Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the Brave New Victorian World
by R. A. Forsyth
From Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 9, No. 4, Nineteenth Century.
(Autumn, 1969), pp. 647-657.

Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the
Brave New Victorian World

R. A. FORSYTH

     The characteristic Victorian conflict between intellectual convictions and spiritual aspirations sprang from the need to accommodate the newly emergent concept of Nature. This concept had dual origins—evolutionism and industrial technology—and demanded adjustment of the traditional relationship between God, Man, and Nature. The man-made industrial city became the visible symbol of the new relationship. Buchanan reflected the dilemma, more particularly in The City of Dream. In the section “City Without God” the poet presents a type of scientific-humanist Utopia, the opposite, it seemed, of contemporary London from which he had fled. Unexpectedly, however, he rejects this city, seeing it as the epitome of rationalism and materialism, philosophies which offered no satisfaction in those aspirations to immortality which were his real motivation. Accordingly he also rejected political activism as mere socialistic tinkering with the grand movement of evolution, unable to appreciate the “evolutionary” nature of political legislation. He resolved the anomaly by identifying God and City as being alike hostile to spiritual man, with thaumaturgic Christ becoming a humanist opponent of the Father’s implacable “laws.” But Buchanan’s resolution was only partial because the superseded concept of a beneficent dispensation unconsciously remained his chief emotional solace in the brave new Victorian world.

          ONE OF THE CENTRAL concerns of the Victorian Age was the cosmological problem of defining man’s place in the emergent natural dispensation. This new concept of Nature had dual origins. On the one hand it resulted from the multifarious scientific speculation and theorizing comprehended under the term “evolutionism”; and, on the other, from the harnessing of steam for locomotion and industry that led to vast economic expansion. Furthermore these origins were interrelated. For that harnessing not only endowed men with a seemingly godlike control of time and space, but led also to the concomitant spread of cities of unprecedented size and complexity. Hitherto the English ethos had been essentially rural and God-oriented, enshrined in a pattern of values and attitudes rooted in the soil, and ritualistically determined by the cyclic demands of the seasons. With the emergence of the new man-made urban-industrial environment, however, this traditional ethos was steadily discredited as the real context of human endeavor. Understandably, the ⁶⁴⁸ supplanted ethos became increasingly associated by many with nostalgia for a lost paradise of tranquil stability. And such feelings were heightened by the broad acceptance of the Romantic philosophy of natural idealism, more especially as presented by Wordsworth. Nostalgia for a golden era buried in the life of the past clearly informs, for instance, Matthew Arnold’s characteristic advice to his Scholar-Gipsy to “Fly hence. . . . Plunge deeper in the bowering wood!” that he might escape the contamination of “this strange disease of modern life.” The industrial city, in short, came to be the visible symbol of the reversal of the time-honored relationship between God, Man, and Nature, necessitating in the process a new configuration of the components of that fundamental trinity. In turn, to revert to the dual origins, that necessity was heightened by the sense of human alienation from an “evolutionary” universe which seemed no longer to be controlled by a beneficent deity intimately concerned with the redemption of individual souls, but was governed rather by chance and amoral processes through “laws” indifferent both to spiritual idealism and justice. And this sense of alienation was aggravated by the realization that its recognition was suffered by no creature other than man, who was also, ironically, Nature’s evolved masterpiece.
     Arnold defined his times as those in which “the dialogue of the mind with itself”¹ commenced. In terms of the reversal outlined above, that dialogue most commonly took the form of a tormented struggle between emotional needs and intellectual persuasions, fought on the field of a discredited theodicy. This struggle is plainly revealed in the poetry of Robert Buchanan because the intense emotional demands of his sensibility in contrast to his fiercely intellectual upbringing rendered him peculiarly vulnerable to its torments. In particular I wish to look at “The City Without God,” part of a long poem The City of Dream, which was singled out from current poetry by W. E. H. Lecky in a speech delivered at the Royal Academy Banquet in 1888 as affording the best proof “that the artistic spirit in English Literature has not very seriously decayed.”²
     Buchanan was born in 1841 to parents of strong Socialist

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¹ M. Arnold, Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853).
² Lecky was not alone in his praise of Buchanan’s poetry. Arthur Symons observed that “from the first his books were received with serious attention; they were considered, often praised greatly, often read largely. Whenever he had anything to say, people listened.” (Studies in Prose and Verse. London, 1904, pp. 121-122.) His early poetry was highly regarded by R. H. Hutton (see A. Stodart-Walker, Robert Buchanan: the Poet of Modern Revolt. London, 1901, p. 42) and by Robert Browning and G. H. Lewes (see H. Jay, Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships. London, 1903, ch. X); and even Rossetti, at the height of the notorious “Fleshly School” controversy, acknowledged the poetic talents of his assailant (see H. Murray, Robert Buchanan: A Critical Appreciation, and Other Essays. London, 1901, p. 8).

