|
TO MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. SIR,—You are perhaps the best existing type of the militant man of letters. Certainly none is readier to fight, none less awed by the quality of an opponent. You are not daunted by great names, nor restrained by considerations of policy. You donned your armour and furbished your blade as readily and joyously to meet the late Mr. Matthew Arnold as you now assume the fighting gear to meet Mr. Andrew Lang, or Mr. George Moore, or Mr. Edmund Yates, or Mr. Labouchere. The challenge never comes to you in vain; nor are you to be disturbed with impunity. The thistle might well be engraven on your shield, and ‘Ready, aye ready’ would not be an inappropriate motto. Like the bold Macpherson, your literary life has been one of ‘sturt and strife.’ From that early assault on ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ to the recent bombardment of ‘Imperial Cockneydom,’ 222 you have encountered many a doughty warrior, and dealt many a weighty and valorous blow. And the spirit of the fray is still strong upon you. To-day, as in times past, you present yourself with girded loins and an undiminished ardour for battle. I suppose there are times when you would really prefer not to fight, but the public knows nothing of you in such moments of weakness. So far as you are known to your readers, the arms are always in order, and the spirit ever eager.
I am disposed to think that it is not love of fighting for its own sake that leads you to unsheathe your sword so frequently, but a love of truth, a love of fair-play, a love of purity and goodness, a love of high principles and your fellow-men. You are not simply a polemic; though, once you are in the arena, you are as hot and stubborn a controversialist as the late Charles Reade himself. You do not seem, to me, to take up arms for the pleasure of destroying, or the glory of jumping on weak opponents. And certainly you do not take them up with an eye to your own profit. It is not by ‘telling the truth and shaming the deil,’ as the Scottish proverb has it, that 223 men gather in the shekels. Though it is painful to be compelled to make the admission, rather the contrary is the case. ‘If a man would fill his granaries and attain to the sublime heights of worldly prosperity,’ says a quaint old moralist, ‘three things he must earnestly pray to be delivered from. He must petition, first, that he be not stirred up to a vehement insistence on disagreeable truths; what men profess to be deaf to let him be silent on: second, that he be not tempted to cross the vanity or self-love of his fellows; for thereby ensueth bitterness and strife which do mightily hinder a man: third, that he be endowed with the supple properties of the willow, which bendeth gracefully before the blast; for assuredly it cometh to pass that the man like the tree that bendeth not shall be levelled by the hurricane. The Gallic proverb, that there is nothing beautiful but truth, containeth a grievous heresy. Verily it is my opinion that this same wench who is called truth hath been the ruin of many a right excellent man.’ While taking exception to some of the moralist’s sentiments, there can be no question that the policy 224 he inculcates is full of worldly wisdom. None knows better than you how extremely detrimental it is to all one’s worldly interest, in this languid and euphuistic age, to call a spade a spade and a quack a quack. You have recently told us that at one period of your career it became inexpedient to publish your works under your own name, because on some question or other, affecting the weal of the republic of letters, you spoke your mind in forcible Saxon language. Yet this knowledge,—the knowledge that plain speech is inimical to a man’s financial interests— does not now deter you from saying all you wish to say, and saying it in words as plain as those of Swift himself; so that I might appropriately apply to you the lines of Burns to Charles James Fox—
And, indeed, one never thinks of your deeds without being struck with your colossal courage. You, more markedly than most, possess that ‘perfect will which no terrors can shake, which is attracted by frowns, or threats, or hostile 225 armies; nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a pure flame, and is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme.’ We may call you impetuous and impolitic, but we dare not deny your courage. You shoot your shafts straight at the mark, and not at some substituted simulacrum, some shade or dim adumbration set up as a decoy to deceive the public. When your dander is up, as Dandie Dinmont would say, none may approach you too closely. As Mr. Lowell said of a certain countryman of yours, when you are in the storm and tumult of battle, you are like a three-decker on fire— dangerous alike to friend and foe. Yet no one is readier to own an error or make amends for a wrong. It is not given to every man to be generous as well as just. I believe they are comparatively few who could address such lines as these to an old enemy—
‘I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow,
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and charity I bring thee now
A lily flower instead. Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me.’ 226
This is, I dare say, as characteristic as anything you have written, and made as great a demand on courage as any conflict in which you ever engaged.
Moreover, it is evidence that you have learned the greatest lesson which destiny has to teach—that of being true to one’s-self—in other words, the necessity of overcoming all fear—fear to acknowledge a fault as well as fear to storm a stronghold. ‘He has not learned the lesson of life,’ says one whose silver pen you have yourself extolled, ‘who does not every day surmount a fear. . . . Have the courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope, and cause, and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, or Gentoo, which does not equally preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds about nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme 227 Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because they come only so long as they are used; or if your scepticism reaches to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you—namely, your own.’ I do not think it will be denied by any one who has watched your career and studied your writings, that your opinions are most distinctly your own. You do not belong to the flaccid class that eternally assents; you are not one of those who live in perpetual fear of giving offence; nor will it be gainsaid that whatever difficult duties your conscience prescribes, you perform to the uttermost of your ability.
We may admire your courage, however, without at all concurring in your opinions. Indeed, we will admire the more because of a difference of sentiment. And for myself let me say frankly that from many of your judgments I entirely dissent. Your opinion of Goethe, for example, seems to me altogether unworthy of your perspicacity as a critic, and your liberality as a thinker. Your estimates of 228 George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, too, seem to me curiously unjust. When you call George Eliot a ‘pragmatic rectangular prosaist,’ and speak of the ‘preposterous’ career of the author of Faust, and aver that he really never lived, one is inclined to think that, like David when he slandered all mankind, you spoke in very inconsiderate haste. I for one see nothing preposterous in the career of Goethe, and I think that George Eliot, far from being a prosaist, is, except in occasional lapses, a truly creative artist. But you seem to me most unjust in denying the title of poet to Matthew Arnold. I believe with Mr. Hall Caine that there is poetry in the ‘Strayed Reveller’ and ‘Dover Beach,’ and I find ‘The Youth of Nature’ touching and true. The lines—
‘Race after race, man after man,
Have thought that my secret was theirs,
Have dreamed that I lived but for them,
That they were my glory and joy.
