From A Literary History of Scotland by John Hepburn Millar
(London : T.F. Unwin, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1903)

From Chapter XI, ’The Victorian Era: 1848-1880 (p.601-603)

 . . . Had Gray lived a century earlier, he might have found a more congenial mode of expression for his thoughts and emotions in the literary vernacular. As it is, though his artifice is manifest, it is never disagreeable; and even in the sequence of Sonnets, entitled In the Shadows, and written literally intuitu mortis, he is always frank and amiable; never a mere trickster or poseur.
     Very different is the verdict that must be returned with regard to Gray’s friend and fellow-emigrant to London. Robert William Buchanan ¹ (1841-1902) was a Scot by extraction, if not by actual birth. The highest expectations were at one time formed of his genius, and not altogether without reason. Fra Giacomo, for example, which is among his earliest poems, has considerable power, though it is marked by all the crudeness of youth. But whatever promise may have been held out by Undertones (1864) or Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865) seemed to be almost entirely quenched after the appearance of the North Coast Poems (1867). Buchanan had entered with considerable zest into the life of second- and third-rate “Bohemianism” for which London affords so many opportunities. He turned some of his experiences to tolerable account in his London Poems (1867), but he paid the penalty of becoming, to the tips of his fingers, what Wilson would have called a “Cockney” poet. The two stout volumes which contain his poetical writings bear witness to the industry of his pen; but of all his verse, perhaps only three pieces may be remembered when the work of better poets has been forgotten—The Wake of Tim O’Hara, The Wedding of Shon Maclean, and Phil Blood’s Leap—and even these will chiefly be called to mind at smoking-concerts and in similar congregations. What he always seemed to be attempting to say has been said by Tennyson and Browning, by Mr. Kipling and Mr. Henley, but was never said by him. It was for no want of technical skill that Buchanan failed as a poet. In this respect he was well equipped, and the variety of his measures is extensive. The flaw in his composition was a deep-seated and irremediable insincerity.² Scarce a line he has written bears the true stamp of emotion. We need not, indeed, adopt the view of Firmilian that—

                                       “What we write
Must be the reflex of the thing we know”;

but the superficial knowledge of Greek mythology which enables a man to talk glibly of Prometheus and Dryads and Naiads and Fauns is a poor substitute either for genuine feeling or for that similitude of it which great poets are able to fashion. Buchanan can have imposed upon nobody. He was always, and particularly in his later years, a great lasher of the vices of the age. The haste to be rich, the inordinate lust of gold, the discrepancy between Christian theory and practice, were chastised with abundance of acrimony and strong language. If indomitable pugnacity, shrillness of rhetoric, and the desire to be “nasty” all round, could make a satirist, then had Buchanan been a master of his craft. But it so happened that he was less effective and impressive even than Churchill. Stern moralists who desire their denunciations of avarice to be taken seriously should endeavour to avoid becoming bankrupt through unsuccessful speculation on the turf; and the radical vice which we have noted in Buchanan as a poet was unfortunately made patent in the public prints for all to see and note. Neither his novels nor his plays are of the smallest consequence as literature. But he at least achieved a triumphant success in adding two new chapters to the voluminous history in which are recorded the quarrels of authors. By means of a magazine article, signed “Thomas Maitland,” in which he assailed The Fleshly School of Poetry, and, eodem contextu, extolled his own performances, he drew from Mr. Swinburne an extremely rich and “fruity” specimen of that poet’s early polemical manner;³ and by means of a similar attack upon “society” journalism, he elicited from Edmund Yates a retort which deserves to be treasured among the curiosities, if not among the disgraces, of journalism.⁴
     It would be difficult to conceive of a stronger contrast to Robert Buchanan in point of straightforwardness and sincerity than Walter Chalmers Smiths (b. 1824), probably the most considerable Scottish poet of the generation which produced his namesake Alexander.  . . .

     ¹ Complete Poetical Works, 2 vols., 1901.   See also Robert Buchanan: Some Account of his Life, &c. By Harriett Jay, 1903.
     ² As a poet of “revolt” against the status quo, he cannot be compared with James Thomson (1834-82), a native of Port-Glasgow, whose striking City of Dreadful Night (1874) is the unquestionable offspring of despair and the narcotic habit.
     ³ Under the Microscope, 1872.
     ⁴ Consult the file of the World newspaper, September, 1877.

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From History of Scottish Literature by Maurice Lindsay
(London: Robert Hale, 1977, revised edition 1992.)

From Chapter Five, ’The Nineteenth Century’ (p.300-301)

     Robert Buchanan (1841-1901), born in Staffordshire but brought up in Glasgow, settled in London in 1860. That the empty swagger and consistent insincerity of his verses once led him to be dubbed “The Scottish Browning” now seems astonishing. His Idylls and Legends of Inverburn (1865) and London Poems (1866) are hollow, posturing stuff. However, in 1871 he wrote a derogatory article, “The Fleshly School of Poetry”, against his betters, the Pre-Raphaelites, for the Contemporary Review. This provoked a libel action, which he won, and, more importantly, Gilbert’s and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience (1881). Douglas Young remarked that when preparing his fascinating compendium, Scottish Verse 1851-1951, he learned that Buchanan, “a big man in London journalism . . . had issued a Poetical Works in 534 octavo pages, double-columned (1884).” Yet Young was “surprised to find nothing worth printing, except a stanza of The Wedding of Shon Maclean, to which nothing is added by the rest of the piece.” He goes on to point out that, like his contemporary Tennysonian, the ninth Lord Southesk, “Buchanan never seems to give birth to more than a small idea, and then suffocates it with poeticizing.” The favoured stanza goes:

To the wedding of Shon Maclean,
     Twenty pipers together
Came in the wind and the rain
     Playing across the heather;
Backward their ribbons flew,
Blast upon blast they blew,
Each clad in tartan new,
     Bonnet and blackcock feathers:
And every piper was fou,
     Twenty pipers together!

It would be difficult to disagree with Young’s verdict.
     Buchanan’s young Kirkintilloch friend David Gray (1838-1861), a Keatsian dreamer, left Glasgow University to lead a literary life in London, but spent his first night in Hyde Park, caught consumption, and soon came home again to die. His Thomsonian river-celebration, The Luggie, has some original sensuous imagery, while one or two of the sonnets he wrote as he wasted towards death have a moving simplicity. Had he lived, he might well have found the discipline successfully to order his undoubted talent.

___

(p. 330)

Robert Buchanan’s The Shadow of the Sword (1876) and God and the Man (1881), offer hearty pietism and a swaggering straining after effect at the expense of sincerity as obvious defects.

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(Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan)