ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY (21)

The City of Dream (1888)

The City of Dream (1888)

The Morning Post (28 March, 1888 - p.2)

THE CITY OF DREAM.*

     It will be well before beginning Mr. Robert Buchanan’s poem, “The City of Dream,” to read a “Prose Note” which is found at the end of the work. Mr. Buchanan gives a new version of the meaning of the term an “epic poem.” He believes it ‘applicable to any poetical work which embodies in a series of grandiose pictures the intellectual spirit of the age in which it is written.” To him the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is the epic of English Dissent, while, to compare small things with great, the “City of Dream” is an epic of modern revolt and reconciliation. The foregoing lines sufficiently indicate the key- note which is struck in the writer’s new book. It exposes almost all the phases of modern spiritual doubt, and, by way of a singular antithesis, is dedicated “To the Sainted Spirit of John Bunyan,” in some lines as graceful as they are  unorthodox. “Christian” is here replaced by “one Ishmael, born in an earthly city beside the sea,” who “having heard strange tidings of a Heavenly City, sets forth to seek the same.” It is named “Christopolis,” and, as may be supposed, although directed to it by Evangelist and Pitiful, it is not the city of Ishmael’s quest. Through his weary pilgrimage there is no sadder hour than that of his arrival in the “Valley of Dead Gods,” in which he finds “his townsman Faith lying dead and cold.” Mr. Buchanan’s conception of this stage of a doubting soul’s progress is embodied in verse of weird horror.

“Alone within a valley lone as death,
Alone tho’ all around me shapes like men
Pass’d wailing, and their crying in mine ears
Was as the waves of ocean when they wash
On sunless arctic shores of rock and ice,
I wander’d, and at every step I took
The shadows of the night grew balefuller;
Yet dimly I discerned on every side
Black mountains rising up to blacker skies,
And hither and thither forked lights that flash’d
O’er gulfs of dread new-riven; and methought
The path I trode was strewn on every side
With tombs of stone and marble sepulchres,
Out of whose darkness look’d the sheeted dead,
Moaning; and oft I paused in act to fall
Into some open grave, and looking down
Saw skulls and bleaching bones and snakelike ghosts
That crawl’d among them. Then in soul’s despair
I call’d aloud on God, and all around
Thunder-like hideous laughter answer’d me,
And from the throat of every open grave,
Came shrieks and ululation.”

At last Ishmael, having past through the “City without God,” finds “solace and certainty on the brink of the celestial ocean.” A limited space only allows of indicating the above features of what is undoubtedly a remarkable book. Like most iconoclasts, Mr. Buchanan destroys more easily than he reconstructs. Doubt, fear, nothingness are expressed by him in words of vivid realism. His “Revolt” is palpable—the “Reconciliation” vague and shadowy. Still those the most opposed to his ideas may acknowledge the talent and impressive earnestness with which he treats his grave theme.

     * The City of Dream. By Robert Buchanan. London: Chatto and Windus.

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The Academy (7 April, 1888 - No. 831, p.231-232)

LITERATURE.

The City of Dream: an Epic Poem. By Robert Buchanan. (Chatto & Windus.)