They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!
I remain,’
seem to me to give out the right tone. But I am more concerned with you as an artist than as a critic.
229 You have been a busy worker in the realm of imagination, and, to my mind, a successful worker. You have written too much to be always at your best, but your worst is never bad. You have not had, or you have not taken, the leisure to excise, polish, and amend your productions, as among present-day poets Lord Tennyson and Mr. Lowell have done, or among past poets Pope and Gray. But you are always a poet, and invariably an artist. Many of your poems are exquisite in form, and nearly all of them attest beyond a peradventure that even at the close of the nineteenth century the spirit of poetry is still in our midst. No one can read Balder the Beautiful, or The Book of Orm, or The City of Dream, without being convinced (if he have an eye and ear for such things) that he is reading the work of a true poet. Nor is your prose less true or less important than your poetry.
As a novelist you work with a purpose. You descend, as you say yourself, to the heresy of instruction. Many eminent critics do hold it a heresy to descend to instruction in works of fiction, and many great authors are with the 230 critics. Goethe (whom you will permit me to call great), for instance, says in reference to his own Werther, in that autobiography which every student of literature should read, ‘It cannot be expected that the public should receive an intellectual work intellectually. In fact, it was only the subject, the material part, that was considered, as I had already found to be the case among my own friends, while at the same time arose that old prejudice, associated with the dignity of a printed book—that it ought to have a moral aim. But a true picture of life has none. It neither approves nor censures, but develops sentiments and actions in their consequences, and thereby enlightens and instructs.’ These are Goethe’s sentiments on the subject. He did not believe in the novel with a purpose; nor did Scott consider himself under any necessity to be didactic. Shakespeare, likewise, was careless of his opportunities to play the rôle of schoolmaster, and it is my candid opinion that Homer never really concerned himself about the moral and social welfare of his auditors.
However, the English people, though paying 231 little heed, as a rule, to moral instruction, like nothing better as an amusement; and there is no valid reason for not gratifying their tastes. Moreover, it pays to have a purpose when the purpose is not flaunted too officiously in the reader’s face. Dickens, in various sweet preparations, gave his readers heavy doses of ‘doctrines of reform,’ and they clapped their hands and shouted for joy. Mr. Besant, too, has followed in the footsteps of the author of David Copperfield, with very gratifying success, and Mrs. Ward has enjoyed quite a ‘boom’ as a teacher and reformer. You have, therefore, precedent and example enough in writing romance with a purpose. And let it be granted without demur that in your case the process of indoctrination has been accomplished with a skill and an eloquence that give your novels a high place in the best class of didactic fiction. The Shadow of the Sword is, perhaps, the most powerful polemic against public war that has ever been written; more powerful than all the orations of all the orators from Demosthenes to John Bright. Nor is it less admirable as a work of art than as a protest 232 against the most heinous, because the most cruel and least excusable, crime that darkens the annals of mankind. The characters and situations alike are strong and telling, and abide in one’s memory. In another way your Martyrdom of Madeline is almost as good. But I think it is in God and the Man that you touch high-water mark. That is a powerful, a terrible, a fascinating book. You call it ‘a study of the vanity and folly of individual Hate,’ and surely never before in romance was the folly of individual hate more eloquently and fearfully made manifest. Never before did human being pursue an enemy more fiercely and relentlessly than Christian Christianson, or find revenge so bitter. The character of Christian is titanic—titanic in its ferocity, its tenacity, and its ultimate nobleness. Nothing could be more savage than his appetite for vengeance, nothing more disappointing than the dead-sea fruit to which that vengeance turns in the moment of expected triumph, nothing more touching than the final sorrow and humility of the stricken soul. Like a demon he prays and blasphemes at the beginning— 233
‘Yield up to me
This man alone of all men that I see!
Give him to me and to misery!
Give me this man if a God thou be. But the cruel heavens all open lie,
No God doth reign o’er the sea and sky,
The earth is dark and the clouds go by,
But there is no God to hear me cry. There is no God, none, to abolish one
Of the foul things thought, and dreamed, and done!
Wherefore I hate, till my race is run,
All living men beneath the sun.
. . . . . .
O Lord my God, if a God there be,
Give up the man I hate to me!
On his living heart let my vengeance feed,
And I shall know Thou art God indeed.
. . . . . .
The night is still, the waters sleep, the skies
Gaze down with bright innumerable eyes;
A voice comes out of heaven and o’er the sea:
“I am; and I will give this man to thee.”’
And with the bloodthirstiness of a sleuth-hound he tracks his prey from point to point, on land, on sea, in green England, and amid the snows and ice of the Polar regions, till at last he has him fast; and then—then vengeance swift and terrible—ah! no, only a temporary madness, a momentary exultation, a 234 spasm of cruel delight in the misfortunes of Richard Orchardson, and then God smites the heart of the would-be murderer, till it melts and gushes like the hard rock in Horeb. His behaviour, when Richard Orchardson lies dying before him, is piety itself. ‘When I knew that he was dead indeed, I bent over him reverently, placed his arms down by his side, and seeing his eyes wide open, drew down the waxen lids over the sightless orbs. Then I held a little water in the palm of my hand, and cleansed the dead face; afterwards with careful fingers arranging his hair and beard. Lastly I took one of my rude lights and set it at the corpse’s head, like the death-lights we burn round dead folks in the Fens. . . . When I had ordered all in Christian cleanliness and reverence, I sat and gazed upon mine enemy. . . . Then one still morn, when the air was bright for the place and time of year, I lifted him in my arms and carried him slowly forth across the snow. I had the rude grave all ready, and now I laid him down within it, with his white face to the sky. As I stood above him, and took my last look of him, more snow began to fall. . . . 235 Then standing bareheaded, eager still to keep my pledge to him, I repeated, as far as I could remember, the words of the old sweet Burial Service out of our English Book of Prayer; and when I could remember no more, I stretched out my arms in blessing, commending my enemy’s soul to God. Before I had ended, his face had faded away in the falling whiteness; and seeing it vanish utterly, I sobbed like a little child.’ And so Christian Christianson has his revenge, pouring out his heart in sorrow.
