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From Essays on Poetry and Poets by Roden Noel
(Kegan Paul, Trench and Company, 1886.) ROBERT BUCHANAN’S POETRY. (Since this was written Mr. Buchanan has published a poem of wonderful beauty and noble significance, “Balder,” also “Julia Cytherea,” and “Phil Blood’s Leap,” a most spirited ballad. Of this order there are several very remarkable in his last volume, “Ballads of Love and Humour.” I do not here allude to the grand prose romances, “The Shadow of the Sword,” or “God and the Man.”) EXCEPT by a clique, and perhaps by here and there a small literary buccaneer, who admires nobody but himself and the manes, or rather names, of departed greatness, whose hand is against every man and every man’s against him, the merit of Mr. Buchanan’s poetry is, I suppose, now pretty generally acknowledged.
Refined critics certainly objected in the first instance to Mr. Buchanan’s choice of vulgar everyday subjects. But now they have been driven out of this position, and the new ground taken up against him by a certain school is that he has treated these subjects unpoetically. It is difficult to answer this except by saying that he hasn’t— “Meg Blane” being one of the finest poems of the kind in the language—though occasionally, no doubt, he may be open to the charge. In the “Poems and Ballads of Life” the treatment is indeed somewhat slight; but if it were not so, dramatic propriety would be violated, because the poet’s method is usually to relate his story through a third person who is in the same rather humble class of life as those whose fortunes he narrates. Now in a poem like “Widow Mysie,” I think it may be conceded there is a certain commonness, even vulgarity of flavour, chiefly because the heroine is a commonplace person in commonplace circumstances; and while there is no tragic intensity in these, the humour is not subtle enough to redeem the superficial vulgarity of the subject. For poetry, surely the level of these lines, which gave the key-note of the whole, is low:—
“Tam Love, a man prepared for friend or foe,
Whiskered, well-featured, tight from top to toe.”
But on the whole, Mr. Buchanan in his narrative poems probably makes his people talk more naturally than any other verse-writer of the day. Ought girls of the lower class, like Nell and Liz, to speak in language concocted by a poet out of his own creditably familiar knowledge of the classics, the Italian poets, and Elizabethan English? It is averred by critics that they have no objection to Nell and Liz being heard in verse—they will condescend to listen to them even—but—but what? How does Shakespeare make his clowns, and hinds, and common soldiers, and Dogberries, and even Falstaffs talk? How does Tennyson his “Northern Farmer”? or his Tib and Joan in “Queen Mary”? By no means euphuistically. To my mind the pathetic simplicity of language in one of the most beautiful of these poems, “Liz,” is one of its chief merits, and on the whole the form of the poem is fully as excellent as the substance: if it were more remarkable, the poem of course would not be a quarter so good. Ought Scott to have made Halbert Glendinning or Mary Avenel use the same language as Sir Piercie Shafton?
Some finical, fastidious gentleman objected to the word “costermonger” in “Liz.” It made him stop his ears and give a little scream; but it was appropriate where it stood, and I am sorry Mr. Buchanan has altered it. He has “Joe Purvis” instead, and I am sure the gentleman will object to that equally. It should have been “Reginald Mauleverer,” so as not to offend ears polite. Speaking of his indiarubber ball, the little boy said to his governess: “If you prick it, it will go squash!” “Oh shocking, my dear!” said the prim lady; “you should have said, ‘If you puncture it, it will collapse.’” But Mr. Buchanan won’t, I trust, make gravediggers call spades effodiators, or housemaids call coal-scuttles Pandoras (though, perhaps, they will soon in real life), for all his governesses may say to him. A poet may leave fine language of that kind to advertising tradesmen. The “Last of the Hangmen,” however, seems to me too merely coarse and grotesque—not sufficiently spiritualized. He might do in a Dutch picture; but be is hardly elaborately realized enough for a poetic study even of the Dutch order.
