ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY (21)

The Earthquake (1885)

The City of Dream (1888)

The Earthquake: or Six Days and a Sabbath (1885)

The Academy (19 January, 1884 - p.43)

     WE regret to hear that Mr. Robert Buchanan is suffering from an attack of gastric fever. His illness has retarded the publication of his new volume of poems, which will contain the ripest and most recent work of his pen. It will be entitled The Great Problem; or, Six Days and a Sabbath. It is now some years since Mr. Buchanan published a new volume, his last poetical work—Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour—consisting almost entirely of reprinted matter.

___

The Methodist (7 March, 1884)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan is reported to be in better health, and his new book, The Great Problem; or, Six Days and a Sabbath, may be looked for soon.

___

The Liverpool Mercury (7 October, 1885 - p.7)

     The new poem by Mr. Robert Buchanan will be the first original poetical work published by that author since the “White Rose and Red” appeared anonymously ten years ago. It will, we hear, be called “The Earthquake,” and comprise an elaborate scheme. The intention is primarily philosophical, but the treatment is romantic, and includes some of the most picturesque and dramatic writing the author has achieved. When Mr. Buchanan first appeared as a poet in 1860, he was a youth of 19. His success was swift and great. “London Poems” established his reputation, and they deserved to do so. His philosophical essays in poetic form were hardly less popular than his humorous and pathetic idyls. But he divided his energies, and to some extent dissipated his powers. His talents were various, but not, perhaps, so various as his writings. As essayist, novelist, dramatist, and poet Mr. Buchanan has appeared successively. His position as poet was undoubtedly high ten to fifteen years ago. Since then a large school of poets has arisen, and his early fame has been somewhat obscured. It remains to be seen how far he is capable of rising above the younger men. In any effort to regain his old place, he labours under the serious disadvantage of a strong prejudice among the gentlemen of his own craft. For this unfavourable attitude of the critics he has himself partly to blame. It is only too true that his ebullient energy has too often spent itself in attacking other writers. Perhaps he has been sometimes right, perhaps often wrong. In any case the result has been the same.

___

The Liverpool Mercury (18 November, 1885 - p.3)

LITERARY NOTES.
_____

     It is natural at a moment of great political excitement that literature should not be very active. Some of the best books of the season are being held over until after the elections. Lord Tennyson’s new poems will not appear until December; Mr. Browning’s new volume will be published about January or February. Some novels by good writers are being kept back. Mr. Buchanan’s poem “The Earthquake” will be published in a few days. It is philosophical in design, but the treatment is quite popular. Perhaps it would be premature to give a sketch of the contents. It may be sufficient to say that the earthquake of the title is not intimately related to the earthquake of the motto from Revelations. It is an imagined earthquake in London which drives the inhabitants into the surrounding country and gives the poet opportunities for dramatic narrative and psychological analysis. The poem has for its subtitle “Six Days and a Sabbath.” One of the days is devoted to a sketch entitled “Pan at Hampstead,” the intention being to show by force of imagination that the old pagan life is being lived even yet in the very heart of western civilisation. Altogether we predict for the poem a substantial recognition. It is ten years since the author published a poem, and that is just nine years too long, for the interval has been occupied with some work that has not altogether satisfied the readers who—in spite of much undoing—have a high opinion of the poet’s powers.

___

The Academy (28 November, 1885 - No. 708, p.355)

     WE understand that in Mr. Buchanan’s new poem, which will be ready for issue early next week, there are pen-and- ink portraits of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Herbert Spencer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Pater, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Mallock, Miss Cobbe, and other contemporaries. The book is a sort of poetical symposium, with discussions of the “burning” questions of religion and science, and illustrative tales and lyrics.

___

The Globe (4 December, 1885 - p.6)

A POEM OF TO-DAY.
_____

     Messrs. Chatto and Windus published yesterday a volume by Mr. Robert Buchanan, which may be described as a species of poetical Decameron, but a Decameron of an essentially nineteenth-century tone and temper. It is called “The Earthquake,” and the reader is asked to suppose that London has been stirred to its depths by a terrible terrestrial convulsion, which has induced the Lady Barbara to flee, with her husband and her household, to her “place” upon the banks of Tweed, whence, by and by, she issues invitations to her intimates to come and stay with her. This Lady Barbara is a Queen of Society, and we read of her that—

“All through the season to her afternoons
The favourites of Fashion and the Muse,—
The last great traveller in gorilla-land,
The newest painter or musician,
The poet latest found and most divine,—
Flock’d, sure of worship and a cup of tea;
But chiefly (for our Barbara, understand,
Was nothing if not philosophical)
The modern savant and the scientist,
The students of the heavens and the earth,
Professors of all ’ologies and ’isms,
Found there a welcome.”

It is not surprising, then, that the gathering on Tweed-side should be a varied one. It is, indeed, a motley crowd. To begin with, there is Douglas Sutherland—

“Critic and comic vivisectionist,
Young cynic of the ‘Cynical Review,’
Who, drifting round the compass of the creeds,
Had found no foothold for his slippery feet.”

There is “the plump Pantheist, Spinoza Smith”—

“With luminous eye and hanging under-lip,
Loose gait, lax logic.”

There is “Sappho Syntax, with her spectacles,” side by side with—

“Jennie Homespun, Clapham’s idyllist,
Called “Wordsworth’s daughter” by the small reviews.”

Then there is “Dan Paumanok, the Yankee pantheist”—

“Hot gospeller of Nature and the flesh,
Who, holding soul but body purified,
Vaunted the perfect body fifty years,
Then sunk beneath a sunstroke paralysed . . .
                                               A craggy form,
Snow-bearded, patriarchal, wearing well
His crown of kindly sorrow.”

Nor these alone. There is Verity, “the gentle priest of Art,” for long a worshipper of that “Scottish prophet”—

“Who, thundering for the nations seventy years,
Found in the end that he had merely soured
The small beer and the milk of his own dwelling.”

Verity, we read—

“Had from his master learned the scolding trick,
And so was somewhat shrewish out o’ doors.
Inside the temple where he ministered
His soul was solemnised to perfect speech.”

“Buller from Brazenose,” “another priest of Art,” holds that Art—

“Is lost if clothed or draped;”

while Cuthbert, “our modern Abelard,” is—

“The Church’s outcast, foe of all the creeds,
But most at war with his own unbelief.”

Finally, there is “Sparkle, Professor of the Institute,” who, through “a glittering eyeglass,”—

                           “The bright pane
Fix’d in his intellectual dwelling-house,”—

gazes “serenely at the follies of the world.” Such are the men and women gathered round the Lady Barbara, and it will be observed that they are not wholly without antetypes in actual life. It is proposed to them that, for lack of any other occupation, they shall employ their time in “tales of meaning and of mystery,” taking for subject, not “:Pink Cupid or bright-eyed Saint Valentine, but God himself, the riddle of the world.” Then come a series of short poems, in various metres and manners, but mainly of the narrative sort, duly charged with “mystery,” if not with “meaning,” and linked together by a thread of narrative, in the course of which the members of the group comment, each in his own way, upon the stories that are told. There is, it will be seen, nothing new in the plans of “The Earthquake,” and equally free from novelty is the mode of treatment, which is a quasi-combination of the styles of “The Princess” and “The New Republic.” Nevertheless, the work (of which, by the way, only half is given in this volume) is certain to be read, if only for the intense modernness of its note. It is, as we have said, a poem of to-day. Whether it is desirable to discuss after this fashion the most solemn problems of the time is, no doubt, a matter for argument, and it may be objected that, after all, Mr. Buchanan does not make those problems any clearer. On the other hand, he behaves very impartially towards the various theorists; and, possibly we may find, when the second half of the poem reaches us, that the work is not so entirely without moral as it seems at present. The book would have been all the better, doubtless, without the egotistic “dedication” and “interlude,” from the latter of which we gather, among other things, that Mr. Buchanan regards “poesy” as his “birthright.” There can be no question that it is his literary métier. He has injured the effect of two or three powerful romances by sending after them half a dozen sensational rhapsodies. He has tried to be successful on the stage, and has ended by producing one of the poorest of melodramas. It was, however, as a poet that he first gained the ear of the public; and “The Earthquake” proves once more, and incontestably, that as a poet he has an unquestionable claim to be heard.

___

The Academy (19 December, 1885 - p.410)

     WE hear that Mr. Robert Buchanan has received very flattering letters from two of the personages referred to in his satirical poem recently published.

___

Bath Independent (Maine, U.S.A.) (19 December, 1885)

     Robert Buchanan’s new poem is entitled “The Earthquake.” The assertion that it’s no great shakes of a poem is doubtless a malicious invention of his enemies.

___

The Scotsman (1 January, 1886 - p. 7)

     Mr Robert Buchanan, in his new poem The Earthquake, has shown royal disregard of the charge of plagiarism. The skeleton plan of it is as old as Chaucer and Boccaccio, and the “Decameron” also seems to have yielded the central idea. For details of scenery and stage “properties,” Mr Buchanan has been beholden to other sources. The “Priory ruins” on the banks of the Tweed where the tales pass from mouth to mouth amid banter and argument suggest the Abbey ruins in Tennyson’s “Princess;” and for the mailed figure of “Sir Ralph,” we have the torso of a faun. All this does not deprive Mr Buchanan of the praise of originality in the choice and treatment of his subject. A shock of earthquake has passed through London, and the great city is shaken to the foundations of its society. At Limehouse a factory has fallen; a fissure has opened down to the sewers in one of the streets—

                   On the western side
Of great St Paul’s, by folk descried at dawn
A running crack like forkèd lightning ran—
Strange as the fabled writing on the wall,
And like that writing ominous of doom.

A second, but less severe shock follows, and London is seized with panic. Nobody seems to have been hurt; but the great metropolis is deserted; only

In the City still and in the Marts
The lights of commerce flickered timorously;
A few pale men still walked about on ‘Change,
And in the darkened vaults of dusty banks
Gaunt slaves still guarded gold.

Among the first to flee, was the Lady Barbara of Kensington—

                             Barbara the learned
Flower of Mid-Lothian and the agnostic Queen,
Who, full of culture to the finger tips,
A Scots Earl’s daughter, born ’neath Arthur’s Seat
Young, bonnie, winsome, and a poetess,
Married the little Yankee Millionaire,
And flitted from the North to Babylon.

In the North she seeks refuge from the doom impending over London, and about her gathers a motley crowd of the worshippers of new cults, like strange animals fleeing, as before another flood, to the Ararat on the Tweed:—

In flocks they came, the apostles of the creeds,
Poets and painters and philosophers,
Teachers and preachers, lions, lionesses,
Long-haired æsthetics, long-winded scientists.

