Nature and the Victorian City: The Ambivalent Attitude of Robert Buchanan
by R. A. Forsyth
From English Literary History, Vol. 36, No. 2. (June, 1969), pp. 382-415.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

NATURE AND THE VICTORIAN CITY:
THE AMBIVALENT ATTITUDE OF
ROBERT BUCHANAN

BY R. A. FORSYTH

It would scarcely be consistent with the plan of this work to omit noticing the wondrous development of a new agent or element of civilization, the astonishing results of which are daily rising in fresh and unexpected forms before our eyes—the use of steam as a motive power, the progress of machinery and manufactures, and the rapid accumulation of large masses of people in manufacturing districts, are formative powers, almost created before our eyes. There can be no doubt that these circumstances are producing an immense and increasing influence on the destinies of Europe, and that they will modify if not direct the civilization of the coming age. But experience will give us little help in determining the nature of the influence they may exercise, for the steam-engine, the cotton-mill, and the railroad, have had no precedents; history furnishes no rule for their management. So rapidly did they pass through their stage of infancy, that they had taken their position in society and firmly established themselves before there was time to prepare a place for their reception. Such potent novelties, developing themselves with equal force and rapidity, necessarily dislocated and disturbed all existing institutions; and a considerable amount of suffering must have been produced, and perhaps may still be expected, before the nice process of adjustment between the old and the new elements of society can be fairly arranged.¹

W. Cooke Taylor, 1840.

                    I

     The emergence of industrial cities is the predominant historical fact of the Victorian Age. Their proliferation stands as a visible symbol of what Karl Polanyi calls “the great transformation,”² unprecedented in the life of any nation, from a rural to a market economy. Michael Wolff has defined the process in present-day terms by regarding Victorian England “as the first of what we

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¹ W. Cooke Taylor, The Natural History of Society (London, 1840), vol. II, pp. 261-262.
² See K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944), passim.

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³⁸³ now call the emerging nations,” one important aspect of which is the “psychological effects of modernization on those who find themselves suspended between traditional values and modern facts.”³ And Polanyi points to the real implications of Wolff’s description when he observes that although “Several authors have insisted on the similarity between colonial problems and those of early capitalism . . . . they failed to follow up the analogy the other way, that is, to throw light on the condition of the poorer classes of England a century ago by picturing them as what they were—the detribalized, degraded natives of their time.”⁴ The true nature of Disraeli’s “two nations,” that is to say, was a type of spiritual “apartheid.” And again, in an essay concerned generally with “The Victorian Self-Image and the Emergent City Sensibility,” I have suggested that the City “became for some the image not only of ‘man’s inhumanity to man,’ but was also intimately related to the urgent search for individual values and a sense of identity in a world made increasingly alien, not only by materialism and rationalism, but also, and more importantly, because the established incorporation of Man in the traditional cosmological trinity with God and His Nature had been dislocated.”⁵
     From these various formulations emerge, then, in the words of Walter E. Houghton, “The two outstanding features of their world which most impressed the Victorians . . . bourgeois industrial society and widespread doubt about the nature of man, society, and the universe.” These features, from which “no one could escape,” were, he rightly asserts, the main determinants of “the major Victorian attitudes . . . as much from the reaction they provoked as from their positive effect.”⁶ They were, furthermore, complementary, each supporting the view that “the long revolution,” as Raymond Williams calls it, was essentially cultural in nature rather than explicitly industrial or political or economic, being involved, in the last analysis, precisely with man’s self-image and his sense of identity. Polanyi draws attention to

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³ M. Wolff, “Victorian Study: an Interdisciplinary Essay,” Victorian Studies, VIII (1964), 62.
⁴ Polanyi, p. 290.
⁵ R. A. Forsyth, “The Victorian Self-Image and the Emergent City Sensibility,” University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIII (1963), 72.
⁶ W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1957), p. 22.

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³⁸⁴ “the moral and cultural catastrophe of the English cottager or copyholder of decent ancestry, who found himself hopelessly sinking in the social and physical mire of the slums of some factory neighbourhood.”⁷ This points up the crucial consideration of the relationship between the individual and the community, which lies at the heart of the social disaster of detribalization, and which leads to the realization that although any diatribe against urban corruption and hypocrisy would be largely sentimental and irrelevant, certainly the new cities are of prime importance in focussing the changes that comprise the revolution. In short, some examination of the dynamics of cultural change should provide a necessary framework of reference for further understanding the two-way interaction between individual men and their emergent industrial environment. For, in the words of Alexander Goldenweiser, “In its constituent elements culture is psychological and, in the last analysis, comes from the individual. But as an integral entity culture is cumulative, historical, extra-individual. It comes to the individual as part of his objective experience, just as do his experiences with nature, and, like these, it is absorbed by him, thus becoming part of his psychic content.”⁸
     As early as 1840 William Cooke Taylor, in his general history of civilization entitled The Natural History of Society, came to the important realization that the industrial city was a “new element” in society, which could not develop without disturbing established institutions and social relationships. It exhibited, he wrote, “a system of social life constructed on a wholly new principle, a principle yet vague and indefinite but developing itself by its own spontaneous force, and daily producing effects which no human foresight had anticipated.”⁹ The relationship between the new principle and these daily effects is substantially the same as that defined by Goldenweiser in terms of the communal and individual aspects of the growth of culture. And, to use Ralph Turner’s formulation, that growth is carried forward by the social process impelling “individuals to new modes of action and thought—innovations, they are called—and these new modes, in turn, become organized as enduring patterns, through selection

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⁷ Polanyi, pp. 173-174.
⁸ A. Goldenweiser, History, Psychology, and Culture (London, 1933), p. 59.
⁹ Quoted in R. E. Turner, “The Industrial City: Center of Cultural Change” in The Cultural Approach to History, ed. C. F. Ware (New York, 1940), p. 228.

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³⁸⁵ in the social process.”¹⁰ Whilst these modes were steadily assimilated into daily behaviour to form a cultural pattern distinctively urban, that process might, by virtue of historical continuity, also validly be regarded as a re-orientation of the superseded rural ethos. “Since the city is the product of growth rather than of instantaneous creation,” as Louis Wirth observes, “it is to be expected that the influences which it exerts upon the modes of life should not be able to wipe out completely the previously dominant modes of human association. . . . This historic influence is reinforced by the circumstance that the population of the city itself is in large measure recruited from the countryside, where a mode of life reminiscent of this earlier form of existence persists.”¹¹ These observations are corroborated by the comments of Melville J. Herskovits on detribalization and consequent urbanization in present-day Africa, where “sanctions and values of a given tradition under contact with another are applied to new forms, combining and recombining until syncretisms develop that rework them into meaningful, well-functioning conventions.”¹² That is to say, cultural development proceeds by the simultaneous loss of old elements of behaviour rooted in and reflecting an earlier environment, and the incorporation of new elements characteristic of an emergent environment. The resultant pattern of new absorbing old has a complexity which would be illuminated by myriad individuals’ daily existences, throwing into sharp relief the self-image and sense of identity of each. The process, then, as Goldenweiser stresses, affects both community and individual; its operation is both cultural and psychological. And when related to individual behaviour the most appropriate term is “ambivalence,” the “co-existence within a person, to a similar degree, of opposed traits, attitudes, or sentiments,”¹³ that simultaneous looking before and behind that typifies the “suffering” state of mind of an individual caught in a transitional culture before, as Taylor suggested, “the nice process of adjustment between the old and the new elements of society can be fairly arranged.”¹⁴

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¹⁰ Ibid., p. 230.
¹¹ L. Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” The American Journal of Sociology XLIV (1938), p. 3.
¹² M J. Herskovits, The Human Factor in Changing Africa (London, 1962), p. 292.
¹³ H. B. and A. C. English, A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms (New York, 1958), p. 25.
¹⁴ Taylor, p. 262.

