ROBERT BUCHANAN AND THE MAGAZINES

‘George Heath, The Moorland Poet’ published in Good Words, March 1871.

Glasgow Herald (4 March, 1871)

     In Good Words Mr Robert Buchanan introduces to the general public the poems of George Heath, the Moorland Poet. Heath was born at Gratton, a hamlet in the moorlands of Staffordshire, on the 9th of March, 1844. He was born of poor parents, and, after learning to read and write, was apprenticed to a carpenter. He died in 1869 of consumption, in which he lingered for four years. Mr Buchanan, as becomes a brother poet, gives us a very loving sketch of poor Heath, in whose fate and genius he finds a striking resemblance to David Gray, the author of the “Luggie.” Among other specimens of the “Moorland” muse we have the following:—

THE POET’S MONUMENT.

Sad are the shivering dank dead leaves
     To one who lost love from his heart unweaves,
Who dreams he has gathered his life’s last sheaves,
     And must find a grave under wintry eaves!

Dead! dead! ’mongst the winter’s dearth,
     Gone where the shadows of all things go,
Stretch me full length in the folding earth,
     Wind me up in the drifting snow;

None of the people will heed it or say,
     “He was a singer who fainted there,
One who could leaven with fire, or sway
     Men’s hearts to trembling unaware.”

No one will think of the dream-days lost,
     Of the ardours fierce that were damped too soon;
Of the bud that was nipped by the morning’s frost,
     And shrivelled to dust in the sun ere noon.

No one will raise me a marble, wrought
     With meaning symbol, and apt device,
To link my name with a noble thought,
     A generous deed, or a new-found voice.

My life will go on to the limitless tides,
     Leaving no trace of its current-flow,
Like a stream that starts when the tempest rides,
     And is lost again in the evening’s glow.

The glories will gather and change as of yore,
     And the human currents pass panting by,
The ages will gather their wrinkles more,
     And others will sing for a day and die.

But thou, who art dearer than words can say,
     My more than all other of earth could be;
Such a joy! that the Giver I thank alway
     With a glowing heart, that He gave me thee.

I shall want thee to dream me my dream all through—
     To think me the gifted, the Poet still,
To crown me, whatever the world may do,
     Though my songs die out upon air and hill.

And, Edith, come thou in the blooming time—
     Thy world will not miss thee for just one hour;
I’d like it best when the low Bells chime,
     And the earth is full of the sunset’s power,—

And bend by the silently settling heap,
     While the Nature we loved is a May all round,
While God broods low on the blue arched sweep,
     And the musical air is athrill with sound;

And look in thy heart circled up in the past,
     And if I am perfectly graven there,
Unshaded by aught, save the anguish cast
     By the parting clasp, and the death despair;

Encirqued with the light of the pale regret,
     Of a “might have been,” all of a day-dream lent,
With a constant hope of a meeting yet,—
     Oh! I shall not want for a Monument.

This month’s number is more than usually readable. We are glad to notice another sketch of Scottish life and manners from the graphic pen of the author of “Peasant Life in the North.”

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Phil Blood’s Leap and The Ballad of Judas Iscariot
published in The Saint Pauls Magazine, February 1872.

(Note: Buchanan’s name was not attached to either poem. Phil Blood’s Leap: A Tale of the Gambusinos was ‘by the author of “St. Abe and his Seven Wives.”’ The Ballad of Judas Iscariot was published anonymously. The February edition of the magazine also included Buchanan’s essay on Dickens, ‘The Good Genie of Fiction’.)

The Newcastle Courant (16 February, 1872)

LITERARY NOTICES.

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     The Saint Paul’s Magazine. (London; Strahan and Co., 56, Ludgate Hill.)—“Saint Paul’s” is remarkably brilliant this month. While all the prose contributions, with, perhaps, one exception, are of a decidedly superior character, the two poems—“Phil Blood’s Leap,” by the able author of “St. Abe and His Seven Wives,” and “The Ballad of Judas Iscariot”—are the finest things of the kind that have appeared lately. Our correspondent “Spectator,” it will be remembered, noticed them at some length last week, and we greatly mistake if they do not have the effect of running the current number of “St. Paul’s” into more than the usual one edition.

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‘The Character of Goethe’ published in The New Quarterly Magazine, October 1874.

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (25 October, 1874)

NEW QUARTERLY MAGAZINE.

     The New Quarterly Magazine, which has acquired already much popularity among the more thoughtful and serious readers of modern periodical literature, thoroughly deserves the success it has achieved. The men and women who contribute to its solid pages, are writers whose opinions are worth studying and remembering. It seems to us that the great fault of most of the magazine literature with which England is afflicted at the present time is, that there is so little worth remembering or recalling. How few of the “padding” sketches and articles and novelettes which appear month after month, would bear a second reading! It would seem that the English people have a special taste for this poor literature; it is certain that it flourishes in no other country in the same degree. The Americans have their periodicals, it is true; but few of us would complain if we could boast a Scribner’s Monthly, and Atlantic Monthly, as average specimens of popular reading.
     To return to the New Quarterly, however—the October part of which has reached us—we must observe that we can find no fault with the style or intention of the authors who figure therein. The principal point of interest in the list of contents for the quarter just opened will undoubtedly be Robert Buchanan’s estimate of the character of Goethe—an estimate which is on the whole fairly formed and modestly stated. The picture put before the young generation of the great German poet is one that will surprise many. In this self-sufficient age, when interest in great men and curiosity respecting their lives, are very lukewarm, well-educated men know the broad outline of Goethe’s character, but few will have mastered the disheartening details which Mr. Buchanan has set before us. Goethe’s superb selfishness is certainly no new feature in his character; it is recognised by his most fervent students and worshippers. But it is brought perhaps more vividly to light in this minute examination of Goethe’s character than we have been wont to think of it, and the theatrical affectation which accompanied this unworthy trait, does not render it more excusable. He had few real friends, and these were disappointed in him. Witness the following passage from Mr. Buchanan’s essay:—

     His habit of cold impassiveness and stately reserve grew upon him at Weimar; and repelled many of his friends, who were not slow to express their irritation in words. “Outside relations,” he said, “make our existence, and at the same time devastate it; nevertheless, one must withdraw oneself occasionally from study, for I don’t think it healthy to be completely isolated like Wieland.” Schiller, faithful to him as he was faithful in all things, was rewarded by a certain amount of confidence, much the same as Goethe would have vouchsafed to a clinging mistress, Lili or Frederika; and when Schiller died, the blow went straight home to Goethe’s heart. When the aged and noble-minded Klopstock thought fit to remonstrate on the disorderly living encouraged by Goethe at Weimar, the “privy councillor’s” reply was cold and keen as ice. He solicited no confidence and he tolerated no interference. His affectations—for they were affectations—alienated his best friends. “What the devil possesses this Wolfgang!” cried Mark, a friend of his childhood; “why on earth will he play the courtier and the valet-de-chambre? Has he nothing better to do?” And the same excitable person said to Goethe himself, “Look here, Goethe! when I compare what you are with what you might have been, all that you have written seems to me contemptible!” But his most troublesome relations appear to have been with Herder. The great ideal philosopher and the great poetic image-former possessed a strange attraction for each other, by virtue of the individual strength of each; yet they never perfectly comprehended one another, and on one side, at least, there was a great deal of irritation. They met for the first time at Strasburg, when Herder was twenty-two years of age, and Goethe seventeen. This was in 1766. Twenty years afterwards, when both were at the zenith of fame, when Goethe’s name was a household word with young Germany, and Herder’s gigantic “Ule” was delighting all philosophers of the old school, Herder had not yet abandoned the air of patronage which he had affected to his junior student, and Goethe, on his side, had not forgotten Herder’s epigram on his name—

“Thou! descendant of Gods, or of Goths, or of Gutters!”
                                                                        —(Koth.)

