HARRIETT JAY BOOK REVIEWS

2. Two Men and a Maid (1881) to Robert Buchanan (1903)

Two Men and a Maid: A Tale (1881)

The Graphic (17 December, 1881, Issue 629)

     MISS HARRIETT JAY, having achieved a foremost place among writers of Irish fiction, has in “Two Men and a Maid” (3 vols. : F. V. White and Co.) entered upon a deeper and wilder exploration of human passion than she has hitherto attempted. Her latest novel is a portraiture of jealousy in its most extreme form. It need not be said that the subject is not attractive in itself, and that whatever attraction the strongest hand can bestow upon it is of the nature of fascination.It must not be supposed that the exposure of Richard Glamorgan’s self-torturing soul, until it becomes crazed well-nigh to murder, affords a pleasant spectacle. But it is a terribly fascinating one, and gains in effect from the extraordinary skill with which Miss Jay has kept the most consuming and overwhelming passion well to its own side of the line that divides it from insanity. Glamorgan is a passionate self-tormentor, seeking for the one woman whom he can trust, and determined, with or without cause, to find himself deceived. He can love with his whole life: but with him, as he says of himself, love does not mean faith, but jealousy. He plots a hideously cruel stratagem to test whether the love of the woman who has given him her whole heart is great enough to endure beyond the grave. By the extreme of poetical justice, the plot fails, or seems to fail, and three lives at least are destroyed or ruined for ever. But it is less in the outline of her plot than in her mastery over the extremes of tragic passion and over the most violently contrasted characters that Miss Jay’s strength displays itself most thoroughly. Nothing can be more dramatic than the contrast between Alice and Glamorgan—between the man who imprisons her life in, and by means of, the gloom of his own, and the girl, weak and gentle by nature, but stronger in her very feebleness than his seemingly greater strength could dream. It is probably merely a coincidence that the quaint sound of the title, “Two Men and a Maid” should, by echoing the “Man and a Maid” in Tennyson’s “Maud,” suggest also that kindred study of self-torture.But nevertheless, whether purposely allusive or not, the title is, from this point of view, singularly well chosen. Compared with the former works of the authoress of “The Queen of Connaught” this novel must be pronounced second to none.It is more dramatically complete and shows even extraordinary capacity for dealing with the greater passions, by means not only of the power that comes from insight, but also of the subtle touches derived from thought and study. A little more self-restraint in description, a little more accuracy in outward matters, fewer lurid effects, and more frequent gleams of sunshine, are still needed at her hands.But, even without these, “Two Men and a Maid” is something more than a merely good and powerful novel. In what respects it is more, no reader will fail to understand.

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The Scotsman (22 December, 1881 - p. 3)

Two Men and a Maid: A Tale. By Harriet Jay, author of “The Queen of Connaught,” &c. &c. Three Volumes. London: F. V. White & Co.

     It is not often that a book is produced with a more wildly extravagant plot and development than those which Miss Jay has embodied in Two Men and a Maid. The hero is a certain Richard Gloucester, a gloomy, suspicious, hot-tempered man, who has nevertheless contrived to win the love of a beautiful and sweet Welsh girl, Alice Chepstow, the daughter of a poor vicar. Mr Gloucester, in an earlier part of his career, has ruined his fortunes for the sake of a woman who, in the hour of the adversity he had incurred for her sake, showed that it was not himself but his money that she loved, and calmly deserted him. This makes him almost insanely distrustful of Alice’s sincerity. He goes out to China to retrieve his estate, which, though large, is mortgaged up to the hilt. The understanding is, that in nine months he will come back for Alice, marry her, and take her with him to his place of Eastern exile. Before the expiration of this fixed time, however, news comes that he has been murdered by pirates in the China seas. The shock to Alice is terrible, for her love for Gloucester has been deep and intense. She is gradually recovering her physical health, however, when a new complication arises. Gloucester’s lawyer, a man of the name of Tremaine, is the real owner of the mortgages on his estate. By the will of the supposed dead man, Alice has an interest in the property unless or until she marries. Mr Tremaine has a direct interest in hastening that event, and he is taking measures to that end; but he is soon spurred on by a stronger motive than the desire of pecuniary gain. His one child, a daughter, to whom he is passionately devoted, has long loved Gloucester; and when that gentleman, as every novel reader will have foreseen, returns to England, though in a shockingly mutilated condition, Tremaine plots, on the one hand, to make Alice Chepstow believe that Gloucester has never really loved her with an honest love, and, on the other, to persuade Gloucester that Alice is already preparing to console herself for his loss. He is the better able to carry out this design because Gloucester, with his usual tendency to morbid suspicion, keeps the secret of his return, and goes down to the place of Alice’s residence in disguise to act as a spy on his unfortunate betrothed. Alice’s love for him is really unabated; but she is induced by Tremaine’s machinations to lose her faith that he had died true to her, and is persuaded by her relatives to consent to marriage with another and very eligible suitor, who has loved her long and ardently. Gloucester contrives to carry her off a few hours after the marriage ceremony has been performed. The only consolation he derives from this infamous act is to find that her love for him is still unabated; but he is obliged to restore her to her heart-broken husband, and she very soon afterwards dies—which is, indeed, all that is left for her to do. This preposterous story is told with a certain amount of narrative and dramatic vigour; but no literary power could give real interest or vitality to a plot which is one long violation of probability. It is impossible for the reader to have the smallest sympathy with the personages of the tale, most of whom would inevitably, in real life, be consigned to a lunatic asylum before they had committed half the follies here ascribed them. Alice is too colourless a character to arouse any interest, and Richard Gloucester is simply a monstrosity—a sort of caricature of Rochester in “Jane Eyre,” with none of that personage’s redeeming traits.