The other characters are almost equally well drawn, and there are throughout the book many delightful bits of description, and situations that thrill one to the marrow; but over these I may not now linger. Sufficient to say that so long as we have writers writing books like God and the Man, there is still hope for the literature of our country. (Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) __________ From The Sonnet in England, & Other Essays by James Ashcroft Noble
(Elkin Mathews and John Lane, London, 1893.) ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET HAD Mr Robert Buchanan added to his other achievements those of a politician and an orator he would have rivalled the versatility of the first Lord Lytton who was surely the most variously endowed Englishman of his time. Though, like his great contemporary Browning, ‘ever a fighter’ he has, so far as I know, kept clear of the arena of political conflict, but he has made his mark as poet, novelist, biographer, (his sketch of David Gray is a delightful piece of work) essayist, critic, and playwright; and though it cannot truthfully be said of him that he has touched nothing that he has not adorned, it may surely be declared that in every kind of intellectual labour to which he has put his hand he has, somewhere or other, left an impress which no seeing eye can mistake for anything but the sign manual of genius. And 159 yet, curiously enough, while Mr Buchanan is essentially a poet and a novelist, playwright, and the rest only, as it were, par hasard, the work which is most characteristic, most truly his own, has obtained recognition noticeably scanty when compared with that accorded to the other work which speaks of a talent rather than a personality. His novels good and bad—and he has produced both—have been read by thousands; night after night his plays, which are sometimes little more than creditable journeyman’s work, have been greeted with the applause of crowded houses; but his poetry, though it has numerous and warm admirers, cannot be said even yet to have caught the ear of ‘the great reading public,’—a fact that is all the more curious because his verse, while by no means devoid of the higher poetical qualities which will always appeal exclusively to the few is peculiarly rich in other qualities which are, in the best sense of the word popular. Yet, strange as it is, it is certainly true that numbers of readers who could stand a fairly rigorous examination in half-a-dozen contemporary poets both of the first and the second rank will confess that Robert Buchanan is known to them only by ‘Phil Blood’s Leap,’ 160 or possibly also by ‘St Abe and his Seven Wives.’
I have spoken of Mr Buchanan’s versatility as exhibited in various classes of intellectual endeavour— poems, novels, plays, and so forth; but if he is studied simply as a poet this versatility is no less impressive. Apart from the work of the laureate, no body of contemporary verse presents the same variety of imaginative, emotional and intellectual appeal; and though variety is not in itself a thing of price, it becomes distinctly valuable when it can be recognised as an indication of the fecundity of a richly vitalised nature. Now this is the kind of variety which is distinguishable in the work of Mr Buchanan—the variety which must make itself manifest in the outcome of an impulsive energy which no single conduit of expression suffices to exhaust. His purely lyrical poems—such for example as ‘The Fairy Reaper,’ ‘Spring Song in the City,’ and the lyrics in ‘White Rose and Red’— are so full of the essential spirit of song as to leave upon the mind of the sensitive reader the impression that the writer is pre-eminently a lyrist—a simple maker of the winning music of melodious verse. Then, while this impression is strong upon him, he turns to 161 other groups of poems, and finds that though the purely sensuous charm of music is still there, it has taken a subordinate place, and the man who seemed but a singer reveals himself as a dramatic creator, a philosophical mystic, a winning story-weaver, a maker of ballads that have the strength, simplicity and directness belonging to the ballad-work of a less sophisticated day.
The poetry of ecstatic or rapturous song when seen in its perfect and typical form, as for example in the most characteristic verse of Shelley, has the quality or the defect—for to differing moods it may seem either —of a certain unsubstantiality and vagueness of outline, which find their visual correspondence in the aspect of material objects seen through mist or moonlight. When Mr Buchanan’s verse is most purely lyrical it approaches this effect, but never quite reaches it; it never quits its hold of the tangible, never lacks the full humanity which is compact of sense and soul in vital combination. The difference is almost too subtle and elusive to be expressed in terms of definition, but its reality will be felt and its nature apprehended by any one who comes fresh from the 162 wonderful lyric in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound
to any of the ‘Songs of the Veil’ in The Book of Orm, the Celt, where Mr Buchanan’s work, so far as outward form is concerned, bears the strongest resemblance to the work of his great predecessor. The later poet can never detach himself from the simple familiarities of human life, and even when the solemn veil is lifted and the divine Face is disclosed he turns from the ineffable vision to the homely world on which the Face looks down.
‘I awoke my body,
And up the mountains,
With the sweet sun shining
I wander’d free,—
And the hills were pleasant,
Knee-deep in heather,
And the yellow eagle
Wheel’d over me—
And the streams were flowing,
And the lambs were leaping
Merrily.
* * * *
‘Hard by I noted
Little children,
Toddling and playing
In a field of hay—
The Face was looking, 163
But they were gazing
At one another,
And what cared they?
But one I noted,
A little maiden,
Look’d up o’ sudden
And ceased her play,
And she dropt her garland
And stood upgazing,
With hair like sunlight,
And face like clay.’
Of course this is not quoted as an example of Mr Buchanan’s best work, but as an illustration of that instinctive habit of nature which impels him to reach things of spirit through the things of sense, to find in simple familiar humanity an avenue of approach to the unseen and the spiritual. He does not strive to render the mysterious awe of the unveiled Face in the heavens: he shows it reflected in the face of the child on earth.
It is natural that Mr Buchanan should turn most frequently and spontaneously to those kinds of work in which his native bent towards the treatment of the simple humanities has full play. To compare him with Chaucer would be an absurd extravagance; but it is not extravagant to say that since Chaucer we have had no poet 164 who can be more emphatically described as a poet of flesh and blood. The name of Robert Browning will occur to many as that of a poet to whom the designation would apply, but Browning’s men and women are very largely either representatives of exceptional types, or of familiar types placed in an environment which confers on them an unfamiliar interest—generally the kind of interest involved in a somewhat complex moral problem. Mr Buchanan’s men and women have more of the primitive simple every day humanity which makes a permanent and universal appeal. Willie Baird, Attorney Sneak, Liz, Nell, Widow Mysie, and the three whose varying loves provide the tragic comedy of White Rose and Red are obviously nearer to the common mind and heart than are Bishop Blougram, the Queen of In a Balcony, Sordello, and Caponsacchi, highly vitalised as all these creations undoubtedly are. In sheer vividness of presentment the portrait of Widow Mysie the fascinating inn-keeper—sensuous, warm-blooded, cold-hearted and calculating—is a little masterpiece.