There was no love lost between the two; and their mode of intercourse was rather that of two rival swordsmen than of affectionate friends. On the whole, Goethe seemed rather afraid of Herder’s mighty mind, knowing well that its great scheme of the Universal Idea, with all its practical tendencies towards Optimism and the regeneration of Humanity, was exactly the scheme which refused admittance to so shallow and slight a theory as that of mere self-culture and “pyramid building.” “It is doubtful,” Herder once cried passionately, apropos of Goethe’s cold-bloodedness and affectation—“it is doubtful if a man has any right to raise himself to a sphere where all suffering, true or false, real or merely imaginary, becomes equal to him; where he ceases to be a Man, if he does not cease to be an Artist; and whether this right, once admitted, does not imply the absolute negation of human character. No one cares to envy the gods their eternal tranquillity; they may regard everything on earth as a mere game the chances of which they direct as they please. But we are men, men subject to all human wants, and we do not care to be amused for ever with theatrical attitudes. You study nature in all her phenomena from the hyssop to the cedar of Lebanon. But I should not like you, for all that, to conceal from me the most beautiful phenomena of them all—Man, in his natural and moral grandeur.” To the same effect, though with less success, protested others—Wieland, Jacobi, even Schiller. But Goethe, though the criticism struck home, was not to be moved. Affectation and indifference, two elements quite contrary in themselves, had blended together to form the one pose that he kept for the rest of his life: a pose thoroughly theatrical, as Herder’s keen eye at once detected, but so long used as to become natural at second hand. An earthquake would not have changed it. The statue stood, in courtier’s costume, calm, holding a microscope. A thunderbolt might have dashed the statue to the ground; but it would have altered nothing. To alter Goethe now, God would have had to obliterate him altogether.

     The picture we have of Goethe elaborating his “Theory of Colour” in the Duke’s gardens at Weimar, unmoved by the mighty throes of the great French Revolution, uninterested in its leaders, indifferent to anything that did not immediately concern himself—is by no means a pleasant one; and most persons will leave Mr. Buchanan’s paper with a regret that so great a mind should have been combined with various peculiarities of temperament that cloud the works left behind in his name. Goethe’s dying words, “More light,” should have been his rallying cry through life!
     We have given so much consideration to Robert Buchanan’s able article that we have little space to devote to other subjects of interest that are intelligently and thoughtfully discussed in the course of the New Quarterly Magazine. A paper on “Small Farms,” by Richard Jefferies, will be found excessively useful to readers of an agricultural turn of mind. .....

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‘Thomas Love Peacock: A Personal Reminiscence’
published in The New Quarterly Magazine, April 1875.

The Examiner (10 April, 1875)

     In Mr. Robert Buchanan’s “Personal Reminiscence” of Thomas Love Peacock, in the New Quarterly Magazine, the most interesting point is that, on a certain sunshiny day, several years ago, Mr. Robert Buchanan might have been seen “going on pilgrimage” to Lower Halliford, with “youth in his limbs, reverence in his heart, a pipe in his mouth, and the tiny Pickering edition of Catullus (a veritable lepidum libellum, but, alas! far from novum) in his waistcoat pocket.” Mr. Buchanan does not tell us what he had for breakfast before he started; but he communicates the equally interesting fact that, though Mr. Peacock had a horror of tobacco, and he had made a solemn promise not to smoke within five hundred yards of Mr. Peacock’s house, he is ashamed to say that he “violated the arrangement,” and “well remembers one night stealthily opening the bedroom window in the house at Halliford and ‘blowing a cloud’ out into the summer night.” Some people will be surprised to hear that there was perfect agreement between Mr. Peacock and Mr. Buchanan, except on the subject of tobacco-smoke. This, Mr. Buchanan says, proved “the one dark cloud of misunderstanding between them.”

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In April 1878 Buchanan launched his own weekly journal, Light.

The Examiner (23 March, 1878)

     The new weekly journal which is shortly to appear, under the editorship of Mr. Robert Buchanan, is to be entitled Light. Why not adopt Mr. Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, and give the journal the appropriate title of Sweetness and Light?

[Advert for the first issue of Light from The Examiner (30 March, 1878)]

[Advert for the first issue of Light from The Graphic (30 March, 1878)]

Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (13 April, 1878)

     We cordially welcome the advent of a new literary and artistic journal, Light, the first number of which has just been issued. Its aim is to hold a distinct position between the comparative tameness of the old journals of literature and the flippancy of the new journals of fashion, a course which will no doubt commend itself to a wide circle. Ample space is devoted to literature, art, science, and the drama, and one of the special features is a literary history of the week. Another is a detached weekly supplement of eight pages, to be devoted exclusively to original contributions in fiction, biography, picturesque travels, descriptive essays, verse, &c. While one member of the household is perusing the more serious portions of the journal, the belles lettres may be in the hands of someone else. The first supplement contains the opening chapters of a new serial tale, “The Lady of Launay,” by the distinguished novelist, Anthony Trollope, and the first part of a tale, “The Impulsive Lady of Croome Castle,” by Mr. Thomas Hardy, who is also recognised as one of the first novelists of the day. Judging from the contents of the present number, Light will be regarded as something more than a mere society or gossip journal, and it should find a cordial welcome in all cultivated homes.

[Advert for the second issue of Light from The Pall Mall Gazette (13 April, 1878)]

Birmingham Daily Post (28 June, 1878)

LONDON GOSSIP.
[From our own Correspondent.]
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     Ever while you live be careful not to give an opinion (unless it be flattering) of the works of any living author, painter, or actor. It has become a dangerous experience; authors nowadays never accepting criticism, only puffs—and regarding as libel the expression of any adverse opinion on their performances. Mr. Buchanan, in Light, has dared to criticise “Our Boys,” and to express his idea that the play itself is bad, vulgar, and contrary to all rule of good taste. Only Mr. Buchanan does not add the rider which everybody else never fails to do, that the acting is so good, so truly artistic, as far as the men are concerned, that were the play itself ten times more vulgar, it could not fail of success with the public. The consequence of the omission in the déchaînement of a whole army of brave defenders of Mr. Byron’s play, which stands in no need of defence after eleven hundred nights’ performance, but Mr. Buchanan himself has furnished an anecdote, which is “going the rounds,” as it has become the fashion to express publicity. It appears that some little while ago a literary dinner was given at Richmond by the proprietors of the Fortnightly Review Mr. Buchanan being short-sighted, beckoned a figure towards him, calling out at the same time, in a rather sharp and peremptory tone, “Waiter, bring me a ‘Bradshaw.’” Now, the figure deemly seen through Mr. Buchanan’s imperfect vision belonged to no waiter at all, but was that of Mr. Richard Holt Hutton, one of the very clever editors of the Spectator. Of all the literary cutters and slashers in the critical world, those of the Spectator happen to be the most dreaded. Mr. Buchanan thereupon was seized with a panic. He remembered the motto of the old Princess Palatine of Bavaria, “Amour propre, once offended, never forgives,” and felt sure that his book just coming out would be unmercifully treated by the Spectator. But he was wrong. Mr. Hutton is too generous a man and too conscientious a critic to suffer “Old Elizabeth of Orleans” to influence his literary opinion; and as Buchanan’s book was really a first-rate production, he did not hesitate to say so. It is a pity that Mr. Buchanan should have expressed his convictions so crudely as to declare that nine critics out of ten would have remembered the mistake with bitterness, and repaid it with compound interest. He may not have reflected that Mr. Hutton may have a soul above the reach of offence, imparted by his own somewhat precipitate step, and the defective vision of Mr. Buchanan. And so ends squabble the first. Mr. Hutton, however, does not himself escape attack in another direction, for not exactly approving the collection of Mr. Allingham’s poems just published, and refusing to give them the full mead of praise to which, in the author’s opinion, they can claim. Mr. Allingham undertakes to prove, not that his poems are good poems, but that his critics are bad men. He openly accuses the editor of the Spectator of having acted from motives of revenge. Now, it is acknowledged by the whole literary world that, though the judgments of the Spectator are sometimes severe, they are never actuated by any other motive than that of honest criticism. This opinion has been the making of quite as many literary ventures as it has marred. The last number of Fraser contains Mr. Allingham’s own private sentiments on the Spectator. He, too, quotes no doubt in his inmost soul the lines made upon the paper some forty years ago, when, after quoting the attributes of the different journals of the time, the poet winds up with the doggerel lines—

“And last, but not least, comes the sour Spectator,
“Who, hated by all men, has turned a man-hater.”

