From MY STORY by Hall Caine
(London: William Heinemann, 1908.)

p. 92-97

     Whatever the cause of the book’s immediate success, there can be no doubt that Rossetti himself took great delight in it, and that in the first flush of his new-found happiness he began afresh with great vigour on poetic creation, producing one of the most remarkable ballads of his second volume within a short time of the publication of the first. But then came a blow which arrested his energies and brought his literary activities to a long pause.
     About a year after the appearance of the “Poems,” an article was published in one of the most influential of the reviews, the Contemporary, which was in general a denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age, in art, music, poetry, and the drama, and in particular an impeachment of the poetry of Rossetti, Swinburne, and William Morris, who were said to have “bound themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art, to aver that poetic expression is better than poetic thought, and by inference, that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.”
     The article, which was entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” a name that was in itself an offence, suggesting the shambles and wounding the very sensibilities which it was supposed to defend, was undoubtedly written with great vigour, much knowledge of literature, and an immense power of popular appeal. It produced a sensible effect, awakening that moral conscience which in the English people always slumbers, like the conventional lion, with one eye open, and being quickly followed by articles in the same spirit appearing in other reviews and newspapers of equal or yet greater standing.
     On its publication in the Contemporary the article bore the signature “Thomas Maitland,” but it afterwards became known that the actual writer was Robert Buchanan, then a young author who had risen to very considerable distinction as a poet, and was consequently suspected, no doubt without much injustice, of being actuated by feelings of envy rather than by desire for the public good.
     Against Rossetti, as the latest and most universally acclaimed of poets, Buchanan’s attack was especially directed; and while it may be freely admitted that there was actually present in some of the poetry assailed a tendency to deviate from wholesome reticence in dealing with human passion, and that to deify mere lust is an offence and an outrage, the sum total of all the poetry that was really reprehensible was probably less than one hundred lines, and therefore too inconsiderable to justify the charge made against its authors of an attempt to ruin society.
     To say that Rossetti felt this charge is not to express his sense of it. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread of the distracting influences of public opinion; he who for fifteen years had kept back his poems from print in obedience first to an extreme modesty of personal estimate, and afterwards to the command of a mastering passion, was of all men the one most likely to feel deeply and incurably the wicked slander, born in the first instance of jealousy, that he had unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions and demoralised the public mind.
     If what Rossetti did, under this first fire of the enemy, seems weak or futile, let it be said that only those who know by experience what it is to have this foul accusation made against them, can have any idea of its distracting power. In the first moments of his indignation, he wrote a full and point-by-point rejoinder, printed it as a pamphlet, had a great number struck off; then he destroyed every copy. After that he wrote a temperate but not very effectual letter to the Athenæum; but finding that the accusations he rebutted were repeated immediately with increasing bitterness, he lost hope of stemming the tide of hostile criticism, and announced his intention of abandoning poetic composition.
     One by one some of the remaining friends of earlier years seemed now to have left him. Whether, as I have heard certain of them say, they wearied a little of Rossetti's absorption in the critical attacks made upon him—thinking he put them out of proportion, or interpreted their origin and intention by a light that was scarcely consistent with sanity—or whether Rossetti on his part (as one of the letters I have quoted appears to show) began to think of his old comrades as “summer friends” who fell away at the first breath of winter, the result was the same—he shut himself up in his big house in yet more absolute seclusion than before.
     Nor did the mischief end there. The chloral which he had first taken in small doses, he began now, in moments of physical prostration and nervous excitement, to indulge in to excess; and as a consequence he went through a series of terrible though intermittent illnesses, inducing a morbid condition, in which he was the victim of many painful delusions. Among them, as was perhaps natural, were some that related to the exhumation of his wife’s body, and the curse that was supposed to have followed him for that desecration. This was an idea very liable to torment a mind so susceptible to supernatural suggestion as Rossetti’s; and although one’s soul cries out against a torture that was greater than any sins of his deserved, one cannot but welcome the thought that the seclusion to which he doomed himself, and the illness from which he suffered, were due to something more serious and more worthy of a man than the hostile article of a jealous fellow-poet.

