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BUCHANAN OBITUARIES From The Scotsman (Tuesday, 11 June, 1901 - p.5) THE LATE ROBERT BUCHANAN MR ROBERT BUCHANAN, novelist, poet, and dramatist, has died within a year from the time he was struck down with paralysis. He died yesterday morning at the residence of his sister-in-law, at Streatham, London. For more than two years preceding the attack Mr Buchanan was subject to pneumonia and heart disease following on influenza. Next came insomnia, and the sturdy spirit breaking down, he was plunged into profound fits of melancholia. Two or three months later he made a wonderful recovery, and with characteristic energy resumed his work. He wrote a serial story, finished a play, and was making a rapid progress with his autobiography when the blow fell. He was talking with a friend in the highest spirits, discussing future plans, when, without warning or signal of danger, he was stricken down paralysed and speechless. It is little more than forty years since Mr Buchanan went to London. He told in a pathetic story welcomed by Thackeray, in the then young “Cornhill Magazine,” how he and his companion, having nowhere to lay their heads, passed the night in the park; how his comrade, a poet of promise, caught cold and died. Since then, as author and dramatist, he had been much to the fore. But some four or five years ago, entering into a speculation that proved disastrous, he became bankrupt, the copyright of his works disappearing with his other assets. A pension of £100 was granted him from the civil list by Mr Gladstone.
Though born in Warwickshire in 1841, Robert Buchanan was the son of a native of Kilbarchan, who has been described as “schoolmaster, Socialist, lecturer, and author.” He was educated at the High School and University of Glasgow, where he had for his college companion and intimate friend David Gray, son of a weaver near Kirkintilloch. The friends and literary aspirants (so it is told in “Celebrities of the Century”) concocted the scheme of leaving Glasgow for London. Gray was to carry with him the inevitable poem which was to take the world by storm. Buchanan’s masterpiece was yet in embryo. They set out for the Metropolis, without giving warning to their friends, on the same evening, but, owing to a contretemps, by different lines of railway, and arriving at opposite sides of London about the same hour next morning, their companionship was for the time interrupted. Afterwards they shared a garret until the consumption from which Gray eventually died made his return to Scotland a necessity. He did not live to witness the recognition of his early efforts. In 1860 Mr Buchanan produced a volume of poems, “Undertones,” which attained considerable popularity. It was dedicated to the friend of his college days in a pathetic poem, entitled “To David in Heaven.” Five years later came “Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,” and the following year, “London Poems,” in which Mr Buchanan depicted humble life in the Metropolis with great vividness, much humour, and genuine pathos. The volume proved very popular. It was followed by a translation of Danish ballads and a collection of “Wayside Posies.” In 1871 appeared a lyrical drama, “Napoleon Fallen,” a volume of magazine articles issued under the title of “The Land of Lorne,” containing delightful sketches of Argyllshire; and “The Drama of Kings.” In 1876, under a pseudonym, he contributed a paper to the “Contemporary Review” on “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” which gave rise to much discussion and brought Mr Buchanan into warm controversy with Mr Swinburne. In the end Mr Buchanan withdrew some of his charges. In later years Mr Buchanan was more widely known as a novelist and as a dramatist, some of his stories and plays achieving a great success. His last years, as has been indicated, were somewhat clouded by financial difficulties, and towards the end of 1900, when he was struck down by paralysis, a movement was privately set on foot to raise a fund for the purpose of maintaining him in comfort during his closing days. The Press Association, in giving some details of Mr Buchanan’s illness, says:—In October last, after a morning’s severe cycling exertion, Mr Buchanan was prostrated by a paralytic stroke. Since then he has been completely invalided, totally bereft of the faculty of speech, and with the exception of a few carriage drives, wholly confined to his room. On Friday last he suffered an attack of congestion of the lungs, from which, being too weak to rally, he gradually sank, and passed peacefully away in the presence of his sisters-in-law, Misses Harriet Jay and M’Dear, who have nursed him throughout his illness. Mr Buchanan was