ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY (25)

The Ballad of Mary the Mother (1897)

The New Rome (1898)

Complete Poetical Works (1901)

The Ballad of Mary the Mother: a Christmas carol (1897)

The following notice appears in The Ballad of Mary the Mother:

Whether it is due to this, my own incompetence, or pure chance, I have (so far) not come across any contemporary reviews of The Ballad of Mary the Mother.

The Aberdeen Weekly Journal (3 February, 1897 - p.4)

     Mr Robert Buchanan, man of letters, is irrepressible. For a long while he has either been allowing his literary fire to die out, or he has been sulking, Achilles-like, in his tent. The critics who so mercilessly slated his “Devil’s Chase” were doubtless laying the flattering unction to their souls that they had silenced for ever the pen, if not the voice, of Robert Buchanan. Little did they know the man they were dealing with. The poet-publisher was born to fight, if any man ever was. Keats, we are told, was, in his youth, of a distinctly pugilistic turn, but his sensitiveness killed it. But Robert Buchanan has fostered his pugnacity till it has become a second nature to him. That spirit which urged him to become the literary censor of his age; to denounce in language, neither poetry nor prose, the “fleshly school of poetry”—the so-called mawkish, erotic sentimentality which a few dyspeptic poets had made fashionable; to pose before the world as the one whose sole desire was to understand and interpret humanity; to satirise mankind a la Swift, without Swift’s genius; in fine, to misinterpret Matthew Arnold’s dictum that poetry was a criticism of life, still animates him. He has tried to build a reputation on the notoriety of popular discussion; he, like that other Literary celebrity, Marie Corelli, struck out in a new line, and the result—in his case at least—has been most disastrous. His magazine failed, his dramas failed, his essays and his novels have not succeeded. And Robert Buchanan turned pessimist. He has declared that a literary life deteriorates a man’s moral life. In the case of some men, it certainly does. But in most cases it is the abuse of the literary life that makes the Robert Buchanans. Mr Buchanan’s latest is an address to bookbuyers, issued from his publishing office in Gerrard Street. He is about to issue five books, and he wishes to offer the literary Cerberus a most tasty sop. Referring to the reception which his “Devil’s Chase” received in Scotland, he writes—“I did expect a little sane consideration in my native land.” But he ought to console himself with the dictum about the prophet and his country. “I am the only surviving Religious Poet,” says Mr Buchanan in concluding his address, “and am possibly the last of the race.” If religious poets are those who transmit unworthy, trashy thoughts in infelicitous diction and weak rhyme, it is just as well that he is the “last minstrel.” A definition of the term “religious poet” would be interesting.

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The Glasgow Herald (6 February, 1897 - p.9)

     Two new volumes of poems by Mr Robert Buchanan are about to appear through his own publishing office in Gerrard Street. They are respectively entitled “The Ballad of Mary the Mother: a Christmas Carol,” and “The New Rome: Ballads and Poems of our Empire.” Both books will be illustrated, some of the pictures being drawn by Mr Buchanan himself.

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The Hull Daily Mail (30 December, 1897 - p.4)

     “The Ballad of Mary” is the title of Mr Robert Buchanan’s new work issued to-day. Mr Buchanan is his own publisher, and is not sending any copies to the press.

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St. James’s Gazette (8 January, 1898 - p.12)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan—whose courage no one doubts, whatever may be thought about his taste—is about to salute the happy morn of 1898 with a “Ballad of Mary the Mother,” which is to narrate, after Mr. Buchanan’s manner, the Communings of the Magdalene and the Virgin Mother about the Sacred Birth. Mr. Buchanan thinks that “the imagination of a modern poet is fully as reliable as the imagination of a mediæval monk.” People have, no doubt, said some very nasty things about the imagination of the mediæval monk. Those who feel moved to say things about the imagination of the modern poet are invited to procure copies of Mr. Buchanan’s Ballad by written application to the publisher, 36, Gerrard-street, Shaftesbury-avenue, London, for no copies will be sent out for review.

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The Hull Daily Mail (12 January, 1898 - p.1)

     Mr Robert Buchanan’s new work, “The Ballad of Mary the Mother,” will cause a greater outburst of Christian condemnation than any of his previous works.

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The New Rome: poems and ballads of our empire (1898)

The Westminster Budget (21 October, 1898 - p.21)

     Apropos the early appearance of a new volume of poetry by Mr. Robert Buchanan—“The New Rome” it is to be called, and it will consist, according to the author’s description, of “poems and ballads of Empire”—it may be recalled that it is thirty-eight years since his first volume of poems, “Undertones,” was published, and that in 1870, in consideration of his merit as a poet, he received from Mr. Gladstone a pension of £100 per annum. The late Mr. Hutton, of the Spectator, declared that Mr. Buchanan’s poems were “nearly perfect of their kind, realistic and idealistic in the highest sense.”

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The Scotsman (7 December, 1898 - p.11)

THE NEW ROME. Poems and Ballads of Our Empire. By Robert Buchanan. London: Walter Scott.

     Mr Robert Buchanan explains in a prose postscript to his new book of poems that he began the work as a satire, but was unable to keep it up in that vein. One thinks of Mr Austin Dobson’s triolet—

I intended an ode,
But it turned to a sonnet.

and remembers occasions on which one has been inclined to be grateful for the caprices of poets. But Mr Buchanan is not any more successful in the lachrymose than in the satirical vein. He wanted to whip the age with Juvenal’s lash, but found himself, he says, too full of pity. He can be savage enough, however, when he is after an effect. The truth is, his book is a miscellany of poems without any sort of homogeneity, except that they may all be made to refer to modern conditions of things. It represents the British Empire as a modern Rome, and inveighs, with what seems an artificial indignation, against the subservience of religious to political ends. He parodies Mr Kipling, and goes into a rather hysterical objurgation of Nietszche. On the other hand, he extols Burns and Mr G. B. Shaw. One piece praises Maeterlinck, and another speaks of Schopenhauer as the new Buddha. Whatever is obvious about any modern man or idea is said somewhere or other in these poems, and put with restless impatience of thought and a constant appeal to the womanish of man’s sentimentalities. It is too much to appeal to the example of Juvenal in such a connection. Beside the thunders of the rhythmic indignation of the Roman, these smaller utterances sound like the ingeniously-contrived bleatings of a toy lamb; and, when a book takes up such a thesis as the vices and follies of the contemporary age, serious men want sterner stuff than this.

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Glasgow Herald (14 December, 1898)

     The New Rome: Poems and Ballads of our Empire. By Robert Buchanan. (London: Walter Scott.)—
One thing may always be predicted of Robert Buchanan, and it is one of the noblest characteristics of true manhood. It is pitiful to think that there should be poets who use, and then forget, their early and best friends. Such a creature is not Mr Buchanan, who has had two special friends in life, one of whom, thirty years ago, he addressed, in a prologue to his own “Undertones,” as “David in Heaven.” The person here meant is of course David Gray, the poet, to whose memory his unforgetting friend again devotes in the Proem to the present volume a set of beautiful verses, under the same pathetic title “David in heaven.” Mr Buchanan will be the last man to object if we call his other friend the “Devil in Hell,” or out of it, as the case may be. To no possible human friend could he stick so closely or affectionately as he has stuck to his lively Majesty. Some three years ago, it may be remembered, Mr Buchanan produced a book in which he set forth “The Devil’s Case” with such ability and energy as to command the admiration, not only of the Devil himself, but of so reputable a preacher as Dr Parker of the City Temple. But his Majesty has still much good counsel to give to his vindicator, who, as the two come together again, this time in Kensington Gardens late in the evening, is quoting “Hamlet” and lamenting that ever he was born to set right the disjointed world. He is declaiming from a manuscript, and he has just declared that he will join the knightly band of satirists when a voice at his side says—

                 “Proceed! I’m listening!
     Prithee, remember I am always near
When Bards who ought to soar to Heaven and sing
     Elect to crawl upon the ground and sneer!”

