ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

ROBERT BUCHANAN AND THE MAGAZINES

ESSAYS (3)

‘The Voice of The Hooligan’ - continued

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.

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The Staffordshire Sentinel (20 January, 1900 - p.4)

CRITICISM.

     Mr. Rayner, an old soldier, takes me to task for what he thinks is my want of appreciation of Rudyard Kipling as the soldier’s friend. He says Kipling is the only man, poet, novelist, or essayist, professing to describe the English private soldier who knows anything about the subject. I have only to assure Mr. Rayner that I reported an honest conversation which did no injustice, I think, to Mr. Kipling’s genius or to his patriotism. As for myself, I admire and respect him in both these capacities. . . Mr. Robert Buchanan has had a fling at Kipling, and the Philistine has been met in the “Contemporary” by Sir Walter Besant, who is judicial as well as masterful in his defence of the Anglo-Indian poet. Apart from the controversial question, Sir Walter says, “there should be some observance of professional etiquette in literature as in law; it should be simply impossible for any one, of whatever standing, in the profession of letters to attack another, and especially one who has attracted the affection of millions—including those of the highest pretensions of culture—with abuse and rancour worthy of a fishwife.”

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

THE FALL OF KIPLING
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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.
_____

     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 Shields Daily Gazette (22 January, 1900 - p.2)

KIPLING AND HIS CRITIC.
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     Sir WALTER BESANT, himself one of the purest, and at the same time most successful of novelists, breaks a lance in one of the January reviews in defence of RUDYARD KIPLING, who was the victim of an unusually savage attack from the pen of Mr ROBERT BUCHANAN last month. Mr BUCHANAN declared that KIPLING, who has so quickly won a remarkable popularity, extending far beyond the bounds of Great Britain, is simply, in his rhymes and writings, giving the prominence of printers’ ink to the voice of the Hooligan; he is glorifying an orgy of savagery; he is pandering to the tastes of a brutalised public and has been guilty of “frank and brutal indecency.” The latter charge was founded on the certainly full-mouthed phrase in the chorus to the “Sergeant’s Wedding,” but surely the same charge could be brought on even stronger grounds against Scotia’s noblest poet, ROBERT BURNS, whose poems even Mr BUCHANAN will hardly venture to term “frank and brutally indecent.” Sir WALTER BESANT, with great force, we think, argues that KIPLING is a realist in prose, that he has aimed successfully at showing us the real man behind all the black-guardism and debauchery of the lower type of private soldier. He has at the same time more truly than any other living poet, tried to arouse the great British public, who, after all, have on their shoulders the mighty responsibilities of governing the greatest Empire on earth, to a sense of what those responsibilities really are. It is somewhat hackneyed, perhaps, to-day, to quote that magnificent Recessional which struck a ten-thousand-times truer note during the wild exultation of the Diamond Jubilee than all the meretricious jingles of the nominal poet LAUREATE:—

If drunk with sight of power we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law,
Lord God of Hosts be with us yet
Lest we forget, lest we forget.

     Could any but a true poet and true man have penned those noble lines, or can they for a moment be held to be from the pen of one who is “frankly and brutally indecent?” Or those other even more beautiful lines describing the return of the Mariners, are they the “voice of the Hooligan?”

Let go, let go, the anchor,
Now shamed at heart are we,
To bring so poor a harvest home,
That had for field the sea,
Let go the great bow anchor,
Ah! fools were we, and blind.
The worst we stored with utter toil,
The best we left behind.

     Again, could one who is simply and solely a blatant Jingo, have reminded us of how the liberties of this England of ours were won?

All we have of freedom, all we use or know
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago,
Ancient right unnoticed as the breath we draw
Leave to live, by no man’s leave underneath the law.
Lance and torch and tumult, steel and gray goose wing
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all slowly from the King.
                   *          *         *          *
So they bought us freedom—not at little cost—
Wherefore must we watch the King lest our gain be lost.

How far removed from mere Jingoism is his song we see in “The White Man’s Burden,” which he tells us is

No iron rule of Kings
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things,
  *          *         *          *
To bind our sons to exile,
To serve our captives’ need,
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild.

Again in his L’Envoi, how far is the spirit it breathes from the mercenary lust of gold and worship of Mammon which he is said to glorify?

