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Robert Buchanan

A CRITICAL APPRECIATION

AND OTHER ESSAYS

Robert Buchanan

A CRITICAL APPRECIATION

AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY

HENRY MURRAY

' I pass too surely : let at least Truth stay '

Browning {C/eon)

LONDON

PHILIP WELLBY

6 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN

1901

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70 SAMUEL MACKEW, ESQ., M.D.

My Dear Doctor, —

It was at your instigation^ and under your

editorial auspices^ that a considerable part of the work

contained in this volufue was done. I find a sincere pleasure

tn dedicating the hook to you as a memento of our connexion.

Believe me always,

Tours sincerely,

HENRT MURRAY. London, June 1901.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

ROBERT BUCHANAN i

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE . .116 A FRENCH FIEW OF RUSKIN . . .128

RUSKIN AND CARLTLE 140

RUDTARD KIPLING 153

FRENCH AND ENGLISH 163

ZOLA'S LAY SERMON 182

A LYRIC LOVE 202

MISS MARIE CORELLl 215

DE PROFUNDIS 230

Robert Buchanan.

I FIRST met Robert Buchanan in the summer of 1885. Our acquaintance, for some time of a lax and ordinary kind, was — very characteristically of such a man — cemented into a warm and enduring friendship by an occurrence which would have brought most acquaintances to an abrupt termination. An article from his pen on ' The Modern Young Man as Critic ' appeared in a monthly review, attracting a good deal of attention and a considerable amount of public comment. It compared some of the more prominent among the younger literary person- alities of the day with corresponding types with which Buchanan had been familiar in his youth, and denounced their pessimism, their irreverence, and their cheap culture in the cut-and-thrust fashion we had all, long before that date, learned to associate with his polemical utterances. I was at that time associated with a cer- tain weekly publication, now extinct, which enjoyed a great reputation for smart and outspoken comment on current topics, and my editor — who was more or less lie with more than one of the objects of Buchanan's onslaught — commissioned me to reply to his article.

B

ROBERl BUCHJNAN.

My feelings towards Buchanan at that time were of a somewhat mixed description, compounded of admiration for the genius evident in his best work, and regret that he should so often fall below the lofty level which, in his happier moments, he attained and kept so easily ; and in my criticism of * The Modern Young Man as Critic' the second of those senti- ments certainly found stronger expression than the first. I had at that time a tendency, which perhaps even now I have not altogether outworn, to let my pen run away with me, and to express the passing mood of the moment with unnecessary strength. What I said was, as Buchanan himself subsequently confessed, true enough, but it was truth savagely spoken, and I have to own that the article was per- meated by a certain air of personal resentment, quite unjustified by the circumstances of the case. As the hazards of life drew us closer and closer together I regretted my virulence more and more ; and when, some months after the appearance of my ill-tempered article, Buchanan, by a most thoughtful and quite un- solicited act of friendship, showed how kindly he had come to regard me, I felt that the hour for full con- fession had arrived. I wrote to him, avowing myself the author of the article and apologising more for its manner than its matter. His reply was like him- self— fi*ank, cordial, generous. ' Nobody knows better than I how, in these random fights of the literary arena, a man loses his temper and strikes harder than he need. I have many such sins on my conscience.

ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

There is really very little in your article that you need regret, and indeed, knowing how you feel on these matters, I do not see how you could well have

written otherwise To requite your candour, I

was fairly certain that you had written the article, and quite certain, if my belief was true, that you would sooner or later " own up " to it. Don't avoid me like the plague because you have voluntarily gone into the confessional, but come up to dinner next Sunday and do penance.' The matter was never again mentioned between us, and this apparently untoward accident was the starting-point of an absolutely uncheckered friendship of more than twelve years' duration. I mention it here only because it was so richly characteristic of a side of Buchanan's nature which the majority of people, knowing him merely from his published utterances, could hardly believe him to possess. 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 in- dividuals ; he was incapable of the least personal malice towards an opponent. His relations with Rossetti furnish an illustrative case. It is certainly not worth while, at this time of day, to dig up the buried and forgotten bitternesses to which the once famous ' Fleshly School ' criticism gave rise. The protagonists — Buchanan himself and the men of genius he had attacked — fought their battle vehemently, but

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

honestly. There was hard hitting in plenty, but none ' below the belt.' But smaller and less honest partisans envenomed the strife with all sorts of petty false- hood. The absolutely unfounded statement that Buchanan had puffed his own poems in the pseudonymous ' Thomas Maitland ' article has been quite recently revived, and, so long as the memory of the incident remains, will probably never be finally laid to rest. But all the petty spite imported into the dispute by the outside skirmishers could not prevent Buchanan from owning that he had over- stated his case, and in the ardour of over -statement had neglected sufficiently to recognise Rossetti's genius. To that genius he paid eloquent tribute on more than one occasion, but never so touchingly as in the dedication to Rossetti of his novel, * God and the Man.'

TO AN OLD ENEMY.

I would have snatch'd a bay leaf from thy brow, Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head ;

In peace and tenderness 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.

Ten months later came the news of Rossetti's death, and Buchanan added the sad and charming lines : —

ROBERT BV CHAN AN.

Calmly, thy royal robe of Death around thee,

Thou sleepest, and weeping Brethren round thee stand ;

Gently they placed, ere yet God's angel crowned thee, My lily in thy hand.

I never saw thee living, oh my brother,

But on thy breast my lily of love now lies. And by that token we shall know each other

When God's voice saith ' Arise ! '

A year or two later (in 1877), in 'A Look (8'^( Round Literature,' he emphasised and extended this already sufficient apology, moved thereto by an article in the British ^arterly^ the writer of which, says Buchanan, ' takes occasion to repeat at second- hand, for a wiser generation, all the hasty expressions and uninstructed abuse that I published in hot haste ten years ago, and have since, as my readers know, repented. It is so easy,' he goes on, ' to create a nickname that will stick, so difficult to write a criticism that will endure. Perhaps it may be worth while .... to show the readers of this book how false a judgment it was, how conventional and Pharisaic a criticism, which chose to dub as ** fleshly " the works of this most ethereal and dreamy — in many respects this least carnal and most religious — of modern poets.' Seldom have royaller compliments been paid by a poet to a contemporary poet than those Buchanan poured at the feet of Rossetti. ' The man was a magician, of the tribe of Kubla Khan ; and at his bidding there rose a stately pleasure dome, every precious stone of which

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

had a name and a mystery, and when he entered it to weave his strange verse, he was within his right

in using the language of incantation If he was

wrong, all the mystics have been wrong ; Boehmen was a blunderer, Richter was a proser, Novalis was no poet.' And in the brief following passage he plumbed the depth of the mystery of Rossetti's work : ' He uses amatory forms and carnal images, just as he uses mere sounds and verbalisms, to ex- press ideas which are purely and remotely spiritual ; and he takes the language of personal love to express his divine yearning, simply because that language is the most exquisite quintessence of human speech.' And again : ' This mood of perfect vision and grave assurance inspires all the best work of Rossetti. He has no questions to ask, no problems to trouble him ; he is sibylline, not from being puzzle-headed, but because he has looked behind the curtain of the sibyl. He sees the trees walk, he hears the flowers speak, with a sober certainty of waking bliss. When an angel passes him, he can feel the very texture of his robe, and tell the colour of his eyes. He is as sure of Heaven and all its white-robed angels as ordinary men are of each other.' Further on, speak- ing ■ of the Sonnet Sequence, ' The House of Life/ which the British Quarterly reviewer had stigmatised as a ' house of ill-fame,' he wrote : ' It is, to a cer- tain extent, monotonous, and the sacrament of flesh and blood has a constant place in it ; but out of this sacrament rises the ghostly vision of the Host,

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and ere he has ended we hear the voices of all the angels praising the Lord of Heavenly Love. And of this strange texture, of this starry woof, is the

so-called " fleshly " poetry The stairs of the

earthly love lead to the heavens ; he ascends them s'lep by step, that is all, hand in hand with his sweet guide — who is a bright earthly maiden at the beginning, then a bride, then a shining creature, winged and marvellously transfigured ; the rest in order ; last, an amethyst ! You can transfigure Love, but you can never transfigure Lust ; this last never made an angel, or inspired a true poem, yet,' * And so,' he adds as his final word — a word which, one might be excused for hoping, might be allowed to remain the last regarding the entire business — ' And so, when all is said and done, the friendly criticism remains the best and wisest. Those who have read Mr. Swinburne's eulogy of his master, and thought it, perhaps, a little strained, may admit, at least, that it was strained, like all eulogy of love, in the right direction. My own abuse was and is, like all hasty contemporary abuse, nothing. Mr, Swinburne's honest praise was, and is, like all honest praise, something. The poet of " The House of Life " is beyond both ; but his fame will remain, when all detraction is forgotten, as a golden symbol, a^re perennius, of much that was best and brightest in the culture of our time.'

It is pleasant also to know that, even in the first heat of the strife occasioned by Buchanan's

S ROBERT BUCHANAN.

original criticism, Rossetti could recognise the high qualities of his assailant, as he showed when he interrupted the denunciations of an ardent partisan by the emphatic exclamation, * Yes — but, by Jove, he ' J a poet ! ' As Christopher North said, when he held out the olive-branch to his old foeman, Leigh Hunt, ' The animosities pass, the humanities are eternal.'

It may interest the reader, and may serve as a further illustration of the real kindliness of personal feeling which underlay Buchanan's occasional viru- lence of attack, to read the brief address to two of his oldest and most persistent opponents, the late Edmund Yates and the living Henry Labouchere, which was, by a mere accident, left out of its proper place in the first — and at present, only — volume of *The Outcast'

So, Edward, Henry, pax vobiscum^ Arcades ambo, here's adieu !

All strife, all hate, at last to this come — The silent grave, the sunless yew.

The scandal-monger, the truth-seeker, The man of this world or a fairer.

Must drink at last of the same beaker, Whereof a skeleton is bearer.

A little space a little life,

A little time a little strife.

Then calm, then rest, then slumber deep,

'Mid the black brotherhood of sleep.

As Rome was once, when on the Tree

Bloom'd the blood -rose of Calvary,

So is our England now, and you

Perform your parts like Romans true.

ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Afoot or horse-back, proud or prone,

Continue beautiful and brave, And take a smile, and not a stone, From him who walketh all alone

The common highway to the grave.

The student of Buchanan who would thoroughly understand his work — and more especially his critical work, literary or social — must be careflil 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 utterance as a writer, and much of his conduct as a man. When the Cockney critic anathematised him as a ' provincial,' he not merely accepted the description, he proclaimed and gloried in it — as also did another Scotsman, with whom in most respects he had little enough in common — Thomas Carlyle. The practice of the literary art in the freest of Bohemian society, influences which act with such deadly effect as solvents on the prejudices, innate or acquired, of most men, never affected in any appreciable degree Buchanan's philosophy of life. Loathing Calvinistic theology, he remained a Calvinistic moralist to the end of the chapter ; and that morality impregnates every serious utterance on life and its mysteries that ever fell from his pen. Absolutely at the antipodes of mere asceticism — no man better loved the good things of this life than he — sensuality

10 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

was horrible to him. It was for that reason that he fell foul of Rossetti, as on other occasions he ftW foul of Mr. Swinburne and Theophile Gautier, because — mistakenly, as we have seen that he candidly and generously confessed — he thought him what Byron, in his ' English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' called Thomas Moore, ' A mere melodious advocate of lust' To Buchanan, sexual love was one of two things. Sanctified by affection, it was the holiest and most beautiful thing in life ; not so sanctified, the basest and most degrading. Men of the world find foothold for themselves somewhere between these extremes of opinion ; but in many respects Buchanan had no desire to be accepted as a man of the world, and, as one who knew intimately every detail of his personal life for many years, I can testify that he at least sealed his faith by his daily practice. A man is never a Puritan upon one point alone, and Buchanan's puritanism, so far from being merely sexual, invaded and coloured his views of all the important questions of life. He hated triviality, cackle and small talk and scandal, and any- thing which could come under Matthew Arnold's sweeping definition of ' intellectual levity. ' Consequently, he had scant love for modern journalism, and especially for that department of journalism marked by the prefix 'Society.' Hence his vehement onslaughts on Mr. Yates and Mr. Labouchere, and much of the criticism of contemporary art and literature which earned for him, among strangers to his personality, a reputation as a cantankerous spoil-sport.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. ii

It was Buchanan's innate tendency and cultivated habit to look almost entirely to the ethical value of any literary work which attracted his attention. He summed up his critical doctrine in a single phrase in the 'Epistle Dedicatory' of' The Outcast,' to ' C. W.S.,' a phrase to the effect that ' a Poet was a Prophet and a Propagandist or nothing.' This present utterance of mine being intended, not as a eulogy at-any-price — a form of literary exercise which Buchanan detested — but as a critical appreciation, I may say that this phrase neatly defines the battle-ground of many a tough and interminable argument between us. I do not go so far as absolutely to reverse Buchanan's dictum, or even so far as to say that a poet is never less a poet than when he is engaged in preaching or propa- gandising ; though either of those positions is, I believe, quite tenable, and both have been frequently and ably defended. Personally, I fly very light in the matter ot artistic dogma. The one qualification I inexorably demand of an artist is — that he shall know his business. So long as a painter's pictures are beautiful in form and colour, so long as a poet's verses are clear in meaning and exquisite in verbal expression, they are good enough for me — barring, of course, the artistic expression of cases of abnormal ethical aberration, such as have sometimes, though very rarely, occurred. La correction de la forme, cest la vertu, said Theophile Gautier, and in matters artistic I accept that ruling, with certain private reservations which I feel no need to express at length.

12 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

To a man of Buchanan's mental habits, such a declaration necessarily appeared as the confession of a Sadducee and a dilettante trifler, tolerant of all moralities for the simple reason that he had none of his own — the view taken by the dogmatist of the latitu- dinarian in all ages. But I cannot but think that his intransigeance on this point cost him much. It certainly blinded him to the mere artistic beauty of much work which happened to be based upon interpre- tations of the eternal verities differing from his own — such, for instance, as that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Though I share to the full Buchanan's hatred of the ultra-Jingo views which Mr. Kipling has made it his business to interpret, I cannot but think it a pity that any divergence of opinion should disable a critic of that gentleman's work from perceiving and enjoying even its merely technical excellence, or should cause him to ignore much of Mr. Kipling's writing from which the taint of chauvinism is altogether absent — such work as ' In the Rukh,' or the little tale which has been described, not unworthily, as ' the best short story in the language,'

* Without Benefit of Clergy;' or such of his verses as

* Recessional ' and ' What the People said ; ' or to forget the splendid verbal strength and directness which make even his banalities and vulgarisms more than half pardonable. So also, in judging Mr. Bernard Shaw, Buchanan laid stress on the irresponsible cynical mockery which — if that singularly constructed man of genius could only be persuaded to see it — is his weak- ness, rather than on his really admirable powers as a

ROBERT BUCHANAN. ij.

dramatic constructor, and as a writer of trenchant and characteristic dialogue. It should be added, in justice both to Buchanan and to Mr, Shaw, that Buchanan revised — or rather supplemented — his original criticism by the following lines, published in * The New Rome.'

No Slave at least art thou, on this dull Day

When slaves and knaves throng in Life's banquet-hall! . . , Who listens to thy scornful laugh must say

'Wormwood, though bitter, is medicinal !'

Because thou turnest from our feast of Lies

Where prosperous priests with whores and warriors feed. Because thy Jester's mask hides loving eyes

I name thee here, and bid thy w^ork ' God speed !'

In many a conversation with Buchanan I expressed my fear that this insistence on the merely ethical outlook of each individual writer by an authority of his weight might act rather for evil than for good. It expressed a mental attitude already too common, to my thinking, among Englishmen, and it has resulted in the cases of people of small artistic feeling or culture in absurdities which have more than once made England the laughing-stock of the intellectual world. An extreme case was the publication, a few years ago, of an edition of ' David Copperfield,' from which the episode of Steerforth and little Em'ly had been expunged as unfitted for family reading ! To insist to the English public on the propagandist duties of the verbal artist is rather like carrying coals to Newcastle. To mix a metaphor, the pendulum of English opinion has always shown a sufficiently marked inclination to the

14 ROBERT BUCHJNAN.

side of ' moral value.' We have, as a nation, at least enough of the utilitarian, as opposed to the purely artistic, leaven in our blood, and stand in greater need of artistic than of moral culture. To persuade Buchanan either of the truth or the expediency of such a standpoint was, of course, quite impossible. The artistic beliefs of such men as he are no more 'idle' than were the ' manners ' of the Knights of the Table Round, they are the fruits of a strong personal intelligence, sedulously cultured.

But, when any great principle was at stake, no man was less hidebound by preconceptions than Buchanan. Much as he loved, and fiercely as he defended, certain minor dogmas, he would forego their interests where major interests were concerned, as he proved by his warm defence of Emile Zola, long before that great writer — and greater Man — had won the suffrage of every honest man alive by his splendidly heroic defence and rescue of the unfortunate Dreyfus, and when he was at the very nadir of English public opinion.

Everybody will remember how, in 1889, the veteran publicist and historian, Mr. Henry Vizetelly, was con- demned, through the action of a clique of pestilent busy- bodies known as the 'National Vigilance Association,' to a term of imprisonment for publishing translations of Zola's novels. The Press for the most part applauded the foolish and tyrannical proceeding, and Buchanan was the one English man of letters of any weight or position who resented the barefaced outrage on literature and liberty. He addressed an open

ROBERT BVCHJNJN. 15

letter, in the form of a pamphlet, to Mr, Henry Matthews, then Home Secretary, praying, in the interests of justice and humanity, for Mr. Vizetelly's release. English officialism could, of course, take no note of so irregular a plea, however well supported by logic and eloquence ; but ' On Descending into Hell ' (the pamphlet in question) deserves to take its place by Milton's ' Areopagitica ' and John Mill's 'Essay on Liberty ' as an irrefutable argument on the side of freedom of thought and expression. Had Shakespeare or Victor Hugo been the insulted author instead of the writer of * Pot-Bouille ' and * La Terre,' this ' speech for the defence ' could not have been conducted with closer reasoning or more generous fervour. ' I affirm,' wrote Buchanan, ' that Emile Zola was bound to be printed, translated, read. Little as I sympathise with his views of life, greatly as I loathe his pictures of human vice and depravity, I have learned much from him, and others may learn much ; and had I been unable to read French, these translations would have been to me an intellectual help and boon. / like to have the Devil's case thoroughly stated^ because I know it refutes itself* As an artist, Zola is unjustifiable ; as a moralist, he is answerable ; but as a free man, a man of letters, he can decline to accept the fiat of a criminal tribunal.' The pamphlet ends with a passage which, for terseness of argument and cogency of illustration, has few rivals in nineteenth-century polemical literature : —

* ' Who has ever seen Truth worsted in a fair field ? ' — Milton's * Areopagitica.'

1 6 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Wholesale corruption never yet came from corrupt liter- ature, which is the effect, not the cause, of social libertinage. Do we find morality so plentiful among the godly farmers and drovers of Annandale, or among the unco' guid of Ayrshire or Dumfriesshire — thumbers of the Bible, sheep of the Kirk ? Stands Scotland anywhere but where it did, though it has not yet acquired an aesthetic taste for the Abominable, but merely realises occasionally the primitive instincts of La Terre? Dwells perfect purity in Brittany and in Normandy, despite the fact that Zola there is an unknown quantity, and Paris itself a thing of dream ? Bestialism, animalism, sensualism, realism, call it by what name you will, is antecedent to, and triumphant over, all books whatsoever. Books may reflect it, that is all ; and I fail to see why they should not, since it exists, I love my Burns and like my Byron, though neither was a virtuous or even a ' decent ' person. My Juvenal, my Lucretius, my Catullus, and tvenmy porcus porcorum Petronius, are well read. My Decameron, with all its incidence of amativeness, is a breeding-nest of poets. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale. La Fontaine's infinite variety. But I take such books as these, as I take all such mental food, cum grana salisy a pinch of which keeps each from corruption. Even the fly-blown Gautier looks well, cold and inedible, garnished with Style's fresh parsley. But I have never found that what my teeth nibble at has any power to pollute my immortal part, I must stand on the earth, with Montaigne and Rabelais, but does that prevent me flying heavenward with Jean Paul, or walking the mountain-tops with the Shepherd of Rydal .? Inspection of the dung-heaps and slaughter-houses with Jonathan Swift and Zola only makes me more anxious to get away with Rousseau to the peaceful height where the Savoyard Vicar prays. By evil only shall ye distinguish good, says the Master ; yea, and by the husks shall ye know the grain.

