From Robert Buchanan: A Critical Appreciation And Other Essays by Henry Murray
(Philip Wellby, 1901.)

Robert Buchanan.

(Part 2)

     The position I claim for Buchanan in the Victorian period of English literature, is, then, briefly this — that his failure to attain the highest rank as an executive artist was greatly determined by the power of circumstance and in part by his own deliberate choice. I pass now to the second half of my claim, which is, that as an exponent of the deeper intellectual life of his epoch as evidenced in its religious evolution he was truer, more complete, and therefore, in so far greater, than his two great and friendly rivals, Browning and Tennyson, whose credentials to be accepted as the typical vocalisers of modern religious thought I have already ventured to examine. To sum up as briefly as may be their positions in this matter, I think it may fairly be said that Browning failed by ambiguity of expression, an ambiguity so marked that, to his own ‘amazement and concern,’ ¹⁰ he found himself acclaimed as the public champion of a Church whose membership, in private, he unmistakably repudiated. Tennyson failed, as the most scholarly and one of the most admiring of his critics has found himself forced to confess, because he had not that full measure of moral and intellectual audacity firmly to face, and pitilessly to dissect, the doubts he could but feel. It now remains for us to consider the treatment accorded to identical problems by the third great English poet who, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, made it his business to deal with them.
     As we have seen, in common with almost every other poet who has ever written, Buchanan began his career as a seer and delineator of beauty. The lovely myths of Greece had appealed to him as they did to Keats, and his young imagination had chosen for the site of its first wanderings the hills and forests of Hellas. Then, as will be made clear by a chronological study of his work, such themes ceased to content him, the actualities of life drew him from the contemplation of the beautiful shadows of the olden poesy; and Willie Baird and Poet Andrew, the Widow Mysie, the Little Milliner, Liz the Coster-girl, Edward Crowhurst the rustic poet, usurped the place upon the poetic easel hitherto occupied by Selene and Polyphemus, Pygmalion and Pan. The strident roll of the city street, the sweet sounds of British and Irish rustic life, entered into the music of his verse, and the verse grows sadder, as it needs must do when a poet turns from the moonlit, opalescent wraiths of an extinct dreamland to the practicalities of life. The note of sadness deepens from volume to volume, though it is still relieved by such bits of innocent gaiety as ‘Clari in the Well,’ and of rollicking Irish devilry as ‘The Wake of Tim O’Hara,’ until, in the year 1870, being then in his twenty-eighth year, Buchanan struck the keynote of his future main life-work in ‘Coruisken Sonnets.’ It was during his wanderings amid the stern grandeurs of the Isle of Skye that the problems on whose discussion he first entered in that little volume took a firm grip of him and assumed the disquieting proportions they never afterwards lost. Small as the volume is, it is important to the student of Buchanan’s theological evolution, and by no means unimportant in the poetical history of the last century. I know of nothing quite like these Sonnets, of no utterance which is, in some ways, more strange and interesting, more expressive of the spiritual unrest which is the tormenting inheritance of every thinking man born in our times. As in Browning, as in Tennyson, as in every powerful personality in any marked degree in touch with the conflicting hopes and doubts of the century, there was in Buchanan ‘a dual personality;’ that of the poet, the eternal child, who would so gladly be content with what he himself has called ‘the fairy tales of God,’ happy in the dim light and incense-laden air of the Temple of Faith, did not his adult alter ego clamour for satisfaction of the reason, for iron-bound logic, for precise rectangular demonstration. The second of these personalities had hitherto been asleep, stirring faintly at moments when a shadow had fallen on his closed eyelids. It was obvious that the young lad who had joined gaily in the cheap revels of the literary Bohemia, and had shared the jokes and junkets of ‘inky-boys and bouncing lasses;’ who had recreated his fancy by translating into song the crystalline babble of the mountain brook; had toyed with Grecian legend and depicted old Horatius Flaccus chirping over his Falernian on the Digentia; had hitherto found life too good and sweet, too satisfactorily explanatory of its own excellence, to grizzle over the problem of its ultimate outcome and meaning. But, in the weird solitudes dominated by the shadow of Mount Blaabhein the doubting half of him awoke to life:—

Late in the gloaming of the year
I haunt the melancholy mere;
A Phantom I, where Phantoms brood
In this soul-searching solitude.
Hiding my forehead in the dim
Hem of His robe, I question Him.

     It is worthy of notice that this ‘questioning’ of God was not, as in the case of Tennyson, the result of a sudden shock to any individual human affection. The loss of David Gray had wounded Buchanan’s heart much as the loss of Arthur Hallam had lacerated Tennyson’s, but so far from having suggested to him doubt of the goodness, or of the very existence, of the Divine Fatherhood, it had actually strengthened belief and acquiescence. It was God’s ‘justice,’ not his cruelty, which had inspired the stroke that parted the two friends. The dead friend lived still in the ‘influence and warning and delight’ he rained upon the living, and, in his loneliness the survivor could still ‘smile with joy and pride’ in the friend who was as a veritable ambassador of his love to the throne of God. It was before the impassivity of external nature, the eternal silence of the hills, the inarticulate moan of the tormented waters, beneath the chill immensity and aloofness of the inaccessible sky, that he felt suddenly

Cold are all these as snow, and still as stone.

