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From The Literature of the Victorian Era by Hugh Walker
(Cambridge University Press, 1910.) Part II: Creative Art. A. Poetry. Chapter VII: Later Developments.
2. The Celtic Poets.
(pp. 574-585) There remains one Celt of the most varied gifts, and of genius which ought to be unquestionable, though it has been questioned—Robert Buchanan (1841-1901). Of blood half Scotch, quarter Welsh and quarter English, Buchanan, though born in England, as it were adopted Scotland for his country. He lived and was educated there for about ten years; by his choice of a subject for one of the most ambitious of his poems he proclaimed himself of the Celtic school; and by his power he vindicated his right to be considered its head.
As the son of a Glasgow journalist, Buchanan may be said to have been born on the fringe of literature; but ambition and a well-founded consciousness of high gifts impelled him towards the centre. Even from boyhood he was conscious of the inspiration of the poet. Like many another Scot of talent, he felt his surroundings to be too narrow for him: the world was his oyster and London the place where the oyster must be opened. To this decision he was helped by the friendship he had formed with David Gray (1838-1861), whose three years’ seniority were enough to give him considerable influence over a character stronger than his own. The two set out in 1860 for the metropolis,—Gray to creep home and die in the following year, Buchanan to fight a long hard battle, to write poems, dramas and novels, and to tell simply, tastefully and beautifully the pathetic story of his friend’s life.
The short memoir of David Gray is a model of what a biography ought to be. There are few facts to record, but the story of the Kirkintilloch weaver’s poet-son is full of human interest, and in some seventy or eighty pages Buchanan gives a vivid impression of character and talent. Gray had a very considerable, perhaps he had even a great, poetic gift “There 575 was in him,” says Monckton Milnes, “the making of a great man”; but poor Gray did not live to prove the soundness of this judgment. Soon after he went to London he caught through exposure a cold which sowed the seeds of consumption, and he died at the age of twenty-three. Buchanan shows that Gray was no “morbid, unwholesome young gentleman, without natural weaknesses—a kind of aqueous Henry Kirke White, brandied faintly with ambition”; but it is also evident from his sketch that there was a certain want of stability in Gray’s character, which, notwithstanding his ambition, might have proved disastrous. Gray’s principal poem, The Luggie, was published after his death; he had seen a proof-sheet just the day before he died. It is a blank-verse piece of some 1200 lines, not so much descriptive of the little stream from which the name is taken, as inspired by its scenery. It cannot have been composed without some thought of the work of Thomson, and there are occasional echoes of him, of Keats and of Wordsworth. There is also evidence of the immaturity of the writer, and perhaps of the fact that the hand of death was on him as he wrote; but nevertheless The Luggie is the work of a poetic spirit, keenly sensitive to the beauties of nature. The series of sonnets, In the Shadows—a pathetic record of the poet’s thoughts and feelings as the gloom of death deepened around him—are richer and stronger.
Robert Buchanan was a man of remarkable independence of mind. There is even something defiant in his independence: “A man’s a man for a’ that” may be sung with a certain blatancy. And as the impulse to write came to him from the sense that he had something to say which the poets of the time either could not or would not say, it was to be expected that he would show himself even aggressively self-reliant. And so, on the whole, he does. But nevertheless even Buchanan had to pass through his period of initiation. His first volume of verse, entitled Undertones (1864), is essentially imitative. It consists chiefly of studies of classical themes, a sort of work suggested to him doubtless by Tennyson and Arnold, hut one which was ill calculated to bring out his own strength.
576 Next year came the Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, where Buchanan found his true field, or rather one of his true fields, and made an immense stride upwards. There are still crudities and evidences of imperfect training; and sometimes, in the original edition, there were even gross solecisms. But the collection as a whole is excellent. The poems are written with great force and with admirable lucidity, often with pathos, sometimes with remarkable dramatic power. Willie Baird is a touching little tale; The English Huswife’s Gossip is satisfactory evidence of the author’s power to realise and to portray character; Poet Andrew owes its pathos to the thought of poor Gray. Elsewhere in his works two other pieces, To the Luggie and To David in Heaven, are avowedly dedicated to Gray’s memory. It is noticeable that in the Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, the lyrical legends are less successful than the idyls. Buchanan had not yet attained mastery over lyrical measures.