Then none but the Master shall praise us,
And none but the Master shall blame,
And no one shall work for money
And no one shall work for fame.
But each for the joy of the working,
And each in his separate star
Shall draw the thing as he sees it,
For the God of things as they are.

Was ever the dignity of labour, whether of hand or head, more nobly set forth? It is quite easy for the captious critic to find matter of complaint in the work of our best writers. We have had a bowdlerised SHAKESPEARE and even sacreligious proposals for the bowdlerising of the Scriptures. KIPLING himself would never claim to rank beside the swan of Avon; indeed one, perhaps the great, secret of his success is his intense humanity. He is one of us with our feelings, our aspirations, our desires, but he possesses in addition that rare gift, the God-given ability to clothe them in language which can make the simplest and most indifferent to see the hidden meaning, of what he himself has called, the little things he sings about.

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The Adelaide Observer (Australia) (27 January, 1900 - p.24)

PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE.

     Under the classical title of “The Voice of ‘The Hooligan’” Mr. Robert Buchanan in the “Contemporary Review” administers what is evidently intended to be a severe rebuke to the “vulgarity, brutality, and savagery” of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and the “coarse and soulless patriotism of the hour.” The article was written some weeks ago; and, in the absence of cable advices to the contrary, it is reasonable to assume that Mr. Kipling is still alive and well—possibly even engaged in composing some ballad full of the “Cockney vulgarity and triviality” which have so offended his critic’s fine ideas of propriety in literature! Mr. Buchanan, himself a poet and novelist, refuses to admit that Mr. Kipling has done anything but pollute the “fountains of intellectual Light and Beauty;”' and with a vitriolic pen he abuses also the newspaper Press which has often befriended him, and condemns the prevailing “soulless patriotism” and “false Imperialism.” Mr. Buchanan—who gained some notoriety a few years ago by a magazine article on “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in which he fiercely attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti—is decidedly angry; and he cannot find a good word to say of the “Singer of the Empire.” There is, however, no need to defend Mr. Kipling or his works against Mr. Buchanan—both speak for themselves in a manner at once convincing and conclusive; but, on the principle that it takes one tradesman to detect another, it is interesting to recall in passing an opinion expressed a few years since by Mr. Edmund Gosse, a poet and critic as capable as Mr. Buchanan of expressing a judgment on literature. “Just when Tennyson,” wrote Mr. Gosse, “was sinking into his last illness he met with ‘The English Flag,’ and it stirred his old Britannic heart with its fervour. No competent critic can doubt that the loudest, clearest, fullest voice of the new generation is that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.” Mr. Gosse, whilst condemning Mr. Kipling’s “pedantry of colloquialism,” refers to such defects as “spots in the sun.” As for “Barrack-room Ballads,” Mr. Gosse said:—

Some people say that these arc very fine, but that they arc not poetry. If not, I would give a good many more volumes of what passes for poetry for the best of them—for “Mandalay,” for instance, and “Danny Deever.” These ballads stir my blood like the wind in April—the sap of youth seems rising in the boughs of a middle-aged soul as I read them. “Ford o’ Kabul River” dims my eyes with tears whenever I read it; “Screw Guns” positively makes me want to enlist in the Engineers.

That is the point. Mr. Kipling causes his readers to see and feel. He expresses current ideas in strong and vigorous diction; he places his finger on the pulse of the public, and records the heart-beat of a nation.
     But no matter whether or not Mr. Robert Buchanan accepts Mr. Kipling as a poet. The young singer holds a high place in the affections of his countrymen, who do not regard his patriotism as being “soulless” or his “Imperialism” false. Mr. Buchanan, in his lament at the “present relapse back to barbarism of our public life, our society, our literature,” speaks for a small but a very noisy minority; and Mr. Kipling is singled out for splenetic reference merely because he is held to represent that patriotism and the Imperialism which to them is objectionable. Mr. Buchanan believes that to “speak the truth as we see it, to confront the evil and folly of the hour, is as dangerous to-day as when Socrates drank his hemlock cup;” yet like a