a widower, his wife having predeceased him in 1881. He will be interred at Southend in the family grave, in which his wife and mother are buried. A book of his complete poems is even now going through the press. Proofs had been returned only the other day to Messrs Chatto & Windus, the publishers, by Miss Harriet Jay. REMINISCENCES OF MR BUCHANAN. “One who knew Him” writes to last evening’s “Westminster Gazette:”—By the death of Robert Buchanan a stormy and turbulent literary career has been closed. Seen through the public spectacles, he cannot be said to have presented a very amiable personality. He was aggressive, combative, sudden of quarrel, and he often seemed unnecessarily bitter of speech. But to his friends “Bob” Buchanan was a very different man—kindly, genial, and even over-hospitable in the tranquillity of his own home, and little concerned about his quarrels with the world once the street door had been closed upon them. It was the harshness of his early struggles in literature that embittered Buchanan’s life. A little over forty years ago, when a lad of seventeen, he left his father’s office in Glasgow—the office of the old dead-and-gone newspaper, the “Sentinel”—where he made his beginnings in journalism. There, even as a boy, he used to be found lolling back in his father’s easy chair with a smoking cap on his head and a long pipe in his mouth, thinking out plots and verses, and devising marvellous letters to literary celebrities in the hope that he might disclose his young genius to advantage in the high places of literature. In one letter to George Henry Lewes he demanded—“Am I, or am I not, a poet?” while in another to Philip Hamerton he made the formal declaration—“I mean, after Tennyson’s death, to be Poet-Laureate.” Such ambitions would not long permit “Bob” to remain in the stodgy old office of the “Sentinel,” so off to London he determined to go. In this determination he was joined by three other youths from Glasgow. One was David Gray, the young poet, whose death was almost as tragic in its way as Chatterton’s; Charles Gibbon and William Black, the novelists, were the others. Buchanan and Gray were to go by the same train, but somehow they missed each other, and for days they were kept apart in London. Half-a-crown apiece was all they possessed after paying their fares, and to save his humble capital Gray spent his first night under the stars in Hyde Park—an experience which cost him his life, for he caught a chill which sent him home to die. Buchanan, however, found better shelter than was offered by the Hotel de Belle Etoile, and finally put up in a “dear old ghastly bankrupt garret” at 66 Stamford Street, Waterloo Bridge, for which he paid, when he had the money, seven shillings a week. Thither he bore his poor friend Gray, coughing piteously; and thither came such men as Monckton-Milnes, Laurence Oliphant, and Sydney Dobell to see the dying boy-poet.
Nevertheless it was a happy, though hungry, time; and Buchanan once described his splendid isolation, for he made no friends, in his manner:—”What did my isolation matter when I had all the gods in Greece for company, to say nothing of the fays and trolls of Scottish Fairyland? Pallas and Aphrodite haunted that old garret; and on Waterloo Bridge, night after night, I saw Selene and all her nymphs; and when my heart sank low, the fairies of Scotland sang me lullabies! It was a happy time. Sometimes, for a fortnight together, I never had a dinner—save perhaps, on Sunday, when the good-natured Hebe would bring me covertly a slice from the landlord’s joint. My favourite place of refreshment was the Caledonian Coffee House in Covent Garden. Here, for a few coppers, I could feast on coffee and muffins—muffins saturated with butter, and worthy of the gods! Then, issuing forth, full-fed, glowing, oleaginous, I would light my pipe and wander out into the lighted streets.”
Gradually, however, Buchanan made his way into literary journalism. Criticisms for the “Athenæum” brought him half-a-guinea a column, and work for the “Literary Gazette,” then edited by John Morley, fetched him about the same fee. Then he came into contact with Dickens, and contributed to “Household Words.” “Bob” Buchanan could never talk of Dickens without enthusiasm. Here is his memory of the great novelist:—”Two or three times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing Cross Station to the office of ‘All the Year Round’ in Wellington Street, came the good, the only Dickens. From that good genius the poor straggler from fairyland got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was then to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight; the gospel of plum-pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia.”