Buchanan’s next volume, London Poems (1866), broke fresh ground; but in North Coast and other Poems (1868) he reverted once more to something like the Inverburn poems. These and the North Coast Poems belong to a type of verse which he never abandoned and in which not a little of his best work was done. Pieces like The Scaith o’ Bartle and Meg Blane are among the best of modern legendary and ballad poems. Buchanan tells his story rapidly and impressively, bringing both scene and actors vividly before the eye. Again, in the powerful and affecting ballad, The Lights of Leith, the hopes and fears of the sailor as he draws near the shore and prepares to enter his old mother’s hut are depicted with the graphic power of a true dramatist. The story is almost too painful, but it is “an ower true tale,” and it is well that we should be reminded still that such things were once done in the name of religion.
Buchanan is the most Scottish of all recent poets: his nationality is one of his distinguishing marks, the one by which perhaps his work can best be discriminated from that of any of his contemporaries. No other contemporary Scotchman, after the death of Alexander Smith, had a mind so poetic; and nobody but a Scotchman or a native of the North of England could have 577 written the Inverburn and the North Coast Poems. It is not merely a matter of dialect with Buchanan. He could use dialect with skill; but the brand of nationality is on many of his poems which are written in pure English, We see it in the scenery and in the characters. The coast is the east coast of Scotland, the people are Scotch sailors, Scotch peasants and shepherds, and their mothers and wives and sisters. Another national note of a very different quality is sounded in The Book of Orm; but in the group of poems now under consideration the basis, as has been hinted, is realism. It is, however, a realism warmed by imagination, and occasionally there are even hints of mysticism, foreshadowing The Book of Orm.
The London Poems, different as is their setting from that of these poems of the North, have more kinship with them than is at first sight apparent, The idyllic and legendary elements are gone, and the realism is more pronounced; but the tales are still touched and lit with imagination which lifts them out of the gutters of the “mean streets” wherein they are enacted, and sets them on a higher plane than that of the more recent stories of sordid London life. Buchanan was always poetic in mind, and he could never descend to such depths. The conclusion of Tiger Bay expresses the spirit which inspires the London Poems. The human in the dens of London vice is hardly distinguishable from the bestial in the Indian jungle; but nevertheless in the former there is just the spark of soul which, fanned and cherished, will burn away the bestial:—
“God said, moreover: ‘The spark shall grow—
’Tis blest, it gathers, its flame shall lighten,
Bless it and nurse it—let it brighten!
’Tis scattered abroad, ’tis a Seed I sow.
And the seed is a Soul, and the Soul is the Human;
And it lighteth the face with a sign and a flame.
Not unto beasts have I given the same,
But to man and to woman.
Mark! mark!
The light shall scatter the dark:
Where murmur the Wind and the Rain,
Where the jungle darkens the plain,
And in street and lane.’ 578. . . So faint, so dim, so sad to seeing,
Behold it burning! Only a spark!
So faint as yet, and so dim to mark,
In the tigress-eyes of the human being.
Fan it, feed it, in love and duty,
Track it, watch it in every place—
Till it burns the bestial frame and face
To its own dim beauty.
Mark! mark!
A spark that grows in the dark;
A spark that burns in the brain;
Spite of the Wind and the Rain,
Spite of the Curse and the Stain;
Over the Sea and the Plain,
And in street and lane.”
Though there is as much power in these London Poems as in the poems of the North Country, they are not so pleasant to read; and as pleasure is one of the ends of poetry, they are for that reason less poetical. The sordid streets and dens are not more real than the wild northern coast and the lonely glens, while they are infinitely less sweet and wholesome. The inhabitants of those streets are not more, rather they are less, human than the fishermen and rustics. Nell is full of strength; but it is not the kind of poem we elect to remember. If it abides in the memory it does so by reason of its force, uninvited. Though none of the London Poems is superior to Nell, some of the others are more attractive. In spite of its sordidness, Lily is beautiful from its pathos. The Little Milliner is a London love-tale, very simply and pleasingly told. Edward Crowhurst has pathos of another sort. It is a wonderfully terse and strong narrative of the life of a labourer-poet, who is flattered, patronised, corrupted, neglected, and at last becomes mad. It embodies many of the facts of the life of John Clare, who was evidently in Buchanan’s mind, with, perhaps, Burns and his own friend Gray. His imagination had been rendered sensitive by what he had witnessed in the case of Gray, and the idea of “mighty poets in their misery dead” touched it keenly.