This was in the day of Mr. Rintoul, the most bitter enemy that poetasters ever had. So much for squabble the second. Now move we on to higher ground. Leaving the wriggling worms of this dull earth we ascend into the ethereal regions above this world, with Canon Farrar and the author of Eternal Hope; and here, although the fight is carried on in mid air, it is none the less fierce and passionate, like the combat of the gods and warriors in Kaulbach’s picture. Canon Farrar, as we all know, holds for certain that eternal punishment is inconsistent with that Divine mercy we have been taught to consider as the first attribute of the Almighty. His adversary contends, with no despicable logic, that the whole system of the universe being founded on the law of contrast, upon the theory of light and shadow, that eternal reward could have no existence unless contrasted with eternal punishment. This squabble is the most important of all, for it has gone far enough to serve for text of the advertisement of one of the works—that certain expressions in the adversary’s book having been considered libellous, the case has been placed in the hands of a solicitor. Next comes the deadly feud between Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Whistler. The former expresses such entire disapproval of Mr. Whistler’s painting, which, in tone, colour, sentiment, execution, so completely disgusts the fine sense and artistic judgment of Mr. Ruskin, that the latter openly declares that its very existence has become an insult to the common sense of man, and all acknowledged taste in art. This is the rough outline of Mr. Ruskin’s sentiments, and as he is not used to clothe them in purple and fine linen, but to present them in all their nudity to the public, why, Mr. Whistler thinks it of such bad example that he is resolved to try whether he would not be entitled to designate such  plain language as libellous. But, how comes it that we are well nigh forgetting the most important quarrel of all? Ouida, the Amazon, fights with Burnand, the slinger, who has presumed to make most glorious sport of the fair enthusiast. But Ouida is no ordinary combatant, and she endeavours to floor her antagonist with apologue bitter and sarcastic. “A frog that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a lamp.” “Why do you do that?” said the glowworm. “Why do you shine?” said the frog. If Mr. Burnand be not crushed by this withering irony, his vitality must be as defiant of injury as that of the humble reptile to which she compares him. The last work of Ouida—“Friendship” by name—is the first real literary fiasco which has ever befallen that lady. The heroine is decidedly more wicked than any of her former female characters, and, what is worse, she is dull and unpleasant too. There will be a fine field for the frog to hop in when he comes to frolic amongst the pages of “Friendship,” and the only difficulty this time will be for him to find the glow-worm—its light is so entirely quenched—and nothing remains but its dull grey shiny coat. The moral of all these literary and artistic squabbles is a sad one, indeed. It proves the want of true genius amongst our authors and artists. When Byron was attacked by Jeffrey he did not threaten to go to law, he sat down to pen a repulse far more satirical and incisive. When Bulwer was satirised by Thackeray he did not grow furious and abusive, he simply ignored the offence, and accepted the author’s apology from “the very top of his grandeur,” as the French say. Thackeray would vastly have preferred a lawsuit, no doubt; but times are altering every day, and our feelings are altering with them.

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The Ipswich Journal (12 November, 1878)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan’s new literary and political weekly paper, Light, went out a week ago. It is another of Mr. Buchanan’s disappointments. He has worked very hard at this publication, and it was far better in quality than many a successful weekly; but there was no opening for it, and these are not times in which to cultivate new fields in the realms of the reading public.

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Despite the failure of Light, Buchanan did contemplate launching another journal of his own, at least according to the following news items. As far as I know none of these projects ever got beyond the ‘pre-publicity’ phase.

The Daily News (13 December, 1889)

     LITERARY NOTES.—The Academy says:—Universal sympathy has been expressed at the tidings—made known through The Daily News—of Mr. Browning’s serious illness, just at the moment when his new volume is being issued to the public. His best friends are the most confident that his great physical energy will enable him to make a rapid recovery.—Mr. Robert Buchanan’s new poem, to be published immediately, with illustrations, is entitled “The Outcast: a Rhyme for a Time.” It is described as a somewhat new departure in poetry, intermingling with a legendary subject a good deal of contemporary matter. The hero is that mythical person, “The Flying Dutchman,” whom the poet assumes to be still existing, and who in the prelude (called “The First Christmas Eve”) makes his appearance in the heart of London.—We are informed that the beginning of 1890 will witness the birth of a new monthly review, to be edited by Mr. Robert Buchanan. It will be eclectic in character, but among its objects will be the promotion of the editor’s views on social and religious questions. Unusual prominence will be given to the discussion of current literature.—The announcements for a new volume of Good Words, beginning with the January number, include “The Impregnable Rock of Scripture,” a study of modern criticism, by Mrs. W. E. Gladstone.

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The San Francisco Call (16 November, 1890 - p.11)

     Robert Buchanan is to start a new publication with the amiable purpose of criticizing critics. It is to be called The Modern Review, and Mr. Buchanan says he hopes to give the critics a new sensation. In his declaration of faith in his own abilities he states that his first effort will be to be honest, his next to be interesting, and—and—“even amusing,” forsooth, and, above all, that he will try to be literary and print good literature.

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Glasgow Herald (23 October, 1894)

     WINTER season generally brings with it at least one or two new papers or magazines, but during the coming month we are to be favoured with no fewer than three new periodicals. Mr Robert Buchanan is to make the heroic attempt to give us a new weekly, to be published on Sunday morning, that is to be up-to-date, independent in politics, independent in thought, and independent in its literary and dramatic and artistic views. Another forthcoming weekly is the Realm, to be edited by Lady Colin Campbell and Mr W. Earl Hodgson. It is, I hear, to be on the lines of the Saturday, the Spectator, and the World, that is, it is to adopt the most vital lines of these periodicals, “to be as literary as the Speaker or the Academy, and as up-to-date as the World, and better than them all severally and collectively,” as one of the writers already engaged for it phrased it to me. Certainly the Realm—the name seems to me the least satisfactory thing about it—promises to start well. First and foremost there is ample capital to back it up. Then the editors are both experienced journalists and authors. Lady Colin Campbell is not only well known for her two delightful books, the novel “Darrell Blake” and the piscatorial articles collectively called “A Book of the Running Brooks,” but as an able critic of art and the drama. She is one of the ablest of the regular writers on the staff of the World and the Pall Mall Gazette. Mr W. Earl Hodgson also had much experience editorially and as an author, and his conduct of Rod and Gun and assistant editorship of the National Review give warrant of capability for his new joint responsibility.
     As to the third new periodical, I knew nothing till I received a notification this morning “with the compliments of the editor of Illustrated Modern Art and Literature. This notification was an invitation to view “the original oil paintings, water-colour, and sketches by eminent English and Continental artists. which it is proposed to reproduce in future numbers of the journal.” The forthcoming periodical is at least cosmopolitan, for the place of publication is quadruple—London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. Of these I expect the last is the genuine original, for the invitation circular, though dated from Fleet Street, is printed in the German capital.

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The Battle of Isandúla published in the Contemporary Review, April 1879.

The Guardian (4 April, 1879 - p.6)

THE APRIL MAGAZINES.

     The Contemporary Review contains a poem on “Isandula” by Mr. Robert Buchanan. Its versification is spirited, but it cannot be said to be on the whole successful. In particular, there is an obvious jar in speaking of the Zulus as “devils,” “tigers,” &c. This is not the way in which brave men or the bards who worthily sing brave men’s deeds speak of opponents in fair fight.