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⁶⁴⁹ and Free Thought leanings. As a young man his father, a poor tailor of Ayrshire, had been so deeply impressed by Robert Owen that he threw up his livelihood in order to become an apostle walking in his master’s footsteps and preaching the new and often unpopular gospel of Socialism. In 1840 he married Margaret Williams, whose father, a philanthropic solicitor of Stoke-upon-Trent, was an advanced freethinker from whom she inherited a firm Socialist orientation towards social, political, and religious questions. With parents such as these, Buchanan was inevitably reared in the sternest traditions of sceptical unbelief. And yet despite his upbringing, and despite his love for his parents and respect for their views, particularly those of his mother, he early and unexpectedly discovered within himself “the sweet spirit of natural piety” ³ as he later described his burgeoning religious sentiments. This emotional aspect of his temperament may well have been nurtured by the social persecution he suffered as the son of a notorious unbeliever in Sabbatarian Glasgow—“Don’t play with yon laddie,” his potential playfellows warned each other, “his father’s an infidel.” ⁴ It did not, however, result in any enduring religious persuasion as regards the spiritual significance of his individual existence. And personal immortality became the crux of dissatisfaction with the emergent dispensation because it pointed up man’s painful awareness of death in relation to his imprisonment within the amoral “laws” of nature which implied a final involvement rather than the prospect of eventual liberation from them into eternal life. “What is left if we abandon the idea of eternal life, as reason teaches us to do?” asks Buchanan, distraught at the death of his adored mother: “Only a horrible nightmare—a devil’s dream.” ⁵ The anguished struggle between emotions and intellect is here clearly apparent, and Buchanan spent most of his

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³ H. Jay, p. 19.
⁴ H. Jay, p. 18.
⁵ H. Jay, p. 280.

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⁶⁵⁰ poetical life attempting to resolve this dilemma by trying to formulate a theodicy viable in the urban-industrial environment. But, as I have suggested, that environment was so opposite to the “Eden” of the rural ethos with which the Godhead had been traditionally identified, as to equate for Buchanan and many contemporaries the dreadful City with Hell, and to make of the growing complexity resulting from industrialization something of a latter-day Fall. For despite his conscientious efforts from an early stage in his career to turn from the “outmoded” rural ethos to become a type of urban Wordsworth by singing “the unsung city’s streets,” ⁶ we find his emotional affiliations to that superseded ethos so deeply entrenched that in the end his intellectual resolve is frustrated.
     Sometimes, as in “Jane Lewson,” Buchanan reveals his underlying hostility to the city through oblique nostalgia for the simplicities of the countryside. More commonly, as in “Liz,” it is manifested in his heroising of its downtrodden products, whose dignity he thereby hoped to restore whilst at the same time indicting the savagery of the environment that caused the corruption of their innate nobility. In “The City Without God,” however, the criticism is more direct. The poem as a whole, The City of Dream, which the poet described as “an epic of modern revolt and reconciliation,” ⁷ takes the characteristically Romantic-Victorian form of a spiritual search, often to establish personal identity, and is cast in terms of a journey. In this case the poet, in the person of Ishmael, sets out from the earthly city of his birth on a pilgrim’s progress to discover the Heavenly City of which he has heard rumor. The search, by being presented as an exploration for the traditional City of God rather than any other objective, suggests indirectly the “unholiness” of contemporary London from which he departs. The tenor of the poem is defined in Buchanan’s own words as an attempt “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.” ⁸ Ishmael’s search is largely unsuccessful, for, as the title suggests, he comes in the end to the bitter realization that “all his spirit’s life-long quest hath been only a Dream within a Dream.” ⁹ It is towards

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⁶ “Bexhill.1866.”
⁷ Quoted by A. Stodart-Walker, p. 12.
⁸ A. Stodart-Walker, p. 12.
⁹ Quoted from Buchanan’s “Argument,” prefixed to the poem.