THERE is no sounder critical canon than that which rules that any sustained literary production must be judged from the author’s standpoint, despite the prevailing tendency to arraign every work at the bar of a strictly orthodox criticism, to be condemned or to be honourably discharged in strict accordance with the merit or demerit of its appeal to a rigid tribunal. More especially should this canon guide the reviewer when he has to deal with a poem of epical proportions, occupied with so abstruse a subject as the evolution of a typical human soul through all the phases of spiritual faith, belief, negation, and unformulated expectancy. Such an epic or epoch-poem it is that Mr. Robert Buchanan has written; and lest any should misapprehend his poetical principles, he has prefixed an “argument” and appended a prose note to “The City of Dream.”    This poem in fourteen books is scarcely an epic as commonly understood, though the author has not hesitated to apply the term to “a poetical work which embodies, in a series of grandiose pictures, the intellectual spirit of the age in which it is written.” It is Mr. Buchanan’s aim to make “The City of Dream” an epic of modern Revolt and Reconciliation, as the Homeric epics are the epoch-poems of the heroic or pagan period, as the De Rerum Natura is the epic of Roman scepticism and decadence, as the “Divine Comedy” is the epic of Roman Catholicism, the “Jerusalem Delivered” of mediaeval chivalry, and “Paradise Lost” of the so-called Protestant epoch. It is a daring enterprise to write an epic nowadays; for so urgent and multiform are the poetic strains from all sides that we are apt to be repelled by magnitude, just as the ordinary newspaper reader now prefers his political or social news paragraphically rather than in “leader” or essay form. There is no poetical failure so absolute as that of the early-defunct “epic” in a dozen or more books; nor is there any literary limbo so dire as that wherein obliviously abide “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” “The Course of  Time,” and all their dreary kin. Yet when an epic is animated by an epical motive and by dignity and beauty of matter and manner it is its own justification. It then justly ranks as the royallest of poetic vehicles. That “The City of Dream” belongs to the scanty company of justifiable epics I am well inclined to believe; but in what degree, and with what chances of general acceptance, it were not easy to surmise. As an allegorical record of the heartburnings, doubts, and experiences of a human soul in its progress through all the possible phases of belief and unfaith, from the blind acceptance of an orthodox creed to atheism, thence again to a baffled and half indifferent agnosticism, and finally to a “large” but vague hope—as such a record it must seem to many neither typical nor logically sequent. There are few who, once in the shepherdy of Evangelist, journey thence to the city of Christopolis; fewer still who, having sought and found refuge in that modern Babylon, pass again into its gloomier half (Presbyterianism, and kindred “isms”), and thereafter traverse the wastes of revolt, dally in the “Groves of Faun” and drink the Waters of Oblivion in the Vales of Vain Delight, go shudderingly through the Valley of Dead Gods, rest for awhile in Nature, climb the hills of mysticism wherefrom may be seen the “Spectre of the Inconceivable,” enter and dwell in the City builded without God (Humanitarianism), seek death in Chaos and find it not, and finally gain the margin of the Celestial Ocean. On the other hand, the author might reasonably expect that none of his more thoughtful readers would take this chronicle to be the story of a single soul. As an abstract record of the spiritual vicissitudes of the unrestful, enquiring human soul it has genuine interest; but probably there will be some, at any rate, among Mr. Buchanan’s admirers (among whom the present writer includes himself) who will agree with me in finding that, unlike most epics, “The City of Dream” cannot be satisfactorily read in parts. Its impressiveness is the result of ordered narrative and of culminating interest. Save, perhaps, in the two sections, entitled “The Groves of Faun” and “The Amphitheatre,” the “Books” would greatly lose in effect if read out of order, or if but one or two were indiscriminately selected for perusal. The gain or loss here, however, is rather a matter of opinion than for dogmatic assertion. The prototype of “The City of Dream” is The Pilgrim’s Progress, but there is one striking distinction. In Bunyan’s poetic allegory everything is clearly defined: the contrasts are sharp, and there are no gradations, no illusions of mental mirage, and the conclusion is absolutely definite and decisive. In Mr. Buchanan’s epic not only are the personifications occasionally very vague (as in the instances of “Masterful,” “Nightshade,” &c.), but the conclusion can leave little definite impression on anyone’s mind save the somewhat illogical one that since God is indiscoverable in earth or heaven, in any human or natural temple, in the mysteries of nature or in the heart of man, he is probably to be found on the further shore of the Celestial Ocean of Death. One may cling to this hope, and even may, with Mr. Buchanan, find solace and certainty on the brink of this Celestial Ocean, and yet scarcely be consistently able to propound his vague hope as a serene and assured faith. I have been duly impressed by the frequent beauty of the story of the pilgrim Ishmael’s God-quest—as every reader must be who has experienced in any degree and in whatever sequence the like spiritual phases—yet I cannot but feel that in the fine closing lines there is a mere playing with the wind so far as the apprehension of any definite conception is concerned:

“But those who sleep shall waken and behold,
Yonder across those wastes whereon they sail,
God and the radiant City of my Dream.
And as I spake the ether at my feet
Broke, rippling amethystine. Far away
The mighty nebulous Ocean, where the spheres
Pass’d and repass’d like golden argosies,
Grew phosphorescent to its furthest depths:
Light answer’d light, star flash’d to star, and space,
As far away as the remotest sun
Small as the facet of a diamond,
Sparkled; and from the ethereal Deep there rose
The breath of its own being and the stir
Of its own rapture. Then to that strange sound
Stiller than silence the pale Ship of Souls
Moved from the shore; I stood and watched it steal
From pool to pool of light, from shade to shade,
Then melting into splendour fade away
Amid the haze of those caerulean seas.”