Barbara is constituted Queen of the new “Court of Learning,” and since she is “nothing if she is not philosophical,” and since

The world is old and gray before its time;
And that blind god which used to run before
Its happy feet, and wave the golden torch,
Beckoning with smiles, now sits as Darwin’s ape
Upon its shoulder, whispering “Vanity”—

she proposes that

                   Our new Decameron
Take as its theme no little pasteboard god
Pink Cupid or bright-eyed Saint Valentine,
But God himself, the riddle of the world.

Straightway the lions and lionesses, among whom we recognise under thin disguises, voices and lineaments of Ruskin, Spencer, Swinburne, Walt Whitman, and other teachers, preachers, and poets of the age, attracted by the novelty or the profanity of the idea, open their mouths in acclaim. But, as it has been noticed that in the presence of danger the lion and the lamb will lie down peaceably together, the apostles of the creeds are found to be in wonderfully tolerant as well as outspoken mood. Christianity suffers rough and contemptuous treatment at the hands of “plump Pantheists,” “pallid Pessimists,” and “positive Positivists,” and is not much helped by such advocates as Bishop Eglantine or Bishop  Primrose. But only once, after a peculiarly defiant utterance of “Sparkle, Professor of the Institute, a wandering priest of Science”—an utterance, as we are not surprised to learn, “by some deemed blasphemous”—did there arise “angry cries” and a timorous crowding together of the lions, “as if fearing the earthquake’s jaws might open under them.” The present volume contains only three days’ sittings of the “new Decameron”—or rather “Heptameron”—ranged under the titles of “Renaissance,” “Anthropomorphism,” and “This World;” it is too soon yet, therefore, to pronounce opinion on the scope of the poem, and the success of the poet in presenting the different aspects of the “Great Problem.” In the tales and lyrical interludes Mr Buchanan is almost professedly imitative rather than original; he would probably decline to hold himself personally responsible for the super-subtle sensuousness of “Julia Cytherea,” or the Pagan morality of “Pan at Hampton Court,” any more than for the audacious arrogance of the “Soliloquy of the Grand Etre.” The “Grand Etre” speaks the jargon of science in the spirit of Heine:—

I am Lord of the World. I am God, being Man,
     In the night I began.
Then grew from a cell to a soul without plan.

As far as the limits of Time and of space
     I my footsteps may trace,
Wending onwards and upwards from race back to race.

I am God, being Man. In my glory I blend
     Life and death without end.
If the void hold my peer, let Him speak, I attend.

Passages of great sweetness and of considerable strength abound; the poetry of the “Earthquake” will indeed be much more to the liking of the majority of readers than its philosophy. The May-day lilt of the Hampton Court idyll makes “music in the blood,” though its unabashed Bohemianism causes Lady Barbara’s pretty cousins from Annandale to blush and “titter amid their curls.” The “Voyage of Magellan” has a fine lyrical roll and swell like a South Sea billow—

With the frost upon his armour, like a skeleton of steel,
Stands the Master, waiting, watching, clad in cold from head to heel,
Loud his voice rings through the vapours, ordering all and leading on,
Till the bergs, before his finger, fall back ghostlike and are gone.

Once again before our vision sparkles Ocean wide and free,
With the sun’s red ball of crimson resting on the rim of sea,
“Lo, the sun!” he laughs exulting—“still he beckons far away,
Earth is round, and on its circle evermore we chase the day.”

Was not Mr Buchanan’s memory haunted here by

We know the merry world is round
And we can wander evermore?

To our taste the fine old wine of poetry and romance is more palatable and healthy, even with the rank flavour it sometimes possessed in Boccaccio, than when mixed, after Mr Buchanan’s blend, with the vitriolic acid distilled from the controversies of the creeds and ‘isms.

___

The Illustrated London News (2 January, 1886 - p.27)

     A familiar literary form which is specially associated with the name of Boccaccio, has been employed by Mr. Robert Buchanan in his latest volume of poetry. The Earthquake; or, Six Days and a Sabbath (Chatto and Windus) deals with life from the standing-point of doubters, Positivists, and orthodox believers. The Lady Barbara of Kensington, “full of culture to the finger tips,” receives, in her London mansion, all the wisdom and folly of the land. Thither flock the favourites of fashion, and thither, too,

The last great traveller in Gorilla-land,
The newest painter or musician,
The poet latest found and most divine,
Flock’d, sure of worship and a cup of tea;

But the great city is alarmed by an earthquake; and when the murmur came—

The teacup trembled in the scoffer’s hand,
The wise looked foolish, and the lions ran
Lowing together like affrighted stirks.

So the Lady Barbara hastens back to her native Scotland, and the apostles of the creeds—long-haired æsthetes and long-winded scientists—follow her in crowds. There, under the summer sky, while the air is filled with summer music and the dove is cooing in the woods, they discuss what Barbara calls the “Great problem.” A conception very similar has been carried out, as our readers will remember, by Mr. Mallock, in prose; but it is Mr. Buchanan’s aim to treat the beliefs of modern thinkers poetically, and, in doing this, he has produced, under feigned names, characters whose personality will be readily detected. Mr. Buchanan treats his argument poetically, as a poet should, but the charm of the work is to be found, perhaps, chiefly in its accessories, and especially in the delicate and faithful pictures of external nature. These pictures are never overdrawn. To do justice to the poet. it would be necessary to quote long passages. But, as one instance of truthful representation, take the following:—

And here the willow trailed her yellow locks
In golden shallows, whence the kingfisher
Flashed like a living topaz, and was gone;
         *          *         *          *
And there, from shadowy oaks that fringed the stream,
The squirrel stood upright and looked at us
With beaded eyes; and all the flowery banks
Were loud with hum of bees and song of birds;
And often on the smooth and silent pools,
Brimful of golden warmth and heavenly light,
The salmon sprang a foot into the sun,
Sparkled in panoply of silver mail,
And sank in the circle of his own bright leap!

It may be added that the present volume contains the first three days only, but it is said to be practically complete in itself.

___

The Glasgow Herald (7 January, 1886 - p.2)

(4) The Earthquake.

     Mr Buchanan certainly needs no introduction to the poetry-loving public, least of all to the poetry-loving public north of the Tweed. He is well-known as one who sometimes makes prose the vehicle of his imagination, and sometimes verse. In the present volume he appears as a singer, and his admirers have cause to welcome his song. The title which he has chosen is a somewhat startling one, but we soon find ourselves carried away from the seismic disturbances to scenes of idyllic beauty and peace. The earthquake comes at the beginning of the volume. It makes itself felt in London, stirring “the roots of that vast tree of life, the mighty city.” The results, both physical and mental, are graphically described. On the one hand we are told

         “How the troubled Thames
Had risen like a serpent in the night,
And, shuddering, overflown its slimy banks;
How the dark streets were shaken, rocked, and riven,
Above the sudden and mysterious swell
Of some dark subterranean sea of fire.”

     On the other hand , we hear of its effects on the minds of various dwellers in the Metropolis, chief among whom is Lady Barbara, of Kensington:—

“Who doth not know our Barbara the learned,
Flower of Mid-Lothian and the agnostic queen,
Who, full of culture to the finger tips,
A Scots Earl’s daughter, born ’neath Arthur’s Seat,
Young, bonnie, winsome, and a poetess,
Married the little Yankee millionaire,
And flitted from the North to Babylon?”

     This noble lady is the centre of a circle scientific and artistic, on whom she showers her smiles:—

“Her London mansion was the home of art,
In style antique, with Argus on the walls
And ‘Salve’ on the threshold of the door;
Her guests the very learned of the land,
And every guest a lion great or small.
All through the season to her afternoons
The favourites of Fashion and the Muse—
The last great traveller in gorilla-land,
The newest painter or musician,
The poet latest found and most divine—
Flocked, sure of worship and a cup of tea.”

     In her comfortable drawing-room these savants and dilettanti wrangled over their pet theories till the earthquake awed them into silence. Lady Barbara headed the panic and quitted the Metropolis:—

“Yet flew not far, but pausing with her train,
At Ferndale Priory, on the banks of Tweed,
Sat in the sun and held her frightened Court.”

     Thither, after the panic had somewhat subsided, came her votaries, having received

“Sweet-scented missives in her own fair hand,
Bidding them while the terror held the city
To attend her Court of Learning, bright and glad
As any mediæval Court of Love,
In that fair dwelling on the banks of Tweed.”

     Her guests formed a motley crowd, comprising, as they did,

“The apostles of the creeds,
Poets and painters and philosophers,
Teachers and preachers, lions, lionesses,
Long-haired æsthetes, long-winded scientists.”

     There, by the sweetly-flowing Tweed, they spent six days and a Sabbath, the idea being, of course, borrowed from Boccaccio’s Decameron. The events of only three days, however, are given in the present volume, the other three days and the Sabbath being reserved for poetic treatment in another volume, which Mr Buchanan tells us in a prefatory note “is ready, and will be published after a short interval.” The incidents which are here narrated in connection with the three days are slight, the interest depending not on them, but on the conversations which are plentifully scattered through the volume, and on the ballads introduced from time to time for the sake of variety. These ballads serve as an agreeable foil to the other portions of the book, which are in blank verse.
     No one can read this volume without feeling how skilfully contemporary thought is mirrored in it. In its pages we see the beliefs, the doubts, and the denials of our nineteenth century vividly reflected. Artistic crazes, scientific theories, and theological crotchets are all here represented. The pantheist, the atheist, and the positivist have each their turn, and, as Mr Buchanan phrases it, pass on the “fitful torch of tale-telling/” It would be too much to affirm that these various speculations have been here presented in a way which preserves throughout the claims of poetry. It is not easy to illuminate theology and science with its rays, as any one acquainted with some of our Poet-Laureate’s productions must allow. We therefore think it no disparagement to Mr Buchanan to say that he has not succeeded in every case in shedding upon his learned disquisitions the ethereal light of imagination. He has brought to a focus the culture of the age, and if that culture is not in every instance capable of distinctively poetic treatment, the culture, rather than Mr Buchanan, must bear the blame. Every now and again the descriptions are enlivened by delicate humour and playful satire. There is a sustained power about many of the lyrical portions of the volume which makes them very pleasant to read, and the allusions to outward nature are often extremely suggestive. Take, for instance, the description of early summer:—

“ ’Twas the glad flower-time: over orchard walls,
Mossy and golden, softly blushed the pear,
Though apple-blooms were falling; scented May
Ran quick along the hedgerows, white and red;
And lilac, scented like a maiden’s breath,
Flower’d in sun-shaded gardens, maiden-like;
And lush laburnum shook its locks of gold
O’er bonnie banks of green and golden broom;
The white pea lit its delicate lamps afield,
And in the lanes speedwell and campion
Clustered round snow-white stars of Bethlehem.
The bee, with dusty gold upon his thigh,
Humm’d busily to himself; the butterfly,
A wingèd flower, blew lightly higher and thither;
The woods, the fields, the lanes, were all alive
With quick-eyed sylvan creatures, numerous
As motes i’ the sunshine. Cheerily sung the lark,
Answer’d from hawthorn branches by the merle,
Gold-bill’d and silver-throated. By the river
The heron stood as motionless as stone
Over his dim blue double, then arose,
With soft dark flap of wing, to light again
Among the speckled shallows lower down.”