It has been urged again that these poems are too sentimental: so that what seems to be desiderated is this—that costermongers and street women should say very hard, harsh, and commonplace things—perhaps blaspheme?— only in turgid, euphuistic English. Perhaps somebody was right when he said that Mr. Buchanan makes his townspeople and peasants talk a little too much about external nature—but there is generally something in their circumstances that affords a clue to that. Liz, in a very fine passage, expresses her horror of the country, which she had once visited. How would the critics set about presenting such people poetically at all—except by the aid of artificial euphuism? What Mr. Buchanan does is to take such men and women at moments and in moods when some circumstance of their lives brings out the finer and more human traits in them. Over them he sheds the mild light of sorrow, or the stormy glare of tragedy. And he rightly believes that there is this humanity of infinite worth in them all—desiring to clear them from the rags and grime that hide them from persons with pouncet boxes. So in death, common features may seem grand, and assume the semblance of some fairer, nobler relation. Well then, the poet does not make them leave out their h’s, and does not make them talk argot—that is another count in the very self-consistent indictment—but that may not be essential to them; he just indicates their rank by the speech; he makes it “poetical” enough not to be displeasing; not too “poetical” to be out of character altogether. I do not indeed say he might not do what is suggested, and yet leave them poetical enough, as Tennyson, Bret Harte, Col. John Hay, and others have done recently. Indeed he has done so in many pieces.
Picturesque the “dim common populations” are in some aspects, rugged, full of movement and colour, with none of their angles rubbed down in the social mill. And is it not well that a poet should take us with him into the heart of great cities, or into rude huts on the mountain side and on the shore, setting us face to face, heart to heart, with men and women—“fate-stricken” persons, often braving hunger and want, danger and despair, toiling ever to render easier life possible for us—making us know more wisely, because more lovingly; the very waifs, outcasts, and lost children of our human family? They who lounge at club windows, or write leaders for gentlemen, may like to shut out all that from them; it is an offence and a puzzle to them; only “false sentiment,” “philanthropy,” or something equally odious and de mauvais ton notices these things. “Odi profanum!” But let these persons be more tolerant of other tastes; let them cease to suppose that they in their cloisters or clubs are mouthpieces of what is soundest and most enduring in the heart of this nation. Why should they fancy, moreover, that they know so much more of these people than this poet who professes to have suffered and struggled with them—to have sprung from them—and to have experienced that there is a soul of good even in things evil; who, on the whole, with Walt Whitman, from whom he has learnt much, refuses to call anything—except the “fleshly school”—common or unclean? The people, in moments of emotion, have poetry of thought and expression far more genuine than that of the genteel, and they are able to feel—if they have leisure, even to dwell upon their feelings—though they may not dwell so much upon them as we, nor make a luxury of the practice in their hard hand-to-hand fight with stern gross wants. I would not deny that these poems may be too uniformly tearful and sad; nevertheless, the poet has humour very salt and genuine too: I wish he would use that faculty oftener. Poets have it seldom nowadays. Herein, as in other ways, Buchanan sometimes reminds one of Burns.
No doubt such metrical stories have been written before. We have Shenstone, Crabbe, Clare, E. Elliot, and, above all, Wordsworth. But such idyls have not been written, I think, about the inhabitants of cities. To our great novelist, Charles Dickens, we chiefly owe an interest about and knowledge of modern cities, and while Nell a little reminds us of Oliver Twist, Angus Blane in one respect reminds us of Barnaby Rudge. But Mr. Buchanan’s best things are essentially poems, and not novels. Though he has been influenced by his great master—and by that other great master, Wordsworth, who in “Michael” and the “Excursion” led us to feel the nobility and pathos of common life—yet he is thoroughly original. As to Crabbe, though in him there is “iron pathos,” and grim realistic tragedy, yet, as a rule, I cannot feel in him the consecration of the “light that never was on sea or land.” And there is surely very little verbal music in Crabbe. It is photography. The details are not selected.
“John,” “Kittie Kemble,” and “De Berny,” all seem to belong to Mr. Buchanan’s inferior work—in them the motif is too slight, and the metre hardly seems to have sufficient raison d’être, while neither that nor the diction is for its own sake striking. Such sketches are clever, but one can hardly accept them as poems. Mr. Buchanan writes a great deal, and perhaps no one’s work is less equal; but great inequality may be predicated of the best poets. As Byron says to Murray, “What poem is good all through? You may think yourself lucky if half ‘Don Juan’ be good.” It may be said that most of Gray and Campbell is good; but are Gray and Campbell in the first order of poets? And are they good all through? Certainly not, unless mere “correct,” or tumid, bombastic diction makes good poetry—without fire, without emotion, without vision. Yet, Campbell’s odes, and Gray’s “Elegy” are admirable beyond question. Mr. Swinburne says of Byron that you are never secure in him from some hideous dislocation of pinion when be is in full flight. I think that may be true. But you have, unfortunately, to choose between this and a poet who, while remaining on the ground, flaps and beats his wings as if he were flying, or else plays tricks, as of a tumbler pigeon, in mid-air. What poet always soars, and never collapses, or plays fantastic tricks? “Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus.” And if so, what of the rest?
