Author, dramatist, and publisher of his own writings; born, Caverswall, Staffordshire, 18 Aug. 1841; only son of Robert Buchanan, socialist, missionary, and journalist, and Margaret Williams, of Stoke-upon-Trent. Educ.: Glasgow Academy and High School; Glasgow University. Came to London from Scotland in 1860, and has since then been journalist, novelist, and dramatist; passing part of the time in Scotland and Ireland; visited America in 1880. Publications: Poems, including “London Poems,” 1866; “Book of Orm,” 1868; “Collected Poetical Works,” 1880; “The Wandering Jew,” 1890; published anonymously, “St. Abe and His Seven Wives,” “White Rose and Red;” first novel, “The Shadow of the Sword,” published about 1874; from 1880 onward has produced many popular plays; became his own publisher in 1896, issuing “The Devil’s Case” and other works.
Personal
A man of passionately cherished ideals, most of which were utterly opposed to the practice of his day; a man who, while he lived, must freely speak whatever truth he saw, at whatever cost to the feelings or interests of individuals; he was incapable of the least personal malice towards an opponent. His relations with Rossetti furnish an illustrative case…. The student of Buchanan who would thoroughly understand his work and more especially his critical work, literary or social—must be careful to keep in mind one pregnant fact regarding him. He was the descendant of a long line of Calvinistic Puritans, and, although half an Englishman by the maternal side, and bred, to his tenth year, south of the Border, he was, in many respects, a thorough-going Scotsman. The Celtic ichor accounted for much of his utterances as a writer, and much of his conduct as a man.
During the earlier days of the return of the malady I was in London again and saw a great deal of him, was witness to his having become subject to illusions, and heard his declarations that he was beset by enemies and that he continually heard them in an adjoining room conspiring to attack him, and he attributed the savage criticism of Buchanan on his volume of poems to his being in the conspiracy to ruin him. The attack of Buchanan had a most disastrous effect on his mind. It was the first time that Rossetti had experienced the brutalities of criticism, and his sensitiveness was excessive. No reassurance had any effect; he had heard, he declared, the voices of those who had combined to ruin his reputation discussing the measures they were going to take, and it was evident that it had become a mania closely resembling insanity. Buchanan’s criticism had a rancor and breadth of personality in it which had no excuse; it was a savage, wanton attack on the poet which he felt not only as a poet and artist but as personal; for, to Rossetti, the two were the silver and golden sides of the shield. Though the morbid state was there, I think that the article of Buchanan had more to do with the intensification of the mania of persecution than anything else that occurred. And at that time he had not yet contracted the habit of taking chloral.
Poetry
Robert Buchanan seems to me a man of genius. Whatever deductions may have to be made; whatever faults and shortcomings may limit his reputation and lower his rank, there will not long be a doubt that he deserves to rank among the poets—a small class in every age…. When I have said that the poems need severe revision, and especially need to have at least two-thirds of the references to honey blotted out, I have said all that is necessary in the way of general fault-finding. The other shortcomings and errors are mainly such as may fairly be set down to the writer’s youth, or to the natural limitations of his genius. He has no tricks to be warned against. He has nothing to unlearn, though much, of course, to learn. Such as he is, I believe him to be a genuine poet, who may one day become a distinguished poet. Even if his stature never enlarges, his place among the pastoral poets will be undisputed.
He seems to us one of the few young singers of the day who is really a poet, and who has a future before him.
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 give the keynote of the whole, is low:—
| Tom Love, a man prepared for friend or foe, | |
| Whiskered, well-featured, tight from top to toe. |
By “Meg Blane,” our author not only sustained his previous claim to the attention of the public, but deepened his hold as the translator of the tragic elements of modern existence into the common language of humanity. There is a strange mingling of weirdness and reality about the ballad which is both fascinating and appalling. Edgar Allan Poe has given us a thrilling picture of despair in the form of a monologue, and though we are bound to admit that on the score of musical effect the American poet has the advantage, yet there are other points in which the verdict must be decidedly in favour of the English one…. All the qualities which are admirable in poetic art find a lodgment to a greater or less degree in “The Book of Orm.” It has simplicity, grandeur; beauty, sublimity; sweetness, pathos. The word-painting—to adopt a phrase for which we have no special liking, but which is very expressive—is wonderful; whilst we witness also a felicitous handling of all kinds of rhythm and rhyme…. Besides Tennyson and Browning, there is no other person except Mr. Buchanan whose work we could consider it [“White Rose and Red”] to be, and there are insuperable aspects which would immediately forbid us associating the authorship with the Poet Laureate, or the writer of “Pippa Passes.”
Mr. Robert Buchanan at one time gave promise of taking a high rank among modern poets. Assuredly he has not fulfilled all the hopes of his first days, but he must always stand well among the singers who only claim to form the second order of the poets of our time.