     The volume is a work of art, and not a book of homilies. Mr Buchanan has accordingly drawn no lesson from the variety of the opinions here brought under the notice of his readers. The earthquake described in the volume may be meant to symbolise a corresponding disturbance in the intellectual sphere, giving rise to the conflicting creeds here presented to us; but in any case Mr Buchanan has left his readers to draw their own inferences.

     (4) The Earthquake; or, Six Days and a Sabbath. By Robert Buchanan. The First Three Days. London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly. 1885.

___

St. Stephen’s Review (9 January, 1886 - p.19)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has exhausted three of his seven days’ “Earthquake” (Chatto and Windus). Yet the round world sleeps on unconscious. A poet who christens his work “The Earthquake” gives unnecessary hostages to the reviewers. Were I inclined to be sarcastic I should say that the little volume is only the echo of other peoples’ earthquakes, “Pan at Hampton Court” reminds me of that other Pan of whom Mrs. Browning sang, and the Voyage of Magellan suggests “The Ballad of the Revenge,” whilst “Rizpah” was possibly written to flatter one of Mr. Buchanan’s early foes. There is much metaphysic in the book; Pantheism diluted for a May Fair drawing-room; the Athanasian creed tempered to meet the tender susceptibilities of modern waverer. However, the verse runs clear and limpid; the ideas are pretty and the characters who people the gardens of Ferndale Priory are sufficiently like their living prototypes to give a social gusto to the scheme which, shortly put, is “The New Republic” of Mallock, done into metre. Mr. Buchanan is clever story-teller enough to interest the reader, and I think no one who takes up “The Earthquake” will lay it down unfinished. There are mornings in late spring or early summer when we are apt to dally tenderly with great thoughts, and fancy ourselves philosophers. On such mornings we could have no better companion than this little book.

___

The Academy (16 January, 1886)

LITERATURE.

The Earthquake; or, Six Days and a Sabbath. By Robert Buchanan. The First Three Days. (Chatto & Windus.)

WEEK after week I have lingered with growing discomfort, hoping that time would suggest something not unfriendly to say about this book. Without expecting to disarm Mr. Buchanan’s displeasure, I will own how unwelcome it is to disparage a work of imagination planned on the ambitious scale of less degenerate days—a work whose inception and laborious execution are alone a credit to any writer; a work which I could not myself have executed half so well in half a lifetime, if at all. At least fifteen years ago I read with sympathy Mr. Buchanan’s “North Coast.” His other poems I do not know. Of that I retain a distinct impression. It contained true, and even strong, poetry. This impression was confirmed by the two novels I have read. In spite of some opinions I ought to respect, in spite of such a concentration in his writings of all that is, to me personally, so repellent, I have always maintained—twice in these columns—that Mr. Buchanan does possess that mental fire we call genius—a power of grandiose conception, and a rich breadth and sweep in his dramatic delineation of human passions. But he is seldom, if ever, himself. To be perfectly frank, this I attribute on the one hand to vanity, which tempts him to restless self-assertion; on the other to self-distrust, which urges him to distort his conceptions by imitations of his fellow poets. If this be so, its causes are beyond criticism. The blossom of genius is ever rare; its fruit is rarer still. The richest soul can never ripen to the measure of its promise unless fostered, or at least left free, by a life whose harmony is disturbed only by tragic sorrows. An unkindly spring, a summer of struggle to rise above the weeds and thorns into the still air, an autumn gusty, treacherous, and unrestful; such is the nature of many a specked and shrivelled fruit of truest genius. The poet, before all men, is the slave of circumstance—the finest poet is not always he who achieves the finest poems. As soon as we can clearly identify poetic genius, let us respect it—as I unaffectedly respect it in Mr. Buchanan; but let us not cringe and flatter in presence of its failures.
     The very ground-plan is fatal—a modern adaptation of the Decameron, so slavishly imitative as to border on plagiarism. By some bright conceit or clever distortion it might have been elevated into graceful, whimsical parody, like Mr. Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. But no! we have a Lady Barbara and her fashionable intellectual set fleeing from London, threatened by an earthquake, to “Ferndale Priory on the banks of Tweed,” where they discuss and narrate in verse, after the fashion of our old friends in prose. A thousand pities this—at every page we are reminded of the chasm between the glorious freedom and mental symphony of that joyous company, and the fevered, floundering, befogged jargon of their make-believe imitators. Granted the evil background of the Decameron, the refined selfishness and cruelty (Manzoni has drawn the truly Christian contrast in his picture of another Plague—that of Milan under the martyr Borromeo), still the Ferndale picnickers are not less cowardly, less cynical, less frivolous. Nor can the picture be excused as satirical, since some of the characters are meant for flattering portraits of living celebrities. In short, it is a mistake.
     The description of the consternation of the city at the first warning shocks is, on the whole, powerful, though marred by some overstrained lines, such as “a deep vibration, faint yet distinct, brief yet electrical”; “The tea-cup trembled in the scoffer’s hand”; “Of sleepers wakening in the dead of night, Their white beds surging like the waves o’ the sea.” The following is a fair specimen:

                         “Once more the Thames
Rose loudly sobbing and o’erswept its bed;
Once more the streets and walls chattered like teeth;
Once more men wakened shuddering out of sleep
With that dread sound of warning in their ears:
Then preachers prophesied the end of all,
Doom, and the opening of the seventh great seal;
While in the lonely streets and crowded lanes
The haggard folk clustered as thick as ants
Which feel the anthill crumbling underneath.”

The sylvan and garden scenes at the Priory are often finely drawn, many touches being most beautiful and expressive. These and the conversation-pieces are in Tennyson’s modern narrative style; and a bad style it is, though we scarcely yet dare to say so. A novelette with the ordinary polite conversation of modern ladies and gentlemen done into blank verse is preposterous—the more poetical, the more unreal—the more natural, the more prosaic. Mr. Buchanan, like his master, eddies backwards and forwards between this Scylla and Charybdis.
     As to the Ferndale visitors—in imitation of Mr. Mallock’s imitators—they are no doubt meant for well-known personages. Perhaps the personages rather like this sort of thing. After all, gratuitous advertisement is a compliment. The public enjoy it immensely, and Mr. Buchanan has no worse end in view than to please them. For myself I am old- fashioned enough to feel the impertinence of putting foreign and unauthentic opinions into the mouths of my superiors. A downright burlesque is, perhaps, allowable; but it must be entirely fanciful, exaggerated, and the merest fun and frolic. The New Republic was already far too serious. Mr. Verity is evidently meant for Mr. Ruskin, whose opinions may, I think, be more profitably apprehended from his own publications. Who the others are, I neither know nor care.
     The tales or poems they repeat in this first volume are ten in number. “Julia Cytherea”is the first and longest. Much of its poetry is admirable. It is at best but a nasty nightmare, in Mr. Buchanan’s very worst taste, that which he caught, with exaggeration, from Mr. Swinburne’s infelicitous first manner. His classicism seems forced, aggressive, and artifical—in short, Lemprière classicism. What all this evil means—what earthly good all this riotous jumbling up of Petronius, Pall Mall Gazette, and New Testament, can do anybody, is a mystery to me. I find it simply disgusting. Christ and the Christian faith is brought in as the Dioneo element in this new Decameron. How light and venial—how healthy even—do the subtle obscenity and real unhealthiness of Dioneo’s tales appear besides this misguided profanity. For I think it no less. In “Ramon Monat” and “Serapion” it does not appear. Here the thought is somewhat jejune; but there are many strong lines, as also in the “Julia,” which, indeed, contains much that is really very fine, fine enough to redeem the “wicked woman scented sweet.”
     “In a Fashionable Church” is certainly an original idea. The verses are rather careless, but forcible and ringing. If trite, the moral bears repeating, and it brings out one of Mr. Buchanan’s best points, his quaint, rough, old-world satirical touch.
     “Rizpah Madonna” seems to me a joke. Perhaps I fail to understand it. It means Papal Rome, not the Virgin Mary, and begins:

“O Rizpah, Mother of Nations, the days of whose glory are done,
Moaning alone in the darkness, thou countest the bones of thy Son!”

and it ends—

“Thou canst not piece them together, or hang them up yonder afresh,
The skull hath no eye within it, the feet and the hands are not flesh.
Thou moanest an old incantation, thou troublest the world with thy cries—
Ah! God, if the bones should hear thee, and join once again and arise!
In the night of the seven hill’d City, discrown’d, and disrobed, and undone,
Thou waitest a sign, O Madonna, and countest the bones of thy Son!”