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p. 222-223

     I have one more memory of those cheerful evenings in the poet’s bedroom with its thick curtains, its black-oak chimney-piece and crucifix and its muffled air (all looking and feeling so much brighter than before), and that is of Buchanan’s retraction of all that he had said in his bitter onslaught of so many years before. One day there came a copy of the romance called “God and the Man,” with its dedication “To an Old Enemy.” I do not remember how the book reached Rossetti’s house, whether directly from the author or from the publisher, or, as I think probable, through Watts, who was now every day at Cheyne Walk, in his untiring devotion to his friend, but I have a clear memory of reading to the poet the beautiful lines in which his critic so generously and so bravely took back everything he had said:

“I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow,
     Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and charity I bring thee now
     A lily-flower instead.

Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
     Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
     And take the gift from me.”

     Rossetti was for the moment much affected by the pathos of the words, but in the absence of his name it was difficult at first to make him beheve they were intended for him.
     “But they are, I’m sure they are, and Watts says they are,” I went on repeating, until he was compelled to believe.
     It was a moving incident, and doubly affecting at that moment, when the poet had just emerged from the long night of so much suffering. And it was fit and meet that Buchanan’s retraction should come before it was too late for Rossetti to hear of it; but if I had wanted anything to prove to me that the cloud that had hung over the poet’s life was not that of another poet’s criticism but a far graver thing, I should have found it in the fact that after the first hour of hearing of the retraction, he never spoke of the matter again.