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     In the context of the dynamics of cultural change, as I have briefly outlined them, I want to suggest this ambivalent mode of thought and behaviour as a representative response in particular to the multiple revolution that characterises Victorian England, and predicate it as the framework of reference through which we may further understand the interaction between individual men and their emergent industrial environment. That framework is precisely delineated by Ralph Turner when he writes:

If the industrial city, considered as the social milieu of a new structure of behaviour and thought, is influencing ever larger parts of national populations, this influence is evident, on the one hand, in the dislocation of old forms of behaviour and thought in the several national traditions and, on the other hand, in the appearance and spread of new forms. However, at the moment, because the dislocation of the old forms intensifies the emotional attachments to them, the new ones are not recognized. If at the moment such is the case, the prevailing confusion is understandable in the feeling that, although the old modes of behaviour and thought no longer serve life, there is nothing to replace them.¹⁵

These statements read like a prose comment from a cultural point of view on that characteristic Victorian situation defined by Matthew Arnold as,

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
                   (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”)

And it is not by chance that this is so, for the earnest critic of society and reforming School-Inspector struck as the most characteristic note in his poetry a wistful nostalgia for a faded “Golden Age” associated with rural millennialism.
     It seems valid to regard ambivalence not as evasive, but rather as an adjustment device, giving the participant some small area for psychic manoeuvre and accommodation. Such an area, sometimes mislabelled “hypocrisy,” would seem imperative in a transitional age, the complexity of which had resulted in a society whose “practical ideals,” as G. M. Young aptly expresses it, “were at odds with its religious professions and its religious belief was at issue with its intelligence.”¹⁶ In cases where an individual’s response to social change is implacably rigid and uncompromising,

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¹⁵ Turner, p. 232.
¹⁶ G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (London, 1936), p. 16.

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³⁸⁷ one may regard the very extremism of that response as a measure of the gravity of the threat. Outstanding, and conveniently divergent, examples of this reaction are provided by William Barnes and James Thomson (B. V.). Whilst on the one hand we have the reclusive Barnes, immured within the fastnesses of Eden-like Dorset, stolidly refusing at all levels of thought and behaviour to participate in “the great transformation,” on the other we have the response of Thomson, immersed in the dreadful City, for whom industrialism, aggravated by a sense of evolutionism being implacably materialistic, became the dark night of his soul.¹⁷
     Between these two extremes stands the response of Robert Buchanan, who exemplifies, in some ways more explicitly than more notable contemporaries, that tension between an overpowering desire to believe and equally immovable intellectual doubts which characterises so much of Victorian mental and spiritual life. In his efforts to resolve this problem Buchanan struggles towards a new structure of feeling based on a conscious turning from the countryside to the city as the real centre of current life. As the century proceeded, Nature and the City became increasingly opposite points of interest, and his relative failure may be gauged by his continued ambivalence towards both. The resulting configuration is complex and yet unsophisticated, and presents itself as a poetical example of the spiritual and intellectual difficulties which Herskovits regards as “basic . . . in the adjustment of individual behaviour and of institutional structures” and which is “to be found in all situations where peoples having different ways of life come into contact.”¹⁸

                    II

     Robert Buchanan is generally remembered on two main counts: firstly, as the pseudonymous protagonist of “The Fleshly School of Poetry” controversy which stemmed from his revengeful attack in 1871 on the poetry of Rossetti and Swinburne;¹⁹ and secondly, as the “ingenious young Scotch writer” whose uncultured

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¹⁷ See further in this connection R. A. Forsyth, “The Conserving Myth of William Barnes,” Victorian Studies, VI (1963), 325-354; and “Evolutionism and the Pessimism of James Thomson (B. V.),” Essays in Criticism, XII (1962), 148-166.
¹⁸ Herskovits, p. 292.
¹⁹ C. R. Decker, The Victorian Conscience (New York, 1952). Chapter 4 is an interesting account of this controversy.

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³⁸⁸ rationalisation of swarming over-population in terms of “divine philoprogenitiveness”—incongruously most active among urban slum-dwellers whose desperate poverty and hunger made them the least suitable to exemplify an obsolescent theory of plenitude—led to his being classed amongst those “liberal practitioners” whom Matthew Arnold scarified in his bitterest vein of irony.²⁰ His reputation has not always been thus tangential, however; during his lifetime his stature as a literary figure, and more particularly as a poet, was considerable. Arthur Symons observed that “from the first his books were received with serious attention; they were considered, often praised greatly, often read largely. Whenever he had anything to say, people listened.”²¹ His early poetry was highly regarded by R. H. Hutton²² and by Robert Browning and G. H. Lewes;²³ and even Rossetti, at the height of the “Fleshly School” controversy, acknowledged the poetic talents of his assailant.²⁴ His “The City of Dream” (1888) was singled out from current poetry in a speech by W. E. H. Lecky at the Royal Academy Banquet as proof “that the artistic spirit in English Literature has [not] very seriously decayed.”²⁵ He was granted a Government pension by Mr. Gladstone in 1869 and at his death in 1901 was hailed as “the poet of modern revolt”²⁶ and was even ranked with Tennyson and Browning as one of the three major poets of the age.²⁷
     The particular issue that absorbed in its various facets much of his attention was certainly a characteristic concern of his times—the cosmological problem of Man’s place in the emergent concept of Nature which resulted both from the multifarious scientific speculation and theorizing comprehended under the term “evolutionism” and from the commercial and economic expansion consequent upon the harnessing of steam in industry and locomotion. For that harnessing not only endowed men with

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²⁰ M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1938), p. 202.
²¹ A. Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (London, 1904), pp. 121-122.
²² See A. Stodart-Walker, Robert Buchanan: the Poet of Modern Revolt (London, 1901), p. 42.
²³ See H. Jay, Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships (London, 1903), Chapter X.
²⁴ See H. Murray, Robert Buchanan: A Critical Appreciation, and Other Essays (London, 1901), p. 8.
²⁵ Jay, p. 229.
²⁶ See Stodart-Walker, passim.
²⁷ Murray, p. 35.

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³⁸⁹ an unprecedented, semi-divine power over time and space, but led also to the rapid proliferation of cities of almost inhuman dimensions. The increasingly discredited God-orientated rural ethos, retrospectively treasured by many as paradisal, was, then, supplanted by the city, which came to be the palpable symbol of the transformation that had overtaken the traditional relationship between God, Man and Nature, demanding in the process a new orientation amongst the components of that fundamental trinity. The context of that demand was the sense of human alienation from a universe whose remorseless and amoral processes were thought to be regulated by “laws” of such implacable indifference to spiritual idealism and aspirations as to reduce them to merest sentimentality. And this sense of alienation was exacerbated by fortuitous circumstance or by the perverse humour of the Maker that rendered its recognition the painful birthright solely of human consciousness, which was also, ironically, Nature’s evolved masterpiece. Disillusion and frustrating indirection characterized the response of many to this situation, forcefully described by Conrad as late as 1897 in a letter to Cunninghame Graham, where he likens the universe to a machine that evolved itself “out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider,—but it goes on knitting. . . . The infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight . . . without heart. It is a tragic accident,—and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. . . . It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair, and all the illusions,—and nothing matters.”²⁸ Buchanan was as little content as most of his contemporaries to be knitted haphazardly into this “horrible work” whose separate threads seemed to be chance mutation and a process of amoral survivalism. He too would have liked the machine “to embroider.” And much of his creative energy, exuberant and often undisciplined, was directed at effecting this transformation.
     Robert Buchanan was born in 1841 to parents of strong Socialist and Free Thought leanings. His father, a poor tailor of Ayrshire, had, the poet recalled, been so powerfully affected by “the benign Don Quixote of modern Socialism, Robert Owen”

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²⁸ Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London, 1927), vol. I, p. 216.

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³⁹⁰ that he “[threw] down goose and scissors” to become his apostle, “following his gentle leader into perilous places where the new gospel was hateful or unknown.”²⁹ His mother was Margaret Williams, whose father, a philanthropic solicitor of Stoke-upon-Trent, was an advanced free-thinker, from whom she acquired a strong Socialist orientation towards political, religious and social problems. Despite the pervasive atmosphere of sceptical unbelief of his formative years—during which, as he later described them, he “was nourished on the husks of socialism and the chill water of infidelity”³⁰ —and despite his high regard for his parents, Buchanan early discovered within himself “the sweet spirit of natural piety.”³¹ But this did not anchor him in any calm and enduring conviction regarding the religious significance of his personal existence. He became involved, rather, as did many of his contemporaries, in a tormented struggle between emotional needs and intellectual convictions, fought in terms of human alienation from Nature and on the field of a discredited theodicy. Personal immortality became the pin-point of dissatisfaction with the emergent dispensation because it located precisely the painful paradox of human consciousness in relation to the imprisonment of man within the amoral “laws” of nature. “What is left if we abandon the idea of eternal life, as reason teaches us to do?” asks Buchanan, distraught at the death of his adored mother. “Only a horrible nightmare—a devil’s dream.”³² The path of disenchantment travels full circle if we recall Conrad’s vision of the universe as an infamous knitting-machine that has “knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair, and all the illusions,” not into a complex pattern of metaphysical ingenuity and religious consolation, but into a satanic nightmare, a wild imbroglio of values where “nothing matters.”