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The Examiner  (5 April, 1879)

     The current number of the Contemporary Review contains a poem by Robert Buchanan on the disaster at Isandula. A good many poets all over the country have already been inspired by our defeat, and have not hesitated to commit their inspirations to paper; nor is the crop yet exhausted, for we shall, in the year 1900, have to expect Mr. Tennyson’s ode. Meanwhile, we are quite satisfied with Mr. Buchanan’s. It is the most metrical, the most flowing, and the most poetic we have yet read. An ode on a battle is nothing if it does not sound well; Mr. Buchanan’s metre is well-chosen, and his verses are sonorous. There is in this number an extremely interesting letter from Russia, which we warmly commend to the few who still believe in her.

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Justinian published in the Contemporary Review, January 1880.

The Academy (10 January, 1880 - p.27)

     THE Contemporary Review is somewhat dull, and ought not to publish an article of Herr Karl Hillebrand, which has been already noticed in these columns, on “England in the Eighteenth Century,” without a statement of the fact that it appeared in the Deutsche Rundschau for December. Prof. Blackie attempts to settle the land question by an appeal to the “law of nature,” which wondrous code we thought had now been abandoned. Prof. R. K. Douglas gives a sketch of the “Chinese Drama” which does not lead us to think that even the existing taste for Chinese art will lead any devotee to agitate for the establishment of a Chinese theatre. The most striking of the contents of this number is a poem by Mr. Robert Buchanan called “Justinian,” which, however, has nothing to do with the Emperor, but is the account of an amiable scientific atheist who begat a son that he might nurture him without superstition, stimulated his desire to work until his health gave way, saw him die with despair, and had none of the comforts of religion. Mr. Buchanan does full justice to the atheist and his good intentions, and the poem has much discrimination of character and much pathos. It is a pity Mr. Buchanan does not know more about obvious things. He makes the father choose for his son “the learned name Justinian,” because he wants a name whose associations are “heathen no more than Christian;” but surely Justinian was not learned, and was eminently pious and superstitious. He gives us a picture of an Italian lake which is positively excruciating. He showers upon it all the colours of the rainbow, and then makes châlets hang upon its sides and gondolas crawl across its stillness.

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‘Free Thought in America’ published in The North American Review, April 1885.

The Graphic (4 April, 1885)

     In the North American Review, “Free Thought in America” contains Mr. Robert Buchanan’s views on the teachings of Colonel Robert Ingersoll, and of Mr. Frothingham. Of the first he says that he represents the natural reaction of American Bohemianism against the Puritanism of Boston and the overstrained Transcendentalism of Brook Farm. The vice of America accentuated in Colonel Ingersoll is “its materialism,” and, says Mr. Buchanan, “we owe much to the gods, but for them Europe would have been Americanised long ago,” and he goes on to show what a bad thing this would be for us. With Mr. Frothingham he is less severe; but misses in him “the charm of those fairy stories of God which will continue to add to human happiness so long as the heart of man is as a child’s, and some glimpses of a heavenly dream remain.”—Mr. Charles D. Warner’s “A Study of Prison Management” is descriptive of the system in vogue in Elmira Reformatory, and supplies suggestive reading for members of Social Science Congresses.

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‘The Modern Young Man As Critic’ published in The Universal Review, March 1889.

The Graphic (30 March, 1889)

I.

     THE most striking paper in the Universal Review is Mr. Robert Buchanan’s “The Modern Young Man as Critic.” The modern young man is, in this writer’s opinion, very different to the young man of his own early experience. That paragon “lifted his hat to the Magdalen, in life and literature. . . . In Bohemia, he had heard the bird-like cry of Mimi; in the forest of Arden he had roamed with Rosalind. For him, in the light-heartedness of his youth, the world was an enchanted dwelling-place. The gods remained, with God above them.” Mr. Buchanan selects Mr. Henry James, M. Paul Bourget, M. Guy de Maupassant, Mr. William Archer, and Mr. George Moore, for the lash of his scornful criticism, characterising them respectively as “The Young Man who is Superfine,” “The Detrimental Young Man,” “The Olfactory Young Man,” “The Young Man in a Cheap Literary Suit,” and the “Bank-Holiday Young Man.” Of this latter personage we have this:—“If he has studied any books, he is completely fogged as to what books. He knows literature, as he knows Nature, out of his own ill-balanced head. He hates everything— Shakespeare, Art, Poetry, Religion, Decency—everything, but pipes and beer.” Mr. Buchanan is not far wrong in making Thackeray responsible for a good deal of the current cheap cynicism. As a slashing critique his article will well repay perusal, and there is enough truth in it to make it bite.

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‘Is Chivalry Still Possible?’

This was a letter written by Buchanan to the Daily Telegraph in March 1889, and, as such, these responses should be in the ‘Letters to the Press’ section of the site. However, since I haven’t seen the original, and the letter was republished in his 1891 collection of essays,  The Coming Terror, I thought it best to add them here.

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (31 March, 1889)

WOMAN: HER RIGHTS AND WRONGS.

     The conference of the National Society for the Promotion of Women’s Suffrage once more revives the whole question as to the assumption by women of public functions. With regard to the suffrage, the opinion is growing that it is ungenerous and unfair to deprive women ratepayers and householders—who stand in precisely the same relation to the State as men—of this right or privilege. Eminent statesmen of all parties are agreed upon this; though there are still some, like Mr. Bright and Sir Henry James, who do not see their way to its acceptance. Many, again, would not oppose the granting of the franchise to single women, if they could be sure it would not be ultimately extended to married ones. We confess that there is a good deal to be said for this view. If a husband and wife are in perfect political accord it is obvious that there is no necessity for giving the vote to the latter; and where they disagree it would manifestly not conduce to the peace of many households if the husband and wife took an active part in promoting the claims of rival political candidates. Mr. Woodall, M.P., stated at the demonstration in Prince’s Hall that on the second reading of the Women’s Suffrage Bill he should ask the direct vote of all who were in favour of its great cardinal principle, but that in Committee members should be free to exercise their judgment either in enlarging or in limiting the measure as they might think wisest and most expedient. But Sir Richard Temple, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, Mr. McLaren, and Mr. Jacob Bright are in favour of giving the suffrage to all women alike, and a resolution to that effect was carried at the meeting. This is a definite issue; but it is doubtful whether the House of Commons, or, at least, the present Parliament, will consent to open the doors of the Constitution so widely as this. On the contrary, a measure restricted to single women and widows would have had a very good chance of passing. It is neither just nor expedient that property which is in the hands of female owners should continue to go unrepresented. There are many questions upon which the voice of women ought to be clearly and distinctly heard—such questions as education, health, morals, and the operation of the poor laws. As to the argument that women are sentimental, impulsive, easily open to influence, and impervious to reason, we attach little weight to it; for there are many men of whom the same might be said. Let but women vote for sensible male candidates to represent their interests, and the suffrage would be shorn of half its terrors. Women are certainly not unfitted for going to a polling booth and tendering their votes, though there is a natural conviction amongst the great bulk of the community that public life, when regarded in all its bearings, and with what it entails, is not desirable for women, either for their own sakes or for those of their families. But we are glad that this whole question of the claims of women is pressing to the front. For every one of their legitimate grievances there should be found a remedy. There are too many in our midst who affect to despise the status of women; and Mr. Robert Buchanan’s timely and vigorous condemnation of such in the columns of a contemporary will elicit many a hearty response. Woman is too often regarded by man as a mere plaything, and it is time that a higher and nobler standard of womanhood prevailed. It will be an evil day for England when woman is degraded beneath her proper level; and there can be no surer sign of the speedy decadence of a nation than when the spirit of chivalry towards her begins to die out.

