Robert Buchanan by Rev. A. L. Lilley
From The Humane Review (January, 1902), pp. 302-310.

ROBERT BUCHANAN.*

     * Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. 2 vols. Chatto and Windus. 1901.

     AFTER nearly forty years of ceaseless literary toil, Robert Buchanan has passed away, leaving the world in a mood of pathetic perplexity as to what it ought to have made of him or even what it is to make of him now. It could not even in its dullest moods fail to realise the tempestuous and overwhelming force of the man. But it continued hesitant whether that force represented a permanent and vital power or the self-consuming throes of a fever-fit.
     Yet surely there never was poet concerning whose assured claim to that title there need have been less hesitation. To one at least of his admirers it seems that it was his very excellences which robbed him and still rob him of his due meed of appreciation. He was excellent in ways of which his time recked little or was frankly contemptuous. His genius was careless and liberal, with the carelessness and liberality of Nature. He squandered himself recklessly and with the magnificent unconsciousness of those who have much to squander. And this did not suit the mood of a time which esteems as the chief of virtues a studied aloofness from real feeling, a delicate sensitiveness of self-expenditure. Again, Buchanan was by far the most simple and natural of modern poets. He was filled with a great fervour of faith and feeling which had to find expression, and nothing was farther from his mind or bent than that study of fantastic literary grimace which passes to-day for a devotion to style. His poems have the looseness and copiousness of Nature, but they have too its life. They are not trimmed and trained to the requirements of the latest fashion in poetic parterres.
     But the chief obstacle to the immediate recognition of Buchanan’s greatness may also prove to be the surest guarantee of his eventual triumph. He has defied classification, and by his own obstinate individuality of faith and feeling he must live or die. It is not indeed expected of the poet that he should rigidly conform to the respectable beliefs of his time. The world of ordinary readers has its code of literary live-and-let-live. It is graciously patient of the heresy which clothes itself in polite and well-turned phrases. It has a satisfying secrecy of delight in the heresy which wears with success a roguish mask of orthodoxy. But it must draw the line at a heresy which insists that it is heretical. And Buchanan, it must be admitted, kept it pretty busily engaged drawing lines throughout a long literary life. He could not endure to be suspected of belonging to any party or school. The moment a belief ceased to be an object of persecution, it lost some of its charm for him. He was indeed what he called himself, an “Ishmael of Song,” and the breath of his intellectual life was the belief to which men were afraid or unable to be fair.
     Perhaps it is not wonderful that a man who so consistently and strenuously ranged himself against every established opinion, or proved himself fair and charitable to a belief which was passing through its time of struggle and trial only to assail it with compensating bitterness in its day of success, should have earned at last a reputation for invincible perversity. But natural, inevitable indeed, as it was, considering how superficial and impatient contemporary criticism usually is, it was nevertheless wholly unjust. There may have been a certain measure of perversity in Robert Buchanan’s nature. The circumstances of his literary life, lived at a white heat of polemical fervour, may have accentuated whatever natural perversity was his. Buchanan did not escape the defects of his qualities any more than the least of us. But intellectual perversity, so far as he suffered from it, was in him a most pardonable defect to those who recognised the true measure of the quality which it relieved. He was indeed an eclectic, and gloried in his eclecticism. But he gloried in it only because it was an expression of his sympathy with the eclecticism of humanity at large. He felt so much with the race, with the strugglings and aspirations of men as men, that he half forced himself to think with them too in all their varieties of thought. The only intellectual attitude which he rejected, but against it he launched his inexhaustible store of anathemas, was the attempt to give supremacy to any one explanation of the experiences of life. He could tolerate no Cæsar on the intellectual throne, and as men are wont to depose one only to find themselves conferring a more assured autocracy upon another, they always found in Buchanan the man who showed them what they were doing and so made it at least difficult for them to do it. He waged war with every established tyranny, and if his wars were many, it was because of the numberless tyrannies which he found men contentedly enduring and not at all because of any special delight of his own in war.