“Satan again!” says the poet, and the newcomer responds—

                   “I see you recognise me!
     The real and only Devil, whose cause rejected
You championed ’gainst a world that vilifies me,
And so for Hell’s black laurel were selected!
Yea, Satan! Not the gruesome Deil invented
Up North by kings and ministers demented,
Not the Arch-Knave in bonnet and cock’s feather
Who scaled the Brocken peaks in windy weather,
Far less that fop of fashionable flummery
Beloved by Miss Corelli and Montgomery;
Nay, the true Æon, friend of things created,
Whom ’tis your glory to have vindicated!

“What brings you hither?” asks the poet, and the Æon answers that it is to remind him of sundry noble themes “worth your while, my son, to sing of.” He counsels him against satire, and most of all to “shun the jogtrot jungles of the pinchbeck Masters.” “And if,” says the poet, “my Muse refuses to obey you?” The reply is prompt:—

“Be damn’d with Austin and the poetasters!
But come, your subject?”

“Rome!” answers the poet,

“The new-created
     And dominant realm which now makes jubilation.
This Empire, which is Rome rejuvenated.”

Then he proceeds to draw a parallel between the old Rome and the British Empire, the Rome that now is, characterised by sins, sorrows, and wrongs. What is now wanted is a Bard like Juvenal of yore:—

“Fearless, free-spoken, sane, and strong,
To smite with stern and savage song
This monstrous Age of shams and lies.”

“All right,” quoth the Devil, agreeing with the justice of the poet’s parallel, while maintaining his own conception as to methods, which he thus expounds:—

“But not by hate and not by scorn,
Not by the arts of bards outworn,
I work! I conquer and confute
By Love and Pity absolute!
And he who earns my praise must find
     The Light beyond these clouds of Fate—
By love, not Hate, for Humankind,
Must he enfranchise and unbind
     The slaves whom God leaves desolate.”

“Amen!” says the poet, and the Devil resumes by declaring that in his throat he lies who, taught by tyrants, sees in him “the Evil Spirit that denies.” He declares, on the contrary, that his task is “to affirm and free.” He goes further:—

                         “I claim as kin
     All noble souls, however blind,
Who freely stake their lives to win
     Respite of sorrow for mankind!”

The reader will be inclined to ask—“Can this be the Devil?” So it would seem—according to Mr Buchanan, his dear friend. Then the poet goes on to complete his parallel between the ancient Rome with its horrors and cruelties of custom and the evil practices of the New Rome:—

“The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now) the tinsel’d Priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher’s sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of men!”

He then makes a dash at the New Woman, whom he denounces as a creature who, in striving with men in the arena, now as of old, forgets “her sex, her children, and her God.” The Devil defends the new woman, who, so far from being marred, is rather enfranchised. The poet of course takes a shy at newspapers—how natural in the case of the man, who has in his time earned many a precious and needful guinea through those same newspapers! He also strikes with satiric sword at the philosopher to whom there is no God, and can see no heaven, but only “the eternal, Cul de Sac!” Then there is the poet who is

                     “happy, and at home
In all the arts and crafts of learned Rome,
He sees the bloody pageant of despair,
All Nature moaning ’neath its load of care,
Takes off his hat, and with a bow polite
Chirps, God is in his Heaven! the world’s all right.”

These things would have made Huxley and Browning laugh. One would fancy that the world was going to the Devil, but in this case the Devil checks the poet, and mends his mood by saying—

                       “But hark, that cry!
The hosts of Tommy Atkins passing by!
The Flag that for a thousand years has braved
     The battle and the breeze is floating there!
What Shakespeare glorified and Nelson saved
     Is worth, I think, some little praise and prayer!
Even I, the Devil, at that note
Seem the lump rising in my throat!
’Tis something, after all, you must agree,
To mark the old Flag float from sea to sea.”

This is curative, and the poet is at least partially pleased with the patriotic words of the Devil, who further delivers a fine eulogium on the home-bred valour of the British race.

“Enough of Rome! My Poet’s gentle eyes
     Are blinded with the City’s garish day—
Sleep in the Moonlight for a time! you’ll rise
     Renew’d and strong, and Care will wing away.”

Such is the introduction to Mr Buchanan’s “Songs of Empire,” which are vastly different from most of the Imperial “row- de-dow” odes and songs which have been showered upon the public of late. They are daring, biting, crushing, clever, and roll along with immense spirit. They are songs and ballads which only Mr Buchanan could or perhaps would write. They may not please all readers, but there cannot be the slightest doubt as to their intense readability. Two of the ablest and “rummiest” of the lot are “The Chartered Companie” and “The Ballad of Kiplingson,” which ought to delight many people without hurting the subjects of them. On the other hand, the poem on “The Grand Old Man” will produce a mixed impression of pleasure and pain, according to the reader. “The Irishman to Cromwell” is a scarifying piece of verse. Among the series under the title “Through the Great City” will be found many a masterpiece of verse—such as “The Sphinx on the Thames Embankment,” and “The Last Christians.” Among other poems, “The Gnome,” which sketches the life and character of Heine, is capital. A couple of pieces on “Burns” are also fine. In fact, the whole book is a marvel and a treasure.

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The Arbroath Herald (15 December, 1898 - p.2)

“THE NEW ROME.” By Robert Buchanan. London: Walter Scott. (6s.)

     In this volume of “Poems and Ballads of our Empire” Mr Robert Buchanan has assumed the role of a British Juvenal, satirising with characteristic power many things which make the British Empire of to-day strikingly like the Rome of the days of the great Roman satirist. The author who undertakes the unhappy task of “lashing,” to use Swift’s phrase, his age, must pay the price. If some bless, there are many who will curse him. Mr Buchanan will have many readers, I hope, who will swear inwardly over lots of his lines. It will do them good so to swear; it would be a sorry business, indeed, if this volume were read with admiration all round. The spirit of the poems is strong for truth and righteousness. There is expressed musically and valiantly the contempt for loitering, insolent, hypocritical wealth, and the sympathy for downtrodden labour which form to-day the trumpet call for all sons of the morning.

“Honour to those who died for this our Rome,
Honour to those who, while we crow at home,
     Preserve our freedom for a beggar’s pay.
“Let loose the dogs of war!” the gigman cries,
Feasting on gold while Tommy starves and dies.”

Whatever be the faults of this volume there is in it throughout the note of Ruskin’s principle that national wealth can only be rightly reckoned in happy homes and hearts, and in helpful lives—in justice, righteousness, peace and freedom—and not in conquests written in letters of invasion, brutality, rapine and extermination, even although these may mean increased trade, extended empire, more gold and more gluttony. A courageous, patriotic, disturbing volume this, fitted to do most good to those whom it satirises most effectively.