     “Storm in the Night” is similar in style, but intelligible, orthodox, and dignified. Such lines as “The swift moon walked and the white-toothed sea ran with her,” bear study. Indeed, Mr. Buchanan’s epithets are often of singular, if not quite unrivalled, originality and felicity.
     In the lengthy “Voyage of Magellan” we are reminded of “Locksley Hall” by the metre, of the “Ancient Mariner” by the imagery, and by the tone, of “Sir Richard Grenvil.” The geography is excessively obscure. Surely, they never passed the Antarctic circle at all; yet long after they are in the perpetual night they keep steering south till they get to the icebergs, and then the Horn. As they double it, some phenomenon about the sun getting round them took place, which baffles my feeble science entirely. Again, though I have never had the advantage of personally inspecting the Magellanic clouds, I have seen them figured, and cannot but marvel at this warm description: “Sparkling, ruby-ray’d and golden round the dusky neck of night Hangs the jewelled constellation, strangely, mystically bright.” It seems that the captain wore his armour through the Antarctic rigours: “With the frost upon his armour like a skeleton of steel,” “clad in cold from head to heel,” “Till the bergs, before his finger, fall back ghost-like and are gone”—as well they might, discomfited and thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A picture, after all, perhaps more terrific than comical. The poem is vigorous, and with some omissions and alterations I should prefer it to the extravagantly praised “Grenvil.”
     The “Soliloquy of the Grand Etre” is an attack on Humanitarianism—vastly ambitious, vastly vague, fine in places, as a whole gusty and fatiguing. With contrition I confess it tempts irresistibly to parody, so no more o’ that.
     “Pan at Hampton Court” has been kept to the last, because it is not only the best, but stands quite apart. Even here there is much one would fain wish away—the Fauns, and Nymphs, and Venus, and Pan piping while “Christ is dead.” These ideas might just have been touched in the preface: they spoil the poem. Mr. Buchanan puts it into the mouth of a youthful poet; but the voice is his own, and his truest voice. He need not be ashamed of it. Surely this is no mere artificial imitation—besides who was there to imitate?—but a train of poetic inspiration genuinely felt. And how rare that is nowadays! I am convinced that these ideas and images arose spontaneously, and were worked out with joyous enthusiasm. To Mr. Buchanan I feel indebted for having put into happy rhyme the thoughts which to me, as to him, are suggested by the rural gambols of the ’Arrys and ’Arrietts on a summer day. In spite of the sneers of the journalists, they alone recall the rustic jollity of Virgil and Theocritus—these alone still enjoy. Wanton the poem is—I would not have it otherwise. Wanton love remains the only relic of romance now left to the poor. The poet, the moralist even, who views life with an eye unaided by microscope or telescope, will not be severe to him who rejoices with them who do rejoice, though they be poor and of low degree. Who stoops to ask what unconscious delight in air and sun and all fair living things, what profound depths of latent instinct, what impulsive harmony of humanity with nature are tuning ’Arry’s discordant voice to Babel, and flushing the dishevelled charms of ’Arriett? Very few I fear. Mr. Buchanan has done so. This is the high office of the poet. Not to borrow the old models, already perfect beyond imitation, and bedizen them up into a spurious novelty. Not to mourn over the barren, prosaic to-day. But to seek around him—and in neglected corners and dark places his eye can spy them out—such as is left to human life of joy and beauty and nature, and to glorify them in his song. Inasmuch as Mr. Buchanan has done this, he is a poet, and not among the least.
                                                                                                                                                     E. PURCELL.

___

The Graphic (27 February, 1886)

     Both title and motto are calculated to arouse expectation in the case of “The Earthquake; or, Six Days and a  Sabbath,” by Robert Buchanan (Chatto and Windus); at present the application of the latter is not apparent, but the promised second part of the work may explain this. The main idea, pleasantly worked out, is borrowed from the scheme of the Decameron, and the heterogeneous company of Lady Barbara’s guests, amongst whom will be easily recognised some clever portraits of well-known characters, occupying themselves in the rather futile discussion as to the existence and nature of the Supreme Being. Mr. Buchanan always writes musically, though not invariably happy in his choice of metres, and some of the stories told are good, especially “Serapion” and “The Voyage of Magellan,” whilst the touches of natural scenery are charming. The poem is evidently meant as a satire on the would-be philosophies of the present day, and is decidedly clever; the sequel will be awaited with some interest.

___

The British Quarterly Review (April, 1886)

The Earthquake; or, Six Days and a Sabbath. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. The First Three Days. Chatto and Windus.

     There can be no doubt of Mr. Buchanan’s power and versatility, and as little of his lack of self-restraint and artistic patience. This work is a proof of it. Neither in the fable nor in execution can it be said to be altogether happy, though there are passages that show both the man of genius and the poet, and are worthy of a better setting. And then we have but a part of what is, after all, only a squib by a superior writer; and a squib with ‘deferred remainder’ is surely too like a rocket that goes off before its time and explodes imperfectly half way in the air. As to the fable; it is too conspicuously a copy of the Decameron and its many successors, and the initiatory detail of circumstances, in its realism, and in view of recent experiences, is too suggestive of horror and horror only. Down on the North-east Coast, whatever Mr. Buchanan’s friends on the ‘South’ Coast might say, many persons would not thank him for trying to poetize their terrors and make them a setting for playful badinage and mock-serious criticism and philosophizing. Of course there are clever lines descriptive of ‘Lady Barbara’ and ‘Mr. Verity’ (Mr. Ruskin), and ‘Buller of Brazenose’ (Mr. Pater)—

‘Another Priest of Art, who holds that Art
Is lost if clothed or draped, and in whose eyes
The very fig-leaf is a priest’s device
To mar the fair and archetypal Eve.’

And the sketches of Bishops Primrose and Eglantine are good. One or two of the lyrics are fine. But, after all, this seems to us but indifferent work for a man like Mr. Buchanan, and the attempt to make capital out of personalities in this style is hardly worthy of a poet of his distinction.

___

The Sheffield Daily Telegraph (8 June, 1886 - p.5)

     On Saturday night the Archbishop of Canterbury gave the first of a series of dinners at Lambeth Palace. One or two lights of the diplomatic world attended, with a number of peers and politicians. Literature was represented by Mr. Robert Buchanan, the poet and dramatist. Some curiosity has been expressed as to why the Scotch bard should have been chosen for the occasion. It is to be explained in this way. The Archbishop was much interested in Mr. Buchanan’s story the “New Abelard,” when it was published a couple of years ago. He communicated with the author, and asked for an opportunity to meet him. Since then they have been excellent friends. The Archbishop is to appear, I believe, as one of the characters in the second part of the “Earthquake” which is to be published shortly by Mr. Buchanan.

___

The Boston Daily Globe (27 September, 1886 - p.2)

     Robert Buchanan has completed the second part of his poem, “The Earthquake.” The first part was written in America before his illness.

___

The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (14 December 1886 - p.5)

     The friends of Mr. Browning and Mr. Swinburne have long looked for new works from the pens of these poets. In a little while they will be happy. A lengthy poem by Mr. Browning is now in the press. The volume will make its appearance early in the year. In January or the beginning of February, too, something fresh and altogether new from Mr. Swinburne will be forthcoming. Mr. Robert Buchanan was to have published the second part of the “Earthquake” this winter. His health, however, has not been good of late, and furthermore his time has been largely taken up with dramatic work. The second half of the “Earthquake” will not put in an appearance till the summer. Perhaps it will come in June as a Jubilee convulsion.

___

Sheffield Daily Telegraph (7 October, 1887 - p.4)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan is the most persevering of playwrights. Having realised that the drama is the most lucrative branch of the literary art, he pens plays instead of poems, and abandons the calling of a novelist for that of acting-manager. It is possible, therefore, that the second volume of his “Earthquake” may not be forthcoming for some time. His drama, “The Blue Bells of Scotland,” has not proved the attraction which it might have done. We are told, however, that Scottish reformers are encouraging the play with a view of kindling the crofter question. This afternoon the Novelty Theatre was thronged with what are known, in theatrical circles, as dead heads, to witness the experimental performance of “Fascination,” a light comedy by Mr. Buchanan. This play was palpably written with a view of enabling the poet’s sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, to romp in boy’s attire. Miss Jay scored in a part of the kind in Mr. Buchanan’s adaptation of the “Ironmaster” some two years ago.

Back to Reviews, Bibliography, Poetry or The Earthquake

_____

The City of Dream (1888)

The Morning Post (28 March, 1888 - p.2)

THE CITY OF DREAM.*

     It will be well before beginning Mr. Robert Buchanan’s poem, “The City of Dream,” to read a “Prose Note” which is found at the end of the work. Mr. Buchanan gives a new version of the meaning of the term an “epic poem.” He believes it ‘applicable to any poetical work which embodies in a series of grandiose pictures the intellectual spirit of the age in which it is written.” To him the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is the epic of English Dissent, while, to compare small things with great, the “City of Dream” is an epic of modern revolt and reconciliation. The foregoing lines sufficiently indicate the key- note which is struck in the writer’s new book. It exposes almost all the phases of modern spiritual doubt, and, by way of a singular antithesis, is dedicated “To the Sainted Spirit of John Bunyan,” in some lines as graceful as they are  unorthodox. “Christian” is here replaced by “one Ishmael, born in an earthly city beside the sea,” who “having heard strange tidings of a Heavenly City, sets forth to seek the same.” It is named “Christopolis,” and, as may be supposed, although directed to it by Evangelist and Pitiful, it is not the city of Ishmael’s quest. Through his weary pilgrimage there is no sadder hour than that of his arrival in the “Valley of Dead Gods,” in which he finds “his townsman Faith lying dead and cold.” Mr. Buchanan’s conception of this stage of a doubting soul’s progress is embodied in verse of weird horror.

“Alone within a valley lone as death,
Alone tho’ all around me shapes like men
Pass’d wailing, and their crying in mine ears
Was as the waves of ocean when they wash
On sunless arctic shores of rock and ice,
I wander’d, and at every step I took
The shadows of the night grew balefuller;
Yet dimly I discerned on every side
Black mountains rising up to blacker skies,
And hither and thither forked lights that flash’d
O’er gulfs of dread new-riven; and methought
The path I trode was strewn on every side
With tombs of stone and marble sepulchres,
Out of whose darkness look’d the sheeted dead,
Moaning; and oft I paused in act to fall
Into some open grave, and looking down
Saw skulls and bleaching bones and snakelike ghosts
That crawl’d among them. Then in soul’s despair
I call’d aloud on God, and all around
Thunder-like hideous laughter answer’d me,
And from the throat of every open grave,
Came shrieks and ululation.”

At last Ishmael, having past through the “City without God,” finds “solace and certainty on the brink of the celestial ocean.” A limited space only allows of indicating the above features of what is undoubtedly a remarkable book. Like most iconoclasts, Mr. Buchanan destroys more easily than he reconstructs. Doubt, fear, nothingness are expressed by him in words of vivid realism. His “Revolt” is palpable—the “Reconciliation” vague and shadowy. Still those the most opposed to his ideas may acknowledge the talent and impressive earnestness with which he treats his grave theme.

     * The City of Dream. By Robert Buchanan. London: Chatto and Windus.

___

The Academy (7 April, 1888 - No. 831, p.231-232)

LITERATURE.

The City of Dream: an Epic Poem. By Robert Buchanan. (Chatto & Windus.)