The man who says that a book has power to pollute his soul, ranks his soul lower than a book. I rank mine infinitely higher.

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 17

In his generally admirable study, recently published, entitled ' Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Revolt,' Mr. Archibald Stodart-Walker says of his subject that, to the end, he preserved ' an almost childish sensitiveness to criticism, and a fanatical hatred to ... . critical injustice.' The second of these allegations is perfectly true ; the first is a curiously wrong-headed statement, proceeding as it does from the pen of a writer who was for some years one of Buchanan's personal friends. As a matter of fact, I have never met a man more serenely indifferent to criticism, merely as criticism, than was Buchanan. That he waged eternal war with the motley mob of gentle- men of the Press who chronicle and criticise the current literature of the day is, of course, matter of literary history; but the motive of his polemical activity is to be sought in the second of Mr. Stodart- Walker's statements, not in the first. Buchanan hated ' critical ' as he hated all other forms of injustice, and as he hated ignorance, arrogance, presumption, bad faith, and tawdry, sham enthusiasm, of which elements latter-day criticism is so largely compact. Elsewhere, Mr. Stodart-Walker says, ' There is a deadly want of the sense of humour in attacking criticism as a whole.' The statement is challengeable, merely as it stands, for the entire history of criticism — even criticism as written by men of large powers and wide culture — is little more than a record of the stupid injustice with which the world at large has received its greatest and its best. And criticism ' as she is wrote ' to-day is

c

1 8 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

little more and little else than an impertinence and a darkening of counsel. Among the thousands of news- papers published in Great Britain there are few which do not employ the services of a ' critic,' and, viewed in the light of that simple fact, criticism, ' as a whole,' is reduced to an absurdity, inasmuch as the writer capable of dealing adequately with any book worth noticing at all is almost as rare a phenomenon as the writer capable of producing such a book. Nor is mere incapacity the worst feature of modern criticism — it becomes easily tolerable when set beside the cynical defiance of mere common intellectual honesty which is the stock-in-trade of so many of the critical tribe. It is a matter of sad fact that — with the possible exception of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who, despite his many vulgarisms of manner and the flat banality of his outlook upon life, has real force and fine literary power — there is not a contemporary English author alive to-day under the age of sixty who approaches the first rank of excellence; yet, to judge by the current criticism of the newspapers and reviews we should believe that England was groaning in a positive plethora of literary genius. We have been gravely informed — and expected to believe — that Mr. Rider Haggard was the superior of the elder Dumas, that the cherry-stone chef d'ceuvres of the late Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson had quite hid from sight the granite monoliths which bear witness to the mighty mallet-hand of Scott, that Mr. George Moore is ' a greater Zola,' that Mr. Kipling is a ' greater Dickens,'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 19

that Mr. Henry James eclipses Thackeray, that in Mr. Stephen Phillips we have a dramatic poet who unites the excellences of Sardou and Tennyson, Milton and Dumas pere. When the late Hugh Conway died, I read a sonnet in a professedly literary journal — I refrain from naming the journal for fear of possible error — in which he was compared to a ' thunder-smitten eagle ! ' There is probably hardly a journal in England bearing the date of the day on which I write these words which is not proclaiming as ' a masterpiece ' some tawdry performance whose author's name, six months hence, it will require an effort of memory to recall. A century ago, in the early days of 'Blackwood's' and the ' Quarterly,' he was the greatest critic who was foulest in insult, most careless of decency, who had stabbed most reputations, who had inspired most despair in the breast of budding talent. Those bad old days have vanished, and to-day the greatest critic is he whose benevolently microscopic eye can detect the greatest number of ' geniuses ' among the heterogeneous mob whose crude prose and cruder verse replenish the shelves of the circulating library. En revanche, it was only at the moment of Robert Browning's death that the Press, with anything like unanimity, hailed him for what he was — one of the greatest and most certainly enduring glories of English literature. Buchanan's statement that ' Browning's life was darkened by constant neglect and infinite detraction;' and that, ' if it had not been for the efforts of a small body of devoted worshippers, who preached

20 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Browningese in spite of endless ridicule, he would

scarcely have been heard of by the great public,' is the

simple statement of a simple truth. ' Again and

again, when he was issuing his works of thought and

imagination, he was informed that it was a Poet's

duty, not to instruct, but to amuse, his generation.

A leading critical authority compared him to a noisy

and mannered " Auctioneer." He was requested to

favour the world with light performances, suitable for

the suburban reciter and drawing-room entertainer.

Since he was an eager man among men, en rapport

with everything human, he was described as a worldling

and a diner-out. Suddenly, on his death, the world

discovered that he was a sublime person, a great

person. Column upon column was written in his

praise by gentlemen who had scarcely read one of

his works. " He was great," was the cry, '* bury

him at Westminster." And scarcely was he cold

when it was deeply regretted that he missed wearing

the laurel, still worn, we Poets thank God, by the

Galahad of modern Poesy.' And he — the good and

great Tennyson — how had the current criticism of

his early days received him ? As ' a new star in the

milky-way of poetry,' of which ' Johnny Keats ' was

a specimen-luminary ! It was only when Tennyson

assumed the laurel, ' greener from the brows ' of

Wordsworth — himself too the subject of ' constant

neglect and infinite detraction' — that the critical

snobs recognised his value. Hermann Melville —

Name The surges trumpet into fame —

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 21

the ' Yankee-Greek,' greatest and best of all writers of the sea, years ago broke his pen, swearing never more to write a line ; sick of the futile struggle against the platitudinous mediocrities bepuffed by the newspaper critic. ' Imagine this Titan silenced,' said Buchanan, 'and the book-shops flooded with the illustrated magazines ! ' George Meredith, the possessor of the widest and acutest intellect which has ever bent itself to the production of prose fiction, was grey before our critical ciceroni mentioned — or apparently knew — his name. Criticism, ' as a whole,' has sought to atone for insulting or neglecting these men, together with Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and James Thomson, by discovering an earth-shaking portent in ' our school- room classic, Stevenson,' and by deifying the author of ' Herod.'

That there was a spice of personal feeling in Buchanan's frequent and furious onslaughts on the current criticism of his day is true enough. He would have been something more than mortal man had it been otherwise. It would be a task as barren as distasteful to burrow in the sarcophagi of out- of-date newspapers for specimens of the malicious detraction and spiteful stupidity with which hordes of anonymous scribblers greeted his work for many years. He scored a sweet and decisive revenge about the year 1873, ^^ which he published his two poems, ' St. Abe and His Seven Wives,' and ' White Rose and Red.' Both volumes appeared anonymously, and both were received with roars of applause by journals

22 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

which, till that date, had never failed to stigmatise their author as ' a pretentious poetaster,' ' a dullard,' * a madman,' and a condemned Scotsman. As both were American in subject and story, and possessed moreover a certain carefully maintained Transatlantic literary flavour, they were generally ascribed to James Russell Lowell — one of the few writers of real value for whom the contemporary Press had much enthusiasm. One incident in this business afforded Buchanan a great amount of justifiably malicious satisfaction. A leading London daily sent a representative to the publisher of ' St. Abe ' (Mr. Strahan) with a proof of a highly laudatory review of two columns in length, to ask — in strict confidence, of course — whether the popular belief was true, and Lowell was really the author of the book. Mr. Strahan, meticulously faithfiil to his pledge of secrecy, declined to answer ' Yea ' or *Nay;' and no notice at all of the poem appeared in the columns of the inquisitive journal f Small wonder that, when a man with such an experience fell foul of the critical scribes he threw a little extra muscle into the strokes of the dog-whip. But that Buchanan was personally sensitive to criticism, printed or spoken, is a quite mistaken idea. He hailed a critical mis- statement or stupidity with positive joy, because it gave him a chance of replying to it, and so afforded an opportunity for additional exploitation of his idea. He fell foul of puffery of bad work and of neglect of good work because, as Mr. Stodart- Walker puts it, he hated critical injustice, and because nothing gave

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 23

him greater pleasure than to puncture an overblown reputation — except to vindicate neglected talent. Two of his utterances in this connexion are memorable, because they are richly typical of the man who made them. ' I have my own opinion of myself/ he once remarked in the course of conversation. * It is a lower one than people might fancy, but it suffices.' And on another occasion, in answer to a phrase of condolence regarding a bitter attack upon one of his books, he wrote, ' My soul will survive in my poetry, and can take care of itself Sensitive- ness to criticism is, I fancy, generally allied with spiritual weakness of some sort, and especially with vanity. It is the intimate curse of the man who takes himself more seriously than the ideas he has to express. A man conscious of having something to say worth the world's hearing will pretty generally be prepared, in Buchanan's own phrase, for ' the neglect of the idle and the misconstruction of the impatient.'* ' My dear Doctor,' said tough old Johnson to the weeping Goldsmith, 'what man is the worse for being called Holofernes ? ' There was a strong re- semblance between the characters of Johnson and Buchanan. Both were hard hitters, strenuous fighters for ideas they believed to be true and necessary to be expressed; both were free from malice because it was fundamentally to settle the great question, ' What is right.''' and not the infinitely little question, '■Who

* ' The Outcast.' Epistle Dedicatory.

24 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

is right ? ' that they wrote and argued. Johnson himself had not a more robust contempt for that puerile vanity which makes ' intellect ' an excuse for any weakness or any meanness in the mind of the fribble who flatters himself that ' intellect ' is the gift in which he is especially rich. ' I have never yet discovered/ wrote Buchanan, ' in myself, or in any man, any gift which entitles me to despise the meanest of my fellows.'*

To love the worst, to feel The least is even as I —

to claim no exemption from common labour or common duty on the ground of superior intelligence, but rather to demand that a higher intellectuality should be the corollary of a loftier moral sense — this was Buchanan's creed. It was the creed he imported not merely into his daily life, it partly furnishes the explanation of his huge literary activity. ' I have not escaped the charge of selling my birthright for a mess of pottage ; of gaining my bread by hodman's labour, when I might have been sitting

empty-stomached on Parnassus My errors,

however, have arisen from excess of human sympathy, from ardour of human activity, rather than from any great love of the loaves and fishes. Lacking the pride of intellect, I have by superabundant activity tried to prove myself a man among men, not a mere litterateur So I have stooped to hodman's work

* ' The Outcast.' Epistle Dedicatory.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 25

occasionally, mainly because I cannot pose in the god-like manner of your lotus eaters. I have not humoured my reputation. I have thought no work undignified which did not convert me into a Specialist or a Prig. I have written for all men and in all moods. But the birthright which belongs to all Poets has never been offered by me in any market, and my manhood has never been stained by any sham hate or sham affection.'

Infinite as are the points of diversity between the poetical literature of the latter half of the nineteenth century and that of all preceding epochs, there is one among them which the unborn reader will find supreme in interest above all others — the intrusion, into the poetic field, of the polemist and theologian. England has been described as the native land of paradox, but among all the paradoxes discoverable in her history there is none stranger than the indifference of most of her great poets to the theological struggles whose fluctua- tions and developments have gone so far towards making up her national history. It is not, of course, surprising that Chaucer and his predecessors and contemporaries should be free from any expression of theological bias. That Chaucer was a man of fixed and humble piety is made certain by every serious page he ever wrote. Being for his day a man of wide culture, he was probably well read in the current divinity. But, in Chaucer's day, there was only one theology, and it was accepted by all

26 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

men. If any manifestation of the spirit of Lollardism ever came his way, it left him untouched so far as is discoverable from his writings, and most probably left him untouched altogether, for he does not seem to have been of the kind of stuff of which, in any age, the polemist is made. The good green earth, and what grew and moved thereon, was enough for him, as it was enough for his unlettered neighbours, the farmer in his furrow and the cobbler in his stall. Life, intellectually and morally, was life reduced to its simplest terms. The morning prayer, the daily toil, the well-earned sleep which was the guerdon of their labour, filled men's lives. They accepted, with the simplicity of children, the teaching ot their pastors, that life was a probation, that he who bore its labours and its trials with patience and submission would be wafted on the wings of angels to an eternal paradise, that the wicked and rebellious would go to people a real objective hell. It was all so simple : —

The world was rich in man and maid,

With fair horizons bound ; This whole wide earth of light and shade

Came out a perfect round,

and heaven itself was only a little beyond the sunset

clouds.

Le bon Dieu, gravely interfering

In all humanity's affairs, Bending his kind grey head, and hearing

The orphan's cry, the widow's prayers.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 27

was, to them, as actual and real a person as his vicegerent on earth, ' the Pope that dwelled in Rome,' and not much further off. Chaucer died in 1400, and literature slept for a century, to awaken, in common with every other manifestation of intellectual energy, amid the glorious turmoil of the Renaissance ; and it is at this point in history that the theological indifFerentism of our great poets becomes so truly remarkable. For in no field was the human spirit in the sixteenth century more active than in the domain of theology. The geographical isolation of England made us somewhat slow to catch the contagion of new religious thought. The healthy conservatism and hatred of extremes joined with the fundamental tolerance and bonhomie which are among the best points of our national character to make the struggle between new and old at once less bitter and less prolonged than it was in some con- tinental countries ; yet the fight, while it lasted, was sharp and bitter enough. But, while Henry and Edward and Mary and Elizabeth hanged and burned and racked and tortured; and while the Continent, from Spain to Friesland, was torn by a strife as deadly as it has ever witnessed ; the Muse of English poesy still dreamed on in her own quiet fairyland, as unmoved by the ghastly turmoil as Proserpine in her garden. Neither politics nor theology nor war — for so long a time almost inter- changeable terms — stirred her from her golden calm. The glories of a new - found world enriched her

28 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

metaphors and coloured her vocabulary, but, though all England was shrieking horror over the American devilries of the Spanish freebooters, she had no word of pity for outraged humanity. The soil of Holland was like a sponge blood-soaked with the life-stream of thousands of the martyrs of the faith which England had adopted, and Holland's and humanity's greatest and purest hero was meeting with splendid courage and defeating with incredible success the tremendous armaments of Spain, our bitterest enemy, with whom we also were girding ourselves to come to inevitable death-grips ; but martyrdom and heroism and the fear, which all men felt, of Spanish tyranny, left this strange sprite unmoved. There is nothing so amazing in all intellectual history as this complete aloof- ness from every most passionate interest of humanity which was displayed at that epoch by the great poets of England. Who, that was ignorant of the date of Shakespeare, could guess, from any internal evidence disclosed by his writings, the political storm and stress by which his life must have been surrounded; or that his fellow-citizens were being racked, mutilated and hanged for differences of theological opinion } Unless — which it is impossible to believe — a score of passages in his plays are mere fulsome rant meant to tickle the groundlings, Shakespeare was an ardent patriot. It would be an even greater absurdity to suppose that he had neither the heart to sympathise with the aborigines of America and the Protestants of Holland, nor the modicum of political sagacity to foresee the

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 29

possibility of curses as dire as those from which they suffered falling upon his own friends and neighbours. He must have sympathised with other nations, he must have feared for the country he loved so well. He must passionately have desired the triumph of liberty and the downfall of oppression. Yet where, in the entire bulk of the work we owe to him, do we find the smallest indication that he had ever so much as heard the name of Montezuma, of William the Silent, of Luther, on the one hand, or of Charles the Fifth or Philip the Second on the other ? His treatment of the clerical element in his plays is curiously mild ; the priestly figures which cross his stage from time to time, ' Pandulph, of fair Milan Cardinal,' Wolsey and Campeius and his friars, might, for any internal evidence yielded by the style of portraiture, have been painted by the hand of the most fervent Romanist. Yet he was almost contemporary with Alexander the Sixth and Cassar Borgia, and actually contemporary with Cardinal Granvelle, the priestly minister of the insane and puerile cruelties of Philip; a trio, not merely of the most unworthy prelates, but of the most bestial criminals the world has seen. Were these men and their acts never discussed at the Mermaid, never canvassed in the tiring-room of the Globe.'' One might think so, from Shakespeare's public silence concerning them. And what is true of Shakespeare in this particular is true of his contemporaries without exception.

Milton would appear to have been the first English

30 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

poet of real importance to break through the bonds of this strange reticence, and to bring the light of the poetic intelligence to bear upon the problems of his day. His prose ' Areopagitica ' and his noble sonnet on the persecution of the Protestants of Piedmont have never been surpassed as instances of the incommensurable value of the poetic-speculative treatment of the ' burning questions ' of which every generation has its share. With him, poetry ceased to be the mere idle pastime it had been, the poet was no longer only the denizen and painter of a fairy world removed from every vital interest of human daily life. Stony as was the ground on which his seed was fated to fall, ill-fitted as was the atmosphere of the Restoration to encourage loftiness of thought or freedom of expression, the seed was sown, and its own innate vitality kept it from utter corruption or complete sterility. The plant was fostered by the literary harlot, Dryden, and the fungoid growth of affecta- tion which overspread it during the period of Queen Anne could not kill it. We smile over the strings of prim and polished aphorisms in which Pope expressed his tea-table system of theology and ethics, but his tinselled and beribboned candlestick served at least to keep the flame alight, and it burned serenely in the pages of Cowper, and through that dreary gap in the succession of genius in which Hayley and Pye and Crabbe were hailed as poets, to spring to a vivid blaze in the opening years of the nineteenth century. Keats is the only indubitably great poet of that epoch who

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 31

was content to dwell in the old celestial lubber-land in which Shakespeare and Spenser idled away their time. Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Burns — even the dreamy and unpractical Coleridge, descended into the political and theological arenas, and fought in the ranks of humanity, side by side with common men. Buchanan's dictum, already quoted, that ' a Poet is a Prophet and a Propagandist, or nothing,' is only an exaggeration of what is to-day a universal sentiment. The mere idle melodist can never hope again to take rank with the truly great poets. We have seen this illustrated in the career of one of the most gifted singers of the century — Algernon Charles Swinburne. Great in imaginative faculty, rich in melody, a superb verbal technician, he has failed in holding a place among the great singers of his time, because, alone among them, he has had no gospel to proclaim, no message to deliver. He ranks, as a poet, as Gounod ranks as a musician. Set beside Browning, Tennyson, and Buchanan, his stature seems to dwindle to something less than its true and fair proportion, as Gounod's delicious melodies seem thin and vapid beside the graver strains of Beethoven and Wagner.

At the beginning of the present century there was prevalent a superstition, which found its most lasting and familiar expression in a famous passage in Macaulay's ' Essay on Milton,' that the spirit of science and the spirit of poetry were and must be inter-destructive, that a civilisation based upon science must necessarily be incapable of producing great

32 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

poetry. That superstition has long since been aban- doned, and it is now among the most widespread of critical commonplaces that out of the fusion of Poetry and Science will arise a literature nobler than any the world has yet possessed. That conclusion, we may be pardoned for thinking, is one that might surely have been arrived at by the a priori method of reasoning. All good influences, all forces which make for right- eousness, are friendly one to another, and must needs work in harmony. If Science be the bread of life, as it is, Poetry is its air and sunlight, and, as the body does not live by bread alone, so the soul will for all time demand that lighter and less tangible nutriment, which only imagination can supply. Shakespeare possibly believed that the swallows which nested in the eaves of his father's house in summer time took refuge from the winter's cold under the waters of the horse-pond. He possibly believed that the witches he drew in ' Macbeth,' the fairies which peopled his ^ Midsummer Night's Dream,' and the spectres which broke the sleep of Richard and haunted the midnight watch of Marcellus had their genuine counterparts in the actual economy of nature. Tennyson was a scientific ornithologist, to whom the horsepond-hibernation theory would hardly appeal, but nevertheless he wrote about the swallow one of the sweetest lyrics in the language. He probably had no belief in ghosts, but he used them as powerfully as if he had, in the last act of ' Harold.' The mind of man is tenacious of all that is of mental or imaginative value, and

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 33

even the most modern of readers is content to go back for a while into the region of ghosts and ghouls in the company of any guide who has the art to make his spooks sufficiently convincing. Science and imagination can never be really inimical one to another.