In estimating a poet’s position I fancy we must ask—not, What bad things has he done? or, What defects are there in his work? but, How good are his best things? and, perhaps, How many good things has he done? To me it seems that there are in Sydney Dobell, and Alexander Smith, a few passages, even lyrics, of such transcendent excellence as almost to counterbalance the marvellous want of organic unity in their productions; yet, these being only passages, one hesitates where to place them—though indeed “the Roman” is good all through. In Buchanan, however, you have poems good, not passages merely. And the question is, therefore, How good are those poems?
What is especially striking about “Nell” is the intensity of its passion; every word sinks home; its brevity gives it high tragic power. “Poetic diction,” and ingenious metrical effects would simply ruin that poem. The lines—
in their place are intensely poetical, exactly because there is no “poetic diction” about them. These women are as noble too as Chaucer’s Patient Griseld is.
I hardly know any one who can draw such telling pictures in a few words, or set before you a group of figures with their background so distinctly, as if by a flash of lightning issuing out of the darkness of stormy night.
Before proceeding to notice more particularly “Meg Blane,” I would express regret at not seeing in this collection “Attorney Sneak,” an exceedingly humorous piece; but I am glad to see “Tim O’Hara,” and the “Starling,” of the same order.
Meg Blane was a kind of sailor woman, rough and gaunt, yet with a woman’s nature. She had lived with a man as his wife: he had gone to sea, and she knew not what was become of him. With her, in her hut by the shore, abode her full-grown, half-witted son, and the love these two bore one another is described with much beauty. Of the boldest was Meg Blane in perilous adventures by sea, but she yearned ever, like a true woman, after the absent. One night there was a great storm, which is depicted with intense power. Meg Blane gets some men to go with her in a boat out to a wreck, which breaks up before they reach it; but one man was drifted on shore alive, and borne to a cottage, where Meg afterwards goes to see him while he lies asleep and exhausted. She recognizes in this man her old lover; and most powerful is the picture of this. She withdraws, and returns later—but troubled, and wondering to herself that the joy seems less absolute than she had fancied all these years it would be. Intensely dramatic and moving is the representation of the interview wherein she learns, on presenting to him the half-witted Angus as their “bairn,” that he is married and has children! Some of the most lovely lyrical lines in the language follow:—
“Lord, with how small a thing
Thou canst prop up a 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
Licked 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 shall we dare
Thither in peace to fall,
But for a feeble glimmering even there,
Falsest perchance 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. “In poverty, in pain,
For weary years and long,
One faith, one fear, had comforted Meg Blane,
Yea, made her brave and strong;
A faith so faint, it seemed not faith at all:
Rather a trouble, and a dreamy fear,
A hearkening for a voice, for a footfall,
She never hoped in sober heart to hear.
This had been all her cheer:
Yet with this balm
Her soul might have slept calm
For many another year.”
But after this hope failed her she lost her courage at sea, her heart for toil on land; poor Angus, who depended on her, suffered, and was sad as partaking of her sorrow; and this was bitter to her—the stern woman became hard toward men, and fretful, and knew she had not long to live.
“‘O bairn, when I am dead,
How shall ye keep frae harm?
What hand will gie ye bread?
What fire will keep ye warm?
How shall ye dwell on earth awa’ frae me?’
‘O mither, dinna dee!’ “‘O bairn,it is but closing up the een,
And lying down never to rise again:
Many a strong man’s sleeping hae I seen;
There is nae pain.
I’m weary, weary, and I scarce ken why;
My summer has gone by:
And sweet were sleep but for the sake o’ thee!’