At least fifteen years ago I read with sympathy Mr. Buchanan’s “North Coast.” His other poems I do not know. Of that I retain a distinct impression. It contained true, and even strong, poetry. This impression was confirmed by the two novels I have read. In spite of some opinions I ought to respect, in spite of such a concentration in his writings of all that is, to me personally, so repellent, I have always maintained—twice in these columns—that Mr. Buchanan does possess that mental fire we call genius—a power of grandiose conception, and a rich breadth and sweep in his dramatic delineation of human passions. But he is seldom, if ever, himself.
As an abstract record of the spiritual vicissitudes of the unrestful, enquiring human soul it has genuine interest; but probably there will be some, at any rate, among Mr. Buchanan’s admirers (among whom the present writer includes himself) who will agree with me in finding that, unlike most epics, “The City of Dream” cannot be satisfactorily read in parts. Its impressiveness is the result of ordered narrative and of culminating interest…. Regarded in its literary aspect, “The City of Dream” seems to me a poem which, while full of fine lines and beautiful passages, is no advance upon the author’s previous work. Personally, I find the “Book of Orm”—with all its incompleteness and faults of excessive mysticism—superior; and “Balder the Beautiful” has more of the white-heat glow of genuine poetry, while its purely lyrical portions are unmistakably finer than the rhymed interludes in the blank verse of “The City of Dream.”
I confess that I am and always have been one of those lovers of poetry—be the number large or small—who have an undoubting faith in Mr. Buchanan’s genius. Occasionally I have regretted to see him waste his powers on work and on interests that were beneath them; though in saying this I do not refer to his romances or to his chief plays, and it is needless to particularise further. Of this I am sure, that if he will let politicians and all the other quarrelsome people fight out their differences for themselves, and will devote his powers to creative work, he may take a foremost place among living men of letters.
To compare him with Chaucer would be absurd extravagance; but it is not extravagant to say that since Chaucer we have had no poet who can be more emphatically described as a poet of flesh and blood…. 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.
Mr. Buchanan tells us that he conceived the scheme of his poem twenty years ago. Had he published it then, one would have had less cause to question its relevancy. As it is, it must be pronounced an anachronistic performance. Many of us who have thought and wrestled with thought have as boys or striplings, written in prose or in verse violent attacks upon Christianity. But for a man to wait until he has reached middle age, and then, after being for years a kind of household god among the devout, to spring upon them a long-cherished but carefully concealed attack upon all they hold dear, may be “smart;” though it is hardly considerate…. Mr. Buchanan has a loud voice and a heavy tread: that is his manner. It is unfortunate, but he cannot help it. A man who has been persistently ostracised has no need, he may think, to be too particular. In any case that person is noble indeed, who, painted black, does not end in becoming what he is painted. The author of “The Wandering Jew” is not the man, we may be sure, to show everybody his hand.
Mr. Buchanan, if we mistake not, is a poet who, notwithstanding inequalities, has scarcely any superiors among English poets now living…. We see unmistakably a richly endowed poet [“London Poems”], full of imagination, dramatic insight, humour, pathos, and an abundance of sympathy with the unintelligible anguish of life that so often meets us in the lowest human forms. Here was no playing with the gossamer hues of air-spun fancies. There is a terrible earnestness in these poems; and if at times we are tempted to revolt against the plainness with which the almost hopeless enigmas of life are set forth, we find comfort in the representation, again and again repeated, that after all the bad is not altogether bad, and that there is a saving leaven in human nature even at its worst.
General
It is not necessary that we should here detail the successive volumes of poetry, criticism, and fiction, which have from year to year flowed from his fertile and brilliant pen. It is sufficient to say, that he is, beyond comparison, the foremost living Scottish poet, and has permanently enriched English literature with some of the noblest poems of the present century. He possesses in affluence, dramatic insight, imagination, humour, and pathos, and is, perhaps, the most variously-gifted, as he is certainly the most illustrious of living literary Scotsmen.
I find Mr. Buchanan’s volume of essays fresh, vigorous, original, and full of suggestion, admirable and varied in substance, strenuous and powerful in style. The book gives abundant proof that Mr. Buchanan is an excellent critic when not too strongly under the influence of personal feeling. His knowledge of literature is broad and intimate, his insight is keen and deep, and his sympathies are catholic. As a critic of poetry he finds room enough in the world for the poetry of enchanted symbolism, and for the poetry of kicking up one’s heels and rolling with the milkmaids in the hay. Æschylus and Victor Hugo, Goethe and Walt Whitman, Burns and Rossetti, Shelley and the author of the burlesque on the “Wicked World,” have all their points of appeal for him. Nevertheless, his opinions are clear and his aim is distinct. He is a Philistine, and he knows that the name of Philistine is only the name in modern parlance which it is possible for him to bear.
A little more than a year after the publication of the “Poems,” an unimportant scribbler, whose name does not deserve to be dignified by mention, obtained access to the pages of a leading review, and published over a pseudonymous signature an article entitled “The Fleshy School of Poetry.” This article was a direct attack upon Rossetti’s poems, and fairly reeked with what Swinburne calls a “rancid morality.”
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…. 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.
