BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY

Idyls and Legends of Inverburn from The Reader (17 June, 1865 - p.679-80)

     Mr Buchanan has here attempted to set modern life—more especially that of the lower Scotch classes— into poetry. Nor can we regard the attempt as a failure, though it is far from a complete success. To write a novel in verse requires the same great qualifications as are necessary for a dramatist. Mr Buchanan is at times excessively happy in his descriptions of local scenery; shows the power of seizing the traits of child-life; and exhibits now and then, not only humour, but a delicate pathos. Many of these rare qualities, however, are marred by a want of a severer discipline than any to which Mr Buchanan has apparently accustomed himself. The descriptions become at times over-loaded and the humour once or twice degenerates into vulgarism. But, after all, it is the poet himself who must perform the difficult task of criticism—he who without shrinking must mark his own shortcomings, and discover where his strength lies. This a critic can but partially tell him. Mr Buchanan has not only given us promise, but performance. We have purposely abstained from making any quotations from his words, hoping that our readers may be induced to read the original, especially the story of Willie Baird.

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Idyls and Legends of Inverburn from The Guardian (27 June, 1865 - p.6)

Idyls and Legends of Inverburn. By Robert Buchanan, author of “Undertones.”
     London: Strahan. 1865.

     The promise of excellence made in “Undertones” is not sustained in these “Idyls and Legends.” They contain much common-place writing, poetry only by courtesy, and much that is not poetry at all, despite blank verse and measured length of line. To our mind there is a certain dignity of subject and of treatment appropriate to the poet’s art. Mr. Buchanan does violence to such a feeling, and so far, we think, fails as a singer. Turn where we may, passages open to this charge face us. Take a random selection: here is an extract from “The Two Babes:”—

But Robin! .* * and the laddie’s looks were cast
Full modest on his book, his jet black hair
Was neatly comb’d behind his rabbit ears;
His poor old clothes were patch’d and cleanly brush’d,
And butter soft seem’d melting in his mouth,—
And when he met his master’s canker’d gaze,
He blush’d like any maid and seem’d ashamed.

A clever lad was Robin Anderson!
A clever clever lad with fox’s eyes!
A clever clever lad in lambkin’s gear! &c.

Scarcely the stuff, we fancy, out of which to earn an “immortality of fame.” The author of “Undertones” has done, and can do, better, much better, than this.

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London Poems from The New York Times (8 November, 1866)

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE,
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ROBERT BUCHANAN.
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LONDON POEMS. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. London and New-York: ALEXANDER STRAHAN.

     The first thing which strikes us in this book is the publisher’s name identified with “London and New-York.” Such is the present state of our laws relative to the manufacture of books that a London house can compete successfully, in our own market, and find it a lucrative enterprise to maintain branch houses on this side of the Atlantic. We merely note the facts, although they are a fruitful subject for comment, especially in connection with other facts stated by ANTHONY TROLLOPE in his recent paper read before the Social Science Congress at Manchester in regard to an International Copyright Law. All who cherish an intelligent and patriotic interest in the claims and progress of American literature and of popular education, in the broadest sense of the phrase—on this continent—should unite to secure a revision of our laws, taxes and tariffs, so far as literary property and book manufacture in the United States are concerned. Meantime, let us turn to the work before us.
     This is a very neat volume of neat rhymes. Its fair pages, clear type and versified narratives are winsome to the eye. The quotations from Greek, Latin and German indicate culture, and suggest intellectual discipline. The dedication to the accomplished editor of the Athenæum, now on a visit to this country, evinces a manly gratitude for early words of kindly recognition and literary encouragement. The plan and scope of the volume are well fitted to propitiate criticism, inasmuch as they include subjects open to daily observation and near to average sympathies,—subjects such as would naturally attract a young poet dwelling in a large city, and such as sympathetic observation can legitimately develop and illustrate; subjects, in a word, which might easily inspire a fresh and kindly bard; and therefore yielding a favorable contrast to those remote and conventional themes so often chosen by inexperienced but ambitious singers—not from affinity, but audacity. Thus predisposed in the author’s favor by the aspect and aim of the volume before us, we sit down to its perusal in a candid and gracious mood. We find a command of language and rhyme, a fluent, and, on the whole, natural expressiveness and considerable narrative skill; many of the stories are pleasant reading—much of the art displayed is pretty and graceful. There is a series of episodes or incidents, characters and phases of London life—drawn from its toilsome, poor, patient, reckless or ruined classes; and described in the simple language of colloquial heroics, easy ballad-metre or Wordsworthian blank verse. The titles give a not inadequate idea of the kind of local histories and anecdotes thus versified: Such as “The Little Milliner,” “Artist and Model,” “Attorney Sneak,” “Nell,” and “Liz.” Familiar and often literal in style, sometimes quite musical and usually ingenious either in the details or plot, these “London Poems” are quite readable, and we should think would be popular, especially among readers unfamiliar with English poetry—to whom they will have the charm of novelty. But those who have fondly explored and critically studied that rich and rare field of literature, and who vividly remember the salient characters and scenes of modern English fiction—these “London Poems” will prove reminiscent and familiar rather than fresh and impressive. The subjects, the scenes, the characters, the incidents, often the very ideas and expressions, recall DICKENS, CRABBE, HUNT, HOOD, Mrs. BROWNING, and others, who have sought to apply the “sad music of humanity” to the mysterious vicissitudes of humble toil, sin and indigence. “Barbara Gray,” “Nell” and “Liz,”—the “Blind Linnet” of the poor seamstress, the pet starling of the poor tailor, the frugal loves of the “Little Milliner,” and the poor clerk, and of the “Artist and Model”—are conceived in an identical vein, and narrated with more or less imitative skill—as some of CRABBE’S stories, passages of Aurora Leigh and the Princess, or the lyrics of metropolitan misery by HOOD. Despite this family likeness the stories are pleasantly told and prettily versified. The style of versification and narrative tact of the author may be fairly estimated by the following extracts from two of the Poems:

LONDON IN 1864.