‘O mither, dinna dee!’ “When summer scents and sounds were on the sea,
And all night long the silvern surge plashed cool,
Outside the hut she sat upon a stool,
And with thin fingers fashion’d carefully,
While Angus leant his head against her knee,
A long white dress of wool.
‘O mither,’ cried the man, ‘what make ye there?
A blanket for our bed!
O mither! it is like the shroud folk wear
When they are drown’d and dead!’
And Meg said naught, but kissed him on the lips,
And looked with dull eye seaward, where the moon
Blackened the white sails of the passing ships,
Into the Land where she was going soon.”
The man soon followed her. There is a most extraordinary Celtic glamour about this poem, penetrating through the intense and rugged realism of it. And this it is which the author truly conceives to be one great characteristic of his work—though he insists upon the “mysticism” of it almost too strenuously—which exasperates all those (the majority even of intelligent pcople) who detest “mysticism”—does not Mr. Swinburne call philosophy “a pestilential and holy jungle”?—besides indicating a tendency which, I fancy, might become prejudicial to his remarkable realistic human faculty in poetry. Thus Mr. Buchanan himself has perceived that his long “Drama of Kings” was, on the whole, a failure; and I cannot help thinking that the mystical element here unduly prevailed over the human. I shall hardly be suspected of undervaluing philosophy, or the mysterious spiritual element in poetry; but in his presentation of the Napoleons and Bismarck, Mr. Buchanan did not give one the impression of so firm a grasp upon individualities as he does in his portraits from low life. There is much more complexity in characters of this kind, and they are, before all, men of action—their ends being chiefly tangible and practical, however large, and therefore to some extent ideal. Celebrated statesmen may be prominent instruments in the carrying out of certain universal laws, which thinkers may be able to detect; but very seldom are such laws uppermost in their thoughts, even if consciously grasped by their understanding at all. “With how little wisdom is the world governed!” and yet might it not be worse governed with more? It is in the delineation of simpler, ruder natures, swayed by deep emotions, and but half-consciously influenced by the grand wild natural elements around, that Mr. Buchanan excels—what can be finer, for instance, than his “Tiger Bay,” and his picture of the tigerish would-be murderess watching the sleeping sailor in some low lodging of Ratcliffe Highway—not of the whole scene merely, but of the subtle play, and shifting of emotions in the wild woman’s mind, till the better prevail—with that companion picture of an actual tiger in a jungle?
The great Napoleon is, indeed, depicted with some dramatic skill; but the very fragmentary glimpse of him we get in his dispute with the queen and cardinal somehow fails to satisfy; and his solitary broodings, though striking, and possibly appropriate, do not seem sufficient to fill up the portrait of him quite characteristically. We have the same feeling as regards the portraiture of Bismarck, and the Third Napoleon; though one is rather more satisfied with the latter, who indeed seems to have been a brooding, irresolute, somewhat shallow and pretentious person. But here more elaboration, more distinction of poetic language and metre, might have been efficacious in raising the work to a higher poetic level. In fact, one wants here a real drama with movement and development. There is an absence, moreover, of Mr. Buchanan’s special merit—condensation, terseness, intensity. The choruses and semi-choruses are unequal, and too numerous; nor does their moral and intellectual generality seem to harmonize with the fragmentary realistic glimpses of actual passing events—too familiar, because too little spiritualized; less still do I like the imitation of Goethe’s supernatural Faust machinery. Out of Shelley (not to say, in Shelley), one can scarcely read choruses and semi-choruses ad libitum, and not rebel. The whole thing in Shelley is sublimated; it passes in an æthereal region of unearthly and seraphic loveliness.
There is, perhaps, a danger lest “the mystic” should not accept life in all its variety and interaction; and too arbitrarily selecting from his own standpoint what seems to him individually most significant and lofty, the dramatist or narrator may thus too easily become the preacher or moraliser, sliding into turgid and nebulous generalities—far removed from the living order of Shakespeare’s creations—or at least into monotonous mannerism of treatment; and this, even though he may not be ready to swallow whole merely conventional views of virtue. There is always, moreover, a danger of a man posing as mystic or prophet, and contemplating himself in that character—a danger to his insight and art of the same kind as would arise from his considering too much what will make him immediately popular with the many, or with a clique.