                    III

     In his earliest poetry, Buchanan took what can only be called a fashionable interest in writing descriptively about the natural scene. That he could do so is indicative of the general acceptance by about 1860 of the suitability of this as a subject for poetry.

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²⁹ Jay, pp. 2-3.
³⁰ Stodart-Walker, p. 9.
³¹ Jay, p. 19.
³² Ibid., p. 280.

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³⁹¹ The Romantics, superficially understood, had set the seal of authority on it; Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites had established the improving moral results of fervent attention to visual detail, and with the wide-spread if somewhat limp support of illustrated albums and the mystique of “the language of flowers” the subject had become the substance of a popular literary tradition. Buchanan in his early poems is completely encompassed by this tradition—he writes of the countryside as a visiting literary gentleman, in no way to be confused with such authentic literary countrymen as John Clare and William Barnes. This may be observed in the following representative passage where the influence of Keats transmuted by the rhythms of Tennyson is patent;

The air is hotter here. The bee booms by
With honey-laden thigh,
Doubling the heat with sounds akin to heat;
And like a floating flower the butterfly
Swims upward, downward, till its feet
Cling to the hedgerows white and sweet.
A black duck rises clumsily with a cry,
And the dim lake is nigh.
The road curves upward to a dusty rise,
Where fall the sunbeams flake on flake;
And turning at the curve, mine eyes
Fall sudden on the silent lake,
Asleep ’neath hyacinthine skies.³³

The Spirit of Nature as presented in this painted countryside is little more than a literary figment, and nothing of a Presence. Motivated by neither the mystical intensity of Romantic visionary gleams nor the elegant vigour of the “picturesque,” such verse remains derivative merely, rhetorical in the sense of W. B. Yeats’s definition: “the will trying to do the work of the imagination.”³⁴
     Buchanan’s first mature volume of poetry, Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865), on the strength of which G. H. Lewes claimed that its author “seems to me a man of genius,”³⁵ is marked by an interesting and significant departure from his previous mode. Here he turns from descriptions of external nature to genre pictures of rural life, affecting tales after the style of

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³³ “Up The River,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan (London, 1901), 2 vols. This edition of the poems has been used throughout.
³⁴ Quoted in A. Tate, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (London, 1936), p. 87.
³⁵ G. H. Lewes, “Robert Buchanan,” Fortnightly Review, I (1865), p. 446.

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³⁹² Tennyson’s “Dora” and “The Miller’s Daughter.” His treatment of the emotional responses of simple people to extraordinary events which confront them, without being psychologically subtle and revealing of the protagonists, is nevertheless dramatically effective within the somewhat sentimental framework of his intentions. And often he shows quite shrewd insight into the characters of his narrative, as when, for instance, the stern Calvinistic father of “Poet Andrew” describes his son’s clandestine scribblings as,

Words pottle-bellied, meaningless, and strange,
That strutted up and down the printed page,
Like bailies made to bluster and look big.
                                                      (“Poet Andrew”)

But even in these poems Buchanan is not truly concerned with country people and their way of life, as were Barnes and Clare, but rather with the eccentric or the psychologically curious. This is not to imply that the sentiments of his “personae” or the atmosphere of the tales are spurious but rather that Buchanan here shows himself as a poetical journalist primarily concerned with “human interest” stories. This sense of detachment, a lack of imaginative involvement in his themes, is an extension of the artificiality that characterized his earlier writing and is also, more importantly, a reflection of that deeper alienation of man from the “horrible work” of the universe.
     Buchanan soon came to realize the obsolescence of the tradition in which he had composed these early poems, and steadily replaced it with an awareness of the spreading industrial cities as the predominant formative influence of modern sensibility. For after living in London for some time—he had gone there from Glasgow in 1860 to take “the literary fortress by storm”³⁶ —he found his “human interest” stories increasingly in the lives of the impoverished urban masses, and through relating their degraded spiritual and physical conditions to their new and ugly environment was led to the attempted formulation of a theodicy more suitable to the reality of industrialism. His later poetry, then—motivated by an amorphous religious emotion that swung him between a Christianity of a most undoctrinal sort and a thoroughgoing agnosticism—is concerned almost exclusively with

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³⁶ R. Buchanan, “David Gray, a Memoir,” in A Poet’s Sketch-Book (London, 1883), p. 51.

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³⁹³ man in his social and religious aspects and the interaction between these. And his method in presenting this “modern” poetry of revolt was the attempted vindication of the apparently faithless ways of urban and scientific men to the unworthy God of Nature who had hitherto been the apex of the cosmological Trinity.

                    IV

     Buchanan was conscious of the difficulty involved in the transition to new poetic themes, as is apparent from the important “Bexhill, 1866” with which he opened his London Poems, the urban counterpart of the rural Idyls and Legends of Inverburn. In this poem Buchanan attempts to present a poetic credo acknowledging his indebtedness to Wordsworth, the guiding light of his youth, but at the same time intimating the shortcomings in the contemporary world of his mentor’s poetic philosophy. Buchanan’s awareness of those limitations resulted from his urgent sense of the necessity, despite “The buying, and the selling, and the strife/Of little natures” that characterized much of urban existence, to make,

The busy life of London musical,
And phrase in modern song the troubled lives
Of dwellers in the sunless lanes and streets.

     The poem takes the form of an interplay, discursively lyrical rather than dramatic, between the “pastoral solitude” of the Scottish hills with their “serener air . . . [and] pure sunshine” and the “unsung city’s streets.” This interplay is suggested by the echoes throughout, in diction and rhythms, of passages from “Tintern Abbey,” the manifesto counterpart in the Wordsworthian canon. It becomes quite explicit, however, in the persistent contrast of the rustic serenity of “Scottish dales and dells” and the “great roar . . . [of] London streets” as he recounts his vacillation between these fascinating opposites. The “humming of the town,” for instance, reminds him of “the sound I used to hear/In Scotland, when I dwelt beside the sea”; and again,

. . . from time to time, the hum of life
Around me, the strange faces of the streets,
[Mingled] with those thin phantoms of the hills,
And with that ocean-murmur.

And whilst singing his “modern song” he was “haunted . . . (by) the presence of the mountains” and

. . . the murmur of the sea                                                                     394
Deepen’d my mood; while everywhere I saw,
Flowing beneath the blackness of the streets,
The current of sublimer, sweeter life,
Which is the source of human smiles and tears.

Wordsworth, too, had felt

. . . the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,  (“Tintern Abbey”)

and, hearing “The still, sad music of humanity” from what Buchanan would have regarded as the distance of philosophic seclusion, had idealised the natural perfection of the dalesmen of Cumberland, those “humble sons of the hills . . . a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists . . . [who] had a consciousness that the land, which they walked over and tilled, had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood.”³⁷ Buchanan, on the other hand, compassionate for the impoverished crowds of the “terrible City,” attempts, though perhaps inadequately equipped, to shoulder the burden of the “unsung city’s streets” believing them to be the true contemporary source of “the weariness and weight of tears.”
     Significantly, however, this transference to new poetic themes, complete though it seemed, did not involve an outright repudiation of the Wordsworthian principle of the educative power of Nature on the moral and spiritual sensibility of responsive individuals. Such a repudiation would have been the probable poetic resolution of the conflict in “Bexhill, 1866” had the interplay between rustic retreat and urban involvement been presented in terms of dramatic tension between elements mutually exclusive. Instead it is precisely because “the woods/And meadows” remain for Buchanan

. . . an ecstasy,
The singing birds a glory, and the trees
A green perpetual feast to fill the eye,

that he is able to continue the search in

. . . the mirror of my soul for shapes
That linger’d, faces bright or agonised,
Yet ever taking something beautiful

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³⁷ W. Wordsworth, “Guide to the Lakes,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. Knight (London, Vol. VIII), p. 242.