[Press notices for Two Men and a Maid printed in the endpapers of
My Connaught Cousins (London: F. V. White and Co., 1883).]

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My Connaught Cousins (1883)

The Academy (23 December, 1882)

My Connaught Cousins. In 3 vols. By Harriett Jay. (White.)

     There was no necessity for a prefatory note by Mr. Robert Buchanan to My Connaught Cousins; the book is quite pleasant and quite intelligible enough to stand on its own merits. It is written with a lively and intelligent sympathy with the Irish people by one who evidently enters into the tragic elements of the Irish character arising from the impulsive warmth of feeling and incompleteness of development, which must leave its destiny a question not to be solved in any time near our own, but still to call out the disinterested efforts and fruitful sympathy of leaders of the future. Jack Stedman, the hero, is invited to a typical Irish home, full of that joyous hospitality, that courteous kindliness and perfect freedom, which make up the associations which most people have with Irish visits. Six delightful cousins vie in their efforts to spoil him; and, of course, Oona, the most beautiful, is the heroine. The prospects of the book looked doubtful when Jack set himself to read Oona’s MS.; but her story is better than anything Jack writes of his own; in fact, it becomes plain that his visit is chiefly a framework to introduce these somewhat wild, but interesting, Irish stories. Oona’s tale of the two brothers; Nora’s, of “The Maid of Cruna Island;” and, best of all, Kathleen’s, of “Rose Merton,” are well worth reading—the last too sadly worth remembering in the light of recent Irish affairs. In addition to the stories with which he is regaled, Jack Stedman becomes interested in the characters around him, and has some admirable opportunities of studying the landlord question (which he leaves with most disheartening results, we must confess) and the customs and claims so dear to the hearts of a people who can never be rightly judged until they are seen and known in their own homes. There is little artistic effort, but there is genuine pathos and the sympathetic feeling which goes far to solving vexed questions, in My Connaught Cousins.

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The Daily News (29 December, 1882 - Issue 11453)

RECENT NOVELS.
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     We should have thought that the original power and intrinsic worth of Miss Harriett Jay’s Irish romances would have made their way with the public without the aid, if aid it be, of expostulation or exhortation from her friends. Her brother-in-law, Mr. Robert Buchanan, has, however, deemed it desirable to prefix a prefatory note to her last novel, “My Connaught Cousins” (3 vols., F. V. White and Co.), in which he disclaims, on the author’s account, any hostile feeling to Irish nationality, and utters a protest against what he calls the neglect with which some, at any rate, of her books have been received. This seems to us surprising, for, while Miss Jay’s stories have received an amount of opposition which is inevitable to works dealing with disturbed political questions, neglect is the last condition we should have believed them abandoned to. We have been under the impression that they were widely read and exceedingly well-known. No one could write a novel about Ireland and he Irish of the present day which would be worth reading if it did not contain views which would be contradicted by one side or the other. Miss Jay’s novel “The Priest’s Blessing” presented a view of the relations of the peasantry to their priesthood and the nature of the influence of the priest which must inevitably have aroused opposition only bitterer for the evident sincerity of the author’s conviction. It was as Mr. Buchanan says, a “powerful social study,” and, though some readers thought it mistaken or one-sided, most people thought it worth reading. Perhaps there is no country which presents at the moment so many and so widely-differing social aspects as Ireland, and about which so many positively true and absolutely different notions can be expressed. It all depends on the point of view. In “My Connaught Cousins,” as in previous works, Miss Jay exhibits a generous and warm sympathy with the suffering people and a keen observation of the temperament, at any rate, of the class her story lies amongst. To say that the peasants of her Connaught country are in many ways very unlike the peasants of Ulster is only to re-state the truism that Ireland is a country of self-contradictions. In the main the qualities of the Celtic temperament are everywhere alike. But, to take only a small social question as a test of accuracy, we should like to know what the priests and doctors of Ireland generally would say to Miss Jay’s fourth chapter, in which Father John and Doctor Maguire are described as “martyred men, lugubrious, monosyllabic” because they were temporarily divorced from the whiskey bottle, only recovering their jocund spirits on breaking self-imposed pledges and swallowing quantities of raw spirits. “My Connaught Cousins” is not so much an ordinary novel as a series of local sketches, sometimes, as in that we have just alluded to, a little over-coloured, and occasionally showing traces of hasty arrangement. It fully displays, however, the author’s fresh and lively descriptive power and vivid style.

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The Graphic (6 January, 1883, Issue 684)

     Miss Harriett Jay, in “My Connaught Cousins” (3 vols.: F. V. White and Co.), has most effectively given some of the results of her intimacy with the people and the traditions of Western Ireland. Mr. Robert Buchanan’s preface is not needed to vouch for the sincerity and the power of the pen that wrote the “Queen of Connaught” and “The Priest’s Blessing,” or for the breadth of Miss Jay’s social and political sympathies. The present work is a collection of sketches and tales—how far the latter are collected, original, or adapted, Miss Jay best knows—illustrating life and character in the remotest West, arranged and connected by a pleasant holiday setting in the form of a prosperous love story. All this is managed with such skill and such variety of charm that few will be tempted to charge the general effect with being a little one-sided. The “stupid and cowardly Saxon” is, in truth, only too swift and too eager to sympathise with the characteristics of that island which is so resolutely determined to consider itself miscomprehended. Miss Jay has brought out all the good that thousands besides herself have found in the quick and warmhearted West, and those who know her scenery the best will thank her the most for confirming their own experiences in so adequate and so delightful a way.