     Not in the anguish of sudden personal loss, but in the contrast between the stony calm of the huge cosmos reflected in a waste solitude, the question rose ‘Does God exist at all?’ For—

I found Thee not by the starved widow’s bed,
Nor in the sick rooms where my dear ones died;
In cities vast I hearken’d for Thy tread,
And heard a thousand call Thee, wretched-eyed,
Worn out, and bitter. But the Heavens denied
Their melancholy Maker. From the dead
Assurance came, nor answer! Then I fled
Into these wastes, and raised my hands, and cried:
‘The seasons pass—the sky is as a pall—
Thin wasted hands on withering hearts we press—
There is no God, in vain we plead and call,
In vain with weary eyes we search and guess—
Like children in an empty house sit all,
Cast-away children, lorn and fatherless.’

There the question is posed and answered by a bitter negative. This particular sonnet is peculiarly interesting for the double reason that while it is almost the first utterance of Buchanan’s dealing with the problem of Godhead, it is also the last and only one I have been able to find in his work in which the existence of a Diety is flatly denied by the poet in his own person. An ‘Atheist’ in the true meaning of the word, Buchanan never was, and that he should have written this sonnet, even in his blackest mood so early in his career, is all but incredible. He knew many fluctuations of feeling and belief regarding the being of a personal God, and expressed most of them; and it is just because of that, because he found the courage not merely to face and dwell upon the problem—a courage common enough—and also because he possessed the rarer courage to feel no shame in professing and proclaiming every phase of his incertitude, that he seems to me so pre-eminently the poet of his day. He was profoundly in sympathy with the dictum of Goethe that ‘Religion stands in the same relation to Art as any other of the higher interests of life.’ Accepting that dictum, he asked, ‘Where is the great poem, where the noble music built on that wondrous theme? . . . . The reticence of false culture steals over the life of many who might instruct us deeply by their experience. . . . There is a great emotional and spiritual life yet unrepresented, there are rude forces not yet brought into play, but all of which must sooner or later have their place in art.’ He practised himself the spiritual and intellectual freedom whose necessity he proclaimed, he marked every halting-place on the line of his own theological evolution by a volume or a song: he travelled far and wide, but never at any later period of his life did he arrive at the goal of Atheism, which yet, upon the testimony of this one sonnet, might be taken for his starting point. ‘Without the sanction of the Supernatural, the certainty of the Superhuman, Life to me is nothing,’ he wrote in the Epistle Dedicatory to ‘The Outcast,’ and I remember him saying one day that ‘God and his own soul’ were the only entities in the universe of which he felt any abiding certainty. But, to a mind with any strong tinge of what may perhaps be called ‘intellectual practicality,’ the ‘God’ of Buchanan seems at best but a misty, uncertain, and rather useless personality. He is certainly not the God over whose dethronement the poet mourned in the opening passages of ‘The Outcast,’ or defined, if ‘definition’ is not too precise a name for so shadowy a performance, in the Proem to ‘The Book of Orm,’ in lines of singular beauty:—

When in these songs I name the Name of God,
I mean not Him who ruled with brazen rod
The rulers of the Jew; nor Him who calm
Sat reigning on Olympus; nay, nor Brahm,
Osiris, Allah, Odin, Balder, Thor,
(Though these I honour with a hundred more);
Menu I mean not, nor the Man Divine,
The Pallid Rainbow lighting Palestine;
Nor any lesser of the gods which Man
Hath conjured out of Night since Time began.
I mean the primal Mystery and Light,
The most Unfathomable, Infinite,
The Higher Law, Impersonal, Supreme,
The Life in Life, the Dream within the Dream,
The Fountain which in silent melody
Feeds the dumb waters of Eternity,
The source whence every god hath flown and flows,
And whither each departs to find repose.

Nebulous enough! but nebulosity is the natural and inevitable result of any endeavour to define the indefinable. There was, to a positive mind, little enough to cling to even in such a Deity as this, but faint and far away as are the personality and the locale here described, both grew fainter yet in the poet’s later years. In his last published volume, ‘The New Rome,’ he declares God to be ‘in process of becoming,’ and a rather slow and laborious process it would appear to be:—

Turn from that mirage of a God on high
     Holding the sceptre of a creed outworn,
And hearken to the faint half-human cry
     Of Nature quickening with the God unborn!

The God unborn, the God that is to be,
     The God that has not been since Time began,—
Hark,—that low sound of Nature’s agony
     Echoed thro’ life and the hard heart of Man!

Fed with the blood and tears of living things,
     Nourished and strengthened by Creation’s woes,
The God unborn, that shall be King of Kings,
     Sown in the darkness, thro’ the darkness grows.

Alas, the long slow travail and the pain
     Of her who bears Him in her mighty womb!
How long ere He shall live and breathe and reign,
     While yonder Phantom fades to give Him room?

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

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

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

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

No God behind us in the empty Vast,
     No God enthroned on yonder heights above,
But God emerging, and evolved at last
     Out of the inmost heart of human Love!

     One can only say, in this connexion, that theological terminology is at its best so misty and uncertain, that the attempt to pin any believer in any form of Godhead down to a scientific definition of the object of veneration, is to ask the impossible: and for the believer to make the attempt unasked is to attempt the impossible. Browning, wiser in his generation, was content to aver that he was ‘very sure of God,’ but he nowhere, in his proper person, gave any definition or description of the God of Whom he was so certain. God, as already said, has seemed hitherto an absolute necessity to the poetic intelligence. It is a word, more infinitely full of vague suggestion than ‘Mesopotamia,’ and the poet finds a mysterious comfort in repeating it, and in clinging to some shadowy and nameless outside force for which it serves as a sort of algebraic symbol. It was the Celtic strain in Buchanan’s blood which made him cling to this diaphanous spectre of Deity, though there were moments when the Divine Donothingness moved his passionately human heart to outcries of revolt, as in that bitter parody, ‘The Devil’s Prayer,’ printed originally in the sixth section of ‘The Book of Orm’:—

Father, which art in Heaven,—not here below;
     Be Thy name hallowed, in that place of worth;
And till Thy Kingdom cometh, and we know,
     Be Thy will done more tenderly on Earth;
Give us this day our bread—since we must live;
     Forgive our stumblings, since Thou mad’st us blind;
If we offend Thee, Sire, at least forgive
     As tenderly as we forgive our kind;—
Spare us temptation—human and divine;
     Deliver us from evil, now and then;
The Kingdom, Power, and Glory all are Thine
     For ever and for evermore. Amen.