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From glamour of green branches, and of clouds                                    395
That glided piloted by golden airs.

Although, therefore, the Wordsworthian nature philosophy has for Buchanan been largely discredited as a viable one in an urban-industrial context, it remains the shadowy framework of his poetic investigation of his problems.
     This is sometimes manifested in a straightforward opposition between the physical and moral advantages of living in the countryside and the disadvantages of incarceration in the grimy city. Thus in “Jane Lewson” we find “the dismal square of wither’d trees” presented as a visual image of spiritual desolation—“The thousand sordid images,” to adapt T. S. Eliot’s lines, “Of which her soul was constituted” (“Preludes”). The “dull life that she wore [like] a gloomy garment” is suggested in terms of “The dusty grass that grew within the rails”; and the occasional flowers that “Grew up, and sicken’d in the smoke, and died” are contrasted with

. . . those sweet places in the fields,
Those homes whereon the sun shone pleasantly,
And happy mothers sat at cottage doors
Among their children.

Such poems never become true Pastoral, for in them reference to the countryside amounts to a picnic view of rural life, a week-end nostalgia for a faded Arcadia rather than the imaginative focus through which effective criticism of the emergent cities might be made. Mainly, however, Buchanan’s enduring attachment to the rustic dream and all its metaphysical consolations becomes apparent in a more oblique, even paradoxical, way through the pervasiveness of misery, poverty and death in his numerous poems based on urban themes. For the pattern of virtually unrelieved gloom and depravity leads to the realization that in Buchanan we have, in fact, not a minor Baudelaire accurately presenting his imaginative response to the city, but rather a man morally outraged at drunkenness, cruelty and prostitution, which are by implication the evil flowers of urban society alone. The point is nicely made through his turgid use of “rural” imagery in the “L’envoi to London Poems,”

I sing of the stain’d outcast at Love’s feet,—
Love with his wild eyes on the evening light;
I sing of sad lives trampled down like wheat
Under the heel of Lust, in Love’s despite;
I glean behind those wretched shapes ye see                                         396
In the cold harvest-fields of Infamy.

     With a few exceptions, such as the lyrics “The City Asleep,” “To the Moon” and “These Voices,” these city poems are cast in the form of dramatic monologues, but they rarely achieve the artistic excellence of Browning’s exemplars, as they generally lack variety of poetic skill and psychological acuity. In addition, the “personae” in Buchanan’s poems are often discovered near death, yet, despite physical extremity and the depraved circumstances in which we invariably find them, they remain only too articulate to the end. Especially this double sentimentality militates against the autobiographical veracity which is the hallmark and strength of the mode. Furthermore, he proceeds to use the form largely for the expression of personal views rather than for the illumination of character and situation. So repeatedly he defeats his own poetic purpose—but in a most revealing way. Although the real source of these poems, as suggested, is moral outrage at the hellish city—thereby invoking its shadowy counterpart of heavenly ruralism—it seems to me neither satisfactory nor sufficient merely to dismiss them as escapism, or the lurid titillation of one wishing to expose the “shame of the city.” For what we have here, rather, is an ambivalence of attitude where the complexity and strain of a chosen role—the poet of the “unsung city streets”—is so imaginatively demanding that Buchanan, almost unconsciously, uses the defensive strategy of reviling the subject while continuing to play the role.
     This situation is well illustrated in what appears at first sight. to be a unique exception to the general rule. In “Liz,” first published in the opening issue of the “Fortnightly Review” by George Henry Lewes, who was “moved and delighted” by the collected London Poems,³⁸ Buchanan tells the harrowing story of a girl whose widowed mother was unable to earn enough to prevent her young son’s early death from starvation. The mother dies soon after and Liz turns to fruit-selling for a living. She avoids the looming danger of prostitution by becoming the “de facto” wife of honest Joe Purvis, in bearing whose child she is brought to the death-bed from which she tells her life story. The tale is typical of what constitutes city life for Buchanan in these poems, and it was doubtless factual enough. What is unusual,

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³⁸ Jay, p. 127.

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³⁹⁷ however, is the long section in which Liz speculates on the nature of heaven. This would have seemed an apt opportunity for expansive and glowing ruralism. Instead we find her so thoroughly urbanised that she associates her single visit to the countryside, despite its beauty for eye and ear, with loneliness and isolation, from which she recovers only when she “crept into the great black streets again; / And when I breathed the smoke and heard the roar.” Habit and daily usage had alienated her from the rural dream of bright innocence, because of her sombre childhood spent mainly in a garret from which she

. . . saw the housetops round me in the smoke,
And, leaning out, look’d down into the gloom,
Saw deep black pits, blank walls, and broken panes,
And eyes, behind the panes, that flash’d at me,
And heard an awful roaring, from the lanes,
Of folk I could not see.

     The countryside for Liz, therefore, is an unreal place, merely that which happens to be outside the city, and yet the city, the real and unavoidable centre of living to which she must return, is harsh and cruel, the “wicked town,” where she is “Moved on and hunted through the streets of stone” like a human pariah. But she is not simply caught between conventional alternatives, for there is a further element in the poem that becomes the crux of the issue. And that is the moral courage and spiritual integrity which characterise Liz’s reactions to the tough circumstances of her daily existence, to the physical ugliness which is its environment, and to her final sad predicament. Whilst the city as institution is presented through these repeated miserable autobiographies as the very image, economically, socially and spiritually, of man’s inhumanity to man, many of the most suffering of its members rise up with a remarkably Wordsworthian resolution and independence to “overcome” the city’s unconcern by virtue of their innate pity and courage and love. And it is not only Liz’s moral fortitude and wise forbearance that one may evidence, but also the charitable kindness of the “tall, pale lady” who helped her in various ways without ever patronising or moralising, and again the tolerance of the parson who sits at her death-bed listening to her life-story. Similar patterns may be found, for instance, in “Jane Lewson,” where the real hero is human courage and love (associated with ruralism) and the villain is hypocritical religiosity, cruelty and loneliness (associated with the grimy, ³⁹⁸ harsh city), or in “Nell,” a tale of love and charity, flourishing, as Buchanan describes it, by “the lurid light of an ever-deepening terror”³⁹ in the most unpropitious environment of the London slum of Seven Dials.
     It is clear, then, that Buchanan takes a sombre, monochromatic view of the industrial city, with nowhere suggested the vitality, variety and opportunity of urban life. It would be wrong, however, to regard this limitation as falsifying his presentation, because appreciation of its real nature suggests rather an involvement with central issues in the cultural revolution of his day. Other poets had reacted in somewhat similar fashion to what they too regarded as a threat to human identity and dignity, against which the individual soul had to be protected—“Wragg is in custody,” thundered Arnold⁴⁰—and yet, paradoxically, to which it had in the end to become vitally accommodated if the twin dangers of alienation and nostalgic pastoralism were to be avoided. Tennyson stressed the emotional validity of the “feeling heart” against the claims of scientific rationalism, and Arnold postulated a situation in which man’s “genuine self” was a “buried life,” difficult to arrive at and possess because of the “stupefying power . . . Of all the thousand nothings of the hour . . . distractions . . . [that] well-nigh change his own identity,” the frantic isolation—not yet exacerbated to the intensity that would afflict Prufrock—with “the mass of men . . . alien to the rest / Of men, and alien to themselves” (“The Buried Life”). In the light of this reaction we might valuably view Buchanan’s presentation, with its stress on individual lives and its ambivalent attitude, as reflecting that fear he shared with Conrad that the “active universe” was a self-created knitting-machine, but in this context transferred to the new man-made machine of industrialism and its product the teeming city. It is this same fear that Dickens powerfully presents in terms of “the orphan, the exposed child, the lonely governess, the girl from a poor family,” for as Raymond Williams justly observes, “these are the figures which express the deepest response to the reality of the way of life . . . in the literature they emerge carrying an irresistible authenticity, not merely as exemplars of the accidents of the social system, but as expressions of a general judgment of the human

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³⁹ Ibid., p. 128.
⁴⁰ M. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Matthew Arnold, Poetry and Prose, ed. J. Bryson (London, 1954), pp. 363-364.