Buchanan’s first book was a little volume of verse published in Glasgow; others followed in London, and he was in the fair way to making a name as a poet—a name which, judging from the standard of to-day, it is not extravagant to suppose might have given him the coveted Laureateship—when he suddenly became enamoured of fiction, and rushed into print with “The Shadow of the Sword” in 1870, followed by “A Child of Nature,” “God and the Man,” and others, wedged in with all sorts of plays—even a Mormon melodrama entitled “St Abe and His Seven Wives.” Some of Buchanan’s French adaptations, however, made very good plays, notably “A Man’s Shadow,” produced by Mr Beerbohm Tree, which was a version of “Roger La Honte.” Notable also were his renderings into dramatic form of Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe.” His methods of adaptation were interesting. “I never translate and I never extract,” he once told me. “I read the original through twice or perhaps three times, then close the book for ever, and write my play.” He, however, also did a good deal of original work, and wrote a number of Adelphi dramas in collaboration with George R. Sims. “A Society Butterfly” was written for Mrs Langtry.
Robert Buchanan, however, was by no means so conspicuous a figure in literature as he might have been had his talents been better directed. He seemed only to flirt with the muses, so that we have a composite figure of a poet-novelist-dramatist with no outstanding merit in the combination save that of uncommon versatility. He lacked definite aim in his work, and therein lay his failure to achieve the highest success. Then his frank outspokenness gave him in a large degree the gentle art of making enemies. He hated hero-worship; indeed, he had no love for gods of any kind, so that when Rudyard Kipling and Lord Kitchener became the heroes of their hours Buchanan must needs attack them—not with a modest rapier like a Christian, but with the sword Excalibur.
In his closing years he became sadly embittered with his stormy fortunes, and railed against the world. “It is a badly stage-managed world,” he said to me scarcely more than a year ago. “Oh, it will be all right on the night,” I replied, quoting from a well-known play. “Not a bit of it,” said Buchanan; “it is not rehearsing it needs, but reconstruction.” _____ From The Times (Tuesday, 11 June, 1901 - p.7) OBITUARY.
_____ MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. We regret to learn that Mr. Robert Buchanan’s long illness ended yesterday in his death at Streatham, in the house of his sister-in-law and sometime collaborator, Miss Harriet Jay. He was in his 60th year. In the middle of October, last year, Mr. Buchanan was struck down by paralysis without any warning. He had been in indifferent health for some time before, and had been obliged almost to give up work, depending upon the assistance of friends and a small Government pension. His savings had been swept away in a disastrous speculation, which obliged him to go through the Bankruptcy Court and to part with all his copyrights. Just before the stroke of paralysis, however, he had begun to gain strength and to recover his spirits, and had taken up work again. In his helpless state he had once more to rely upon the aid of friends. He had been a very generous man when he was prosperous himself. He had never refused help to any one in distress, and in his time of need he was generously assisted. His old friend Mr. John Coleman, actor and author, busied himself in starting a fund, and enough money was raised to meet the immediate needs of the case. It was seen from the first that no permanent recovery could be hoped for, and the end has come as a merciful release from a state of the most pitiful helplessness and living death.
Mr. Buchanan was a man of great mental activity, who seemed at one time to be in the way to become a permanent intellectual force. Twenty-five years ago he was regarded by many good judges as the coming poet. But his energies were at once too widespread and too undisciplined for his mind to make a mark upon the age. It was not the fact that he was “ever a fighter” which told against him; it was his method of controversy and the nature of the subjects which took him into the field. Activity of mind he inherited, for his father was, in his own words, a “Socialist missionary,” lecturer, and journalist; and no doubt he inherited, too, that dissatisfaction with the world as it is which came out especially in his later life, and which made his humour often bitter and his endeavours to alter this “sorry scheme of things” seem over-hasty and petulant. Had he devoted himself with single aim either to poetry or to fiction, or even to criticism, he would probably have gained a lasting name. As it is, the future chronicler of letters will take note of him mainly as a very industrious worker in various fields of literature who was once connected with an incident that greatly stirred the literary world. This incident was, of course, Buchanan’s attack upon Rossetti in the pseudonymous article called “The Fleshly School of Poetry” which appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1871. Even to those who do not recollect the article the nature of the attack is sufficiently indicated by its title. In itself it was unimportant—merely one of those attacks to which most poets of distinction are subjected in the course of their careers. Mr. Buchanan himself soon saw that he had done Rossetti an injustice, and showed it, among other ways, by dedicating “God and the Man” to “An Old Enemy.” But it created some sensation at the time, and in Rossetti’s life it became “deplorably prominent,” since, according to his brother, it happened just at the worst possible moment and had an effect upon the poet’s mind from which he never recovered.