Still there are passages of much excellence in this long book, and the author here reprints some of the best of the lyrical ones under the title of “Political Mystics” and “Songs of the Terrible Year.” “Titan and Avatar” is in parts particularly fine, Titan being the People, or the Spirit of Man, and Avatar the great Napoleon. The curse on him pronounced by Titan, whom he has misled with false though specious promises, lured by false fires for his own ends, on whom he has brought so much misery and desolation, is especially striking. The great anarch is doomed to wither away on the lonely rock of St. Helena—as Haydon has painted him—
“Till like a wave, worn out with silent breaking,
Or like a wind blown weary, thou forsaking
Thy tenement of clay,
Shalt wear and waste away,
And grow a portion of the ever-waking
Tumult of cloud and sea. Feature by feature
Losing the likeness of the living creature,
Returning back thy form
To its elements of storm,
Thou shalt dissolve in the great wreck of Nature!”
A sweeping resonant lyric, too, is the “Song of the Sword,” supposed to be sung by the Germans on the coronation of their Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
“Artist and Model” is a poem which I should fancy might commend itself even to the most euphuistic of persons with pouncet boxes, who refuse to let common things and common words come between the wind and their nobility—who invent felicitous, periphrastic disguises for the nakedness of all vulgar little ands or buts—who white the sepulchre, and, like certain tribes, cover the face decorously, leaving other parts exposed. But probably the diction of this poem would seem to them too simple, direct, and exquisitely compliant to the delicate mould and subtle movement of suggested thought or tender emotion. This is just, however, what fulfils my Philistine idea of good expression, and good form, which I also, in my poor way, value.
I shall now say a word about the “Book of Orm.” The more it is read, the more it grows on you. On the whole, I cannot sufficiently express my admiration. Its loose rhythms are usually most skilful, musical, and fascinating. These, harmonizing well with the whole conception, which is Celtic in character, impress you with a sense of originality, as the varied metres of the “Drama of Kings” somehow did not. Thc poem is no less than a contribution in poetic cypher toward the solution of some universal problems— ambitious this!—yet the poet has fairly grasped some of the best thought of the time, even if he have not quite mastered the world’s foremost thinkers. But what is distinctively his own, and of the highest artistic import here, is the manner in which he has seen and successfully presented a few very striking ideas, invested with vivid, noble, and appropriate forms, rising out of the depths of a personal, boldly creative, and profoundly emotional imagination.
“The Vision of the World without Death” is a most admirable attempt to show the use, and even consoling influence of visible death, as also of resting-places for mortal ashes. I am sorry for any who fail to feel the marvellous beauty of this part. In its magical pathos the picture of the mother losing her children without seeing them die is unsurpassable. All this shows a very high and rare imagination.
“And stilly in the starlight came I backward
To the forest where I missed him, and no voices
Brake the stillness as I stooped down in the starlight,
And saw two little shoes filled up with dew,
And no mark of little footsteps any further,
And knew my little daughter had gone also.”
In “Songs of Seeking” the author shows his very characteristic grasp of the great truth which so few can feel, that wickedness is not absolute—not final, therefore; nor Doom—that there is “a soul of good in things evil;” that “God hath made even the wicked to praise Him,” in a far profounder sense than that in which the doctrine of everlasting damnation teaches it. Very beautiful, in their spontaneous informal melody, are the stanzas named “Quest” and the “Lamb of God.”
“As in the snowy stillness,
Where the stars shine greenly
In a mirror of ice,
The reindeer abideth alone,
And speedeth swiftly
From her following shadow
In the moon,
I speed for ever
From the mystic shape
That my life projects,
And my soul perceives,
And I loom for ever
Through desolate regions
Of wondrous thought,
And I fear the thing
That follows me.
Doth thy winged lightning
Strike, O Master!
The timid reindeer,
Flying her shade?
Will thy wrath pursue me,
Because I cannot
Escape the shadow
Of the thing I am?”