     The secret of Buchanan as man and as poet was his love of the weak, the down-trodden, the depressed. For him the key to all human duty lay in the capacity to see and to answer the claims of weakness. His own poetry is one long passionate appeal on behalf of all weak and forgotten things, a passionate protest against the self-contained unthinking march of mere strength. He arraigned the unconscious movements of nature, its careless, heartless masteries, before the tribunal of man’s heart. He elicited the deep inner pity that lurks in every heart that is beginning to be human, and set it with assurance on the throne of universal judgment. He was so sure that all who had chosen to suffer for others, all who had merged their life in a close identity with the pain and defeat of others, were the true exponents of the world’s justice. For if that were not so, then indeed was there no justice. But his surest and most abiding faith was that just this identification of strength with weakness, this sacrifice of strength for the sake of weakness, was the only solution of life’s mystery. That solution indeed was not able to justify itself to the intellect. It could not command, or even very boldly appeal to the beliefs of men. But at least it was the matter of their unconquerable hope. Only through it could the huge evil of life be faced, and that evil become the stuff of an ultimate good.
     Buchanan had taught in song for twenty years before Huxley stated it in prose the great doctrine that human ethics is the reversal of the evolutionary method. That indeed was the starting-point of the poet’s faith, and on that he always laid the greatest stress. Like the Gnostics of the first Christian centuries he rejects the God of Creation as the object of human love or reverence. The God to whom his heart turns, to whom he would turn the hearts of his brothers, is the God of Redemption. And this God he finds to be working out His purposes, to be unfolding as it were His essential being, in the movement of the life of humanity. All the great myths of love and sacrifice, like the story of Balder, are the witnesses of that life which is growing within life. The lives which have most suffered defeat for the sake of men, for the sake of pity and love and helpfulness, are the martyred ministers of its growth. The process of redemption, of the eliciting of that which is enduring in life, is just the reversal of the process of natural evolution. That is the constant starting-point of all the poet’s feeling. Yet he did not by any means allow himself to harden this feeling into a rigorous logical formula. On the contrary, he revolted against every attempt which had been made in the history of human thought to lay the yoke of such a formula upon man’s mind and will. The logical outcome, in belief, of such a feeling is asceticism, and against asceticism in all its forms Buchanan protested as vehemently as he had protested against submission to the heartless evolutionary process. He felt that there was some reconciliation of hedonism and asceticism—of Paganism and Buddhism, let us say. He felt that asceticism in its extreme forms was practically a denial of life, and that the redemption in which it hoped was really a break which no consciousness could survive. With what healthy scorn Buchanan rejected this travesty of redemption, this attempt to discover or to gain a worthy life through despair of and contempt for the daily life men know, all can learn who will take the trouble to read his poem on Schopenhauer, which he calls “The New Buddha.” Buchanan looked to find the redemptive process somehow accomplished within the circle of that same evolutionary movement which in its naked pitilessness he had banned. Already he finds the life within the life committed to man. That is just the human secret. In man there is already by a more intimate guerdon of Nature the power of love, of sympathy, of helpfulness, which redeems the coarser methods of her first attempts at handing on the gift of life. It is to man that the enduring sense of Nature’s joy and beauty is entrusted, just as to him only is also given the full sense of Nature’s cruelty and ravin and ugliness. Life begins to redeem itself as soon as it is able to feel the need of redemption. And out of the strength with which it slew and wasted and lusted, it creates the force whose delight is to save and to love and make alive.
     This is something like the way in which Buchanan attempts the reconciliation of the lower and the higher processes in life—the process of the conservation of the individual life by itself at all risks, and the process of the redemption of higher individual powers by the sacrifice of lower, or of the saving of the weak by the self-sacrifice of the strong. The reconciliation indeed is never complete. The poet was too honest to pretend and too sincere to invent an intellectual certainty where there is only a certainty for the high moods of feeling and of hope. He was too much of a poet and too little of a philosopher to round off his hope, however high and assured, to a logical completeness. The difficulty of this reconciliation was so present to him that he often seemed to speak with two voices—a prose voice in which he acclaimed with a kind of courageous resignation the cruel truth of Nature’s ways which physical science had revealed, and the voice of the poet with which he adhered to every implacable protest against those ways. Now he seemed to regard the protest against Nature as futile and magnificently absurd, again as the only and the assured means of a new and higher development of her life. Now in his prose mood, his mood of despair, he would say: “Jesus was a man of a beautiful temperament, carried beyond himself by a false and sentimental conception of the mechanism of life. He uttered, no one so exquisitely, the human cry for a Divine Fatherhood. But unfortunately he appealed to Nature for corroboration of his appeal. Nature never answered him. Then, as now, she kept God’s secret.” But the poet’s voice would speak anon, and speak with a largeness and fulness which shamed prose out of its cold realities. As for instance, when he gives for answer to the question:—

“Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son?”
“In Him and in my Brethren every one:
The child of Mary who was crucified,
The gods of Hellas fair and radiant-eyed,
Brahm, Balder, Gautama, and Mahomet,
All who have pledged their gains to pay my debt
Of sorrows—all who through this world of dream
Breathe mystery and ecstasy supreme;
The greater and the less: the wise, the good,
Inheritors of Nature’s godlike mood;
In these I do believe eternally,
Knowing them deathless, like the God in me.”

     Or again where was the hope of a great and eternal birth, from the slow patient bitterness of humanity’s travailing, ever better expressed than here?—

“Where’er great pity is and piteousness,
     Where’er great Love and Love’s strange sorrow stay,
Where’er men cease to curse, but bend to bless,
     Frail brethren fashion’d like themselves of clay;

“Where’er the lamb and lion side by side
     Lie down in peace, where’er on land or sea
Infinite Love and Mercy heavenly-eyed
     Emerge, there stirs the God that is to be!

“His light is round the slaughter’d bird and beast
     As round the forehead of Man crucified,—
All things that live, the greatest and the least,
     Await the coming of this Lord and Guide;

“And every gentle deed by mortals done,
     Yea, every holy thought and loving breath,
Lighten poor Nature’s travail with this Son
     Who shall be Lord and God of Life and Death!”

     So that, after all, the doubt of Buchanan’s prose mood finds its answer in the certainty of Buchanan the poet. If it was unfortunate that Jesus appealed to Nature for corroboration of His appeal to a Divine Fatherhood, at least the mistake seems to have been only one of sex. For Nature is herself, the poet sees, in pangs of motherhood which have been relieved in such lives as Jesus lived and such unconquerable faith in life as He displayed.
     But Buchanan’s humanist ethics, his humanitarian fervour, were no mere passionless altruism produced in an emotional vacuum. He did hot hold that men would give their lives for others because they had no share in the lives of those others, but exactly because they had. For him the solidarity of life was complete. No life could be lived to itself or for itself. It  shared in all other achievement. It contributed to it. Loss or gain, salvation or damnation, were corporate experiences. They were indeed individual too, and individual primarily. For it is only the individual that feels the loss or grows by the gain. But he shares in loss and gain which seem to be beyond the range of his own making, and all he has done and been will appear as loss or gain in other life than his own. This solidarity of the deepest and most essential human fortunes is the key-note of many of Buchanan’s most characteristic poems. As early as the “Book of Orm,” written before he was thirty, he gave it mystical expression in a brief allegorical interlude which he titles “Sanitas.” It is worth quoting:—

“Dreamily, on her milk-white Ass,
Rideth the maiden Sanitas—
With zone of gold her waist is bound,
Her brows are with immortelles crowned:
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
Lower, lower, sinks the sun,
The white stars glimmer, one by one!