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Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin) (30 November, 1883)

     The Messrs. F. V. White and Company, London, have issued three popular novels in a 2s. edition. “My Connaught Cousins,” by Harriet Jay, is already well known to us on account, mainly, of its strange mixture of ignorance and knowledge concerning the Irish character. The prefatory note, from the pen of Robert Buchanan, in which that gallant tries to explain away the seeming hostility displayed by the authoress towards our nationality, is quite a feature in the volume.—“My Sister the Actress,” by Florence Marryat, who ought, from experience, to know better than to use the present tense right through a long story, has been found, no doubt, to possess a fascinating influence over some minds.—“The Dean’s Wife,” by Mrs. Eiloart, can boast of a great many points in its favour. For all which reasons these books are welcome in the cheap form.

Through the Stage Door (1884)

The Graphic (19 January, 1884, Issue 738)

     At a time when everything relating to the stage is of such supreme interest as it is, Miss Harriett Jay’s “Through the Stage Door” (3 vols. : F. V. White and Co.) must be considered eminently well-timed. The inner life of the stage, painted by a successful actress, claims a popular value of its own, independently of the literary merits safe to be found in any work by the authoress of “The Queen of Connaught” and “The Dark Colleen.” Considered merely as a novel, we do not think that “Through the Stage Door” is nearly equal in merit to Miss Jay’s studies of modern Irish life and character. It is in the serious portraiture of strong passions among appropriate surroundings that she most excels, and something of the unreality of the stage attaches to the persons and situations of her new theatrical novel. Possibly, however, this was to some extent indispensable, especially as she has preferred to deal with her subject lightly.She has certainly not fallen into the grotesque and common error of idealising the still little known world that lies behind the scenes, nor is her picture likely to attract young ladies and gentlemen who are smitten with the taste of the hour. Her heroine, Lottie Fane, and Lottie’s lively sister, Carrie, illustrate possibilities of combining innocence and good sense under the most adverse circumstances; but then these adverse circumstances are dwelt upon no less strongly. Of course the heroine’s charm is brought out all the more effectively by force of contrast not only with the difficulties of her domestic and public life, but with the household of the man whom she is so fortunate to obtain for her lover, and finally for her husband. Miss Jay holds the balance evenly throughout, between whatever reasons have in any period injured the stage in social estimation and those dull and stupid prejudices which go far to keep the stage from vindicating itself, and gaining the full recognition bestowed upon other arts so freely. In short, the novel admits the due amount of right and wrong on both sides of the question, and amply shows how much more human interest attaches to the life of the stage as it really is than to those monstrous illusions hitherto given to the world as theatrical novels. That actors and actresses are just men and women is a piece of knowledge which is still uncommon; and Miss Jay’s interesting and able story will help to promulgate this truth.

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The Daily News (1 March, 1884 - Issue 11820)

     It seems singular that the natural talent of Miss Harriett Jay, her literary associations and her experience of the theatre, should not enable her to produce anything better in the way of a theatrical novel than “Through the Stage Door” (3 vols., F. V. White and Co.). The tone is pitched throughout on a level with the attainments of the burlesque actresses whose story it professes to tell, for, though Miss Lottie Fane takes to Shakespeare after her love disappointments and performs Rosalind to her pert sister’s Celia, the reader is not enabled to realise any idea of her performance of the part or in any sense to “see her in it.” It is difficult to believe that the same hand wrote this poor novel as that which wrote the “Queen of Connaught,” and other stories of power and meaning.

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A Marriage of Convenience (1885)

The Graphic (22 August, 1885, Issue 821)

      Miss Harriet Jay’s “A Marriage of Convenience” (3 vols.: F. V. White and Co.), is not by any means up to the level to which the authoress of “Queen of Connaught” has accustomed her readers. We fear it must be classed with the results of the art of book-making—it certainly bears all the signs of fatal hurry. It contains powerful passages here and there, but they seem always to have dropped into the work by accident, as the result of some chance inspiration, and not as that of any clear and harmonious design. The characters are stagey to extravagance—the melodramatic Spanish Duke, the man who has vowed life-long vengeance against him and follows him like a sleuth-hound, the stern old lady who also lives for an incomprehensible or rather lunatic revenge, the persecuted heroine, and all the rest of them. The footlights never cease to glare between the reader and the stage: and the situations correspond to the characters—or rather, while the latter are merely conventionally extravagant, the former are impossible. We have had so constantly to speak with unqualified admiration of Miss Jay’s work that we are the more bound to note the first symptom of indifference to what is due from an artist to her art. Nobody can be always at his or her best: but novels like “A Marriage of Convenience” are best left in the limbo of the magazines—in one of which, to judge from the periodical recurrence of a fainting fit or some other temporary climax, the story probably first appeared.

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The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown (1897)

The Scotsman (8 February, 1897 - p.2)

The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown. By Charles Marlowe (Harriet Jay.) London: Robert Buchanan.

     A three-act comedy has already been founded on The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, and perusal of the tale might even suggest that it was originally written for stage presentation. The characters are the beings of modern comedy; the main incidents demand of the reader a certain blindness to probability commonly required in drama. The story is that of the marriage of a ward in Chancery to a young military captain. The marriage ceremony is scarcely performed when Angela is recaptured by her guardian, and conveyed back to the boarding-school from which she has fled. Thither her husband follows her, dressed in female attire; and the doings of the harmless Don Juan, who goes by the name of Miss Brown, are amusing enough. In the end, when everything has reached a crisis, it is announced that the captain has succeeded to a peerage. The objections to the marriage are thus removed, and the course of true love is smoothed. The tale is entertainingly written.