Macaulay was a young man when he propounded the theory just briefly discussed; he had grown old when a vastly more venerable bugbear was disinterred from among the ashes of the past, and the cry rang shrilly from all the churches and conventicles of Europe and America, that Science was killing Religion. It was certainly killing much that passed by that name, and the holocausts of superstitions by which its march was marked were no doubt very terrible to that numerous body to whom the sanctity of superstition meant daily bread. The militant Atheist, who would appear at times to be a sillier— and even less decent — person than his enemy, the dogmatic religionist, fell into the same obvious pitfall, and from the depths of his ignorance clamoured his glee in the ' destruction ' of Religion as loudly as the priest and the parson wailed their grief and terror. There is an illuminating passage regarding this matter in Buchanan's article on ' Free Thought in America ' (^A Look Round Literature)^ apropos of the utterances of that once notorious atheistic lecturer. Colonel Robert Ingersoll : —

Colonel Ingersoll is very fond of proclaiming his admiration for the great scientific teachers of his age ; but in reality he is as far away in spirit from the thought of Darwin as from the

D

34 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

vision of Shakespeare, as obtuse to the scientific problems as to the pathetic poetic fallacy. Religion is the grave, elder daughter of Poetry, and to understand religious questions a man must have the heart of a poet. Science, too, is the daughter of Poetry ; indeed, her youngest born ; vv^hile calmer and colder than her mother, she has the same far-away, rapt look into the heaven of heavens j and her teaching is for poetic hearts also, not for those who confound her with her sordid and hard-working handmaid, Invention. Science ranges the universe, touches the farthest suns, reaches the farthest cloud confines, and cries honestly and loudly, * Thus far — no farther — here I pause ; ' and then even she begins to dream. Invention squats on the ground, sets her little water-wheel, lights her little lamp, pieces her mechanical puzzles, does homely work, delightful and useful to everybody. But Invention-worship is fetish-worship, and Colonel Ingersoll is a fetish-worshipper — that is to say, an individual exactly at the savage state where neither religion nor science begins.

' The last word of science,' said George Henry Lewes to Buchanan on one occasion, when the latter had asked if that ' last word ' would be one of nega- tion and despair, ' will not be spoken for many a century yet. Who can guess what it will be ? ' Meanwhile, and pending that far-off consummation, the wise man who gives himself time to think will arrive at the comforting conclusion that, no more than Science and Imagination, can Science and Reli- gion be truly inimical. Science is no horrible Djinn, solidified from the smoke of our nineteenth-century retorts, like the imprisoned demon of the ' Arabian Nights ' from the vapour of his bottle. It is coeval with humanity, and therefore coeval with Religion itself. Some Religion Man must always have had,

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 35

there is no race so low in the scale as to have none at all. Some Science Man must always have possessed — how otherwise should he have lived at all ? Religion is eternal — the holocaust of creeds leaves her untouched, nay, it has imparted to her new strength and vitality, as the lopping away of vege- table parasites quickens the vigour of a forest tree. I have already set in juxtaposition the names of the three poets of the Victorian era who are, as I believe, securest of posthumous regard — the names of Tennyson, Browning, and Buchanan — and I have tried at least to adumbrate the reasons which prompt me to that selection. The conditions of the contest for the crown of poetic supremacy have changed from what they were in former times. That crown is awarded no longer to him who is merely the sweetest singer of his generation — otherwise the public vote would place it on the head of Mr. Swinburne. A sweet singer, a poet in the old restricted sense, every candi- date who aspires to wear it must needs still — and always — be. But he must be very much beside and beyond that. He must combine, with the purely poetic gift, the gifts of the historian, the sociologist, the philosopher, the theologian, the legislative re- former. He must absorb and render back the desires and aspirations of his generation, and indicate the road that it must walk in its progress towards their realisa- tion ; his utterance must be not only a sweet sound in men's ears, but a guiding light unto their feet. And it is because the three poets I have named

36 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

combined each in his individual person and expressed each in his proper work, the gifts here dwelt upon, that their influence on the minds and lives of men is certain to endure.

The critical superstition of Macaulay's earlier days, that Science and Poetry are necessarily antagonistic, had, and still has to many minds, a surface plausibility. The poetic and religious spirits are more nearly akin than the poetic and scientific, and if science necessarily ended in atheism, the Poets would never have had much to say to it. An atheistic poet was, a generation ago, almost a contradiction in terms. The Poet felt with Browning's ' Bishop Blougram ' : —

What can I gain on the denying side ? Ice makes no conflagration.

There was but one genuine and indubitable English poet who ever went so far as even to mistake himself for an atheist — Shelley. And if the ' Adonais ' is of any authority, Shelley, towards the end of his life, had drifted at least as far as Theism : —

The one remains, the many change and pass, God for all time abides, earth's shadows flee —

and long after Shelley's time, and even to the present day, the poets who have believed that science had robbed them of God, have proclaimed themselves the most desolate of orphans. The melancholy end of Alfred de Musset was as clearly traceable to the assumed impossibility of religious belief as to any

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 37

one of the more frequently cited causes. His pages are full of laments for the lost Fatherhood, and he attacked Voltaire with a virulence rarely lavished on any but a contemporary enemy.

Dors-tu content, 6 Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire Voltige-t-il encore sur tes os decharnes ?

Ton siecle, dit-on, etait trop jeune pour te lire — Le notre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont nes.

La Mort devait t'attendre avec impatience

Pendant quatre-vingt ans que tu lui fis ta cour.

And again :

Et que nous reste-t-il, a nous, les deicides ? Pour qui travailliez-vous, demolliseurs stupides, Lorsque vous dissequiez le Christ sur son autel?

And de Musset's great and strangely neglected con- temporary, Auguste Barbier, was even less polite to Voltaire's memory, when he called him

Singe assis sur les decombres — Marteau encore brulant de demolition.

Baudelaire complained :

Je suis ne trop tard dans un siecle trop vieux —

feeling, as a Godless poet of his time must have felt, like a worshipper with his hands full of incense who can find no altar whereon to lay it. Verlaine, in his unregenerate days, ranked himself with as much sad- ness as pride among

les supremcs poctcs, Qui vcncrons les dieux et qui n'y croyons pas.

38 ROBERT BVCHANAN.

The crushing sense of the orphaned condition of humanity drove James Thomson to the fallacious comfort of alcohol, and sent him to the grave. It is curious to remember, in this connexion, that Voltaire wrote the wistful and charming quatrain :

On a banni les demons et les fees, Le raisonneur tristement s'accredite :

On court, helas, apres la verite,

Ah, croyez-moi, I'erreur a son merite.

It is even more curious to remember that he penned the lines —

Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir ; Le present est afFreux, s'il n'est point d'avenir, Si la nuit du tombeau detruit I'etre qui pense —

but the lines are his, none the less, and would seem to indicate that ' the great architect of ruin ' knew moments in which he doubted the sanity and justice of the task he performed with so terrible a com- pleteness. This fear of the destructive tendencies of science — a fear which blinded men of less clear mental insight to its constructive value — is strongly evident in the work of both Browning and Tennyson. Both were ardent students of the most advanced thought of their time, and each, in his^ fashion, fought in the ranks of religious conservatism.

It is quite a common thing, even to-day, to hear Browning spoken of as 'a Christian poet.' That claim was made, with obvious sincerity, by Richard

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 39

Hutton in the columns of the Spectator^ and quite recently I re-read the article, which has been re- published by Hutton's literary executor in a volume entitled 'Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought.'* That claim seems as strange and as wildly untenable as any claim well could be. That the average reader — perhaps even the average reader of Browning — should make or admit it is no great wonder. But that a man of Hutton's critical capacity should be the victim of such a delusion is curious indeed. Hutton admits that ' Browning was very jealous of its being supposed that he accepted literally the cut-and- dried formulas of any Christian Church.' A few lines further on, he continues, ' In " Saul," in " Christmas Eve and Easter Day," in " The Ring and the Book," and fifty other poems. Browning has endeavoured to depict the very heart of his own faith, and of course he prefers his own mode of indicating that faith to that of the narrow-minded Evangelical preacher, or the technical scholastic theologian, or the cold rationalistic critic. No doubt,' Hutton goes on, ' he told Mr. Buchanan that in his (Mr. Buchanan's) sense of the term, he did not profess to be a Christian ; but, as Mrs. Sutherland Orr puts it, we want to know exactly what meaning Mr. Buchanan had put upon the term, before we can attach any great importance to this asserted denial.'

It is strange, to say the least of it, that Mrs.

* Messrs. Macmillan (Evcrslcigh Scries).

40 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

Sutherland Orr should have made such a remark, and stranger still that Hutton should have repeated it. For, if one thing in Buchanan's theological scheme is more plain and explicit than another, it is the scientific rigidity of his definition of the word ' Christian.' Christianity, Buchanan was never tired of repeating, is a number of dogmas, accurately summed up in the Credo taught to children. Do you believe in the Immaculate Conception and in the efficacy of the Atonement ? If so, you are a Christian. If not, you may be anything else you choose to call yourself, but a Christian you are not. You may love and admire the character of Christ, you may preach and practise the virtues He extolled, but nothing short of the definite acceptance of the dogmas of the Godhead and the Re- demption can qualify you to stand within the Christian pale.* It was in that plain sense that Browning under- stood Buchanan's categorical inquiry, ' Are you not,

* Some six or seven years ago, Mr. Richard Le Gallienne gave Buchanan an additional chance of insisting on this hard-and-fast definition by the publication of his book, 'The Religion of a Literary Man,' vi^herein, having carefully ruled himself out of acceptance of any sort of dogma whatsoever, he described himself as 'essentially a Christian ;' after which feather-headed pronouncement he went off, as Buchanan said, ' to tipple and flirt in the society of that arch- materialist, Omar Khayyam.' Mr. Le Gallienne's claim to stand within the Christian fold provoked the elder poet to the committal of a bit of rollicking verse, which appeared originally in the Star newspaper, and was afterwards incorporated in ' The Devil's Sabbath ' [Tke New Rome).

If I desire to end my days at peace with all theologies. To win the penny-a-liner's praise, the Editor's apologies.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 41

then, a Christian ? ' And it was with a full sense of the meaning his reply would bear in Buchanan's mind that Browning replied — ' thundered ' is Buchanan's expression — ' No ! ' And, in the circumstance that Buchanan, knowing Browning's work so well as he did, should have felt the need to ask such a question at all; and in that other circumstance, that, with Browning's reply on record before him, Hutton could still, sincerely (as I have already said), and with any chance of finding agreement with the view, still claim Browning as a Christian poet, lies matter for interest- ing reflection, as we shall presently perceive.

Browning wrote much on theological subjects. His early education, his serious cast of mind, the very character of his genius, all tended to make theological speculation interesting to him. Even the most meagre citation of the passages in which he treated of the eternal mysteries and of men's guesses

Don't think I mean to cast aside the Christian's pure beatitude. Or cease my vagrant steps to guide with Christian prayer and platitude. No, I'm a Christian out and out, and claim the kind appellative Because, however much I doubt, my doubts are simply Relative ; For this is law, and this I teach, tho' some may think it vanity, That whatsoever creed men preach, 'tis Essential Christianity !

In Miracles I don't believe, or in Man's Immortality — The Lord was laughing in his sleeve, save when he taught Morality ; He saw that flesh is only grass, and (though you grieve to learn it) he Knew that the personal Soul must pass and never reach Eternity. In short, the essence of his creed was gentle nebulosity Compounded for a foolish breed who gaped at his verbosity ; And this is law, and this I teach, tho' you may think it vanity, That whatsoever creed men preach, 'tis Essential Christianity !

42 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

at their meaning would absorb a quite disproportionate amount of space, and I shall select as my field of quotation those only of his poems which contain the fullest and directest expression of his attitude towards the question of the divine birth and ambassadorship of Christ, Among these, Hutton mentions ' Saul,' ' Christmas Eve and Easter Day,' and ' The Ring and the Book/ Let us examine them,

' Saul ' contains one passage, and only one, which, taken apart from its context and from the entire atmosphere of the poem, can possibly be regarded as an affirmation of the divinity of Christ.

'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for ! my flesh, that I

seek In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it ! O Saul, it shall be A Face like my face that receives thee ; a Man like to me Thou shalt love, and be loved by, for ever : a Hand like this

hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the

Christ stand !

Taken as an isolated statement, nothing could be completer, nothing more splendidly fervent, as a proclamation of the godhead of Christ. But it cannot be so taken. It must be examined as part of a whole, and so examined it ceases to be a confession of personal faith on the part of its writer, and becomes a mere bit of literature. For the utterance is dramatic, and the speaker is not Robert Browning, but David the shepherd minstrel. It is of no more authority as evidence that its author was an Orthodox Christian than Tennyson's

ROBERl BUCHANAN. 43

* Tithonus ' could be in supporting the thesis that the late Laureate was an Hellenic Pantheist. And pre- cisely the same thing may be said of the passages which were in Hutton's mind when he spoke of ' The Ring and the Book.' They also are purely dramatic, and Browning's own personal theology finds less expression in the scholarly subtleties of the good Pope Innocent than in the simple, childlike trustfulness of poor Pompilia, praying on her hospital bed for the wretch who murdered her : —

We shall not meet in this world or the next, But where will God be absent ? In His light Is healing, in His shadow, healing too — Let Guido touch the shadow, and be healed.

Before passing on to ' Christmas Eve and Easter Day,' let us look for a moment at some other of his theological pronouncements. It has been stated that ' only a Christian could have written " A Death in the Desert." ' The only meaning this statement can be taken as bearing is that nobody but a Christian could have felt the fervid love for and belief in Christ which Browning expresses by the lips of the dying John. But in this poem we must again notice that it is dramatic, not lyrical. In the body of the poem it is the voice of the Apostle, in the appended passage it is the voice of Pamphylax the Antiochene. And in that addendum there is a statement, more direct and forceful than any made by John upon the other side, of the difficulty, to a mere human, logical

44 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

intelligence, of accepting the splendid promises of Christ : —

If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men

Mere man, the first and best, but nothing more —

Account Him, for reward of what He was,

Now and forever, wretchedest of all.

For see ; Himself conceived of life as love,

Conceived of love as what must enter in,

Fill up, make one with His each soul He loved :

Thus much for man's joy, all men's joy for Him.

Well, He is gone, thou sayest, to fit reward.

But by this time are many souls set free.

And very many still retained alive :

Nay, should His coming be delayed awhile,

Say, ten years longer (twelve years, some compute)

See if, for every finger of thy hands.

There be not found, that day the world shall end.

Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ's word

That He will grow incorporate with each.

With me as Pamphylax, with him as John,

Groom for each bride ! Can a mere man do this ?

Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do.

Call Christ, then, the illimitable God,

Or lost !

There is a direct, a terrible simplicity in this exposition of doubt which is quite absent from John's proclamation of belief. That proclamation is subtle, ingenious, eloquent to a high degree — the very per- fection of polemics; but in the force of its appeal to human understanding it is no more comparable to the passage I have quoted than is a flight of thistledown to a volley of grapeshot. True, the addendum has itself an addendum, in the words completing the last

ROBERT BV CHAN AN. 45

line of the poem — ' But 'twas Cerinthus that is lost.' Yet those few words — even if I am wrong in taking them also as a dramatic utterance added by some later commentator than ' Pamphylax the Antiochene ' — are little to set against the appallingly plain statement of the difficulty of belief And if they are to be taken as expressing Browning's personal adherence to Christian dogma, all that can be said is that they form the only definite proclamation of that adherence to be found in the whole range of his poetical work.

' Christmas Eve,' and, in a less measure, * Easter Day,' are certainly Browning's most important con- tributions to theological literature. They owe something of that importance to the fact that they are the longest of his works which treat of theological ideas, and most of it to the other fact that they are personal, not dramatic, utterances. Let us see on which side they testify most strongly. In * Christmas Eve,' the poet is transported in his trance to the lecture room in Gottingen, and listens to the address delivered by ' the hawk-nosed, high-cheekboned Professor,' who, after demolishing the divine claims of Christ by a cannonade of Teutonic-scientific criticism, tells his audience that the ' myth ' thus pulverised still leaves, ' for residuum,'

A man ! a right, true man, however, Whose work was worthy a man's endeavour j Work, that gave warrant almost sufficient

To his disciples, for rather believing He was just omnipotent and omniscient,

46 ROBERT BUCHANJN.

As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving His word, their tradition — which, though it meant Something entirely different From all that those who only heard it. In their simplicity thought and averred it, Had yet a meaning quite as respectable —

at which point the poet follows his divine Guide out into the darkness, and, as he flies through the air in His wake, muses on the Professor's lecture. * Thus much of Christ does he (the Professor) reject ? ' asks Browning —

And what retain ? His intellect ? What is it I must reverence duly ? Poor intellect for worship, truly, Which tells me simply what was told

(If mere morality, bereft

Of the God in Christ, be all that's left) Elsewhere by voices manifold ; With this advantage, that the stater

Made nowise the important stumble

Of adding, he, the sage and humble. Was also one with the Creator. You urge Christ's followers' simplicity :

But how does shifting blame evade it ? Have Wisdom's words no more felicity ?

The stumbling-block, his speech, who made^it \ How comes it that, for one found able To sift the truth of it from fable, Millions believe it to the letter ? Christ's goodness, then — does that fare better ? . Strange goodness, which, upon the score

Of being goodness, the mere due Of man to fellow-man, much more

To God — should take another view

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 47

Of its possessor's privilege, And bid him rule his race !

*****

The goodness — how did he acquire it ? Was it self-gained, did God inspire it ? Choose which ; then tell me, on what ground Should its possessor dare propound His claim to rise o'er us an inch ?

Were goodness all some man's invention,

Who arbitrarily made mention What we should follow, and whence flinch — What qualities might take the style

Of right and wrong — and had such guessing

Met with as general acquiescing As graced the alphabet erewhile. When A got leave an Ox to be. No Camel (quoth the Jews) like G, — For thus inventing thing and title Worship were that man's fit requital. But if the common conscience must Be ultimately judge, adjust Its apt name to each quality Already known — I would decree Worship for such mere demonstration.

And simple work of nomenclature,

Only the day I praised, not Nature, But Harvey, for the circulation.

If this passage can be accused of obscurity, it is only of such obscurity as even cultured people who have not made themselves familiar with Browning's occasional jerkiness of utterance often complain of — the obscurity is merely verbal. That small difficulty conquered, the thought of this passage is as simple, plain, and direct as thought can be. And it is a

48 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

denunciatory criticism of the claims of Christ, even to the measure of merely human greatness which the Atheistic Professor left to him, to which most other diatribes of the kind in modern literature are mere child's play. It says, with a plainness which leaves no chance for quibbling, that if Christ were not God, he was little more than nothing ; it grudges him even a place among great ethical teachers. 'Ah, but,' you can hear the Christian claimant of Browning replying, ' Browning goes on to reconstruct the Divine Figure. Read the end of the poem.' You can read the end ot the poem. You can read it with a microscope, and there is absolutely no reconstruction of the divinity of Christ to be found in it. It is merely nebulous rhetoric. It is impossible to print here the following and con- cluding passages, which make some hundreds of lines. Nor is it necessary. The onus of proof lies on the critics who claim Browning as a Christian poet. Let one among them cite, either from ' Christmas Eve ' or from any other of his utterances, any passage on their side as plain, direct, logical, and indubitable in meaning as those quoted in support of the contrary affirmation.