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⁶⁵¹ the conclusion of his long allegorical journey that he comes upon the remarkable “City Without God,” which, in the appearance of its broad streets and handsome buildings, in the health and gaiety of its inhabitants, in the lavish social amenities and absence of poverty, seemed the opposite of its Victorian counterparts, the epitome indeed of what the Hammonds described as “the idea of the town as a focus for civilization, a centre where the emancipating and enlightening influences of the time can act rapidly and with effect, the school of social arts, the nursery of social enterprise, the witness to the beauty and order and freedom that men can bring into their lives.” ¹⁰ At first sight this City seems to be a simple scientific-humanist Utopia, in its conception strongly under the influence of Comte and “my beloved master, Herbert Spencer.” ¹¹ And yet, despite his invariably hostile criticism of the inhumanity and squalor of contemporary cities, Buchanan unexpectedly rejects this imaginary City, making of it an inverted Utopia, an indictment of the spiritual effects of the rationalism and materialism which, from one aspect, were the resultant philosophies of the scientific discoveries on which industrial towns were built. For what initially delights Ishmael as a sort of Shelleyan heaven-on-earth is soon translated into an ironically “brave new world” whose ethos frustrates the religious aspirations to immortality which are the true motivation of his search. By rejecting the antiseptic sanity of this Godless city’s social and ethical constitution, Buchanan is, in fact, attempting to deny those frightening mutations in man’s traditional self-image which he felt resulted from the idea of scientific progress. This attitude is clearly similar to his placing, in his London Poems, the buoyant moral virtue of his underprivileged and browbeaten characters in opposition to the brutality of contemporary cities—a sort of variant on the Grail legend, whereby one proved in the perilous journey of life one’s essential humanity through at least moral victory, if no other, over hard times.
     For these reasons, then, Ishmael gains no permanent consolation from the sophisticated civic and leisure amenities and pastimes of the Godless city, where

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¹⁰ J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer 1760-1832. London, 1925, p. 53.
¹¹ Quoted by H. Jay, p. 140.

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never sound of war,                                                                              652
Clarion or trumpet, cry of Priest or King,
Came to disturb the City’s summer peace;
And never a sick face made the sunlight sad,
And never a blind face hunger’d for the light,
And never a form that was not strong and fair
Walked in the brightness of those golden streets.

To reject such humane and civilized advances seems perverse, but Buchanan is justified in doing so in the light of his view here of the organizing scientific spirit as the evil genie of the urban machine running amok to humanity’s detriment. This becomes apparent in the most “advanced” aspects of the social ethic—the euthanasia of infirm or defective infants, and the ritualistic vivisection of animals to demonstrate empirically for the gratification of assembled citizens the evolved biological supremacy of man. These are not freakish practices in the sense one would attribute to Frankenstein, nor are they wildly fanciful. Their significance, indeed, may best be understood in the light of present-day science fiction. For just as Kingsley Amis has described the current wide-spread production of this genre as the plotting of “new maps of hell,” ¹² so, likewise, Buchanan was exploring in his poem what he regarded as hellish, plotting fearfully man’s enforced wandering from the true image of himself. The form of inverted Utopia in which Buchanan cast his warning of the dangerous elements in uninhibited scientism has come to be the favored mode for such presentations, as one may judge, for instance, from the work of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Buchanan seems, indeed, to look forward with accuracy over a century to Nineteen Eighty-Four when we discover that the sinister psychology practised by O’Brien on Winston Smith to “persuade” rather than force him to conform to the Party ethic, is precisely that employed with frightening benevolence on Pilgrim Ishmael by the Citizens when he protests at what strikes him as cruel, perverse, or obscene—“Give up the man” they mildly urge,

“We shall not slay him, but deliver him
To those who in our public hospitals
Are the approved physicians of the soul.”

     There is, however, another and equally revealing way of looking at “The City Without God.” Buchanan in presenting his

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¹² See K. Amis, New Maps of Hell. London, 1961, passim.