Lo! I stand at the gateway of Honor,
     And see the lights flashing within,
And I murmur these songs of the city,
     Its sorrow, its joy, and its sin;
And the sweetness is heavy upon me,
     Though grown of the past and its wrong;
My losses are sure if that sweetness
     Be felt in the soul of the song.
I murmur these songs of the city,
     And cast them as bread on the sea;
And mine eyes are dim with the singing
     That is all in the world to me!

*     *     *     *     *     *

THE LITTLE MILLINER.

*     *     *     *     *     *

     ’Twas when the Spring was coming, when the snow
Had melted, and fresh winds began to blow,
And girls were selling violets in the town,
That suddenly a fever struck me down.
The world was changed, the sense of life was pain’d,
And nothing but a shadow-land remained;
Death came in a dark mist and look’d at me,
I felt his breathing, though I could not see,
But heavily I lay and did not stir,
And had strange images and dreams of her. 
Then came a vacancy: with feeble breath,
I shiver’d under the cold touch of Death,
And swoon’d among strange visions of the dead,
When a voice call’d from Heaven, and he fled;
And suddenly I waken’d, as it seem’d,
From a deep sleep wherein I had not dream’d.

     And it was night, and I could see and hear,
And I was in the room I held so dear,
And unaware, stretch’d out upon my bed,
I hearken’d for a footstep overhead.

     But all was hush’d. I look’d around the room,
And slowly made out shapes amid the gloom.
The wall was redden’d by a rosy light,
A faint fire flicker’d, and I knew ’twas night,
Because below there was a sound of feet
Dying away along the quiet street,—
When, turning my pale face and sighing low,
I saw a vision in the quiet glow:
A little figure, in a cotton gown,
Looking upon the fire and stooping down,
Her side to me, her face illumed, she eyed 
Two chestnuts burning slowly, side by side,—
Her lips apart, her clear eyes strain’d to see,
Her little hands clasp’d tight around her knee,
The firelight gleaming on her golden head,
And tinting her white neck to rosy red,
Her features bright, and beautiful, and pure,
With childish fear and yearning half demure.

     Oh, sweet, sweet dream! I thought, and strain’d mine eyes,
Fearing to break the spell with words and sighs.

     Softly she stoop’d, her dear face sweetly fair,
And sweeter since a light like love was there,
Brightening, watching, more and more elate,
As the nuts glow’d together in the grate,
Crackling with little jets of fiery light,
Till side by side they turn’d to ashes white,—
Then up she leapt, her face cast off its fear
For rapture that itself was radiance clear,
And would have clapp’d her little hands in glee,
But, pausing, bit her lips and peep’d at me,
And met the face that yearn’d on her so whitely,
And gave a cry and trembled, blushing brightly,  
While, raised on elbow, as she turn’d to flee,
“Polly!” I cried,—and grew as red as she!

     It was no dream!—for soon my thoughts were clear,
And she could tell me all, and I could hear:
How in my sickness friendless I had lain,
How the hard people pitied not my pain;
How, in despite of what bad people said,
She left her labours, stopp’d beside my bed,
And nursed me, thinking sadly I would die;
How, in the end, the danger pass’d me by;
How she had sought to steal away before
The sickness pass’d, and I was strong once more.
By fits she told the story in mine ear,
And troubled all the telling with a fear
Lest by my cold man’s heart she should be chid,
Lest I should think her bold in what she did;
But, lying on my bed, I dared to say,
How I had watch’d and loved her many a day,
How dear she was to me, and dearer still
For that strange kindness done while I was ill,
And how I could but think that Heaven above
Had done it all to bind our lives in love.
And Polly cried, turning her face away,   
And seem’d afraid, and answer’d “yea” nor “nay;”
Then stealing close, with little pants and sighs,
Look’d on my pale thin face and earnest eyes,
And seem’d in act to fling her arms about
My neck, then, blushing, paused, in fluttering doubt,
Last, sprang upon my heart, sighing and sobbing,—
That I might feel how gladly hers was throbbing!

     It is not as a creditable caterer to public taste or the rhymed requisites of the day that we challenge ROBERT BUCHANAN’S originality—but as a new aspirant for the Laurel, as a young poet whose promise should be hailed with cordiality but not without discrimination. The miscellaneous poems appended to the “London Poems” are chiefly ballads, which have the old ring of LOCKHART’S, and sometimes remind us of ROBERT BROWNING. In subject and legend, more or less striking, they are often skillfully versified and gracefully turned.
     We have dwelt, in this and previous instances, upon the rifacimento school of modern poets, because we honor the craft and delight in the glory of the Muse—and would fain see her wooed with absolute freshness and freedom and not second-hand, and by virtue of sympathetic and artistic facility, rather than individual emprise and affinity. “These,” says ROBERT BUCHANAN, in his preface, “are the last of my Poems of Probation wherein I have fairly hinted what I am trying to assimilate in mind and thought.” So be it; only let the assimilation be directly from inward experience or outward observation—not through the medium of other, however gifted, interpreters of nature and of life.