Pure-hearted hero of a bloodless fight,
Clean-handed captain in a painless war,

the author of “God and the Man” girds on his armour and boldly defies all the danger. But the Buchanans, the Steads, and the rest of the minority—yes, even the disloyal subjects of Her Majesty in South Australia who could be so very well spared—need have no fear so long as they elect to seek the protection of the flag under which, according to them, so much that is “wicked and barbarous” is done. The writer in the “Contemporary” regrets that want of space precluded his drawing “a final contrast between the coarse and soulless patriotism of the hour and that nobler Imperialism in which all true Englishmen . . . . must believe.” Others will object because, for “want of space” or some other reason, Mr. Buchanan omits to explain how he would deal with rebellious subjects and enemies who invade British territory. Possibly if a foreign army landed in England to-morrow Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Stead would still preach against a “Quasi-savage militant spirit,” and would send—not take themselves!—a supply of peace tracts into the camp of the enemy? The magazine critic complains of an absence of the “old philanthropic spirit” from the Empire’s dealings with other nationalities, and asserts that England exhibits “a greed of gain, a vain-glory, a cruelty, a boastful indifference to the rights of others.” Did the “old philanthropic spirit” or did this “cruelty” and “indifference to the rights of others” permit the Transvaal and the Free State Republics and Dutchmen in Cape Colony to steadily import war material and openly prepare for the invasion of British territory? The present trouble in South Africa is the direct outcome of that “philanthropy” which the Little Englanders so loudly applaud, and the war is a legacy of the mistaken peace-at-any-price policy which prevailed after Majuba Hill. The Empire is now paying the bills of the little Englanders, and being abused by them for doing it! Mr. Buchanan tells us that—

True Imperialism has nothing in common with the mere lust of conquest, with the vulgar idea of mere expansion, or with the increase of the spirit of mercenary militarism; its object is to diffuse light, not darken the sunshine; to feed the toiling millions, not to immolate them; to free man, not to enslave him; to consecrate, not to desecrate, the great temple of humanity.

A very pretty effort at word-spinning, but what does it all mean? Where is the distinction between patriotism, which first brought the Empire to its present high position amongst the nations, and which has made for peace and progress, and “true Imperialism” which Mr. Buchanan would probably wish his readers to accept as his definition of that “noble” patriotism which he professes to admire? Is there a “lust of conquest” in Great Britain and her colonies joining forces to-day to drive the Boers out of Natal? Has there been any suggestion of excessive “militarism” in England having allowed the Dutch in South Africa to be better prepared for war than she has been herself? Under the “Imperialism” which this critic condemns has nothing been done for the “toiling millions?”
     It is pleasant to be able to bring forward an American authority in answer to this fault-finding Englishman. Writing in a United States magazine a few years ago, the authority referred to compared the different systems of colonization, and came to the conclusion that the “only colonization is the English.” Colonization and territorial extension he regarded as burdens and not gains.

England, as a penalty of her greatness, finds herself in all parts of the world face to face with the necessity of maintaining her jurisdiction, and of extending it in order to maintain it. When she does so she finds herself only extending law and order for the benefit of everybody.

Is not this true? Not a German, or Frenchman, or Afghan, or any other resident under the British flag in Australia to-day can deny that he enjoys more privileges, better protection, more opportunities for reaping where he has sown, because he lives in a British colony. If any one doubts that assertion let him study the history of German colonization in West Africa, and of the French policy now being observed in Madagascar, or the conditions under which colonists were compelled to live in Cuba or the Philippines when these islands were subject to Spanish rule! Mr. Buchanan is rather unfortunate in his quotation of what he terms “the sentiment of a wide-world nationality, as expressed in the passionate lines of a modern poet'”—

         Hands across the sea!
         Feet on British ground!
The Motherhood means Brotherhood the whole world round!
         From the parent root,
         Sap, and stem, and fruit
         Grow the same, or son or name—
         Hands across the sea!

That is the Imperial feeling which is influencing all parts of the Empire to-day, and the practical application of the sentiment of “Hands across the sea” is, we are told, a “soulless patriotism!” Never surely was there a worse misuse of terms.