From these groups of poems it is easy to detect the difference 579 between Buchanan and the poets who reigned in his early day. It is a wide one. His cry is, back to nature and reality; not to nature as she is when cultivated and trimmed and pruned by man, nor to human character as it is when smoothed and polished by education and convention; but to nature free and wild, to characters unsophisticated, strong of passion, rude and forcible of speech.
Buchanan had no quarrel with the classical poets: for a moment, as we have seen, he even followed their lead, though afterwards he knew that their method was wrong for him. But he had a quarrel with the Pre-Raphaelite poets; and it is probably their “careful garden in the sun” to which he refers in these lines. His critical instinct was not wrong in suggesting to him the sense of an irreconcilable difference between himself and the Pre-Raphaelites, for he and they are in spirit poles asunder. But he would have done well to reflect that Parnassus is a mountain of more than one peak and of innumerable slopes and ridges. There might be room for them to fulfil their mission as well as for him—the word is appropriate, for both Buchanan and the Pre-Raphaelites are rather obviously conscious of a mission.
The Northern poems and the London poems constitute two great sections of Buchanan’s work, but his restless intellect impelled him to try many other things. Napoleon Fallen (1871) was among his failures. In Saint Abe and his Seven Wives (1872) and in White Rose and Red (1873) he crossed the Atlantic for his subject. But of course he could not possess that intimacy of knowledge and depth of sympathy which mark his North Country poems. E. C. Stedman, who on this point speaks with authority, declares that Buchanan “has succeeded only in being faithful to a British ideal of American frontier life.” These two poems were published anonymously and the secret of their authorship was very carefully guarded. Buchanan was then under the cloud 580 caused by his virulent attack upon Rossetti in The Fleshly School of Poetry, and he believed that only under the veil of anonymity could he hope to receive fair treatment from the critics. The two poems certainly were welcomed with unusual warmth; but this might be due to the fact that they are stories in verse, lucidly and vigorously told.
In the opinion of many, however, Buchanan achieved his highest triumphs in the Celtic poems, and especially in The Book of Orm (1870), where the quondam realist showed himself a pronounced mystic. Buchanan was conscious of the Highland blood in his veins: he was a clansman, a Celt; and it was this clan-feeling which hurried him into the Celtic Revival, to which his principal contribution was this Book of Orm.
Whatever may be the value of the distinction between the Celtic and the Teutonic elements in English literature, what Buchanan himself regarded as the Celtic element in this poem is plain enough, The poet has declared that the object of The Book of Orm is to “vindicate the ways of God to man.” But the phrase is far too clear and definite. We no longer know the Deity as we know “the man in the next street”; and a reasoned justification like that of Milton or that of Pope would be out of place, and is not attempted, in Buchanan’s poem. But still, beneath the veil of mysticism there dimly glimmer those great problems of life and death which occupied and perplexed Tennyson and Browning as well as Buchanan.
Buchanan sent forth The Book of Orm as an avowed contribution to racial poetry. Perhaps he was too conscious and deliberate in his purpose to be wholly natural. The keynote is struck in the prefatory lines:—
“Read these faint rimes of Mystery,
O Celt, at home and o’er the sea;
The bond is loosed—the pool are free—
The world’s great future rests with thee! Till the soil—bid cities rise—
Be strong, O Celt—be rich, be wise—
But still, with those divine grave eyes,
Respect the realm of Mysteries.”
581The whole poem is in the same spirit. The author evidently regarded mysticism as the essence of the Celtic contribution to poetry; and The Book of Orm is profoundly mystical. In this lies at once its charm and, perhaps, its defect. Nothing makes a greater draught upon the poetical powers than mysticism: it is so difficult to keep it from passing into mistiness. Buchanan’s powers were great, but possibly not quite great enough for his purpose. For one thing, he is not sufficiently a master of metre and rhythm; for in proportion as the poet leaves the world of hard fact behind him, the sensuous enchantments of verse gain importance. Where there is a definite story, or a definite thought addressed to the understanding, the simpler harmonies of verse will suffice. Pope’s couplets are nearly as good as their kind could be made. But Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters and Coleridge’s Christabel demand a very much more subtle rhythm. In this respect Buchanan was a competent but not a great artist. There is a roughness, often intentional, but nevertheless unpleasing, in the verse of The Book of Orm.
Perhaps too Buchanan was not altogether great enough in thought; and he was certainly not spontaneous enough in his use of the supernatural. He could call spirits from the vasty deep; but the depth from which they came was not so profound as that from which certain mere Teutons have drawn. Sometimes (conspicuously in the Prayer from the Deeps) there is too plain a revelation of the modern critical spirit, which harmonises ill with mysticism. On the other hand, the section to which this prayer belongs, The Devils Mystics, is as a whole strongly conceived and strongly written; and still more powerful is The Vision of the Man Accurst.