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North Coast and Other Poems from The Times (12 December, 1867 - p.5)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has every reason to be well pleased with the manner in which his latest collection of poems has been put before the public. (North Coast and other Poems. Routledge and Sons.) The illustrations are by the Brothers Dalziel, J. Wolf, A. B. Houghton, and other artists, and they are all of great merit. The sea sketches to “Meg Blane” are vivid and powerful, and two drawings, of first-rate excellence, among others, accompany the poems called the “Exiles of Oona”—one on page 211, by Mr. W. Small, and the other on page 213, by Mr. J. Wolf. The poems are fully worthy of the care which has been expended upon them.

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The Book of Orm: a prelude to the epic from The Scotsman (28 July, 1870 - p. 6)

THE BOOK OF ORM: A Prelude to the Epic. By Robert Buchanan. Strahan & Co.

“READ these faint runes of mystery.” We have done so, and with what feeling? There is but one way of expressing it, and it is by saying that “The Book of Orm” impresses one precisely as music heard at a distance. Too far away to catch the meaning of the sound, unable to follow the rises and falls and modulations, the ear is gratified by the stream of pleasingly monotonous sound, and may extract greater delight from this soothing monotony than from the quick and fatiguing successions of varied notes. And the indistinct imagery, the vague meaning, the repetitions, of “The Book of Orm” act precisely like distant music. We know not very well what is meant; we nevertheless listen with a pleasure felt we hardly know why. Take, for example, these verses:—

“Yet mark me closely!
     Strongly I swear,
Seen or seen not,
     The Face is there:
When the Veil is clearest
     And sunniest,
Closest and nearest
     The Face is prest;
But when, grown weary
With long downlooking,
The Face withdrawing
     For a time is gone,
The great Veil darkens,
And ye see full clearly
Glittering numberless
     The gems thereon.
For the lamp of his features
Divinely burning,
Shines, and suffuses
     The Veil with light,
And the Face, drawn backward
With that deep sighing
Ye hear in the gloaming,
     Leaves ye the Night.
     Thus it befell to men
Graveward they journeyed,
From waking to sleeping,
     In doubt and in fear,
Evermore hoping,
Evermore seeking,
Nevermore guessing
     The Master so near:
Making strange idols,
Rearing fair Temples,
Crying, denying,
Questioning, dreaming,
Nevermore certain
     Of God and his grace,—
Evermore craving
To look on a token,
To gaze on the Face.”

“The Book of Orm” we can imagine delighting one of mystical mind. He could dream what he liked into these vague words. There are so much raw material to be worked up into whatever shape he pleases, and one may make of it what one pleases.

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Napoleon Fallen: a lyrical drama from The Scotsman (10 January, 1871 - p. 5)

NAPOLEON FALLEN. A Lyrical Drama. By Robert Buchanan. London: Strahan & Co.

MR BUCHANAN has here made a bold seizure of a prominent character in modern history for poetic handling. He feels that he has been courageous even to temerity, saying truly in his preface that “ardent politicians, who would have let me have my own way with Tiberius or Peter the Great, or even Bonaparte, are certain to rate me roundly if I disagree with them about Louis Napoleon.” But others besides “ardent politicians” may question the good taste of making a living man subject of such artistic treatment as Mr Buchanan here gives the Emperor. He would say, in reply, perhaps, that Napoleon is dead for history; to which again Imperialists would probably rejoin, “nous verrons.” He revived before, after Strasbourg, and Boulogne, and Ham; and who shall say that a second lease of power may not yet be his? And, be this as it may, is it fair to practise this sort of dramatic vivisection in any case?
     But, leaving such nice questions, it must be allowed that Mr Buchanan has handled his topic at once with much dramatic vigour and great lyrical grace. He is a little too fond of blood and swords, fire and famine, death and wounds: but of these, he may well plead, Europe is now full. Here is a striking scene representing Napoleon asleep at Wilhelmshohe, with his good genius—the spirit of his mother—and his many evil genii contending in his dream. It is a fair specimen of the mixed vigour and tenderness of the poet’s fancies:—

Night. NAPOLEON sleeping. Chorus of SPIRITS.

A VOICE.

What shapes are ye whose shades darken his rest this night?

CHORUS.

Cold from the grave we come, out of the dark to the light.

A VOICE.

Voices ye have that moan, and eyes ye have that weep,
Ah, woe for him who feels such shadows round his sleep!

CHORUS.

Tho’ thou wert buried and dead, still would we seek and find thee,
Fly where thou wilt, thou shalt hear feet from the tomb behind thee.
Sleep? shall thy soul have sleep? Nay, but it shall be shaken.
Gather around him there, spirits of earth and air, trouble him till he awaken!

A VOICE.

Who in imperial raiment, darkly frowning, stand,
Laurel-leaves in their hair, sceptred, yet sword in hand?

ANOTHER VOICE.

Who in their shadow looms, woman-eyed, woe-begone,
And bares his breast to show the piteous wounds thereon?

CHORUS.

Peace, they are kings; they are crown’d; kings, tho’ their realms have departed;
Realms of the grave they have, and they walk in the same weary-hearted.
Sleep? Did their souls have sleep? Nay, for like his was their being.
Gather around him there, spirits of earth and air, wake him to hearing and seeing.

SPIRIT OF HORTENSE.