“Who sitteth musing at his door?
Silas, the Leper, gaunt and hoar;
Though he is curst in every limb,
Full whitely Time hath snowed on him—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
The Leper, drinking in the air,
Sits like a beast, with idiot stare.

“How pale! how wondrous! doth she pass,
The heavenly maiden Sanitas;
She looketh, and she shuddereth,
She passeth on with bated breath—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
His mind is like a stagnant pool,
She passeth o’er it, beautiful!

“Brighter, whiter, in the skies,
Open innumerable eyes;
The Leper looketh up and sees,
His aching heart is soothed by these—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
He looketh up with heart astir,
And every star hath eyes like her!

“Onward on her milk-white Ass
Rideth the maiden Sanitas.
The boughs are green, the grain is pearled,
But ’tis a miserable world—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
All o’er the blue above her, she
Beholds bright spots of Leprosy.”

     Again in his very latest volume of poems, published three years ago, he gives expression again and again to this community of the deeper human fortunes. Of the victims of human lust whom we contemptuously dismiss as “lost women” the passionate indignation of his heart utters the truth which ought to ensure them a refuge in every heart that still knows how to feel or to be just.

“How? Thou be saved, and one of these be lost?
     The least of these be spent, and thou soar free!
Nay! for these things are thou—these tempest-tost
     Waves of the darkness are but forms of thee.

“Shall these be cast away? Then rest thou sure
     No hopes abide for thee if none for these.
Would’st thou be healed? Then hast thou these to cure;
     Thine is their shame, their foulness, their disease.”

     And then in the poem which he calls “These Voices” he proclaims the identity of all human experience with himself. So far as he is failing to make it his own, he is losing his life. So far as he is powerless through failure of heart, or of knowledge, or of will, to enter into the stress of any living joy or sorrow, to penetrate the mystery of any living soul, he feels that it is his own life which is suffering failure and defeat.

“Hear the strong man in the dark for pity crying,
     Hear the foul man’s word of hate as he goes by thee;
Hear the shriek of trampled women, vainly flying
     From the phantoms that appal thee and defy thee!
     .          .          .          .          .          .          .          .          .

“All the foul things God would seem to put his ban on,
     All the fair things that would seem to have his blessing—
Without thee, yet within thee, O Buchanan,
     They are thronging, with a riddle for thy guessing.
     .          .          .          .          .          .          .          .          .

“Ah! the Voices! and the Faces!—wild and wan, on
     They are rushing, to destroy or to renew thee!
Like a foam-flake shalt thou vanish, O Buchanan,
     If but one of these is lost that cry unto thee!”

     It seems a pitiable futility of criticism that the one great poet of human hope and redemption who is at all worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with Robert Browning should have been relegated to a worse punishment than literary annihilation, viz., summary and impatient dismissal to the limbo of the second-rate singers of our time. Buchanan is sure of his rescue from this abode of darkness. In its own defence the new time will call to its aid, in the throes of spiritual pain through which it has to pass, one of the most strenuous, the most believing, and the most loving singers that the England of the second half of the nineteenth century knew. He foresaw its need better than most. He forefelt its pain better than any. He was free from the great vice of his own time, the cowardice that worshipped the tyrant of the actual until its indifference to all ideals became the creed by which it proposed to live. Because he believed in man’s divine struggle against the actual as the real key to the mystery of human life, because he believed that the growing and waning fortunes of that struggle were stuff for the noblest poetry, because he made of his own superb imagination a mint for this true coinage, he was depreciated and defamed by a narrow literary clique. But because he did all these things, the broad needs of human life in the coming years will claim him and justify him as a poet of prophetic vision and of enduring right to fame.

                                                                                                                                  A. L. LILLEY.

(Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan.)

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From Dramatic Criticism Vol. III, 1900-1901 by J. T. Grein
(London: Greening & Co. Ltd., 1902), pp. 233-237.

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS A DRAMATIST.

                                                                                                                              June 16, 1901.

I.