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Glasgow Herald (25 February, 1897)

     The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown. By Charles Marlowe (Harriet Jay). (London: Robert Buchanan.)—One hardly needs to be reminded that this story is of close kin to “the popular three-act comedy produced in 1895 at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, and still running in England and America.” There is all the delightfully conventional improbability of stageland in the runaway marriage of the gallant young officer and the Chancery ward, and especially in the stratagem whereby Captain Courtenay, until matters are smoothed by his succession to a peerage, introduces himself as a parlour boarder into the ladies’ seminary to which his bride has been brought back by her legal guardians. Quite stagely orthodox, too, are the characters—the impassive captain himself and his romantic inamorata, the friendly Irish major who swears “by the saints” and possesses a warm-hearted Irish wife full of infinite resources for the aid of distressed lovers, the sentimental confidante, the prim schoolmistress, the philandering music-master, and all the other personages necessary for the conduct of an innocent little intrigue. The structure of the story, in fact, is rather that of the play than of the novel, and the various chapters are really dramatic scenes turned into narrative. None the less the book is a thoroughly brisk and amusing one, well fitted for the employment of a vacant hour.

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The Stage (25 March, 1897 - p.13)

     Robert Buchanan, publisher amongst his other vocations, has issued in one-volume novel form, “The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown.” This is the story from which the play of that name was dramatised. “Charles Marlowe,” otherwise clever Miss Harriett Jay, is the author. The book is much upon the same plan as the extravagant piece, and will, no doubt, like the latter, find very many to enjoy it.

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The Era (10 April, 1897 - Issue 3055)

     “THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF MISS BROWN.” By CHARLES MARLOWE (HARRIETT JAY). London: Robert Buchanan, Gerrard-street, W.—Few farces are amusing reading, and one is therefore agreeably surprised to find that The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown stands so well the ordeal of cold print. But then we have a right to expect excellent work from so experienced an authoress as Miss Harriett Jay. The story told in the book runs exactly on the same lines as that acted at the theatre, except that it was thought prudent to transfer to a drawing-room the scene between Angela Brightwell, Miss Schultz, and “Miss Brown” that in the novel is located in a bedroom. Those who have seen the play will be able to revive memories of pleasant evenings at the theatre, and those whose knowledge of “Miss Brown” will be derived from the book will find “her” worth knowing.

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The Morning Post (17 April, 1897 - p.2)

THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF MISS BROWN.*

     Some may incline to think that there is more of farce than of comedy in this most amusing book, but to this opinion objections may reasonably be made. Although the personages not seldom find themselves in ludicrous situations, they are well defined, and have in themselves nothing of the exaggeration which is one of the necessary elements of farce. Take, for instance, Miss Brown, otherwise Captain Courtenay, whose adventures are told in a manner that might have imparted a sense of humour to Diogenes. He is as “brave a soldier as ever wore uniform,” clever, but with a demeanour remarkable for its stolidity. The circumstances in which the author ingeniously places him are absurd, but in spite of all he never degenerates into a clown, and manages all through to retain a considerable amount of dignity. Of course, probability is set aside when the cheery O’Gallaghers are made to appear ignorant of the gravity of the consequences that may result from the step to which they urge the lovers. But why be hypocritical when almost every page is brimful of fun. The Major, to do him justice, does entertain apprehensions, and represents to his wife that the proposed bride is “only eighteen, and a ward in Chancery.” But his irrepressible wife, instead of feeling impressed, insults the majesty of the law by exclaiming, “Yes, the poor darling. Without father or mother to look after her, and only a deputy Providence in the shape of an old gentleman with a wig.” Once the marriage over, and the bride back again in Miss Romney’s select academy, while the bridegroom, hiding from justice, weaves plots to effect her deliverance, the mirth becomes fast and furious. From first to last Courtenay is too good for the empty-headed, silly school-girl his imagination has transformed into a goddess. He is such a thoroughly excellent fellow that one leaves him with regret, and also the warm-hearted O’Gallaghers. Angela perhaps learns to live up to the good fortune that befalls her. At any rate, gratitude is owing to them all for the amusement they have been made to afford not only in this novel but in the play in which they had already appeared.

     *The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown. By Charles Marlowe (Harriett Jay). 1 vol. London: Robert Buchanan.

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2. Biography

Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life,
His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships (1903)

The Scotsman (2 February, 1903 - p. 2)

ROBERT BUCHANAN. Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships. By Harriet Jay, Author of “The Queen of Connaught,” &c. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

     Readers of novelty will find relatively little to satisfy them in this biography, for the obituary notices given in the newspapers when Robert Buchanan died less than two years ago were well informed, and the life of that man of letters was uneventful except in the publication of books. Yet the work has its own fresh interest as a piece of literary piety. It is written by Buchanan’s wife’s sister, who had been adopted into his family when a child; and, while coloured by a partiality characteristic of familiar biographers, brings together a larger and more trustworthy body of particulars concerning the author of “The Shadow of the Sword” than is to be found elsewhere. It recounts Buchanan’s boyhood in Glasgow as the son of a busy journalist there, and his going up to London at eighteen years of age, when his father’s fortunes failed. It gives pathetic incidents of that period of early struggles in which Buchanan lived and worked in a garret, and tells over again the story of the ill-starred ambitions, the sad illness, and early death of his companion, the poet David Gray. It tells of the friendships he formed with authors, journalists, and actors in Bohemia, of his marriage, and of his first books that came out in the early sixties. The spirit of these ran counter to the orthodox theologies of their day, and the biographical narrative is at this point appropriately interrupted by a paper in which Mr Henry S. Salt gives his impressions of Robert Buchanan as a humanitarian. The writer’s services to the literature of his time were already so far recognised as to have made him the recipient of a Government pension; but his name was scarcely known to the great public until it came to be connected with the pseudonymous article and pamphlet that attacked the so-called fleshly school of poetry. The reception of invective with which this publication met at the hands of poets and critics is duly recorded by the present biographer, who, without going so far as to maintain the justice of Buchanan’s attack on Swinburne and Rossetti, explains the provocation that led to it, and puts it that Buchanan found in the pleasures of independence more than a compensation for the pains of personal martyrdom. The book then follows the author through his career as a novelist, a poet, and a writer of plays, retracing the steps of a public career known to all reading men of these days, and now supplemented by a record of the few domestic incidents, such as the deaths of Buchanan’s wife and his mother, and of the many pecuniary embarrassments that chequered its private side. Mr George R. Sims contributes to the volume a reminiscence of his dramatic collaboration with Buchanan; and Mr Henry Murray describes from personal knowledge the fondness which the humanitarian poet cherished for speculation upon the turf. As if anticipating the objections of the censorious, Mr Murray does not neglect to tell that Buchanan did not allow the race meetings to interfere with his literary work. “Nay,” he says, “he even carried his literary labours on to the turf. At the time when he was preparing a long commentary on Rénan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari about him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.”
     That passage may be said in no unkindly spirit to give a juster notion of the odd mixture of energies embodied in Buchanan as a man than does the book as a whole, touched so strongly as it is by the natural feeling of a writer perhaps too near her subject to see its lineaments with perfect clearness. The book would have been more complete had it exhibited more fully Buchanan’s place in literature and defined more closely the relation of his works to the fiction and poetry of his own time. As it stands, however, it is an interesting and a valuable memorial that will be eagerly read by the many who remember its subject.