Woe! O ye shades unblest,
Leave ye my child to rest,
     Leave me here weeping.
This night, at least, have grace,
See, the poor weary face
     Child-like in sleeping.

SPIRIT OF CAESAR.

Greater than thou, I fell: thy day is o’er.
Thou reap the world with swords! thou wear the robe I wore!
Back to thy books and read again how, in his hour of pride,
At the foot of Pompey’s statue, slain by slaves, Imperial Caesar died.

SPIRIT OF HORTENSE.

Woe! From his bed depart,
Ye who first taught his heart
     Bloody ambition.
Back! he is God’s in sleep;
Ah, in his heart burn deep,
     Pain and contrition.

SPIRIT OF BONAPARTE.

Greater than thou, I fell; die, and give place.
Thou take from my cold grave the glory and the grace!
Thou rise victorious where I fell! Back to thy books, thou blind!
Read how I watched the weary Sea, less vast than my Imperial mind.

NAPOLEON (in sleep.)

Dost thou too frown, dark Spirit of our house?
Scorn be thy meed for scorn. Thou hadst become
A theme for nameless bards, a lullaby
For country folk to rock their cradles with,
A sound, a voice, and echo of a name
Dying most melancholy. In my mouth
Thy name became a trumpet once again
And woods and wilds, to earth’s remotest peaks,
Echoed “Napoleon.” Cursed be thy name.
Cursed be thou this day! . . . O mother! mother!

SPIRIT OF HORTENSE.

Father in Heaven, they rise!—
Spirits with dreadful eyes
     Hither are creeping.
Thrice on this brow I write
Thy blessed Cross this night,
     Moaning and weeping.

A VOICE.

What Spirit art thou, with cold still smile and face like snow?

SPIRIT.

Orsini; and avenged. Too soon I struck the blow.

A VOICE.

And thou, with bloody breast, and eyes that roll in pain?

SPIRIT.

I am that Maximilian, miserably slain.

A VOICE.

And ye, O shadowy things, featureless, wild, and stark?

CHORUS.

We are the nameless ones whom he hath slain in the dark!

A VOICE.

Ye whom this man hath domm’d, Spirits, are ye all there;

CHORUS.

Not yet: we come, we come—we darken all the air.

A VOICE.

O latest come, and what are ye? Why do ye moan and call?

CHORUS.

O hush! O hush! we come to speak the bitterest curse of all.

HORTENSE.

Woe!—for the spirits wild,
Woman and man and child,
     Hither are creeping.
Thrice on his brow I write
Thy blessed Cross this night,
     Moaning and weeping.

CHORUS.

     Ours is the bitterest curse of all:—for we
     Are Souls that perished, foully slain by thee.
Ah! would that thou hadst slain our bodies too, like theirs!
     We ate of shame and sorrow till we ceased.
     We drank all poisonous things at thy foul feast—
Back from the grave we come, with curses deep, not prayers.

     With sin and death our mothers’ milk was sour,
     The womb wherein we grew from hour to hour
Gather’d pollution dark from the polluted frame—
     Beside our cradles naked Infamy
     Caroused and Lust sat smiling hideously—
We grew like evil weeds apace, and knew not shame.

     With incantations and with spells most rank,
     The fount of Knowledge where we might have drank,
And learnt to love the taste, was hidden from our eyes;
     And if we learnt to spell out written speech,
     Thy slaves were by, and we had books to teach
Falsehood and Filth and Sin, Blasphemies, Scoffs, and Lies.

     We drank of poison, ev’n as flowers drink dew;
     We ate and drank of poison till we grew
Noxious, polluted, black, like that whereon we fed;
     We never felt the light and the free wind—
     Sunless we grew, and deaf, and dumb, and blind—
How should we dream of God, souls that were slain and dead?

     Love, with her sister Reverence, passed our way
     As angels pass, unseen, but did not stay—
We had no happy homes wherein to bid them dwell;
     We turned from God’s blue heaven with eyes of beast,
     We heard alike the atheist and the priest,
And both these lied alike to smooth our hearts for Hell.

     Of some both Soul and Body died; of most
     The Body fatten’d on, while the poor ghost,
Prison’d from the sweet day, was withering in woe;
     Some robed in purple quaff’d their fatal cup,
     Some out of rubied goblets drank it up—
We did not know God was; but now, O God, we know.

     Ah woe, ah woe, for those thy sceptre swayed,
     Woe most for those whose bodies, fair arrayed,
Insolent, sat at ease, smiled at thy feet of pride;
     Woe for the harlots, with their painted bliss!
     Woe for the red wine-oozing lips they kiss!
Woe for the Bodies that lived, woe for the Souls that died!

     Lambs of thy flock, but oh! not white and fair;
     Beasts of the field, tamed to thy hand we were;
Not men and women—nay, not heirs to light and truth;
     Some fattening, ate and fed, some lay at ease;
     Some fell and linger’d of a long disease;
But all look’d on the ground—beasts of the field forsooth.

     It is too late—it is too late this night—
     To bid us live again in the fair light:
Back from the grave we come, with curses deep, not prayers.
     Ours is a darker doom than theirs, who died
     Strewing with blood the pathway of thy pride—
Ah, would that thou hadst slain our bodies too, like theirs!

SEMI-CHORUS I.

Tho’ thou wert buried and dead, still would they seek thee and find thee.
Fly where thou wilt thou shalt hear feet from the grave behind thee.

HORTENSE.