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⁶⁵³ poem in the form of an inverted Utopia, it is worth noting, was not writing within the supporting structure of a long-established literary convention, as the form, popular though it has subsequently become, seems to date only from the eighteenth century, with Swift as the pre-eminent exponent. Much more common, and usually in prose, were straight Utopian fictions such as Edward Bellamy’s famous Looking Backward, a mild socialist dream which appeared in the same year as Buchanan’s poem (1888). Although none of the available sources mentions it as fact, Buchanan’s poem in some major aspects of thought appears to be a direct response to Bellamy’s book. Partial confirmation of this might be seen in his hostile reference to Looking Backward in the Preface to his The Coming Terror and other Essays and Letters, published in 1891, and particularly in the title essay, which is a fierce attack against Socialism and serves as a prose counterpart to ‘The City of Dream.’ In the Preface he states the main contention of the book to be “that no amount of political or social tinkering will complete the process Nature chooses to work out by her own slow methods of conscientious evolution and that . . . by the emergence of Mob Morality and Mob Rule, those sublime methods are being indefinitely retarded, even occasionally reversed. . . . This tinkering will lead to the ‘new Reign of Terror’.” ¹³
     Here again, in this more political context, the stress of trying to retain a mental balance in the face of conflicting emotional demands is apparent in Buchanan’s fear of “tinkering” with a traditional view of social organization based on the myth of Natural Justice that was integral to the superseded ethos to which he continued unconsciously to adhere. His admiration of, and pity for, the city’s underprivileged individuals, and hopes for their betterment, as a result, could not extend to envisage political rumblings of discontent as an inevitable consequence of their corporate situation or, indeed, as the most likely means through which any amelioration of it might be effected. In short, he establishes a false differentiation between “social tinkering,” with its undertones of progressive legislation, and the grand inexorable movement of “conscientious evolution,” implying that the latter ought to be a process untrammelled by human intervention, and that the social and political affairs of men are not susceptible to its promise of improvement. That

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¹³ R. Buchanan, The Coming Terror and Other Essays and Letters. London, 1891, pp. 7 and 8.

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⁶⁵⁴ is, whilst protesting acceptance of evolutionary theory and its “sublime methods” of adaptation and survival, Buchanan seems blind to the general applicability of the principle of development the theory gives rise to. In this situation, then, he changes roles, and, as O’Brien here presents us, a century in advance, with a neat piece of protective “doublethink” which is perhaps the true source of his fulminations against “scientific” socialism: “No man would be a free agent. . . . He will breed according to legislative enactments. . . . Life will be superintended in all departments according to Acts of Parliament. . . . England will be well lighted, well drained, moral, conventional, an excellently-regulated Machine.” ¹⁴
     Such “doublethinking” as this illuminates the dilemma which forms the broad issue of our present investigation. For Buchanan’s typically Victorian problem is the attempted resolution of what emerges as the paradoxical position of man in the “evolutionary” dispensation—a creature whose spiritual aspirations appeared to be discredited by his intellectual discoveries. This becomes plain if we examine further his attempts to accommodate his intellectual “acceptance” of Darwinism to his unremitting emotional distaste for its supposed implications for spiritual man.
     In justifying his “The Wandering Jew” (1893) against charges of sacrilege, Buchanan wrote:

     “It is only in so far as Christianity is itself secular that it is of the slightest influence upon the age in which we live. . . . Mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into a science of life. . . . Human love and self-respect, human science and verification, human perception of the limitation of knowledge, have done more in half a century to justify God and prove the Godliness of life, than the doctrines of other-worldliness have done in nineteen hundred years.” ¹⁵

These views, if the italicized words were omitted, could, as Henry Murray observed, have been properly expressed by a scientific humanist such as Thomas Huxley, whose works Buchanan had almost certainly read, as he was ardently interested in contemporary scientific literature during the last thirty years of his life.¹⁶ But it is the incongruous presence of

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¹⁴ R. Buchanan, pp. 36-37.
¹⁵ Quoted by H. Murray, p. 108.
¹⁶ H. Murray, p. 94.