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p. 271-279

ROBERT BUCHANAN

ABOUT two months after Rossetti’s death I was at work in my chambers in Clement’s Inn on one of my articles for the Mercury, when somebody knocked with his knuckles on the door, and, in answer to my call, came in. It was Robert Buchanan, whom I had never seen before, a thick-set man of medium height, with a broad fresh-coloured face, distinctly intellectual, but certainly not ascetic, or spiritual, or inspired. He had seen something I had written about Rossetti, with a reference to himself, and he had come to thank me and to reproach me at the same time. In a voice that had a perceptible tremor he said:
     “Did you want to heap coals of fire on my head? Good God, man! what did you think you were doing?”
     I was deeply touched by this strange manifestation of his gratitude, giving proof enough that under that rather rugged exterior a real human heart was quivering. We became friends immediately, and if I had any momentary sense of disloyalty to my dead comrade in joining hands with one whose enmity had helped to darken the last years of his life, I persuaded myself, not without reason, that, after all, Rossetti and Buchanan had a good deal in common, and but for the devilish tangle of fate they might even have been friends.
     At that first meeting we talked of Rossetti only, and I well remember Buchanan’s long silence, the quivering of his eyelids and the moistening of his eyes, when I told him how the poet, whom he had wronged so deeply, had praised his “Lights o’ Leith.” A few days afterwards he wrote a long letter, which was intended to explain the motive which had led him to make his unjust attack:
     “In perfect frankness, let me say a few words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely that my article in the Contemporary Review was unjust to Rossetti’s claims as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was written the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a mere drop of gall in an ocean of eau sucrée. That it could have had on any man the effect you describe I can scarcely believe, indeed, I think that no living man had so little to complain of as Rossetti on the score of criticism. Well, my protest was received in a way which turned irritation into wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I think you will admit that there has been some cause for me to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the world; but, happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the courage of an approving conscience.
     “I was unjust, as I have said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti’s claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently. But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side, not on mine. The amende of my dedication in ‘God and the Man’ was a sacred thing— between his spirit and mine; not between my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought he would understand—which would have been, and indeed is sufficient. I cried, and cry no truce with the horde of slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is all. But, when all is said, there still remains the pity that our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with God—that God who will justify and cherish him, who has dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we did not meet—that I did not take him by the hand; but I am old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a prelude, and that our meeting may take place—even yet.”
     During the next two years I saw a great deal of Buchanan. We were constantly together, and I think we became sincerely attached to each other. It was impossible not to admire his compelling power, his immense vigour, his courage, and even his audacity. There was a sense in which he was the true literary man, the born  “slinger of ink.” His control over his vehicle was such as I have never seen equalled, and what he could do he could do without an effort. As a journalist he was worth a wilderness of the men who were always depreciating him in the newspapers. He would write an article while they were nibbling a pen and gazing vacantly at a sheet of paper, having a quick sense of what the public wants, the art of swift assimilation, and a never-failing power of vigorous expression.
     He knew life, too; and though he knew books, and knew them well, he had not spent all his days within the four walls of a library. In his youth he had gone through bitter privations, tramping the streets with David Gray and lodging in a top room in the “New Cut,” where a tender-hearted Cockney servant-girl would smuggle up a dish of half-cold potatoes from the kitchen in pity of the hunger of the struggling boys from Scotland.
     There was a heart in him, too, and when he permitted himself to speak out of it the world had no choice but to hear; so that the time had been when in recognition of the power, the pathos, the humour, and the undoubted literary form of his earlier poems, he was recognised as the heir-apparent to Tennyson. 
     That time was long past when I came to know him, but he was still the lusty, brawny, stalwart fellow who had more than once fluttered the literary dovecots. His hostility to the profession of letters was beginning to run to seed. He had an honest contempt for the mutual admiration of the little cliques who were then so busy tinkering up fictitious reputations; and his big robustious body would rock with derisive laughter at the little kinking humour of what he thought the Oxford manner—the manner of the don turned journalist.
     Already he was rapidly becoming the Ishmael of literature, with his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. He would make no terms with his literary contemporaries to win their confidence or disturb their distrust. No clubs, no public dinners, no literary gatherings ever knew him; and when he saw himself left out of lists of men of letters, which included battalions of weaklings who were not fit to wipe his boots, he growled out his disgust and spat at literature.
     But the spirit of literature keeps a swift revenge for the literary men who lower her flag, just as she loves the best, if she works the hardest, those who hold her standard high. Buchanan as a force in literature began to disappear. The man who had written the “Ballad of Judas Iscariot” declined on inconspicuous melodrama, and wasted himself in casual journalism. Setting the intelligence of the public low, he deliberately gave them what he thought they wanted, judging of that by the quality of what he saw succeed. The high conscientiousness of earlier years, whereby he had seen that less than his best was less than was due from any artist to the public, had gone down in the general débâcle of his literary character.
     Then came a more tragical development. In his last years life went hard with him. He had been an affectionate son, husband, and friend, and his dear ones were beginning to suffer. At that his rebellious spirit seemed to break all bounds, and even his faith began to fail. He seemed to me sometimes like a man at war with the Almighty. It was only the struggle of a big soul, badly beaten in the fight of life, to reconcile itself to the ways of God with men; but the Ishmael in Buchanan, lying out in the desert and crying for a drink of water, became a trying thing to see.
     In those last years he railed at the world and nearly everything in it; but he kept a warm place in his heart for a few (his devoted sister-in-law above everybody), and I have never heard that he wrote a word against me. Very early in our friendship he asked me to collaborate with him, and I attempted to do so; but there was nothing to correct my faults in Buchanan’s undoubted qualities, and our literary partnership died almost before it was born.
     After a few years we parted company, not from any quarrel, but by that gradual asundering that makes a wider breach than open rupture. I never ceased to think of him with affection, or to regret what I saw of the decay of his noble gifts, the lowering of his natural quality; and when he celebrated his sixtieth year, I wrote to wish him many happy returns of the day, and to lament the space by which life and the world had divided us.
     His reply was painful reading. He was ill, he had lost his mother, the world had forgotten his existence, and but for one “angel in the house,” heaven alone knew what would have become of him. It was a pretty thing to wish a man many happy returns of a day that had dawned on misery that was more than he could bear. Only one good thing, he said, had emerged from his sufferings—he had put away for ever all my own  pitiful superstitions about a beneficent Providence who ruled the world in righteousness!
     I was hurt but not hopeless. Down to the last Ishmael was crying in the desert, but he was not unheard there, and when the end came everything was well.