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³⁹⁹ quality of the whole way of life . . . a radical human dissent. At the level of social character, the society might be confident of its assumptions and its future, but these lonely exposed figures seem to us, at least, the personal and social reality of the system which in part the social character rationalized. Man alone, afraid, a victim: this is the enduring experience.”⁴¹ Although he is unable to present any compensating equivalent of Dickens’ humanised and benign labyrinth of Todgers, that protective urban macrocosm in which “every man comes out freely in his own character,”⁴² this radical human dissent is, in a minor way, the enduring experience also of Buchanan’s urban poems. And it is manifested most strongly in his concern with “fallen women,” one of the great social problems resulting from urbanisation.

                    V

     The enormous increase of prostitution in Victorian England was directly related to the congestion of living conditions endured by the urban under-privileged. As T. E. James has observed, “. . . the question of prostitution began to assume a problematic form as the industrial revolution set its mark upon the world: mass movements took place away from the country to the towns, where people were crowded together under wretched housing conditions, their leisure occupations restricted and their everyday work monotonous and emotionally unsatisfying. The modern problem of prostitution is essentially an urban one, its character largely depends on the size and locality of the town.”⁴³ The problem aroused to active good works of redemption the consciences of men as diverse as Dickens and Gladstone. It appeared as the central theme of numerous mid-Victorian novels,⁴⁴ treated at first obliquely, but later with an increasing directness. And the protracted discussion, both bigoted and informed, that was devoted to its eradication made it pre-eminently one of those “modern subjects” fundamental to the pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, as evidenced in such paintings as Millais’ “Virtue and Vice,” Holman Hunt’s “The Awakened Conscience” and Rossetti’s “Found.”

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⁴¹ R. Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961), p. 68.
⁴² C. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, Ch. 9, “Town and Todgers’s.”
⁴³ T. E. James, “Prostitution,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1963, Vol. 18, p. 599.
⁴⁴ P. Thomson presents an interesting survey in The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal, 1837-1873 (London, 1956), Ch. V.

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⁴⁰⁰ Such widespread social and artistic interest in the problem suggests that Buchanan was not being idiosyncratic in paying it considerable attention in his urban poems. There are in his particular case, however, considerations that qualify what appears to be simply an alert interest in “the great social evil” of the times.
     In the first instance, one cause of the frequency of that theme might valuably be construed in Freudian terms as an offshoot of the Oedipus relationship that seems likely to have existed between an adoring, over-protected son and his too-fond mother. Buchanan was an only child (except for a sister some twelve years younger, who died in infancy) and, as Harriet Jay recalls, “he became the idol of his mother, whose affection for him he returned with absolutely over-mastering intensity.”⁴⁵ Buchanan himself often said that his “feeling towards his father . . . was one of ordinary, though strong affection, but towards his mother it was far from ordinary”;⁴⁶ they were to each other “all the world, all happiness, all life, all being.”⁴⁷ He was always shocked when anyone happened to refer to her as “old” and when she died he said, “I cannot imagine the world without my mother!”⁴⁸ Although Buchanan admired his father’s moral fortitude in adversity, his view of him as a husband was predictably unfavourable: “his relations with my mother were not happy, and he was to no little extent to blame, and in many respects he was as weak as water.”⁴⁹
     The familial relationship that emerges from these personal expressions seems to indicate a classical Freudian situation, in which the son’s “pure” though illicit love is deprived of its object and at the same time is sanctioned by its base counterpart, the ageing father’s “prostitution” of the mother’s unfading beauty. One result of this situation is apparent in the guilt-ridden obsession with “fleshliness” of which he accuses the poetry of Rossetti and Swinburne with such vitriol and personal animus as to be self-damning. For it is the publicity given to the “animal sensations,” pointing up their illicitness rather than their actual depravity, that he finds most offensive—Rossetti is reprehended for parading “his private sensations before a coarse public,” for

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⁴⁵ Jay, p. 8.
⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 8.
⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 288.
⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 9.
⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 44.

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⁴⁰¹ “putting on record for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection,” for obtruding “such things as the themes of whole poems.”⁵⁰ And the issue becomes patent when he complains of Rossetti’s “Jenny,” significantly about a prostitute: “Its fleshliness is apparent at a glance; one perceives that the scene was fascinating less through its human tenderness than because it, like all the others, possessed an inherent quality of Animalism.”⁵¹ Certainly Buchanan would not be alone in idolising the image of pure womanhood, epitomised typically in mother and wife, for this protective device against animalism was an established attitude, particularly amongst the middle classes.⁵² In his personal case, however, this social attitude seems to have been aggravated to an extreme psychological degree by his Oedipus attachment. And, seeing them from this viewpoint, we might validly assume that in his city poems he often projected his love on to the errant women of the streets, not out of “human tenderness” for them as lapsed sisters, but because he believed their fall resulted from their innate purity being sullied through contact with “wretched animalism.” Animalism is here conceived in urban terms as a harsh and depriving paternalism, his submerged sexual hostility to his father being identified with the city whose squalid conditions in turn had “caused” the fall of his ideal of pure womanhood. For the calamity of that fall is, in Buchanan’s view, properly understood only when it is seen as an aspect of the total situation of modern man’s translation from rural paradise to urban hell, where the desolate cries of the “sisters of midnight” echo the remorse of banished Eve.
     Now this association between oppressive fatherhood and the unkind City prefigures Buchanan’s equally important identification of the Father and evolutionary Nature. He repudiated both City and Nature because he saw them as merciless machines opposed to mankind. And the important point for us here is his association in each case of oppression with paternalism, whether heavenly or human, both springing, it would appear, from his familial background. The male principle, so to speak, seemed to him the selfish and predatory opposite to the female and humane qualities of love and sympathy. His frequent heroising, often in

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⁵⁰ R. Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in R. Peters, Victorians on Literature and Art (London, 1964), pp. 246-247. My italics.
⁵¹ Ibid., p. 254.
⁵² See Houghton, pp. 354-355.

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⁴⁰² turgid rhetoric, of fallen women implies a view of masculinity as libidinous, animalistic, an evil inherent in the natural dispensation. And his sense of the brutal sexuality of the mass of men, it is not surprising to discover, subsumes a fear of social rampage and political insurrection.
     It was the physical congestion of the masses, even more than their great numbers, that was regarded as a threat to social stability. For the vast accumulation of impoverished workers, largely without the social and moral restraints springing from religious belief, was justifiably regarded by many as a hazardous breeding-ground of socialist discontent. W. Cooke Taylor, for instance, writing in 1840, viewed “the crowded hives . . . with anxiety and apprehension”⁵³ and Mark Rutherford spoke of “the masses of dark, impenetrable, subterranean blackguardism”⁵⁴ bred in the slums. And the fear of political insurrection, made seemingly imminent by the continuous rumblings of political agitation and by repeated rioting, was readily associated with the extreme physical violence, in Buchanan’s significant words, of some impending “reign of terror.” This was a major facet of that historical process against which Tennyson also, with his ideal of benevolent feudalism, had hopelessly set his face. The answer to the Laureate’s benign query

Why should not these great Sirs
Give up their parks some dozen times a year,
To let the people breathe?

was, in the words of C. F. G. Masterman, “to see ‘the people’ claiming as their own right that which was to be granted as a gracious favour; the hedges broken down, the motley crowd flooding in on the pleasant preserves; strange shapes, socialists, democrats, anarchists, each preaching some new creed, which was to create the new heaven and the new earth; the downfall of the older ideal; the stormful birth of the new era.”⁵⁵ Buchanan, too, feared that new era, finding in mobocracy a powerful threat to “individualism” in all branches of social and political life. “Our governing classes no longer really govern,” he wrote in “The Coming Terror”; “if they still occupy the high seats of Olympus, it is in impotence of Godhead, trembling at Demogorgon-Socialism,

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⁵³ Taylor, p. 274.
⁵⁴ M. Rutherford, The Deliverance (London, 1893), p. 65.
⁵⁵ Quoted Murray, p. 65.