At the time when this incident brought him prominently into the public eye, Mr. Buchanan had already attracted notice by his poetry. His first book, issued in 1860, was dedicated to the memory of his unfortunate friend David Gray, with whom he first came to London. They were at Glasgow University together, and, both bitten by the desire of literary fame, they determined to take their fortunes to the great city where they were sure speedy recognition and fame awaited them. The sequel was sad. Gray, a delicate lad, gradually wasted away in consumption, and he died before he had time to give full proof of his talent. Mr. Buchanan felt his loss keenly and always spoke of this early friendship with touching, wistful pathos. He himself was of more robust constitution, and he soon found his place in the world of letters. His work improved rapidly, and the reputation that he and Gray had dreamed of came to him in full measure. His first book of poems, “Undertones,” appeared in 1860, and his talent was recognized at once. The dedication verses “To David in Heaven” were of a moving pathos and beauty, and the young writer’s gift of expression was clear proof of poetic power. “London Poems” (1866) brought him into wider notice. The lyrics which composed it were the outcome of his life—a lonely and, for the most part, a sad life—in a London garret. They hit off phases and episodes now with humour, now with a pathetic force that touched the chord of tears, always vividly and effectively. “Napoleon Fallen” was ambitious, too ambitious for his powers, but there are fine passages in it. The same may be said about “The City of Dream,” which, however, won public praise from Mr. Lecky. Mr. Buchanan’s verse came too easily and he was too little self-critical to distil his inspiration into the vessels that would best have held it. Still, he had an individual talent; and, although it was intermittent, there was inspiration in his work. If he had kept to poetry, the promise of his youth might have been fulfilled. But his energies were dissipated in too many directions at once. He became a novelist and a playwright as well as a poet and critic. His fiction was vigorous and often boldly original. “God and the Man” is the best remembered of his novels, but there were several others well above the average. He was no more constant, however, to novel-writing than he had been to poetry. He found a profitable outlet for his energies in the drama, and for a number of years he provided the stage with a fairly constant succession of plays of all kinds. His greatest success was with an adaptation of “Tom Jones” which was played at the Vaudeville Theatre under the name of Sophia for nearly two years. Encouraged by this, he extracted plays also from “Joseph Andrews” and “Clarissa Harlowe” and managed again to hit the popular taste. Among his other successful efforts in this line was a familiar melodrama called Alone in London, which still holds the stage.
Of late Mr. Buchanan had turned again to verse, but, though there was still plenty of vigour, there were lacking the poetic qualities that promised well in his earlier work. He had been for several years his own publisher, but he undertook this additional labour too late to profit much by it. _____ From The Guardian (11 June, 1901) MEMORIAL NOTICES
_____ ROBERT BUCHANAN. We regret to announce the death of Mr. Robert Buchanan, which occurred at Streatham yesterday, after a long illness.
Robert Buchanan was born in 1841 at Caverswall, Staffordshire. He was the only son of Robert Buchanan, a Scottish schoolmaster long settled in Lancashire, who had become well known both there (while Manchester was a sort of centre of Owenism) and afterwards at Glasgow as an exponent of the doctrines associated with the name of Robert Owen. The elder Buchanan lectured and contributed to the “Northern Star,” played a certain part as a Chartist—though always opposed to the employment of violent means,—and published some volumes of sociology. His son, the future author, was brought up in Glasgow and educated at the Academy, the High School, and at Glasgow University.