In the course of his essay Hutton says, ' It is as plain as vivid imaginative expressions can make it, that if Browning was not in some very deep and true sense a Christian — a believer even in the divinity of Christ — his language is elaborately adapted rather to conceal and misrepresent his mind than to express it ' — a remark which seems to me a little shallow and lacking in critical insight. There is no need to conclude that

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 49

Browning was so untrue to his genius and manhood as to palter with us in a double sense on the gravest of all human problems. I am not defending him from that injurious charge from any sentimental belief that a great brain must needs mean great courage and great honesty. On the contrary, it seems to me that what we call ' great men,' taken in the lump, have been pretty poor specimens of humanity. The simple ex- planation of Browning's ambiguity in his theological utterances is as follows. He was strongly attracted by theological questions, by the Divine Mysteries, and loved to think and write about them. He believed — passionately, whole-heartedly believed — in God, and in God's personal supervision of the world. About that at least, any shadow of doubt is impossible to any intelligent student of his poetry, and his letters to Elizabeth Barrett testify to it almost on every page. And he would have loved to believe in Christ, to have accepted the Divine Legend in its entirety. But that he could not do, the character of his intelli- gence, the strain of tough logicality which ran through his mind, forbade it. There was in Browning a dual personality, the poet who longed to believe, the logician who clamoured for absolute demonstration. He had not the heart to attack overtly so beautiful a creed as Christianity, and he could not keep his pen from writing about it. So he found a keen delight in ex- pressing his love for the character of Christ in the form in which it could be expressed most completely — by dramatic utterances put into the mouths of men of

E

50 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

absolute and unquestioning faith. Read in the light of that belief, his work contains a pathetic beauty, an adumbration of the great heart-hunger of our orphaned and sorrowful humanity. There is one dramatic utter- ance of Browning's in which he did indeed speak his whole heart — the final lines of the 'Epistle' of Karshish, the wandering Arab physician, who had met and talked with Lazarus, the living witness of the miraculous power of Christ.

The very God ! think, Abib, dost thou think ? So, the All-Great, were the All-loving too — So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! Thou hast no power nor may conceive of mine. But love I gave thee, with myself to love. And thou must love me who have died for thee ! '

The madman saith He said so ; it is strange.

Karshish, one may say, is the veritable Browning himself, the eager student and close cross-questioner of Nature, hoping that his pryings into natural secrets may one day give him certainty of the existence of some stronger divine sanction than his iron logic will yet permit him to believe in.

But, though Browning cannot be found 'guilty' on the alternative charge which Hutton brought against him — the charge of consciously paltering in his written utterances with what he personally regarded as the gravest of all human problems, there is a minor accusation from which he would have found it difficult

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 51

to free himself. The fact remains that many of his readers claim him as a Christian poet, and that such a classification was sufficiently plausible to find endorse- ment by a man of the critical acumen of Hutton. That Browning refrained from writing, in his own proper person, any word which could be accepted as proclaiming the validity of the Christian hope is in itself enough to acquit him of the grievous stigma of having pandered to popular sentiment, or of designedly misleading his readers. But that was not enough. The man who, being asked in private conversation, ' Are you not a Christian ? ' could ' thunder ' so decisive a negative, should not have permitted his sentimental or aesthetic leanings to make so vital a matter at all questionable in his public utterances. This is a point of cardinal importance. It proves in Browning a lack of that completer moral courage exhibited by his two most prominent rivals in the field of poetical polemics, Tennyson and Buchanan, about whose con- victions on kindred topics it would be impossible for any reader of average intelligence to harbour the smallest uncertainty. And it has the flirther disquiet- ing effect of provoking doubt as to whether ' the poet of optimism par excellence^' as Browning has been called, was thoroughly sincere in his eternal cry of ' Sursum corda ! ' One cannot but ask oneself if it was indeed possible that a man of the world, ' an eager man among men ' of whom it was as impossible to predicate ignor- ance of the actualities of life as lack of intelligence to understand them, should really be so blind to the sin

52 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and misery, the filth and failure, the injustice, the

brutality, the hydra-headed horror which dominates

existence. His optimism was not merely robust, it

was at moments positively impertinent. To read

Browning in sickness or in great sorrow or physical

suffering —

when the sensuous frame

Is racked by pangs that conquer trust ;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust.

And Life, a Fury slinging flame —

would drive a sensitive organization to stark madness. There are moments when the statement ' God's in his heaven ' seems questionable to the staunchest believer, as we know it did at moments even to John Henry Newman. And there are frequent moments when ' All's right with the world ! ' is a gratuitous insult to common sense and common eyesight. Optimism is no doubt a virtue, of sorts, but pushed too far it becomes, not optimism, but insensibility — to use na harsher word.

Very different was the regard with which Tenny- son looked upon the world ; far more valuable to heart and brain was the verdict he pronounced on the strange inchoate drama we call ' Life.' An optimist to the end, his optimism, less insistent and less loud than the violent asseveration of Browning, ' All's love and all's law,' brings a more real comfort with it, for we feel that it is based, not on an almost brutal denial of the reality of pain and disappointment, but on a frank recognition of all the phenomena of life.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 53

Tennyson's intellectual courage was far from complete, he was not armed at all points, he made, as we shall see, unjustifiable reservations and claims philosophically inadmissible ; but the great grief of his life was, in- tellectually, life's greatest boon to him — it forced a naturally reverent and rather timid soul to face and £ght ' the spectres of the mind,' and to tell his gener- ation, with a beautiful and noble candour, the progress and the issue of the struggle. He was by far the most powerful advocate of revealed religion produced by the nineteenth century, simply because he brought to his task not merely his consummate literary ability, but so large a share of candour to his opponents ; so frank a recognition of much that was true in their teaching; so free a confession of the doubts and difficulties which assailed, but could not kill, his faith in the eternal Fatherhood. He realised, as Browning in his own person certainly never did, the thought which Browning so splendidly expresses by the lips of Bishop Blougram ;

When the fight begins within himself

A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,

Satan looks up beneath his feet — both tug —

He's left, himself, i' the middle : the soul wakes

And grows. Prolong that battle through his life !

Never leave growing till the life to come.

The sum of all is — yes, my doubt is great. My faith's still greater, then, my faith's enough.

All his life long, though he kept his eyes resolutely

54 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

fixed upon the sunlit mountain summits, Tennyson's feet trod the thorny ways of the Valley of the Shadow. Granted foreknowledge of his love for Arthur Hallam and the tragic end of that heroic friendship, ' In Memoriam ' might have been prophesied from the pen which wrote ' The Two Voices ' and ' Maud.'

A still small voice spoke unto me — ' Thou art so full of misery Were it not better not to be ? '

A life of nothings, nothing worth, From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.

He found an answer to the dull murmur within his heart, but the answer was hardly satisfactory, and the spectre of doubt was never finally laid. It reared its- head again in ' Maud,' and made of ' the brave o'er- hanging firmament, fretted with golden fire' a terrible witness to human insignificance : —

A sad astrology — the boundless plan That made you tyrants in your iron skies, Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes, Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand His nothingness into man.

And we may be certain that when, many years later, he wrote that terrible poem ' Despair,' the utterance was not merely and wholly dramatic, but that, though it probably did not express the mood in which it was

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 55

actual] y written, its bitterness was inspired by memories of many hours of torturing personal doubt.

And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in

the sky, Flashing with fires as of God ; but we know that their light was

a lie — Bright as with deathless hope — but, however they sparkled and

shone The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of

woe like our own — No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below, A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

He often felt chilled and homeless in the vastnesses of Time and Space : —

Many an vEon moulded earth before her highest, Man, was

born. Many an .^on too may pass when earth is manless and

forlorn,

and at moments they so crushed him that he breaks out with a cry of angry contempt of himself and the impotent race to which he belongs,

What is it all but the trouble of ants, in the gleam of a million million of suns ?

It is impossible not to recognise and admire the courage which goes so far, which does not shrink from posing, squarely and honestly, some of the more powerflil reasons for doubt and denial. It is certainly in no carping or malicious spirit that I venture to criticise the faith of such a man, or the processes by which he arrived at that faith. When all possible exceptions and

56 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

all fair deductions have been made, the bulk of Tenny- son's utterances upon the problems of his century will remain a document of the highest value. He failed to speak the final word — not the final word of a controversy which will probably still be raging when the sun goes out — but the final word which it is within the power of the humblest of us to speak, the final word of individual opinion ; because, with that timidity which was one of the few flaws of a conspicuously noble nature, he did not dare to follow his brains, to trust his intelligence in the denial of much which his heart so passionately desired. So deep a student and so reverent a lover of Tennyson as Mr. Masterman is forced to admit so much : —

Tennyson, in fact, in his treatment of contemporary life around him, directly opposes the principle of Evolution which, in theory, he had accepted. In religious speculation, and in practical affairs, he never did actually launch out into the deep. He always was one of those who hugged the shore, ever directing the prow of his ship towards the illimitable ocean, but ever again seeking shelter under the shadow of the land.*

Mr. Masterman is so valuable a witness that I shall make no apology for quoting rather freely from his book — the most admirable critical utterance regarding Tennyson with which I am acquainted, and one of the most capable and luminous critical exercises in the language. Here, for instance, is a passage which

* ' Tennyson as a Religious Teacher,' by Charles F. G. Masterman.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 57

sheds a penetrating light on much of Tennyson's philosophy : —

Tennyson's first attempts to solve this great problem (the apparent vastness of the Universe and the insignificance of Man) consist of mere affirmation v^^ithout explanation — affirma- tion of the reality of self through the reality of love. He deliberately turns away from the immensity of Space, and refuses any longer to contemplate it. I am : I love : this, at

least, is certain This is the reply of the hero of

* Maud ' to the maddening thoughts suggested by his ' sad astrology.'

But now shine on, and what care I,

Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl. The countercharm of space and hollow sky, And do accept my madness, and would die

To save from one slight shame one simple girl.

But in this first attempt to encounter the problem the human intellect cannot rest satisfied ; it must go forward in an effort to escape from this unsatisfactory dualism, the reality of the macrocosmos without us, the reality of the microcosmos within. The mind incessantly craves for some kind of harmony, and refuses to acquiesce in the discord between these two entities, and so Tennyson was compelled to essay an explanation. He found it in the form of idealism taught by that philosopher who had never wearied of contemplating the sublimity both of the starry heavens without and the moral law within. This was the assertion of the subjective element in space ; that space is not a reality outside our own conscious- ness, but, at least as apprehended by us, a product of this consciousness itself

* Space is nothing but the form of all phenomena of the external senses,' says Kant ; * it is the subjective condition of our sensibility, without which no external intuition is possible

58 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

for US;' and again, *If we drop our subject, or the subjective form of our senses, all qualities, all relations of objects in Space and Time, nay, Space and Time themselves, would vanish.'

The world as we know it, the whole material universe, Tennyson maintains, is but a vision or a picture in our minds and the minds of beings possessing organizations similar to our own. Impressions have rained down upon us from something beyond ourselves ; each of us has woven these impressions into a unity, which he terms the Natural World. How different this may be from the real world outside ourselves we cannot at present apprehend ; but we can at least emphasise the im- possibility of being content with the first naive view of things,, the impossibility of the assertion that this manifestation of consciousness must possess a real tangible existence outside the minds which apprehend it. In this sense it is untrue to affirm that humanity could be removed from the solar system without making any practical difference in the economy of the universe \ for if all consciousness were simultaneously to cease, the whole material system would suddenly disappear ; ' the great globe itself and all which it inherit ' would vanish like a dream, leaving ' not a rack behind.' *

This indeed seems to me to be a case in which

Physic of metaphysic begs defence, And metaphysic calls for aid on sense —

and the call is disregarded. There is, of course, no appeal, in the realm of pure reason, from Kant's pronouncement. Time and Space must be regarded, for purposes of thought, as mere emanations of the human intelligence, mere abstractions, having no necessary — perhaps no probable — relationship to the

* ' Tennyson as a Religious Teacher.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 59

actual scheme of the universe. But to transplant that idea from its native realm, and to attempt to base upon it a plan of daily action, is impossible. For, if Space and Time are merely human ideas, why should we grant the objective existence of those 'beings possess- ing organizations similar to our own,' whose reality Tennyson — and apparently Mr. Masterman — some- what unphilosophically take for granted.^ Meta- physically, my fellow men are as merely ' phenomena ' as the stars in the sky or the figures on the dial, and, so viewed for the purposes of my daily life, can have no possible claim on my consideration. Unless I grant the real, objective existence of my neighbour, and his capacity to suffer as I suffer and to enjoy as I enjoy, where is my moral obligation to take him into account at all ? Good metaphysics may be very questionable common sense. Laugh as we may at old Samuel Johnson smiting the table to prove the existence of matter, we must all literally accept his ruling in our daily life. ' The universe,' says Mr. Masterman, ' need no longer affright us through its greatness,' but I fear he will find few to echo the senti- ment, or to discover in his proff^ered solution any comfort which will survive a moment's thought. De deux choses^ rune — the entire macrocosm, of which Time and Space are but the vastest features, and which includes Man as it includes them, is real or a dream. One cannot choose portions of such a whole and deny to them an objective reality granted to the rest.

Mr. Masterman, having exhibited the process by

6o ROBERT BUCHANAN.

which Tennyson exorcised the disquieting phantom of * Vastness,' proceeds, in the second chapter of his book, to discuss that by which he arrived at the ' Faith ' which he made it his lifelong task to inculcate in the mind of his generation. Here again it will be well to let Mr. Masterman speak for himself and his great subject.

We have reduced everything, says Mr. Masterman, to two fundamental propositions, and these appear mutually destructive. On the one hand, that the Universe is fundamentally perfect; on the other, the presence of imperfection : in theological language, the existence of God and the existence of evil. And apparently w^e can go no further. We can retrace our steps along each line, vi^ithout finding a flaw in any link of the chain ; but placing one proposition against the other, both representing facts, we can see no possibility of subordinating one to the other or of including both in some higher synthesis. If the adoption of imperfection was necessary for the attain- ment of greater perfection, then God was not originally per- fect. If the adoption of imperfection was not necessary, then why does imperfection exist ? . . . . And so at length we arrive at a blank outlook, and realise that, with our present limited, imperfect knowledge, intellectual consideration will carry us no farther.

Tennyson declines to be content with this impossible con- clusion. He clearly recognises this knowledge, and the limita- tion of human intelligence. Yet he will not adopt the ready expedient of shutting his eyes to either set of facts. To take refuge in a a blank atheism would be to neglect the one chain of reasoning. To refuse to acknowledge the evil of the world, and assert a blind optimism, would be to neglect the other. To suspend judgment, and refuse to commit oneself to either alternative, is impossible in a world where action is impera- tive : every word and deed, every conscious choice of daily

ROBERT BV CHAN AN. 6i

life must depend implicitly, if not explicitly, on the decision which is accepted. We are compelled, by the conditions of our existence in a world of change, to act as if we had solved the problem ; and the theoretical oscillation, which might be possible in a world of thought, becomes intolerable in a world of free choice between conflicting claims.

And here, Tennyson asserts, is the true sphere for the operation of faith. Faith furnishes the impulse and pre- dominant motive demanded for action by the bold assertion that, in some manner unknown to us., these contradictory propo- sitions are reconcilable. It emphasises our refusal to shut our eyes to either facts of experience ; but it trusts that in some higher unity, the nature of which we cannot even conceive, these two contrary propositions may be harmonised. To every man, to the determined Pyrrhonist or most convinced Sceptic, some measure of faith is necessary for the transition from his metaphysic to his practical philosophy. Recognise that evil possesses real existence, and we can assail it, and battle with it, and pass our lives in conflict with it ; but for support in this combat, and for motive in the long day's struggle, we must also maintain faith in the reality of good- ness, and the unity of the world, and the ultimate triumph of righteousness. And although., intellectually, we may have no glimmerings of a possible harmony ; yet if we are faithful to our belief we may find other reasons for adhering to it. Doubts will still trouble us, but deep in the human heart there will arise a conviction which no logical argument can destroy, a confident apprehension that ' all is well.' *

Well might Buchanan proclaim the hopeless illo- gicality of all who ' seek to trim and tinker the be- wildering popular religion. 't We are, says Tennyson

* ' Tennyson as a Religious Teacher.' {T^e italics are mine.) f Prose note to 'The Ballad of Mary the Mother.'

62 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

— and apparently Mr. Masterman echoes the state- ment— to evade the sense of personal insignificance provoked by the vastness of the Universe by declaring that part of the phenomena which so affright us is only phenomenal, while admitting the objective reality of the rest. And further, we are to reconcile the eternal paradox of the cruelty or indifference of Nature by taking for granted a * possible harmony ' of which, it is confessed, we have not even ' a glimmering ! ' I have read somewhere of one of the old quacksalvers and pro- jectors of the Middle Ages that he made it a sine qua non with all pupils who committed themselves to his tuition that, for three years, they should study no system but his, and permit no doubt of his teaching to find room in their minds. A royal road to belief indeed, but not one which is likely to commend itself to a generation fed by the thought of Spencer and Huxley. Such a philosophy is impossible of acceptance by the thinking minority who have made up their minds lo know^ even if the whole sum of knowledge they can arrive at is that they can know nothing. One turns from such a feast of husks, such ' vacant chaff well meant for grain,' to the dish-and-all-swallowing * faith ' of Bishop Blougram with a sense of positive relief: —

I hear you recommend, I might at least

Eliminate, decrassify my faith

Since I adopt it, keeping what I must

And leaving what I can — such points as this.

I won't — that is, I can't throw one away.

Supposing there's no truth in what I hold

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 63

About the need of trial to men's faith, Still, when you bid me purify the same To such a process I discern no end. Clearing ofF one excrescence to see two, There's ever a next in size, now grown as big That meets the knife : I cut and cut again ! First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last But Fichte's clever cut at God himself? Experimentalize on sacred things ! I trust nor hand, nor eye, nor heart, nor brain, To stop betimes \ they all get drunk alike. The first step, I am master not to take.

Here, at least, something like an intellectual foothold is possible. We may call the man who clings to such a position a moral and intellectual ' skulker,' but all the logical cannonading in the world will not dislodge one stone of his fortress. He is neither above nor below logical argument — he is out of its range altogether. Tennyson was nearer, in his theological standpoint, to Bishop Blougram than to the leaders of scientific thought. Mr. Masterman, with a healthy ■scorn for the mere * case-making ' advocacy which will have the object of its adulation right on all points, owns as much : —

It was the safe rather than the heroic course that Tenny- son exalted in the world of thought and of action. In his own speculation he never launched out on the turmoil of modern doubt. He was always crushing his doubts, refusing to let them shake his belief in the older ideal. . . . And the consequence of all this is, that for the more adventurous minds, Tennyson, as a teacher, can never give that full satisfaction which they can derive from those who have journeyed freely, and gone forward

64 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

wherever they may be led. He is too much prepared to judge success and failure by the mere worldly standard ; he cannot see that * earth's failure ' may be necessary for ' heaven's success,' and that it is better to have failed in a great cause than to have contentedly acquiesced in a lower ideal. It is well to remember the lesson insisted on by a great contem- porary writer, ' While in all things that we see or do we are ta desire perfection, and to strife for it, we are, nevertheless, not to set the narrow thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the noble thing, in its mighty progress ; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty ; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat, not to lower the level of our aims that we may surely enjoy the complacency of success.'

This intellectual timidity runs all through Tenny- son's work, bounding his outlook, shortening his hands, cramping the effort of which, had it been backed by an extra grain of mental courage, such a genius as his might have been capable. Let us once more listen ta Mr. Masterman : —

* Trim hedges, smooth lawns, butterflies, posies, and nightingales ' — a quiet English scenery — is the scenery loved by Tennyson. This is peopled by contented peasants, who bow deferentially to their superiors, a society organized in a hierarchy culminating in the great house. Here dwell a select and cultured few, who discuss mild philosophy, profess a languid enthusiasm for slowly broadening freedom, and, in moments of leisure, thank God for the existence of the narrow seas that protect them from * the mad fool-fury of the Seine.' Such was Tennyson's ideal of the perfect life. And it was because he lived to see the gradual destruction of this order, and seemed powerless to restrain the incoming tide, that in his latter years his voice so often rose in a melancholy cry of despair. His ideal was benevolence descending, halo-crowned.

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 65

received with enthusiastic gratitude by those below. ' Why,'

he asked, as if suddenly discovering some marvellous act of

kindness,

Why should not these great Sirs

Give up their parks some dozen times a year.