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The Times Literary Supplement (13 February, 1903 - p.46-47)
[Reviewed by Edward Verrall Lucas]

ROBERT BUCHANAN
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ROBERT BUCHANAN. Some account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and Literary Friendships. By HARRIETT JAY. (Unwin. 10s. 6d. Net.)

     This portly volume once more suggests the need for the more serious consideration of biographical values. The men of whose lives a pedestrian year-by-year record, such as this, is necessary require to be separated more rigorously from the men of whom a bird’s-eye view would suffice. Some one should decide; if the publishers are not capable, there should be a necrologist-in-chief, to whom intending biographers should apply before setting forth on their tasks. Then we should be spared the pain of having to say that Miss Harriett Jay’s memoir of her brother-in-law, the late Robert Buchanan, is both out of proportion and insufficiently instructive. We are afraid, indeed, that Mr. Gosse’s indictment of the widow as biographer must be extended to the sister-in-law. Love and admiration and a sweet charity Miss Jay has in abundance, but she was too near her subject, and she has few of the more important gifts of either the biographer or the critic. The whole man is not in these pages; we doubt, indeed, if more than a moiety of him is here, or rather would have been here but for the contributory chapter by Mr. R. E. Francillon, to which we shall return later.
     Robert Buchanan, neither by performance nor by character, was subject for the near-of-kin pedestrian biographer; but he was eminently fitted for the brief monograph by a student of men and letters. The facts of his life, after his childhood and youth were over, were unimportant. His work was rarely better than second-rate in any of the many departments of intellectual industry which he attempted; his friends were not notable, nor was his own personality conspicuous. He wrote nothing that will endure, such was his fecundity and want of distinction and style. He wrote a little good poetry, but much that was indifferent; he wrote little good criticism (although much that by its wrongheadedness made other people think); he wrote second-rate novels and second-rate plays. We dislike to have to put the case thus baldly; but it is necessary to show why Robert Buchanan, in common with too many other men whose biographies make heavy volumes, was no subject for the painstaking treatment which has been accorded him. But, on the other hand, Robert Buchanan was curiously well fitted to be the subject of a discriminating monograph which should state as many of the facts of his life (particularly his parentage and early years) as were necessary, and then pass on to focus him as a whole. He was fitted for such treatment for several reasons. He was a very perfect type of the literary Berserk; he was a fearless and headstrong champion of what he believed to be right and opponent of what he believed to be wrong; he was a superb weaver of angry prose; he was once found at Sandown-park between two races, reading his Greek Testament with a tipster’s telegram to mark the place; it was he who said one of the best things of Ruskin that was ever written, in the compactest form, when he called him in one of his satires
                    Half seraph and half shrew;
and he was the author of the “Ballad of Judas Iscariot” and certain other striking poems of strong individuality, if undistinguished in form.
     The monograph, however, has not been written. Instead, we have Miss Jay’s diffuse volume, which, were it not for the contribution of six pages by Mr. Francillon, who met Buchanan very occasionally but instantly divined his character, would tell us of essentials little more than we knew before. Mr. Francillon writes:—

     The right reading of Buchanan was, I am convinced, that his very genius had prevented him from outgrowing, or being able to outgrow, the boyishness of the best sort of boy; while too many of us only too quickly forget what any sort of boyhood means. And the grand note of the best sort of boy is a sincere passion for justice, or rather a consuming indignation against injustice—the two things are not exactly the same. The boy of whatever age can never comprehend the coolness with which the grown-up man of the world has learned to take injustice as part and parcel of the natural order of things, even when himself the sufferer. The grown-up man has learned the sound policy of not sending indignation red-hot or white-hot to the post or the press, but of waiting till it is cool enough to insert in a barrel of gunpowder without risk of explosion. But the boy rebels, and, if he be among the great masters of language, hurls it out hot and strong, in the full belief that no honest feelings could be so weak as to be wounded by any honest words. Of course he was wrong. Complete honesty is perfectly compatible with even abnormal thinness of skin, and with an even exceptionally plentiful crop of corns. He would often have been amazed and shocked could he, to whom hard hitting was so easy, have estimated the effect of his blows. I do not believe Robert Buchanan to have been capable of a malign or vindictive thought; I know that I never heard him utter an unkindly word. I wish, above all else, that those who thought of him as I had thought of him before knowing him could have met him at home—Strasz-Engel, Haus-Teufel (“Street Angel, House Devil,” say the Germans) —not that they have any monopoly of the experience. I have never heard the natural converse of the saying, but it is impossible to think of Buchanan without its suggestion. . . .
     In short, he always gave me the impression of being thrown into a world into which he had never really grown, where he was never at home, but always in a foreign country whose language he could not learn, despite all his efforts, and whose manners and customs, despite his desire to adopt them, he could not understand. It was not that, like many mystics, he in his inmost mind regarded life as a sort of dream to be slept through pleasantly or painfully, as the case might be, but not with serious concern. On the contrary, while to the Celtic part of him the unseen life was fully as real as the seen, to another element in him the seen was as real as the unseen. And so the two hostile realities became mixed without becoming fused, so that the ordinary man of ordinary affairs, who knows this world (or at least his own little part of it) very well—who indeed makes this world what it is—found Buchanan exceedingly easy to misunderstand.