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The Guardian (27 December, 1898 - p. 6)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, who rarely abandons the attitude of an Ishmael among the poets of his time, sustains that character—with talent and with energy, as always—in his last volume, The New Rome, “poems and ballads of our Empire” (Walter Scott, 8vo, pp. 387, 6s.). It will certainly displease those whom, we take it, the author intended primarily to displease—the “Jingo Jew,” the “cockney cliques,” and “the gigman,” to whom we recommend, among other items, “The Charter’d Companie” and “The Ballad of Kiplingson,” but we fear it may offend the inoffensive too. Frankly, those who read the volume through must be prepared to encounter much that is quite blasphemous, much that is indiscriminately violent, and some irony of the sort that is unconscious praise. Inspired by “The Aeon” (another name for Mr. Buchanan’s unnameable client), he has scourged some of the obvious vices of his age in Juvenalian satire and Goethian rhapsody with something of Byron’s forcible wit. It is a pity that he has attacked also things that many good men hold not only harmless but even sacred, and that since nature has not denied him the gift of verse he has relied so constantly upon a rather monotonous indignation. However, it is only just to recognise, on the æsthetic side, his dexterity and strength, and, on the moral, his perfectly sincere and passionate humanity; let those who doubt either read “Old Rome,” “The Wearing of the Green” (new style), and “The Cry for Life.” He is seldom a sweet poet, and indeed, generally, Mr. Buchanan is to be taken as medicine.

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The Academy (28 January, 1899 - p.119)

Reviews.

New Verse.

THE perusal of Mr. Buchanan’s latest volume, The New Rome (Scott), from first page to last, leaves some such impression as a mass meeting in Hyde Park—for the poet writes (as was said of another) at the top of his voice, and he is usually angry. We believe his anger to be mainly just, we believe his impulses to be mainly right; but he has certainly lost the art of enchaining attention. Poetry that is to reform the world must first allure and then persuade. Mr. Buchanan flings his songs at us, caring apparently nothing for form. The begetter of the book, he tells us, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, who wrote to him: “There is an immensity of matter calling for strong denunciation and display of white-hot anger, and I think you are well capable of dealing with it. More especially, I want someone who has the ability, with sufficient intensity of feeling, to denounce the miserable hypocrisy of our religious world, with its pretended observances of Christian principles side by side with the abominations which it habitually assists and countenances.” Mr. Buchanan, however, gave up the idea of a connected satire, and produced this volume of distinct but, he holds, congruous lyrics and ballads. We quote, from the section called “In the Library,” a poem to Mr. Hardy:

THE SAD SHEPHERD.

Thy song is piteous now that once was glad,
     The merry uplands hear thy voice no more—
Thro’ frozen forest ways, O shepherd sad,
     Thou wanderest, while windy tempests roar;

And in thine arms—aye me!—thou claspest tight
     A wounded Lamb that bleateth in the cold,
Warming it in thy breast, while thro’ the night
     Thou strugglest, fain to bear it to the fold!

Shepherd, God bless thy task, and keep thee strong
     To help poor lambs that else might die astray!
Thy midnight cry is holier than the song
     The summer uplands heard at dawn of day!

We do not quite gather for what Mr. Hardy is commended. Not even at the dawn of his day was he a particularly cheery writer, nor does he, we imagine, aim now at helpfulness. (In another poem, we might add, Mr. Buchanan writes: “Tom Hardy, blow the clouds apart With sounds of rustic fifes and tabors!”) Mr. Buchanan also addresses Mr. Bernard Shaw, and bids his work “God-speed.” But for Mr. W. D. Howells and Mr. Henry James, Tolstoi and Ibsen, he has only hard knocks. Altogether, there is a vast deal of undisciplined vigour in this book, but the verses have been thrown together with the utmost recklessness and no suggestion of revision. Many of the pieces are mere rhymed journalism.

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The Press (New Zealand) (13 April, 1899 - p.4)

A Modern Satire.

Apparently we owe Mr Robert Buchanan’s latest volume, “The New Rome,” to a suggestion from Mr Herbert Spencer that he should write a satire on the age. Juvenal’s cloak, however, does not quite fit the modern satirist. “The New Rome” is imperial England,

                         “gathering hour by hour,
The aftermath of human pride and power,
As Rome was then, when all the gods were dead,
When Faith was gone and even Hope had fled.”

Across the foam come the shrieks of the slain; at home a thousand starve, a few are fed; not Christ, but Christus Jingo rules; the new woman leads the dance of death and vanity, patriotism is the desire to cut our neighbour’s throat, and the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain, for his speech on the love of one’s country, come in for a severe castigation as “heir of Judas,” which is a clear infringement of the copyright of some of the Irish Party. Because of her bloodshed, her hypocrisy and her lust, this Empire, too, shall share the inevitable doom of old Rome, “with all the weary world for tomb.” When dealing with his literary confreres, Buchanan does not spare the lash. Only the “little banjo-bards” are now strumming, he says; the age is one of wind and windy reputations.

“Ended is all the mirth and song,
Fled are the merry music-makers,
And what remains? The Dismal Throng
Of literary undertakers!”

The grim monarch of this throng is Zola, grimy as his theme. Then comes Tolstoi, mad with his self-made martyr’s shirt, and obscene through hatred of obsceneness. Ibsen follows, with his gospel of sin, squirming at Nature and Society, and hugging his gloomy bottled thunder. But it is on Kipling that the worst blows fall. (The old device of bringing him to St. Peter’s gate comes in rather unfortunately just now after his illness. He tells St. Peter he has just died of a plethora of puffs.

“I was raised in the lap of Jingo, sir, till I grew to the height of man,
And a wonderful literary gent, I emerged upon Hindostan!”

But the saint replies that the saddest thing he has ever seen “is a brat that talks like a weary man or a youth with a cynic leer,” and he wants to know what the candidate for Heaven has found, after probing all creation through. “The Flag of England,” Kipling cried, “and the thin black penny-a-line!” Regarded as poetry, “The New Rome” shows a great falling off from the days of Balder the Beautiful and the older Coruisken Sonnets, though there are occasional powerful passages. But one cannot get away from the thought that the satire would have been less savage, perhaps, even, less unjust, had Mr Buchanan’s writings enjoyed the vogue of some of those whom he lashes so unmercifully.