To let the people breathe ?

He lived, alas ! to see ' the people ' claiming as their own right that which was to be granted as a gracious favour ; the hedges broken down, the motley crowd flooding in on to the pleasant preserves ; strange shapes, socialists, democrats, anarchists, each preaching some new creed, which was to create the new heaven and the new earth ; the downfall of the older ideal ; the stormful birth of the new era. Small wonder, if he turned away in disgust from —

This earth a stage so gloomed with woe, You all but sicken at the shifting scenes.

Small wonder indeed that a man of such a tempera- ment should so turn away, but something surely of a pity that the most divinely beautiful of all English singers should have found no message for the down- trodden helots of an effete hierarchy other than that conveyed in the old familiar jingle : —

Always know your proper stations.

Live upon your daily rations,

And bless the Squire and his relations.

This is obviously not the place in which to attempt a complete appreciation of the work of the two great poets with whose theological tendencies I have thus briefly dealt, and I must rely upon the candour of my readers to understand that the gift of imagination and the power of expression

r

66 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

which were the especial glories both of Browning and Tennyson have no warmer living admirer than myself. Nor, when I claim for Buchanan — as I shall presently attempt to prove — that, in his views and treatment of theological questions, he came nearer than they to expressing the trend of his generation, do I make any claim for him of genius generally superior to theirs. He would himself have been the first to repudiate any such claim. The frank and cordial admiration he extended to both his great rivals was repeatedly expressed. He held Tennyson facile princeps as a verbal artist, and he laboured hard for many years among the little band of critics whose generous praise did so much to atone to Browning for journalistic insult and public neglect. In offering my appraisement of him for what it may be worth, I enjoy a complete sense of critical liberty, inasmuch as I know that, could it reach his knowledge, he would ask no more than I have to give ; that he would neither desire nor accept a critical verdict which would place him one inch higher than he has a right to be at the expense of contemporaries whose splendid gifts he was himself ever the first to recognise and acclaim. That he might, had he so chosen, have stood beside the greatest merely as a poetic stylist, is my express conviction. The boy who, in the early twenties, could write verse of the quality of that Buchanan wrote in the ' Undertones ' had nothing to fear, as a writer of verse, even from the impeccable Tennyson. But, in his later years, he was content to forego what>

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 67

unfortunately, he had come to consider a prize not worth the grasping. He had educated himself into a contempt of verbal chic or prettiness — an unwise contempt, since even mere chic is distinctly worth having — and had a fierce impatience of mere perfection of verbal form, not giving it the importance it fairly possesses even when its beauty is merely the fitting garniture of noble thought. ' Two-thirds of our native poetic growth from Euphues downwards is mere verbiage,' he wrote, ' and of late years verbiage has blossomed with the amazing splendour of a sun- flower,' The theory which guided him throughout the latter years of his career was, as he himself expressed it, ' the theory that the end and crown of Art is simplicity, and that words, when they only conceal thought, are the veriest weeds, to be cut remorselessly away.' But it cannot be said for him that, in avoiding mere floweriness, he always succeeded in avoiding verbiage, and the careless rapidity with which he wrote but too often made his style unworthy of his matter. It was a favourite saying of his that, if the thought was clear, the vocabulary to clothe it came of itself, which, though true enough to an extent, is only a half-truth. Thought is common to all intelligent people, and most ideas may fairly be said to be common property. Solomon nor Shakespeare had no keener — perhaps no deeper — sense of the mystery of life than many a thoughtful peasant, but the peasant can only at some passing moment of high emotion find the phrase which

68 ROBERT BV CHAN AN.

illumines the depth of his own heart. I remember, years ago, hearing the news broken to a working miner that the home he had left safe and happy only an hour or two before had been swallowed in a landslip determined by the sinking of the ground above the gallery of a worked-out mine. His mother, his wife, and his two children had perished. Except that the man's face went ashen grey in colour, he showed little sign of emotion, but after a minute of dumb immobility he passed his hand across his eyes like a man struggling against an overpowering dizziness, and said, ' I shall wake by-and-by.' The sentiment conveyed by the words is identical with that tremendous line of the Eliza- bethan poet, put into the mouth of Titus Andronicus, who, like the illiterate miner, was staggered by a catastrophe too great for instant comprehension : —

When will this fearful slumber have an end ?

A poet might write any number of such verses quite

coolly, moved only by the mere artistic thrill of

pleasure in his creation of a strong and living line.

The rude phrase of the miner was probably the one

striking utterance of his life. A local poet of the

same district — the South Staffordshire Black Country

— ran Burns neck-and-neck so far as the sentiment

of his verse was concerned, in such doggerel as the

following : —

The sun that shines so bright above Knows nought about my wrongful love :

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 69

The birds that sing in Wigmore Lane

Bring nothing to my heart but pain :

It is a very dismal thing

That in my ears the birds should sing

While my Selina has gone ofF

To walk with Mr. Abraham Gough.

Where is the difference, save in that all-essential quality of style, between this and Burns's anguished

' ' Ye'll break my heart, ye little birds

That wanton on yon flowery thorn — Ye mind me of departed joys — Departed never to return !

The only meed we can yield the pitman-poet is a smile. The phrase of Burns, which is, verbally, almost as simple, wrings the heart-strings; yet both express an identical feeling — the sense of angry revolt at the indifference of external Nature to our personal woe.

It may be said, as a broad and easy generalisation, that the lover of mere beauty will prefer the earlier poems of Buchanan ; the lover of thought, his later work. It was but seldom, after forty, that the rush and turmoil of the ideas he felt it his mission to express left him the time or the desire to linger over his work, to polish it to the highest attainable pitch of brightness. Let it be remembered that it was a lad of twenty-two who wrote the following passage from ' Pan,' in ' Undertones,' and the claim for Buchanan, that, had he been content to cultivate beauty of expression as the greatest poetical good, he might have stood shoulder to shoulder with the

70 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

greatest of English verbal artists will hardly be

seriously questioned.

In Arcady

1, sick of mine own envy, hollow'd out

A valley, green and deep, then, pouring forth

From the great hollow of my hand a stream

Sweeter than honey, bade it wander on

In soft and rippling lapse to the far sea.

Upon its banks grew flowers as thick as grass.

Gum-dropping poplars and the purple vine.

Slim willows dusty like the thighs of bees.

And further, stalks of corn and wheat and flax.

And even further, on the mountain sides

White sheep and new yean'd lambs, and in the midst

Mild-featured shepherds piping. Was not this

An image of your grander ease, O gods ?

A sweet, faint picture of your bliss, O gods ?

They thanked me, those sweet shepherds, with the smoke

Of crimson sacrifice of lambkins slain,

Rich spices, succulent herbs that savour meats;

And when they came upon me ere aware,

Walk'd sudden on my presence where I piped

By rivers low my mournful ditties old.

Cried ' Pan ! ' and worshipp'd. Yet it was not well,

Ye gods, it was not well, that I, who gave

The harvest to these men, and, with my breath

Thickened the wool upon the backs of sheep,

I, Pan, should in those purblind mortal forms

Witness a loveliness more gently fair.

Nearer to your dim loveliness, O gods !

Than my immortal wood-pervading self —

Carelessly blown on by the rosy Hours,

Who breathe quick breath and smile before they die —

Goat-footed, horn'd, a monster — yet a god.

For modern music more perfect than this we must

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 71

go to Keats, to Shelley, or to the mature work of Tennyson. More than one other of the poems in the same collection has this magic of melody. Listen to the varied, changing syllabic beat of ' Selene the Moon.'

I hide myself in the cloud that flies

From the west and drops on the hill's grey shoulder, And I gleam through the cloud with my panther eyes,

While the stars turn pale, the dews grow colder ; I veil my naked glory in mist,

Quivering downward and dewily glistening, Till his sleep is as pale as my lips unkist.

And I tremble above him, panting and listening. As white as a star, as cold as a stone,

Dim as my light in a sleeping lake. With his head on his arm he lieth alone,

And I sigh * Awake ! Wake, Endymion, wake and see ! ' And he stirs in his sleep for the love of me ;

But on his eyelids my breath I shake : ' Endymion, Endymion ! Awaken, awaken ! ' And the yellow grass stirs with a mystic moan.

And the tall pines groan, And Echo sighs in her grot forsaken

The name of Endymion !

*****

Ai ! The black earth brightens, the sea creeps near,

When I swim from the sunset's shadowy portal 5 But he will not see, and he will not hear,

Though to hear and to see were to be immortal : Pale as a star and cold as a stone.

Dim as my ghost in a sleeping lake. In an icy vision he lieth alone,

And I sigh, ' Awake !

72 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Wake, Endymion, wake and be

Divine, divine, for the love of me ! ' And my odorous breath on his lids I shake :

' Endymion, Endymion ! Awaken, awaken ! ' But Jove sitteth cold on his cloud-shrouded throne

And heareth my moan, And his stern lips form not the hope-forsaken

Name of Endymion.

I do not wish to overload my pages with quotation^ but a certain latitude in this matter is allowable, and indeed necessary; and I must ask the liberty to allow Buchanan to speak for himself in justification of certain claims I make for him in cases where his own personal utterance alone can carry conviction of the justice of the claim. His later work, dealing always honestly, and sometimes fiercely, with vital questions of conduct and outlook regarding which every thinking man must needs work out his own belief, naturally attracted an amount of notice which has tended to throw into the shade of forgetfulness the earlier achievements upon which, as an artist, his fame will ultimately rest. Critical duty would be only partially fulfilled were not the attention of the reader redirected to work of lofty artistic quality, which in the polemical excitement occasioned by such utterances as ' The Wandering Jew,' and ' Mary the Mother,' has been, if only temporarily and partially, forgotten or ignored. Finally forgotten or neglected it could not be; its artistic quality will ensure it a place in the anthology of English poetry, and there is more than a mere off-chance in the

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 73

possibility of its finally eclipsing in the popular affection the later work in which its author had the greater faith as a passport to the consideration of posterity. Beauty in a work of art must always be a paramount quality, and, when once recognised, is in small danger of ever being forgotten. I shall permit myself one final and perhaps rather lengthy quotation fi-om the ' Undertones,' in which Buchanan touched the high- water- mark of his poetical achievement, a poem worthy of the supreme beauty and divine significance of the affections to which it owed its creation. ' Undertones * were preceded by a Prologue, addressed to ' David in Heaven,' and closed by an Epilogue dedicated to 'Mary on Earth.' 'David* was David Gray, the poet of the Luggie, the splendidly gifted and un- fortunate young writer to whom Buchanan was united by the bonds of an affection which may be soberly described as passionate. His early death was, to the surviving fi-iend, as bitter a blow as the loss of Arthur Henry Hallam was to Tennyson. And, as Hallam's death inspired one of the most exquisite poems in the literature of the entire world, so the death of David Gray moved Buchanan to utterances of sorrow which, to my ear and heart at least, are scarcely less beautiful. ' Mary ' was Mary Jay, Buchanan's dearly loved wife, whose loss, some sixteen years ago, caused him a sorrow even more poignant than that which dwelt about the memory of his boyish friend. She was living at the date of the poem which bears her name, and for some years thereafter, and in that poem Buchanan brought

74 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

into sweet accord the two loftiest and most abiding in- fluences of his life, his yearning for his dead friend, his affection for his living bride. I quote the poem in its entirety, feeling it too sacred for mutilation, and feeling also that it alone will suffice to justify the claim I make — that its author stands of right among the great poets of England.

I. So, now the task is ended ; and to-night, Sick, impotent, no longer soul-sustain'd. Withdrawing eyes from that ideal height Where, in low undertones, those spirits plain'd, Each full of special glory unattain'd — I turn on you, Sweet-Heart, my weary sight. — Shut out the darkness, shutting in the light : So ! now the task is ended. What is gain'd ?

First, sit beside me. Place your hand in mine.

From deepest fountains of your veins the while

Call up your Soul; and briefly let it shine

In those grey eyes with mildness feminine.

Yes, smile, Dear ! — you are truest when you smile.

My heart to-night is calm as peaceful dreams. — Afar away the wind is shrill, the culver Blows up and down the moor with windy gleams, The birch unlooseneth her locks of silver And shakes them softly on the mountain streams. And o'er the grave that holds my David's dust The Moon uplifts her empty, dripping horn : Thither my fancies turn, but turn in trust, Not wholly sadly, faithful though forlorn.

ROBERT BVCHANAN. 75

For you, too, love him, mourn his life's quick fleeting ;

We think of him in common. Is it so ? —

Your little hand has answer'd, and I know

His name makes music in your heart's soft beating ;

And — well, 'tis something gain'd for him and me —

Him, in his heaven, and me, in this low spot,

Something his eyes will see, and joy to see —

That you, too, love him, though you knew him not.

4-

Yet this is bitter. We were boy and boy.

Hand link'd in hand we dreamt of power and fame,

We shared each other's sorrow, pride, and joy.

To one wild tune our swift blood went and came.

Eyes drank each other's hope with flash of flame.

Then, side by side, we clomb the hill of life,

We ranged thro' mist and mist, thro' storm and strife ;

But then, — it is so bitter, now, to feel

That his pale Soul to mine was so akin.

Firm fix'd on goals we each set forth to win.

So twinly conscious of the sweet Ideal,

So wedded (God forgive me if I sin !)

That neither he, my friend, nor I, could steal

One glimpse of heaven's divinities — alone,

And flushing, seek his brother, and reveal

Some hope, some joy, some beauty, else unknown ;

Nor, bringing down his sunlight from the Sun,

Call sudden up, to light his fellow's face,

A smile as proud, as glad, as that I trace

In your dear eyes, now, when my work is done.

5.

Love gains in giving. What had I to give Whereof his Poet-Soul was not possest ? What gleams of stars he knew not, fugitive As lightning-flashes, could I manifest ?

76 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

What music, fainting from a clearer air ?

What light of sunrise from beyond the grave ?

What pride in knowledge that he could not share ?-

Ay, Mary, it is bitter ; for I swear

He took with him, to heav'n, no wealth I gave.

No, Love, it is not bitter ! Thoughts like these

Were sin the songs I sing you must adjust.

Not bitter, ah ! not bitter ! — God is just ;

And, seeing our one-knowledge, just God chose

By one swift stroke, to part us. Far above

The measure of my hope, my pain, my love,

Above our seasons, suns and rains and snows, —

He, like an exhalation, thus arose ;

Hearing in a diviner atmosphere

Music we only see, when, dewy and dim,

The stars through gulfs of azure darkness swim,

Music we seem to see, but cannot hear.

But evermore my Poet, on his height,

Fills up my Soul with sweetness to the brim,

Rains influence, and warning, and delight ;

And now, I smile for pride and joy in him !

7-

I said, Love gains by giving. And to know That I, who could not glorify my Friend, Soul of my Soul, although I loved him so. Have power and strength and privilege to lend Glimpses of heav'n to Thee, of hope, of bliss ! Power to go heavenward, pluck flowers and blend Their hues in wreaths I give thee with a kiss — You, Love, who climb not up the heights at all ! To think, to think, I never could upcall On his dead face, so proud a smile as this !

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 77

8.

Most just is God, who bids me not be sad For his dear sake whose name is dear to thee. Who bids me proudly climb and sometimes see With joy a glimpse of him in glory clad ; Who, further, bids your life be proud and glad, When I have climb'd and seen, for joy in me. My lowly-minded, gentle-hearted Love ! I bring you down his gifts, and am sustain'd : You watch and pray, I climb — he stands above. So, now the task is ended, what is gain'd.

9-

This knowledge. — Better in your arms to rest. Better to love you till my heart should break. Than pause to ask if he who would be blest Should love for more than his own loving's sake. So closer, closer still ; for (while afar. Mile upon mile toward the Polar star. Now in the autumn time our Poet's dust Sucks back thro^ grassy sods the flowers it thrust To feel the summer on the outer earth) I turn to you, and on your bosom fall. Love gains by giving. I have given my all. So, smile — to show you hold the gift of worth.

10.

Ay, all the thanks that I on earth can render

To him who sends me such good news from God,

Is, in due turn, to thy young life to tender

Hopes that denote, while blossoming in splendour

Where an invisible Angel's foot hath trod.

So, sweetheart, I have given unto thee.

Not only such poor song as here I twine.

But Hope, Ambition, all of mine or me.

My flesh and blood, and more, my Soul divine.

78 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

Take all, take all ! Ay, wind white arms about My neck and from my breath draw bliss for thine : Smile, Sweet-Heart, and be happy — lest thou doubt How much the gift I give thee makes thee mine !

It is undeniable that during the latter years of his life Buchanan failed not merely to improve in verbal technique, but even to hold anything like the high level of excellence which he had formerly attained and held so easily. There are several explanations of this merely artistic decadence. He had passed the earlier years of his life in bitter struggle in London, and, after that period of enforced poverty, had chosen to spend a further time in the wilder portions of Scotland and Ireland, living a life of the completest simplicity. Had he continued that existence his work would, in all probability, have been very much smaller in bulk, and proportionately finer in texture. But he heard the great world calling ; he sickened of the loneliness of the mountain and the moor, feeling, as he himself has told us, that, ' after ten years of solitude he should have gone mad if he had not rushed back into the thick of life.' Weary of solitary dreaming, he found an almost fierce delight in 'superabundant activity.* Fame had come to him, and with fame came too a large increase in the wages of his work. Every magazine and review in London was open to him, the theatre held out golden lures. His facility of execution was some- thing astounding — almost disquieting. I have known him produce a one-volume novel of the length of fifty thousand words in twelve days, and a three-act comedy.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 79

which ran for over a year in London, was invented and written in less than a week. All the vast mass of thought, scholarship and experience which he had accumulated during the first tranquil twenty years of his active intellectual life was seething and fermenting in his brain ; length of practice as a writer had given him enormous facility of expression; the costly life of London demanded far more money than had sufficed for the simpler existence of Skye and Conne- mara; and by a natural and inevitable consequence, his literary output grew in extent and — but too frequently — declined in quality. His professedly poetical work alone makes something like the bulk of Browning's, and many times the bulk of Tennyson's. Add to that the writing (and personal production) of over fifty plays; the writing of more than thirty novels and of a camel-load of critical, polemical, and sociological ' etceteras ' in the forms of pamphlet, review, and * Letters to the Editor' of the 'T'elegraph, the Chronic le, the Star, the Sunday Special, and other metropolitan journals; and a huge mass of unpublished and un- finished work in prose and rhyme, and it will be seen that the forty years of intellectual activity allotted to Buchanan were fairly well filled; and that it is little wonder that he fell out of the running, merely as an artist, with crafiismen whose leisurely habits of pro- duction allowed them to ' smoke seven pipes ' over the polishing of a single phrase. An incurable contempt of money, joined to the tenderest heart in the world, helped not a little towards this consummation. Robert

So ROBERT BVCHJNAN.

Buchanan could hear of no case of poverty or suffering and rest until he had relieved it, and for many years he was the milch-cow of every impecunious scribbler in London. His nationality must have cost him many scores of pounds per annum, because, at all times open to the moving influence of a tale of woe, he would always reward with a double gratuity any such tale that was told with a Scotch accent. The actor who had fallen on evil times dined sumptuously on the day he met Buchanan. Often laughing at himself for being the dupe of people he knew to be morally unworthy, he never knotted his purse-strings for such a reason. It was enough that the applicant was poor. He had little faith in ' organized ' charity, and detested the self- advertisement of the published subscription list. He felt that charity was hardly charity at all unless the alms could pass from hand to hand, accompanied by a word of hopeful cheer which doubled the value of the gift The days of his own early struggles remained with him a living memory, and kept his heart soft for all the stepsons of Dame Fortune : —

Et ego in Bohemia fui !

Have known its fountains deep and dewy,

Have wandered where the sun shone mellow

On many an honest, ragged fellow,

And for Bohemia's sake since then

Have loved poor brothers of the pen.