At nineteen, having migrated to London, he published his first volume of poetry, “Undertones.” Few are the writers whose first attempts are really characteristic. “Undertones,” though many of its subjects are conventionally classical, showed at once the qualities and defects which never left Buchanan—the prodigious facility of versification, the abundant energy, the spirit of revolt which made him all his life an Ishmael among writers, the carelessness and the tendency to melodramatic effects. The volume contains nothing perfect, but nothing insipid; it rises occasionally to splendid heights of passion, as in the “Prologue to David in Heaven,” and even attains an austere dignity and limpidity of expression with “Penelope”; originality could hardly be denied to this first book, which to us who read it “after the event” seems in some respects to have heralded the dazzling poetic appearances of a few years later. But the public of 1860, which was only just beginning to tolerate Browning, ignored this remarkable essay. A few distinguished men, however, among whom were George Henry Lewes, William Hepworth Dixon, and John Westland Marston, encouraged the young poet with their approval. He published in 1865 a less striking collection of Highland idylls and legends; and in 1866 “London Poems,” having in the meantime recommended himself to the publishers as a compiler and translator of Danish. “London Poems” could not but confirm the impression of power which “Undertones” had made upon a few attentive readers; though several of these portraits of London types are marred by a false idyllicism, though the satire is too obvious and the humanitarian intention a little obtrusive, the book contains much excellent poetry and reflects an observant mind and a heart burning with the hatred of injustice. It was succeeded the year following by “North Coast Poems,” and “The Book of Orm” appeared in 1868. Buchanan, perhaps the most fertile author of his generation, was to attempt every form. In 1871 he wrote a lyrical drama, “Napoleon Fallen,” and in the same year “The Drama of Kings” was published. These works, in which the iconoclastic side of his genius was chiefly represented, were never, we fancy, put upon the stage. But, having turned to drama, Buchanan now produced at short intervals several plays which, without winning any remarkable success, made his name familiar to the theatre-going public. Among them may be mentioned “The Witchfinders,” produced at Sadler’s Wells in 1873; “A Madcap Prince,” which was presented at the Haymarket; and “A Nine Days’ Queen,” in which last piece the author’s sister-in-law, the novelist Miss Harriett Jay, made her first appearance. For some years Buchanan ceased to write for the stage, but a comedy called “Lady Clare” from his pen was produced at the Globe Theatre in 1883.
But as early as 1872 the poet and playwright became known also as a critic. It was in that year that “The Fleshly School of Poetry” appeared. This virulent, anonymous, and unjustified attack upon a school of poets with which but for it Buchanan’s own work might easily have been confounded by an undiscriminating public gave rise to a violent literary quarrel. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the writers principally assailed, replied with the crushing article on “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” which now finds a place in his collected works; nor did the friends of Mr. Swinburne keep silent. In justice to Buchanan it should here be noticed that he candidly acknowledged the authorship of the offensive essay, and acknowledged also that he had not been justified in the personal imputations he had made against some men of genius whose artistic ideals were not his. From this time he contributed frequently, and on all sorts of subjects, to the periodicals; he was for long most intimately connected with the “Contemporary Review.” With so voluminous an author it would be hopeless to attempt any sort of classification of his more ephemeral work. He appeared perhaps most often in the reviews in the character of a literary iconoclast, and amongst his recent diatribes our readers will hardly have forgotten the attack on Mr. Rudyard Kipling, “the poet of the Hooligan.” In 1874 Buchanan published a collected edition of his poems. In 1875 “Saint Abe and his Seven Wives” startled and enlivened both the English and the American public. This witty and vigorous satire directed against Mormonism was perhaps the most wholly successful effort of Buchanan’s muse, and, by a kind of fatality, it was issued anonymously, and for long confidently attributed to Lowell. The work was reprinted in Buchanan’s name as lately as 1898.