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The Penny Illustrated Paper (6 April, 1889 - p.221)

THE SHOWMAN.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,—

     The first green buds gem our trees. Ye know of old—in the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. And that’s the reason, I guess, why Master Robert Buchanan, his poet’s eyes with a fine frenzy rolling, took up his versatile pen, and asked the learned Editor of the Daily Telegraph— “IS CHIVALRY STILL POSSIBLE?” Quite possible, say I. When gents sit inside a ’bus, and the ladies, bless ’em! outside—when men persist in wearing their hats in theatres to hide the actors from the unbonnetted fair sex—and when lovely woman stoops to folly and makes the east end of Piccadilly a scene of midnight uproar—who can deny this D. T. question is, at least, seasonable? Why this riddle has succeeded the “Is Marriage a Failure?” conundrum is another matter. Peradventure, it has been sprung upon the public by the shrewdest newspaper conductor in London, because he held that the “Special Commission” and Palaver debates did not wholly satisfy the average palate for breakfast. There’s no London daily (save the London New York Herald) which caters for the fairer half of creation so well as the D. T. does. And I imagine that it was in fulfilment of his morning duty in this direction that (Sir) Edward Lawson (attended by his smart young esquire, Harry Lawson, M.P.) really threw down the gauntlet to the callous “Mashers” of the period who opine that Chivalry is no longer possible. There’s a world of romance, friends, to be threshed out of this theme, believe me!

     “Is Chivalry still possible?” Why, certainly! Look at Hodge’s courteous and chivalric reception of each Primrose Dame who canvasses him at election-time, and who doesn’t hesitate to offer bribes or to threaten social boycotting to secure her ends, as she often did in Enfield, I’m told. Aren’t our elections immeasurably refined by the seductive billing of these real canvass-back ducks? We doff our hats directly to these descendants of the irresistible Duchess of Devonshire of historic memory—and only pray they may escape imprisonment for the practised wiles that bring them within “measurable distance” of the Bribery Act and the jail. “Is Chivalry still Possible?” I own much parlous nonsense has appeared in the D. T. on the question, which is held to be not yet answered. But who can look around, and estimate the amount of self-sacrifice and busy bees of this world cheerfully subject themselves to in order to keep their women folks at home in comfort, and not agree with me that the best and most lasting kind of Chivalry is not only possible, but flourishes in our midst?

     Ye will have observed that on Tuesday our sandy young friend Buchanan returned to the subject in the D. T.; exclaiming afresh, “The man who lays his hand upon a woman, except in the way of kindness, is unworthy the name of man!” The gallery has cheered that heroic, if stale, sentiment anew. But, when all has been said that can be said, I fancy the discussion will resolve itself into this:—

Sing a song of Chivalry—
     Chivalry all awry—
Lawson throws his gauntlet down
     To give the Tel. a cry.
When the cry was opened,
     Buchanan ’gan to sing,
“Isn’t this a pretty cry?
     ’Twill advertise me like anything!”

                                                            CODLIN.

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Punch (13 April, 1889 - p.177)

’ARRY ON CHIVALRY.

     DEAR CHARLIE,—Your letter ’as reached me, and give me a reglar good laugh.
Me engaged to be married? Who tipped you that kibosh, or is it your chaff?
The world’s awful given to Pigotting, CHARLIE, jest now, and no kid;
But you didn’t suck that in, now did yer? You wos a fair mug if you did.

Not percisely, my pippin. No, thanky; I know a game wuth two o’ that.
I am not a Buchananite, CHARLIE, so don’t write me down for a flat.
Read your dear D. T. lately, no doubt, my dear boy? Well, then, wot do you think
Of this “Chivalry” question, which ROBERT has got in no end of a kink?

I ain’t much up in histry, myself, it seems dismally dry tommy-rot,
Fur as ever yours truly looked into it, a regular rummy old lot
Our ancestors seem to have bin; blooming geesers all round, big and small;
And, like LABBY, I think it’s a pity we ever ’ad any at all.

Wot this Chivalry wos, mate, fust off, BOB BUCHANAN may know—or he mayn’t—
But if it meant making the Woman a speeches of gingerbread Saint,
And a bobbin’ around her with billy-doos, big battle-haxes, and such,
Like a lot of tin-kettles with trimmings, it won’t work to-day, mate, not much.

BUCHANAN’S a poet, they tell me, and poets don’t nick me, nohow,
Kind o’ long-winded loonatics, mostly, dead-nuts on the biggest bow-wow;
Sort of gushing G. O. M.’s in metre; and Chivalry, if you arsk me,
Seems a stror-stuffed poetical “property,” all bloomin’ fiddle-de-dee.

Knights be jolly well jiggered, I say, ’cept the turtle-fed City Swell sort,
Like Sir ROBERT, the Parnell-boohooer; now he is a plucky old Sport;
But you don’t ketch him planking on Chivalry; no, it’s as much out o’ date
As DON QUICKSHOT’S old crock, Rosy Nanty, would be in a race for a Plate.

But Woman! Well, Woman’s all right enough, not arf a bad sort of thing
When a fellow is young and permiskus. And when he has ’ad his fair fling,
And wants quiet diggings or nussing, she do come in ’andy no doubt;
In fack, taking Woman all round, she’s good goods the world carn’t do without.

But washup ’er, CHARLIE? Wot bunkum!—as Mrs. LYNN LINTON remarks.
To watch her wire into ’er sex like Jemimer, old man, is rare larks.
She do let ’em ’ave it to-rights. ’Ow I larf as she lays on the lash!
It must rile ’er to know she’s a She, but I do like ’er devil and dash.

ROBERT’S down on the Modern Young Man, who’s a ’ARRY sez he (’ang his cheek!)
With a H.! Now that give me the needle, old man. I ain’t mealy or meek,
Nor yet one of yer rhyme-pumping milksops wot look on a gal as a saint,
But I do know the petticoats, yus, and I’m fly to palaver and paint.

I’m a Modern Young Man, if there is one, a “Cynick” right down to the ground;
Wich means that I am not a juggins, nor yet to be copped on the bound.
Pap’s passy, old pal; pooty sentiment’s fairly played out; no one ’ooks
Yours truly with patter of “fame and fair women, and beautiful books.”

Yah! Sech hantydeluvian kibosh may cosset up kittens or kids,
But Chivalry ain’t in the ’unt when it’s matched agen Class and the quids.
Your Magdalen muck will not wash, nor we don’t want it washed, wich is more,
In Bohemia p’raps it might work, in the Strand sech soft soap is a bore.

BOB BUCHANAN may lather his ’ardest, may scrub and blow bubbles like steam,
But his moral Spring-clean won’t come off, it’s a quill-driving laundress’s dream.
Old mivvies are too fond of sluicing and tidying-up like all round;
Let Chivalry’s charwomen chatter; they won’t mop me up, I’ll be bound.

The Modern Young Man? Wy, that’s Me, CHARLIE! ’ARRY’s the model and type,
But no more like BUCHANAN’S stuffed dummy than prime pully sowty’s like tripe.
At the Pubs or the Clubs it’s all one; it is me sets the fashion, old pal;
And we’re all of a mind to a hinch about togs, lotion, larks, or a gal.

This here Chivalry ain’t in our maynoo; we ain’t sech blind mugs as all that.
The Modern Young Man must be wide-oh! He’s never a spoon or a flat;
Takes nothink on trust, don’t “part” easy, is orkurd to nobble or spoof;
And there’s only three things he believes in—hisself, a prime lark, and the oof.

There you ’ave it, BUCHANAN, my buffer, put neat in a nutshell, old man.
We don’t dream, or kotow to the petticoats; no, Sir, that isn’t our plan;
And you arsk wot we’re coming to? Well, you may arsk and arsk on till all’s blue,
But one thing we ain’t coming to, BOB, that’s to learn of a poet—like you!

If I wrote a Young Man’s Confessions, like Mr. GEORGE MOORE, as you say—
Don’t know him myself, but he seems to be fly to the right time o’ day.
I should make you sit up jest a mossel; and this I can promise, old chap,
You’ll find no tinpot “Chivalry” there, nor no moonstruck poetical pap.