All the loyal hearts who long
To keep our English Empire whole

are now engaged in what Sir Wemyss Reid has termed “weaving the warp and woof of our Empire into one compact and harmonious fabric.” When the necessity arose there was no suggestion of holding back “thro’ craven fear of being great!” The parlour patriotism of the idealistic school of Little Englanders was promptly discarded for that true patriotism which makes for Empire, and of which Mr. Kipling has been the poetical exponent. English. Scotch, Irish, Canadians, Indians, Australians recognised their manifest duty in the hour of peril. Owing to a mistaken kindness, a “spirit of philanthropy” and peace-at-any-price—a desire to exhaust the arts of diplomacy before resorting to the force of arms—the Boers have been allowed to get a long start. They have invaded British territory, and struck a blow at the Empire. Would it be patriotic to quietly, submit, and meekly acknowledge them as masters in Southern Africa—masters whose rule of the inferior races would be a curse? That is evidently the patriotism of Mr. Buchanan and—to their shame be it said—of a few disloyal people even in South Australia—people who owe all they possess to the freedom and opportunities given to them under the Union Jack. True patriotism has its obligations as well as its privileges, and Australia is giving the most convincing proof of the alternative she prefers to choose by sending with all haste a Second Contingent to the seat of war.

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The New York Times (3 February, 1900)

LONDON LITERARY LETTER.
_____

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

     LONDON, Jan. 15.—

. . .

     I mentioned last week that I had heard three apparently intelligent Englishmen maintain that Kipling had never written a line of poetry. Certain other men have recently been writing letters to a weekly paper, pointing out that Kipling knows next to nothing of India, and that he is extremely inaccurate in his descriptions of men and things in India. These letter writers are evidently in love with accuracy, but the instances of inaccuracy which they cite from Kipling’s Indian stories are far from convincing. My own belief is that if they are right in detecting inaccuracies it is India which is inaccurate, and not Kipling. I find no difficulty in believing that India ought to be exactly what Kipling describes it, and if it is not so in all respects, I am sorry for India, and feel sure that it is India that is in fault.

. . .

     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 West Australian (Perth) (17 February, 1900 - p.9)

“THE VOICE OF THE HOOLIGAN.”
_____

DEDICATED TO A CERTAIN PROFANE SCRIBE.
_____

I read some lines the other day
On what Buchanan had to say
To show we’ve all been led astray,
And lost the straight and narrow way,
         Through you, our good friend Rudyard K.

It seems we’ve all misunderstood,
Have been seduced from what is good—
That Rudyard voices but a mood
         To pass away.

Degenerate, savage, in his mind,
A preacher false unto his kind—
We must some purer idol find
         To suit our day.

His boys are boys—for aye the same;
His rhymes sometimes we must not name;
You make me, Rudyard, blush for shame—
         You are so frank.

The man who wrote The Wandering Jew
Is shocked at what you say and do.
For knowing where you’ve led us to
         We’ve him to thank.

You’ve never written words of truth
Sweet as the legend old of Ruth—
Recalled the dear mirage of youth,
         As genius can.

Nor shown beneath the outward shell
Coarse-spoken men their roughness quell—
Brethren who end their day’s work well.
         Not you—some other man!

Man has two sides: don’t show us both—
The tender heart behind the oath—
The first, the Race’s long slow growth;
         The other, breath.

Teach not how Deeds show Faith beyond
The narrow creed’s constrictive bond—
How Esaus have God’s armour donned,
         And conquered death.

Pictures we want—with rose leaves drawn.
Portraits—but Life’s rich colour gone.
Hot poppy-heads among your corn
         With greys please cool again.

We want our Shakspeare “bowdlerised,”
The sermon on the Mount revised.
Dame Nature’s face must be disguised—
         She’s Mrs. Hooligan.

                                                 MAORI.
     Perth, February 15.

___

The New York Times (10 March, 1900)

LONDON LITERARY LETTER.
_____

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.

___

The Boston Globe (21 March, 1900 - p.7)

UNDER THE ROSE.
_____

. . .

A WORD IN PASSING.

     I have asked half a dozen well-read people who Robert Buchanan is. About half of them knew he was an English author, and only one of them knew anything he had written, and that was a bitter attack on Rudyard Kipling. I will advertise Buchanan to this extent, to say that he wrote “The Voice of the Hooligan,” the aforesaid attack; that Walter Besant took up the cudgels for Kipling and his millions of admirers, and Buchanan thereupon drew an analogy between Sir Walter Besant, knight, and Robert Shallow, Esquire and gradgrind; that one of the ill-mannered ejections of Buchanan, whom Fra Elbertus might call a literary fiste, follows: “Sir Walter Besant avers that I have no right to speak of these things (the carnage and brutality sometimes found in Kipling’s works) because they concern the prestige and the pocket of one who, with a publisher on each side of him, like the bishop on each side of Richard in the play, lately cried aloud for, and obtained, the sympathy of two continents.”