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Pall Mall Gazette (3 June, 1899 - p.3)

REVIEWS.
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JUVENAL MINIMUS.*

ENCOURAGED by the praises of those well-known authorities on the art of poetry, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, Dr. Parker, of the City Temple, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Robert Buchanan continues to take himself very seriously indeed. He tells us in a note that this is a “homogeneous book,” and that Mr. Spencer is to some extent responsible for it. The philosopher called the poet’s attention to the fact that there was “an immensity of matter” (delicious phrase!) “calling for strong denunciation and display of white-hot anger,” and added, “I think you are well capable of dealing with it.” Accordingly the poet—we are summarizing his words—started out to castigate, and produced the introductory dialogue in this volume. But he soon found that he “was drifting into mere imitation of defunct masters”—that “he was only pretending to be in a passion,” and that he had no “hate” in him, being too sorry for poor Humanity. So he ceased to be inspired by Mr. Spencer, and turned to another source of poetry which he terms the Devil, or the Æon, or the Spirit of Supreme Love and Pity, and under this happier influence he completed his book.
     That is what he tells us; but, with apologies to Mr. Spencer, we should never have known, had we not been told, where his inspiration ceased and where that of the devil began. In this respect, perhaps, the book is “homogeneous,” for we find throughout the traces of that white-hot anger—or, rather, of that “pretending to be in a passion” which Mr. Buchanan frankly tells us we may discover in the opening dialogue.
     The plain fact is, that Mr. Buchanan’s sound and fury fail to move us one whit. And this is not because our hide is as hard as our heart, but for other good reasons. In the first place, he himself has cut away the logical basis of two-thirds of these poems. If he is inspired with supreme love and pity for “poor Humanity;” if, as he says in his envoi, his principle has always been —

To love the worst, to feel
     The least is even as I—

we might expect to find in his pages some signs of humility. We do not find them, but we soon find out who they are that he considers “the worst,” and he dissembles his love by a generous largesse of epithets such as Christus-Jingo, Judas, Jupiter’s guttersnipe, and so forth, whenever he speaks of them. Secondly, the personal note is sounded with such tiresome reiteration that it is impossible to resist the conviction that Mr. Buchanan’s dissatisfaction with things in general is to a great extent the result of his want of success with the British public. We have already quoted the astonishingly egoistical envoi to the book, of which the refrain is, “I end as I began”; and this is true in a literal sense, if applied to this volume, for in the melancholy Proem—which has some genuine pathos of a purely egoistic kind—the predominant feeling is one of bitterness. The Fame he deemed divine is a harlot: Fortune is fickle, and her treasure empty. Mr. Buchanan even goes so far as to picture himself standing naked in “Life’s great hippodrome,” while Fame sits by the side of Antichrist and urges on the wild beasts—Hate, Falsehood, and Calumny. It is all a storm in a teacup, and Mr. Buchanan may invoke himself by name to any extent, thus:—

These voices! Hark, Buchanan! All about thee.

And thus:—

Woe unto thee, Buchanan!

The result is rather to raise a smile, as we try to imagine any other poet’s name—except perhaps Walt Whitman’s—in the place of his. People are not so much concerned with Mr. Buchanan as he imagines; and, so far from wishing him any harm, we fancy that they will in general extend to him the tolerance which is generally given to gentlemen who have a certain power of metrical expression, but who are obviously suffering from acute megalomania. If Mr. Buchanan’s voice were less shrill, it would be more audible. On the whole, we think we prefer his rabidness in regard to Verlaine, Ibsen, and Rudyard Kipling to the attitude of pitying tolerance which he adopts when speaking of Tennyson and Robert Browning, just because they were men who, with all their knowledge of human sins and sorrows, did not rant about the Devil and the Æon, or squeak and gibber about upas trees.

     * “The New Rome: Poems and Ballads of our Empire.” By Robert Buchanan. (London: Walter Scott.)

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The Standard (20 June, 1899 - p.4)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, who has given to his latest collection of verse the not very appropriate title of “The New Rome: Poems and Ballads of our Empire” (Walter Scott), is well known to be a poet with a grievance, or many grievances. This age has declined to accept Mr. Buchanan as the moral teacher he believes himself to be. In his “Prose Note” to “The New Rome,” he says that he has learnt, by sharp experience, that loftily didactic poems are not wanted by the public. He has found that “all modern Society expected from its poets was a little verbal music and a great deal of acquiescence and patriotic sentiment. . . . For a verse-writer to be a thinker and a pioneer, in revolt against political and religious abominations, was regarded as an impertinence; his business was to twang the lyre, or strum the banjo, leaving politics to the thieves and thinking to the philosophers. To tell the truth, or what seemed to me the truth, would please no one but my friend, the devil. Well, my diabolical instinct was too strong for me, and this book is another proof that I am past all ordinary salvation.” This is all very fine and haughtily defiant; but the true cause of Mr. Buchanan’s failure is another and a sadder tale. In all our recent literature there is no example of a man who has more conspicuously falsified the promise of his prime. He is the possessor of a noble poetic talent, which, rightly used, would have placed him among the Immortals. He ought to be one of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—of our living poets; for there is none left among us more richly endowed by Nature with imagination, originality, and the power of expression. Mr. Buchanan best knows how he has used these splendid gifts. If he is now almost ignored by the present generation of readers, or known chiefly as the writer of lampoons on his younger contemporaries, it is not because he has been too ethical or too religious. Even as it is, he can still write with a true poet’s touch. Take for instance the beautiful “proem” with which the volume opens:—

                   Ah! the dream, the fancy!
                   No power, no necromancy,
Peoples Heaven’s thrones again or stirs the poet throng!
                   Nought can bring unto me
                   You who loved and knew me,
The boy’s belief, the morning red, the May-time, and the song—
                   Faintly up above me
                   Winter bells ring warning—
Aye me! the Spring, when we were young, at the golden gates of morning.

One turns with a sigh from such a stanza as this to the vulgar satire on a more successful versifier which is called “The Ballad of Kiplingson.” It is, indeed, quite painful to observe the paroxysms of vituperative anger into which the fame of some younger writers drives Mr. Buchanan, who ought surely by this time to have acquired that mellowed calm which should be among the rewards of the bard as he grows old. On the whole, it is an unsatisfying volume, and one closes it repeating the melancholy epitaph on a great literary faculty which has missed its mark: what a poet the author might have been!

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The Yorkshire Post (9 August, 1899 - p.7)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has published a volume of verse called “The New Rome” (Walter Scott, 6s.), of which it is hard to say whether the high pretension or the bad taste is most amazing. The sub-title is “Poems and Ballads of Our Empire”; England is the “New Rome”; but a larger title was wanted to do the book justice. It embodies many moods and speculations which have troubled the author. They were not to be silenced:—

Ah, the Voices! and the Faces!—wild and wan, on
     They are rushing, to destroy or to renew thee!
Like a foam-flake shalt thou vanish, O Buchanan,
     If but one of these is lost that cry unto thee.

And Mr. Buchanan not only talks to himself, but in passages of rare assurance, to the Maker of heaven and earth, stating, for one while, what he would do “If you were a man like me, and I were a God like you.” His attack on Mr. Kipling is so vulgar in conception and feeling that he must have regretted it; and yet he uses Mr. Kipling’s method in verses written for the honour and glory of a Little Englandism masquerading as Christianity. He says that the book is a satire after the manner of Juvenal, and that Mr. Herbert Spencer got him to write it. The shade and the philosopher are to be commiserated together.

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Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser (6 October, 1900 - p.4)

Back to Reviews, Bibliography, Poetry or The New Rome

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Complete Poetical Works (1901)

The Arbroath Herald (9 May, 1901 - p.4)

     “We are glad to hear,” the Bookman says, “that Messrs Chatto and Windus have in preparation a collected edition of the whole of Robert Buchanan’s poems. They are to be published in two six-shilling volumes, each containing a portrait of the author.”

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The Academy (11 May, 1901 - p.398)

Bibliographical.