Woe! woe! woe!

SEMI-CHORUS II.

Ye who beheld dim light thro’ the chink of the dungeon gleaming,
And watch’d your shade on the wall, till it took a sad friend’s seeming,
Ye who in dark disguise fled from the doom and the danger,
And dragging a patriot’s chain died in the land of the stranger.
Men whom he set aside to die like beasts in the traces!
Women he set aside for the trade of polluting embraces!
Say, shall his soul have sleep? or shall it be darken’d and shaken?

CHORUS.

Gather around him there, spirits of earth and air, trouble him till he awaken.

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Saint Abe and His Seven Wives: a Tale of Salt Lake City from The New York Times (26 January, 1872)

SAINT ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES. New York: GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS.

     This is a poetical romance drawn from experiences of life at Salt Lake City. The characters are capitally sketched in a light but truthful manner, and the entire poem is literally mined with concealed humor, which, with slight penetration, produces the most startling mirth explosions. It may be urged by some in way of objection that the conclusion drawn from the sorrows and trials consequent to polygamy is not carried to its highest possible ground; but then every one knows what the deductions would be from a strictly moral standpoint, while it is both novel and gratifying to know that the condition is far from an agreeable one, even when judged by the easy cynical tests of a modern man of the world.

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Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour from The Scotsman (11 May, 1882 - p. 6)

     The right of Mr Robert Buchanan to a high place among living poets has long since been recognised. This volume of Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour, if it will not do much to exalt the reputation of the author of “White Rose and Red,” serves to show that his hand has lost nothing of its cunning, and that he has at command the same fertility and glow of conception, the airy imaginativeness, the power of emotional expression, and the felicity of epithet which won favour for his earlier efforts. The first half of the volume is occupied with what Mr Buchanan calls “Dramatic Ballads and Romances,” and in these his peculiar gifts of fancy and expression find their fullest display. In some of them—”The Lights of Leith” and “Fra Giacomo,” for example—we have pure tragedy, embodied in verses of befitting force and intensity. “The Wedding of Shon Maclean,” which first appeared several years ago in one of the magazines, is an example of Mr Buchanan’s mastery of form; it is like the blast of the bagpipes put into verse, and is irradiated by genuine humour. In “Phil Blood’s Leap” we have the poet in another mood; it is an episode of the rough life and violent passions of the Western mining communities, told with all Bret Harte’s graphic strength, and with more than his metrical power. The most remarkable poem in the volume, however, is “The Devil’s Peepshow”—not only because of its quaint and catching rhythm, but also because of the subtlety with which its inner meaning is suggested. It proclaims, in allegorical fashion, the revolt of modern thought and belief against the old sulphureous doctrines with which for ages the Churches have striven to terrify mankind into submission. The lyrical ballads, which form the second part of the volume are for the most part picturesque in form and thought; but they do not possess the strength or the originality of the longer poems, and do not impress the reader as the natural expression of Mr Buchanan’s inspiration.

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The Earthquake: or Six days and a Sabbath from The Scotsman (1 January, 1886 - p. 7)

     Mr Robert Buchanan, in his new poem The Earthquake, has shown royal disregard of the charge of plagiarism. The skeleton plan of it is as old as Chaucer and Boccaccio, and the “Decameron” also seems to have yielded the central idea. For details of scenery and stage “properties,” Mr Buchanan has been beholden to other sources. The “Priory ruins” on the banks of the Tweed where the tales pass from mouth to mouth amid banter and argument suggest the Abbey ruins in Tennyson’s “Princess;” and for the mailed figure of “Sir Ralph,” we have the torso of a faun. All this does not deprive Mr Buchanan of the praise of originality in the choice and treatment of his subject. A shock of earthquake has passed through London, and the great city is shaken to the foundations of its society. At Limehouse a factory has fallen; a fissure has opened down to the sewers in one of the streets—

                    On the western side
Of great St Paul’s, by folk descried at dawn
A running crack like forkèd lightning ran—
Strange as the fabled writing on the wall,
And like that writing ominous of doom.

A second, but less severe shock follows, and London is seized with panic. Nobody seems to have been hurt; but the great metropolis is deserted; only

In the City still and in the Marts
The lights of commerce flickered timorously;
A few pale men still walked about on ‘Change,
And in the darkened vaults of dusty banks
Gaunt slaves still guarded gold.

Among the first to flee, was the Lady Barbara of Kensington—

                              Barbara the learned
Flower of Mid-Lothian and the agnostic Queen,
Who, full of culture to the finger tips,
A Scots Earl’s daughter, born ’neath Arthur’s Seat
Young, bonnie, winsome, and a poetess,
Married the little Yankee Millionaire,
And flitted from the North to Babylon.

In the North she seeks refuge from the doom impending over London, and about her gathers a motley crowd of the worshippers of new cults, like strange animals fleeing, as before another flood, to the Ararat on the Tweed:—

In flocks they came, the apostles of the creeds,
Poets and painters and philosophers,
Teachers and preachers, lions, lionesses,
Long-haired æsthetics, long-winded scientists.

Barbara is constituted Queen of the new “Court of Learning,” and since she is “nothing if she is not philosophical,” and since

The world is old and gray before its time;
And that blind god which used to run before
Its happy feet, and wave the golden torch,
Beckoning with smiles, now sits as Darwin’s ape
Upon its shoulder, whispering “Vanity”—

she proposes that

                    Our new Decameron
Take as its theme no little pasteboard god
Pink Cupid or bright-eyed Saint Valentine,
But God himself, the riddle of the world.