This is the temper in which we would have had the monograph on Buchanan written. Miss Jay’s lengthy biography has, however, as we have said, come instead. It is a well-published book (save for its flat back), and will be found readable by those who want an emotional and superficial account of an author’s life. For ourselves, we can but regret that so little has been made of the more interesting episodes, such as, for example, Buchanan’s friendship with Thomas Love Peacock. We could well have spared reminiscences of the “Bard” by Mr. George R. Sims to have more of Buchanan’s own autobiographical sketches; and a few of his best poems might have been given. Here we leave the work—with a prayer for the speedy arrival of the necrologist-in-chief.

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The Guardian (17 February, 1903 - p.4)

ROBERT BUCHANAN: SOME ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE, HIS LIFE’S WORK, AND HIS LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. By Harriett Jay. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Pp. 324. 10s. 6d. net.

     Miss Jay does not pretend to approach her subject critically. She collaborated with Buchanan in some of his later dramatic work, and he was always her generous and intimate friend. If her devotion leads her sometimes into mistake, we must recognise that generally she writes with moderation and with a reserve that will not be misunderstood. It strikes us sometimes that the life is a little lacking in the intimate touches that might give a clearer impression of personality. Buchanan’s attitude to the world was perhaps rather artificial, and a great part of the book is made up of letters and reminiscences in which his opinions are stated and restated. Miss Jay’s plan is not, we think, the best that could have been adopted. The compromise between a general trend of narrative and the grouping of particular features is not very skilfully carried out, and the positions of certain chapters, written by other friends, seem to be determined arbitrarily. There is one by Mr. H. S. Salt on Buchanan’s “Humanitarianism,” an “Impression” by Mr. R. E. Francillon, “A Reminiscence” by Mr. G. R. Sims, and a short account of his connection with the turf by Mr. Henry Murray. Miss Jay refrains from any criticism of Buchanan’s work and is content to indicate its reception by the public and by certain of his contemporaries. The earlier parts of the book are the most coherent, and we are shown the causes which made of Buchanan, naturally genial, a persistent rebel. He belonged to the ostracised faction, and as he was born in the “odour of infidelity” his early life was passed among theorists, “atheists,” and uncomfortable people of various epithets. There are some interesting passages about the influence of Robert Owen, and the initial steps of the poetical career are clearly traced. Among those who showed him kindness in his youthful struggles in London were Barry Cornwall and Lord Houghton. Other acquaintances or associates, whose names may serve to suggest Buchanan’s wide and various interests, were Louis Blanc, Hermann Vezin, Peacock, Edmund Yates, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Browning, Charles Reade, Whitman, and Roden Noel, his “most intimate and life-long friend.” Certainly Buchanan lived a very full and, we may believe, upon the whole a happy life. Miss Jay’s biography shows us a man of many good and generous impulses who “fought bravely for the good of Humanity” but never quite got himself in hand. The diversities of his pursuits may be illustrated by a passage from Mr. Murray’s chapter:—

     At the time when he was preparing a long commentary on Rénan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari about him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray, apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.”

A bibliographical list includes some fifty volumes of prose and verse, which, together with the numerous plays of which he was author, wholly or in part, makes a formidable body of work. Whatever may be the ultimate verdict upon it, admiration and respect are compelled by a life of such fine activities.

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The New York Times (7 March, 1903)

MR. ALDEN’S VIEWS.
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LONDON, Feb. 26.—The life of Robert Buchanan, by Harriet Jay, his sister-in-law, has the merit of giving a truthful portrait of the man. As a rule, this cannot be said of a biography written by one who is in warm sympathy with the subject. When a man has been dead a hundred years or so, a biographer may be expected to tell the truth about him, but a biography written within a year after the death of the subject, and written, too, by a personal friend, almost inevitably takes on the coloring of friendship, and gives us a purified and glorified impression of the dead man. But Buchanan was one of the most transparent of men, and it was not a difficult task to show him as he was. certainly Buchanan was a poet, for he wrote not a little verse that was worthy of the name of poetry, although he also wrote much that was simply rhyme and nothing more. He was a novelist, but his books always suggested that they were written merely to sell, and not because the writer had any thing to say or any love for his art. He was a clever and savage critic, but his personal animosities made his criticism occasionally worthless. He never attained a commanding position in literature, and it is doubtful if anything written by him will survive.
     But for many years Buchanan was a prominent personality in London. He had a strong nature, and he spent his life in revolt against most things. He might be summed up as an intelligent, warm-hearted man, with an ungovernable temper, and a disposition to attack everything that other people liked. He came up to London as a friendless and penniless young poet, and he received much kindness. How he repaid some of it, by savage attacks on men who had helped him, will not be forgotten, especially as he had the bad taste to make his attacks under the disguise of another name than his own. He never recovered his position after that unfortunate event. Men were afraid of trusting to his friendship, and as the knowledge of this grew upon him, he became more and more of an Ishmaelite.
     And yet Buchanan was really a kindly man. It is doubtful if he fully comprehended how virulent and abusive were his attacks upon other authors, and it is probable that he was somewhat surprised to find that they were indignant. When he saw a head he hit it, but he thought it rather hard that the owner of the head should be seriously annoyed. He knew that the angry impulses which made him attack friends, and whatever they held dear, were passing moods, and he wondered that others attached importance to them. He did not really hate Christianity although he reviled it with vigor. It was something that commonplace people believed in, and therefore he attacked it, but in his heart he did not despise it, except, perhaps, when Mr. Richard Le Gallienne defended it.
     Had Robert Buchanan ever learned the value of self-restraint, and practiced it, his life would have been a very different one. He would have succeeded in literature far better than he did succeed, and he would have gained the esteem and respect of his fellows. The whole trouble with him was that he uniformly gave way to his impulses, and mocked at the idea of restraining them. He was a lovable man who made himself disliked without a shadow of excuse for so doing.
     Miss Jay does not say this in plain language. Indeed, it is by no means certain that she holds any such opinion of Buchanan as I have expressed. But in her book we cannot fail to see just what manner of man Buchanan was. The story is for that reason a pitiful one. There was so much that was good, so much that was clever, in the man, that it is an infinite pity that he never learned to govern himself. But it should be remembered that he was brought up in Scotland, where the strict restraints to which he was subjected had a natural tendency to beget in him a hatred of all restraint. Had he been born and bred in a more liberal land he might have been a very different man.