THE Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, which Messrs. Chatto & Windus, it is understood, are preparing to issue in two-volume form, will, no doubt, be welcome to many. Mr. Buchanan first issued his Poetical Works when he was only thirty-three years old—namely, in 1874. His next issue of his Poetical Works came ten years later—namely, in 1884. This was a substantial volume of 534 double-column pages, printed in a rather small type. Since 1884 he has put forth a good deal of verse. One has only to name The Earthquake (1885), The City of Dream (1888), The Outcast (1891), The Wandering Jew (1893), Red and White Heather (1894), The Devil’s Case (1896), and The New Rome (1898)—the last-named being a very well-filled volume. Altogether, Mr. Buchanan’s Poems must, taken as a whole, occupy a good deal of space. One always likes to have a man’s Works complete, but I am not sure that Mr. Buchanan’s reputation as a poet would not be most enhanced by the publication of a judicious Selection from his rhythmic work. This was done in 1882, but needs doing over again. Mr. Buchanan has the pen of a ready writer, and a very great deal of his verse is only fluent prose in “lengths.” Perhaps we must leave it to the next generation to do the sifting.

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The Portsmouth Evening News (12 October, 1901 - p.2)

THE LAST CRY.

     Next week Messrs. Chatto will publish the collected edition of Robert Buchanan’s poems. His sister-in-law, Miss Harriett Jay, has assisted to prepare the edition, which is in two volumes. The second volume includes poems by Buchanan that have not before appeared in book form. It closes with a very touching verse entitled “The Last Cry”:—

Forget me not, but come, O King,
And find me softly slumbering,
In dark and troubled dreams of Thee.
Then, with one waft of Thy bright wing,
                                   Awaken me!

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The Academy (26 October, 1901 - p.384)

WE have made no calculations, but we should not be surprised to learn that the poet of the “greatest number of lines” in the nineteenth century was Mr. Robert Buchanan. This idea is suggested by the two-volume edition of his “Complete Poetical Works,” just issued in admirable style by Messrs. Chatto & Windus at twelve shillings. To each volume a portrait is prefixed. There is no introduction. The poems are arranged in chronological order, and in appropriate sets as they were originally issued in smaller volumes. One cannot but feel sorry that this presentment of the entire poetical work of a poet so vexed, vigilant, and industrious is posthumous. Peace be to the ashes in which this “Last Cry” seems still to live:

Forget me not, but come, O King,
And find me softly slumbering
     In dark and troubled dreams of Thee,
Then, with one waft of Thy bright wing
     Awaken me!

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The Echo (6 November, 1901 - p.1)

ROBERT BUCHANAN’S POETICAL WORKS.

     The first reflection that occurs to one on being confronted with the two volumes of Robert Buchanan’s poetical works is—Can such a prodigious amount of verse be all poetry? Is anyone justified in writing so much even is he be a poet? His collected works amount to as much, if not more, than all Browning ever wrote, and some of us are inclined to feel at times that even Browning might have spared us a little of his philosophy. Robert Buchanan’s philosophy, expressed in verse, is not interesting, largely because he is a fatalist. We read poetry not to be convinced that we are at the mercy of blind, irresistible forces. Such a conception of life appears everywhere throughout his poems, and is not calculated to increase the happiness of mankind, and although we cannot blame him for expressing in his poems his own belief, we do feel that his poetry ceases to move just at the point when his spiritual power fails. No one to-day would say that Robert Buchanan was an irreligious man merely because he made statements that sounded blasphemous. We are all too inclined to regard as blasphemy any word spoken against the existing order or the orthodox conception of the First Cause; but one cannot help pitying the man, because his poems show how great a hold the idea of God had upon him. He cannot leave the subject of religion; it recurs again and again, and instead of brightening it only darkens the landscape. It is for this reason that the first half of the first volume gives us far more pleasure than the work of his later years. He had a genuine affinity with Nature in all her moods, and it appears everywhere in the poems written when quite young, before life became to him the subject of perplexing despair.

Sing, little River, while I rest,
Songs of your hidden mountain nest,
And of the blue sky in your breast!

And he is quite in his element when, leaving the tumult and discordant noises of the city, he goes forth

     To lie in this green retreat,
     In a beautiful dim half-dream
     Like a god on a hill; and seem
A part of the fair strange shapes up there,—
     With the wood-scents round my feet.

     In one respect Robert Buchanan strongly resembles Robert Browning, and that is in the way in which he invents and projects new metres for every new subject; there is a certain sense of freshness in his versification which makes the longer poems readable. That Robert Buchanan had a great heart and real appreciation of great-hearted men is seen when he writes about such leaders as Lincoln:—

Turn, and, behold the sad Soul of the West
     Passing behind a Rainbow bloodily—
     Conscience incarnate, steadfast, strong, and free,
Changeless thro’ change, blessing and ever blessed.

     The publishers have done their work well, and the two volumes, comprising over a thousand pages, are models of cheapness and good printing.

“The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan,” in two volumes, with Portraits. (Chatto and Windus.)

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The Bookman (London) (December, 1901 - p.97-98)

ROBERT BUCHANAN.*

     Every critic of Buchanan’s poetry thinks it incumbent on him to dilate on his redundancy and his artistic carelessness, while owning his great qualities. This is only natural. He was what they say of him, and of all that is contained in these two volumes only a small proportion will last. But let us consider that as proved and said, and turn not to what he might have given but to what he actually did give. It seems to us a large and rich gift. For a new reader to start on a study of Buchanan’s work is a stiff task; but if he turn to “balder” and the “Book of Orm,” he will find what will make him willing to be patient through much long-winded matter, confident of treasure. It is well for him to know what he will not find. He will not find one perfect poem. He will never find the final expression of any thought or feeling. But he will find what, perhaps, he may value—even though his quest be a poet—a man. Buchanan was a thinker, a sentimentalist sometimes, a man of strong feeling always; a propagandist, an apostle rather than a pure poet. He knew quite well the kind of verse-writer he was, the kind he desired to be, and he tells it in “faces on the Wall.” The strugglers of the world have been his teachers and inspirers. No “idle singer of an empty day” is he.

     “On other walls let flush’d Bacchantes leer;
In quainter rooms of snugger sons of song
     Let old fantastic tapestries appear.
Lone House! for comfort when the nights are long,
     Let none but future-seeking eyes be here!”

He has sung of common joys; no one savoured them more, but he always thought verse too good for trifling. Terribly in earnest, he was for ever asking

“Is the soul safe? Shall the sick world be well?
Will morning glimmer soon, and all be fair?”

He could not write for the triflers.

         “I sit apart, a lonely wight
On this bare rock amid this fitful Sea,
     And in the wind and rain I try to light
A little lamp that may a Beacon be,
     Whereby poor ship-folk, driving thro’ the night,
May gain the Ocean-course, and think of me!”

     Buchanan was alive to all the influences of his age. In many ways he lived far beyond it. He never succumbed to the fashion for trifling, never became infected with the materialism that marred many of his contemporaries. In religion, politics, and common life he remained a lofty, stubborn idealist. Like all men of his impulsive, passionate temperament, he made many mistakes, but never an ungenerous one; and in all this mass of verse, good, bad, and indifferent, sometimes of surpassing beauty, sometimes rather dull, you will find nothing base, nothing, so far as moral beauty is concerned, even second-best.
                                                                                                                               ANNIE MACDONELL.