THERE is no sounder critical canon than that which rules that any sustained literary production must be judged from the author’s standpoint, despite the prevailing tendency to arraign every work at the bar of a strictly orthodox criticism, to be condemned or to be honourably discharged in strict accordance with the merit or demerit of its appeal to a rigid tribunal. More especially should this canon guide the reviewer when he has to deal with a poem of epical proportions, occupied with so abstruse a subject as the evolution of a typical human soul through all the phases of spiritual faith, belief, negation, and unformulated expectancy. Such an epic or epoch-poem it is that Mr. Robert Buchanan has written; and lest any should misapprehend his poetical principles, he has prefixed an “argument” and appended a prose note to “The City of Dream.”    This poem in fourteen books is scarcely an epic as commonly understood, though the author has not hesitated to apply the term to “a poetical work which embodies, in a series of grandiose pictures, the intellectual spirit of the age in which it is written.” It is Mr. Buchanan’s aim to make “The City of Dream” an epic of modern Revolt and Reconciliation, as the Homeric epics are the epoch-poems of the heroic or pagan period, as the De Rerum Natura is the epic of Roman scepticism and decadence, as the “Divine Comedy” is the epic of Roman Catholicism, the “Jerusalem Delivered” of mediaeval chivalry, and “Paradise Lost” of the so-called Protestant epoch. It is a daring enterprise to write an epic nowadays; for so urgent and multiform are the poetic strains from all sides that we are apt to be repelled by magnitude, just as the ordinary newspaper reader now prefers his political or social news paragraphically rather than in “leader” or essay form. There is no poetical failure so absolute as that of the early-defunct “epic” in a dozen or more books; nor is there any literary limbo so dire as that wherein obliviously abide “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” “The Course of  Time,” and all their dreary kin. Yet when an epic is animated by an epical motive and by dignity and beauty of matter and manner it is its own justification. It then justly ranks as the royallest of poetic vehicles. That “The City of Dream” belongs to the scanty company of justifiable epics I am well inclined to believe; but in what degree, and with what chances of general acceptance, it were not easy to surmise. As an allegorical record of the heartburnings, doubts, and experiences of a human soul in its progress through all the possible phases of belief and unfaith, from the blind acceptance of an orthodox creed to atheism, thence again to a baffled and half indifferent agnosticism, and finally to a “large” but vague hope—as such a record it must seem to many neither typical nor logically sequent. There are few who, once in the shepherdy of Evangelist, journey thence to the city of Christopolis; fewer still who, having sought and found refuge in that modern Babylon, pass again into its gloomier half (Presbyterianism, and kindred “isms”), and thereafter traverse the wastes of revolt, dally in the “Groves of Faun” and drink the Waters of Oblivion in the Vales of Vain Delight, go shudderingly through the Valley of Dead Gods, rest for awhile in Nature, climb the hills of mysticism wherefrom may be seen the “Spectre of the Inconceivable,” enter and dwell in the City builded without God (Humanitarianism), seek death in Chaos and find it not, and finally gain the margin of the Celestial Ocean. On the other hand, the author might reasonably expect that none of his more thoughtful readers would take this chronicle to be the story of a single soul. As an abstract record of the spiritual vicissitudes of the unrestful, enquiring human soul it has genuine interest; but probably there will be some, at any rate, among Mr. Buchanan’s admirers (among whom the present writer includes himself) who will agree with me in finding that, unlike most epics, “The City of Dream” cannot be satisfactorily read in parts. Its impressiveness is the result of ordered narrative and of culminating interest. Save, perhaps, in the two sections, entitled “The Groves of Faun” and “The Amphitheatre,” the “Books” would greatly lose in effect if read out of order, or if but one or two were indiscriminately selected for perusal. The gain or loss here, however, is rather a matter of opinion than for dogmatic assertion. The prototype of “The City of Dream” is The Pilgrim’s Progress, but there is one striking distinction. In Bunyan’s poetic allegory everything is clearly defined: the contrasts are sharp, and there are no gradations, no illusions of mental mirage, and the conclusion is absolutely definite and decisive. In Mr. Buchanan’s epic not only are the personifications occasionally very vague (as in the instances of “Masterful,” “Nightshade,” &c.), but the conclusion can leave little definite impression on anyone’s mind save the somewhat illogical one that since God is indiscoverable in earth or heaven, in any human or natural temple, in the mysteries of nature or in the heart of man, he is probably to be found on the further shore of the Celestial Ocean of Death. One may cling to this hope, and even may, with Mr. Buchanan, find solace and certainty on the brink of this Celestial Ocean, and yet scarcely be consistently able to propound his vague hope as a serene and assured faith. I have been duly impressed by the frequent beauty of the story of the pilgrim Ishmael’s God-quest—as every reader must be who has experienced in any degree and in whatever sequence the like spiritual phases—yet I cannot but feel that in the fine closing lines there is a mere playing with the wind so far as the apprehension of any definite conception is concerned:

“But those who sleep shall waken and behold,
Yonder across those wastes whereon they sail,
God and the radiant City of my Dream.
And as I spake the ether at my feet
Broke, rippling amethystine. Far away
The mighty nebulous Ocean, where the spheres
Pass’d and repass’d like golden argosies,
Grew phosphorescent to its furthest depths:
Light answer’d light, star flash’d to star, and space,
As far away as the remotest sun
Small as the facet of a diamond,
Sparkled; and from the ethereal Deep there rose
The breath of its own being and the stir
Of its own rapture. Then to that strange sound
Stiller than silence the pale Ship of Souls
Moved from the shore; I stood and watched it steal
From pool to pool of light, from shade to shade,
Then melting into splendour fade away
Amid the haze of those caerulean seas.”

     Regarded in its literary aspect, “The City of Dream” seems to me a poem which, while full of fine lines and beautiful passages, is no advance upon the author’s previous work. Personally, I find the “Book of Orm”—with all its incompleteness and faults of excessive mysticism—superior; and “Balder the Beautiful” has more of the white-heat glow of genuine poetry, while its purely lyrical portions are unmistakeably finer than the rhymed interludes in the blank verse of “The City of Dream.” There seems to me also a certain want of balance, or lack of judgment, in the insertion of the retrospective book x., “The Amphitheatre”—an opinion which I retain in the face of Mr. Buchanan’s appended note:

“The entire poem represents the thought and speculation of many years. How much has been attempted may be seen in such a section as that of ‘The Amphitheatre,’ where an effort is made to adumbrate the entire spirit of Greek poetry and theology. No man can live entirely in the past; but a modern poet must at least have paused in it, and learned to love it, before he is competent to offer any interpretation, however faltering, of the problems of religion, literature, and life.”

Nor does “The Amphitheatre” at all justify its inclusion by any supremacy of merit. It certainly is far from being the best of the fifteen books which make up the volume.
     The foremost point of interest for the poetical critic is the literary expression of the work he happens to be reviewing; and, speaking generally, I feel constrained to say that Mr. Buchanan’s style in this blank verse epic is disappointing. There is, moreover very considerable need of revision, for there are too many passages which—like the prose note just quoted, with its three “entires” in close conjunction—betray signs of undue haste. For the form and style of the work he makes—he asserts—no apology.

“It illustrates once more the theory of poetical expression that has guided me throughout my career—the theory that the end and crown of Art is simplicity; and that words, where they only conceal thought, are the veriest weeds, to be cut remorselessly away.”

In principle this is excellent, and I certainly would be the last to take objection to it; but precept and practice, like husbands and wives, occasionally fall out. In his effort to be simple Mr. Buchanan is too often bald; in his wish never to be ornate he not infrequently becomes prosaic. No ear keenly sensitive to rhythmic music could find delight in lines requiring such unexpected licence in accentuation as

“I, casting down my gaze upon the Book,
Read these things, and was little comforted.”

or,

“And whatever man is born on earth
Is born unto the issues of that sin,
Albeit each step he takes is predestined.”

It is with pleasure, however, that I turn from these too frequent unsatisfactory lines and passages to others of genuine beauty. The whole of the “Groves of Faun” (a section that may easiest be defined as exemplifying the phase of belief in the Beautiful and the Beautiful only) is animated by poetic conception and rhythmic versification. Here are some picturesque lines descriptive of the Eros-guided pilgrim as he passes through the Vales of Vain Delight and floats adown the stream that leads to the mystical hills:

                             “And now I swam
By jewell’d islands smother’d deep in flowers
Glassily mirror’d in the golden river;
And from the isles blue-plumaged warblers humm’d,
Swinging to boughs of purple, yellow, and green,
Their pendent nests of down; and on the banks,
Dim-shaded by the umbrage and the flowers,
Sat naked fauns who fluted to the swans
On pipes of reeds, while in the purple shallows,
Wading knee-deep, listen’d the golden cranes,
And walking upon floating lotus-leaves
The red jacana scream’d.”

     Ere long the twain come upon fallen Pan brooding by the margin of a river-lagoon:

“Thus gliding, suddenly we floated forth
Upon a broad lagoon as red as blood,
Stainèd with sunset; and no creature stirr’d
Upon or round the water, but on high
A vulture hover’d dwindled to a speck;
And on the shallow marge one silent Shape
Hung like a leafless tree, with hoary head
Dejected o’er the crimson pool beneath;
And no man would have wist that dark Shape lived;—
Till suddenly into the great lagoon
The shallop sail’d, and the white swans that drew it
Were crimson’d, oaring on through crimson pools
And casting purple shadows. Then behold!
That crimson light on him who drave the bark
Fell as the shafts of sunset round a star,
Encircling, touching, but suffusing not
The shining silvern marble of his limbs;
And that dark Shape that brooded o’er the stream
Stirr’d, lifting up a face miraculous
As of some lonely godhead! Cold as stone,
Formlessly fair as some upheaven rock
Behung with weary weeds and mosses dark,
That face was; and the flashing of that face
Was as the breaking of a sad sea-wave.
Desolate, silent, on some lonely shore!”

I would like to quote several of the more grandiose passages, particularly that where Ishmael finds his townsman Faith laying stark in death in the desolate Valley of Dead Gods; but this being now impracticable I will confine myself to one brief extract from book viii. (“The Outcast, Esau”):

                                           “Beneath us lay
A mighty Valley, darken’d everywhere
With woods primaeval, whose umbrageous tops,
Roll’d with the great wind darkly, like a sea;
And waves of shadow travell’d softly on
Far as the eye could see across the boughs,
And upward came a murmur deep and sweet,
Such as he hears who stands on ocean sands
On some divine, dark day of emerald calm.
And when we rode into the greenness stretch’d
Beneath us, and along the dappled shades
Crept slowly on a carpet mossy and dark,
It seemëd still as if with charméd lives
We walk’d some wondrous bottom of the deep.
For pallid flowers and mighty purple weeds,
Such as bestrew the Ocean, round us grew,
Soft stirring as with motions of the ooze;
And far above the boughs did break like waves
To foam of flowers and sunlight, with a sound
Solemn, afar off, faint as in a dream!”

     Of the numerous “songs” scattered throughout “The City of Dream” none seems to me likely to add to Mr. Buchanan’s reputation as a master of lyrical measures. There are one or two whose absence would certainly not markedly detract from the charm of the poem as a whole. For myself, I like best the double lyric, in book xii., of the pilgrim and the little herdboy, with its questioning as to the cloud-girt City of God:

“’Tis a City of God’s Light
Most imperishably bright,
And its gates are golden all;
And at dawn and evenfall
They grow ruby-bright and blest
To the east and to the west.