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From A Bookman’s Letters by W. Robertson Nicoll (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913 - Chapter 36, p.323 -330)

XXXVI

ROBERT BUCHANAN

MR. BIRRELL discussed some time ago the question, Is it possible to distinguish between a good book and a bad book? He came to the conclusion that it was very difficult to draw the line. Is it possible to distinguish a good man from a bad man ? It is by no means easy. The question is rarely raised by a biographer. As a rule, one lays down a biography feeling that he has learned something, that the man of whom he has been reading has some quality of nobleness or of patience which may well be admired and followed. But the Life of Robert Buchanan written by Miss Harriet Jay in 1902 almost forces a moral judgment on Buchanan. I hope to resist the compulsion, and to content myself with drawing attention to some materials for the solution of the problem. I do not think there will be any difference of opinion as to Buchanan’s intellectual gifts and literary achievements. He had an unquestionable touch of genius, and has done some fine things. But by far the larger part of his work is quite dead, and only the merest fragments can survive.
     I hasten to say that Miss Jay has done her work admirably, with true affection and lenity, and yet with a frank and serious candour. The great literary power manifested in her early book, The Queen of Connaught, has not failed her. Her style is simple and unambitious, but it has a touch of distinction, and alike in what she says and in what she does not say one cannot but mark her understanding of the issues, and her determination to be at once just and merciful. It weighs heavily on Buchanan’s side that he retained through life the warm affection of three such women as his mother, his wife, and his sister-in-law. They were by no means blind to his failings, but they loved him in spite of all. Let that be remembered whenever he comes up for judgment. Buchanan’s life was in many respects extraordinary and abnormal. Miss Jay says that he was from first to last a lonely man, that he had few friends and many enemies, and that he received from the world many cruel blows. No man, she says, has been oftener abused, though no man needed kindness so much and received so little. How do the facts bear this out? Buchanan’s parents were prosperous in his childhood. He had comforts and even luxuries, and he had a fair education at the High School and University of Glasgow. When he was only eighteen he went off to London, and for a short time he had a pretty hard struggle. In 1861, when he was only twenty, he married a lovely girl in her ’teens, and by that time he was doing fairly well. He had been accepted as a contributor to the Athenæum, and he worked also for other periodicals of importance in their day, such as All the Year Round and Temple Bar. He was employed by the Morning Star as a foreign correspondent. He obtained admission to the inner circle of literary people. Among others he was welcomed by George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, by Barry Cornwall, by Miss Mulock, by Thomas Love Peacock, by Edmund Yates, and by Robert Browning. He was also on very intimate terms with Charles Gibbon and William Black. In 1863, when he was twenty-two, his first volume of poems, Undertones, appeared, and was followed not long after by Idylls and Legends of Inverburn. He came into connection with the most generous of all publishers, Alexander Strahan. His work for Strahan is not adequately recorded in this biography. There was a time when Buchanan wrote most of the St. Paul’s Magazine. One of his first contributions to a London magazine was a poem in Good Words, which, by the way, was signed Williams Buchanan, and though Miss Jay does not say so, I believe the poet’s name was Robert Williams Buchanan. More than that, R. H. Hutton, of the Spectator, took him up with vehement enthusiasm, as much later he took up William Watson. The result was that, before he was twenty-five, Buchanan was offered £400 for a volume of poems, and was able to take a house near Oban. We are told that he lived there the life of a regulation country gentleman. His tastes were expensive, and he gratified them. He had his shooting and his fishing, while his yacht was riding at anchor in Oban Bay. Now I should like to know what right Buchanan had to complain of the world? Is there any case of a young author making so prosperous a start? He had hardly arrived in London as a mere boy when the most exclusive houses and the most jealously guarded periodicals were open to him, when the chief critics of the day—George Henry Lewes and Hutton and Hepworth Dixon—were loudly chanting his praises; when publishers were competing for his poems as they would compete for hardly any poet nowadays; and when he was able to live like a country gentleman, with his shooting, his fishing, and his yachting. True, the country life came after a few years, but it is perfectly evident that from the date of his marriage Buchanan must have been making an income of very comfortable proportions. So far as I know, and so far as this biography shows, he had no enemies then. He never had to run the gauntlet of criticism. He was accepted from the first, and all things opened fair for him. The truth is, not that Buchanan did not make friends, but that he could not keep friends. I remember well the manner in which he wrote of Hutton towards the end of his life, and it raised the question whether Buchanan knew what gratitude meant.
     Clouds came over the bright opening of his life. Was this because friends played him false? I do not think so. It was because he played himself false. Miss Jay virtually acknowledges that he had no conscience about his literary work—that is, he did not feel bound to do his best. He was always recklessly extravagant, and we are told in this volume that his wife had no faculty for saving any more than he had. In consequence, he was always impoverished. No matter how much his income was, he always contrived to spend more. Money had to be found, and he got it somehow by writing incessantly. But how badly he could write! It is melancholy to read the list of his books. After God and the Man, nearly all might be struck out with great advantage to his reputation; in fact, some volumes which preceded God and the Man, especially Napoleon Fallen and the Fleshly School of Poetry, might very well be spared. I will not raise questions as to the authorship of some books published under Buchanan’s name, a subject on which I do not profess to know more than other people.