***

     To understand the venomous brutality of such a sentence it is only necessary to recall that Buchanan refers to the days when Kipling and his children lay between life and death, when his child died, when he could neither object effectually to the presence or absence of his publisher nor “cry aloud” for the blessed oxygen which his lungs lacked. Yes, he did obtain “the sympathy of two continents.” And the sympathy and love of two continents will abide with Kipling long after Buchanan is forgotten.
                                                                                                                                                   BUD BRIER.

___

Cedar Rapids Republican (Iowa) (15 April, 1900)

The Disparagement of Rudyard Kipling.

     Houston Daily Post: If Mr. Kipling be not well fortified in philosophy he may be both astonished and dismayed by the sudden turn in the tide of his prosperity.
     The series of attacks so able and vigorous, that some of his countrymen now lead against him means more of course, than coincidence and more than casual expressions of opinion—it indicates a condition.
     We shall understand for one thing that here is in full pavement the traditional penalty of early and easy success.
     Always, soon or late, comes fortune with this account for settlement. It was so with Dickens, it was so with Byron of old time, it was so with Pope and Dryden. It will be so ever with authors swiftly achieving wide popularity.
     Now the cynical laugh at these things as examples of human inconsistency since the food that was but now to us as luscious as locusts has presently become as bitter as coloquintida. But in this instance is a graver significance. Observe for example, a peculiar note in the recent and bitter criticisms of Kipling:
     Robert Buchanan says that he is “the voice of the Hooligans”—“Hooligans” meaning the depraved and criminal among the London poor, the lowest type of humanity yet found by anthropologists.
     Sir Edward Clarke says that his teachings are hopelessly bad and productive of serious evil.
     Marie Corelli says he must be ranked among the mountebanks of the music halls that what he has given forth for poetry at all, but a vicious kind of verse and that the controlling spirit of his work is violence.
     A writer in a contemporaneous magazine regards him as the incarnation of the spirit of war and vile deeds and either the champion or the product of the worst tendency in modern life.

*    *    *

     These among the foremost. Behind comes a chorus of disparagement.
     In the meantime, but not because of such comments, the booksellers discover that the previous demand for Kipling has suddenly lost its zest.
     While some of the reasons for this precipitate dethroning of the idol may seem mysterious enough, others are quite plain. Something of course, is to be said of an inevitable revulsion following excessive praise, something of an ultimate refusal of men to be led by the nose to admire a thing they do not really admire. But a more important and far more suggestive cause is the disillusion that came when we found that the singer of the “Recessional” was also capable of raising his voice for the most infamous and mercenary war of modern times. “Lest We Forget” made an impossible discord with these later efforts; there rang the broad note of an insincerity too plain to escape notice. And, after all, it may be doubted if the slaughter of men is now viewed with the complacence of our skin-clad ancestors of the Northland forests; after all, glory won by plain butchery is not universally admired.
     As to the exact literary and artistic worth of Mr. Kipling’s work aside from these considerations, of course the views of Mr. Buchanan, Sir Edward Clarke, Marie Corelli and the chorus, individually or collectively, may be interesting; but they are not important. Nothing that will be said of Mr. Kipling in this generation will be of a feather weight in determining his ultimate place in literature. No contemporaneous criticism ever affected the verdict of posterity, which is the only important question. Neither present praise nor present blame will reach as far as that court of last resort. Poets as popular in their own day as Mr. Kipling has been in his are now entombed in the dust of museum shelves; poets far more bitterly assailed than he have lived to be the only links to fasten their assailants to human remembrance.

*    *    *

     But while an attempt to estimate the opinions of the future may seem an idle, not to say preposterous thing, being in its last analysis a view almost certain to be tinged with prejudice and only the personal preference in another form, still remain some reflections both apt and substantial. So far at least, in the world’s history we may discern in all of the poetry that has lived and appealed to men from century to century essentially the same qualities. Materialism, in the coming centuries, may get such hold upon mankind that even the normal mentality may be changed. But is that believable? Then as what has hitherto been vital in poetry of long life seems likely still to be vital hereafter, at least it is possible to determine whether evidences of these vital qualities appear in Mr. Kipling’s work.
     And this inquiry, though really settling nothing, every reader can easily make for himself. How much of Kipling is founded upon basic principles of life? How much reaches to the solemn emotions that thus far have alone endured? How much is there of motive that would have been as much of serious purpose and sincere service in art? Does the reader come from him with broader views of life or any firmer faith? For this reading shall he be the kinder or more decent, clearer-sighted toward the hatefulness of wrong fortified with new sense of the general brotherhood? Shall he have greater sympathy for man, tossed about, the prey of fate and sorrow?