He brought out shortly after this his first novel, “The Shadow of the Sword,” and from this time forward he produced more fiction than anything else. No one who knows Buchanan’s best poetry can doubt that as a novelist he fell nearly always far below his highest powers. Fiction, however, was the easiest way to win a popular recognition that had escaped him, and having much imagination, and gradually acquiring the technical part of the story-teller’s art, he was in the latter part of his career successful above the average with a prolific output of stories, some of them adroitly sensational and others very obviously written “with a purpose.” It will be enough to mention a few of Buchanan’s earlier performances in fiction. “A Child of Nature” was published in 1879, “God and the Man” in 1881, “The Martyrdom of Madeline” in 1882, “Love Me for Ever” in 1883, “The New Absalom” in 1884. He continued to produce novels until the end; “Andromeda” appeared only a year ago. But his abandonment of poetry, which we are constrained to attribute to disappointment and disgust, was not quite complete. “Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour” (1882) should not be forgotten; “The City of Dream” (1888), a somewhat tedious pilgrim’s progress through pages of invective alternating with vague and languid descriptions, was intended to express the poet’s yearnings for a better social state; and last year saw the publication of a rhapsodical collection of satires, often effective and wholly outrageous to the spirit of the hour, directed against luxury, greed, and—Imperialism. It ought to be mentioned that, having quarrelled with the publishers, Buchanan was from 1890 onwards for several years to some extent his own publisher.
Any general estimate of Buchanan’s works as a whole would be evidently premature. We cannot forbear expressing a belief that in his lifetime, through a variety of causes to which he himself contributed not a little, justice has not been done to his real poetical powers—powers which, indeed, he sometimes did his best to obscure by a constant attitude of revolt, by little eccentricities, and by frequent lapses of taste and carelessness of form. But he was unfortunate in the moment at which he appeared before the world; he was eclipsed before he had had a chance of recognition by men of greater powers who, with widely different ideals, appeared superficially to resemble him. Let us hope that not everything will perish of the perverse and inconsequent but virile and magnanimous idealist. _____ From The New York Times (11 June, 1901)
[Note: The mistakes in the following obit. are in the original copy.] ROBERT W. BUCHANAN DEAD.
_____ Career as Poet, Novelist, Playwright, and Controversialist Started in a London Garret. LONDON, June 10.—Robert Williams Buchanan, poet, critic, and novelist, is dead. _____ Robert Williams Buchanan, poet, critic, novelist, playwright, and literary controversialist, was born at Caversnall, Staffordshire, England, Aug. 18, 1841. He was the only son of Robert Buchanan, Socialist, missionary, and journalist. Having been graduated from the University of Glasgow, he went to London with his schoolmate, Daniel Gray, who, like Buchanan, was destined to achieve a reputation as a poet. The two shared a garret room. Buchanan’s literary career began in 1860. The same year he and Gray reached London. The under world of London had a great fascination for him, and his first work of note, “Undertones,” was inspired by his study of the poor and erring of the great city. From 1862 to 1872 he produced several books of poems, among them “London Poems,” “North Coast Poems,” and “Napoleon Fallen,” a lyrical drama. His first drama was “The Witchfinder.” Others were “A Madcap Prince,” “A nine-Days’ Queen,” “Lady Clare,” “Alone in London,” “Sophia,” “Joseph’s Sweetheart,” “Dick Sheridan,” and “The Charletan.” Among his novels were “The Shadow of the Sword,” “God and the Man,” “Love Me Forever,” and “The Gifted Lady.”
There is one incident in the career of Buchanan which is as yet uninterpreted to his advantage. In 1869 Dante Gabrielle Rossetti recovered the manuscript of a number of poems from the coffin of his wife, who had died seven years before, and published them. They, together with poems by Rossetti’s friends, were bitterly assailed by Buchanan in an article under a pseudonym, which appeared in The Contemporary; later the article, which was entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” was brought out in pamphlet form. Rossetti was seriously affected by the criticism, and never entirely recovered from the blow, which, by his morbid sentimentality, he imagined had been delivered directly at the memory of his dead wife.
But Rossetti did not go unavenged; the poet Swinburne issued a counter pamphlet, which, under the title of “Under the Microscope,” flayed Buchanan alive.
Mr. Buchanan visited the United States in 1884-5. In 1893 he published “The Wandering Jew,” a poem which led to much controversy in the English journals. _____ From The Stage (13 June, 1901 - p.14) DEATH OF MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN.
_____ On Monday morning the long and hopeless illness of Mr. Robert Buchanan came to a merciful end. Since October last Mr. Buchanan had lingered in a helpless state from the effects of a paralytic stroke. The immediate cause of death was congestion of the lungs. He died at the residence of his sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, at Streatham. Mr. Buchanan, who had been a widower since 1881, leaves no children.