     But this is a small part of the indictment. The gravest charge against Buchanan is not that he wrote quantities of disgraceful rubbish, but that he introduced a truly diabolical spirit of malignity into literary controversy. As to literary controversies, there is a distinction. Many of them are merely theatrical. They give amusement to both sides, and to the public. Even these, perhaps, do harm to literary men. They do not show them in their best light. But there are literary controversies that blight lives and poison minds, and of such were Buchanan’s. I do not wish to take up again the excessively disagreeable story of Buchanan’s attack on Rossetti. On this, as on almost every point, Miss Jay has written with admirable sense and good feeling. Rossetti was quite open to criticism, and even severe criticism. No less a man than Lowell wrote adversely and severely of his poems in the North American Review. But what cannot be excused to any critic is that he should write to avenge real or fancied insults. Mr. Swinburne, it seems, made a contemptuous allusion to the poems of Buchanan’s early friend, David Gray. Buchanan thought that Swinburne was retaliating on himself for his review of Poems and Ballads in the Athenæum. That article, which lies before me, was offensive in the highest degree, and there is hardly any provocation that could have justified it. Buchanan resolved to strike at Rossetti, and did so. Miss Jay says: ‘His motive was, I know, primarily revenge.’ It is too well known that the attack, contemptible as it was in form and spirit, grievously injured Rossetti, and was, in fact, the primary cause of his decline and death. Buchanan repented and retracted, but the mischief was done. He did not learn wisdom or charity from the quarrel. He went on to denounce other writers, great and small, with equal unscrupulousness, and from the same motive, that of revenge. I hope it is not necessary to argue that criticism inspired in this fashion is evil, and that it brands the name of the perpetrator. In conducting his warfare Buchanan stuck at nothing. For example, he wrote afterwards that Tennyson and Browning were with him, and that Tennyson told him that he considered a certain sonnet of Rossetti’s the ‘filthiest thing he had ever read.’ I say that under no circumstances is it justifiable to hold such language. When Buchanan published this statement Tennyson was dead, and unable to contradict it. It rests entirely on Buchanan’s word; and, frankly, I believe that the statement was not true, for in the reminiscences contributed by Mr. Palgrave to Lord Tennyson’s memoir, there is a eulogium by Tennyson on this very sonnet. Nobody will suppose that Palgrave lied, nor do I say that Buchanan lied. There were innumerable misstatements in the later papers of reminiscences published by him in the Sunday Special and elsewhere. He imagined that he was speaking the truth, no doubt. It is very disagreeable to write in this strain, but it is necessary in the interests of justice. Buchanan is a warning to all critics. If they are unfortunate enough to cherish personal animosity towards any author, it is perfectly plain that they have no right under any circumstances to review his books. If they use their power as critics to avenge real or imagined personal wrongs, they are vermin who ought to be, as soon as possible, caught, cracked, and extirpated. It must also be pointed out that there is a peculiar baseness in attacking, not the man who has done you wrong, but another man who has done you no wrong, and is simply the friend of your enemy. Every one concerned for the reputation of literature ought to denounce without mercy all such practices. I wish I could think they were quite given over now.
     In the latter part of his life Buchanan took to play-writing, and received very large sums of money. Miss Jay tells us that he squandered them all. Whatever his income was, he always managed to be a little in arrear. ‘He could no more help being prodigal with his great gains than the sun can help shining.’ In 1894 he was standing in the bankruptcy court a practically ruined man. Mr. Henry Murray tells us that he was a born gambler, and though he was fully fifty years of age before he ever saw a racecourse, he took to the sport of racing with the same youthful ardour which characterised his pursuit of all that attracted his attention. He was a persistent loser, though we are told that he never regretted the money which the turf cost him. Buchanan had a right to be poor. He had a right to spend his income; but had he the right to become bankrupt? If he had become bankrupt through an unavoidable misfortune, was it not his duty to strain every nerve in order to repay his creditors? That was the view taken by Sir Walter Scott, and it is well to read Scott’s journal after this biography in order to recover one’s faith in human nature. We are told nothing here of the sum for which Buchanan failed, or of the money he provided for his creditors, and it is not my business to give the particulars. There is no doubt that Buchanan could be generous, that he was often very lavish in his gifts. But justice comes before generosity, and it has to be asked whether Buchanan was just.
     Let it be remembered that he was a man of fine gifts, of much humanity, and that by those who knew him best he was most dearly beloved. There is a great deal in this book, too much, I think, about Buchanan’s notions on Christianity. We are told that when he was preparing an article on the subject, he went down with a friend to the Sandown Races. His friend found him in the middle of the ring serenely unconscious of the carnival, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marked the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.

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Harriett Jay’s Theatrical Reviews

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