“God’s Dream” is really a profound poem. “The Lifting of the Veil” is a vivid, imaginative picture of what would happen to men and women if they did know the whole mystery of God, which they mourn they cannot know. The “Seeds,” too, is a most notable lyric of the development of life, consciousness, power, and pain. The “Devil’s Mystics” are surely somewhat obscure, especially “Roses:” I was glad to see the Spectator’s exposition, which Mr. Buchanan reprints and accepts. His Devil is the incarnation of Evil regarded as Defect. This very familiar metaphysical conception does not lend itself easily, however, to personal symbolism. This mystic “Devil” becomes necessarily a kind of beneficent being, and so loses his very distinctive nature as Devil: as a spirit of evil. To try to render this idea concrete is to fail. Nevertheless, the last lines are extremely suggestive, and might be taken by the author as his motto:—
The “Song of Deicides” is extremely vigorous and clever; but the “Vision of the Man Accurst” is a truly grand imaginative effort, and embodies the central truth of Christianity, that utter self-sacrificing love is divine, and is alone capable of prevailing over evil—which truth has been embodied in a supreme manner by Victor Hugo in his “Misérables.” If it were not that, perhaps, the shadowy, phantom-like genius of the whole poem demands it, one might complain of a certain want of complex detail and coherence in the imagery here—but it is Ossianic, and fine in its own large, vague Brocken-spectre style. One “man accurst” alone is not saved from sin, though all beside are saved. He is cast out from Heaven, and blasphemes in a wild region of ice. At length God asks if any will go forth and voluntarily share his doom. At last his mother and his wife go forth from bliss to the loathsome thing, and “kiss his bloody bands.” “The one he slew in anger—the other he stript, with ravenous claws, of raiment and of food.” “Nevertheless,” says the wife—
“‘I will go forth with him whom ye call curst;
I have kis’t his lips; I have lain upon his breast;
I bare him children, and I closed his eyes;
I will go forth with him.’. . .
. . . . A piteous human cry, a sob forlorn
Thrilled to the heart of Heaven. The man wept;
And in a voice of most exceeding peace
The Lord said, while against the breast divine
The waters of life leapt gleaming, gladdening,
‘The man is saved: let the man enter in!’”
Still one feels inclined to congratulate Mr. Buchanan on his having dropped the prophet in his anonymous works, “St. Abe,” and “White Rose.” He has gained variety of human interest by dropping it. In these works he shows, besides matured humour and satirical faculty, dramatic genius also, as journals hostile to Mr. Buchanan (either from personal reasons, or because their editors were dominated, one supposes, by certain cliques, wedded to a particular school), observed only too truly and naïvely, not knowing, unfortunately, of whom they thus wrote! The prosaic baldness, triviality, bad taste, and over-blankness, which certainly do disfigure some of his earlier work, have in these narratives entirely disappeared; while the narratives are much more rich and complex as studies of character, of persons in their mutual life-influence on one another, than anything which has preceded. Thoroughly sincere and graphic studies of external Nature also occur. Notable here, as usually in the author’s work, are its artistic totality and clearness of outline; also the racy, nervous, direct Anglo-Saxon strength of its language, for which we must go otherwise at the present day to Tennyson, or to Professor J. Nichol’s admirable “Hannibal,” and “Themistocles,” to J. A. Symonds, and Sir H. Taylor’s dramas; or back to Byron, Wordsworth, Pope, and Chaucer—notable, too, its absence of affectation, artifice, and general excess. There is no poverty of matter, or extravagance of manner. All this used to be thought essential in the time of Aristotle, and even since. It used to be thought “classical.” But academies have changed their minds. Of course, one may lay too rnuch stress on self-restrained symmetry, and clearness. “Endymion” is beautiful poetry, and Gifford’s “Baviad” is nothing of the sort. Gold ore is better than polished brass snuffers. Still these qualities are something; for they are essential to the greatest artists—for instance, to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Homer.
Yet in the early work, fine as it often was for intensity, and severity of outline, the colouring was almost fatiguing in its lurid and fiery brilliancy; one longed for a little more repose, more delicate complexity of subtly varying hues, more gradations, more half-notes, more tendernesses of shadow, more development of character, such as one finds in life, and in external Nature. Here we have much of all this, without losing breadth and decision of touch, or depth and lustre of tint. Splendidly vivid is the Boss’s tale in “St. Abe;” admirably humorous are the feminine whispers in church during Brigham’s sermon; the sketch of Abe Clewson’s seven wives; and the close analysis of his own character, partly contained in his last epistle to the polygamists of Utah, in which he relates how he fell in love with his own wife—his last and youngest, who also loved him—and how they fled together, he seriously describing himself years after as not saintly enough for Mormonism.