     In the days when wild storms were whirling around the devoted head of Mr. Clement Scott, because in that famous interview he had stated things which perhaps had better remained unsaid, it is reported that Mr. Robert Buchanan exclaimed, “Ah! they are quite right, there are plenty of virtuous women on the English stage, but only half-a-dozen actresses.” It characterises the man. He was always dramatic, trenchant, mordant. What he said was invariably clever, but under a multitude of words he hid an inner meaning which betokened a somewhat soured, and not invariably just, view of the world in general. By nature impulsive, romantic, bellicose, Robert Buchanan could never let well alone, and fighting was to him the breath of his nostrils. There is scarcely a literary man of distinction, certainly not a well-known critic, in London with whom Robert Buchanan has not had his skirmishes and his battles. He resented Archer’s adverse criticisms of his plays with ponderous assaults not altogether of an impersonal nature; and if Archer once called him a “cuttle-fish,” he fairly represented the position which Robert Buchanan then occupied in the aquarium of the literary world. Robert Buchanan has belaboured George Moore; he has denounced Clement Scott, for whose fearlessness as a critic he had always sincere respect until a play written for Mrs. Langtry provoked an unfavourable notice. Then Robert, irate to bursting, stepped upon the stage, a weighty manuscript in his hand, and spoke to the audience words which amounted to this—that he was proud to be hated and persecuted by a man like the dramatic critic of the Daily Telegraph. Now, as a matter of fact, Mr. Clement Scott had mostly been lenient to the dramatic work of Robert Buchanan, and will probably be consoled by the idea that he is not the only member of the critical fraternity whose hatred was preferred to his sympathy. From time to time Mr. Robert Buchanan, in these very columns, made slighting references to the work of the present writer, and although I suspect that he had a sneaking fondness for my method, he never neglected to point out that somewhere there must be a “bee in my bonnet,” the particular species of apiculture being called, Apis Ibsensis. Personally, I did not mind this at all, but what did grieve me in the manner of his attack was that Robert Buchanan often gave vent to his feelings to such an extent that he even once assailed a successful woman in her family circumstances. I refer to Mrs. Craigie, whose great success in “The Ambassador” entitled her to take rank among our dramatists. This so angered Mr. Buchanan that he devoted an entire article not only to demolishing the play, but to ridiculing the lady because she was a favourite of society and her father a successful manufacturer of a patent medicine. Through all this there ran a feeling which, in an ordinary human being, we would call not merely jealousy, but by a name less condoning and more ungraceful. But Robert Buchanan was not an ordinary man, and in his heart of hearts I do not think he was even a jealous man. He laboured, and not wrongly, under the impression that the world did not understand him—that it did not esteem him at his proper value, and was ever ready to proclaim “prophet” the one who happened to be the spoilt child of popular favour. He called the world badly stage-managed, and perhaps from his point of view he was right. There were days when Robert Buchanan was almost the leading star in our poetic firmament, and when there was every reason to believe that one day the laurels of the Court-poet would crown his brow. There were days when writing “God and the Man” and “The Shadow of the Sword,” both romances of great power, he bade fair to be one of the most prominent novelists of the period. There were days when, adapting Fielding’s “Tom Jones” to the stage in that charming play “Sophia,” which ran for 500 nights, there was every hope that Robert Buchanan would be the champion of a rejuvenated romantic drama. None of these hopes have been entirely fulfilled, although it can hardly be said that they were wholly blighted. In every branch of literature, as a poet, as a novelist, as an essayist, as a dramatist, Robert Buchanan has done some work which is far above the average, which belongs to literature and deserves to outlive its author. Curiously enough, with all these splendid gifts, this unrivalled productiveness, this facility for wielding the pen and generating thought, the work of Robert Buchanan has not rooted among the multitude, nor found among the literary world the recognition it deserved. To say that in his case it was not the work itself, but the man, who was at fault, is to endorse in a qualified manner the words cited above—that, with regard to some of us players, the world is indeed badly stage-managed.