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From FIFTY YEARS OF AN ACTOR’S LIFE (Vol.2) by John Coleman
(New York: James Pott & Co., London: Hutchinson & Co., 1904.)

p. 649-651

     On   the  day when  I commenced operations for  my débût a  crowd  of authors, actors, journalists, and old friends came, some to seek engagements, others to congratulate me. First came Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, and Tom Taylor to wish me God-speed. Next, a remarkable-looking man of forty and a girl scarce half that age, neither of whom I had ever seen before. He was clad in an ample Inverness cape of grey frieze, with a white muffler twisted round his huge neck. His fierce blue eyes asserted themselves defiantly through his blue binoculars. His hair was a mass of golden brown, and his beard of burnished gold. His assertant nose (too prononcé for Greek, yet not enough for Roman) and dilated nostrils, his leonine head and chest, combined with a certain “come if you dare” demeanour, suggested the very image of a Viking on the war-path. The girl was tall, slender, dark-eyed, dark-haired, clad in some dark clinging stuff, and there were even then suggestions of statuesque outlines, which indeed afterwards became more amply and superbly developed. He carried a huge, hideous “gamp,” pointed bayonet-wise at my breast, as if about to charge and pin me to the wall behind. The girl, who had evidently never penetrated Stage-land before, gazed curiously at me and the glittering paraphernalia of armour and jewellery scattered around, as who should say, “Where am I, and what manner of man is this player-king?” While they were doubtless summing me up, I took stock of them; hence I recall thus vividly my first impressions of the author of The Shadow of the Sword and London Poems and his pupil and protegée, the authoress of The Queen of Connaught.
     And now to  explain  the  cause of this visit. Walt Whitman had fallen on bad times, and his brother poet had made an appeal to the British public on his behalf. I had sent a little cheque, and Robert Buchanan had called to acknowledge it. Although then at the zenith of his great powers, his vigorous attack on “The Fleshly School” had made him many enemies, and barred the doors of the theatre to him. It pleases me now to recall that the very next day I invited him to meet Charles Reade and other men of light and leading at my house in Wigmore Street, that I induced my friend Henry Neville to produce his first drama, and from that time forth commenced a friendly intimacy which continued, with rare intervals, to the day of his untimely and terrible death.

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p. 652-654

     Whatever diversity of opinion might possibly have existed as to the rendition of Henry V., there was but one opinion as to the splendour of the spectacle, which both Phelps and Greenwood and even Mrs. Charles Kean and Mr. Planché then generously acknowledged had never been equalled, while I am bold enough to assert even now that it has never since been surpassed. By the special grace of Dean Stanley we were permitted to photograph the Abbey and the Jerusalem Chamber, to model and reproduce the Coronation Chair and the mystic Stone of Scone beneath it. Mr. Kean was kind enough to lend me all the sketches and designs which had been prepared for Charles Kean’s sumptuous get-up at the Princesses’, while every scene, every costume, every weapon, every suit of armour, every trophy and banner were prepared from the highest authorities, after the designs of Mr. Godwin, the eminent archæologist. Permission was obtained from the Horse Guards for the pick of the British army to assist in the Coronation, the Siege of Harfleur, the Battle of Agincourt, the Royal Nuptials, and the Triumphant entry of Harry and Katharine de Valois into London. So extensive were the preparations that we had the greatest difficulty in getting ready for our opening.
     At length all obstacles were surmounted, and the eventful night arrived, when I made my first appearance, assisted by one of the best companies then in existence, including Mr. Phelps, Mr. Ryder, Mr. Tom Mead, Mr. Clifford Harrison, M. Leon Espinorn, Miss Margaret Leighton, Miss Emily Fowler, Mrs. Hudson Kirby, Miss Kate Phillips, and numerous other eminent artists. The first item on the programme was a poetic, inaugural address written for the occasion by Robert Buchanan. By the way, Tom Greenwood, Phelps’s partner at the Wells, had kindly volunteered to assist at our “send-off.” When he learned that the address was by Buchanan, the wily old fox said, “If the Fleshly School Gang even guess that he’s the author, they’ll go for the whole crowd of you bald-headed. Better keep it dark and leave the rest to me.” I don’t know whether he actually set the rumour afloat or not, but Charles Reade assured me that E. L. Blanchard (Greenwood’s old friend) confidently asserted in the lobby that night that Algernon Swinburne was the author, and that the assertion was accepted as gospel! However that might have been, the lines were splendid and splendidly declaimed by Miss Leighton, who stirred the house to enthusiasm with her majestic presence and her magnificent voice. Mrs. Seymour told me that shortly after meeting an eminent critic at a dinner party, he gushed over Swinburne’s magnificent composition, alleging it was worthy of Shakespeare himself. When, however, she informed this learned pundit ’twas written by Buchanan, he exclaimed in a fine flush of virtuous indignation, “A fraud—a vile fraud, madame! Had I known it was by that red-headed Scotchman, I’d have crucified the wretch!”
     Those who were present that night can scarcely have forgotten the roar which arose, which came back again and yet again, until the whole audience burst forth into one mighty acclamation, when the curtain revealed to view the war-worn lion of Lancaster lying beneath the shadow of death in the Jerusalem Chamber, nor the generous recognition accorded to Ryder, Mead, and other old favourites. “On their own merits modest men are dumb,” but I may be permitted to say here that perhaps no actor ever made a more triumphant entry into London than he who impersonated the hero of Agincourt on that occasion.