     Regarded in its literary aspect, “The City of Dream” seems to me a poem which, while full of fine lines and beautiful passages, is no advance upon the author’s previous work. Personally, I find the “Book of Orm”—with all its incompleteness and faults of excessive mysticism—superior; and “Balder the Beautiful” has more of the white-heat glow of genuine poetry, while its purely lyrical portions are unmistakeably finer than the rhymed interludes in the blank verse of “The City of Dream.” There seems to me also a certain want of balance, or lack of judgment, in the insertion of the retrospective book x., “The Amphitheatre”—an opinion which I retain in the face of Mr. Buchanan’s appended note:

“The entire poem represents the thought and speculation of many years. How much has been attempted may be seen in such a section as that of ‘The Amphitheatre,’ where an effort is made to adumbrate the entire spirit of Greek poetry and theology. No man can live entirely in the past; but a modern poet must at least have paused in it, and learned to love it, before he is competent to offer any interpretation, however faltering, of the problems of religion, literature, and life.”

Nor does “The Amphitheatre” at all justify its inclusion by any supremacy of merit. It certainly is far from being the best of the fifteen books which make up the volume.
     The foremost point of interest for the poetical critic is the literary expression of the work he happens to be reviewing; and, speaking generally, I feel constrained to say that Mr. Buchanan’s style in this blank verse epic is disappointing. There is, moreover very considerable need of revision, for there are too many passages which—like the prose note just quoted, with its three “entires” in close conjunction—betray signs of undue haste. For the form and style of the work he makes—he asserts—no apology.

“It illustrates once more the theory of poetical expression that has guided me throughout my career—the theory that the end and crown of Art is simplicity; and that words, where they only conceal thought, are the veriest weeds, to be cut remorselessly away.”

In principle this is excellent, and I certainly would be the last to take objection to it; but precept and practice, like husbands and wives, occasionally fall out. In his effort to be simple Mr. Buchanan is too often bald; in his wish never to be ornate he not infrequently becomes prosaic. No ear keenly sensitive to rhythmic music could find delight in lines requiring such unexpected licence in accentuation as

“I, casting down my gaze upon the Book,
Read these things, and was little comforted.”

or,

“And whatever man is born on earth
Is born unto the issues of that sin,
Albeit each step he takes is predestined.”

It is with pleasure, however, that I turn from these too frequent unsatisfactory lines and passages to others of genuine beauty. The whole of the “Groves of Faun” (a section that may easiest be defined as exemplifying the phase of belief in the Beautiful and the Beautiful only) is animated by poetic conception and rhythmic versification. Here are some picturesque lines descriptive of the Eros-guided pilgrim as he passes through the Vales of Vain Delight and floats adown the stream that leads to the mystical hills:

                             “And now I swam
By jewell’d islands smother’d deep in flowers
Glassily mirror’d in the golden river;
And from the isles blue-plumaged warblers humm’d,
Swinging to boughs of purple, yellow, and green,
Their pendent nests of down; and on the banks,
Dim-shaded by the umbrage and the flowers,
Sat naked fauns who fluted to the swans
On pipes of reeds, while in the purple shallows,
Wading knee-deep, listen’d the golden cranes,
And walking upon floating lotus-leaves
The red jacana scream’d.”