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⁴⁰³ the Mob, the Plebiscite . . . . Woe to [man] if, to appease his thirst and hunger for the loaves and fishes of the earth, he sacrifices to Social Despotism the freedom of his living soul!”⁵⁶ The situation seemed little changed from those earlier decades when, as Charles Kingsley bluntly stated, citizens felt they might be called on at any time to fight their “natural enemies . . . the masses . . . for the safety of their property and the honour of their sisters.”⁵⁷ Kingsley’s formulation (in the preface to Alton Locke) is a remarkable corroboration of the cleavage between Disraeli’s “two nations” in its definition of impoverished compatriots as the “natural” enemies of an embattled bourgeoisie armed with “laissez-faire” and the profit motive against disruption of their “divine” stability. For as he stated in another context, “the laws of trade and of social economy, just as much as the laws of nature, are divine facts.”⁵⁸ The main significance of his formulation for us here, however, is that in its reference to the safeguarding of “the honour of their sisters” as well as property, it points to the inter-connection between the two spheres, the political and the sexual, within which Buchanan also mainly experienced his fear of “the coming terror.”
     One way in which Kingsley hoped to forestall that terror was by the implementation of the practical ethic in which he associated ablutionary cleanliness with moral and spiritual purity. His belief in the value of “that morning cold bath” was based on his discovery that “a man’s sobriety is in direct proportion to his cleanliness.”⁵⁹ And “cold water” was one of the main agents in the arduous cleansing process of “baptism” into social acceptability and decent manhood of Tom the chimney-sweep in The Water Babies. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” of this sort, might readily be granted to conceal a sexual association if related to the sooty waif’s defiling “intrusion” into the white boudoir of Ellie. For the old rule of etiquette, “Never permit the sanctity of the drawing-room to be violated by a boot”⁶⁰ suggests possible outrage against more than merely social decorum, if that

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⁵⁶ R. Buchanan, The Coming Terror and Other Essays and Letters (London, 1891), p. 26 and p. 39.
⁵⁷ C. Kingsley, Alton Locke (London, 1902), “Preface, to the undergraduates of Cambridge,” p. 83.
⁵⁸ C. Kingsley, “Great Cities and Their Influence for Good and Evil” in Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays (London, 1880), p. 218.
⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 203.
⁶⁰ Quoted by Walter Besant, Fifty Years Ago (New York, n. d.), p. 124.

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⁴⁰⁴ boot was unclean and belonged to a denizen of “Temple Street and Lewin’s Mead,” which, though physically near, were “as strange to most Londoners as a village in the African forests.”⁶¹
     The association of slum districts with primitive African villages is interesting. Indeed, as Asa Briggs has observed, “it is remarkable how often the exploration of the unknown city was compared with the exploration of Africa and Asia.”⁶² And the interest lies not so much in the patent social and economic differences between the “two nations,” but rather in the implication of a radical difference in constitution and temperament between their respective inhabitants. The situation is similar to that resulting from the philosophy of “apartheid” in present-day South Africa, in the convenient rationalisation that the non-Europeans’ inherent inferiority prescribes their role in the Divine economy—suitably enforced, of course, by human legislation—as permanent hewers of wood and drawers of water. The implied difference in both cases is simply between the civilized, the disciplined, the intellectual, on the one hand, and on the other, the primitive, the unrestrained, the sensual. In the eyes of the comfortable Victorian citizen, focussed by an awareness of evolutionary theory and historical development, the uncultured and often savage denizens of the slums could indeed at times have been viewed atavistically. This seems likely in the light of John Morley’s horror at “the most awful influx the world ever saw of furious provocatives to unbridled sensuality and riotous animalism,”⁶³ or what George Eliot described as “the savage beast in the breasts of our generation . . . the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing towards it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class.”⁶⁴ For to judge from numerous contemporary allusions to the savagery and animalism of the masses,⁶⁵ and bearing in mind their sexual licence and high birth-rate, the nether of Disraeli’s “two nations” might well have appeared to the polite like the reeking and fecund underbelly of an otherwise healthy body

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⁶¹ Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), p. 62.
⁶² Ibid., p. 60.
⁶³ Quoted by F. W. Hirst, Early Life and Letters of John Morley (London, 1927), Vol. I, p. 10.
⁶⁴ George Eliot, “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” in Essays and Leaves from a Note-book (London, 1883), pp. 273-274.
⁶⁵ See, for example, Houghton, ch. 13 passim.

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⁴⁰⁵ politic. And their political fears for their property and personal safety were complemented by the largely suppressed fear, most common one would expect in those numerous homes where sex was “the skeleton in the parental chamber,”⁶⁶ of sexual outrage by the libidinous lower orders of humanity.
     Kingsley’s sanitative baptism was, of course, a somewhat eccentric protection against this assault. More widely accepted as a stay to those “furious provocatives” was the idealisation of the home and married love based on the concept of female purity. The image of unsullied womanhood, epitomised in the idolised mother and wife, became an icon withholding unlicensed thoughts even from entering the acolyte’s mind. Buchanan, as we have seen, went further than this by heroising the female principle in the fallen woman herself, thereby expressing his submerged hostility to the city in a double way. Her degradation was a measure of the city’s cruel inhumanity and, by contrast, her moral strength in the face of it indicated her essential and invincible humanity. But to this, from the social and political considerations just discussed, a further element that complicates his attitude to the city is added. His hostility to paternalism and to the male principle led him, as we have seen, to associate them with aggression and indifference—and this, in relation to the “great social evil,” enables him to lay the culpability for the prostitution of women, and the consequent degradation of human dignity, on animalism bred ideally, indeed exclusively, in seething urban slums. And animalism is also blamed for the fearful threat of social anarchy and political revolution, which, in turn, were regarded as characteristic products of “the crowded hives.” Sexual assault and political assault, that is, were twin fears fathered by the City.
     What emerges from this interpretation of Buchanan, then—bearing in mind Goldenweiser’s description of culture as being both psychological and historical—is an image of the turbulent and mobile Victorian city as a paradigm of the individual. Deep within its “human” walls the libidinous “masses,” previously controlled by the orientative discipline of a hierarchical socio-religious structure and by the scattered population pattern of the countryside, now become a hydra-headed proletariat, and fear of being overwhelmed by animalism produces the reaction formations of prudery and fascinated outrage at fleshliness. For as

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⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 353.

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⁴⁰⁶ Freudian theory has suggested, there exists a fundamental antagonism between society and the naked “homo brutus,” because he has certain basic drives which are anti-social, and which society, through mechanisms of restraint and education, attempts to integrate into acceptable patterns of behaviour. It is this alienation between natural man and society, presented in political terms, that informs Buchanan’s fears of “the coming terror” at the hands of the uncivilized masses. And the mechanism through which those fears would become operative is precisely defined in Steven Marcus’ comment on Dickens’ prophetic understanding in Barnaby Rudge of the real nature and implications of Chartist violence: “. . . he saw beyond it into what we have seen happen in the twentieth century—that politics and the life of society come more and more to resemble externalizations of the life of the unconscious mind, and that the disorders in society and personal life are confluent and interpenetrating and grow steadily more difficult to bear and control, and steadily more dangerous.”⁶⁷

                    VI

     John Crowe Ransom has defined religion as a “system of myths which gives a working definition to the relation of man to nature.”⁶⁸ In this sense of the term the Wordsworthian ethos is clearly religious, with “Michael,” perhaps, as its most memorable presentation. The poem is complemented by Wordsworth’s prose description in his Guide to the Lakes of “the almost visionary mountain republic . . . of Shepherds and Agriculturists . . . this pure Commonwealth . . . towards the head of these Dales [of Cumberland] . . . the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society or an organized community whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it.”⁶⁹ The “system of myths” which supported “this pure Commonwealth” had been debilitated mainly by what some, such as Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s tutor at Cambridge, regarded as the disease of evolutionary theory. And Sedgwick it was who pointed accurately to the consequences that Victorians feared would flow from the system’s discredit. Darwinism, in his view, by treating the order of living

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⁶⁷ S. Marcus, Dickens: from Pickwick to Dombey (London, 1965), p. 211.
⁶⁸ J. C. Ransom, God Without Thunder (London, 1931), p. 160.
⁶⁹ Wordsworth, pp. 242-243.