Straightway the lions and lionesses, among whom we recognise under thin disguises, voices and lineaments of Ruskin, Spencer, Swinburne, Walt Whitman, and other teachers, preachers, and poets of the age, attracted by the novelty or the profanity of the idea, open their mouths in acclaim. But, as it has been noticed that in the presence of danger the lion and the lamb will lie down peaceably together, the apostles of the creeds are found to be in wonderfully tolerant as well as outspoken mood. Christianity suffers rough and contemptuous treatment at the hands of “plump Pantheists,” “pallid Pessimists,” and “positive Positivists,” and is not much helped by such advocates as Bishop Eglantine or Bishop Primrose. But only once, after a peculiarly defiant utterance of “Sparkle, Professor of the Institute, a wandering priest of Science”—an utterance, as we are not surprised to learn, “by some deemed blasphemous”—did there arise “angry cries” and a timorous crowding together of the lions, “as if fearing the earthquake’s jaws might open under them.” The present volume contains only three days’ sittings of the “new Decameron”—or rather “Heptameron”—ranged under the titles of “Renaissance,” “Anthropomorphism,” and “This World;” it is too soon yet, therefore, to pronounce opinion on the scope of the poem, and the success of the poet in presenting the different aspects of the “Great Problem.” In the tales and lyrical interludes Mr Buchanan is almost professedly imitative rather than original; he would probably decline to hold himself personally responsible for the super-subtle sensuousness of “Julia Cytherea,” or the Pagan morality of “Pan at Hampton Court,” any more than for the audacious arrogance of the “Soliloquy of the Grand Etre.” The “Grand Etre” speaks the jargon of science in the spirit of Heine:—

I am Lord of the World. I am God, being Man,
     In the night I began.
Then grew from a cell to a soul without plan.

As far as the limits of Time and of space
     I my footsteps may trace,
Wending onwards and upwards from race back to race.

I am God, being Man. In my glory I blend
     Life and death without end.
If the void hold my peer, let Him speak, I attend.

Passages of great sweetness and of considerable strength abound; the poetry of the “Earthquake” will indeed be much more to the liking of the majority of readers than its philosophy. The May-day lilt of the Hampton Court idyll makes “music in the blood,” though its unabashed Bohemianism causes Lady Barbara’s pretty cousins from Annandale to blush and “titter amid their curls.” The “Voyage of Magellan” has a fine lyrical roll and swell like a South Sea billow—

With the frost upon his armour, like a skeleton of steel,
Stands the Master, waiting, watching, clad in cold from head to heel,
Loud his voice rings through the vapours, ordering all and leading on,
Till the bergs, before his finger, fall back ghostlike and are gone.

Once again before our vision sparkles Ocean wide and free,
With the sun’s red ball of crimson resting on the rim of sea,
“Lo, the sun!” he laughs exulting—“still he beckons far away,
Earth is round, and on its circle evermore we chase the day.”

Was not Mr Buchanan’s memory haunted here by

We know the merry world is round
And we can wander evermore?

To our taste the fine old wine of poetry and romance is more palatable and healthy, even with the rank flavour it sometimes possessed in Boccaccio, than when mixed, after Mr Buchanan’s blend, with the vitriolic acid distilled from the controversies of the creeds and ‘isms.

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The Outcast: a rhyme for the time from The Scotsman (31 August, 1891 - p. 2)

NEW POETRY

     Mr Robert Buchanan had a miraculous escape from being born a genius. Sometimes when he is seen with his eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, glancing from heaven to earth and from earth to the abyss, and apostrophising with melodious volubility God, and Man, and the Devil, one is ready to jump to the belief that he is a heaven-sent poet with an inspired message. But after listening to him it presently becomes clear that he is all the time speaking of and to himself, and that Deity, Humanity, and Diabolus—the “spirit that denies and spurns”—are but aliases of Mr Buchanan. There are amazingly clever and wonderfully beautiful things in The Outcast, but, granting that it may not be quite fair to judge the whole by the part, one fails to see in it the promise that “The Amours of Vanderdecken,” when that great opus is complete, will take good second rank as poetry—to say nothing of philosophy—after “Faust” or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” There must be more in inspiration of the highest kind than is implied in the utmost measure of fluency and versatility; and the singer, if his singing is to be really true to nature and endowed with the hope of immortality, must try to forget both himself and the critics. Mr Buchanan’s new poem is proof, if any were needed, that he has talent enough to furnish forth a host of minor versifiers, and yet not sufficient power of concentration and self-forgetfulness to become a really great bard. The new Flying Dutchman is only the poet himself, soliloquising. It is true that he puts the bolder and naughtier—some old-fashioned people will say the more profane and nasty—sayings within “inverted commas” as the words and opinions for which Vanderdecken is to be held responsible. But, after all, it is only a question of degree—and not always of degree—between the language of the guest and the host—between the Outcast Spirit and his medium. If the reader does not fully understand the nature of the Diary kept by the Accursed—a parchment written, “just for a joke,” in his own red blood, and left with Mr Buchanan to be edited and published by instalments to the gaping world—it is not his editor’s fault. He has written a “Proem,” a “Prelude,” an Inscription to the Reader, promising him, among other things, “curious and often improper Reflections on Men, Manners, and Morals;” an Interlude, an Epilogue, and Dedicatory Addresses, both in prose and in verse. In these the poet almost necessarily repeats himself; but, along with the particulars of Vanderdecken’s sin and early career, we gather a good deal of information concerning the subsequent and still untranscribed adventures of this strange hero, and are allowed to do more than guess at his ultimate fate. As a dramatist and playwright, the author ought to know the danger of thus anticipating the course and end of his marvellous drama of Sea and Land, and of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, which he is careful to inform us is intended to be taken seriously, and not to be read as mere horseplay and flouting of Providence and the stream of Modern Tendency. Philip Vanderdecken makes his entry in a manner not at all new, but in a garb in which one would scarcely have expected to find him. It is a London masher, an intellectual dandy,