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⁶⁵⁵ those words, of course, that makes the statement strange and noteworthy. For they indicate Buchanan’s unsatisfied emotional need for religious direction in his life—“a dumb, wistful yearning . . . to something higher”¹⁷—despite the fact that he had intellectually rejected the “omnipotent Impotence”¹⁸ of the Creator. Buchanan, in fact, rationalizes his distaste for the remorseless processes of evolutionary development by identifying their seeming indifference to human beings as the work of a merciless Maker unable to alter the “laws” which regulate His Creation and which have as their highest achievement the anomaly of suffering human consciousness. God becomes for him “the principle of the All-Father, the egoistic principle of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.”¹⁹ This view is paralleled exactly by his disguised hostility to the industrial city which is also seen as the oppressor of downtrodden humanity. City and Creator, then, become associated, in terms of Progress and Evolution, as twin aspects of an autocratic Fatherhood as far removed from that benevolent Paternalism traditionally associated with the fading rural ethos as was the life of the slum-dweller from his idealized rural counterpart. Despite his hostility to the Godhead, however, Buchanan found his religious aspirations too strong to allow him to become a fully-fledged atheist. We see in Buchanan, as Henry Murray cogently describes it, “the spectacle of a man who, clinging with despairing grip to a shibboleth, yet frequently belabours the figure whose label is the very shibboleth itself.”²⁰
     The counterpart to Buchanan’s rejection of God, the malicious architect of evolutionary Nature, is the elevation of Christ, “The Wandering Jew,” the supreme figure of pity and love. Jesus, through his thaumaturgic power, is presented as humanity’s liberator from the stranglehold of implacable natural law, and becomes for Buchanan, therefore, a revolutionary secularist, an “audacious unbeliever” rather than the Son of the “inexplicable, pitiless God of the Universe.”²¹ “He led the war against Nature,” wrote Buchanan, “against the

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¹⁷ Quoted approvingly by Buchanan from a “Spectator” review of modern poetry, describing what he had achieved better than any of his contemporaries. H. Jay, p. 20.
¹⁸ H. Jay, p. 123.
¹⁹ Quoted by A. Stodart-Walker, p. 8.
²⁰ H. Murray, p. 97.
²¹ A. Stodart-Walker, p. 253.

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⁶⁵⁶ God of Nature . . . the great unknown God who is at once the master and servant of His own inexorable Will.”²² The divinity of Christ, that is, is epitomized in his essential humanity. And his unexpected lieutenant in the new “man-made” dispensation is Satan, whose rebellion against the Godhead is applauded as the precursor of Christ’s later “revolt.” Together they are presented as the main agents of enlightenment, exemplifying, as Archibald Stodart-Walker described Satan, “the spirit of Revolt, the spirit of Eclecticism, the spirit of Science as opposed to the spirit of Theology, the inspirer of research as opposed to the upholder of authority and tradition.”²³ And increasingly in late works such as The Earthquake, The Outcast, and The Devil’s Case, Buchanan identifies scientists, because of their explanation of natural laws, as the liberators of mankind from the servitude of God’s dispensation. One might be led to think, then, that he had satisfactorily resolved the great dilemma of his times by answering Tennyson’s question that had crystallized the problem, “Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams?”²⁴ But his answer is, in fact, more ingenious than satisfying. Revealed religion had been discredited for him by scientific discovery, and in his view, “if all the priceless enthusiasm, all the energy, all the effort, and time and money which have been wasted on the propaganda of revealed religion had been concentrated on the elucidation of the laws of nature, the culture of the intellect, and the relief and prevention of human suffering, in what a different world we should all be dwelling now!”²⁵ Despite such advanced views, however, he was unable finally to integrate the fact that it was precisely the elucidation of those laws that had resulted in the discredit of religion and the traditional view of nature, and had indirectly led to the establishment of the urban-industrial ethos. Equally he failed to realize that what he regarded as useless cruelty and suffering in nature was the basis of that very evolutionary amelioration in whose workings he recognized intellectually the source of progressive hopes for mankind. Indeed, the tension between his intellectual persuasions and his emotional commitments remains to the end. And it does so, as with many contemporaries, because of

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²² From Buchanan’s prose note to “The Ballad of Mary the Mother,” quoted by A. Stodart-Walker, p. 229.
²³ A. Stodart-Walker, p. 253.
²⁴ “In Memoriam,” section 55.
²⁵ Quoted by H. Murray, p. 113.

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⁶⁵⁷ the continuing emotional fascination for him of the superseded rural ethos legislated by a divine benevolence which led him to grapple with the contemporary cosmological problem in the context of a natural theology whose categories of thought had been rendered obsolete by the principle of evolutionary development.

UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

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