Here, among the hills it lies,
Like a lamb with lustrous eyes
Lying at the Shepherd’s feet;
And the breath of it is sweet,
As it rises from the sward
To the nostrils of the Lord!”

This simple strain is vaguely suggestive of the “colossal innocence” as well as of the subtle music of one of Blake’s childhood-songs.
                                                                                                                                     WILLIAM SHARP.

___

The Graphic (21 April, 1888 - p.16)

RECENT POETRY AND VERSE

     “THE City of Dream: an Epic Poem,” by Robert Buchanan (Chatto and Windus), will not greatly advance the author’s reputation as a poet. It contains fine passages, as his work almost invariably does, more especially those in which he has scope for the descriptive faculty, which is one of his most striking characteristics. For instance, nothing could be better of their kind than the lines beginning “Green were the fields with grass, and sweet with thyme,” the ensuing song, “O child, where wilt thou rest?” the mystical voyage under the guidance of Eros, the pageant, or the passage opening “O bright the morning came.” But when all is said, the fact remains that the poem is tedious, as long allegories in verse have a way of being. Mr. Buchanan apostrophises Bunyan (who would have been highly horrified by some of the sentiments enunciated) and seems to have tried to write a sort of sceptical “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It would, of course, be grossly unfair to credit him with upholding the dreary, hopeless views put forward by Ishmael and others of his characters; but we fail to see what possible benefit to the world can accrue from their presentation in this form. Will any one be the wiser, better, or happier for such a book? And when the author speaks of “childish faith” being “past,” is he not arguing, in defiance of all logic, from particulars to generals? We hope for better work than this from his pen.

___

[Note:
At the Academy Banquet held at Burlington House on Saturday 5th May, 1888, W. E. Lecky praised the poem in his speech, giving The City of Dream a new lease of life and resulting in a second edition. Lecky’s remarks also led Buchanan to begin the process of buying back his poetical copyrights from Chatto & Windus with the intention of becoming his own publisher.]

___

The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (9 May 1888, p.5)

     Mr. Lecky, when responding for literature at the Royal Academy on Saturday night, made a very handsome reference to Mr. Robert Buchanan’s new poem. In doing so he gave “The City of a Dream” an impetus in the book market such as that given by Mr. Gladstone to “Robert Elsmere.” Somehow or other the poem which was published in February last escaped the attention of the majority of the critics, while the general reading public were quite in the dark as to its existence. But since Saturday there has been a run on the book at the libraries and at the booksellers. The works of our poets are scanned more closely than usual just now, for since the death of Mr. Matthew Arnold speculation has been very busy as to who would succeed Lord Tennyson as Laureate.

[Advert for the second edition of The City of Dream from The Standard (29 May, 1888 - p.4).]

The Spectator (2 June, 1888 - 61, No, 3,127, pp.752-754)

BOOKS.

THE CITY OF DREAM.*

THE City of Dream contains much fine poetry, but we cannot think with Mr. Lecky, who eulogised it at the Royal Academy dinner as a noble poem. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan will say that this is because the present writer, who lives in what Mr. Buchanan calls “the fairy-land of dogmatic Christianity,” cannot pass sufficiently out of himself to do The City of Dream justice. But there he would be mistaken. What we admire most are the beautiful delineations of the restless spirit of modern doubt. What we admire least is the flaunting, glaring, empty, and even vulgar picture of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. But besides this, the poem suffers grievously from its entire want of intellectual coherence. “The sympathetic modern,” says Mr. Buchanan, “will find here the record of his own heartburnings, doubts, and experiences, though they may not have occurred to him in the same order or culminated in the same way; though he may not have passed through the valley of dead Gods at all, or have looked with wondering eyes on the Spectre of the Inconceivable; though he may never have realised to the full, as I have done, the existence of the City without God, or have come at last footsore and despairing, to find solace and certainty on the brink of the Celestial Ocean.” That some of the heartbnrnings, doubts, and experiences of the modern thinker are here very effectively painted, we fully admit. But we deny that the picture of Greek mythology, can have had any real relation, such as is here assumed, to the development of modern doubt. The whole of the section, and it is a considerable part of the poem, devoted to Greek mythology, seems to us completely out of place in an attempt to delineate the natural development of modern doubt; while the two sections on “The Spectre of the Inconceivable” and “The Open Way,” are wordy, weak, and wearisome, and neither prepare the reader for the striking section on “The City without God,” nor bear any clear relation to the equally powerful sections on Greek mythology which have preceded. The truth is, that Mr. Buchanan should have given us his study of Greek mythology in a separate poem. It does not belong in any way to a study of the development of doubt in the soul of a modern thinker; for beautiful as these Greek legends are, no student who was as much in earnest as Mr. Buchanan desires us to think his pilgrim to have been, would have thought for a moment of going back to the Greek mythology in search of a faith, after being disappointed in his study of the Christian revelation. He might possibly have gone to the Buddhists,—as few amongst us have done,—in search of a religion. He might possibly have gone to the Pessimists. But no modern thinker, in his despair at what he had held to be the failure of Christianity, would have seriously interrogated the oracles of Greece. Such a thinker, in his despair of truth, might, by some accident of moral caprice, have plunged into the literature of pagan fancy by way of literary refreshment after the collapse of his hopes. But such a task would not have been, as this is represented, a serious. and important part of his pilgrimage; it would have been an interlude wholly unconnected with it; nor are such interludes any proper constituents of such a poem as this, in spite of the unfortunate precedent which Goethe has made for such interludes in Faust. It is difficult to imagine a pilgrim in search of faith passing from a serious study of the legendary lore of Greece, to the metaphysical passion for the Inconceivable,—the Unknown and Unknowable, Mr. Spencer would, we suppose, call it,—and that, too, on his way to the pure atheism of “The City without God.” Rather, we think, should the pilgrim have made his way straight from the phase of revolt delineated in the fine canto which is termed “The Outcast, Esau,” to “The City without God.” Mr. Buchanan seems to us to have spoiled his poem by wedging into it the two cantos on Greek mythology, and following them up almost immediately with the two very dreary ones on “The Spectre of the Inconceivable” (which turns out not to be inconceivable at all, but a perfectly conceivable and uninteresting sort of aurora borealis) and “The Open Way.” Again, in. the last canto we cannot find anything but the vaguest “reconciliation” of revolt with faith. Except

—    * The City of Dream: an Epic Poem. By Robert Buchanan. London: Chatto and Windus. —

⁷⁵³ a very superfluous child who is supposed to effect the reconciliation, there is nothing in the canto on “The Celestial Ocean” which has not been urged again and again, without the smallest effect on the pilgrim’s mind, in the course of earlier passages of the poem.
     The worst part of the poem is, however, the coarse and commonplace picture which it presents of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, a picture of which Mr. Buchanan should be ashamed. No thoughtful modern pilgrim, however careless, would have given such a picture as that of the great Christian Churches. It contains nothing, indeed, but the old invectives against priestcraft and worldliness. We suppose that the canto on “The Calvaries” is intended as some slight makeweight against these vulgar pictures, and as giving the effect of Christian teaching on an exceptionally noble character; but it is too vague and feeble to counteract the effect of the gaudy and glaring pictures which have preceded it. Indeed, for us the interest of the poem almost begins at the point where one-third of it is concluded; we say almost, for we admit that the lyrics in the earlier portion of the poem have, on the whole, as much beauty as the lyrics in the later portion. Indeed, with only one or two exceptions, all the lyrics are singularly pathetic as well as musical. Take the first, for instance, the rationalist’s lament that Christ did not rise, which might well compare, in its piteous beauty, with Matthew Arnold’s lines on the grave of our Lord in the poem called “Obermann Once More:”—

“JESUS OF NAZARETH.

Tomb’d from the heavenly blue,
     Who lies in dreamless death?
               The Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth!

Shrouded in black He lies,
     He doth not stir a limb,
               His eyes
Closed up like pansies dim.

The old creeds and the new
     He blest with his sweet breath,
               This Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth!

His brows with thorns are bound,
     His hands and feet are lead;
               All round
His tomb the sands stretch red.

Oh, hark! who sobs, who sighs
     Around His place of death—
               ‘Arise,
Jesus of Nazareth!’

O’er head, like birds on wing,
     Float shapes in white robes drest;
               They sing,
But cannot break His rest.

They sing for Christ’s dear sake;
     ‘The hour is here,’ each saith;
               ‘Awake,
     Jesus of Nazareth!’

Silent he sleeps, thorn-crown’d,
     He doth not hear or stir,
               No sound
Comes from His sepulchre.

‘Awake!’ those angels sing;
     ‘Arise, and vanquish Death,
               O King!
Jesus of Nazareth!’

Too late!—where no light creeps
     Lies the pale vanquish’d one—
               He sleeps
Sound, for His dream is done!

Tomb’d from the heavenly blue,
     Sleeps, with no stir, no breath,
               The Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth!”

But if it had really been so, whence would this tone of infinite piteousness have borrowed its marvellous depth of feeling? In fact, in that case, no one could now have had any reason to suspect what the infinite loss of the world had been.
     The interest of the poem hardly begins for us, as we have said, till after the pilgrim has been driven out of both divisions of Christopolis, and has got into the true wilderness of unbelief. Then the poem begins to rise, not only in its lyrics, but in its substance, into power and occasional sublimity. “The Wayside Inn,” where the various outcasts meet, is powerful enough; but the canto culled “The Outcast, Esau,” seems to us full of true grandeur. Here is a specimen. The pilgrim has mounted behind the outcast Esau on his marvellous black steed:—

                                             “At first my soul
Shrunk trembling, but betimes a new desire
Uprose within my heart and in mine eyes
Soon sparkled while they open’d gazing round;
And I beheld with wild ecstatic thrills
New prospects flashing past as dark as dream:
For through a mighty wood of firs and pines,
Shapen like harps, wherefrom the rising wind
Drew wails of wild and wondrous melody,
The steed was speeding; and the stars had risen,
Cold-sparkling through the jet-black naked boughs;
And far before us in our headlong track
Great torrents flash’d round gash’d and gaunt ravines;
And higher glimmer’d rocks and crags and peaks,
O’er which, with blood-red beams, ’mid driving clouds
The windy moon was rising.
                                               Once again,
I question’d, looking on the rider’s face
Which glimmer’d in the moonlight dim as death,
‘Whither, O whither?’
                                     And the answer came,
Not in cold speech or chilly undertone,
But musically, in a wild strange song,
To which the sobbing of the torrents round,
The moaning of the wind among the pines,
The beating of the horse’s thunderous feet,
Kept strange accord.