     * “The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan.” With 2 Portraits. 2 vols. 12s. (Chatto and Windus.)

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The Humane Review (January, 1902 - p.302-310)

ROBERT BUCHANAN.*

     * Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. 2 vols. Chatto and Windus. 1901.

     AFTER nearly forty years of ceaseless literary toil, Robert Buchanan has passed away, leaving the world in a mood of pathetic perplexity as to what it ought to have made of him or even what it is to make of him now. It could not even in its dullest moods fail to realise the tempestuous and overwhelming force of the man. But it continued hesitant whether that force represented a permanent and vital power or the self-consuming throes of a fever-fit.
     Yet surely there never was poet concerning whose assured claim to that title there need have been less hesitation. To one at least of his admirers it seems that it was his very excellences which robbed him and still rob him of his due meed of appreciation. He was excellent in ways of which his time recked little or was frankly contemptuous. His genius was careless and liberal, with the carelessness and liberality of Nature. He squandered himself recklessly and with the magnificent unconsciousness of those who have much to squander. And this did not suit the mood of a time which esteems as the chief of virtues a studied aloofness from real feeling, a delicate sensitiveness of self-expenditure. Again, Buchanan was by far the most simple and natural of modern poets. He was filled with a great fervour of faith and feeling which had to find expression, and nothing was farther from his mind or bent than that study of fantastic literary grimace which passes to-day for a devotion to style. His poems have the looseness and copiousness of Nature, but they have too its life. They are not trimmed and trained to the requirements of the latest fashion in poetic parterres.
     But the chief obstacle to the immediate recognition of Buchanan’s greatness may also prove to be the surest guarantee of his eventual triumph. He has defied classification, and by his own obstinate individuality of faith and feeling he must live or die. It is not indeed expected of the poet that he should rigidly conform to the respectable beliefs of his time. The world of ordinary readers has its code of literary live-and-let-live. It is graciously patient of the heresy which clothes itself in polite and well-turned phrases. It has a satisfying secrecy of delight in the heresy which wears with success a roguish mask of orthodoxy. But it must draw the line at a heresy which insists that it is heretical. And Buchanan, it must be admitted, kept it pretty busily engaged drawing lines throughout a long literary life. He could not endure to be suspected of belonging to any party or school. The moment a belief ceased to be an object of persecution, it lost some of its charm for him. He was indeed what he called himself, an “Ishmael of Song,” and the breath of his intellectual life was the belief to which men were afraid or unable to be fair.
     Perhaps it is not wonderful that a man who so consistently and strenuously ranged himself against every established opinion, or proved himself fair and charitable to a belief which was passing through its time of struggle and trial only to assail it with compensating bitterness in its day of success, should have earned at last a reputation for invincible perversity. But natural, inevitable indeed, as it was, considering how superficial and impatient contemporary criticism usually is, it was nevertheless wholly unjust. There may have been a certain measure of perversity in Robert Buchanan’s nature. The circumstances of his literary life, lived at a white heat of polemical fervour, may have accentuated whatever natural perversity was his. Buchanan did not escape the defects of his qualities any more than the least of us. But intellectual perversity, so far as he suffered from it, was in him a most pardonable defect to those who recognised the true measure of the quality which it relieved. He was indeed an eclectic, and gloried in his eclecticism. But he gloried in it only because it was an expression of his sympathy with the eclecticism of humanity at large. He felt so much with the race, with the strugglings and aspirations of men as men, that he half forced himself to think with them too in all their varieties of thought. The only intellectual attitude which he rejected, but against it he launched his inexhaustible store of anathemas, was the attempt to give supremacy to any one explanation of the experiences of life. He could tolerate no Cæsar on the intellectual throne, and as men are wont to depose one only to find themselves conferring a more assured autocracy upon another, they always found in Buchanan the man who showed them what they were doing and so made it at least difficult for them to do it. He waged war with every established tyranny, and if his wars were many, it was because of the numberless tyrannies which he found men contentedly enduring and not at all because of any special delight of his own in war.
     The secret of Buchanan as man and as poet was his love of the weak, the down-trodden, the depressed. For him the key to all human duty lay in the capacity to see and to answer the claims of weakness. His own poetry is one long passionate appeal on behalf of all weak and forgotten things, a passionate protest against the self-contained unthinking march of mere strength. He arraigned the unconscious movements of nature, its careless, heartless masteries, before the tribunal of man’s heart. He elicited the deep inner pity that lurks in every heart that is beginning to be human, and set it with assurance on the throne of universal judgment. He was so sure that all who had chosen to suffer for others, all who had merged their life in a close identity with the pain and defeat of others, were the true exponents of the world’s justice. For if that were not so, then indeed was there no justice. But his surest and most abiding faith was that just this identification of strength with weakness, this sacrifice of strength for the sake of weakness, was the only solution of life’s mystery. That solution indeed was not able to justify itself to the intellect. It could not command, or even very boldly appeal to the beliefs of men. But at least it was the matter of their unconquerable hope. Only through it could the huge evil of life be faced, and that evil become the stuff of an ultimate good.
     Buchanan had taught in song for twenty years before Huxley stated it in prose the great doctrine that human ethics is the reversal of the evolutionary method. That indeed was the starting-point of the poet’s faith, and on that he always laid the greatest stress. Like the Gnostics of the first Christian centuries he rejects the God of Creation as the object of human love or reverence. The God to whom his heart turns, to whom he would turn the hearts of his brothers, is the God of Redemption. And this God he finds to be working out His purposes, to be unfolding as it were His essential being, in the movement of the life of humanity. All the great myths of love and sacrifice, like the story of Balder, are the witnesses of that life which is growing within life. The lives which have most suffered defeat for the sake of men, for the sake of pity and love and helpfulness, are the martyred ministers of its growth. The process of redemption, of the eliciting of that which is enduring in life, is just the reversal of the process of natural evolution. That is the constant starting-point of all the poet’s feeling. Yet he did not by any means allow himself to harden this feeling into a rigorous logical formula. On the contrary, he revolted against every attempt which had been made in the history of human thought to lay the yoke of such a formula upon man’s mind and will. The logical outcome, in belief, of such a feeling is asceticism, and against asceticism in all its forms Buchanan protested as vehemently as he had protested against submission to the heartless evolutionary process. He felt that there was some reconciliation of hedonism and asceticism—of Paganism and Buddhism, let us say. He felt that asceticism in its extreme forms was practically a denial of life, and that the redemption in which it hoped was really a break which no consciousness could survive. With what healthy scorn Buchanan rejected this travesty of redemption, this attempt to discover or to gain a worthy life through despair of and contempt for the daily life men know, all can learn who will take the trouble to read his poem on Schopenhauer, which he calls “The New Buddha.” Buchanan looked to find the redemptive process somehow accomplished within the circle of that same evolutionary movement which in its naked pitilessness he had banned. Already he finds the life within the life committed to man. That is just the human secret. In man there is already by a more intimate guerdon of Nature the power of love, of sympathy, of helpfulness, which redeems the coarser methods of her first attempts at handing on the gift of life. It is to man that the enduring sense of Nature’s joy and beauty is entrusted, just as to him only is also given the full sense of Nature’s cruelty and ravin and ugliness. Life begins to redeem itself as soon as it is able to feel the need of redemption. And out of the strength with which it slew and wasted and lusted, it creates the force whose delight is to save and to love and make  alive.
     This is something like the way in which Buchanan attempts the reconciliation of the lower and the higher processes in life—the process of the conservation of the individual life by itself at all risks, and the process of the redemption of higher individual powers by the sacrifice of lower, or of the saving of the weak by the self-sacrifice of the strong. The reconciliation indeed is never complete. The poet was too honest to pretend and too sincere to invent an intellectual certainty where there is only a certainty for the high moods of feeling and of hope. He was too much of a poet and too little of a philosopher to round off his hope, however high and assured, to a logical completeness. The difficulty of this reconciliation was so present to him that he often seemed to speak with two voices—a prose voice in which he acclaimed with a kind of courageous resignation the cruel truth of Nature’s ways which physical science had revealed, and the voice of the poet with which he adhered to every implacable protest against those ways. Now he seemed to regard the protest against Nature as futile and magnificently absurd, again as the only and the assured means of a new and higher development of her life. Now in his prose mood, his mood of despair, he would say: “Jesus was a man of a beautiful temperament, carried beyond himself by a false and sentimental conception of the mechanism of life. He uttered, no one so exquisitely, the human cry for a Divine Fatherhood. But unfortunately he appealed to Nature for corroboration of his appeal. Nature never answered him. Then, as now, she kept God’s secret.” But the poet’s voice would speak anon, and speak with a largeness and fulness which shamed prose out of its cold realities. As for instance, when he gives for answer to the question:—

“Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son?”
“In Him and in my Brethren every one:
The child of Mary who was crucified,
The gods of Hellas fair and radiant-eyed,
Brahm, Balder, Gautama, and Mahomet,
All who have pledged their gains to pay my debt
Of sorrows—all who through this world of dream
Breathe mystery and ecstasy supreme;
The greater and the less: the wise, the good,
Inheritors of Nature’s godlike mood;
In these I do believe eternally,
Knowing them deathless, like the God in me.”

     Or again where was the hope of a great and eternal birth, from the slow patient bitterness of humanity’s travailing, ever better expressed than here?—

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

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

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

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

     So that, after all, the doubt of Buchanan’s prose mood finds its answer in the certainty of Buchanan the poet. If it was unfortunate that Jesus appealed to Nature for corroboration of His appeal to a Divine Fatherhood, at least the mistake seems to have been only one of sex. For Nature is herself, the poet sees, in pangs of motherhood which have been relieved in such lives as Jesus lived and such unconquerable faith in life as He displayed.
     But Buchanan’s humanist ethics, his humanitarian fervour, were no mere passionless altruism produced in an emotional vacuum. He did hot hold that men would give their lives for others because they had no share in the lives of those others, but exactly because they had. For him the solidarity of life was complete. No life could be lived to itself or for itself. It shared in all other achievement. It contributed to it. Loss or gain, salvation or damnation, were corporate experiences. They were indeed individual too, and individual primarily. For it is only the individual that feels the loss or grows by the gain. But he shares in loss and gain which seem to be beyond the range of his own making, and all he has done and been will appear as loss or gain in other life than his own. This solidarity of the deepest and most essential human fortunes is the key-note of many of Buchanan’s most characteristic poems. As early as the “Book of Orm,” written before he was thirty, he gave it mystical expression in a brief allegorical interlude which he titles “Sanitas.” It is worth quoting:—

“Dreamily, on her milk-white Ass,
Rideth the maiden Sanitas—
With zone of gold her waist is bound,
Her brows are with immortelles crowned:
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
Lower, lower, sinks the sun,
The white stars glimmer, one by one!

“Who sitteth musing at his door?
Silas, the Leper, gaunt and hoar;
Though he is curst in every limb,
Full whitely Time hath snowed on him—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
The Leper, drinking in the air,
Sits like a beast, with idiot stare.

“How pale! how wondrous! doth she pass,
The heavenly maiden Sanitas;
She looketh, and she shuddereth,
She passeth on with bated breath—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
His mind is like a stagnant pool,
She passeth o’er it, beautiful!

“Brighter, whiter, in the skies,
Open innumerable eyes;
The Leper looketh up and sees,
His aching heart is soothed by these—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
He looketh up with heart astir,
And every star hath eyes like her!

“Onward on her milk-white Ass
Rideth the maiden Sanitas.
The boughs are green, the grain is pearled,
But ’tis a miserable world—
Dews are falling, song-birds sing,
It is a Christian evening—
All o’er the blue above her, she
Beholds bright spots of Leprosy.”

     Again in his very latest volume of poems, published three years ago, he gives expression again and again to this community of the deeper human fortunes. Of the victims of human lust whom we contemptuously dismiss as “lost women” the passionate indignation of his heart utters the truth which ought to ensure them a refuge in every heart that still knows how to feel or to be just.

“How? Thou be saved, and one of these be lost?
     The least of these be spent, and thou soar free!
Nay! for these things are thou—these tempest-tost
     Waves of the darkness are but forms of thee.
“Shall these be cast away? Then rest thou sure
     No hopes abide for thee if none for these.
Would’st thou be healed? Then hast thou these to cure;
     Thine is their shame, their foulness, their disease.”

     And then in the poem which he calls “These Voices” he proclaims the identity of all human experience with himself. So far as he is failing to make it his own, he is losing his life. So far as he is powerless through failure of heart, or of knowledge, or of will, to enter into the stress of any living joy or sorrow, to penetrate the mystery of any living soul, he feels that it is his own life which is suffering failure and defeat.

“Hear the strong man in the dark for pity crying,
     Hear the foul man’s word of hate as he goes by thee;
Hear the shriek of trampled women, vainly flying
     From the phantoms that appal thee and defy thee!
     .         .          .         .          .         .          .         .          .
“All the foul things God would seem to put his ban on,
     All the fair things that would seem to have his blessing—
Without thee, yet within thee, O Buchanan,
     They are thronging, with a riddle for thy guessing.
     .         .          .         .          .         .          .         .          .
“Ah! the Voices! and the Faces!—wild and wan, on
     They are rushing, to destroy or to renew thee!
Like a foam-flake shalt thou vanish, O Buchanan,
     If but one of these is lost that cry unto thee!”

     It seems a pitiable futility of criticism that the one great poet of human hope and redemption who is at all worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with Robert Browning should have been relegated to a worse punishment than literary annihilation, viz., summary and impatient dismissal to the limbo of the second-rate singers of our time. Buchanan is sure of his rescue from this abode of darkness. In its own defence the new time will call to its aid, in the throes of spiritual pain through which it has to pass, one of the most strenuous, the most believing, and the most loving singers that the England of the second half of the nineteenth century knew. He foresaw its need better than most. He forefelt its pain better than any. He was free from the great vice of his own time, the cowardice that worshipped the tyrant of the actual until its indifference to all ideals became the creed by which it proposed to live. Because he believed in man’s divine struggle against the actual as the real key to the mystery of human life, because he believed that the growing and waning fortunes of that struggle were stuff for the noblest poetry, because he made of his own superb imagination a mint for this true coinage, he was depreciated and defamed by a narrow literary clique. But because he did all these things, the broad needs of human life in the coming years will claim him and justify him as a poet of prophetic vision and of enduring right to fame.
                                                                                                                                 A. L. LILLEY.