‘Oh, sweet was Widow Mysie, sweet and sleek!
The peach’s blush and down were on her cheek,
And there were dimples in her tender chin
For Cupids small to hunt for kisses in; 165
Dark glossy were her ringlets, each a prize,
And wicked, wicked were her beaded eyes,—
Plump was her figure rounded and complete
And tender were her tiny tinkling feet!
All this was nothing to the warmth and light
That seemed to hover o’er her day and night;—
Where’er she moved, she seem’d to soothe and please
With pleasant murmurs as of bumble bees;
Her small plump hands on public missions flew
Like snow-white doves that flying croon and coo;
Her feet fell patter, cheep, like little mice;
Her breath was soft with sugar and with spice;
And when her fingers—so!—your hand would press
You tingled to the toes with loveliness,
While her dark eyes with lessening zone in zone
Flasht sunlight on the mirrors of your own
Dazzling your spirit with a wicked sense
That seems more heavenly-born than innocence.’
This is an example of Mr Buchanan’s frankly realistic manner, in which the vigorous effectiveness of his flesh and blood treatment of a selected individual or type is most plainly apparent; but there is not less of rich warm vitality in the portraits painted with more of idealistic, romantic, or—as some would put it—poetic feeling. Such eminently characteristic poems as ‘Meg Blane,’ ‘The Scaith of Bartle,’ ‘The Glamour,’ and ‘Poet Andrew’ must be studied as wholes; but a few stanzas may be taken from a winning portrait study which has 166 not, I think, been reprinted from the pages of the Argosy where I read it many years ago. It was called ‘A London Lyric’ and might with propriety have been included in the volume of London Poems.
‘Bell from the North hath journey’d hither,
She brings the scent of heather with her,
To show in what sweet glens she grew,—
Where’er she treads in any weather,
She steps as if she trod on heather,
And leaves a sense like dropping dew. ‘The mountains own her for their daughter,
Her presence feels like running water
Cool’d from the sun in a green glade;
So strange she seems to city seeing,—
A playmate of the winds, a being
Made of the dew and mountain shade. ‘In the strange street she stops to listen,
Her red lips part, her blue eyes glisten,
Wild windy voices round her speak;
She sees the streets roll dark and clouded,
Fearless as when she paused enshrouded
By mists upon a mountain peak. ‘And oft, while wondrous eyed she wanders,
She meets a sweet face, pauses, ponders,
And then peers backward as she goes,—
As in the far-off solemn places,
She drooped the tenderest of faces
Over some tender thing that grows. ‘Long have the clouds and winds been by her, 167
Long have the waters murmured nigh her,
And sweet delight in these hath she;
Long has she watched the shapes of wonder
Darken around with crying thunder,
Yet all have used her tenderly.
* * * *
‘When mighty shapes had love and pity,
What should appal her in the city?
What should she fear in sun or shower?
The cloud of life is pleasure-laden,—
She fears it not,—she is a maiden
Familiar with the things of power.
* * * *
‘Yet is she; made in mortal fashion,—
A thing of pureness and of passion,
A winning thing of eyes and lips,
A maiden with a cheek to sigh on,
A waist to clasp, a heart to die on—
Kiss-worthy to the finger-tips!’
The vivid realisation which makes these and a score of other portraits glow with the warmth of life is not less manifest in Mr Buchanan’s rendering of nature and in his treatment of incident and situation. No nature-poetry of our time is less subjective than his, or freer from the intrusion of that ‘pathetic fallacy’ which, fascinating as it often is, denotes, as Mr Ruskin has shown, a lapse from perfect veracity 168 of imaginative vision. He is doubtless saved from it both by that healthful outwardness of mind which distinguishes the poet of observation and creation from the poet of sentiment and reflection, and partly by his absorbing interest in humanity which impels him to utilise Nature as a background rather than as a theme. The masterly and impressive picture of the great snow in White Rose and Red, so rich in rapid touches of detail and yet so broad in general effect, seems at first sight to have been painted for its own sake; but we soon perceive that, whatever be the feeling of the reader, it is to the poet simply, if one may so call it, an expedient—a means to the intensification of the pure human interest by the addition of a new element of terror and pathos to the weary pilgrimage of poor Red Rose to the home of the man who has deserted her. It is so everywhere. Nature is always subsidiary, but whenever its aspects or objects come into the composition as necessary elements they are presented with almost the substance and tangibility of things which appeal directly to the physical sensibilities of sight, hearing and touch. The force of the wind, the emptiness of the sky, the swirl of the sea, the mass of the mountain impress 169 us just in that same vivid way that we are impressed by the palpitating humanity of the men and women.
Such endowments as these are pre-eminently the endowments of the balladist; and Mr Buchanan’s work has nearly always the ballad feeling, and frequently the ballad form as well. For reasons too obvious to need statement the making of ballads—without the final ‘e’—is rapidly becoming a lost art, but Mr Buchanan is one of the very few surviving inheritors of the old tradition. ‘The Ballad of Judas Iscariot,’ one of its author’s most arresting performances, has the directness, simplicity, and glamour of the ancient work, but the intellectual or spiritual conception which dominates it belongs to our own day, and therefore with all its power and beauty it is hardly so representative as are some of Mr Buchanan’s other achievements in this manner. ‘The Lights of Leith’ might, however, be a genuine antique, and it may be worth noting that it was the predecessor by some years of Rossetti’s noble poem ‘The King’s Tragedy,' the only contemporary ballad with which it can properly be compared.
‘“The lights o’ Leith! the lights o’ Leith!”