     Ere long the twain come upon fallen Pan brooding by the margin of a river-lagoon:

“Thus gliding, suddenly we floated forth
Upon a broad lagoon as red as blood,
Stainèd with sunset; and no creature stirr’d
Upon or round the water, but on high
A vulture hover’d dwindled to a speck;
And on the shallow marge one silent Shape
Hung like a leafless tree, with hoary head
Dejected o’er the crimson pool beneath;
And no man would have wist that dark Shape lived;—
Till suddenly into the great lagoon
The shallop sail’d, and the white swans that drew it
Were crimson’d, oaring on through crimson pools
And casting purple shadows. Then behold!
That crimson light on him who drave the bark
Fell as the shafts of sunset round a star,
Encircling, touching, but suffusing not
The shining silvern marble of his limbs;
And that dark Shape that brooded o’er the stream
Stirr’d, lifting up a face miraculous
As of some lonely godhead! Cold as stone,
Formlessly fair as some upheaven rock
Behung with weary weeds and mosses dark,
That face was; and the flashing of that face
Was as the breaking of a sad sea-wave.
Desolate, silent, on some lonely shore!”

I would like to quote several of the more grandiose passages, particularly that where Ishmael finds his townsman Faith laying stark in death in the desolate Valley of Dead Gods; but this being now impracticable I will confine myself to one brief extract from book viii. (“The Outcast, Esau”):

                                           “Beneath us lay
A mighty Valley, darken’d everywhere
With woods primaeval, whose umbrageous tops,
Roll’d with the great wind darkly, like a sea;
And waves of shadow travell’d softly on
Far as the eye could see across the boughs,
And upward came a murmur deep and sweet,
Such as he hears who stands on ocean sands
On some divine, dark day of emerald calm.
And when we rode into the greenness stretch’d
Beneath us, and along the dappled shades
Crept slowly on a carpet mossy and dark,
It seemëd still as if with charméd lives
We walk’d some wondrous bottom of the deep.
For pallid flowers and mighty purple weeds,
Such as bestrew the Ocean, round us grew,
Soft stirring as with motions of the ooze;
And far above the boughs did break like waves
To foam of flowers and sunlight, with a sound
Solemn, afar off, faint as in a dream!”

     Of the numerous “songs” scattered throughout “The City of Dream” none seems to me likely to add to Mr. Buchanan’s reputation as a master of lyrical measures. There are one or two whose absence would certainly not markedly detract from the charm of the poem as a whole. For myself, I like best the double lyric, in book xii., of the pilgrim and the little herdboy, with its questioning as to the cloud-girt City of God:

“’Tis a City of God’s Light
Most imperishably bright,
And its gates are golden all;
And at dawn and evenfall
They grow ruby-bright and blest
To the east and to the west.

Here, among the hills it lies,
Like a lamb with lustrous eyes
Lying at the Shepherd’s feet;
And the breath of it is sweet,
As it rises from the sward
To the nostrils of the Lord!”

This simple strain is vaguely suggestive of the “colossal innocence” as well as of the subtle music of one of Blake’s childhood-songs.
                                                                                                                                     WILLIAM SHARP.

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The Graphic (21 April, 1888 - p.16)

RECENT POETRY AND VERSE

     “THE City of Dream: an Epic Poem,” by Robert Buchanan (Chatto and Windus), will not greatly advance the author’s reputation as a poet. It contains fine passages, as his work almost invariably does, more especially those in which he has scope for the descriptive faculty, which is one of his most striking characteristics. For instance, nothing could be better of their kind than the lines beginning “Green were the fields with grass, and sweet with thyme,” the ensuing song, “O child, where wilt thou rest?” the mystical voyage under the guidance of Eros, the pageant, or the passage opening “O bright the morning came.” But when all is said, the fact remains that the poem is tedious, as long allegories in verse have a way of being. Mr. Buchanan apostrophises Bunyan (who would have been highly horrified by some of the sentiments enunciated) and seems to have tried to write a sort of sceptical “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It would, of course, be grossly unfair to credit him with upholding the dreary, hopeless views put forward by Ishmael and others of his characters; but we fail to see what possible benefit to the world can accrue from their presentation in this form. Will any one be the wiser, better, or happier for such a book? And when the author speaks of “childish faith” being “past,” is he not arguing, in defiance of all logic, from particulars to generals? We hope for better work than this from his pen.

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[Note:
At the Academy Banquet held at Burlington House on Saturday 5th May, 1888, W. E. Lecky praised the poem in his speech, giving The City of Dream a new lease of life and resulting in a second edition. Lecky’s remarks also led Buchanan to begin the process of buying back his poetical copyrights from Chatto & Windus with the intention of becoming his own publisher.]