     The first of the ‘Antiphones,’ which follow and complete the ‘Ballad of Mary the Mother,’ opens with the tremendous adjuration:—

How can I love Thee, God that madest me?
     Who saith he loves Thee, lies!

a statement which the poet absolutely explained and justified:—

Thy works, thy wonders, thine Omnipotence?
          Shall these awake my love?
Nay, these are only phantoms of the sense
          Whereby I live and move.

          *          *          *          *          *
I love my fellow men, I love this hound
          Who gently licks my hand,
I love the land around me, and the sound
          Of children in the land.

But Thee—I love not Thee!—Stoop down, come near
          To me whom Thou hast made,
That I may know Thee close, and hold Thee dear,—
          But now I shrink afraid.

There’s never a helpless thing surrounding me,
          No timid bird or beast,
I love not better far, oh God, than Thee,
          Tho’ Thou be first, these least.

I love the maid I woo, the mother whose touch
          I feel upon my brow,
The friend who grips my hand!—for these are such
          As I, and not as Thou.

Thou Vision of my Thought! Thou Mystery
          Of which men preach and rave!
I would not look, if Heaven held only Thee,
          One foot beyond the grave!

I seek the gentle ones who once were near,
          Not Thee, O light above,—
I crave for all who learn’d to love me here
          And whom I learn’d to love!

     More than one professedly religious journal denounced this utterance as ‘blasphemous.’ Yet, after all, what is it but another facet of the truth proclaimed by Tennyson:—

Merit lives from man to man,
And not, O God, from man to Thee—

a statement placidly accepted by all and sundry. The fundamental idea is here the same as that expressed in the dedication of ‘The Wandering Jew’ to Buchanan’s dead father, ‘Robert Buchanan, Poet and Social Missionary’:—

Father on Earth, for whom I wept bereaven,
Father more dear than any Father in Heaven—

and in it is clearly readable, to any sympathetic and intelligent student of Buchanan’s work, the spirit which informed alike his work and his life.
     Buchanan’s early years had been absolutely godless, in the sense that no form of revealed religion had ever been brought to his notice during his childhood. He was, as he has told us, ‘born in Robert Owen’s New Moral World,’ and had ‘scarcely heard even the name of God until at ten years of age’ he went to Scotland. He became, he goes on to say, ‘God-intoxicated from the first moment he beheld the mountains and the sea’—from the moment, that is to say, at which he found his first revelation of the physical glories of the world. From that moment until twelve years later—the time of his wanderings in the Isle of Skye, which prompted the writing of the ‘Coruisken Sonnets’— he probably, so to speak, took God for granted, happy in an unexamined sense of the perpetual presence of a wonderful and worshipful Maker of a wonderful and delightful world. The Deity was a trouvaille, a wonderful ‘find’ he had made for himself, and he was as contented in its possession as a child who, having found a broken decanter-stopper, believes himself the possessor of a Koh-i-noor. Then, in early manhood, came the question, the chill of doubt, the momentary blank negation, and afterwards the return to a faith in some sort of Deity—undefinable, since, as we have seen, he himself failed to define it. But the doubt grew, and the faith diminished, because the facts of life, strive as he would to keep before his eyes the rose-tinted glasses of poetic and religious optimism, grew in stern clearness of outline, and spoke unquestionable truths which would be neither gainsaid nor ignored. Sorrow and sin and sickness and death; unmerited suffering, war and prostitution and hunger; the brutal follies of men in high places; the daily failures and stumblings of all men, hurtful to themselves and to those about them; abortive effort and its grim set-off, undeserved success—these, and all the other thousand ills of flesh, must needs be looked at and their existence recognised. And side by side with such personal experiences was working the eager love for every kind of knowledge which could be found in the recorded experience of other men. Though, when they assailed too closely that nebulous Deity to which to the last he persisted in clinging, Buchanan would sometimes petulantly repel the leaders of modern science, and denounce the light they brought as a mere Jack o’Lantern, he could not repulse it, and for the last thirty years of his life he was an eager student of modern scientific literature. He could say, with his own Vanderdecken,

                                            All this season
     During my residence among you,
I’ve searched the poor, stale scraps of reason
     Your last philosophers have flung you.
I’ve read through Comte, the Catechism,
(Half common sense, half crank and schism),
     And Harriet Martineau’s synopsis;
Puzzled through Littré’s monstr’ informous
Encyclopædia enormous,
     Until my brain grew blank as Topsy’s.
I’ve sucked the bloodless books of Mill,
     As void of gall as any pigeon;
I’ve swallowed Congreve’s patent pill
     To purge man’s liver of Religion;
I’ve tried my leisure to amuse
With Freddy Harrison’s reviews;
I’ve thumbed the essays of John Morley,
So positive they made me poorly:—

                    *          *          *
The Leben Jesu, Renan’s Vie,
I also studied thoroughly;
I vivisected cats with Lewes,
     I tortured gentle dogs with Ferrier,
Found out just what grimalkin’s mew is,
     And how tails wag in pug and terrier;
But came, however close I sought,
No nearer to the riddle of Thought.