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⁴⁰⁷ nature as an historical and self-sufficient system, could lead to “nothing but ruin and confusion. . . . It will undermine the whole moral and social fabric” by destroying the “essential link” between the moral and material worlds.⁷⁰
     Sedgwick’s fears are made explicit in the observation of C. C. Gillespie that “Elucidation of the divine now required a demonstration of how nature was governed and not simply of how it was balanced.” Nature came to be regarded, that is, as an evolving process rather than, as had been the case hitherto, as a blueprint of ultimate perfection. Therefore, as Gillespie points out, “the issue of providential supervision became correspondingly more difficult for scientists who wished their work to bear continuing witness to the Deity’s role.”⁷¹ The results of scientific observation of Nature in this new sense became, thus, a platform for religious debate. And because of the “indifference” of the new dispensation, those results also provided the central concepts in terms of which many struggled with the overwhelming question of personal identity. So it is that much Victorian nature poetry is a cry of “righteous” indignation at the supposed injustice of the newly revealed picture of the natural order. The issue is clarified if we focus attention on the antiquity of the idea underlying Sedgwick’s fearful prediction, which is a measure both of its immemorial rootedness in man’s self-image, and commensurately of the horror with which its discredit was contemplated. Its origins, as Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield point out in their discussion of “Myths and Legends” in relation to man’s discovery of Time, lie with early man, who “found it natural . . . to believe that the cosmic order and the social order alike had been established in the beginning through a series of divine actions; and that the arts and crafts on which human welfare depends were taught to men by a series of demigods. In every case, the social order was rooted in the Order of Nature: both realms were embraced in a single cosmos, and the annual cycle of rituals duly re-enacted the cosmic drama of Creation, by which the present dispensation was originally set in order.”⁷² This is a crucial formulation in the context of the present essay. The concept that “In every case, the social order was rooted in the

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⁷⁰ S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London, 1965), p. 224.
⁷¹ C. C. Gillespie, Genesis and Geology (Harvard, 1951), p. 40.
⁷² Toulmin and Goodfield, p. 31.

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⁴⁰⁸ Order of Nature” is clearly associated with the tenet of natural theology in which microcosm and macrocosm had been correlatives in the scheme of things. And it is precisely that concept which endured, despite his formal repudiation of the Wordsworthian ethos, as the substantial basis of Buchanan’s hostility to the replacing industrial environment with its corrupting effect on human personality and traditional values and standards. Buchanan’s main poetical consideration of these issues is the lengthy, rambling “The Book of Orm” (1870), a type of Ossianic allegory on Evolution, which, in the poet’s own words, “strikes the personal keynote to all his work.”⁷³ The theme of the poem is essentially the same as the question which faced his own typical Modern in “The Outcast” (1891),

How shall he yonder heavens afar win
In poor Spinoza’s merry-go-round?
How shall he ’scape the apes of Darwin,
Dark’ning what once was fairy ground?

Specific parts of the autobiographical “Book of Orm” and its tone in general are reminiscent of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and indeed the poems deal basically with the same type of problem. Buchanan’s attempt is “to vindicate the ways of God to man” (he quotes the line as one epigraph), as in a sense was Tennyson’s also. Characteristically enough for a Victorian, however, Buchanan is neither persuaded beforehand of possible success in comprehending the mechanism and purpose of God’s mystery of Life and Death, nor that his is a heaven-sent task.
     In the first section of “Orm” the theme is set out in miniature. In the beginning God and Nature were harmoniously united, each reflecting the glory of the other. Nature was both process and producer in God’s creation; in the former capacity she manifested His beneficence through the involuntary execution of His laws which constituted her character, and in the latter revealed His power in producing, as a result of that execution, the infant Earth. But the emergence of self-conscious and critical man through the operation of those same laws brought about the disintegration of this static and beautiful relationship, God withdrawing in horror from and Nature becoming impassive towards the unwanted species. Man’s new role as an accidental intruder, the outcome of chance mutation, resulted inevitably in his alienation

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⁷³ Stodart-Walker, p. 62.

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⁴⁰⁹ from the scheme of things. So the frustrating configuration emerges in which the sensible world of natural phenomena is simultaneously conceived of as the key to God’s presence, and yet as the Veil behind which He hides, unable to save men from “the fangs/Of His own bloodhounds, Death and Force and Law” (“The Earthquake,” 1885).
     During his wanderings Orm meets his aged brother, a fellow-pilgrim. Both are searching for a spiritual justification of human existence. Orm’s humanist proposal that his brother should be consoled because their predicament was common to all men availed little, for the reality of the rewards which had previously made the spiritual quest worthwhile had been cast into gravest doubt. The Devil’s facetious suggestion, “supporting” Charles Kingsley’s association of purity and sanitation, was in fact much to the point,

Fools, one life is all God grants you,
Sweep your houses, heed your drains!
                                                  (“The Devil’s Case”)

This alteration of the ends towards which men’s aspirations were to be directed in order to give significance to their earthly activities, is clear in Orm’s contemporary formulation. He dramatises the position as an interminable conflict between a Wind (the Soul) and the Shadow (Death), which, now that eternal life seemed unlikely, really amounted to a struggle between the spirit of industrial-urbanised man and death as a representative of natural forces. Under the traditional Christian dispensation, this central conflict would normally have been pictured as occurring between the spirit and the flesh, a clash of a personal and moral nature through which the individual enhanced his spiritual worth. The new formulation depersonalizes the issue by making one of the protagonists an absolute in all men’s lives, and furthermore, a terrestrial conclusion instead of a heavenly beginning. The discredit by scientific theory of ancient ends, therefore, also circumscribed the means traditionally associated with their achievement. Buchanan’s case, though disguised by the mock-serious tone of his approach (as often also in “The Earthquake” and “The Outcast”) is here basically compatible with that which the Devil vehemently pronounces,

. . . If such a Ruler,
Wise, Omnipotent, All-seeing,
Had concerned Himself in making                                                         410
Worlds at all, and living creatures,
He’d have made them wholly perfect,
With no fuss of evolution . . . ;
If there is a God, He blunder’d:
Man is here to set him right!
                                                 (“The Devil’s Case”)

     The question of man’s distinctive consciousness and the growth of his spiritual awareness and the needs consequent upon it are central to Orm’s vision and to the development of Buchanan’s thought. And in constantly reverting to the matter, he is really stressing the basic paradox of man’s new cosmological position. In this immediate correlation between man’s evolved consciousness and his capacity for pain lies the significance of Orm’s curious dream in which he sees consecutively, and yet confuses because of their similarity, a proud king holding court and an ape in “A mighty forest of primeval growth.” It is hardly necessary for Orm to elaborate his intentions by observing that “Brute-beast and the small-eyed King/Seem’d brethren,” or to remark on their Darwinian origins. But what is of importance is that to Orm “the brute-beast was the happier . . . . Since never nameless trouble filled his eyes . . . while he poised above/With philosophic swing by claws and tail.” The beast, then, completely at ease in Nature’s dispensation, was neither tormented by spiritual questionings, nor haunted by the awareness of an inevitable and absolute end in death. This is one facet of the demand laid upon man in the new cosmological scheme—a thorough acceptance of his animal origins and of his mortality. But the paradox and the pain of his situation arose, of course, directly from that very acceptance in that it implied the concomitant development of the highest form of consciousness, spiritual awareness, which made man the distinctive animal he was. “What makes mankind tragic,” as Conrad wrote in a letter in 1898 to Cunninghame Graham, “is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well,—but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife,—the tragedy begins.⁷⁴ Such a tragedy, Conrad suggested, would have resulted had he “educated” Singleton, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1898), who, except for his lack of education, achieved in the view of

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⁷⁴ Jean-Aubry, p. 226.