Woman washup’s good fun in its way; I can fake it myself, dontcher know—
With a jolly clear heye to wot’s wot, and a sense of the true quid for quo—
But be a mere moke to the Feminines, mugged up to kneel, fetch, and carry?
That may do for Chivalry-BOB, but I’m blowed if it will for
                                                                 Yours,                        ’ARRY.

_____

‘My First Book’ published in The Idler, May 1893.

Glasgow Herald (13 May, 1893)

THE question of “Literature as a Profession,” much agitated by that eminent professor thereof, Mr Andrew Lang, has been discussed mainly with reference to the pecuniary chances of authorship, but if Mr Robert Buchanan is right in what he says in the current number of the Idler we shall have to look seriously at the moral side of the business as well. Mr Buchanan, with all his wonted emphasis and acerbity, declares that literature is not only “the poorest and least satisfactory of all professions,” but even “one of the least ennobling,” and he affirms that, with a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of his own period, he has “scarcely met one individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary fame.” The Muses, in fact, those very refined young ladies whose society has always been prescribed as so chastening and elevating, are, after all, it seems, no better than they should be, or such, at least, is the Puritanic testimony of Mr Buchanan. The critic of the “Fleshly School,” we know, was always a bit of a Puritan, notwithstanding such insignificant details as the “White Rose and Red,” and the fine old life on the border of Bohemia (made mention of in the Idler article), which “will not bear translation into contemporary English.” And now, apparently, that same steadfast Puritanism of his is taking a yet stronger development, and bringing him almost to the pitch of those Greenock magistrates who made poor John Wilson give up the “profane and unprofitable art of poem-making,” or of Landor’s Sir Thomas Lucy, mourning over the fall of Shakespeare—“A reputable wool-stapler’s son turned gipsy and poet for life!” Poor David Gray, we have to conclude, would have been better at the paternal shuttle, better perhaps even wagging his poetic and rather distended head in the pulpit of some outlandish Free Kirk. Nay, Mr Buchanan himself would have escaped a moral deterioration had he settled down to a desk in Glasgow, and never aspired to the altitudes of “London Poems” and “North Coast.”
     Mr Buchanan’s complaint, of course, is only another addition to the long jeremiad in which authors, from the very beginning of authorship, have lamented the hardships of their profession, and warned young aspirants against following the example themselves have set. The successful author’s advice to those about to go in for literature is invariably the same as Punch’s counsel to those about to marry— “Don’t.” It would seem as if he hated the thought of propagation of the literary species, and desired himself (perhaps not without much unconscious vanity) to be the last of the line. One, however, can understand these complaints of the precariousness of the literary profession—although, it is true, one does not find the successful barrister in a very parallel case warning off all would-be wearers of silk; but it is not easy to find any sense or justice in a caution against the “demoralising” influence of letters. Why the writing of books should be a less ennobling work than clerking or shopkeeping is a puzzle which Mr Buchanan does not help us to solve. “For complete literary success,” he says, “among contemporaries, it is imperative that a man should either have no real opinions or be able to conceal such as he possesses; that he should have one eye on the market and the other on the public journals; that he should humbug himself into the delusion that book-writing is the highest work in the universe, and that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of expediency.” This, however, is not the way in which two of the most brilliant examples of literary success in the last half century, those of Carlyle and Ruskin, to go no further back, were achieved. No doubt there is in the literary career a temptation to sacrifice honest work to the demands of the market, and look only to expediency, but that temptation does not beset the litterateur alone.
     Mr Buchanan will have it that if the man of letters is in arms against anything that is rotten in society or in literature he must be silent; but that is the exact opposite of the truth. The world likes nothing better than to be told that it is going the way of perdition, and some of the most brilliant reputations among contemporaries—Carlyle and Ruskin are again examples—have been won by those who prophesied any but smooth things. Of course, everything depends on the way in which a man takes up his testimony; and if Mr Buchanan as a prophet has been unsuccessful he has nobody but himself to blame. A profession which counts the names of Johnson and Scott, of Thackeray and Dickens and Carlyle, among its votaries is not to be branded as a debasing one, even although Grub Street does lie within its confines. There is striving after unworthy aims in every calling, and he that is filthy in literature would be filthy still in the Stock Exchange or at the bar. It is quite possible for a litterateur in these days to tell the truth, do honest work, and live by it, and withal be as sane and manly as Pope imagined himself when he write to Arbuthnot—

“I pay my debts, believe, and say my prayers;
Can sleep without a poem in my head;
Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead.”

It is true that Pope was far from attaining his own ideal, and the same may be said of some poets who come far after him alike in rank and in time. But that is the fault not of the profession of letters, but of certain of its professors.

___

The Graphic (20 May, 1893)

The World of Letters
_____

BY H. D. TRAILL
_____

.....

     The Chicago Exhibition is to be signalised by what we are assured is the first Conference of Authors ever held, and by what will certainly be the first public discussion of one of the themes suggested for debate. I should, at least, imagine it to be pretty safe to say that no deliberative body has ever yet tackled the subject of “Poetry in the Twentieth Century”; and one can only hope that the exchange of views on the subject will be fruitful. It is sure to be animated—at least, if there are any poets of the nineteenth century present; and there can hardly fail to be at least half a dozen or so, unless the Conference is very small indeed.

     It must not be supposed, however, that all the subjects for discussion are as delightfully “viewy” as this. Most of them, on the contrary, are severely practical, and some of them full of stern monition for the Wicked Publisher; while the main object of the Conference—as is that of the Authors’ Society, which delegates Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Sprigge as its representatives thereat—is to “maintain the worth and dignity of Letters.” One cannot say that the object is a bad one. It is true that the individual in private life who is always “maintaining his worth and dignity” is not usually of an ideally worthy and dignified type of character, and it were, no doubt, much to be preferred that literature, and those who follow it, should dispense with this sort of self-assertion.

     Unfortunately, however, we live in an age in which it seems impossible to attain the mean in anything except by the somewhat violent and barbarous method of opposing one extreme with another. Men and things have to be stinted of their due praise by the judicious in order to counteract the effect of the extravagant laudations of the foolish, and so to strike a sort of rough balance between the two. At times, though less frequently, the reverse operation becomes necessary; and it certainly looks as if just at the present moment the “worth and dignity of letters” could, as the vulgar phrase is, “do with” a little maintaining. One is getting a trifle tired of that cry which is just now being taken up by one successful literary person after another, and which Mr. Robert Buchanan has been the last to echo. The declamations of these gentlemen against the Art which has brought them fame and fortune strike me, I must confess, as mighty unbecoming. Why, there are scores of less fortunate contemporaries of theirs in London to-day following literature for love, and journalism for bread and cheese who would not think of speaking so ungraciously and ungratefully, even of the handmaid, as Mr. Buchanan and a still older offender are in the habit of speaking of the mistress.

_____

‘The Voice of The Hooligan’ published in the Contemporary Review, December 1899.

The New York Times (20 January, 1900)

KIPLING AND AN OLD ASSAILANT.