Winds of the mountain, mingle with my crying,
Clouds of the tempest, flee as I am flying,
Gods of the cloudland, Christus and Apollo,
                   Follow, O follow!

Through the dark valleys, up the misty mountains,
Over the black wastes, past the gleaming fountains,
Praying not, hoping not, resting nor abiding,
                   Lo, I am riding!

Who now shall name me? who shall find and bind me?
Daylight before me, and darkness behind me,
E’en as a black crane down the winds of heaven
                   Fast I am driven.

Clangour and anger of elements are round me,
Torture has clasp’d me, cruelty has crown’d me,
Sorrow awaits me, Death is waiting with her—
                   Fast speed I thither!

Not ’neath the greenwood, not where roses blossom,
Not on the green vale on a loving bosom,
Not on the sea-sands, not across the billow,
                   Seek I a pillow!

Gods of the storm-cloud, drifting darkly yonder,
Point fiery hands and mock me as I wander,
Gods of the forest glimmer out upon me,
                   Shrink back and shun me!

Gods, let them follow!—gods, for I defy them!
They call me, mock me; but I gallop by them—
If they would find me, touch me, whisper to me,
                   Let them pursue me!

Faster, O faster! Darker and more dreary
Groweth the pathway, yet I am not weary—
Gods, I defy them! gods, I can unmake them,
                   Bruise them and break them!

White* steed of wonder, with thy feet of thunder,
Find out their temples, tread their high-priests under,—
Leave them behind thee—if their gods speed after,
                   Mock them with laughter.

Who standeth yonder, in white raiment reaching
Down to His bare feet? Who stands there beseeching?
Hark how He crieth, beck’ning with His finger,
                   ‘Linger, O linger!’

Shall a god grieve me? shall a phantom win me?
Nay—by the wild wind around and o’er and in me—
Be his name Vishnu, Christus, or Apollo—
                   Let the god follow!

Clangour and anger of elements are round me,
Torture has clasp’d me, cruelty has crown’d me,
Sorrow awaits me, Death is waiting with her —
                   Fast speed I thither!”

     That seems to us the climax of the poem, so far as it represents the real religious feeling of the author, though no doubt the last canto, on “The Celestial Ocean,” is intended to convey,—what it does not, however, at all effectively impress on us,—that all this passionate revolt ends in some deep belief in the love of God. It is on its negative side that Mr. Buchanan’s dream is most vivid. While he paints desolation and despair with a force that very few can surpass, he paints the peace and hope of which he gives us occasional glimpses, with a comparatively feeble hand. Take, for example, this attempt to depict what Mr. Buchanan calls the reconciliation of the soul after its long story of revolt. In the following dialogue, the first speaker, who is throughout called “the Man,” is the interpreter of the divine message to the storm-tossed soul of the pilgrim:—

—    * Why “white”? The horse is repeatedly described as black. —

                                           “‘So far away                                      754
He sits, the Mystery, wrapt for ever round
With brightness and with awe and melody;
Yet even here, on these low-lying shores,
Lower than is the footstool of His throne,
We hear Him and adore Him, nay, can feel
His breath as vapour round our mouths, inhaling
That soul within the soul whereby we live
From that divine for-ever-beating Heart
Which thrills the universe with Light and Love!’

THE PILGRIM.

So far away He dwells, my soul indeed
Scarcely discerns him, and in sooth I seek
A gentler Presence and a nearer Friend.

THE MAN.

So far? O blind, He broods beside thee now
Here in this silence, with His eyes on Thine!
O deaf, His voice is whispering in thine ears
Soft as the breathing of the slumberous seas!

THE PILGRIM.

I see not and I hear not; but I see
Thine eyes burn dimly, like a corpse-light seen
Flickering amidst the tempest; and I hear
Only the elemental grief and pain
Out of whose shadow I would creep for ever.

THE MAN.

Thou canst not, brother; for these, too, are God!

THE PILGRIM.

How? Is my God, then, as a homeless ghost
Blown this way, that way, with the elements?

THE MAN.

He is without thee, and within thee, too;
Thy living breath, and that which drinks thy breath;
Thy being, and the bliss beyond thy being.

THE PILGRIM.

So near, so far? He shapes the furthest sun
New-glimmering on the furthest fringe of space,
Yet stoops and with a leaf-light finger-touch
Reaches my heart and makes it come and go!

THE MAN.

Yea; and He is thy heart within thy heart,
And thou a portion of His Heart Divine!

THE PILGRIM.

Alas! what comfort comes to grief like man’s
To weave a circle of sweet fantasy
Around him, and to share so dim a dream?”

It will be admitted that the “reconciliation” of the soul to God is depicted in far fainter colours than its revolt against God. The pilgrim reaches a very hazy and doubtful sort of hospice at the close of the dream. But he passes through no hazy or doubtful paroxysms of denial and despair.
     As to “The Groves of Faun” and “The Amphitheatre,” while we estimate the poetical value of part of these cantos very highly, we have already said that we do not think that they properly belong to the history or psychology of modern doubt at all. The transfiguration of Eros (why, by-the-way, in “The Argument,” does Mr. Buchanan so oddly miscall it the “transubstantiation” of Eros?) into the spiritual form of the crucified Saviour is not a Greek conception, and is one which the Greek mind would not, we think, have hesitated to repudiate with a good deal of energy; but Mr. Buchanan is evidently bent on giving us the supersensual side of Greek religious feeling, and in the effort to do this adequately, he has, we think, overshot the mark.

___

The Star (Christchurch, New Zealand) (29 June, 1888 - p.3)

LITERARY.

     Till Mr Lecky, in his speech at the Royal Academy banquet, referred to Robert Buchanan’s “City of Dream” as “a poem destined to take a prominent place in the literature of our time,” very few people had even heard of that great work. On Monday morning there was a general rush to the booksellers to purchase it, and investigate “the pictures of Greek mythology worthy to compare with those with which Sir Frederick Leighton has delighted us.”

___

The Academy (28 July, 1888 - No. 847, p.53)

     MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN will shortly publish a new poem, in rhymed verse, of a partly humorous character, founded on a well-known legend. It will be issued in the first place with illustrations. The second edition of the City of Dream is already almost exhausted—a result due in no little measure to Mr. Lecky’s panegyric at the Royal Academy banquet.

___

The Daily News (11 October, 1888)

     “The City of Dream”: An Epic Poem. By Robert Buchanan. (Chatto and Windus). The announcement of an Epic Poem in these hurrying days, when the only libraries are “circulating” or railway stalls, is a formidable survival. Indeed, one is apt to doubt whether there is any public for poetry nowadays, except in the very smallest doses. Of verse-making, of course, there is no end, and there is always a market for pretty tunes. But an Epic! Well, here is one in Fifteen Books, and written, too, by a genuine poet—a poet by instinct, by inspiration, by gift of utterance and expression; no poet of solitude and seclusion, lettered and leisured, but a toiler of the turbid sea of London ink; a playwright, a reviewer, a journalist, a theatrical manager on occasion. It was as a poet, however, that Mr. Buchanan made a name, and we are inclined to think it is as a poet that he will keep it. All his periodical and other work, even the roughest and the readiest, has had too much of something not appraised in the prices current of the markets to which he has brought his literary wares. Their faults and failings have been often those of his market rather than of his wares; the faults of articles made to sell in a miscellaneous market. His present work, which “represents the thought and speculation of many years,” is one which, were it signed by an unknown hand, would, we believe, have made a reputation; we trust it may not be obscured by the familiarity of a popular author’s name. We have found in it very high qualities of imagination, emotion, conception, and design, with a sustained elevation of thought and purpose. There are lines and passages of rare descriptive power, of fine imagery, of profound pathetic sympathy with human wretchedness and sorrow. The poem itself is eminently representative of the age that gives it birth. Dedicated “to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan,” it is to an age of tossing and tormenting doubt, of shattered faiths and crumbling altars and extinguished hopes, what “Pilgrim’s Progress” was to an age of God-fearing Puritanism. The pilgrim of the poem is an agnostic in search of the Unknowable God who, in the vocabulary of modern scepticism has replaced the Unknown God of the Athenians to whom Paul preached. The legendary beliefs of his childhood have deserted him, and sick and weary of the unsatisfying dogmas of a theology that ignores the evil and the misery it is impotent to explain or to remedy, he wanders through the enchanted mysteries of the old superstitions and the lonely and loveless realities of modern philosophy with unresting aspiration until from the borders of “the Celestial ocean” he beholds a “Ship of Souls vanishing into the distance of everlasting Light.” In the books entitled “The Outcast, Esau,” “The Groves of Faun,” and “The Valley of Dead Gods,” and “The City Without God,” the poet strikes a succession of chords which resolve themselves into a majestic harmony at the close, and if his unsparing boldness of denunciation may sometimes shock the pious ear, the most religious spirit will be content with the final reconciliation and resignation of the Pilgrim whose dream “seemed no dream at all.” To the critic of form there is an appearance of hasty execution here and there in Mr. Buchanan’s work, as if he had found no time to revise or recast the rough copy. There are iterations, and some doubtful “quantities” perhaps, which demand revision in a poem that deserves to live.