                    *          *          *
Then finally, in sheer despair,
     Burn’d deep with Scepticism’s caustic
Found Spencer staring at the air,
Crying, ‘God knows if God is there!’
     And, in a trice, become agnostic!

So catholic a study of modern thought could have but one result upon a normal intelligence.

                               Cosmogony,
Geology, ethnology, what not—

which Bishop Blougram speaks of as

Greek endings, each the little passing bell
That signifies some faith’s about to die—

are rather to be compared to mordant acids, fatally certain to eat out the heart of the robustest faith; though some hollow simulacrum, like Buchanan’s ‘God’ may still be left erect in some dark corner of the mind. Frequently, in his earlier work, Buchanan consoled himself, as did Tennyson, by the dream of a God who was not indifferent, but merely working out with infinite pity and infinite patience an all-embracing scheme of salvation, in which wretchedness and wrong were only temporary expedients, to be justified presently to the sufferers by the granting of a fuller knowledge. One may be glad that he passed through such a phase of thought, for out of that phase came much noble and beautiful work, as, for instance, ‘The Vision of the Man Accurst’ in ‘The Book of Orm.’ In this Vision, the poet beholds the world after the Day of Judgement, a solitude but for one Man

Who had sinned all sins, whose soul
Was blackness and foul odour,

and whose dread fate it is to wander among the deserts of earth in a solitude and silence broken only by his own blasphemies. Summoned after a period to the presence of God, he is still fiercely unrepentant, and defies God by the mouth of God’s ambassador:—

                                  He saith his Soul is filled
With hate of Thee and of Thy ways; he loathes
Pure pathways where the fruitage of the stars
Hangeth resplendent, and he spitteth hate
On all Thy children . . . .

God asks, ‘What doth he crave?’

Neither Thy Heaven, nor Thy holy ways.
He murmureth out he is content to dwell
In the Cold Clime for ever, so Thou sendest
A face to look upon, a heart that beats,
A hand to touch—albeit like himself,
Black, venomous, unblest, exiled, and base;
Give him this thing, he will be very still,
Nor trouble Thee again.

But there is not ‘in all the waste of worlds,’ another like the Man Accurst, ‘the basest mortal born,’ but God says—

                                 Yet ‘tis not meet
His cruel cry, for ever piteous
Should trouble my eternal Sabbath day.
Is there a spirit here, a human thing,
Will pass this day from the Gate Beautiful
To share the exile of the Man Accurst—
That he may cease the shrill pain of his cry,
And I have peace?

     Two shapes answer to this appeal, and, at the Divine command, reveal themselves as the mother and the wife of the doomed wretch. Both plead to be allowed to share his exile, though he had slain the one, and made the life on earth of the other a long and cruel torment. And

                               The man wept.

And in a voice of most exceeding peace
The Lord said (while against the Breast Divine
The Waters of Life leapt, gleaming, gladdening):
‘The man is saved: let the man enter in!’

     The idea here is, as will at once be seen, identical with that which informs the  ‘Ballad of Judas Iscariot,’ the most popular and widely known—one is glad to know, for the credit of the popular judgment—of all Buchanan’s briefer pieces. It is the note of all that is finest and best in Buchanan’s achievement. In these two poems, the Tennysonian faith

That not one life shall be destroyed
Or cast as rubbish to the void
When God hath made the pile complete—

is very beautifully exemplified. But the study of life and of the lessons of modern science were disintegrating any such hope, and so, in Buchanan’s deeper work, viewed as a whole, there is to be beheld a curious spectacle—the spectacle of a man who, clinging with despairing grip to a shibboleth, yet frequently belabours the figure whose label is the very shibboleth itself. The calm indifference of a fainéant Deity, sitting aloof in ‘impotence of Godhead,’ stirred the poet to warn and lecture the Celestial Majesty in a fashion which the orthodox believer was quite justified in thinking disrespectful. In this same ‘Book of Orm,’ the poet addresses the Deity in the following terms—

Master, if there be Doom,
All men are bereaven!
If, in the universe
One Spirit receive the curse,
Alas for Heaven!
If there be Doom for one,
Thou, Master, art undone.

     *          *          *
Art thou less piteous than
The conception of a man?

     In ‘The City of Dream’ a cognate idea is set forth with logical sobriety:—

                  That duty the created owes
To the Creator, the Creator, too,
Owes the Created. God hath given me life;
I thank my God if life a blessing is;
How may I bless Him if it proves a curse?

     In the already quoted ‘Devil’s Prayer’ and in a passage of ‘Carmen Deific’ (‘The New Rome’), the statement is stronger:—

If I were a God like you, and you were a man like me,
And in the dark you prayed and wept and I could hear and see,
The sorrow of your broken heart would darken all my day,
And never peace or pride were mine till it was smiled away,—
I’d clear my Heaven above your head till all was bright and blue,
If you were a man like me, and I were a God like you.