But “White Rose and Red” is in some respects Mr. Buchanan’s greatest poem. I never read a criticism I thought more ludicrously at sea than that in the Spectator, which declared that this poem was remarkable, not for its humanity, but for its descriptions of Nature. These, indeed, are as good as possible, whether luscious tropical descriptions at the beginning, or those of the Great Snow, or that of Drowsietown. But it is the human pictures that one most prizes here. Magnificent is the portrayal of the hunter’s capture by bathing Indian women; as also of Red Rose, the wild Indian girl, who fell in love with Eureka Hart, the tall, handsome “beaver-minded” white hunter, while he roamed. in his youth through a tropical forest—splendid the relation of her tropical love for him, and its transfiguration, not of him, alas! but of his image in her soul. Yet no one without keen humour touched with pity could have done this. While he begins to dream of civilization and proprieties, and her fierce love begins to bore him, she imagines, looking in his fine face, he is brooding over all kinds of Divine projects—the beaver! Then he says he must go, but he will return—and he means it. He gives her a paper scrawled in blood with his name and address. He comes not; she follows him over many weary lands through the Great Snow. She arrives at a cottage door at last with his child—a mighty storm is raging—his wife opens!—a white little wife—to whom before fainting she shows this paper! That White Rose, Phoebe, is admirably painted, in contrast to Red Rose, and all the alternations of her feeling when she knows the truth: she is proper, somewhat cold, civilized, not too much in love, yet kind and good. The man enters; Red Rose clings to him, still full of faith! The humour of the situation almost predominates over the pathos here. Poor treacherous beaver! He does not know what to do between the two women. ‘He had got back; he wanted to “settle down;” perhaps Red Rose would forget him, in time; and what would Parson Pendon say to his marrying a red squaw—not a Christian? Shocking! And then he fell in love—for the first time in love—with Phoebe Anna—so they were married. Noble in the extreme and graphic is the account of Red Rose’s terrible journey to find him. Soon after arriving she dies—nursed by White Rose, with Eureka Hart by; she still believing in him, and that they shall meet in those happy prairies which are the Indian’s Heaven. Alas! alas! White Rose pardons him—and he, did he forget Red Rose? Never!
“Often, while
He sat and puff’d his pipe with easy smile,
Surveying fields and orchards from the porch,
And far away the little village church,
While all seemed peaceful, earth and air and sky,
A twinkle came into his fish-like eye:
‘Poor critter!’ sigh’d he, as a cloud he blew,
‘She was a splendid figure, and that’s true!’”
Grim tragi-comedy! The metres are sparkling and facile; everybody talks, not in poetic diction or heroics, but as everybody would; and the poet’s humour plays like a lambent flame over all. There is a good deal of Chaucer, Burns, and Byron here; yet the poem is thoroughly original—queer, sensuous, tender, serious, wonderful, like life; as I said, the more so that the poet is for the nonce no prophet, and forgets how angry he has been with the “fleshly school!” The writer’s power of painting external Nature has greatly matured. There are no more admirable descriptions extant than in his prose-work on the Hebrides; where also we find one of his most magically affecting tales, “Eiradh of Canna.”
Mr. Buchanan has written some very noble sonnets; “Faces on the Wall,” and those called “Coruisken,” that open the.”Book of Orm,” and most powerfully mirror the sublime, desolate scenery of Loch Coruisk, embodying also corresponding moods of desolate doubt and dim aspiration. He occasionally gives us delicate fancies, breathing an aroma of evanescent emotion, such as “Clari in the Well,” and “Charmian.” But in the moralized weird and mystical, and in the spiritualized real, is he most at home. A wonderful piece of work of that kind is the “Ballad of Judas Iscariot,” with its high moral. The “Dead Mother,” and “Lord Roland’s Wife” too are steeped in a similar magical atmosphere, but have a more tenderly human pathos.
The following strange, arresting lines among others express the writer’s central idea most forcibly:—
“O Pan! O Pan! thou art not dead:
Ghost-like, O Pan! thou glimmerest still,
A spectral face with sad dumb stare;
On rainy nights thy breath blows chill
In the street-walker’s dripping hair!” . . . .