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The Spectator (24 May, 1902 - pp.18-19)

BOOKS.
_____

ROBERT BUCHANAN’S POETRY.*

THE eternal problem as to what is, and what is not, poetry is presented in a somewhat imperious fashion by the thousand double-columned pages of Robert Buchanan’s collected works. If this is poetry, why is England entirely deaf to it; if it is not, what does it lack? Opening at random, we come upon an ode that seems to have something of the true accent. Let us take the first strophe and examine it:—

               “Lord, with how small a thing
Thou canst prop up the heart against the grave!
               A little glimmering
                   Is all we crave!
               The lustre of a love
                   That hath no being,
         The pale point of a little star above,
               Flashing and fleeing,
               Contents our seeing.
The house that never will be built; the gold
               That never will be told;
The task we leave undone when we are cold;
The dear face that returns not, but is lying,
     Lick’d by the leopard, in an Indian cave;
The coming rest that cometh not, till sighing
     We turn our tremulous gaze upon the grave.
         And Lord, how should we dare
               Thither in peace to fall
But for a feeble glimmering even there—
         Falsest, some sigh, of all?
We are as children in Thy hands indeed,
And Thou hast easy comfort for our need,—
The shining of a lamp, the tinkling of a bell,
               Content us well.”

The first observation a reader makes is that the poet has formed his general style upon Shelley, while for the purpose of this particular poem he has been reading George Herbert. The little star, the leopard, and the Indian cave are of course Shelleyan properties; but the limpid movement is also Shelley’s. On the other hand, the first two lines and the last two are unmistakably Herbert. And wherever the volumes are opened this first experience is confirmed, that although there are traces here and there of this and the other poet, notably of Crabbe and Tennyson, yet the main influence is Shelley’s. And this influence, while it has been beneficial so far as ease of rhythm is concerned, has been merely disastrous to the ultimate success of the poetry; because it has encouraged the poet to be content with vague feeling instead of definite thought, and diffuse expression instead of the inevitable word that at once fixes the thought and illuminates it and carries it home to the hearts of men. This is not to say that Shelley was himself inexpressive. He was a philosopher interested in ideals of a somewhat vague content, and this gave a nebulous air to much of his poetry. But the result of his example upon the poetical practice of his few followers was to encourage in them an idea that feeling was the prime element in the poet’s equipment, limpid fluency of sentiment the true poetical expression, and the Greek mythology the best vehicle for discoursing upon the rights of man. To go back to the ode above quoted. The idea of the passage is the very old and true one that it is hope which keeps men alive, even if the hope be illusion. But so far from the expression illuminating the thought and biting it into our imagination, we have to translate it back into ordinary prose to see what the poet is driving at. “The pale point of a little star above” is a charming line taken by itself; but it has no greater poetical value in the ode than the more obviously conventional “It is the star of Hope, but ah,” in Jeames’s well-known lyric. A star to a sailor or an astronomer may be fateful; but no ordinary person is content with starlight.
     It follows that Buchanan’s best work is contained not in the huge mass of Shelleyan writing, but in the idylls and lyrics of real life, where he had some definite object before his mind. He counted himself always a lover of his race and a hater of injustice, and in the earlier poems the hate is balanced by the love. Perhaps the best of these lyrics, for the freshness of both matter and manner, is the story of the lame tailor’s starling, who died swearing,—an interesting companion in the fields of asphodel to Sterne’s more sentimental bird:—

“All kinds of weather
     They felt confined,
And swore together
     At all mankind;
For their mirth was done,
     And they felt like brothers,
And the swearing of one
     Meant no more than the other’s;
’Twas just a way
     They had learn’d, you see,—
Each wanted to say
     Only this—‘Woe’s me!
I’m a poor old fellow,
     And I’m prison’d so,
While the sun shines mellow
And the corn waves yellow,
     And the fresh winds blow,—
And the folk don’t care
     If I live or die,
But I long for air,
     And I wish to fly!’
Yet unable to utter it,
     And too wild to bear,
They could only mutter it,
     And swear.”

The sempstress’s “blind linnet” who smelt “the musk and the muscatel” in the window-box and sang of country joys, is another poem in the same vein and in the same recitative. These, with “The Little Milliner” and “Liz,” which give the brighter and sadder aspects of girl life as it was in London in the “sixties,” are the best of the “London Poems”; but “The Book-worm” is worth a passing mention, and “Tom Dunstan, or the Politician” something more. This is the first stanza of it:—

“Now poor Tom Dunstan’s cold,
     Our shop is duller;
Scarce a tale is told,
And our talk has lost its old
     Red-republican colour!
Though he was sickly and thin,
     ’Twas a sight to see his face,—
While, sick of the country’s sin,
With bang of the fist, and chin
     Thrust out, he argued the case!
He prophesied men should be free !
     And the money-bags be bled!
‘She's coming, she’s coming,’ said he;
‘Courage boys! wait and see!
     Freedom’s ahead!”

Buchanan in youth was content, like Tom Dunstan, with prophesying a good time coming, based upon the discovery of a soul of goodness in things evil. Later in life he took up Shelley’s youthful crusade against Christianity, without Shelley’s excuse in the apathy of Churchmen to human sin and sorrow, and later still he coupled with it a crusade against Imperial politics. Indignation lends a vigour that is quite wonderful and astonishing to page after page of invective; and through it all Buchanan retains the sublime sense that he alone is left a prophet of God in the midst of a crooked generation. There are three poems worth noticing in which he disposes of his three popular contemporaries. Tennyson’s faith he speaks of as the faith of one who, dreaming at ease on his English lawn—

     “Heeded not the long despair
Of souls that never see the sun.”

Browning is jested upon as the best of doctors, “dear cheery and chirpy Doctor B.”:—

“And, mind you, his learning is prodigious,
     He has Latin and Greek at his finger ends,
And with all his knowledge he’s still religious,
     And counts no sceptic among his friends.

When out of spirits you’re sadly lying
     All dismal talk he puts bravely by:
‘God’s in His heaven,’ you hear him crying,—
     ‘All’s right with creation from star to sty.’”

Mr. Kipling is handled with less tenderness in the “Ballad of Kiplingson” because, being a young man, he had the audacity not to be an individualist cosmopolitan like Shelley and Buchanan, but cared for his country:—

“ ‘Alas and alas,’ the good Saint said, a tear in his eye serene,
‘A Tory at twenty-one! Good God ! At fifty what would you have been!
‘There’s not a spirit now here in Heaven who wouldn’t at twenty-one
Have tried to upset the very Throne, and reform both Sire and Son!’”

Kiplingson retorts that he “is ’cute in almost everything, and has probed Creation through”:—

“ ‘And what have you found?’ the Saint inquired, a frown on his face benign.
‘The Flag of England’! cried Kiplingson, ‘and the thin black penny-a-line.’”

The author of an ode to the glory of Parnell, whom he salutes as Caesar, is consistent in seeing nothing but what is contemptible in the flag of England. And so in an Imperial age the masses of men have not been attracted by the subject- matter of Buchanan’s rough-and-tumble rhetoric and acrid humour, while lovers of poetry can only regret that so much early promise came to so little excellent fruit.

     * The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan. London: Chatto and Windus. [12s.]

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