     Here, we are far indeed from the God Who pardoned Judas Iscariot and the Man Accurst; far away from the ‘solace and certainty’ which, in another time and mood, the poet had found on ‘the shore of the celestial ocean.’ ¹¹
     It is, of course, obvious that since God includes Christ, and since an always impersonal and finally utterly nebulous Deity could hardly be conceived as begetting carnal offspring, the unescapable corollary of the theological evolution I have attempted to trace was the categorical denial of the Divine parentage of Jesus. I doubt if, at any period of his life, Buchanan was ever a Christian in the dogmatic sense—the only sense in which, it will be remembered, he permitted the use of the word. I doubt if ever he was a Christian, as Byron phrased it, ‘on consideration,’ though the personal character and ethical teaching of Christ were the objects of his constant admiration—if, indeed, ‘worship’ would not be a better word. His ‘Balder,’ a character on whom he lavished every divine quality, every beauty of benignity and tenderness, is obviously meant as a study of the character of Christ; and in the poem as a whole there is more than a mere germ, there is a distinct foreshadowing, of the gigantic conception which informs his greatest work, ‘The Wandering Jew.’ The two poems should be read in succession, and, so read, a striking resemblance between their themes becomes at once apparent. Both protagonists are of divine birth, both are informed wholly with a passion of pitying tenderness for all living things. Balder is the object of his Father’s fear and hatred; Christ, in the latter poem, is not hated by his Divine parent—he is simply the sufferer by His cynical carelessness and indifference.
     ‘The Wandering Jew’ was published in 1893. I was privileged to hear it read by its author from stage to stage of its production, and, while greatly struck and excited by its splendid qualities of idea and treatment, I prophesied for it a critical scarification compared with which any former onslaught on the author’s work would be fulsome eulogy. To be just to the English Press, my prediction was almost completely falsified. One or two journals did indeed assail the book with unmeasured abuse, a midland daily of large circulation and influence describing it as ‘a weltering mass of foul accusations,’ and ‘the morbid dream of an egotistic rhymer.’ Miss Marie Corelli, with that genius for self-advertisement which distinguishes her, rushed into print with a denunciation of the book and its author. ‘There would be,’ said Miss Corelli, ‘something inexpressibly funny in a Robert Buchanan pronouncing doom on Christ, if it were not so revolting,—a critical impertinence easily to be corrected by substituting for the name ‘Robert Buchanan’ the name ‘Marie Corelli,’ and for ‘Christ,’ ‘Robert Buchanan.’¹² But the general voice of the Press was to a quite different effect, and, though many critics failed altogether to perceive the true purport or meaning of the poem, the notices as a whole were candid and generous. Even more surprising to relate, the Pulpit took up and advertised the book by the mouths of several of its most distinguished orators. ‘Let me say,’ said the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, ‘that it will do all orthodox and devout Christians immense and endless good to read, ponder, and remember the attack upon historic and ecclesiastical Christianity which this poem utters. I say that nothing better could be done than that Robert Buchanan should rub these facts well into our ecclesiastical skins. I freely admit that through all the centuries the name of Christ has been identified with every kind of devilry. . . . There is nothing in this terrible poem to give intelligent Christians fear.’ In that last phrase Mr. Hughes was no doubt doing his best to make the best of a bad case, but his frank recognition of much that is true in the book, coming from such a source, was exceedingly grateful. Dr. Joseph Parker said that ‘Mr. Buchanan was on his way to the eternal altar’—a true and pregnant phrase, though hardly, I think, in the fashion its author hoped.
     The story of ‘The Wandering Jew’ is indeed as tremendous a conception as has ever entered the mind of man, and its conduct reveals Buchanan at his best. The Poet is wandering, desolate and heartsick, through the snowy streets of London on the night of Christmas Eve, when he hears ‘a tremulous voice cry out in pain,’

‘For God’s sake, mortal, let me lean on thee!’
And peering through the dimness I could see
Snows of white hair blown feebly in the wind;
And deeply was I troubled in my mind
To see so ancient and so weak a wight
At the cold mercy of the storm that night,
And said, while ‘neath his wintry load he bent,
‘Lean on me, father!’ adding, as he leant
Feebly upon me, wearied out with woe,
‘Whence dost thou come? and whither dost thou go?’

O then, meseemed, the womb of Heaven afar
Quickened to sudden life, and moon and star
Flashed like the opening of a million eyes,
Dimming from every labyrinth of the skies
Their lustre on that Lonely Man; and he
Loom’d like a comer from a far countrie
In ragged antique raiment, and around
His waist a rotting rope was loosely bound,
And in one feeble hand a lanthorn quaint
Hung lax and trembling, and the light was faint
Within it unto dying, tho’ it threw
Upon the snow beneath him light enew
To show his feeble feet were bloody and bare!

The Poet’s first clear idea of the old wayfarer’s identity is that he is Ahasuerus, the ‘Wandering Jew’ of legend, but, seeing upon his frozen hands the stigmata of the Great Sacrifice, he recognises Christ.

                             At last I knew
The lineaments of that diviner Jew
Who like a Phantom passeth everywhere,
The world’s last hope and bitterest despair,
Deathless, yet dead.

Anon, the Poet finds himself

                                upon an open Plain
Before the City, and before my face
Rose, with mad surges thundering at its base,
A mountain like Golgotha; and the waves
That surged round its sunless cliffs and caves
Were human—countless swarms of Quick and Dead!

Here, a figure sits in Judgement:—

Human he seemed, and yet his eyeballs shone
From fleshless sockets of a skeleton.

A shadowy advocate rises from amid the mass, and opens his speech for the prosecution with the adjuration:—

O Judge, Death reigned since Time began,
Sov’ran of Life and Change! and ere this Man
Came with his lying dreams to break our rest
The reign of Death was beautiful and blest!
But now within the flesh of man there grows
The poison of a dream that slays repose,
The trouble of a mirage in the air
That turneth into terror and despair;
So that the Master of the World, ev’n Death,
Hated in his own Kingdom, travaileth
In darkness, creeping hunted and afraid,
Like any mortal thing, from shade to shade,
From tomb to tomb; and ever where he flies
The souls of men shrink with averted eyes,
And call with mad yet unavailing woe
On this Man and his God to lay Death low.
Wherefore the Master of the Quick and Dead
Demandeth Doom and justice on the head
Of him, this Jew, who hath usurped the throne
The Lord of flesh claims ever for his own.
This Jew hath made the Earth that once was glad
A lazar-house of woeful men and mad
Who can yet will not sleep, and in their strife
For barren glory and eternal Life
Have rent each other, murmuring his Name!