I've popt at vultures circling skyward,

I've made the carrion-hawks a bye-word,

But never caused a sigh or sob in

The breast of mavis or cock-robin,

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 8i

Nay, many such (let Time attest me ! ) Have fed out of my hand, and blest me ! So when my wayward life is ended, With all my sins that can't be mended, And in my singing rags I lie Face upward to the cruel sky, The small birds, fluttering about me, While birds of prey and ravens flout me, May strew a few loose leaves above The Outcast whom so few could love, — And on my grave in flower-wrought words

The Inscription set that man may view it — ' He blest the nameless singing birds. Loved the good Shepherd's flock and herds,

Et ille in Bohemia fuit ! '

The position I claim for Buchanan in the Victorian period of English literature, is, then, briefly this — that his failure to attain the highest rank as an executive artist was greatly determined by the power of circumstance and in part by his own deliberate choice. I pass now to the second half of my claim, which is, that as an exponent of the deeper in- tellectual life of his epoch as evidenced in its religious evolution he was truer, more complete, and there- fore, in so far greater, than his two great and friendly rivals, Browning and Tennyson, whose credentials to be accepted as the typical vocalisers of modern religious thought I have already ventured to examine. To sum up as briefly as may be their positions in this matter, I think it may fairly be said that Browning failed by ambiguity of expression, an ambiguity so marked that, to his own ' amazement

G

82 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and concern,' * he found himself acclaimed as the public champion of a Church whose membership, in private, he unmistakably repudiated. Tennyson failed, as the most scholarly and one of the most admiring of his critics has found himself forced to confess, because he had not that full measure of moral and intellectual audacity firmly to face, and pitilessly to dissect, the doubts he could but feel. It now remains for us to consider the treatment accorded to identical problems by the third great English poet who, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, made it his business to deal with them.

As we have seen, in common with almost every other poet who has ever written, Buchanan began his career as a seer and delineator of beauty. The lovely myths of Greece had appealed to him as they did to Keats, and his young imagination had chosen for the site of its first wanderings the hills and forests of Hellas, Then, as will be made clear by a chronological study of his work, such themes ceased to content him, the actualities of life drew him from the contemplation of the beautifiil shadows of the olden poesy ; and Willie Baird and Poet Andrew, the Widow Mysie, the Little Milliner, Liz the Coster-girl, Edward Crowhurst the rustic poet, usurped the place upon the poetic easel hitherto occupied by Selene and Polyphemus, Pygmalion and Pan. The strident roll of the city street, the sweet sounds of British and Irish rustic life, entered into the

* ' The Outcast.' Epistle Dedicatory.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 85

music of his verse, and the verse grows sadder, as it needs must do when a poet turns from the moonlit, opalescent wraiths of an extinct dreamland to the practicalities of life. The note of sadness deepens from volume to volume, though it is still relieved by such bits of innocent gaiety as ' Clari in the Well,' and of rollicking Irish devilry as ' The Wake of Tim O'Hara,' until, in the year 1870, being then in his twenty-eighth year, Buchanan struck the keynote of his future main life- work in ' Coruisken Sonnets.' It was during his wanderings amid the stern grandeurs of the Isle of Skye that the problems on whose discussion he first entered in that little volume took a firm grip of him and assumed the disquieting proportions they never afterwards lost. Small as the volume is, it is important to the student of Buchanan's theological evolution, and by no means unimportant in the poetical history of the last century. I know of nothing quite like these Sonnets, of no utter- ance which is, in some ways, more strange and interesting, more expressive of the spiritual unrest which is the tormenting inheritance of every thinking man born in our times. As in Browning, as in Tenny- son, as in every powerful personality in any marked degree in touch with the conflicting hopes and doubts of the century, there was in Buchanan ' a dual per- sonality ; ' that of the poet, the eternal child, who would so gladly be content with what he himself has called * the fairy tales of God,' happy in the dim light and incense-laden air of the Temple of Faith, did not his adult alter ego clamour for satisfaction of the reason, for

84 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

iron-bound logic, for precise rectangular demonstration The second of these personalities had hitherto been asleep, stirring faintly at moments when a shadow had fallen on his closed eyelids. It was obvious that the young lad who had joined gaily in the cheap revels of the literary Bohemia, and had shared the jokes and junkets of ' inky-boys and bouncing lasses ; ' who had recreated his fancy by translating into song the crystalline babble of the mountain brook ; had toyed with Grecian legend and depicted old Horatius Flaccus chirping over his Falernian on the Digentia ; had hitherto found life too good and sweet, too satisfactorily explanatory of its own excellence, to grizzle over the problem of its ultimate outcome and meaning. But, in the weird solitudes dominated by the shadow of Mount Blaabhein the doubting half of him awoke to life : —

Late in the gloaming of the year I haunt the melancholy mere ; A Phantom I, where Phantoms brood In this soul-searching soHtude. Hiding my forehead in the dim Hem of His robe, I question Him.

It is worthy of notice that this ' questioning ' of God was not, as in the case of Tennyson, the result of a sudden shock to any individual human affection. The loss of David Gray had wounded Buchanan's heart much as the loss of Arthur Hallam had lacerated Tennyson's, but so far from having suggested to him doubt of the goodness, or of the very existence, of the Divine Fatherhood, it had actually strengthened beHef

ROBERT BV CHAN AN. 85

and acquiescence. It was God's 'justice,' not his cruelty, which had inspired the stroke that parted the two friends. The dead friend lived still in the * influence and warning and delight ' he rained upon the living, and, in his loneliness the survivor could still ' smile with joy and pride ' in the friend who was as a veritable ambassador of his love to the throne of God. It was before the impassivity of external nature, the eternal silence of the hills, the Inarticulate moan of the tormented waters, beneath the chill immensity and aloofness of the inaccessible sky, that he felt suddenly

Cold are all these as snow, and still as stone.

Not in the anguish of sudden personal loss, but in the contrast between the stony calm of the huge cosmos reflected in a waste solitude, the question rose ' Does God exist at all ? ' For —

I found Thee not by the starved widow's bed,

Nor in the sick rooms where my dear ones died ; In cities vast I hearken'd for Thy tread,

And heard a thousand call Thee, wretched-eyed. Worn out, and bitter. But the Heavens denied

Their melancholy Maker. From the dead Assurance came, nor answer ! Then I fled

Into these wastes, and raised my hands, and cried : * The seasons pass — the sky is as a pall —

Thin wasted hands on withering hearts we press — There is no God, in vain we plead and call,

In vain with weary eyes we search and guess — Like children in an empty house sit all,

Cast-away children, lorn and fatherless.'

There the question is posed and answered by a bitter

86 ROBERT BUCHJNAN.

negative. This particular sonnet is peculiarly inter- esting for the double reason that while it is almost the first utterance of Buchanan's dealing with the problem of Godhead, it is also the last and only one I have been able to find in his work in which the existence of a Diety is flatly denied by the poet in his own person. An ' Atheist ' in the true meaning of the word, Buchanan never was, and that he should have written this sonnet, even in his blackest mood so early in his career, is all but incredible. He knew many fluctuations of feeling and belief regarding the being of a personal God, and expressed most of them ; and it is just because of that, because he found the courage not merely to face and dwell upon the problem — a courage common enough — and also because he possessed the rarer courage to feel no shame in professing and proclaiming every phase of his in- certitude, that he seems to me so pre-eminently the poet of his day. He was profoundly in sympathy with the dictum of Goethe that ' Religion stands in the same relation to Art as any other of the higher interests of life.' Accepting that dictum, he asked, * Where is the great poem, where the noble music built on that wondrous theme ? . . . . The reticence of false culture steals over the life of many who might instruct us deeply by their experience. . . . There is a great emotional and spiritual life yet unrepresented, there are rude forces not yet brought into play, but all of which must sooner or later have their place in art.' He practised himself the spiritual and intellectual freedom

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 87

whose necessity he proclaimed, he marked every halting-place on the line of his own theological evolution by a volume or a song : he travelled far and wide, but never at any later period of his life did he arrive at the goal of Atheism, which yet, upon the testimony of this one sonnet, might be taken for his starting point, ' Without the sanction of the Super- natural, the certainty of the Superhuman, Life to me is nothing,' he wrote in the Epistle Dedicatory to ^ The Outcast,' and I remember him saying one day that

* God and his own soul ' were the only entities in the universe of which he felt any abiding certainty. But, to a mind with any strong tinge of what may perhaps be called ' intellectual practicality,' the * God ' of Buchanan seems at best but a misty, uncertain, and rather useless personality. He is certainly not the God over whose dethronement the poet mourned in the opening passages of ' The Outcast,' or defined, if

* definition ' is not too precise a name for so shadowy a performance, in the Proem to ' The Book of Orm,' in lines of singular beauty : —

When in these songs I name the Name of God,

I mean not Him who ruled with brazen rod

The rulers of the Jew ; nor Him who calm

Sat reigning on Olympus ; nay, nor Brahm,

Osiris, Allah, Odin, Balder, Thor,

(Though these I honour with a hundred more) ;

Menu I mean not, nor the Man Divine,

The Pallid Rainbow lighting Palestine j

Nor any lesser of the gods which Man

Hath conjured out of Night since Time began.

88 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

I mean the primal Mystery and Light,

The most Unfathomable, Infinite,

The Higher Law, Impersonal, Supreme,

The Life in Life, the Dream within the Dream,

The Fountain which in silent melody

Feeds the dumb waters of Eternity,

The source whence every god hath flown and flows,

And whither each departs to find repose.

Nebulous enough ! but nebulosity is the natural and inevitable result of any endeavour to define the in- definable. There was, to a positive mind, Uttle enough to cling to even in such a Deity as this, but faint and far away as are the personality and the locale here described, both grew fainter yet in the poet's later years. In his last published volume, ' The New Rome,* he declares God to be ' in process of becoming,' and a rather slow and laborious process it would appear

to be : —

Turn from that mirage of a God on high

Holding the sceptre of a creed outworn, And hearken to the faint half-human cry

Of Nature quickening with the God unborn !

The God unborn, the God that is to be.

The God that has not been since Time began, —

Hark, — that low sound of Nature's agony Echoed thro' life and the hard heart of Man !

Fed with the blood and tears of living things,

Nourished and strengthened by Creation's woes^

The God unborn, that shall be King of Kings, Sown in the darkness, thro' the darkness grows.

Alas, the long slow travail and the pain

Of her who bears Him in her mighty womb !

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 89

How long ere He shall live and breathe and reign. While yonder Phantom fades to give Him room ?

Where'er great pity is and piteousness.

Where'er great Love and Love's strange sorrow stay,. Where'er men cease to curse, but bend to bless

Frail brethren fashioned like themselves of clay ;

Where'er the lamb and lion side by side Lie down in peace, where'er on land or sea

Infinite Love and Mercy heavenly eyed Emerge, there stirs the God that is to be !

His light is round the slaughtered bird and beast As round the forehead of Man crucified, —

All things that live, the greatest and the least. Await the coming of this Lord and Guide ;

And every gentle deed by mortals done,

Yea, every holy thought and loving breath.

Lighten poor Nature's travail with this Son

Who shall be Lord and God of Life and Death !

No God behind us in the empty Vast,

No God enthroned on yonder heights above,

But God emerging, and evolved at last Out of the inmost heart of human Love !

One can only say, in this connexion, that theological terminology is at its best so misty and uncertain, that the attempt to pin any believer in any form of Godhead down to a scientific definition of the object of venera- tion, is to ask the impossible : and for the believer to make the attempt unasked is to attempt the impossible. Browning, wiser in his generation, was content to aver that he was ' very sure of God,' but he nowhere, in his proper person, gave any definition or description of the

90 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

God of Whom he was so certain. God, as already said, has seemed hitherto an absolute necessity to the poetic intelligence. It is a word, more infinitely full of vague suggestion than ' Mesopotamia,' and the poet finds a mysterious comfort in repeating it, and in clinging to some shadowy and nameless outside force for which it serves as a sort of algebraic symbol. It was the Celtic strain in Buchanan's blood which made him cling to this diaphanous spectre of Deity, though there were moments when the Divine Donothingness moved his passionately human heart to outcries of revolt, as in that bitter parody, ' The Devil's Prayer,' printed originally in the sixth section of ' The Book of Orm ' : —

Father, which art in Heaven, — not here below ;

Be Thy name hallowed, in that place of worth ; And till Thy Kingdom cometh, and we know,

Be Thy will done more tenderly on Earth ; Give us this day our bread — since we must live ;

Forgive our stumblings, since Thou mad'st us blind ; If we offend Thee, Sire, at least forgive

As tenderly as we forgive our kind ; — Spare us temptation — human and divine ;

Deliver us from evil, now and then ; The Kingdom, Power, and Glory all are Thine

For ever and for evermore. Amen.

The first of the * Antiphones,' which follow and complete the ' Ballad of Mary the Mother,' opens with the tremendous adjuration : —

How can I love Thee, God that madest me ? Who saith he loves Thee, lies !

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 91

a statement which the poet absolutely explained and justified : —

Thy works, thy wonders, thine Omnipotence ?

Shall these awake my love ? Nay, these are only phantoms of the sense

Whereby I live and move.

*****

I love my fellow men, I love this hound

Who gently licks my hand, I love the land around me, and the sound

Of children in the land.

But Thee — I love not Thee ! — Stoop down, come near

To me whom Thou hast made. That I may know Thee close, and hold Thee dear, —

But now I shrink afraid.

There's never a helpless thing surrounding me,

No timid bird or beast, I love not better far, oh God, than Thee,

Tho' Thou be first, these least.

I love the maid I woo, the mother whose touch

I feel upon my brow. The friend vv^ho grips my hand ! — for these are such

As I, and not as Thou.

Thou Vision of my Thought ! Thou Mystery

Of which men preach and rave ! I would not look, if Heaven held only Thee^

One foot beyond the grave !

I seek the gentle ones who once were near,

Not Thee, O light above, — I crave for all who learn'd to love me here

And whom I learn'd to love !

More than one professedly religious journal de-

92 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

nounced this utterance as ' blasphemous.' Yet, after all, what is it but another facet of the truth proclaimed by Tennyson : —

Merit lives from man to man,

And not, O God, from man to Thee —

a Statement placidly accepted by all and sundry. The fundamental idea is here the same as that expressed in the dedication of ' The Wandering Jew ' to Buchanan's dead father, ' Robert Buchanan, Poet and Social Missionary ' : —

Father on Earth, for whom I wept bereaven, Father more dear than any Father in Heaven —

and in it is clearly readable, to any sympathetic and intelligent student of Buchanan's work, the spirit which informed alike his work and his life.

Buchanan's early years had been absolutely godless, in the sense that no form of revealed religion had ever been brought to his notice during his childhood. He was, as he has told us, ' born in Robert Owen's New Moral World,' and had ' scarcely heard even the name of God until at ten years of age ' he went to Scotland. He became, he goes on to say, ' God-intoxicated from the first moment he beheld the mountains and the sea' — from the moment, that is to say, at which he found his first revelation of the physical glories of the world. From that moment until twelve years later — the time of his wanderings in the Isle of Skye, which prompted the writing of the ' Coruisken Sonnets' — he probably, so to speak, took God for

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 93

granted, happy in an unexamined sense of the perpetual presence of a wonderful and worshipful Maker of a wonderful and delightful world. The Deity was a trouvaille^ a wonderflil ' find ' he had made for himself, and he was as contented in its possession as a child who, having found a broken decanter-stopper, believes himself the possessor of a Koh-i-noor. Then, in early manhood, came the question, the chill of doubt, the momentary blank negation, and afterwards the return to a faith in some sort of Deity — undefinable, since, as we have seen, he himself failed to define it. But the doubt grew, and the faith diminished, because the facts of life, strive as he would to keep before his eyes the rose-tinted glasses of poetic and religious optimism, grew in stern clearness of outline, and spoke unques- tionable truths which would be neither gainsaid nor ignored. Sorrow and sin and sickness and death ; unmerited suffering, war and prostitution and hunger ; the brutal follies of men in high places ; the daily failures and stumblings of all men, hurtful to them- selves and to those about them ; abortive effort and its grim set-off, undeserved success — these, and all the other thousand ills of flesh, must needs be looked at and their existence recognised. And side by side with such personal experiences was working the eager love for every kind of knowledge which could be found in the recorded experience of other men. Though, when they assailed too closely that nebulous Deity to which to the last he persisted in clinging, Buchanan would sometimes petulantly repel the leaders of modern

94 ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

science, and denounce the light they brought as a mere

Jack o'Lantern, he could not repulse it, and for the

last thirty years of his life he was an eager student

of modern scientific literature. He could say, with

his own Vanderdecken,

All this season

During my residence among you, I've searched the poor, stale scraps of reason

Your last philosophers have flung you. I've read through Comte, the Catechism, (Half common sense, half crank and schism).

And Harriet Martineau's synopsis ; Puzzled through Littre's monstr' informous Encyclopaedia enormous.

Until my brain grew blank as Topsy's. I've sucked the bloodless books of Mill,

As void of gall as any pigeon ; I've swallowed Congreve's patent pill

To purge man's liver of Religion ; I*ve tried my leisure to amuse With Freddy Harrison's reviews ; I've thumbed the essays of John Morley, So positive they made me poorly : —

* * * The Leben yesu, Renan's Vie^

I also studied thoroughly ; I vivisected cats with Lewes,

I tortured gentle dogs with Ferrier, Found out just what grimalkin's mew is,

And how tails wag in pug and terrier ; But came, however close I sought, No nearer to the riddle of Thought.

* * * Then finally, in sheer despair,

Burn'd deep with Scepticism's caustic

ROBERT BUCHJNJN. 95

Found Spencer staring at the air. Crying, ' God knows if God is there ! ' And, in a trice, become agnostic !

So catholic a study of modern thought could have but one result upon a normal intelligence.

Cosmogony, Geology, ethnology, what not —

which Bishop Blougram speaks of as

Greek endings, each the little passing bell That signifies some faith's about to die —

are rather to be compared to mordant acids, fatally- certain to eat out the heart of the robustest faith ; though some hollow simulacrum, like Buchanan's ' God ' may still be left erect in some dark corner of the mind. Frequently, in his earlier work, Buchanan consoled himself, as did Tennyson, by the dream of a God who was not indifferent, but merely working out with infinite pity and infinite patience an all-embracing scheme of salvation, in which wretchedness and wrong were only temporary expedients, to be justified presently to the sufferers by the granting of a fliller knowledge. One may be glad that he passed through such a phase of thought, for out of that phase came much noble and beautiful work, as, for instance, ' The Vision of the Man Accurst ' in ' The Book of Orm.' In this Vision, the poet beholds the world after the Day of Judgement, a solitude but for one Man

Who had sinned all sins, whose soul Was blackness and foul odour,

^6 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and whose dread fate it is to wander among the deserts of earth in a solitude and silence broken only by his own blasphemies. Summoned after a period to the presence of God, he is still fiercely unrepentant, and defies God by the mouth of God's ambassador : —

He saith his Soul is filled With hate of Thee and of Thy ways ; he loathes Pure pathways where the fruitage of the stars Hangeth resplendent, and he spitteth hate On all Thy children ....

God asks, ' What doth he crave ? '

Neither Thy Heaven, nor Thy holy ways. He murmureth out he is content to dwell In the Cold Clime for ever, so Thou sendest A face to look upon, a heart that beats, A hand to touch — albeit like himself, Black, venomous, unblest, exiled, and base ; Give him this thing, he will be very still. Nor trouble Thee again.

But there is not ' in all the waste of worlds,' another

like the Man Accurst, ' the basest mortal born,' but God

says —

Yet 'tis not meet

His cruel cry, for ever piteous

Should trouble my eternal Sabbath day.

Is there a spirit here, a human thing.

Will pass this day from the Gate Beautiful

To share the exile of the Man Accurst —

That he may cease the shrill pain of his cry,

And 1 have peace ?