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⁴¹¹ Cunninghame Graham the heroic ideal of democratic perfection. “. . . I think Singleton with an education is impossible,” replied Conrad. “Then he would become conscious,—and much smaller,—and very unhappy. Now he is simple and great like an elemental force. Nothing can touch him but the curse of decay. . . . Nothing else can touch him,—he does not think.
     Would you seriously wish to tell such a man ‘Know thyself! Understand that you are nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream?’ Would you?”⁷⁵
     And Buchanan shows his precise recognition of the paradox and the pain implicit in Conrad’s question in his ironic inversion of Tennyson’s acclamation in “Locksley Hall” of the age of progress,

O birth betoken’d in that windy hour,
When, sloughing off the brute, we stand and groan,
First frighten’d by the Shadow that has chased
Our changes up through all the grooves of Time!
                                                 (“The Book of Orm”)

Man’s position in Nature according to Buchanan’s interpretation of the “revised version” of creation, then, was far removed from the dramatic one between angel and beast he had traditionally assumed in “The Great Chain of Being.” In his “proper study” he is now shown, rather, as a refractory “sport” in the evolutionary process, “a dark point in the scheme of things,”

That entity within whose brooding brain
Knowledge begins and ends
. . . the first of things and last of blunders,
The crown of Nature and her shame.
                                                     (“The Outcast”)

The mocking echoes of Alexander Pope’s definitive antitheses⁷⁶ point up the radical alteration envisaged in the very quality of human experience. For man is here presented not as gazing through the glass of temporal life to the hope of life eternal, but as scanning the mirror of his own consciousness, seeing reflected only the bitter self-knowledge of his own isolation and bewilderment, disastrously placed as he is on “this isthmus of a middle state,”

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⁷⁵ Ibid., pp. 214-215.
⁷⁶ A. Pope, “An Essay on Man,” Epistle 2, ll. 1-18.

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. . . [he] glanceth with affrighted eyes                                                    412
Backward and forward, and beholds all dark,
Alike the place whence he unconscious came,
And that to which he conscious drifteth on—
Yet seeth before him, whereso’er he turn,
The Shadow of himself, presaging doom.
                                                 (“The Book of Orm”)

This paradoxical conception of the “unnaturalness” of man, the chance evolution of his soul, was the root cause of Buchanan’s need “to justify the ways of God to man.”
     Buchanan came to associate the rigours of evolutionary development in Nature with the notion of the merciless Father, an association exacerbated by the “Godlessness” of the industrial city, which through technology became the very symbol of evolving Progress. As a result he was moved to pity and anger at the suffering of mankind, particularly of the urban poor, and he took their side against those twin all-powerful systems, evolutionary Nature and the industrial City, which he tended to identify with each other in that the “paternalism” of both seemed to reveal no loving concern for individuals or pity for the weak. This may be seen in the following passages where those twin systems are associated as parts of the same ruthless, predatory dispensation. In Nature one finds

The cony struggling in the foumart’s fangs,
The deer and hare that fly the sharp-tooth’d hound,
The raven that with flap of murderous wing
Hangs on the woolly forehead of the sheep
And blinds its harmless eyes;⁷⁷

and in the City, the “Sisters of Midnight”—whose lament suggests that basically their depraved existence in its origins and quality is the same as the “fierce blind fight for life” of Nature’s lesser creatures—

Laugh at the world, all the foulness and vanity,
Hunting your prey from the night till the morn! . . . .
Leprosy’s taint on us, ghost-like we pass,
Watch’d by the eyes of yon pitiless Heaven! . . . .
[He] smiles from His throne on these markets of Hell!
                                                     (“Sisters of Midnight”)

     Accordingly Buchanan repudiated the Maker, “the principle of the All-Father,” as he called Him, “the egoistic principle of the

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⁷⁷ Quoted by Stodart-Walker, p. 328.

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⁴¹³ struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.”⁷⁸ And he replaced that principle with Christ, “The Wandering Jew,” the supreme figure of pity and love, who, by virtue of his thaumaturgy which defied the inflexible absoluteness of natural law, became for him a revolutionary secularist, an “audacious unbeliever” rather than the Son of the “inexplicable, pitiless God of the Universe.”⁷⁹ “He led the war against Nature,” wrote Buchanan, “against the God of Nature . . . . the great unknown God who is at once the master and servant of His own inexorable Will.”⁸⁰ Macrocosm—comprised of the twin systems of evolutionary Nature and the industrial City—and microcosm are, therefore, completely at odds, and Christ, despite his inevitable failure in his role as the “new Prometheus,” becomes the poet’s ideal of what one might term “divine humanity.” Christ’s unconstitutional partner in this remarkable inverted theodicy is the Devil, who is motivated by almost identical principles in his efforts to uphold the weak against the inflexibly strong. He emerges, in Archibald Stodart-Walker’s description, as the epitome of enlightened modern secularism: “The Devil of Buchanan is the spirit of Revolt, the spirit of Eclecticism, the spirit of Science as opposed to the spirit of Theology, the inspirer of research as opposed to the upholder of authority and tradition.”⁸¹ And because

Love is not born of any token bright
Imperial Nature brings,
                         (“The Ballad of Mary the Mother”)

Buchanan looks towards the emergent perfection of humanity as his ideal of godliness, the

. . . God emerging and evolved at last
Out of the inmost heart of human Love!
                                                      (“God Evolving”)

     In vindicating his “The Wandering Jew” (1893), which some considered to be sacrilegious, Buchanan wrote, “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 . . . . mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into a science of life . . . . Human love and

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⁷⁸ Quoted ibid. p. 8.
⁷⁹ Quoted ibid. p. 253.
⁸⁰ Quoted ibid. p. 229.
⁸¹ Ibid., p. 253.

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⁴¹⁴ 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.”⁸² These remarks, if the italicized words were omitted, could, as Henry Murray observed, have been written by a scientific humanist such as Thomas Huxley. And it is clear from such late works as “The Earthquake,” “The Outcast,” and “The Devil’s Case,” that Buchanan increasingly regarded scientists, because of their elucidation of natural law, as the deliverers of mankind from the bondage of God’s malicious tyranny. He never became an atheist, however, despite numerous poetical statements—the most noteworthy being, perhaps, the savagely iconoclastic “The Devil’s Prayer”—which might be taken as evidence to the contrary. So it is the presence of those italicized words that really makes the remarks curious and interesting. For their incongruity points to Buchanan’s continued emotional need for the guidance in human affairs of a supernatural Power—“a dumb, wistful yearning . . . to something higher^”83 —even though he had in fact ceased to believe in the “omnipotent Impotence” of the traditional Godhead, finding the “logic of the Christian message . . . a miracle of clear reasoning raised on false premises.”⁸⁴ And yet despite his scientific-humanist views, and despite his grasp of the general intellectual situation,⁸⁵ he seemed unable fully to integrate the fact that it was the very discovery of those laws that had led directly to the discredit of religion and the traditional view of nature, and indirectly to the establishment of the industrial-urban ethos, just as he failed to realize that what he considered to be useless cruelty and suffering in nature were the basis of that very evolutionary amelioration in whose workings he recognized intellectually the source of progressive hopes for mankind. He was, as H. N. Fairchild neatly puts it, “a perfect specimen of the Victorian believing unbeliever.”⁸⁶

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⁸² Quoted in H. Murray, p. 108.
⁸³ Quoted approvingly by Buchanan from a “Spectator” review of modern poetry, describing what he had achieved better than any of his contemporaries, Jay, p. 20.
⁸⁴ Jay, ibid., p. 123.
⁸⁵ As a single instance take Vanderdecken’s supercilious but comprehensive survey of the contemporary intellectual scene in “The Outcast”—“He paused then added . . . become agnostic.” The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. II, pp. 168-169.
⁸⁶ H. N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York, 1957), Vol. IV, p. 217.

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     And his confusion—leading him to adopt characteristically the ambivalent posture we have remarked throughout—springs from his reliance, often emotional and unconscious, on the tenets of natural theology, which led him, armed thus with obsolete categories of thought, to a hopeless grappling with man’s “cosmological dislocation.” He was able on occasion to repudiate those tenets at a conscious level—as in the sardonic observation of his modern protagonist, the Devil,

. . . ’Tho ’tis written
Not a sparrow falls without Him,
Ne’ertheless—the sparrow falls!
                                                   (“The Devil’s Case”)

But at a deeper level, influenced by his typically Victorian moral view of experience, he is unable, usually, to interpret Tennyson’s “ape and tiger” as more than aspects of evolutionary heritage; and quite beyond his imaginative range looms that emergent view of them as ontological elements in a new self-image of mankind, which D. H. Lawrence was later to formulate as an ethical creed:

That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than
a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the
forest into the clearing of my known
self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let
them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put
anything over me, but that I will
always try to recognize and submit to
the gods in me and the gods in other
men and women.⁸⁷

University of Western Australia

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⁸⁷ D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin” in Studies in Classic American Literature (London, 1964), p. 16.

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