The skipper cried aloud—
While the wintry gale with snow and hail 170
Blew snell thro’ sail and shroud. ‘“The lights o’ Leith! the lights o’ Leith!”
As he paced the deck cried he—
“How merrily bright they burn this night
Thro’ the reek o’ the stormy sea!” ‘As the ship ran in thro’ the surging spray
Afire seemed all the town;
They saw the glare from far away,
And safely steer’d to the land-locked bay,
They cast their anchor down. ‘“’Tis sure a feast in the town o’ Leith,”
(To his mate the skipper spoke),
“And yonder shadows that come and go
Across the quay where the bonfires glow,
Are the merry-making folk.”’
But it is not a feast; it is for a much more grim and gruesome function that the fires are blazing on the quay of Leith. Twenty years before, the mate who with the skipper is watching the flickering flames and the black figures which pass and repass before them, has run away from his home and his widowed mother, drawn by the allurements of the adventurous life of the, sea, and now he is returning to her who, he knows, has been waiting for him so wearily, perhaps so despairingly. He leaps on shore and eagerly speeds to the familiar cottage, but though there are lights on the shore there are 171 none in the little window. Still, his mother may be safely asleep in bed, but his eager knocking meets with no reply. The terrible thought of death overwhelms his spirit, though he does not, cannot guess the awful truth. A form draws near the darkness and reveals the haggard countenance of a kinswoman who slowly tells the piteous story. The superstitious pedant King James VI had landed at Leith trembling at the terrors of the sea, and convinced that the spells of witchcraft had raised the storm that had threatened his sacred person. When kings demanded witches there were plenty to find them, and among the three that were found was the lonely old woman.
‘“They bade her tell she had wrought the spell
That made the tempest blaw;
They strippit her bare as a naked bairn,
They tried her wi’ pincers and heated airn
Till she shriek’d and swooned awa’! ‘“O Robin, Robin, the King sat there,
While the cruel deed was done,
And the clergy o’ Christ ne’er bade him spare
For the sake o’ God’s ain Son: . . .” ‘The lights of Leith: the lights of Leith:
Like Hell’s own lights they glow
While the sailor stands with his trembling hands
Prest hard on his heart in woe. ‘“O Robin, Robin . . . they doom’d her to burn 172
Down yonner upon the quay . . .
This night was the night . . . see the light, see the light:
How it burns by the side o’ the sea!”
The distraught man can hear no more: he rushes madly towards the pyramids of flame that redden the night.
‘What madman is he who leaps in where they gleam,
Close, close to the centremost form?
“O mither, O mither:” he cries with a scream,
That rings through the heart of the storm. ‘He can see the white hair snowing down through the glare,
The white face upraised to the skies—
Then the cruel red blaze blots the thing from his gaze,
And he falls on his face—and dies. ‘The lights of Leith: the lights of Leith:
See, see they are flaming still:
Through the clouds of the past their flame is cast
While the Sabbath bells ring shrill. ‘The lights of Leith: the lights of Leith:
They’ll burn till the Judgment Day,
Till the Church’s curse and the monarch’s shame
And the sin that slew in the Blessed Name
Are burned and purged away!’
This is such powerful work that were any critic to declare Mr Buchanan pre-eminently a balladist it would be difficult to show effective reasons for dissent from his verdict. If, however, I were to ask myself the question ‘What 173 has this poet done that no one else has done at all, or done quite so well, or done quite in the same way,—in short, what is the unique element in his work?’ I should find its answer not in the longer narrative poems such as White Rose and Red, Balder, or his more recent allegorical volumes, not in such dramatic or semi-dramatic performances as Political Mystics and Saint Abe, not in his sonnets or miscellaneous lyrics, not even in his ballads; but partly in the London Poems and in other studies of the homely or terrible realities of the life of the poor, and partly in those remarkable contributions to the literature of poetic mysticism which are most adequately represented in The Book of Orm, the Celt.
In his choice of subjects for the majority of his London Poems it may be frankly admitted that Mr Buchanan did not take an entirely new departure from recognised poetic conventions. He followed the lead of Wordsworth, who in the earlier days of the century had ‘sought the huts where poor men lie,’ and had succeeded in idealising the most apparently unpromising material, not by ignoring or tampering with prosaic details, but by exhibiting them in front of a moral or emotional background suffused 174 with a light which transfigured and glorified them. It may, however, be noted that Wordsworth had an advantage over the later poet, inasmuch as his poems of the poor were, mainly, indeed almost exclusively, rural idylls. The lowliest life spent in the country, howsoever prosaic in itself, is lived in an atmosphere which is essentially and obviously poetic; and for the imaginative cultivator of cottage domesticities the ground is, as it were, prepared. The poet of lowly town life has no such preparatory assistance. He has to mould to his purpose material which is not merely non-poetic but apparently anti-poetic; he has to deal with a life that is not simply unlovely but squalidly vulgar; and it was in setting himself to this special task that Mr Buchanan won the honours of the successful pioneer. It is not, however, the writer’s choice of theme but his victorious treatment of it which sets these poems in a place apart. Years before Mr Buchanan wrote the monologue of ‘Nell,’ in which the young mother who is not a wife pours out her agonised lamentations for the lover who is to die upon the scaffold, Thomas Hood had sung of the suicide of an ‘unfortunate,’ and by so singing had defied the old traditions of poetical respectability. 175 Still in the midst of the defiance there was a suggestion of compromise. Hood did not dare to be quite true to the actual, and the picture is accordingly painted with a delicately eclectic brush. Everyone knows that any presentment of such a subject as that treated in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ in which there appears ‘only the beautiful,’ is not simply an idealisation but a distortion of reality; and while true idealisation may enhance the essential veracity of any work of art, this false idealisation must always detract from it. There are two errors into one of which those poets who deal with homely human themes are peculiarly liable to fall. The first is that of men who, like Hood, preserve the poetry by keeping back some of the truth; the second is that of a writer like Crabbe who lets us see all the truth, but is, as a rule, unable to show us the underlying poetry. There are few men who in delineating the wastes and morasses of the human landscape can give us both Dichtung and Wahrheit, but the name of one of the few is Robert Buchanan.