Two shapes answer to this appeal, and, at the

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 97

Divine command, reveal themselves as the mother and

the wife of the doomed wretch. Both plead to be

allowed to share his exile, though he had slain the one,

and made the life on earth of the other a long and

cruel torment. And

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 ! '

The idea here is, as will at once be seen, identical with that which informs the 'Ballad of Judas Iscariot,'' the most popular and widely known — one is glad to know, for the credit of the popular judgment — of all Buchanan's briefer pieces. It is the note of all that is finest and best in Buchanan's achievement. In these two poems, the Tennysonian faith

That not one life shall be destroyed

Or cast as rubbish to the void

When God hath made the pile complete —

is very beautifully exemplified. But the study of life and of the lessons of modern science were disintegrating any such hope, and so, in Buchanan's deeper work, viewed as a whole, there is to be beheld a curious spectacle — the spectacle of a man who, clinging with despairing grip to a shibboleth, yet frequently belabours the figure whose label is the very shibboleth itself The calm indifference of d. faineant Deity, sitting aloof in ' impotence ot Godhead,' stirred the poet to warn

H

98 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

and lecture the Celestial Majesty in a fashion which the orthodox believer was quite justified in thinking dis- respectful. In this same ' Book of Orm,' the poet addresses the Deity in the following terms —

Master, if there be Doom,

All men are bereaven ! If, in the universe One Spirit receive the curse,

Alas for Heaven ! If there be Doom for one. Thou, Master, art undone.

# # *

Art thou less piteous than , The conception of a man ?

In ' The City of Dream ' a cognate idea is set forth with logical sobriety : —

That duty the created owes To the Creator, the Creator, too, Owes the Created. God hath given me life ; I thank my God if life a blessing is ; How may I bless Him if it proves a curse ?

In the already quoted ' Devil's Prayer ' and in a passage of ' Carmen Deific ' (' The New Rome '), the statement is stronger : —

If I were a God like you, and you were a man like me. And in the dark you prayed and wept and I could hear and see, The sorrow of your broken heart would darken all my day. And never peace or pride were mine till it was smiled away, — I'd clear my Heaven above your head till all was bright and

blue. If you were a man like me, and I were a God like you.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 99

Here, we are far indeed from the God Who pardoned Judas Tscariot and the Man Accurst ; far away from the * solace and certainty ' which, in another time and mood, the poet had found on ' the shore of the celestial ocean.'*

It is, of course, obvious that since God includes Christ, and since an always impersonal and finally utterly nebulous Deity could hardly be conceived as begetting carnal offspring, the unescapable corollary of the theological evolution I have attempted to trace was the categorical denial of the Divine parentage of Jesus. I doubt if, at any period of his life, Buchanan was ever a Christian in the dogmatic sense — the only sense in which, it will be remembered, he permitted the use of the word. I doubt if ever he was a Christian, as Byron phrased it, ' on consideration,' though the personal character and ethical teaching of Christ were the objects of his constant admiration — if, indeed, ' worship ' would not be a better word. His ' Balder,' a character on whom he lavished every divine quality, every beauty of benignity and tenderness, is obviously meant as a study of the character of Christ ; and in the poem as a whole there is more than a mere germ, there is a dis- tinct foreshadowing, of the gigantic conception which informs his greatest work, ' The Wandering Jew.' The two poems should be read in succession, and, so read, a striking resemblance between their themes becomes at once apparent . Both protagonists are of divine birth, both are informed wholly with a passion of pitying tenderness

* Sec the last book of ' The City of Dream.'

100 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

for all living things. Balder is the object of his Father's fear and hatred ; Christ, in the latter poem, is not hated by his Divine parent — he is simply the sufferer by His cynical carelessness and indifference.

'The Wandering Jew' was published in 1893. I was privileged to hear it read by its author from stage to stage of its production, and, while greatly struck and excited by its splendid qualities of idea and treat- ment, I prophesied for it a critical scarification com- pared with which any former onslaught on the author's work would be fulsome eulogy. To be just to the English Press, my prediction was almost completely falsified. One or two journals did indeed assail the book with unmeasured abuse, a midland daily of large circulation and influence describing it as ' a weltering mass of foul accusations,' and ' the morbid dream of an egotistic rhymer.' Miss Marie Corelli,with that genius for self-advertisement which distinguishes her, rushed into print with a denunciation of the book and its author. ' There would be,' said Miss Corelli, ' some- thing inexpressibly funny in a Robert Buchanan pro- nouncing doom on Christ, if it were not so revolting, — a critical impertinence easily to be corrected by sub- stituting for the name ' Robert Buchanan ' the name ' Marie Corelli,' and for ' Christ,' ' Robert Buchanan.'* But the general voice of the Press was to a quite different effect, and, though many critics failed alto- gether to perceive the true purport or meaning of the -poem, the notices as a whole were candid and generous.

* See article on ' The Master Christian.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. roi

Even more surprising to relate, the Pulpit took up and advertised the book by the mouths of several of its most distinguished orators. * Let me say,' said the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, ' that it will do all orthodox and devout Christians immense and endless good to read, ponder, and remember the attack upon historic and ecclesiastical Christianity which this poem utters. I say that nothing better could be done than that Robert Buchanan should rub these facts well into our eccle- siastical skins. I freely admit that through all the centuries the name of Christ has been identified with every kind of devilry. . . . There is nothing in this terrible poem to give intelligent Christians fear.' In that last phrase Mr. Hughes was no doubt doing his best to make the best of a bad case, but his frank recognition of much that is true in the book, coming from such a source, was exceedingly grateful. Dr. Joseph Parker said that ' Mr. Buchanan was on his way to the eternal altar ' — a true and pregnant phrase, though hardly, I think, in the fashion its author hoped. The story of ' The Wandering Jew ' is indeed as tremendous a conception as has ever entered the mind of man, and its conduct reveals Buchanan at his best. The Poet is wandering, desolate and heart- sick, through the snowy streets of London on the night of Christmas Eve, when he hears ' a tremulous voice cry out in pain,'

' For God's sake, mortal, let me lean on thee ! ' And peering through the dimness I could see Snows of" white hair blown feebly in the wind ;

102 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

And deeply was I troubled in my mind

To see so ancient and so weak a wight

At the cold mercy of the storm that night,

And said, while 'neath his wintry load he bent,

' Lean on me, father ! ' adding, as he leant

Feebly upon me, wearied out with woe,

* Whence dost thou come? and whither dost thou go?*

O then, meseemed, the womb of Heaven afar Quickened to sudden life, and moon and star Flashed like the opening of a million eyes, Dimming from every labyrinth of the skies Their lustre on that Lonely Man ; and he Loom'd like a comer from a far countrie In ragged antique raiment, and around His waist a rotting rope was loosely bound, And in one feeble hand a lanthorn quaint Hung lax and trembling, and the light was faint Within it unto dying, tho' it threw Upon the snow beneath him light enew To show his feeble feet were bloody and bare !

The Poet's first clear idea of the old wayfarer's identity is that he is Ahasuerus, the ' Wandering Jew' of legend, but, seeing upon his frozen hands the stigmata of the Great Sacrifice, he recognises

The lineaments of that diviner Jew Who like a Phantom passeth everywhere, The world^s last hope and bitterest despair, Deathless, yet dead.

Anon, the Poet finds himself

upon an open Plain Before the City, and before my face Rose, with mad surges thundering at its base.

ROBERT BUCHANAN. loj

A mountain like Golgotha ; and the waves That surged round its sunless cliffs and caves Were human — countless swarms of Quick and Dead!

Here, a figure sits in Judgement : —

Human he seemed, and yet his eyeballs shone From fleshless sockets of a skeleton.

A shadowy advocate rises from amid the mass, and opens his speech for the prosecution with the adjuration : —

O Judge, Death reigned since Time began, Sov'ran of Life and Change ! and ere this Man Came with his lying dreams to break our rest The reign of Death was beautiful and blest ! But now within the flesh of man there grows The poison of a dream that slays repose, The trouble of a mirage in the air That turneth into terror and despair ; So that the Master of the World, ev'n Death, Hated in his own Kingdom, travaileth In darkness, creeping hunted and afraid. Like any mortal thing, from shade to shade. From tomb to tomb ; and ever where he flies The souls of men shrink with averted eyes, And call with mad yet unavailing woe On this Man and his God to lay Death low. Wherefore the Master of the Quick and Dead Demandeth Doom and justice on the head Of him, this Jew, who hath usurped the throne The Lord of flesh claims ever for his own. This Jew hath made the Earth that once was glad A lazar-house of woeful men and mad Who can yet will not sleep, and in their strife For barren glory and eternal Life Have rent each other, murmuring his Name !

104 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

In a passage of some hundreds of lines, packed close with splendid imagery and eloquence, the Advocate extends and presses this accusation, the clanging periods of his oratory closing with the tremendous line — I demand doom and justice on this Jew !

Then appear the witnesses for the Prosecution — Judas, Ahasuerus, Pilate, Nero, Julian, Hypatia, some soli- tary, others attended by vast cohorts of dumb followers. Then comes Mahomet, escorted by the innumerable millions who have hailed him as the Prophet, and

Buddha

Star-eyed and sad and very beautiful ....

He spake, the throngs who follow' d bent like grass

Wind-blown to worship him !

Zoroaster, ' crowned like a king,' Menu and Moses,

Confiicius and

Prometheus, dragging yet his broken chain And gazing heavenward still, in beautiful disdain.

They pass in interminable procession,

Each kingly in his place, and in his train Souls of fair worshippers that Jew had slain.

The souls of mitred Popes and priests, of Galileo and of the innumerable nameless martyrs of science ; Justinian,

The Master of the Templars, du Molay, Clasped by the harlot. Fire,

Abelard and Eloise, Frederick,

Pale Petrarch, laurel-crow^ned, gazing on

The white face of that sister wobegone

Who through the lust of Christ's own Vicar fell —

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 105

Huss and Columbus and de Gama and Magellan ; and

from West and East, vast swarms of the victims slain

in the name of Christ ; Montezuma and the last of the

Incas. Then comes Voltaire, with Calas blessing and

embracing him ; and after him Holbach, Diderot, and

the rest,

The foes of Godhead and the friends of Man,

and finally, the innumerable hosts of Israel,

The children of the Ghetto, gathering there, His brethren, fed their eyes on his despair, And spat their hate upon him.

It would be impossible, without transcending all precedent in the way of free quotation, to give the faintest idea of the oceanic effect of this series of pictures, which, alone among painters, Gustave Dore might have realised in form and colour. Challenged to produce his Witnesses, Jesus replies

' Hosts of the happy Dead whom I have blest ! '

'- Call ! Let them come ! '

* I would not break their rest ! '

' Thou hast lied to them, O Jew ! ' the dark Judge cried.

And Jesus said, ' O Judge, I have not lied ! '

' False was thy promise — false and mad and drear — There is no Father ! '

' Father, dost Thou hear ? '

io6 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

For the last of many times, Jesus looks heavenwards for some sign. None comes, and the Judge resumes : —

' Enough. Renew thy miracles, and prove Thy words, O Jew ! From yonder void above Summon the Form, the Face, in all men's eyes And we absolve thee ! '

On the starry skies, Still thinly shrouded with the falling snow, He fixed his wistful gaze, and answered low, ' I bide my Father's time.'

John the Precursor, and ' that other John '

Whom Jesus to his breast Drew tenderly, because he loved him best,

Mary the mother and her gentle namesake the Magdalen, appear and testify, and at the summons of Paul,

Shapes of dead Saints arose, a shining throng,

But the greater throng of the victims of his false priests clamour them down and shriek for judgment. And Judgment is spoken, in words no man who has ever once perused can forget, at least in spirit and in essence.

Since thou hast quickened that thou canst not kill.

Awakened famine thou canst never still,

Spoken in madness, prophesied in vain,

And promised what no thing of clay shall gain.

Thou shalt abide while all things ebb and flow.

Wake while the weary sleep, wait while they go,

And, treading paths no human feet have trod,

Search on still vainly for thy Father, God ;

Thy blessing shall pursue thee as a curse

To hunt thee, homeless, through the Universe ;

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 107

No hand shall slay thee, for no hand shall dare To strike the Godhead Death itself must spare ! With all the woes of Earth upon thy head, Uplift thy Cross, and go ! Thy Doom is said.

And lo ! while all men come and pass away. That Phantom of the Christ, forlorn and grey, Haunteth the Earth with desolate footfall ....

God help the Christ, that Christ may help us all !

The commonest critical error made in envisaging this poem was in describing it as a direct and frontal attack upon Jesus. That to a certain extent of course it is, but it is also a flank assault. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes set his finger on its central significance in admitting ' that through all the centuries the name of Christ has been identified with every kind of devilry. The failure of Christ has been a failure to leave a Christ-like human progeny, to make the seed of his divinely beautiful spirit flourish in the rocky and thorny soil of human nature. The poem is at least as much a denunciation of the stupidity and cruelty of man as of the splendid and heroic folly of the greatest of the Paracletes, for whose nature and teaching it breathes nothing but love and admiration. ' I dis- tinguish absolutely,' writes its author, ' between the character of Jesus and the character of Christianity — in other words between Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Christ. Shorn of all supernatural pretensions, Jesus emerges from the gross mass of human beings as an almost perfect type of simplicity, veracity, and natural

io8 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

affection.' 'According to my critics it is secularism, and not Christianity, which is played out " intellectually." If they mean by " secularism " the base and irreverent spirit which gibes and mocks at the beautiful dream of Jesus, and in so doing defames the stainless elder brother of all suffering men, I am cordially at one with them ; but if they mean by secularism the spirit which rejects all compromises and frauds, however innocent, which affirms that the business of humanity is not to wear sackcloth and ashes, but to enlarge the area of its own happiness, and which incidentally, by way of illustra- tion, points out the evils that other-worldliness has brought on man, I take leave to say, that at no time in the world's history has secularism exercised so benign an influence over the lives of all who think and feel. , ... It is only in so far as Christianity is itself secular that it is of the slightest influence upon the age in which

we live It is because the nebulas of [Christ's]

love never cohered to an orb of rational piety, because mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into a science of life ; because if this world is not something joyful and beautiful, all other worlds are dismal de- lusions, that Christ's message to humanity has been spoken in vain. Human love and self-respect, human science and verification, human perception of the limit- ation of knowledge, have done more in half a century to justify God and prove the Godliness of life^ than the doctrines of other-worldliness have done in nineteen hundred years.' Mark, in the second of the phrases here underlined, the curious obsession already alluded

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 109

to, the clinging to the shibboleth of a name which had ceased to denote any fixed or definable idea. Eliminate that, and the rest of the utterance might, in spirit and essence, have proceeded from the pen of Thomas Huxley.

As an allegory, ' The Wandering Jew ' is assuredly abundantly justified. For the last fifty years Christ has indeed been standing at the bar of human judgment, and his claim to divine birth — which in this poem Buchanan, for purely artistic purposes, tacitly admits — has been ruthlessly demolished, but not more ruthlessly than his ethico-social influence. ' The religion of Jesus has never really triumphed at all, except in the area of priestly politics and popular superstition. Our time has been wasted, we have been made the sport of a kindly thaumaturgist, for nearly nineteen hundred years.' *

And the verdict of Humanity has veritably been the verdict that Buchanan has recorded. The wan and way- worn figure of the Christ — ' Deathless, yet dead ' — haunts the sad world, no living presence, but the shadowy wraith of a beautiful dream and a great lost purpose, feebly wandering towards final dissolution and oblivion.

And it is because Robert Buchanan bravely recog- nised and fearlessly proclaimed the vanity of dreams to which his contemporaries clung, that I believe that posterity will accord to him a lofty pedestal in our national Pantheon, as the first great poet to make the

* Prose Note to ' The Ballad of Mary the Mother.'

no ROBERT BUCHJNJN.

choice of his own Balder, to turn his back upon the discredited hierarchy of Heaven and to stay on earth with Man. He obeyed the logic of his nature, he dared to * follow his brains,' to accept the counsel of his own Daemon, the great ^Eon,

Fear not, love not, and revere not, What transcends your understanding, Keep your reverence and affection For the brethren vv^hom you know.*

With unwilling and sometimes retrograde steps, he arrived ultimately where we now find him, discarding by the way many pleasant dreams, many happy fictions, his heart and brain in incessant conflict, the first clam- ouring at all costs to believe, the latter sternly insisting on the sacredness of Truth.

The creeds I've cast away Like husks of garnered grain.

As Mirabeau with political, so he with theological formulas — il les avait Humes tons. From a brief period of God-intoxication, through many doubts and battles and fluctuations, he came at last to face the facts of Life and Death, with only the thinnest veil of mysticism to hide their stern nakedness. Thin as that veil was, it was growing ever thinner. From the broken arc we may divine the perfect round, and it is my fixed belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which struck him down but spared him for a little longer

* ' The Devil's Case.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. iii

time, he would logically have completed the evolution of so many years, and have definitely proclaimed him- self as an Agnostic, perhaps even as an Atheist. Tennyson, who ' crushed ' his doubts

like a vice of blood Upon the threshold of the mind,

might cling to the outworn superstition expressed in the lines of the second ' Locksley Hall ' —

Truth for truth, and good for good ! The Good, the True,

the Pure, the Just — Take the charm 'For ever' from them, and they crumble

into dust —

but with a man of Buchanan's robuster temperament, to whom Doubt was a troublesome, but still a welcome, guest, such a belief, absolutely incompatible with historical fact and daily experience, could not long abide. Even Ruskin, hide-bound religionist as he was, could rise to a loftier conception of human nature than to think that it must needs tumble into nothingness the moment it let go of the apron-string of some grand- motherly Deity.

A brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons; and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it assumes that such a belief is incon- sistent with either purity of character or energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him; nor does the anticipation of death, to-morrow, suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed make the deviceless person more contented in his dullness: but

112 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising : nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be purer, under the conviction that all its evil may in a moment be pardoned, and all its vi^rong-doing in a moment redeemed ; and that the sigh of repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain — than it may be under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that ' what a man soweth that shall he also reap' — or others reap — when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in darkness, but lies down therein.*

Entire races, to whom it never occurred to look * one foot beyond the grave,' have produced societies as excellent, and individual natures as noble and unselfish, as have ever been suckled on the feeding-bottles of revealed religion, and the more than inexpediency of proclaiming Atheism in Christian countries has naturally resulted in placing the declared Atheist perforce among the worthiest individuals of his generation. Militant Atheism is, of course, as absurd a blunder as militant Theism. The plain fact of the matter is that we do not know, and, by the very constitution of the human intelligence, never can know, the nature of the forces which environ us ; and it is as foolish to regard them as malevolent as to proclaim their benignity. They are neither malignant nor benign, they are simply indifferent.

The world rolls round for ever like a mill ; It grinds out death and life and good and ill ; It has no purpose, heart, or mind, or will.f

* ' The Crown of Wild Olive ' (Introduction), t James Thomson, ' The City ot Dreadful Night.'

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 113

Science and philosophy, speaking by the pen of their best-furnished exponent in this generation* have divided the entire Cosmos into two perfectly clean halves, the ' Knowable ' and the ' Unknowable,' and the cultured common-sense of the world has accepted this ruling. If it had but been earlier done — if all the priceless enthusiasm, all the energy, all the effort and time and money which have been wasted on the propaganda of revealed religion had been concentrated on the elucidation of the laws of nature, the culture of the intellect, and the relief and prevention of human suffering, in what a different world we should all be dwelling now ! We, of this generation, may at least be glad that we live in the dim dawn of another and a better day, a day in which men of intellect will frankly recognise the necessary limits of their own intelligence, and be content to work ' while their brief light endures' towards tangible ends and assured results, leaving the Eternal Mysteries where they must needs remain, in the realm of mystery. Humanity has too long wasted its time and effort in prostrations as barren of result as the exercises of St. Simeon on his pillar :

I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light. Bow down one thousand and two hundred times, To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints.

If mankind is ever to arrive at happiness it will not be by the worship of any Fetish, concrete or invisible,

* Mr. Herbert Spencer, ' First Principles.'

I

114 ROBERT BUCHANAN.

but by arduous study and slow conquest of the immut- able laws by which it is surrounded. Buchanan had come to recognise so much ; he was indeed on his way, as Dr. Parker said, ' to the Eternal Altar,' the Altar of the Religion of Humanity, which was standing before any other was built, and will endure when every other has crumbled to the dust. I am not ignorant how contemptuously he more than once turned his back on the fane in which that Altar burns : —

Worship Man ? Go back once more To image-worship as of yore, And bend my head and bow my knee To this King Ape, Humanity? This stomach-troubled, squirming, aching.