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p. 661

     Soon after this I produced—at Brighton—an adaptation by the author and myself of Robert Buchanan’s noble romance, The Shadow of the Sword. I obtained great kudos in the part of the hero, Rohan Gwenfern, but when I brought the play to town during the dog-days (when every one was away) I gained neither money nor reputation by an experiment attempted under such adverse circumstances.

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[Coleman’s production of The Shadow of the Sword did not meet with Buchanan’s approval and led to a spirited exchange of letters in The Era.]

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From RECOLLECTIONS OF FIFTY YEARS by Isabella Fyvie Mayo (Edward Garrett)
(London: John Murray, 1910.)

p. 215-217

     On the day when Queen Victoria went to St. Paul’s to return thanks for the Prince of Wales’s recovery from dangerous illness, we were invited to witness the procession from 56, Ludgate Hill, the offices of Good Words and the Sunday Magazine. We were then living in Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate, and we were advised that, as our way would be hampered both by crowds and barricades, we had better put in an early appearance. So we arrived in Ludgate Hill soon after St. Paul’s clock struck 6 a.m. We were not at all too soon; the street was already full, and we heard afterwards that some of the people had taken up their positions the night before, and had come well provided with food! Among the guests at our destination we were not the first. A party of four was before us—three ladies and a gentleman. We were unknown to each other, but, being shut up together in the otherwise empty room, it seemed only proper that we should exchange slight civilities, and accordingly my husband addressed the gentleman with some remark about the crowd. The only answer was a growl, and we made no further advance. This gentleman was a man of about thirty, wearing a short jacket and a soft rough hat, and he had his hands in his pockets. One of the three ladies was decidedly elderly, plain in dress and appearance, and not conciliatory in demeanour. The youngest lady was little more than a girl. The intermediate lady had a sweet face and a gentle manner. Such were the observations I made, not dreaming who these people were. I was much interested when I learned that they were Robert Buchanan, his mother, wife, and sister-in-law.
     Afterwards, when the rooms filled with people—all artists or authors and their belongings—I did not see Robert Buchanan enter into conversation with anybody. I saw his wife speak to one and another, and I heard his mother addressing Miss Strahan in a way that caused some of us to whisper to each other, with some secret rejoicing, that she was letting the publisher’s sister know that she was the poet’s mother!
     I own I was disappointed in the appearance and manners of Robert Buchanan, for whose work I had had an intense admiration ever since Mrs. S. C. Hall had lent me “Undertones,” with its poignant dedication. That dedication, “To David in Heaven” I had copied out and had preserved among my literary treasures. My admiration had been increased by “London Poems,” with their keen and fearless sympathy with what lies in the depths of human life.
     I had, however, heard from Mrs. S. C. Hall that Robert Buchanan was a young man of forbidding manners. She knew him during his very brief time of struggle, when he and David Gray were living together. He sent some poems to the St. James’s Magazine, which she was then editing. She told me that Mr. Maxwell, the proprietor of the magazine, had treated his young contributor with an inconsideration amounting almost to cruelty, and that, Robert Buchanan having appealed to her, she had spoken to the publisher very plainly.

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