The poem entitled ‘Liz’ provides an interesting and striking example of this strenuous fidelity to the central truth of things. ‘Liz’ is a girl of the slums who has never seen a green 176 field or walked between the hedges of a rural lane; and standing out among the memories of the short and troubled life she is leaving behind her is the memory of one day when she stole away from the familiar street and knew for once what the country meant. It is an attractive theme that lends itself readily to handling that is at once graceful, sympathetic and not apparently untruthful. If we ask what emotion supplies the obvious key-note of such a sketch, the almost universal reply would be the girl’s rapturous delight in the grass of the meadow, the flower by the wayside, the open undimmed sky. But Mr Buchanan will have none of it, and Liz feels no delight but only a strange homelessness—a dull wonder which is neither pleasant nor painful, but which seems further removed from pleasure than from pain.
‘How swift the hours sped on:—and by and by
The sun grew red, big shadows filled the sky,
The air grew damp with dew.
And the dark night was coming down I knew.
Well, I was more afraid than ever then,
And felt that I should die in such a place—
So back to London town I turned my face,
And crept into the cheerful streets again;
And when I breathed the smoke and heard the roar,
Why, I was better, for in London here
My heart was busy, and I felt no fear.
I never saw the country any more, 177
And I have stayed in London well or ill—
I would not stay out yonder if I could,
For one feels dead, and all looks pure and good—
I could not bear a life so bright and still.’
‘The cheerful streets,’ ‘in London here my heart was busy and I felt no fear,’ ‘I could not bear a life so bright and still’—what strokes of penetrating truthfulness are these! We feel that the poet of ‘Nell’ and ‘Liz’ has that catholicity and virility of imagination which subjects the ‘shows of things’ to the ‘desires of the mind’ not by the timorous handling of eclecticism, but by the vigorous grasp of the athlete who wrestles with things evil and ugly, and will not let them go until they whisper their secret of beauty.
It is not often that the work of a poet provides such a marked change of atmosphere as that of which we are conscious when we turn from the London Poems to The Book of Orm, the Celt. It is a passage from all hateful tangibilities of sense to all lovely phantoms of vision, from Seven Dials to the Seventh Heaven; and yet we know that between the two products of the one mind there can be no breach of personal continuity —that an adequate 178 synthesis would exhibit them in obvious and inevitable relations to their source. Nor, indeed, are these relations obscure or difficult of discernment. In the London Poems the most perplexing problems of human life are propounded in those concrete forms which show them in their very nakedness of perplexity. In the Book of Orm there is—not a solution of them: that were too much to expect; but an instinctive outgoing of the spirit in the only direction in which it feels that a solution may possibly be found. From the first ‘Song of the Veil,’ in which we read—
We are led through the ‘Songs of Corruption’ with that strange weird ‘Dream of the World without Death,’ through the ‘Songs of Seeking,’ through the sections entitled ‘The Man and the Shadow,’ ‘The Lifting of the Veil,’ and that most fascinating series of poems ‘The Devil’s Mystics’ to that marvellous ‘Vision of the Man Accurst’ which is to all that has gone before it at once a climax and an interpretation. The veil has been drawn not merely before the arcana of the methods of nature, the mysteries of 179 life and death, but before the secret things of divine providence—before that most wonderful secret of all, the mystery of divine redemption by love. In this final vision we are again in the region of the concrete, for the man who is lifted by the wild wind and whirled away from the heavenly gate to the dark ice-bound shore of the underworld where he stands or stalks, shivering and despairing, crying only for
is, in all human essentials, a figure who might have filled the central place in one of the London Poems. It is only the conditions that are reversed. In the earlier book we are before the veil; in the later book we are behind it; and to the emancipated imagination of the poet are disclosed the living forces which work for salvation in that inner light which to the eye of sense is but darkness. Perhaps for most readers the best way of studying this volume of mystical utterances is to read the last poem first,—as in it the informing idea of the whole work is seen free from the symbolism which, though to certain races—and to certain minds of every race—the most natural mode of presenting a 180 spiritual conception, is to the average Englishman a hindrance rather than a help. If, however, this method be adopted, the significance of the book can hardly be missed even by the most matter-of-fact reader. It is a vindication of that higher optimism which does not content itself with a lazy repetition of the maxim ‘whatever is, is right,’ but only with an assured faith in a Being whose existence and activity provide a guarantee that the thing which is and which is recognised as evil must be doomed to ultimate destruction. This is the plea itself; and the force of its emotional logic lies in the fact that the apparent incredibility of this conception of a prevailing goodness is frankly admitted—is indeed insisted upon through all the poems which are informed with the symbolism of the veil; and that yet, notwithstanding this insistence the final impression is not one of dubitation but of assured faith.
This is not a critical estimate of Mr Buchanan’s poetry, it is, to use Mr Pater’s happy word, an ‘appreciation’ of those portions of it which one reader out of many has found of special worth and interest. Picturesqueness, passion, humour, and pathos, fecundity of imagination, felicity of fancy, and variety of 181 melody are all present in his verse, but it has seemed well to one admirer of it to lay final emphasis upon something which belongs less to its art than to its substance—the spiritual vision which discerns the divine in the human; which sees in the lost souls of Judas Iscariot, the nameless ‘man accurst,’ and Ratcliffe Meg of ‘Tiger Bay’—
(Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) __________ From Studies in Prose and Verse by Arthur Symons
(London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1904.) ROBERT BUCHANAN ROBERT BUCHANAN was a soldier of fortune who fought under any leader or against any cause so long as there was heavy fighting to be done. After a battle or two, he left the camp and enlisted elsewhere, usually with the enemy. He was, or aimed at being, a poet, a critic, a novelist, a playwright; he was above all a controversialist; he also tried being his own publisher. As a poet he wrote ballads, lyrics, epics, dramas, was realist and transcendentalist, was idyllic, tragic, pathetic, comic, religious, objective, subjective, descriptive, reflective, narrative, polemic, and journalistic. He wrote rhetorical and “Christian” romances before Mr Hall Caine; his plays were done entirely for the market, some of them in collaboration with Mr G. R. Sims; his criticism was all a kind of fighting journalism. “Lacking the pride of intellect,” he has said of himself, “I have by superabundant activity tried to prove myself a man among men, not a mere littérateur.” And, indeed, his career shows an activity not less surprising than superabundant. He took himself so seriously that he considered it legitimate to “stoop to hodman’s work”; thinking, he tells us, “no work undignified which did not convert him into a Specialist or a Prig.” He never doubted that he might have been “sitting empty-stomached on Parnassus,” if he had cared for the position. He defended himself, perhaps unnecessarily, for not having done so. “I have written,” he said, “for all men and in all moods.” He took the day’s wages for the day’s work, but was not satisfied. From the first his books 122 were received with serious attention; they were considered, often praised greatly, often read largely. Whenever he had anything to say, people listened. When he hit other men, the other men usually paid him the compliment of hitting back. “For nearly a generation,” he lamented, ten years ago, “I have suffered a constant literary persecution.” Well, it is difficult to do justice to one who has never done justice to another. But persecution is hardly the word to be used for even a hard hit, when the hit is received by a fighter of all work.