Another group of the Celtic poems, the Coruisken Sonnets, are all fine, and some of them are exceptionally beautiful. Among the best are The Hills on their Thrones, King Blaabhein and Blaabhein in the Mists,—titles which remind the reader that Alexander Smith found inspiration in the same scenes. Buchanan attempts no transcript of scenery; but he achieves something far greater, a rendering of its spirit.
The Vision of the Man Accurst deals with a kind of theme in 582 the treatment of which Buchanan was a master. It is akin to, but stronger and more original than, The Ballad of Judas Iscariot. Though the latter is essentially Buchanan’s own, yet once and again the poet draws hints from the past. Not only is it pervaded with the spirit of the old ballads, but there are hints from Hood’s Eugene Aram and from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. There are no such echoes in The Vision of the Man Accurst; and in depth and force as well as in originality that poem seems to be the greater of the two.
For the first ten years of his literary life Buchanan’s work had been mainly poetical; but shortly after the publication of White Rose and Red he became conspicuous both as a writer for the stage, in which capacity he won fame and money, and as the author of a series of novels bearing the mark of his strong personality and his earnestness of purpose. These activities necessarily drew his attention away from verse; but, though he was convinced that the public did not want poetry and would not reward the poet, the old love survived, and the poetic output of the later period is in the aggregate large. Some of it is as good as anything he ever wrote, but on the whole the poet will take his place rather by virtue of his earlier than of his later work. Like many others, he had the ambition to write long poems; and he thought, erroneously, that it was pure perversity or dislike of poetry as such on the part of the public, that made his more ambitious ventures less successful than some of the shorter pieces. Though his Balder the Beautiful: A Song of Divine Death (1877) contains some fine poetry (best of all, perhaps, the Proem to his wife), it is not a well-knit whole. Buchanan justly claimed for it the praise of originality; for it owes little to what he called “the vulgar myths of the Edda.” But this phrase suggests a question. Surely it must be wrong to pour new wine into old bottles, thinking all the time that the bottles are worthless; and the reason why Buchanan’s “song of divine death” is unsatisfactory may perhaps be found in this incongruity between the original and that which is fashioned from it.
Problems such as that indicated by the sub-title were at this period occupying much of Buchanan’s attention, and they profoundly influenced his prose as well as his verse. He had been 583 bred in ignorance of the creeds of the Churches, for his father was a sceptic and a follower of Robert Owen the Socialist. Buchanan had therefore no “Hebrew old clothes” to cast off; on the contrary, it was in manhood that he gradually familiarised himself with, and in some degree adopted, conceptions which the child generally drinks in with its mother’s milk. But he never approached what is commonly regarded as orthodoxy, and, what is much more serious, he never seems to have been able to make up his own mind. “If,” he writes on the death of his wife to his friend, Roden Noel, “if this parting is only for a time, I see its blessedness—but if, as I dread and fear, it is a parting forever, what then1?” In the following year he dedicated his poems to his dead wife, “weeping and sorrowing, yet in sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection2.” This looks like conviction; but later we come again upon evidences of doubt. Buchanan’s next long poem, The City of Dream (1888), an allegory dedicated “to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan,” is the story of the pilgrimage of Ishmael (Buchanan himself) to seek the heavenly city. The picture of Christopolis shows clearly enough that the hand of Ishmael was against most men, and suggests why most men’s hands were against him. It is no reproach to the poet that he does not answer the unanswerable. A work like The City of Dream must, in the nature of things, be vague and inconclusive. But it is not only inconclusive, it is unsuggestive; the author himself is in the mist, and naturally he cannot lead the reader into sunlight. The curious catechism he constructed with reference to The Wandering Jew (1893) illustrates the confusion of his mind. There he declares his belief in a future life; but then he adds: “It is only a belief, not a certainty, a hope, a faith even, not a reality. The testimony of all Science is against it3.”
The Wandering Jew is the most remarkable and by far the most intelligible of the poems of this class. Though it was begun long before the others, it was the last to be published. As early as 1866 Buchanan had written part of it, and he had finished it some years before its publication. The reason was not doubt as to its value—it was “his favourite child”—but a fixed idea that it would 584 prove the end of his career. The fundamental conception of a Christ old and grey, worn and weary, is impressive and pathetic. The poet finds ample material to support his thesis that the professed followers of Christ have, under the cloak of his name, wrought all the sins and cruelties most abhorrent to his nature. Thus he explains the weariness and sadness of the aged figure and makes intelligible his concluding prayer for death and the answer of the Judge:—
“Nay!