___

The Scottish Art Review (April, 1889 - Vol. I, No. 11, pp.332-334)

‘THE CITY OF DREAM.’ ¹

CERTAIN votaries of literary art, who apparently desire to keep their goddess within the contracted ‘sphere’ which man is apt to assign to his mortal and immortal divinities, have recently protested against her inclination to overstep the barriers which confine her—or, let us rather say, to wander from the shrine in which she is worshipped. She may weave graceful patterns of emotion and incident, but woe to her if she touch the proscribed subjects of religious and philosophic doctrine! One of her most zealous guardians, Mr. W. L. Courtney, tells us that the problem of art ‘is the action and reaction of circumstances upon’ human character, and that ‘the particular religious opinions are, from the point of view of art, either of secondary importance, or absolutely immaterial.’ ² It would be interesting to apply this canon to the Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s Faust. But, without appealing to these illustrious precedents, it is surely clear that phases of belief act and react on character not less effectively than the trivial incidents which are the small change of the novelist, or the play of sunshine and shadow which mirrors the poet’s moods. The devout and rigid Puritanism instilled into Catherine Leyburn’s mind had a greater share in moulding her character than the outward influences of her mountain home. Greater tragedies than any depicted by Mrs. Humphry Ward have resulted from the close interweaving of dogmas with moral principles; but whether such tragedies are more or less interesting than those which spring from animal passion or from insensate jealousy, must, of course, depend on the mental habits of the reader. In the meantime, if we may judge from such works as Robert Elsmere, Mr. Alfred Austin’s Prince Lucifer, and Mr. Robert Buchanan’s City of Dream, Literature is enfranchising herself with or without the permission of her warders. If authors insist on producing works of genius which not only mean something, but mean it with obvious intention; if they refuse to concentrate their powers on millinery and scandal, on balls and flirtations, and obstinately busy themselves with recent developments of the human mind, it would seem that the critic must acquiesce in their decision. Criticism, however leonine may be its preliminary growls, always ends by following the footsteps of genius in a truly lamblike fashion. ‘This will never do’ becomes in the course of a generation ‘Nothing else will do.’ It is wise, therefore, to examine poems like the City of Dream as nineteenth-century products, without inquiring into their legitimacy—an inquiry which is always futile, as the canons of art are inductions from actually existing forms of art, and are liable to modification every time an original

     ¹ The City of Dream: An Epic Poem, by Robert Buchanan.
     ² ‘The Agnostic in Fiction,’ Universal Review for September. The italics are Mr. Courtney’s.

type makes its appearance. It is, however, permissible to speculate upon the class of readers who will welcome the new intellectual poetry with genuine appreciation, and upon the measure in which the especial poem before us is likely to gain their sympathy.
     In a prose note appended to his book, Mr. Buchanan states that it ‘attempts to be for the inquiring modern spirit what the lovely vision of Bunyan is for those who still exist in the fairyland of dogmatic Christianity’; and further, that it ‘represents the thought and speculation of many years.’ These two sentences indicate the strength and weakness of the entire poem. It is the work of a man who has passed through many stages of belief and emotion, and whose mind has reflected with varying clearness the different tendencies of his day. Yet there must be a defect of earnestness and profundity in one who can apply the epithet ‘lovely’ to Bunyan’s allegorical version of his grim spiritual experiences, and who can regard orthodox Christianity, with its stern Calvinism, its deep conviction of sin, and its everlasting hell, as a fairyland of æsthetic gratifications.
     The poem, dedicated ‘to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan,’ openly challenges comparison with the Pilgrim’s Progress, as the story of a soul’s pilgrimage. Ishmael, born in a City by the Sea, has heard that

                                 ‘up among the hills
There stands the City christened Beautiful,
Green-sited, golden, and with heaven above it,
Soft as the shining of an angel’s hair’—

a somewhat weak and inadequate comparison. He hastens forth, is blindfolded by Evangelist, relieved of the bandage by Iconoclast, meets the gentle nature-worshipper Eglantine, and enters the glorious city of Christopolis. But even

‘Amid the shining temples, silver shrines,
Solemn cathedrals, shadowy cloister-walls,’

he encounters terrible forms of poverty, hunger, and disease; he finds men’s hearts full of rapine and cruelty; he sees ‘a hunt of kings, with bloody priests for hounds,’ chasing a heretic. In neither division of Christopolis can he find peace, and he is at last driven forth as a blasphemer to the dreary region without the walls. With ‘the outcasts of all the creeds’ the wanderer takes refuge in a dreary wayside inn. Journeying onward, he joins ‘the wild horseman, Esau,’ an outcast more fiery and untamable than the rest. Pictures of weird and vivid power abound in this section of the book; and the midnight ride with Esau is, perhaps, unsurpassed in its swift motion and gleaming chiaroscuro. But in the ‘Wayside Inn’ there is at least one faulty personification. A ‘marble-featured serving-maiden, . . . sleepy, half-yawning, holding in her hand a dismal light,’ is an absurdly poor embodiment of that deadly paralysis of the soul which we call Despair. No writer, possessing either a sense of humour or real tragic power, could be satisfied with so paltry a conception. Compare the figure of ‘Melancholia’ in that great poem, the City of Dreadful Night.
     The ‘Groves of Faun’ are magically delineated, with that luxury of colour and picturesqueness of effect which here find their appropriate place. Not only the ‘vain delight’ of sense appeals to the Pilgrim, but the pure ideal of art, which rejects the sensual, aspires beyond the sensuous, and craves union with the highest spiritual beauty. The ideal is typified in a shepherd-maiden, Dian’s child; her love is the immortal Eros, who bears Ishmael away through scenes of enchantment, and shows him, in a gigantic amphitheatre among mountains, a series of tableaux culminating in the ‘Sacrificial tragedy of Cheiron,’ and intended ‘to adumbrate the entire spirit of Greek poetry and theology.’ The taste of the double transformation scene, in which Cheiron, who relieves Prometheus from his age-long tortures, is changed into the likeness of Christ, who is again imaged by the ‘transfigured’ Eros, even to the stigmata and the aureole, may be questioned even by those whose susceptibilities are moral and æsthetic rather than religious. It is a mistake in art to treat any serious reformer, much more the founder of a great religion, as the central figure in a pantomime. Again, in the ‘Valley of Dead Gods’ there is a revolting picture of a half-reanimated Christ, supported by ‘three woman-forms,’ who wail aloud ‘He hath arisen!’ The idea is clear enough, but the details of sightless eyes, hanging jaw, helpless body swinging to and fro in the women’s arms, give an effect both painful and ludicrous, not only offending the sensitive reader, but defeating the poet’s intention.
     Sylvan, child of nature and naïve pantheist, converses with our wanderer, and the mountaineer Nightshade leads him upward through the Divine Dark of Mysticism, where thought seeks vainly to image the unimaginable. ‘The Spectre of the Inconceivable’ flashes before him for a moment—

                     ‘the Light that is the Life
Within us and without us, yet eludes
Our guessing—fades and changes, and is gone.’

The ‘Open Way’—the haunt of prosaic and unaspiring folk, unlearned or pedantic—leads to a second glorious city. The ‘City without God’ is the ‘latest and fairest of any built by Man.’

                             ‘Down every street
A cooling rivulet ran, and in the squares
Bright fountains sparkled; and where’er I walked
The library, the gymnasium, and the bath
Were open to the sun; virgins and youths
Swung in the golden air like winged things,
Or in the crystal waters plunged and swam,
Or raced with oilëd limbs from goal to goal.
     .         .          .         .          .         .

And never a sick face made the sunlight sad,
And never a blind face hungered for the light,
And never a form that was not strong and fair
Walked in the brightness of those golden streets.’

But in this seeming paradise are asylums where all who dare to believe in God are chained as madmen; hospitals of birth where blind or sickly infants are put to death; lecture-halls where animals are vivisected for the instruction of students. A tortured hound seems as though transformed into the crucified Christ before the Pilgrim’s eyes, and he hurries wildly away to a ‘beauteous garden of the dead,’ where white urns, each with its handful of ashes, are ranged on grassy terraces. Adam the Last, the watcher of the fire, tells him that hope has fled from the fair city, and that

                                             ‘Death alone
Remains the one cold friend and comforter.’

Mad with despair, Ishmael plunges into the land of darkness beyond, peopled with saurians and pterodactyls, and other monsters of the ‘primæval slime.’ But at last, in company with a repentant founder of the godless town, and guided by an angel child, he reaches the brink of the celestial ocean, and sees the ship of souls bound for an unknown city on the further shore—the city of his dream.
     The gravest flaw of this brilliant poem is all the more serious because it is one which most readers will fail to detect. I refer to its gross caricature of the spirit and aims of modern physical science. The ‘City without God’ should rather bear the more positive title of the ‘City of Man’; and it is at least highly improbable that a community governed on humane and hygienic principles would unnecessarily torture sensitive creatures, much less make a public exhibition of their sufferings, or extinguish sickly lives, unless on clear proof that the good of such a practice outweighed the evil. Nor would the citizens ‘surge wildly’ round a ‘pallid wight’ who chanced to utter the name of God, and denounce him as a ‘blasphemer.’ There could be no priesthood, no ‘inquisitors.’ And where Hygeia reigns, Hope, ‘with all the other angels,’ will continue to dwell, quite irrespective of eschatological theories.
     Just as the devout believer will be more revolted than the mere literary critic by the appearance of Christ in a theatrical tableau, so the thinker whose conceptions are founded on scientific data will turn in disgust from untrue or inadequate presentations of his ideal world. Even the decorated Truth may displease him, and the attempt to invest the sublimity of cosmic order with beauty and melody may seem little short of profanation.
     Not from the very loftiest minds will the City of Dream find a cordial welcome; nor, as we have seen, from the most refined and fastidious. In Mr. Buchanan’s writings we look in vain for fine discrimination and terse felicity; there is a certain showiness which does not atone for the lack of delicacy and precision of touch. A fault at least equally striking is the hysterical tone of the whole poem. It contains throughout not a single virile character. There is, indeed, a curious sameness in the forms of effeminacy which pass before us. The Pilgrim himself shakes with ‘exceeding fear,’ moans, shudders, screams, cries aloud, weeps, and trembles like a leaf, all within the course of the first book, and continues to make similar manifestations of feeling through the whole fifteen. His roadside acquaintances are not less epicenely demonstrative. Shrieks, cries, and wails are common; so are eyes ‘red with tears,’ or ‘suffused with dew of easy tears,’ or ‘filled with tearful dew.’ Prometheus himself trembles and moans at the sight of the bleeding Cheiron. Such conduct is doubtless to be expected from beings of the pallid, golden-haired, emaciated type which Mr. Buchanan affects; but it grows monotonous by repetition, and the healthy-minded student is glad to escape into a saner world.
     Still, when all deductions are made, this powerful and splendid poem may find appreciation from readers whose convictions are as yet uncrystallised, who are passing through some of the intellectual and emotional phases here depicted, and whose taste is catholic rather than critical. For the City of Dream, though imperfect as an artistic production, and unsatisfactory as a philosophical allegory, is still a work of genius, and wins admiration by its picturesque force and its frequent verbal music. The lyrics scattered through the volume constitute one of its greatest charms. I quote the first, though hardly the most beautiful, stanza of one of these exquisite songs:—

‘Come again, come back to me,
     White-winged throng of childish Hours,
Lead me on from lea to lea
     Ankle-deep in meadow flowers;
Set a lily in my hand,
     Weave wild pansies in my hair,
Through a green and golden land
     Lead me on with fancies fair.
White-wing’d Spirits, come again,—
     Heal my pain!
Through the shadows of the rain
     Come again!’

                                                                                                         CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN.

[I have to thank Clare Stainthorp for letting me know about this review by Constance Naden, and for the link to this volume of The Scottish Art Review at the Internet Archive.]

Back to Reviews, Bibliography, Poetry or The City of Dream

_____

Book Reviews - Poetry continued

The Outcast (1891) to The Wandering Jew (1893)