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The Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (9 May 1888, p.5)

     Mr. Lecky, when responding for literature at the Royal Academy on Saturday night, made a very handsome reference to Mr. Robert Buchanan’s new poem. In doing so he gave “The City of a Dream” an impetus in the book market such as that given by Mr. Gladstone to “Robert Elsmere.” Somehow or other the poem which was published in February last escaped the attention of the majority of the critics, while the general reading public were quite in the dark as to its existence. But since Saturday there has been a run on the book at the libraries and at the booksellers. The works of our poets are scanned more closely than usual just now, for since the death of Mr. Matthew Arnold speculation has been very busy as to who would succeed Lord Tennyson as Laureate.

[Advert for the second edition of The City of Dream from The Standard (29 May, 1888 - p.4).]

The Spectator (2 June, 1888 - 61, No, 3,127, pp.752-754)

BOOKS.

THE CITY OF DREAM.*

THE City of Dream contains much fine poetry, but we cannot think with Mr. Lecky, who eulogised it at the Royal Academy dinner as a noble poem. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan will say that this is because the present writer, who lives in what Mr. Buchanan calls “the fairy-land of dogmatic Christianity,” cannot pass sufficiently out of himself to do The City of Dream justice. But there he would be mistaken. What we admire most are the beautiful delineations of the restless spirit of modern doubt. What we admire least is the flaunting, glaring, empty, and even vulgar picture of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. But besides this, the poem suffers grievously from its entire want of intellectual coherence. “The sympathetic modern,” says Mr. Buchanan, “will find here the record of his own heartburnings, doubts, and experiences, though they may not have occurred to him in the same order or culminated in the same way; though he may not have passed through the valley of dead Gods at all, or have looked with wondering eyes on the Spectre of the Inconceivable; though he may never have realised to the full, as I have done, the existence of the City without God, or have come at last footsore and despairing, to find solace and certainty on the brink of the Celestial Ocean.” That some of the heartbnrnings, doubts, and experiences of the modern thinker are here very effectively painted, we fully admit. But we deny that the picture of Greek mythology, can have had any real relation, such as is here assumed, to the development of modern doubt. The whole of the section, and it is a considerable part of the poem, devoted to Greek mythology, seems to us completely out of place in an attempt to delineate the natural development of modern doubt; while the two sections on “The Spectre of the Inconceivable” and “The Open Way,” are wordy, weak, and wearisome, and neither prepare the reader for the striking section on “The City without God,” nor bear any clear relation to the equally powerful sections on Greek mythology which have preceded. The truth is, that Mr. Buchanan should have given us his study of Greek mythology in a separate poem. It does not belong in any way to a study of the development of doubt in the soul of a modern thinker; for beautiful as these Greek legends are, no student who was as much in earnest as Mr. Buchanan desires us to think his pilgrim to have been, would have thought for a moment of going back to the Greek mythology in search of a faith, after being disappointed in his study of the Christian revelation. He might possibly have gone to the Buddhists,—as few amongst us have done,—in search of a religion. He might possibly have gone to the Pessimists. But no modern thinker, in his despair at what he had held to be the failure of Christianity, would have seriously interrogated the oracles of Greece. Such a thinker, in his despair of truth, might, by some accident of moral caprice, have plunged into the literature of pagan fancy by way of literary refreshment after the collapse of his hopes. But such a task would not have been, as this is represented, a serious. and important part of his pilgrimage; it would have been an interlude wholly unconnected with it; nor are such interludes any proper constituents of such a poem as this, in spite of the unfortunate precedent which Goethe has made for such interludes in Faust. It is difficult to imagine a pilgrim in search of faith passing from a serious study of the legendary lore of Greece, to the metaphysical passion for the Inconceivable,—the Unknown and Unknowable, Mr. Spencer would, we suppose, call it,—and that, too, on his way to the pure atheism of “The City without God.” Rather, we think, should the pilgrim have made his way straight from the phase of revolt delineated in the fine canto which is termed “The Outcast, Esau,” to “The City without God.” Mr. Buchanan seems to us to have spoiled his poem by wedging into it the two cantos on Greek mythology, and following them up almost immediately with the two very dreary ones on “The Spectre of the Inconceivable” (which turns out not to be inconceivable at all, but a perfectly conceivable and uninteresting sort of aurora borealis) and “The Open Way.” Again, in. the last canto we cannot find anything but the vaguest “reconciliation” of revolt with faith. Except