*    *    *

     With these questions is not connected in any way the cleverness of his entertainment, the extreme interest and joy of his style, the buoyancy of his spirits, the extraordinary novelty and charm of his methods; for with these things we may be sure the future jaded with long lines of his successors, will not stop to deal.
     We may ask ourselves, moreover, where are the dialect poems of three centuries, two centuries, one century ago? Has any work that is an echo of a temporarily degraded state of the language of popular use ever become immortal? Do we find the old black letter ballads written in slang? Is there any trace of the spirit of “Danny Deever” or of “The Absent- Minded Beggar,” or of “Bobs” in “The Nut-Browne Mayd?” Do men love Chaucer for a few scattered touches of coarseness or for his kindly good humor and sincere and gentle art?
     Is it not true that Mr. Kipling comes singing his songs of savagery just at a time when as aspiring race is seeking universal dominion with no nice considerations as to the methods it pursues and that he has become the poet laureate of a movement out of harmony with the real inspiration of his days? Is it not true that he expresses the spirit of war and conquest at a time when the beginnings are manifest of a forward movement utterly opposed to war?
     There remains then, this consideration that hitherto the world’s progress however slow, has been toward decency and tolerance and good will. A return upon this pathway is most unlikely. Hence eventually race hatreds will weaken, force and gain will cease to be the presiding deities of human affairs. We may look for a time when the weak will have as much claim upon justice as the strong, and bloodshed and cruelty will not seem adorable. We shall not always be able to impose upon the world this sweet Anglo-Saxon spirit of ours, with its smug pretense of good and its practice of evil. And we may suppose that in those days the Kiplings and all their tribe and all their works will be less than the blown dust of the highways.

___

The Daily Gleaner (Jamaica) (28 April, 1900 - p.7)

CORRESPONDENCE.
_____

KIPLING’S “TOMMIES.”

The Editor of the Gleaner.

     Sir,—Since the lines with the above title appeared in your issue of Saturday last, I have (through the courtesy of Mr. Walker, of Newton been favoured with the perusal of an article from the pen of Robert Buchanan, which has appeared in a recent number of the Contemporary Review, entitled “The Voice of the Hooligan.” I beg to enclose an extract which I have made from the article, by which it will be seen that, none too early, the task has been commenced, of hurling from the pedestal on which they have been raised by Kipling the gross and infamous characters which have, to a deplorable extent, been accepted by the public at home and abroad as typical of our soldiers.
     It is not to be wondered at that a writer so observant as Robert Buchanan should complain of the “inaudibility” of the protests among the ranks of the army itself. “What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” As one from the “ranks” (I am not now serving) I have long felt, and still feel, that something must be done to awaken public opinion to the fact that there are thousands, many thousands, of English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh men in our ranks who are God- fearing, honest, sober, upright, and self-respecting, and, I may add, quite capable of speaking the Queen’s English. My position in military life is humble, but it has enabled me, from a daily intercourse extending to 34 years, to form a much more correct—and, need I add, infinitely higher?—opinion than that of Kipling of those among whom it has been my good fortune and happiness to spend nearly all my life.
     I have known my late comrades under every condition of a soldier’s life—barracks, camp, field, ship, on the South African veldt, in action, and out of it. They have their faults, which are those of human nature. Who is without them? The point, however, is that Kipling has never, so far as I am aware, presented to his readers one decent non-commissioned officer or man, and it is because he has not done so that the public—under the erroneous impression that Kipling’s characters are drawn from life—accepts his characters as typical of the whole army.
     As there must be many of your readers who will not have the opportunity of seeing the article by Robert Buchanan, I hope that you will be able to find space for the extract sent.—I am, etc.,
                                                                                                                                           GEO. ROBINSON.
     Newcastle,
         April 26th.

_____

Extract.
     “The Ballads thus introduced are . . . descriptive of whatever is basest and most brutal in the character of the British Mercenary . . . are in keeping with the other ballads, scarcely one of which reaches to the intellectual level of the lowest music hall effusions. But in all the ballads the tone is one of absolute vulgarity, unredeemed by a touch of human tenderness. . . . The Tommy Atkins they introduce is a drunken, swearing, coarse minded Hooligan . . . The army again appeared in the same ignoble light as before, with the same disregard of all literary luxuries, even of grammar and the aspirate. There was no glance anywhere of sober and self-respecting human beings, only a wild carnival of drunken, bragging, boasting Hooligans in red coats.
     “Faint almost to inaudibility have been the protests awakened by these Cockney caricatures in the ranks of the army itself. Here and there a mild voice has been heard, but no military man has declared authoritatively that effusions like those quoted are a libel on the service, if not on human nature. Are we to assume that there are no refined gentlemen among our officers, and no honest self-respecting human beings among their men? Is the life of a soldier abroad, as at home, a succession of savage escapades, bestial amusements, fuddlings, tipplings, and intrigues with other men’s wives?  . . . it is certain that the Tommy Atkins of Mr. Rudyard Kipling deserves drumming out of all decent barracks, as a monstrosity and a rogue.”
     “Turning over the leaves of his poems, one is transported at once to the region of low drinking dens and gin palaces, of dirty dissipation and drunken brawls and the voice we hear is always the voice of the soldier, whose God is a Cockney “Gawd,” and who is ignorant of the aspirate in either heaven or hell. Are there no Scotchmen in the ranks, no Highlanders, no men from Dublin or Tipperary, no Lancashire or Yorkshire men, no Welshmen, and no men of any description who speak the Queen’s English? It would seem not if the poet of the “Sergeant’s weddin’” is to be trusted. Nor have our soldiers, from the ranks upwards, any one thing, except brute courage to distinguish them from the beasts of the field. This, at least, appears to be Mr. Kipling’s contention.”

___

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) (20 January, 1906 - p.4)

THE KIPLING QUESTION.

     Although it is supposed by some Englishmen that America is the only place where Mr. Kipling’s works are still read with enthusiasm; the Kipling question is still discussed ardently in Kipling’s island. An essayist by the name of Masterman is the latest to denounce the author of “Kim” as a producer of the literature of artificial brutality. Mr. Masterman says:

     The blind and gibbering maniac at the end of “The Light That Failed”, who shrieks, “Give ’em Hell, oh, give ’em Hell”, from the security of an armored train, while his companions annihilate their enemies by pressing the button of a machine gun, seemed not only a possible, but even a reputable figure.
     But with the coming of actual war in South Africa, continues Mr. Masterman, the literature of the reaction fell, first into shrillness, then into silence. Read to-day, the whole thing stands remote and fantastic, the child of a time infinitely far away. Of its authors some are dead, and some continue a strange, shadowy life in an alien time. Mr. Kipling compiles such mournful productions as “Traffics and Discoveries”. But the pipe fails to awaken any responsive echoes. Even those who before had approved now turn away their heads. He appears like one dancing and grimacing in the midst of the set grave faces of a silent company.

     There is of course, nothing new in this sort of talk. Robert Buchanan began it at least six years ago when he characterised Mr. Kipling’s voice as “the voice of the Hooligan” or the London tough. He said that Kipling’s lamentable productions were “concocted not for sane men or self-respecting soldiers, not even for those who are merely ignorant and uninstructed, but for the ‘mean whites’ of our Western civilization, the idle and loafing men in the street and for such women as shriek at their heels”.
     A just reply to Mr. Buchanan was made by Walter Besant, who quoted the Recessional Hymn as the work of the one poet who saw as in a vision of inspiration the one thing that needed to be said to recall the British people from their orgie of power and of glory. “I know,” said Mr. Besant, “of no poem in history so opportune, that so went home to all our hearts.”
     If Kipling was the poet of the English race at the time when militarism more or less brutal was in the ascendant, certainly he has shown himself capable of speaking for his people in other moods, of painting in striking colors in peace as well as in war the picture of things as they are, and of looking forward in a spirit which seems like prophecy to the great changes of the world in the century on whose threshold we stand. Probably no other living writer so well embodies the spirit of the times.

_____

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