By lonely meres thou dost not wait;
But here, ‘mid living waves of Fate,
We feel thee go and come.”
So, accordingly, the poet gives us beautiful lyrics, like a “Spring Song in the City,” the “City Asleep,” and “Two Sons,” as well as powerful sketches like “Barbara Gray.” His utterance here is bold to a degree; he looks beyond what the conventional world, religious or worldly, may say is right, to that which is more absolutely right; even as it is also in accordance with the best instincts of this plain, but not loveless woman’s heart. The man wronged and left her; she went astray with him; but none else had brought love into her narrow and unlovely life: so, as he lies dead in the grim London room, deformed and unbeautiful himself, she forgives, kisses him, and loves on. Of course the “Art for art” school will say that a poet has no business to teach even by implication, to have or express any moral convictions of his own. That I deny. What do they make of Shelley, and Dante? I say this poem is an artistic glorification of the meanest possible subject, and as such a triumph of art. It is more elevating than the skilful presentation of natures, however brilliant, in lower or more evil moods. That may be done most artistically; but it does not open out to the soul the same infinite vistas, tinged with light from above. If there be nobler spiritual elements, and a moral law with sanctions in our nature, the highest art cannot afford to ignore these in dealing with man: the art that does so distorts, or is most contracted in scope. High art will either create high types, contrasting them with low, or look for hidden larger issues and relations in the low. The highest art does not treat man as if he were but an insignificant member of his own generative organ.
Skill in portrayal is essential, and that includes style; but the point of view selected, and the kind of insight displayed mark the difference between high and low art. This seems not to be understood by a certain school of critics. According to their teaching, the skilful painter of a plum should be equal to the skilful painter of a Last Judgment, or a Cornaro family—the late Mr. Hunt to Michael Angelo, or Titian. But however skilful Teniers may be, Raphael, who showed equal skill in higher spiritual regions, is a greater painter. Homer, too, is greater—yet not a more skilful—poet than Horace, or Theocritus. A very skilful cook or cobbler—is he as great an artist as a very skilful architect? The real difficulty, of course, is to balance greater insight, feeling, and organizing imagination in the one case against greater technical excellence in the other, where these qualities do not exist equally proportioned in two writers. According to the bias of individual judgments, there must always be variation in the verdicts. That technical skill is essential is so certain, that no fool ever disputed it The only difference and question in this connection which arises is—what is skill in dealing with a given subject, and who shows it?
Merely didactic, expository, or analytic verse is not poetry—large portions, therefore, of Lucretius, of Mr. Browning, and of that really magnificent poem by Mr. Domett, “Ranolf and Amohia,” are not. But in Pope always, in Dryden sometimes, we have wit playing through all, like a spiritual flame; in other similar poems we have humour. All original poets flush the lives or objects they behold with emotional light from the depths of their own souls; but this light is a revealing, not a misleading one, whether it shine specially upon sensuous and æsthetic, or upon moral and intellectual aspects; others partaking of the same human sympathies are enabled thereby to see as the poet sees: this is the true transfiguring light of art. Some, however, not gifted with the requisite human elements, how clever and cultivated soever, can only mock and decry. And “criticism,” as commonly understood, means the mockery of malice, or incompetence. But general, as well as concrete truth has been, and may yet be poetically presented.
Some poets again are more in harmony with their own age’s most advanced standpoint than others—but a man may be either superficially, or more profoundly, and less apparently in harmony with it. While low clouds are moving one way, high clouds may be moving another; yet the movement of nether mists may be most evident to careless glances of the many—everybody can see which way the straws blow; but because I believe Mr. Buchanan to have given adequate expression in imaginative rhythmical form to some of the deepest special perceptions and ideal aims of the time, I believe him to be one of our foremost living poets, and destined to become (directly or indirectly) one of our most influential. __________ (An article by Desmond Heath about Roden Noel from the Paragon Review, Issue 7 (Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull) is available online. It serves as an introduction to Heath’s book about the poet, Roden Noel: A Wide Angle, which includes a section on his friendship with Robert Buchanan. Their friendship is also dealt with in Chapter XI of Harriett Jay’s biography.) (Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) |
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