huxley, “a moral troglodyte;” Emile Zola, “a merry and dismal gentleman” devoted to  “questions of moral drainage and social sewerage;” Lord Wolseley, “a droning Military Person;” Paul Bourget “ridiculus mus of a social mud heap in parturition;” Henry James, “a fatuous young man;” Ouida, “that classic of the Langham;” Guy de Maupassant, “whose lovers find out each other, like animals, by the sense of smell;” Mr. William Archer, '”a dull young man of saturnine proclivities; “Mr. George Moore, “a cockney Bohemian of the Latin Quarter;” Mrs. Lynn Linton, his “matron militant;” Mr. John Morley, “a belated Hume;” Louis Stevenson, “a hard bound genius in posse;” Mr. Andrew Lang, “the prophet of modern Nepotism;” Mr. Rider Haggard, “a teller of tales to the marines, a disseminator of the philosophy of the preposterous;” Huxley again, “the Pharisee who passes by,” “the quasi-scientific Boanerges;” “the impeccable albino, Mr. Howells;” “the nerve-shocking, negroesque M. Zola;” are a few of the adversaries this braw Scot, with Gargantuan appetite for slaughter, sets himself to demolish. Up swings razor-edged “In kosi kaas” and down it comes with sledge-hammer force, maiming, disfiguring, crippling, and strewing the ground with corpses. The Grand Old Zulu, to continue the metaphor, never falters. Not for an instant does he pause for breath. He is fleet of foot, supple of limb, and never a blow does he strike in vain. The lust of war is in his flaming eye and his distended nostrils. And a good deal of sympathy must go out to this dauntless warrior who keeps the bridge against an army. Mr. Buchanan’s pungent and pregnant sentences always repay perusal, but of “The Coming Terror” more than that may with justice be said. It is indeed something of a rara avis, a store of original thought and lively speculation, without a dull page to endanger its worth.

Back to the Bibliography or The Coming Terror

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Is Barabbas a necessity? A discourse on publishers and publishing. (1896)

Glasgow Herald (3 March, 1896)

     “Is Barabbas a Necessity?” asks Mr Robert Buchanan, and he answers the question with a decided affirmative, in joining the ranks himself. It may, of course, be said that Byron’s opprobrious characterisation of the publishing trade applied only to publishers who acted for other people, not to men who published for themselves. Mr Buchanan, however, gives away his whole case by one simple act. He has set out on the adventurous path of publisher of his own books; but he also announces one other work which is to appear under his imprint, and in doing so he surrenders the very principle for which he contends with characteristic vehemence. He pleads, of course, that his offence in this direction is a very small one. The book is a mere “unpretending piece of farcical tomfoolery,” and he explains, with unconscious humour, that it “comes from a source so near to me that it may be considered more or less mei generis.” But the inherent unimportance of “The Adventures of Miss Brown” does not alter the fact that Mr Buchanan, at the very moment of flouting Barabbas, enrolls himself under the banner of that much-abused personage. While he denounces all existing publishers as “the barnacles on the ship’s bottom criticising the cargo in the hold,” he sets up in business himself as the barnacle on the cock-boat of “Charles Marlowe!” But nobody ever looked to Mr Buchanan for rigid and prosaic consistency. One is thankful to find him always amusing when, in his capacity of righter of wrongs, he goes forth to tilt at abuses and make mincemeat of his enemies. He has never been more amusing than in his latest diatribe against the “Highwaymen of literature,” “Messrs Barabbas, Macheath, Wild & Co.,” who interpose with “Stand and deliver” between the poor but honest author and his public, and who wax fat in the exact ratio in which the unfortunate producer of books wanes and becomes mentally and physically lean. With such remarkable qualifications for the part of funny man, it is sad to behold Mr Buchanan wasting them on the “eternal problems of Life and Death,” which could be quite well left in other hands, while comic journalism, at present so barren, offers him a field of infinite possibilities that he might make all his own. Meanwhile he has his hands sufficiently full. The eminent poet, novelist, essayist, biographer, and dramatist has added to his other avocations that of publisher, and a curious world will await with eagerness the result of his experiment. One must admire the lightness of heart with which he enters upon his new sphere of usefulness. But it is not surprising that he should do so. The ordinary existent type of publisher is a person who “grows fat and prosperous on the author’s foolishness, and whose heirs are rich men when the descendants of the author are being carried to the workhouse.” And yet his duties are simple and easy, and he comes to them equipped in the lightest possible manner. His main duty is to “stick his name” on the title page, and he frequently has difficulty in “accurately distinguishing between a manuscript and a millstone,” or in “knowing a book from a razor.” Why, then, should not a Great Poet (witness Marie Corelli) step into this royal road to fortune, and, in the intervals of solving the problems of life and death, acquire wealth beyond the dreams of avarice?

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