Mud-wallowing creature of a day. This criticising, this book-making,

Fretful, dyspeptic thing of clay ! This multi-face whom it hath taken

Ages to learn to wash and dress ! This horde of swine, doomed to be bacon. And now, by countless devils o'ertaken.

Shrieking in impotent distress ! This mass of foulness and of folly

Through whom the Paracletes have died I This Yuletide carcase decked with holly

In honour of its Crucified ! Now great Jehovah lies o'erthrown.

Shall the mere pigmy reign at last ? Pshaw ! rather worship stick or stone.

And let Humanity crawl past ! *

The old leaven, ' the filthy virus of the obscene

* I

The Outcast.*

ROBERT BUCHANAN. 115

vaccination of Faith,' as Gerald Massey years ago called it, worked furiously in his veins at times; the cherished superstitions clung like mandrake in the soil of his mind, and were only torn up with groans as of the parting spirit. Such a passage as this must be set beside the entire bulk of his last ten years' work, and, so placed, its very virulence of denial amounts to an assent. It was the Poet of the dual personality pro- testing, and protesting vastly too much, against the too- cogent logic of the Thinker.

ii6

Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Algernon Charles Swinburne. A Critical Study, by- Theodore Wratislaw.

IV/fR. SWINBURNE'S ultimate position in the •*-^-*- hierarchy of English literature will certainly not depend on the judgment of any individual critic, and in that reflection I find a warrant for complete candour in setting my opinion of him in juxtaposition with that of such an enthusiastic worshipper as Mr. Wratislaw. That he is a poet, one of the real authentic God-born race whose credentials are absolute and undeniable, I admit. The claim seems to me to allow of but one answer. But he is rather a unique than a great singer, and a reader whose first flush of youthful enthusiasm has passed hesitates to set him shoulder by shoulder with the greatest of his kind. It has been claimed for him, by older and more responsible critics than Mr. Wratislaw, that he is the supreme verbal artist the language has produced. I should rather say — the supreme verbal juggler. - The great stylists are the great thinkers, and Mr. Swinburne deals far more in emotion — and often very nebulous and misty emotion — than in thought. He has never had much to tell us, beyond the facts

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 117

that wine is sweet and women are kissable — facts with which the world was fairly well acquainted before his advent. We feel in him the lack of that solid core of vital heat, that fire of lofty conviction which throbs in the verse of Milton and Shelley. And he has dread- fiilly frequent moments in which his pen runs away with him, in which his ' revel of rhymes ' becomes a revel of mere melodious nonsense ; moments in which he is no longer the master of his materials, but their servant and slave. It was in such a moment that he penned the dedication of the first series of ' Poems and Ballads ' to Edward Burne-Jones, the first four lines of which mean nothing whatsoever in reality, while such semblance of meaning as they possess is absolutely self-contradictory : —

The sea gives her shells to the shingle. The earth gives her streams to the sea ;

They are many, but my gift is single, My verses, the first ft-uits of me.

Grant that ' verses ' and ' first fi*uits ' are ' single,' what does the statement amount to ? And what is its connexion with the immediately following adjuration : —

Let the wind take the green and the grey leaf,

Cast forth without fruit upon air ; Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leaf \ Blown loose from the hair. . . . ?

I

One might guess that the 'vine-leaf* was in the ascendant when such a verse was written. This is not

ii8 JLGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

the utterance of the divine Sybil, Poesy, but the jibber- ing of the mad witch, Echolalia. Nor does it stand alone in Mr. Swinburne's work. Did space permit, I could supplement it by the dozen. Apropos of this phase of the question, Mr. Swinburne, in trying to sneer at Byron, paid him one of the solidest compliments ever offered to a poet. ' On taking up a fairly good version of " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in French or Italian prose, a reader whose eyes and ears are not hopelessly sealed against all distinction of good from bad in rhythm or in style will infallibly be struck by the vast improvement which the text has undergone in the course of translation. The blundering, floundering, lumbering, and stumbling stanzas, transmuted into prose and transfigured into grammar, reveal the real and latent force of rhetorical energy that is in them : the gasping, ranting, broken-winded verse has been transformed into really efi^ective and fluent oratory.' Did Mr. Swinburne ever think of trying the same experiment on such specimens of his own verse as I have quoted above.'' Turned into an alien tongue, stripped of its liquidity of syllable, its alliteration and assonance, how would such verse show ^ It would have no longer even the semblance of a meaning. Byron, with his ' ramping renegades and clattering corsairs .... violent and vulgar resources of rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter ' .... his ' sickly stumble of drivelling debility '.,..' his drawling, draggle-tail drab of a muse, Inyx, the screaming wry-neck ' — Byron had at least something to say, and said it — something

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 119

so well worth saying that the mere verbal clothing of the idea ceased to matter much — a new sermon on the eternal text, ' The Body is more than the Raiment,'

Mr. Swinburne and his prophet, Mr. Wratislaw, are, I cannot help thinking, both a little ' previous ' in declaring Byron to be dead. As good old Sandy Mackay, in ' Alton Locke,' remarks concerning Mr. Windrush's information to the same effect regarding the Devil : ' I'd no bury him just yet — wait till he smells a wee grewsome.' Premature interment is a serious business.

Mr. Wratislaw can hardly be complimented on the delicacy of his critical discrimination. He claims Mr. Swinburne as a great dramatist. So far from being anything of the kind Mr. Swinburne is essentially and hopelessly undramatic — it might be said, anti-dramatic. One of the many gifts necessary to the writing of drama is the power to project oneself into the personality of the personage depicted, to think, act, and speak, not as William Shakespeare or Richard Sheridan, but as Hotspur or Bob Acres. Mr. Wratislaw challenges our admiration for the following lines, put into the mouth of the Doge, Marino Faliero : —

If these who have wronged me, being wiped out, May leave this Venice with their blood washed white. Clean, splendid, sweet for sea and sun to kiss Till earth adore and heaven applaud her — then Shall nny desire, till then insatiable, Feed full and sleep for ever.

120 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

Such involutions of imagery and language could never get across the foot-lights with the faintest effect, and, if they could, the voice is the voice, not of the heroic and tremendous traitor, but of Mr. Swinburne. The passage has no dramatic quality whatever. Mr. Wratislaw's overwhelming tendency to eulogy-at-any- price runs him into quaint extravagances at moments. He tells us, regarding the tragedy of ' Bothwell,' that ' its conventional five acts run to the unconventional length of five hundred and thirty-two pages of about thirty lines apiece,' and on the same page, adds ' only the historian who has the details of Mary Stuart's career at his fingers' ends in competent to appreciate the dramatic ingenuity of condensation and selection exhibited in this volume ! ' ^ ' Dramatic ingenuity of condensation ' is admirable in such a connexion^ especially when one remembers that one single speech of John Knox is nearly as long as the tragedy of ' Hamlet ' even when played, as recently by Mr. Benson, ' in its entirety.' Mr. Wratislaw might, of course, retort that Mr. Swinburne's dramas are not intended for stage representation. In that case, why choose the dramatic form ? A drama not meant to be acted is as futile as a song not meant to be sung.

Concerning * Atalanta,' Mr. Wratislaw has a phrase more pregnant with meaning than he himself would seem to be aware. ' Such a poem as " Atalanta " is an admirable example of the trite saying that a poet is born, not made. It was published by its author at the age of twenty-eight, but twenty or thirty years of

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 121

study and practice of literature have not given to the poet a surer hand, a sweeter note, or a swifter imagina- tion.' So far from having progressed, either as a thinker or a writer, during the last thirty years, Mr. Swinburne has steadily deteriorated in both particulars, presenting in that respect a curious and interesting contrast with the two greatest of his contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning. To read Tennyson's poems in chronological order of composition is one of the most delightful of literary exercises. His voice deepened and sweetened with every passing year, from the clear, bird-like note of the * Juvenilia ' to the organ music of 'The Revenge ' and ' The Siege of Lucknow;' and the splendour of his workmanship makes welcome and almost lovable the flat banality of his treatment of the noble Arthurian Legend. There are moments when I think ' In Memoriam ' the top summit of English poetic achievement. Age dulled — though only very slightly — his great gift, but in ' Crossing the Bar ' he wrote a masterpiece of Jess than a score of lines worthy to stand beside any other nameable piece of English verse. Browning was an even more remarkable phenomenon ; he seems to have issued from the Eternal Intelligence like Minerva from the brain of Jove, full- statured and full-equipped. His work varies in quality, of course, but the hand which wrote ' The Ring and the Book,' though it was the agent of a fuller know- ledge and a riper experience, was hardly more deft and certain in its perfection of craftsmanship than that which penned ' Paracelsus.' Even of ' Pauline,' of

122 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

whose defects Browning was so conscious that he only republished it under the pressure of transatlantic piracy, it can only be said that it is ' poor Browning :' the Browning quality, the depth of thought, the vigour of expression, the wealth of innate and unearned know- ledge of the human heart and brain, are finely evident. Most genuine poets resemble Tennyson rather than Browning in this matter, notably the two greatest of the post-Revolutionary period, Shelley and Keats, who clarified the rather sickly vintage of ' Queen Mab ' and ' Endymion ' into the sacramental wine of ' Adonais ' and ' Hyperion.' But Mr. Swinburne resembles neither of these classes. He has emulated neither the wider and higher flights of Tennyson nor the stately march along the Alps of poetic power of Browning. His career has been a long exercise in the sad art of sinking. Never either a deep or a just thinker, he has run to seed in a mere revel of senseless sound. " That Mr. Wratislaw should have emerged from the monu- mental task of reading Mr. Swinburne's entire literary output in such a condition of unqualified admiration is a certificate to the strength of his literary digestion, as well as to his unshakable fidelity of affection. He exults over even that weltering waste of wild and whirling words, the volume of critical ' Miscellanies,' which, when I read it on its first appearance, took a still-unchallenged position in my memory as the most voluminously voluble statement of nothing-at-all within the scope of my personal experience.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 123

The dictum that Mr. Swinburne is the most musical of all English poets has by this time hardened to the consistency of critical dogma, a commonplace of universal acceptance. Thk he is a marvellous artist in that respect, that he has treated nearly every established metre with a grace and beauty of execution beyond all praise, and that he has enriched our literature with some new and admirable forms of rhythm, it would be at once idle and unjust to deny. But there is to me, even in his superb mastery of the technique of his art, an element of disquiet — I feel, after reading a certain quantity of his verse, as Charles Lamb describes himself feeling at an instrumental concert — that I must rush out into the familiar clatter of the street traffic to get away from the endless, meaningless succession of sweet sounds. In the homely image, he piles butter on bacon and honey on sugar, driving the aching sense to nausea with the dead, inevitable beat of his rhythm and the irritating recurrence of alliteration and assonance. He seems a sort of poetic Blondin, keeping perilous foot- hold on an imperceptible wire in mid-air, and surrounded by blazing coruscations of rockets and crackers. It is seldom that his theme interests and exalts him into forgetfulness of his rather vulgar and meretricious trickeries, and such happy moments have become rarer and rarer of recent years ; until such portions of his verse as are truly poetic in thought and artistically modest in expression, set beside his endless exercises in rhythmical calisthenics, stand like the proportion of bread to the quantity of sack in FalstafF's

124 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

tavern-bill. It is but seldom that one finds, in the vast and glittering sand-heap of his later productions, those

— jewels five-words-long That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever.

Mr. Swinburne's thick-and-thin admirers, of whom Mr,

Wratislaw is the type in excelsis, are rather in the habit

of talking as if he were the original inventor and

patentee of verbal music, whereas no style in all

literature has a clearer ancestry than his. He is the

direct offspring, as an artist, of Shelley and Keats and

the despised Byron, and he has a distinct dash of

Thomas Moore. And, great as he unquestionably is

as a verbal artist, his finest work is never finer than

much of that of his predecessors, and, to my thinking,

often contrasts but poorly, merely as music, with the

finest achievements of the greatest of his fellow poets.

His florid and over-laboured rhetoric seems tawdry, set

beside the solemn splendours of Milton's description of

how Pandemonium ' rose like an exhalation ;' it sounds

cracked and thin contrasted with the iron periods of

Dryden : —

Of whatsoe'er descent their godhead be — Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree, In his defence his people are as bold As if he had been born of beaten gold.

I find no echo, in his insistent and self-conscious trickery, of the elusive dream music of Coleridge : —

— carven figures, strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain ;

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 125

^^ ' It fanned his brow, it raised his hair.

Like a meadow gale in spring ; It mingled strangely with his fears. Yet it seemed like a welcoming ;

or Shakespeare's

Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay Who twice a day their withered hands hold up To heaven, to pardon blood : and I have built Two chantries^ where the sad and soletnn priests Sing still for Richard's soul —

lines in which Mr. Swinburne's favourite trick of alliteration ceases to be a trick at all. Compare any specimen of Mr. Swinburne's onomatopoeic verse with these lines from ' The Dream of Fair Women ' —

As one that museth where broad sunshine laves The lawn by some cathedral, thro' the door

Hearing the holy organ rolling waves Of sound on roof and floor

Within, and anthem sung —

or with the same poet's

Heated hot with burning fears.

And plunged in hissing baths of tears.

And battered by the shocks of doom

To shape and use.

I find in him none of the nameless, mystic, moon-light charm which permeates ' The Eve of St. Agnes,' and * The Witch of Atlas.' It is a commonplace among his more laudatory critics that no English poet has ever succeeded as Mr. Swinburne has done in conveying

126 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

into our language the sculpturesque sense of the finest Greek verse. It is a point on which I must speak with diffidence, and under grave chances of censure, but to me, who know Greek literature only by the medium of translation, no fragment of Mr. Swinburne's verse has ever conveyed the sentiment of vast strength in calm repose — which I take to be the essential beauty of the great Greek style — as it is conveyed in Browning's superb fragment, ' Artemis Prologises ' : —

I am a goddess of the ambrosial courts. And save by Here, Queen of Pride, surpassed By none whose mansions whiten this the world. Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along; I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace ; On earth I, caring for the creatures, guard Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek. And every feathered mother's callow brood. And all who love green haunts and loneliness. Of men, the chaste adore me, hanging crowns Of poppies red to blackness, bell and stem, Upon my image at Athenai here —

a flawlessly beautiful composition, seeming to suggest long lines of lucent statuary beheld by dim moonlight in a forest glade. And where, among all Mr. Swin- burne's cold and glittering mosaic, can one find a passage like the song of Pippa ^

Overhead the tree-tops meet. Flowers and grass spring 'neath one's feet ; There was nought above me, nought below That my childhood had not learned to know. For what are the voices of birds —

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 127

Ay, and of beasts, but words, our words.

Only so much more sweet.

The knowledge of that with my life begun.

And I had so near made out the sun

And counted your stars, the seven and one.

Like the fingers of my hand —

Nay, I could all but understand

Wherefore through heaven the white moon ranges,

And just when, out of her soft fifty changes

No unfamiliar face might overlook me —

Suddenly God took me.

Such verse as that brings with it the breath of the beyond, and its rhythm stirs heart and feet like wine.

The first series of ' Poems and Ballads ' is the volume by which Mr, Swinburne will live, and its back may be broad enough to carry ' Atalanta ' and ' Erechtheus.' It contains pretty nearly all that Mr. Swinburne has to tell us, and the splendid audacity of the cry of the Neo-Pagan —

What ailed us, oh gods, to desert you For creeds that refuse and restrain ?

Come down and redeem us from virtue, Our Lady of Pain !

will ring in the hearts of men for ever as the expression of the sensuous side of the complex human organism. That is all — or very nearly all — that Mr. Swinburne has ever had to express, and it is that fact which bars him from companionship with the greatest of his kind.

128

A French View of Ruskin.

RusKiN AND THE RELIGION OF Beauty. Translated from the French of R. de la Sizeranne by the Countess of Galloway.

1^^ USKIN has been exceedingly fortunate in finding -* '- so admirable an interpreter of his life-work to the French people as M. de la Sizeranne, and M. de la Sizeranne is to be most heartily con- gratulated on having found such a translator as the Countess of Galloway. Of all writers who have ever lived, perhaps Ruskin has most need of sympa- thetic introduction to a foreign audience — most especially, perhaps, to a French audience of the actual moment. The poles are hardly wider asunder or more diametrically opposed than the gospel of Art as propounded by the Prophet of Coniston, and its doctrines as proclaimed by the fashionable French critics of to-day and illustrated by French artists of the most extended vogue. The mass and extent of Ruskin's work are of themselves grave obstacles to its proper understanding, even in England, and are well nigh insuperable bars to such a comprehension among foreign readers. Mr. George Allen has

A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN. 129

■obeyed a happy inspiration in publishing the Countess of Galloway's excellent translation of this admirable book. Criticisms and appreciations of Ruskin abound and are daily multiplied, but I know of none among them which so admirably fulfils its purpose as the volume now under consideration.

If it were ever wise to prophesy concerning such matters it would seem safe to predict that Time, which has covered with disdainful silence so many loud-resounding contemporary reputations, will <ieal tenderly with the fame of John Ruskin, His position merely as a writer, as a verbal artist, is certainly secure. Merely as literature, one may say of his work what Michael Angelo is reported to have said regarding the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral, in answer to some carping critic who had dwelt upon an alleged error in its construction : ' Sir, it cannot be better done.' No writer of the English tongue has ever surpassed him in the prime quality of style, in the absolute clarity and level strength of his utterance. He played upon the language like Sarasate or Joachim upon the strings of the violin, with complete and facile mastery. His views of every one of all the many human interests with which he dealt — of art, and life, and morals, and contemporary politics — have been frequently disputed and passionately re- pudiated. Perhaps his actual and tangible effect upon his generation has been less than his strongest partisans would proclaim it to have been — it could hardly have been less than he himself frequently declared it to be —

K

I30 A FRENCH VIEW OF RUSK IN.

but he has for many years past been a real factor in the moral and intellectual life of the English-speaking peoples of the globe, and he represents so much that is most truly and deeply characteristic of those peoples that it is not easy to imagine him falling out of their consideration. Only England could have produced him, as only England could have produced Milton. He represents all that is best and highest in the spirit of Puritanism; not the narrow and misanthropic creed which teaches contempt of human joy, but the high and beneficent spirit which turns delight itself into a sacrifice. He will never be widely popular outside the country which gave him birth, because he was so particularly the incarnation of its spirit, and it is one whose workings are almost exclusively confined to the English section of the great Teutonic stock. It has never touched more than an insignificant minority of any Latin race, and then only for a brief moment. It per- vades the entire English character as the perfiame proper to a certain flower pervades the entire structure of that flower. It gives a touch of austerity to our most characteristic virtues, it adds a smack of relishing horror to our vices. Every Englishman is more or less a Puritan, and so it may be said that Ruskin has some message for every Englishman who possesses the modicum of intelligence necessary to feel an interest in the themes with which he deals. His fame would seem to be secure, because the remotest generation of our race

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will produce individuals of his mental and moral order, and because it is not thinkable that any teacher can ever arise who will preach with more persuasive eloquence or more convincing force the doc- trines which he has made it his life-business to expound. The strengths of great individualities are often their weaknesses, and it was so in the case of Ruskin. His absolute, uncompromising intransigeance on the main points of his doctrines — artistic, social, political — is the secret of the passionate love and admiration with which he is regarded by the picked minority of his readers who are in full sympathy with those doctrines ; but it is the secret also of the limitation of his power over his generation as a whole. He was all his life unwaver- ingly certain of the truth of his view of things in general ; he proclaimed, as with thunders of Sinai, the absolute necessity of the entire world to subscribe to the laws he formulated. He had the Puritan narrow- ness which refuses to see any truth outside of the truth, it preaches. To that order of mind, the catholic charity which would dictate such an utterance as that of Robert Buchanan :

There dwells, within all creeds of mortal birth

That die and fall to earth,

A higher element, a spark most bright

Of primal truth and light ; —

No creed is wholly false, old creed or new,

Since none is wholly true —

is something very like a blasphemy. There was no truth but the truth of which John Ruskin was the

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prophet. This intolerance was born in