—    * The City of Dream: an Epic Poem. By Robert Buchanan. London: Chatto and Windus. —

⁷⁵³ a very superfluous child who is supposed to effect the reconciliation, there is nothing in the canto on “The Celestial Ocean” which has not been urged again and again, without the smallest effect on the pilgrim’s mind, in the course of earlier passages of the poem.
     The worst part of the poem is, however, the coarse and commonplace picture which it presents of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, a picture of which Mr. Buchanan should be ashamed. No thoughtful modern pilgrim, however careless, would have given such a picture as that of the great Christian Churches. It contains nothing, indeed, but the old invectives against priestcraft and worldliness. We suppose that the canto on “The Calvaries” is intended as some slight makeweight against these vulgar pictures, and as giving the effect of Christian teaching on an exceptionally noble character; but it is too vague and feeble to counteract the effect of the gaudy and glaring pictures which have preceded it. Indeed, for us the interest of the poem almost begins at the point where one-third of it is concluded; we say almost, for we admit that the lyrics in the earlier portion of the poem have, on the whole, as much beauty as the lyrics in the later portion. Indeed, with only one or two exceptions, all the lyrics are singularly pathetic as well as musical. Take the first, for instance, the rationalist’s lament that Christ did not rise, which might well compare, in its piteous beauty, with Matthew Arnold’s lines on the grave of our Lord in the poem called “Obermann Once More:”—

“JESUS OF NAZARETH.

Tomb’d from the heavenly blue,
     Who lies in dreamless death?
               The Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth!

Shrouded in black He lies,
     He doth not stir a limb,
               His eyes
Closed up like pansies dim.

The old creeds and the new
     He blest with his sweet breath,
               This Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth!

His brows with thorns are bound,
     His hands and feet are lead;
               All round
His tomb the sands stretch red.

Oh, hark! who sobs, who sighs
     Around His place of death—
               ‘Arise,
Jesus of Nazareth!’

O’er head, like birds on wing,
     Float shapes in white robes drest;
               They sing,
But cannot break His rest.

They sing for Christ’s dear sake;
     ‘The hour is here,’ each saith;
               ‘Awake,
     Jesus of Nazareth!’

Silent he sleeps, thorn-crown’d,
     He doth not hear or stir,
               No sound
Comes from His sepulchre.

‘Awake!’ those angels sing;
     ‘Arise, and vanquish Death,
               O King!
Jesus of Nazareth!’

Too late!—where no light creeps
     Lies the pale vanquish’d one—
               He sleeps
Sound, for His dream is done!

Tomb’d from the heavenly blue,
     Sleeps, with no stir, no breath,
               The Jew,
Jesus of Nazareth!”

But if it had really been so, whence would this tone of infinite piteousness have borrowed its marvellous depth of feeling? In fact, in that case, no one could now have had any reason to suspect what the infinite loss of the world had been.
     The interest of the poem hardly begins for us, as we have said, till after the pilgrim has been driven out of both divisions of Christopolis, and has got into the true wilderness of unbelief. Then the poem begins to rise, not only in its lyrics, but in its substance, into power and occasional sublimity. “The Wayside Inn,” where the various outcasts meet, is powerful enough; but the canto culled “The Outcast, Esau,” seems to us full of true grandeur. Here is a specimen. The pilgrim has mounted behind the outcast Esau on his marvellous black steed:—

                                             “At first my soul
Shrunk trembling, but betimes a new desire
Uprose within my heart and in mine eyes
Soon sparkled while they open’d gazing round;
And I beheld with wild ecstatic thrills
New prospects flashing past as dark as dream:
For through a mighty wood of firs and pines,
Shapen like harps, wherefrom the rising wind
Drew wails of wild and wondrous melody,
The steed was speeding; and the stars had risen,
Cold-sparkling through the jet-black naked boughs;
And far before us in our headlong track
Great torrents flash’d round gash’d and gaunt ravines;
And higher glimmer’d rocks and crags and peaks,
O’er which, with blood-red beams, ’mid driving clouds
The windy moon was rising.
                                               Once again,
I question’d, looking on the rider’s face
Which glimmer’d in the moonlight dim as death,
‘Whither, O whither?’
                                     And the answer came,
Not in cold speech or chilly undertone,
But musically, in a wild strange song,
To which the sobbing of the torrents round,
The moaning of the wind among the pines,
The beating of the horse’s thunderous feet,
Kept strange accord.