In a passage of some hundreds of lines, packed close with splendid imagery and eloquence, the Advocate extends and presses this accusation, the clanging periods of his oratory closing with the tremendous line —

I demand doom and justice on this Jew!

Then appear the witnesses for the Prosecution—Judas, Ahasuerus, Pilate, Nero, Julian, Hypatia, some solitary, others attended by vast cohorts of dumb followers. Then comes Mahomet, escorted by the innumerable millions who have hailed him as the Prophet, and Buddha

Star-eyed and sad and very beautiful . . . .
He spake, the throngs who follow’d bent like grass
Wind-blown to worship him!

Zoroaster, ‘crownëd like a king,’ Menu and Moses, Confucius and

Prometheus, dragging yet his broken chain
And gazing heavenward still, in beautiful disdain.

They pass in interminable procession,

Each kingly in his place, and in his train
Souls of fair worshippers that Jew had slain.

The souls of mitred Popes and priests, of Galileo and of the innumerable nameless martyrs of science; Justinian,

The Master of the Templars, du Molay,
Clasped by the harlot, Fire,

Abelard and Eloise, Frederick,

Pale Petrarch, laurel.crownèd, gazing on
The white face of that sister wobegone
Who through the lust of Christ’s own Vicar fell—

Huss and Columbus and de Gama and Magellan; and from West and East, vast swarms of the victims slain in the name of Christ; Montezuma and the last of the Incas. Then comes Voltaire, with Calas blessing and embracing him; and after him Holbach, Diderot, and the rest,

The foes of Godhead and the friends of Man,

and finally, the innumerable hosts of Israel,

The children of the Ghetto, gathering there,
His brethren, fed their eyes on his despair,
And spat their hate upon him.

It would be impossible, without transcending all precedent in the way of free quotation, to give the faintest idea of the oceanic effect of this series of pictures, which, alone among painters, Gustave Doré might have realised in form and colour. Challenged to produce his Witnesses, Jesus replies

‘Hosts of the happy Dead whom I have blest!’

‘Call! Let them come!’

                               ‘I would not break their rest!’

‘Thou hast lied to them, O Jew!’ the dark Judge cried.

And Jesus said, ‘O Judge, I have not lied!’

‘False was thy promise—false and mad and drear—
There is no Father!’

                                ‘Father, dost Thou hear?’

For the last of many times, Jesus looks heavenwards for some sign. None comes, and the Judge resumes:—

‘Enough. Renew thy miracles, and prove
Thy words, O Jew! From yonder void above
Summon the Form, the Face, in all men’s eyes
And we absolve thee!’

                                 On the starry skies,
Still thinly shrouded with the falling snow,
He fixed his wistful gaze, and answered low,
‘I bide my Father’s time.’

John the Precursor, and ‘that other John’

                     Whom Jesus to his breast
Drew tenderly, because he loved him best,

Mary the mother and her gentle namesake the Magdalen, appear and testify, and at the summons of Paul,

Shapes of dead Saints arose, a shining throng,

But the greater throng of the victims of his false priests clamour them down and shriek for judgment. And Judgment is spoken, in words no man who has ever once perused can forget, at least in spirit and in essence.

Since thou hast quickened that thou canst not kill,
Awakened famine thou canst never still,
Spoken in madness, prophesied in vain,
And promised what no thing of clay shall gain,
Thou shalt abide while all things ebb and flow,
Wake while the weary sleep, wait while they go,
And, treading paths no human feet have trod,
Search on still vainly for thy Father, God;
Thy blessing shall pursue thee as a curse
To hunt thee, homeless, through the Universe;
No hand shall slay thee, for no hand shall dare
To strike the Godhead Death itself must spare!
With all the woes of Earth upon thy head,
Uplift thy Cross, and go! Thy Doom is said.

And lo! while all men come and pass away,
That Phantom of the Christ, forlorn and grey,
Haunteth the Earth with desolate footfall . . . .

God help the Christ, that Christ may help us all!