Robert Williams Buchanan, child of a Scots father and an English mother, was born at Caverswall, in Staffordshire, on August 18, 1841. Thus in barely sixty years of life Mr. Buchanan crowded the writings of an exceptionally busy and varied literary career. He left few departments of literature untouched. Poetry, plays, novels, essays, and polemics of all sorts engaged his large gifts and strong, even intractable individuality. In poetry he first made his mark—as a very young man, between the years 1860-5; and in poetry—especially in some of his ballads—his work is likeliest to survive. As a poet he had imagination, feeling, felicity of phrase, often intensity of mood and expression; and if his poetry could not sustain the higher qualities, if it was too personal, erratic, and at times crude and distasteful in character, it had more than a spark of the divine fire. His poetic endowment, indeed, was genuine and considerable; and that it should have been so widely diffused and should have ended in so little perfected work would seem to be one of the losses of modern literature. The energies that Mr. Buchanan gave to playwriting had their outcome on a much lower plane. One recalls the farcical futilities of such a piece as The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown. Some of the most successful attempts on Mr. Buchanan’s part in a branch of authorship in which he tried again and again were in plays of semi-originality—his Sophia and Joseph’s Sweetheart, for example, which had long runs at the Vaudeville. Sweet Nancy, which he dramatised from Rhoda Broughton’s novel, was another instance, as was A Man’s Shadow, from the French of Roger la Honte. His adaptations, indeed, were numerous. They included, further, Lady Clare (Le Maître de Forges), Agnes (L’Ecole des Femmes), Partners (based on Daudet’s “Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné”), The Struggle for Life (in collaboration with Fred Horner from La Lutte pour la Vie), Theodora (Sardou), and the last of his pieces (in collaboration with Miss Jay) to be produced, Two Little maids from School (Les Demoiselles de St. Cyr), which was given at the Metropole, Camberwell, on November 21, 1898. In his original works Mr. Buchanan chiefly won the favour of playgoers in melodrama. Alone in London is a case in point. This freely compounded piece he wrote in conjunction with Harriett Jay. It was brought out by Mrs. Conover at the Olympic on November 2, 1885. In the provinces Alone in London has enjoyed a long-standing popularity. Some years later—beginning in 1891—Mr. Buchanan joined George R. Sims in Adelphi drama, the first fruits of the collaboration being The Trumpet Call, which was succeeded by The White Rose, The Lights of Home, and The Black Domino. With the late Sir Augustus Harris he wrote A Sailor and His Lass for Drury Lane. Amongst more ambitious plays may be named some early dramatisations—The Queen of Connaught (Olympic), The Shadow of the Sword (Olympic), and Storm Beaten (Adelphi)—from his own novels; also The Bride of Love (Adelphi), in verse; The Charlatan (Haymarket), comedy, in which Mr. Beerbohm Tree made a hit; The Sixth Commandment (Shaftesbury), drama; and Dick Sheridan (Comedy), drama. In lighter vein were Fascination, in collaboration with Miss Jay (Olympic), That Doctor Cupid (Vaudeville), The Romance of the Shopwalker (Vaudeville), also jointly with Miss Jay; and various others. Often as he wooed fortune as a playwright, and great as the attraction of the stage evidently was for him, Mr. Buchanan did in this medium little that was worthy of his better powers. His most effective work, curiously enough in a writer of much originality and personal force, came from other inspiration than his own. As a dramatist, in fact, he made the least of his successes; and this failure may have done much to induce the bitterness with which in later years he spoke of theatrical conditions. In fiction, some of his achievements were more decisive. “The Shadow of the Sword,” “A Child of Nature,” “The Martyrdom of Madeleine,” and “God and the Man,” are amongst his best known novels. Consideration of Mr. Buchanan as controversialist need not detain us here. His opinions were more vehement than well considered, and were frequently recanted, as in so crucial a case as “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” the Contemporary Review article on the poetry of Swinburne and Rossetti.
The funeral will take place at Southend. _____ From The Penny Illustrated Paper (15 June, 1901 - p.3) The Late Robert Buchanan. |
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