Winds of the mountain, mingle with my crying,
Clouds of the tempest, flee as I am flying,
Gods of the cloudland, Christus and Apollo,
                   Follow, O follow!

Through the dark valleys, up the misty mountains,
Over the black wastes, past the gleaming fountains,
Praying not, hoping not, resting nor abiding,
                   Lo, I am riding!

Who now shall name me? who shall find and bind me?
Daylight before me, and darkness behind me,
E’en as a black crane down the winds of heaven
                   Fast I am driven.

Clangour and anger of elements are round me,
Torture has clasp’d me, cruelty has crown’d me,
Sorrow awaits me, Death is waiting with her—
                   Fast speed I thither!

Not ’neath the greenwood, not where roses blossom,
Not on the green vale on a loving bosom,
Not on the sea-sands, not across the billow,
                   Seek I a pillow!

Gods of the storm-cloud, drifting darkly yonder,
Point fiery hands and mock me as I wander,
Gods of the forest glimmer out upon me,
                   Shrink back and shun me!

Gods, let them follow!—gods, for I defy them!
They call me, mock me; but I gallop by them—
If they would find me, touch me, whisper to me,
                   Let them pursue me!

Faster, O faster! Darker and more dreary
Groweth the pathway, yet I am not weary—
Gods, I defy them! gods, I can unmake them,
                   Bruise them and break them!

White* steed of wonder, with thy feet of thunder,
Find out their temples, tread their high-priests under,—
Leave them behind thee—if their gods speed after,
                   Mock them with laughter.

Who standeth yonder, in white raiment reaching
Down to His bare feet? Who stands there beseeching?
Hark how He crieth, beck’ning with His finger,
                   ‘Linger, O linger!’

Shall a god grieve me? shall a phantom win me?
Nay—by the wild wind around and o’er and in me—
Be his name Vishnu, Christus, or Apollo—
                   Let the god follow!

Clangour and anger of elements are round me,
Torture has clasp’d me, cruelty has crown’d me,
Sorrow awaits me, Death is waiting with her —
                   Fast speed I thither!”

     That seems to us the climax of the poem, so far as it represents the real religious feeling of the author, though no doubt the last canto, on “The Celestial Ocean,” is intended to convey,—what it does not, however, at all effectively impress on us,—that all this passionate revolt ends in some deep belief in the love of God. It is on its negative side that Mr. Buchanan’s dream is most vivid. While he paints desolation and despair with a force that very few can surpass, he paints the peace and hope of which he gives us occasional glimpses, with a comparatively feeble hand. Take, for example, this attempt to depict what Mr. Buchanan calls the reconciliation of the soul after its long story of revolt. In the following dialogue, the first speaker, who is throughout called “the Man,” is the interpreter of the divine message to the storm-tossed soul of the pilgrim:—

—    * Why “white”? The horse is repeatedly described as black. —

                                           “‘So far away                                      754
He sits, the Mystery, wrapt for ever round
With brightness and with awe and melody;
Yet even here, on these low-lying shores,
Lower than is the footstool of His throne,
We hear Him and adore Him, nay, can feel
His breath as vapour round our mouths, inhaling
That soul within the soul whereby we live
From that divine for-ever-beating Heart
Which thrills the universe with Light and Love!’

THE PILGRIM.

So far away He dwells, my soul indeed
Scarcely discerns him, and in sooth I seek
A gentler Presence and a nearer Friend.

THE MAN.

So far? O blind, He broods beside thee now
Here in this silence, with His eyes on Thine!
O deaf, His voice is whispering in thine ears
Soft as the breathing of the slumberous seas!

THE PILGRIM.

I see not and I hear not; but I see
Thine eyes burn dimly, like a corpse-light seen
Flickering amidst the tempest; and I hear
Only the elemental grief and pain
Out of whose shadow I would creep for ever.