                    Elegant of mien,
Tall, white shirt fronted and dress suited,
Faultlessly gloved and neatly booted,
Who, paletot upon his arm,
Opera hat upon his head,

smiles at the poet’s start of vague alarm when he enters his study after receiving, in answer to his knock, an invitation to come in. It is the Flying Dutchman, who, in the intervals allowed him to go ashore, has been reading more than is good for him in modern literature, and passing his time in dubious social pleasures. Hardly has he handed over his manuscript to Mr Buchanan, and exchanged confidences by which they discover that they have both been damnably ill-used by Providence and the Critics, when his time runs out and there comes over him a sea change—

                     Lo, his cheek
Grew frozen, and though his dark eye burned
With wicked fire, his body grew
     Bent as with centuries of care:
Transformed he shrank before my view,
     With snowy head and sad grey hair!
Yea, e’en his raiment seem’d to change
To something ancient, quaint, and strange—
Rags blown with wind and torn with storm,
That round a skeletonian form
Clung wild as weeds.

We are to recognise in this enigmatic shape the Modern Spirit,

Holding within his ringed white hands
The Book of Doubt, the Writ of Reason.

He has been damned through reading Spinoza, but there is hope for him if he is able to discover, in the interludes of his sojourn on solid land—a grace granted him by special intercession of the Madonna—a woman capable of softening and saving him by her self-sacrificing love. This discovery, we learn, he is at last to make, but not until he has passed through many sad experiences, and uttered opinions which, besides being made salt and strong with improprieties and impieties, have sometimes the still more profound fault of being nonsense. His first probation will seem to many by no means a hard one; he spends what may be called, from the side of the flesh, “a good time” in an Eden of the Pacific. Afterwards he is to be sent to Germany, Rome, Paris, London, and heaven, or the other place, knows where else before he discovers Love, the universal solvent. Were there not so many signs of serious purpose—so much also of noble poetry—in the piece, one might suspect Mr Buchanan of trying his hand at a new kind of “shocker”—one too long, however, as well as too strong, to hit a popular taste.

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The Outcast: a rhyme for the time from The Times (3 September, 1891 - p.6)

     In “A Letter Dedicatory to C. W. S. in Western America,” appended to his new poem, THE OUTCAST: A Rhyme for the Time (Chatto and Windus), Mr. Robert Buchanan almost absolves the critic from his task and discharges it for him. “At 19 years of age,” he tells us, “after having been educated in independence, I was tossed out on the stormy sea of literature, where I have been busy ever since, beating this way and that, often almost sunk by authorized gunboats or piratical dhows, and never finding a fair wind to waft me to the Fortunate Isles. I have since had the usual experience of original men—my worst work has been received with more or less toleration and my best work misunderstood or neglected; while the self-authorized critical pilots who haunt the shallows of journalism have agreed that I am a factious and opinionated mariner, doomed like my own Dutchman to eternal damnation, because like my prototype I have once or twice been provoked to violent language. For nearly a generation I have suffered a constant literary persecution.” And in a subsequent passage of the same letter he offers to wager his friend that his book is either universally boycotted or torn into shreds. If we may assume for a moment the function of the critic without being supposed to adopt the rôle of the persecutor, we should say that the former fate is the more probably of the two, not indeed because Mr. Buchanan is the victim, as he strangely fancies, of a constant literary persecution, but because his poem is in our purblind judgment dull and tedious. “Yet it is a live thing,” he tells us, “part of the very seed of my living soul,” and, as for its “morality,” which he thinks may shock some poor groundlings, “I would read every line of it to the woman I loved, to her whose purity was most sacred to me”—an ordeal which would rather attest the endurance of the lady than the merit of the poem. Surely Mr. Buchanan takes himself too seriously. He is a versatile man of letters who occasionally exhibits flashes of genuine inspiration. But his airs of the persecuted prophet are insufferable, and “The Outcast” is a very mediocre performance.

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The Wandering Jew: a Christmas carol from The Penny Illustrated Paper (14 January,1893 -p.3)

Mr. Buchanan’s “Wandering Jew.”

     Just as I sat down to write these paragraphs a press copy of M. Robert Buchanan’s new poem, “The Wandering Jew,” came to hand. I have met that Israelite at various times and places. My first acquaintance with him was in the pages of Eugene Sue, when the weird figure was strangely mixed up with the horrors of the Paris slums. Then he appeared in a romance by Dr. Croly, called

“Salathiel.”