     Nearly thirty years have passed since Mr. Robert Buchanan gave the world, first in the pages of The Contemporary Review and later in book form, his “Fleshly School of Poetry.” In magazine form the article was signed Thomas Maitland, but later, the next year, when the book appeared, Mr. Buchanan’s own name was found on its title page. Rossetti and his friends were afterward accused by the writer of the paper of trying to prove his criticism was the malicious and cowardly work of a rival poet, afraid to strike in broad day or under his real name, and adopting a pseudonym to conceal his real identity. *  *  *  I have only one word to use concerning attacks upon myself. They are the invention of cowards, too spoilt with flattery to bear criticism and too querulous and humorsome to perceive the real issues of the case.”
     We all remember how the controversy waxed hotter and hotter and what were the arguments brought to bear upon the question from both sides. The value of Mr. Buchanan’s criticism is sufficiently well shown in the following extract. Perhaps the arguments advanced by the other side were more courteously expressed:

     Mr. Rossetti’s poetry, not because it is by any means the best or worst verse of its kind, but because, being avowedly “mature” and having had the benefit of many years’ revision, it is perhaps more truly representative of its class than the grosser verse of Mr. Swinburne or the more careless or fluent verse of Mr. Morris—the main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy. *  *  *  The charge of indecency need not be pressed at all, as it is settled by the fact of artistic and poetic incompetence.  *  *  *  We perceive that the silliness and the insincerity come, not by nature, but at second hand, Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne being the merest echoes—strikingly original in this that they merely echo what is vile, while other imitators reproduce what is admirable.

     How this controversy finally ended, and Mr. Buchanan’s seeming repentance when Rossetti died, we all perfectly remember. While Mr. Buchanan may be held excusable for the early attack above referred to, the passage of nearly thirty years should have rendered impossible a second paper of like nature, and yet “The Voice of ‘The Hooligan,’” which appeared in a recent Contemporary Review, is full of the broadest personalities and utterly lacking in the critical spirit from beginning to end.
     Has it never occurred to Mr. Buchanan that his own position, being that of a minor poet and essayist—albeit the writer of some charming verse and equally delightful prose—might render himself liable to a charge of envy, especially when he attacks a man of world-wide reputation? We find him writing of Mr. Kipling in the following words, which it must be admitted are anything but well weighed or temperate:

     As for our popular literature, it has been in many of its manifestations long past praying for; it has run to seed in fiction of the baser sort, seldom or never, with all its cleverness, touching the quick of human conscience; but its most extraordinary feature at this moment is the exaltation to a position of almost unexampled popularity of a writer who, in his single person, adumbrates, I think, all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time.

     Mr. Buchanan is perhaps equally complimentary to the public, claiming that one of the principal factors in Kipling’s success is “the utter apathy of general readers, too idle and uninstructed to study works of any length or demanding any contribution of serious thought on the reader’s part.” Mr. Buchanan next proceeds to examine Kipling’s poetry in much the same spirit that, thirty years ago, called forth his first bitter attack:

How, then, are we to account for the extraordinary popularity of works so contemptible in spirit and so barbarous in execution?  *  *  *  Amused, therefore, by the free-and-easy rattles, the jog-trot tunes which had hitherto been heard only in the music halls and read only in the sporting newspapers,  *  *  *  the spirit abroad to-day is the spirit of ephemeral journalism, and whatever accords with that spirit—its vulgarity, its flippancy, and its radical unintelligence—is certain to attain tremendous vogue. Anything that demands a moment’s thought or a moment’s severe attention, anything that is not thoroughly noisy, blatant, cocksure, and self-assertive, is caviare to that man on the street on whom cheap journalism depends, and who, it should be said, en passant, is often a member of smart society.

     And so the paper goes on, the whole being a tissue of personal abuse, directed both against Mr. Kipling and the undiscriminating public, who so evidently prefer the latter to Mr. Buchanan. Shall we allow it is, as Mr. Buchanan alleges, because Kipling, although in no true sense of the word a poet, “is as near” an approach to a poet as can be tolerated by the ephemeral and hasty judgment of the day? His very incapacity of serious thought or deep feeling is in his favor. He represents, with more or less accuracy, what the mob is thinking.  *  *  *  Of Mr. Kipling it may be said, so far at least as his verses are concerned, that he has scarcely on any single occasion uttered anything that does not suggest moral baseness or hover dangerously near it.
     We might suggest that the above quoted words savor strongly of “envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness,” to say nothing of the fact that so exaggerated a statement completely fails to carry weight in any critical discussion as to Mr. Kipling’s place in our literature. Mr. Buchanan’s opinions on most literary matters would be entitled to more consideration if worded more moderately. We are not willing to allow that in these days of wide educational advantages, with schools, colleges, universities, libraries, books, and good periodicals far more abundant and easily accessible than ever before, when the general level of education and refinement is far higher than in any other period of the world’s history, all the result such progress has to show is inability to read anything that demands serious thought or feeling.
     Mr. Kipling’s work scarcely needs defense; even the charge that his work is all-suggestive of moral baseness is best disproved by his books themselves, which are open to us all, so that that charge may be passed over in silence. But just one point we would like to controvert—Kipling’s incapacity for serious thought or deep feeling. That he has made not only India, but the British soldier, well known to us is an unquestionable fact, the latter not only on his lighter side, but his courage and devotion to duty, at least when emergencies arise, Tommy Atkins in camp being another story. We might also claim that it is really the deep feeling Kipling possesses that has enabled him to make us understand how thoroughly “Judy O’Grady and the Colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.”
     The appearance of “The Absent-Minded Beggar” in these days of the South African was will come with fresh force to prove, not only Kipling’s earnestness, but his deep feeling and keen patriotism as seen in the story of this four-verse poem, which was sold to a London newspaper—The Daily Mail—for a large sum, that was immediately turned over as a nucleus for a relief fund. The poem was first printed in the pages of the paper and then reissued as a three-page broadside, in fac simile of Kipling’s autograph, with a striking illustration on the middle sheet by Caton Woodville of “A Gentleman in Kharki Ordered South,” the broadside being sold for a shilling per copy, the proceeds going to such fund for the benefit of the wives and children of the “Reservists,” as the volunteer force is called.
     The force and effectiveness of these four verses show more and more strikingly with each fresh reading. The style of the poem is not academic—far from it—but it is earnest and so written that the words, the message of the poem—written, one would say, at white heat, from the heart to the heart—make a direct appeal to you, to you personally, and not collectively, and also make you realize perfectly that the army is one huge brotherhood in these days of a common trouble and menace to all England:

Cook’s son, Duke’s son, son of a belted Earl,
Son of a Lambeth publican, it’s all the same to-day.

     The entire poem is admirably strong and virile, and all the more effectively perhaps for its very slang. Even the opening lines have their message:

When you’ve shouted “Rule Britannia,”
     When you’ve sung “God Save the Queen,”
When you’ve finished killing Krüger with your mouth.

a little method of warfare we all indulge in. Kipling adds:

Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine,
     For a gentleman in kharki ordered south;
He’s an absent-minded beggar and his weaknesses are great—
     But we and Paul must take him as we find him—
He is out on active service, wiping something off a slate—
     And he’s left a lot of little things behind him.
          *          *          *          *          *          *          *
Here are girls he married secret, asking no permission to,
     For he knew he wouldn’t get it if he did.
There’s gas and coal and vittals, and the house rent falling due,
     And it’s more than rather likely there’s a kid.
          *          *          *          *          *          *          *
But it ain’t the time for sermons with the Winter coming on—
     We must help the girl that Tommy’s left behind him.
          *          *          *          *          *          *          *
Let us manage so as later we can look him in the face—
     And tell him what he’d very much prefer—
That while he saved the empire, his employer saved his place,
     And his mates—(that’s you and me)—looked out for Her.
He’s an absent-minded beggar, and he may forget it all,
     But we do not want his kiddies to remind him
That we sent them to the workhouse, while their daddy hammered Paul,
     So we’ll keep the homes our Tommy’s left behind him.

     Had we more space we might name many other poems by Mr. Kipling to show how unjust and completely prejudiced Mr. Buchanan’s charge of lack of serious thought or deep feeling really is, notably perhaps the dedication to “Departmental Ditties.” This little poem is so beautiful in style, wording, thought, and the deep feeling is so apparent—so decided a contrast, too, to the “Absent-Minded Beggar,” because not drawn forth by strong patriotism, but entirely from within—that it has always seemed to us not only one of the most successful poems Kipling has ever written, but in some way to stand for the man’s whole character and personality, as nothing else has ever done. Perhaps also it explains to a great degree the foundation for Kipling’s popularity:

I have eaten your bread and salt,
     I have drunk your water and wine,
The deaths ye died I have watched beside
     And the lives that ye lead were mine.