     The commonest critical error made in envisaging this poem was in describing it as a direct and frontal attack upon Jesus. That to a certain extent of course it is, but it is also a flank assault. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes set his finger on its central significance in admitting ‘that through all the centuries the name of Christ has been identified with every kind of devilry.’ The failure of Christ has been a failure to leave a Christ-like human progeny, to make the seed of his divinely beautiful spirit flourish in the rocky and thorny soil of human nature. The poem is at least as much a denunciation of the stupidity and cruelty of man as of the splendid and heroic folly of the greatest of the Paracletes, for whose nature and teaching it breathes nothing but love and admiration. ‘I distinguish absolutely,’ writes its author, ‘between the character of Jesus and the character of Christianity—in other words between Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Christ. Shorn of all supernatural pretensions, Jesus emerges from the gross mass of human beings as an almost perfect type of simplicity, veracity, and natural affection.’ ‘According to my critics it is secularism, and not Christianity, which is played out “intellectually.” If they mean by “secularism” the base and irreverent spirit which gibes and mocks at the beautiful dream of Jesus, and in so doing defames the stainless elder brother of all suffering men, I am cordially at one with them; but if they mean by secularism the spirit which rejects all compromises and frauds, however innocent, which affirms that the business of humanity is not to wear sackcloth and ashes, but to enlarge the area of its own happiness, and which incidentally, by way of illustration, points out the evils that other-worldliness has brought on man, I take leave to say, that at no time in the world’s history has secularism exercised so benign an influence over the lives of all who think and feel. . . . . It is only in so far as Christianity is itself secular that it is of the slightest influence upon the age in which we live. . . . . It is because the nebulæ of [Christ’s] love never cohered to an orb of rational piety, because mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into a science of life; because if this world is not something joyful and beautiful, all other worlds are dismal delusions, that Christ’s message to humanity has been spoken in vain. Human love and self-respect, human science and verification, human perception of the limitation of knowledge, have done more in half a century to justify God and prove the Godliness of life, than the doctrines of other-worldliness have done in nineteen hundred years.’ Mark, in the second of the phrases here underlined, the curious obsession already alluded to, the clinging to the shibboleth of a name which had ceased to denote any fixed or definable idea. Eliminate that, and the rest of the utterance might, in spirit and essence, have proceeded from the pen of Thomas Huxley.
     As an allegory, ‘The Wandering Jew’ is assuredly abundantly justified. For the last fifty years Christ has indeed been standing at the bar of human judgment, and his claim to divine birth — which in this poem Buchanan, for purely artistic purposes, tacitly admits — has been ruthlessly demolished, but not more ruthlessly than his ethico-social influence. ‘The religion of Jesus has never really triumphed at all, except in the area of priestly politics and popular superstition. Our time has been wasted, we have been made the sport of a kindly thaumaturgist, for nearly nineteen hundred years.’ ¹³
     And the verdict of Humanity has veritably been the verdict that Buchanan has recorded. The wan and way-worn figure of the Christ—‘Deathless, yet dead’—haunts the sad world, no living presence, but the shadowy wraith of a beautiful dream and a great lost purpose, feebly wandering towards final dissolution and oblivion.
     And it is because Robert Buchanan bravely recognised and fearlessly proclaimed the vanity of dreams to which his contemporaries clung, that I believe that posterity will accord to him a lofty pedestal in our national Pantheon, as the first great poet to make the choice of his own Balder, to turn his back upon the discredited hierarchy of Heaven and to stay on earth with Man. He obeyed the logic of his nature, he dared to ‘follow his brains,’ to accept the counsel of his own Dæmon, the great Æon,

Fear not, love not, and revere not,
What transcends your understanding,
Keep your reverence and affection
For the brethren whom you know. ¹⁴

     With unwilling and sometimes retrograde steps, he arrived ultimately where we now find him, discarding by the way many pleasant dreams, many happy fictions, his heart and brain in incessant conflict, the first clamouring at all costs to believe, the latter sternly insisting on the sacredness of Truth.

The creeds I’ve cast away
     Like husks of garnered grain.

     As Mirabeau with political, so he with theological formulas—il les avait humés tous. From a brief period of God-intoxication, through many doubts and battles and fluctuations, he came at last to face the facts of Life and Death, with only the thinnest veil of mysticism to hide their stern nakedness. Thin as that veil was, it was growing ever thinner. From the broken arc we may divine the perfect round, and it is my fixed belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which struck him down but spared him for a little longer time, he would logically have completed the evolution of so many years, and have definitely proclaimed himself as an Agnostic, perhaps even as an Atheist. Tennyson, who ‘crushed’ his doubts

              like a vice of blood
Upon the threshold of the mind,

might cling to the outworn superstition expressed in the lines of the second ‘Locksley Hall’—

Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True,
         the Pure, the Just—
Take the charm ‘For ever’ from them, and they crumble
         into dust—

but with a man of Buchanan’s robuster temperament, to whom Doubt was a troublesome, but still a welcome, guest, such a belief, absolutely incompatible with historical fact and daily experience, could not long abide. Even Ruskin, hide-bound religionist as he was, could rise to a loftier conception of human nature than to think that it must needs tumble into nothingness the moment it let go of the apron-string of some grand-motherly Deity.

     “A brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons; and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it assumes that such a belief is inconsistent with either purity of character or energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him; nor does the anticipation of death, to-morrow, suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed make the deviceless person more contented in his dullness: but it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising: nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be purer, under the conviction that all its evil may in a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a moment redeemed; and that the sigh of repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain—than it may be under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that ‘what a man soweth that shall he also reap’—or others reap—when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in darkness, but lies down therein.” ¹⁵

     Entire races, to whom it never occurred to look ‘one foot beyond the grave,’ have produced societies as excellent, and individual natures as noble and unselfish, as have ever been suckled on the feeding-bottles of revealed religion, and the more than inexpediency of proclaiming Atheism in Christian countries has naturally resulted in placing the declared Atheist perforce among the worthiest individuals of his generation. Militant Atheism is, of course, as absurd a blunder as militant Theism. The plain fact of the matter is that we do not know, and, by the very constitution of the human intelligence, never can know, the nature of the forces which environ us; and it is as foolish to regard them as malevolent as to proclaim their benignity. They are neither malignant nor benign, they are simply indifferent.