Like most fighters, Buchanan fought because he could not think, and his changing sides after the fight was neither loss nor gain to either cause. It was at most the loss or gain of a weapon, and the weapon was often more dangerous to friends than foes. He liked playing with big names, as children play with dolls and call them after their dreams. He took God and the devil into his confidence, very publicly, and with a kind of lofty patronage. He used the name of God to checkmate the devil, and the devil’s name to checkmate God. “And absolutely,” he tells us, “I don’t know whether there are gods or not. I know only that there is Love and Lofty Hope and Divine Compassion.” There are more big names to play with, and he wrote them, even their adjectives, in capital letters. The capital letters were meant for emphasis, they also indicated defiance. He gave many definitions of what he meant by God, the devil, Love, Hope, and Compassion. The definitions varied, and were often interchangeable. I find some of them in a book written in his honour, called “Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt.” From this book I gather that Buchanan was himself an example of the “divine” and the “lofty” virtues. His weakness, he admits, was 123 too much brotherly love. “With a heart overflowing with love, I have gathered to myself only hate and misconception.” Whatever he attacked, he attacked in all the sincerity of anger, and anger no doubt is the beginning of all avenging justice. He has said (so Mr Stodart-Walker’s book tells me, and though I gather that it was said in verse, I am unable to reconstruct the lines in metrical form) “I’ve popt at vultures circling skyward, I’ve made the carrion hawks a byword, but never caused a sigh or sob in the breast of mavis or cockrobin, nay, many such have fed out of my hand and blest me.” There is hardly a contemporary writer whom he did not attack, but it is true that he recanted with not less vehemence, and with a zest in the double function which suggests the swinging impartiality of the pendulum. When he insulted an idea, it was with the best intentions and on behalf of another idea. If he spoke blasphemously of God, it has only been, he assures us, in his zeal for religion, and when he “lifted his hat to the Magdalen,” in a famous phrase, it was all in the cause of chastity. With infinite poetic ambition, he had a certain prose force, which gave his verse, at times, the vehemence of telling oratory. He attempted in verse many things which were not worth attempting and some which were. In all he aimed at effect, sometimes getting it. He was indifferent to the quality of the effect, so long as the effect was there, and the mere fact of his aiming at it disqualified him, at his best, from a place among genuine, that is to say disinterested artists. 1901. (Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) __________ From Reticence in Literature, and Other Papers by Arthur Waugh
(J. G. Wilson, London, 1915.) ROBERT BUCHANAN THE story of Robert Buchanan’s literary life, if it were written frankly and with knowledge, would present a record of as much adventure and emotion as that of any of his own adventurous novels. It started in a spirit of the eighteenth century, and it ran the gamut of almost all the varied interests of the last half of the nineteenth; it joined hands, either in friendship or in combat, with most of the representative writers of the time, and it was above all things the career of a man passionately interested in his fellow-men, a creature of impulse, a child of emotion, capable alike of generous friendship and of equally ungenerous enmity; unreasoning, unreasonable, but often instinctively right, and generally downright and sincere. Judged externally, it would be pronounced successful; for while Buchanan came up to London, like the waifs and Whittingtons of a bygone age, without money or prospects, he passed in his time through most of the phases of popularity and material comfort; he had a hard struggle as a boy, but he enjoyed in his manhood more of the moderate plenty of life than falls to the lot of many men of greater ability and equal industry. And yet his career is one that criticism cannot regard altogether complacently, for Buchanan certainly did not do the good things that at the outset he promised to do; he achieved a great deal, but only a small portion of it was on a distinctively high level. Mr. William Archer has 155 said that he was “guilty of the most unpardonable sin a craftsman can commit—that of not doing his best.” But this is, perhaps, rather too uncompromising a judgment; and we may arrive at a juster estimate by distinguishing rather more carefully some of the issues and necessities of the situation.
Buchanan arrived in London (in 1860), with the romantic confidence of boyhood, “to seek his fortune.” He was nineteen years old, the son of a Stafford socialistic missionary, and of Scots descent. He had been educated at Glasgow High School and University, and he brought with him to London a fellow student of the same ambition, the pair having sworn comradeship in the pursuit of literary fame. The story of the early struggles of Buchanan and his friend David Gray is generally familiar. It is the story of privation in a Grub-street garret, which recalls the early misfortunes of Richard Savage, and it ended for one of the combatants in a premature and pitiful death. Buchanan’s was the stronger temperament; he lived through the lean years of half-starvation, and overcame the obstacles which bristle about the start of a literary career, and in a few years he was making his way steadily upon the newspaper press. Those, however, who watched Buchanan’s career closely were inclined to think that the experiences of those early days in London had set a mark upon him which the circumstances of later life never wholly obliterated. Privation is a cruel taskmistress, and in those probationary years he learnt that to please the public you must provide what the public wants. Material success was essential to one in Buchanan’s 156 position. He had not the provision which might have enabled him to choose the work he would have preferred; he was obliged to write what he could find a market for. And so it was not, perhaps, so much the case that he deliberately did not do his best, as that he fell more and more unconsciously into the habit of working upon lines which he saw elsewhere successful, and in which he knew he could himself succeed most easily. The result in any case was much the same; a true artist was wasted in the necessary pursuit of popular favour.