II.

     I must leave it to others to express their opinion on the poet and the novelist—my domain in these columns is the drama, and about Robert Buchanan as a dramatist I will say a few words. Letting my thoughts drift back over a space of sixteen years, and comparing the output of Robert Buchanan with that of all his contemporaries, I arrive at the conclusion that as far as productiveness is concerned he is facile princeps. He has written more than Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones together. He has produced melodramas by the dozen, adaptations by the score, comedies in quantity; he has written in prose and in verse; he has adapted novels of the eighteenth century and his own, has rendered famous French plays familiar to English audiences; and there was a time when almost every new calendar month brought a fresh play from his pen into temporary prominence. I say, designedly, temporary, for the greater part of his work was temporary, if not ephemeral in the strictest sense of the word, since he enjoyed almost unprecedented runs at the Vaudeville with his adaptations of “Sophia,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” and such like, while his melodrama, “Alone in London,” is still running merrily in the provinces. But for all that, few of his histrionic efforts have come to stay in the Pantheon of our dramatic literature.
     I have often meditated why this is so. Buchanan undoubtedly had the gift of the theatre. His command of language was forcible and abundant. He had an eye for the picturesque, and his vein of sentiment was rich if it was not deep. His dexterity was uncommon. According to his own confession, when busy in the work of adaptation, he never followed the original slavishly, but perused it once or twice, then clapped the book to, and straightway reconstructed the play off his own bat. And yet, endowed with all these master qualities, most of Robert Buchanan’s stage-work was unsatisfactory. You felt, as it were, that there was a something missing—an indescribable something, lacking which, one’s attention, momentarily caught, was not so strongly held as it should be by work well above the commonplace. After much reflection I believe that his deficiency is best defined as want of stamina. His first and foremost aim seemed to be to render his plays picturesque and correct in form, while he was also at pains to give his characters plausibility by putting into their mouths long explanations of their acts. The result of this was, inevitably, a certain ponderosity of style which was fatiguing, not to say irritating. Moreover, the desire to render the drama itself subservient to its form, induced him to leave much unexplained which, though it may have been clear to himself, was not so to the audience. Thus in nearly every play of his there was an air of unreality which frequently spoilt its chances of success. His last acts were mostly inconclusive, and brought a well-worked-up action to a lame termination, and as in his plays he was over anxious not to offend our moral susceptibilities, he frequently broke nature on the wheel in order to give that tone which he believed to be in harmony with the ideas of his audiences. A glaring instance of this method of working was his adaptation of Daudet’s “Fromont Jeune,” anglicised as “Partners,” which, after a beginning almost as charming as the book itself, drifted into painful sentimentality.
     If much cannot be said of his dramatic work in general—if most of it has gone the way of all flesh—there are at least some of his plays which, if mentioned, will call up pleasant recollections. I have already spoken of “Sophia” and “Alone in London”—a most thrilling melodrama which I have seen half a dozen times with pleasure—and I would add to them his delightful play “Sweet Nancy,” his original though somewhat hyperfanciful “Charlatan,” his extremely clever adaptation of “A Man’s Shadow,” which added lustre to Mr. Tree’s career, and his last two comedies, “The Romance of a Shopwalker” and “Two Little Maids from School” (“Les Demoiselles de St. Cyr,” by Dumas), both of which reminded us that, after a long silence, there was life in the old dramatist yet. The stage, therefore, owes its little debt of gratitude to the poet who is gone; but, even more than the stage, the actors are indebted to Robert Buchanan. He has given innumerable chances to our players, and more than one reputation—I need but refer to Miss Winifred Emery—found its basis in the work of a man whose pugnacity often led his critics to do him scant justice. He was a strong figure in our dramatic world, and, if not altogether a sympathetic one, the fault was not entirely his. He wanted “stage management” in many ways, like the rest of the world of which he complained so bitterly.

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