The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will. ¹⁶

     Science and philosophy, speaking by the pen of their best-furnished exponent in this generation ¹⁷  have divided the entire Cosmos into two perfectly clean halves, the ‘Knowable’ and the ‘Unknowable,’ and the cultured common-sense of the world has accepted this ruling. If it had but been earlier done—if all the priceless enthusiasm, all the energy, all the effort and time and money which have been wasted on the propaganda of revealed religion had been concentrated on the elucidation of the laws of nature, the culture of the intellect, and the relief and prevention of human suffering, in what a different world we should all be dwelling now! We, of this generation, may at least be glad that we live in the dim dawn of another and a better day, a day in which men of intellect will frankly recognise the necessary limits of their own intelligence, and be content to work ‘while their brief light endures’ towards tangible ends and assured results, leaving the Eternal Mysteries where they must needs remain, in the realm of mystery. Humanity has too long wasted its time and effort in prostrations as barren of result as the exercises of St. Simeon on his pillar:

I, ‘tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints.

     If mankind is ever to arrive at happiness it will not be by the worship of any Fetish, concrete or invisible, but by arduous study and slow conquest of the immutable laws by which it is surrounded. Buchanan had come to recognise so much; he was indeed on his way, as Dr. Parker said, ‘to the Eternal Altar,’ the Altar of the Religion of Humanity, which was standing before any other was built, and will endure when every other has crumbled to the dust. I am not ignorant how contemptuously he more than once turned his back on the fane in which that Altar burns:—

     Worship MAN? Go back once more
To image-worship as of yore,
And bend my head and bow my knee
To this King Ape, Humanity?
This stomach-troubled, squirming, aching,
     Mud-wallowing creature of a day,
This criticising, this book-making,
     Fretful, dyspeptic thing of clay!
This multi-face whom it hath taken
     Ages to learn to wash and dress!
This horde of swine, doomed to be bacon,
And now, by countless devils o’ertaken,
     Shrieking in impotent distress!
This mass of foulness and of folly
     Through whom the Paracletes have died!
This Yuletide carcase decked with holly
     In honour of its Crucified!
Now great Jehovah lies o’erthrown,
     Shall the mere pigmy reign at last?
Pshaw! rather worship stick or stone,
     And let Humanity crawl past! ¹⁸

     The old leaven, ‘the filthy virus of the obscene vaccination of Faith,’ as Gerald Massey years ago called it, worked furiously in his veins at times; the cherished superstitions clung like mandrake in the soil of his mind, and were only torn up with groans as of the parting spirit. Such a passage as this must be set beside the entire bulk of his last ten years’ work, and, so placed, its very virulence of denial amounts to an assent. It was the Poet of the dual personality protesting, and protesting vastly too much, against the too-cogent logic of the Thinker.

Notes on Part 2:

¹⁰ ‘The Outcast.’ Epistle Dedicatory. [back]
¹¹ See the last book of ‘The City of Dream.’ [back]
¹² See article on ‘The Master Christian.’ (Murray’s review of Marie Corelli’s The Master-Christian included in Robert Buchanan: A Critical Appreciation And Other Essays) [back]
¹³ Prose Note to ‘The Ballad of Mary the Mother.’ [back]
¹⁴ ‘The Devil’s Case.’ [back]
¹⁵ ‘The Crown of Wild Olive’ (Introduction). [back]
¹⁶ James Thomson, ‘The City of Dreadful Night.’ [back]
¹⁷ Mr. Herbert Spencer, ‘First Principles.’ [back]
¹⁸ ‘The Outcast.’ [back]

__________

From The Times (5 September, 1901 - p.13)

     There are two kinds of criticism which it does one good to encounter—illuminating comment, which really helps towards the proper understanding of an author’s aims and place in literature; and vigorous polemic that stimulates us into activity of disagreement and protest. In Mr. Henry Murray’s volume, ROBERT BUCHANAN AND OTHER ESSAYS (Wellby) we get a little of the former and a great deal of the latter kind. Mr. Murray does help us to form a just view of Buchanan’s work, though he will scarcely persuade any one to adopt his own enthusiastic measure of this poet’s genius. In the other papers there is much to arouse antagonism, and yet one is not sorry in the end to have set oneself to grapple with the curiously violent judgments in which the pages abound. Mr. Murray writes with little regard for style, but he is always energetic and generally interesting. We doubt whether it is worth while to insist upon what everybody of taste knows—that the works of Miss Corelli have no connexion with literature; or to explain at great length and with much repetition that there is a very small market for really good work in letters. But the other essays are of more solid interest, and the appreciation of Buchanan which fills half the volume is a useful tribute to the work of a poet whose literary vagaries prevented his genuine poetical talent from receiving the recognition it deserved.

_____

[A review of Henry Murray’s autobiography, A Stepson of Fortune: The memories, Confessions, and Opinions of Henry Murray (New York: The Baker-Taylor Company, 1910), in The New York Times of 9th April, 1910, contains the following paragraph:

     “Murray wrote for The People, a weekly newspaper, and his first contribution to its columns, “The Hotel of the Beautiful Star,” described his experiences as a nightly lodger on the benches of the Thames Embankment the previous week. He praises highly Sabastian Evans, the first editor of The People, and has words of praise, too, for George R. Sims and T. P. O’Connor. He met George Meredith, who was kind to him. He had a pleasant acquaintance with Whistler. He extols Sir Augustus Harris. But his hero of heroes is Robert Buchanan, a writer whose huge capacity for turning out poor stuff weakened the reputation he deserved for the really good things he wrote, whose violent temper often placed him in a pitiable light in the public eye, whose fondness for controversy sometimes made him seem ridiculous. Buchanan was unquestionably a man of extraordinary personality and unusual talent. Men who knew him well esteemed him  highly. Henry Murray collaborated in playwriting with him, and also with another famous figure of London’s Bohemia in late Victorian days—Henry Herman.” ]

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