For the unfortunate part of this compromise with necessity was that it fostered in Buchanan the very defects to which his work was most fatally prone. He was, as we have said, a creature of emotion, and his temperament was always swaying between emotional excesses. When for a moment the balance lay level, he would produce, as he often did in his early career, poems of intense and poignant humanity, genuine and sincere utterances of a man of high feeling and deep sympathy. But the balance was momentary, and with its decline he plunged at once into melodramatic exaggeration. Over-emphasis both of detraction and admiration marred his loyalty to what were often most commendable causes, and in his creative work the same over-emphasis dragged him into lurid and hyperbolical effects which simply defeated their own object. He became the victim of untutored emotion, playing into the hands of the crowd.
And yet he was at heart a true poet, of the vigorous and emotional order. He began to write, perhaps, in an unfortunate time; for the spasmodic, 157 sentimental, and rather formless poetic movement of the ’sixties was precisely the sort of movement to call out in him the qualities which he most needed to restrain, and he yielded himself readily to its fascination. A natural melodist, he was content with loose and flaccid metrical excesses, and his harmony often dissolves itself into the mechanical jingle of the barrel-organ. A rapid and volcanic thinker, he indulged himself in unshapely diffusions; form became the last thing to be considered; effect, effect, and always effect was the mainspring of his work. Later on, too, he assumed subjects far beyond the range of his imagination, and the nebulous and rather pretentious parables in which he attempted to set forth some sort of philosophy of the divine will are found, on careful analysis, to be often very tawdry and always theatrical. But poetry was undoubtedly his sphere. Here, more than anywhere else, he found expression for the most humane and sincere trait in his nature—his generous care and sympathy for the sufferings of the unfortunate. Here, too, he often wrote with persuasive simplicity and directness. It was in his early poetry that he held out promise richer, alas! than any later fulfilment.
Poetry, however, is a poor staff upon which to support a household; and Buchanan, like so many others, turned in time to the more popular field of fiction. Some of his earlier novels are full of power, even if it is rather crudely employed. “The Shadow of the Sword” is not without taint of his besetting sin; it is over-emphatic and over-eager; but it has fine passages and is marked by open and broad sincerity. “God and 158 the Man,” again, has theatrical faults (indeed, it was afterwards recast as a melodrama); but there are scenes of abounding vigour, and in working up emotion to a fever heat Buchanan was not only adroit, but electrically effective. Still, as time went on, Buchanan’s fiction declined in quality more than any other side of his work. As he began to give his attention more and more to the stage, the influence of the theatre affected his fiction to such a degree that one seemed to see in every new novel the process by which it had been hastily recast from a first rough dramatic draft. No doubt, this was not actually the case; and many of the novels which looked like re-adjusted melodramas may have begun and ended their history in their final form of fiction. Still, the pervading influence of the theatre was fatal to good work in the novel, the dialogue became stagey, the effects suggested the footlights, and there was no “conviction” in the whole of the workmanship.
Meanwhile, Buchanan was gaining much popularity in the theatre. It cannot, indeed, be said that he enriched the stage with literature, but he turned out many workmanlike dramas which served their purpose, and were upon the whole healthy and vigorous enough in tone. Sentimentality, a perverted form of his emotionalism, warped some of his effects; and in his adaptations of Fielding and Richardson in particular he imported into the stage versions of the eighteenth century novel a sugary sort of sentiment which was not much in harmony with the virile savour of the originals. On the other hand, he was thoroughly aware of the value of stagecraft, and some of his melodramas, 159 such, for example, as the adapted “Man’s Shadow,” were in their theatrical way genuinely impressive. It is doubtful, however, if any of them would stand literary criticism, if printed; and this, it need scarcely be said, is rather a serious consideration when applied to the work of a professedly literary man.
Finally, some reference is demanded to Buchanan’s excursions into literary controversy, the best-remembered instance of which is his attack upon the Pre-Raphaelites in the article he called “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” Buchanan was, of course, no critic; the violences of his temperament were against him. But he was a tremendous fighter, and he loved controversy, if not for its own sake, at any rate for the opportunity it gave him of venting opinions which increased in emphasis with every outburst of opposition. As a combatant he lacked every grace and chivalry of the lists; urbanity and persuasiveness were apparently distasteful to him, for he lost no opportunity of outraging them with diversities of violence. His attack upon Rossetti was quite without method or stability of judgment; it wounded its victim to the quick, but it probably persuaded no one of its justice. “The Coming Terror,” a volume of controversial essays which aroused some interest more than twenty years ago, contains some sensible ideas intermingled with a great deal of indiscriminate buffeting of the air, and this defect is representative of all his critical arguments. Yet his enthusiasm was as generous in praise as it was violent in difference. The consideration of dates renders it unlikely that Buchanan spoke by the book when he said 160 that he was one of the first to give Browning welcome at a time when all the critical world was contemning him; but it is at least true that among the voices raised to proclaim a new talent Buchanan’s was often among the earliest and the most hearty. His view was not always sound, and the hyperbole with which it was expressed was almost invariably unsound, but he gave encouragement to many literary beginners at a time when they needed it most urgently. Here, too, perhaps the memories of his own early struggles prompted him, and to a better purpose.
We take leave, then, of Robert Buchanan with a sense of kindly and sincere regret. He was a man of real talent and of generous emotion, driven, as we believe, by the force of circumstances to make less of his abilities than might have been made under advantages of leisure and of competency. The struggle of life affects different men in different ways. Some go down under it altogether; some, but these are very few, rise above it and seem to thrive upon opposition; others, and these the great majority, compromise with it, and are content to swim with the tide. Buchanan went with the tide and the majority. The compromise brought him success and his reward; but it would be injustice to his memory to pretend that, under other circumstances and with other advantages, the success might not have been on higher levels and the reward itself more enduring. __________ (Back to Critical Writings about Buchanan) |
|