Death that brought peace thyself didst seek to slay!
Death that was merciful and very fair,
Sweet dove-eyed Death that hush’d the Earth’s despair,
Death that shed balm on tirèd eyes like thine,
Death that was Lord of Life and all Divine,
Thou didst deny us, offering instead
The Soul’s fierce famine that can ne’er be fed—
Death shall abide to bless all things that be,
But evermore shall turn aside from thee.”
Buchanan was the possessor of one more talent which, in justice to him, must still be noticed. He had the gift of humour in a higher degree than any other recent poet except Mr Rudyard Kipling. Saint Abe and White Rose and Red are richly humorous; so are a number of the North Country poems. Kitty Kemble blends satire with humour, and The Wedding of Shon Maclean has a wild rollick unequalled since Outram’s Law Lyrics. It might be compared to a scene from Charles O’Malley, in verse, and transferred from the Irish bogs to the Highland mountains.
The range of Buchanan is such as only an extraordinary spirit could have compassed. And to estimate him aright we must also take account of his independence. This is the secret of his combative career. He both felt himself to be and called himself an Ishmael, and he struck out fiercely against those whose hand he believed to be raised against him. Even where he adopted current forms of verse, he used them in a way of his own. He wrote idylls in an age of idylls; but his have far more of mother earth about them than the Tennysonian idylls. Buchanan’s are related to these as his countryman Allan Ramsay’s pastoral is related to the pastorals 585 of Pope. In his own way Buchanan was a leader of a new return to nature. He was spokesman for a generation rising into manhood when the impulse of the early Victorian poets was beginning to fail, and when their ideals were no longer accepted as all that the heart could desire. The North Country and the London poems were his attempt to satisfy the want, and of all that were made it was the one which offered most hope. The principal alternatives were such Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism as we find in O'Shaughnessy, and the graceful society verse of Mr Austin Dobson and his followers. But society verse can never be the staple of great poetry; and Pre-Raphaelitism carried within it from the start the seeds of decay. A sense of the preciosity, even of the masters, roused Buchanan’s wrath; and he made it his business to combat this and all the other signs of decadence. But, while Buchanan himself had imitators, he founded no great school. This was partly owing to his fault, or rather his insufficiency. He could not fuse the elements of greatness that were in him. Had he been able to weld the mysticism of Orm with the realism of the London Poems, the result would have been something greater than English literature has produced in recent years. As it is, they stand apart—opposite shores separated by a gulf across which Buchanan has built no bridge. 1 Jay’s Robert Buchanan, 221. 2 ibid. 3 ibid. 264. __________ From The Guardian (22 February, 1910 - p.7) Professor Hugh Walker, of St. David’s College, Lampeter, has written a stupendous manual dealing between two covers with THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN ERA (Cambridge University Press, pp. viii. 1,067, 10s. net). Everything that could be treated has been treated—philosophy, theology, poetry, fiction, criticism. It was a vast undertaking, and it seems merely churlish to feel anything but gratitude to the man who took his dive and came through the wave without being submerged by it. Yet Professor Walker, excellent though on the whole his judgments are, does not quite convince us that he was the man for the task. Was it not, for example, a singularly unhappy chance—it cannot surely have been anything more than a chance—that led him to take Oscar Wilde as the theme of his last paragraph and to write of him as though he were the representative of the concluding years of the nineteenth century? If this were a reasonable opinion, we should have heard of it before now; a school or college manual is not the place in which to air it for the first time. Meredith’s poetry, again, is poetry, and must be treated as such; it cannot be disposed of in a chapter devoted to the “Later Fiction.” Moreover, if it is to be dismissed in five pages, can Robert Buchanan’s need eleven? And does not Professor Walker needlessly swell his work with names that have already been visited with a merciful oblivion? Tennyson and Browning come off splendidly, of course, with forty pages each, and forty more between them. Swinburne has sixteen, but he, like Buchanan, is a “later development.” The chief merit of the book is that it teems with life and originality; obviously Professor Walker gives no opinions at second hand. Yet it may not be unreasonable to regard a manual like this as a book the object of which should be to represent the opinions of the average rather than of the individual critic. _____ (Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) |
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