I had the pleasure of knowing the rector of Walbrook, and used to go to the old church by the Mansion House to hear him preach. There were noble passages in his “Salathiel.” Next I found my old friend in the pages of Heine, the German poet with a French style. Again I met with the Irrepressible Israelite in a sort of cantata set to music by Meyerbeer. Anon he turned up in Shelley’s poems, and in the verses of three or four later bards. Meanwhile, after fiction and poetry had done best or worst with “The Wandering Jew,” the stage got hold of him, and at last people began to regard him as

A Hebrew “Bogie Man,”

and would have no more of him. I thought the poor wanderer had possibly, like “The Flying Dutchman,” been redeemed by some gentle maiden; but it seems not. Mr. Robert Buchanan has made a wondrous discovery. His “Wandering Jew” is the “Founder of Christianity” himself, who still walks the earth, grey with accumulated years and lamentations over human sorrows. The poet mixes Him up with

Buddha, Hypatia, Mahomet,

&c., and makes altogether as strange and incoherent a poem as I have ever seen. I expect there will be trenchant reviews of the latest “Wandering Jew.”

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The Wandering Jew from The Guardian (17 January, 1893 - p.9)

The Wandering Jew: A Christmas Carol. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.
     London: Chatto and Windus. 8vo, pp. viii. 151.

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has been so long now at the practice of verse-writing that it would be very strange indeed if he were to produce any poem entirely new in kind. As a matter of fact, any critical reader of his work who is told that the “Wandering Jew,” who is the hero of this piece, is not our old friend Ahasuerus at all (though he appears), but Christ, and that a sort of trial of the Saviour before a court with Death for judge and a long string of persons from Judas Iscariot to Jean Calas as witnesses for the prosecution, could probably anticipate what it is like. To criticise it without an appearance of yea-nay and facing-both-ways is not easy. Mr. Buchanan has, and always has had, some of the requirements of the poet, and those not the commonest nor the easiest to attain. He has a powerful though rather melodramatic imagination, a very considerable command of verse, which, though rarely polished, has vigour, fervour, and sweep, and a certain distinct touch of mystical passion which no one who remembers the “Ballad of Judas Iscariot” will deny, and which has often been exhibited since that ballad. On the other hand, he has no power of self-criticism; he is very deficient both in taste and in logic; his boisterous fluency is a terrible snare to him; and he has followed to his hurt the most dangerous of all models to a person of his stamp—Victor Hugo. He himself will probably take it as a compliment, and the discerning reader will at once perceive the proportions of praise and blame in the remark when we say that the “Wandering Jew” is very like a minor Hugonic poem without the intoxication which even at his worst Hugo knew how to produce by sheer dint of his mastery of rhythm and language. That the orthodox Christian will call it blasphemous and offensive, and that the logical Agnostic will call it fantastically inconsistent and inconclusive, are matters which are not quite minor: for the truth of the second objection cuts away any possible defence to the first. If the poem is a formal indictment of Christianity it must state the charges intelligibly, give proper venues, &c. for the counts, and tender us a rather better list of witnesses than opposition Prophets like Mahomet and Buddha, persecutors like Nero or like Julian, and open rebels to every precept of Christ like the Papal lovers of Marozia or of Vanozza, and the unjust judges who sentenced Calas. If, on the other hand, we are to take the thing poetically, it will have to be objected that, despite some verse of merit, the whole wants concentration and condensation, that the scenario is very obscure, and that the machinery is wholly incomprehensible. In short, the whole thing once more shows Mr. Buchanan’s besetting sin of crudity, a fault by no means uncommon in the best wine and the best poets when both are young, but fatal to both poets and wine when they ought to have and have not outgrown it.

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The Wandering Jew from The Times (19 January, 1893 - p.7)

     In THE WANDERING JEW, a Christmas Carol (Chatto and Windus), Mr. Buchanan seems to us to have essayed a task that would have taxed to the utmost the poetic genius of a Dante and a Milton combined. The Wandering Jew of Mr. Buchanan’s apocalyptic vision is the Redeemer himself, who is arraigned before a mystic tribunal, accused of all the woes, and sins, and tragedies, all the delusions and disappointments of the 19 centuries of Christian history, and condemned to the desolate immortality of an everlasting outcast.
          Since thou hast quicken’d what thou canst not kill,
          Awaken’d famine thou canst never still,
          Spoken in madness, prophesied in vain,
          And promised what no thing of clay shall gain,
          Thou shalt abide while all things ebb and flow,
          Wake while the weary sleep, wait while they go,
          And treading paths no human feet have trod
          Search on still vainly for thy Father, God;
          Thy blessing shall pursue thee as a curse
          To hunt thee, homeless, thro’ the Universe;
          No hand shall slay thee, for no hand shall dare
          To strike the godhead Death itself must spare!
          With all the woes of Earth upon thy head,
          Uplift thy Cross, and go. Thy Doom is said.
This may have a transcendental meaning which we are not sufficiently masters of Mr. Buchanan’s thought to have detected, and so much seems to be rather obscurely suggested in the concluding lines of the poem:–
          And lo! while all men come and pass away,
          That Phantom of the Christ, forlorn and gray,
          Haunteth the Earth with desolate footfall. . . .
          God help the Christ, that Christ may help us all!
But its plain and direct meaning is surely very ill-suited with the title of a Christmas Carol. For the rest, Mr. Buchanan handles the rhymed couplet with no little variety and skill, and, in spite of occasional lapses of taste and diction, he often writes with powerful but ill-regulated rhetoric.

Back to the Bibliography, Poetry or The Wandering Jew

[Richard Le Gallienne’s review of The Wandering Jew in The Daily Chronicle is available in the following section of the site: “Is Christianity Played Out?” - The Wandering Jew controversy. ]

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The New Rome: poems and ballads of our empire from 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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The New Rome from 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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