Was there aught that I did not share,
     In vigil or toil, or ease,
One joy or woe that I did not know,
     Dear hearts across the seas?

I have written the tale of our life,
     For a sheltered people’s mirth,
In jesting guise—but ye are wise,
     And ye know what the jest is worth.

___

The Suburban Citizen (Washington D.C.) (20 January, 1900)

THE FALL OF KIPLING
_____

FURIOUS CRITICISM OF ROBERT BUCHANAN.
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The Famous Novelist Says That Nearly Everything That the
Ex-Reporter Writes Is Tainted with a Low Moral Tone.
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     Robert Buchanan, whose fierce attack on Rudyard Kipling in the Contemporary Review is the literary sensation of the day, has always been noted for plain words whenever he comes out as a critic. Kipling, he asserts, has seldom uttered “anything that does not suggest moral baseness.” The uncrowned laureate, says Mr. Buchanan, takes his inspiration from the street tough and sings “the coarse and soulless patriotism of the hour.” The object of true imperialism is “to free man, not to enslave him.” Mr. Buchanan some years ago turned literary London inside out by a ferocious criticism of Rosetti and Swinburne, making life enemies of these two poets. Kipling’s robust derogator has written poetry himself, but he is better known for his dramas and his novels. His criticisms are forceful and earnest and are characterized by a directness calculated to impress the reader deeply, if not prejudice him. An incidental effect of his acumen seems to be discomfiture for the author criticised, and very often the suppression of the literature commented upon.

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The New York Times (3 February, 1900)

LONDON LITERARY LETTER.
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Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW by
William L. Alden.

     LONDON, Jan. 15.—

     ..... When speaking of Kipling I forgot to say that Sir Walter Besant has, in the last number of The Contemporary Review, done for Mr. Robert Buchanan in a mild way what Stevenson did for Dr. Hyde in a more severe way. Buchanan, who is as good a fellow personally as he is cantankerous in print, abused Kipling violently last month, insisting that the influence of his writings is in the highest degree demoralizing. Mr. Buchanan has a genius for taking the wrong side of everything, but fortunately when he champions a cause he does it in such an uproarious way that people only laugh at him. Since the person calling herself “Ouida” asserted that Kipling was ignorant of the rudiments of style, and should be stood in the corner and spanked for his impertinence in daring to write, nothing more absurd has been written than is Mr. Buchanan’s so-called criticism of Kipling. It evidently moved the mild Besant to wrath, and he has cudgeled Buchanan with energy. No one, however, will ever match Edmund Yates’s immortal description of Buchanan. It would be unkind to quote it at this late day, but it will never be forgotten.

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The Graphic (17 February, 1900)

The War in the Magazines

     WITH one accord all the serious magazines devote themselves to the present crisis, and readers may take their choice of a score of explanations of the present reverse. In the Nineteenth Century the late General Sir George Chesney makes a raid on the War Office. He wants sweeping reforms, but seems to doubt whether the business will be taken in hand until action is forced on the country by disaster— and disaster even greater than the present warning:—

     Her ocean girdle may save England from falling into the depths of abasement which befell Prussia after Jena and France after Sedan; but if England be safe from the humiliation of herself lying prostrate under the conqueror’s heel, yet the English Empire, spread over the world, is vulnerable at every point. But neither Prussia in 1806 nor France in 1870 was so culpably careless as we are now, nor invited disaster so plainly as we shall do if, after the warnings given, we recklessly suffer our military administration to continue unreformed, and a system to be maintained which every inquiry made into it shows to be utterly insufficient for the purpose it is intended to fulfill.

     To the same review Mr. R. B. Townshend contributes a paper called “Some Stray Shots and a Moral,” in which the moral is the importance of marksmanship, and he propounds a very easy way in which the youth of the nation may have simple but useful practice with an air gun such as one may buy for twenty or thirty shillings. His great point is the necessity of training the man behind the rifle to shoot straight, and a man who is in earnest with air-gun practise can very cheaply “make himself a sure shot and a quick shot at close quarters, or, in other words, he can ground himself thoroughly in the A B C of shooting.”

WORSE THAN WAR?

     To the Contemporary Mr. Robert Buchanan contributes a slashing reply to the article written by Sir Walter Besant in defence of Mr. Kipling, whom Mr. Buchanan had attacked. Sir Walter was bold enough, in speaking of Mr. Kipling as a war poet, to say that there were worse evils than war, and Mr. Buchanan has no words in which to express his indignation. He cannot understand the attitude of one “who is not afraid to echo at this hour of the day the mad platitudes which drove Englishmen into homicidal frenzy forty years ago. There are worse things than war, quotha? Worse things even than war beginning and ending in the lust for gold, and the ardour of freebooters to grab the solid Earth?”

     I take my stand on the belief that there is no worse evil than war, and that all the talk of its power to purify a nation or an individual is the veriest and foulest cant. Two blacks never yet made a white, nor any two wrongs a right, and, disguise the truth under what phrases we may, war is simply murder with another name. That is my belief, and if that belief is false, every word which I have written concerning Mr. Kipling is false as well.

     Against this frenzied diatribe let us set the words of one who was if anyone a man of peace, and who never wrote a line without weighing his words for years—the late Professor Ruskin.

     When I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It is very strange to me to discover this, and very dreadful—but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. . . . I found, in brief, that all great nations learnt their truth of word and strength of thought in war, that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace.

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The New York Times (10 March, 1900)

LONDON LITERARY LETTER.
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Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW by
William L. Alden.

     LONDON, Feb. 25.—Now that an officer of the army has written to a daily paper complaining that Mr. Kipling insulted the British soldier when he called him an “absent-minded beggar” there is actually a controversy over the question whether or not Mr. Kipling’s way of speaking of the soldier is insulting. Of course, Mr. Buchanan considers that it is, but then Mr. Buchanan is a Scotchman of the type that seems utterly incapable of understanding anything but the most prosaic prose, and, besides, no one cares a straw for Mr. Buchanan’s opinion as to anything. It is plain, however, that there are other persons who think that Mr. Kipling has treated the soldier very cruelly by calling him a “beggar,” and by asserting that he is ever absent-minded. They gravely assert that the British soldier never begs and therefore cannot be a beggar, and that there is no reason to suppose that he is more absent-minded than the average man. They remind me of a boy of my acquaintance who mistranslated the Latin fable of the mice and the cats, and defended himself by asserting that it would be an impossibility for mice to tie a bell to a cat’s tail, and that it was therefore impossible that the Latin text could have been intended to convey any such meaning.
     Mr. Kipling has actually succeeded in revolutionizing public sentiment as to the British soldier. Before he wrote “The Barrack Room Ballads” it was taken as a matter of course that the soldier should be treated as an outcast, unfit to drink at a bar with drunken civilians, or to sit with them in a theatre. Now the publican who should treat Tommy Atkins with incivility would find himself boycotted. And this change of opinion runs throughout everything. The soldier is no longer regarded as low and despicable, and the uniform is no longer a disgrace. This change is due to Mr. Kipling and to no one else, and yet when he writes a poem that brings thousands of pounds to the relief of the families of soldiers people can be found who gravely accuse him of having insulted the army. Such people make Gen. Mercier and his views of the honor of the French Army comprehensible. It would be extremely interesting to examine their bumps. After all, this sort of criticism of Mr. Kipling probably has its origin in unconscious jealousy. The wonderful success that so young a man has obtained is irritating to a certain type of commonplace mind. Therefore the effect is made to belittle Kipling’s reputation, and Mr. Buchanan, who has written a reply to Sir Walter Besant’s rebuke, is clearly of the opinion that he will succeed in belittling it if he perseveres. Time will show what is the decision of the public in any controversy between Kipling and Buchanan.

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