THE MAN.

Thou canst not, brother; for these, too, are God!

THE PILGRIM.

How? Is my God, then, as a homeless ghost
Blown this way, that way, with the elements?

THE MAN.

He is without thee, and within thee, too;
Thy living breath, and that which drinks thy breath;
Thy being, and the bliss beyond thy being.

THE PILGRIM.

So near, so far? He shapes the furthest sun
New-glimmering on the furthest fringe of space,
Yet stoops and with a leaf-light finger-touch
Reaches my heart and makes it come and go!

THE MAN.

Yea; and He is thy heart within thy heart,
And thou a portion of His Heart Divine!

THE PILGRIM.

Alas! what comfort comes to grief like man’s
To weave a circle of sweet fantasy
Around him, and to share so dim a dream?”

It will be admitted that the “reconciliation” of the soul to God is depicted in far fainter colours than its revolt against God. The pilgrim reaches a very hazy and doubtful sort of hospice at the close of the dream. But he passes through no hazy or doubtful paroxysms of denial and despair.
     As to “The Groves of Faun” and “The Amphitheatre,” while we estimate the poetical value of part of these cantos very highly, we have already said that we do not think that they properly belong to the history or psychology of modern doubt at all. The transfiguration of Eros (why, by-the-way, in “The Argument,” does Mr. Buchanan so oddly miscall it the “transubstantiation” of Eros?) into the spiritual form of the crucified Saviour is not a Greek conception, and is one which the Greek mind would not, we think, have hesitated to repudiate with a good deal of energy; but Mr. Buchanan is evidently bent on giving us the supersensual side of Greek religious feeling, and in the effort to do this adequately, he has, we think, overshot the mark.

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The Star (Christchurch, New Zealand) (29 June, 1888 - p.3)

LITERARY.

     Till Mr Lecky, in his speech at the Royal Academy banquet, referred to Robert Buchanan’s “City of Dream” as “a poem destined to take a prominent place in the literature of our time,” very few people had even heard of that great work. On Monday morning there was a general rush to the booksellers to purchase it, and investigate “the pictures of Greek mythology worthy to compare with those with which Sir Frederick Leighton has delighted us.”

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The Academy (28 July, 1888 - No. 847, p.53)

     MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN will shortly publish a new poem, in rhymed verse, of a partly humorous character, founded on a well-known legend. It will be issued in the first place with illustrations. The second edition of the City of Dream is already almost exhausted—a result due in no little measure to Mr. Lecky’s panegyric at the Royal Academy banquet.

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The Daily News (11 October, 1888)

     “The City of Dream”: An Epic Poem. By Robert Buchanan. (Chatto and Windus). The announcement of an Epic Poem in these hurrying days, when the only libraries are “circulating” or railway stalls, is a formidable survival. Indeed, one is apt to doubt whether there is any public for poetry nowadays, except in the very smallest doses. Of verse-making, of course, there is no end, and there is always a market for pretty tunes. But an Epic! Well, here is one in Fifteen Books, and written, too, by a genuine poet—a poet by instinct, by inspiration, by gift of utterance and expression; no poet of solitude and seclusion, lettered and leisured, but a toiler of the turbid sea of London ink; a playwright, a reviewer, a journalist, a theatrical manager on occasion. It was as a poet, however, that Mr. Buchanan made a name, and we are inclined to think it is as a poet that he will keep it. All his periodical and other work, even the roughest and the readiest, has had too much of something not appraised in the prices current of the markets to which he has brought his literary wares. Their faults and failings have been often those of his market rather than of his wares; the faults of articles made to sell in a miscellaneous market. His present work, which “represents the thought and speculation of many years,” is one which, were it signed by an unknown hand, would, we believe, have made a reputation; we trust it may not be obscured by the familiarity of a popular author’s name. We have found in it very high qualities of imagination, emotion, conception, and design, with a sustained elevation of thought and purpose. There are lines and passages of rare descriptive power, of fine imagery, of profound pathetic sympathy with human wretchedness and sorrow. The poem itself is eminently representative of the age that gives it birth. Dedicated “to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan,” it is to an age of tossing and tormenting doubt, of shattered faiths and crumbling altars and extinguished hopes, what “Pilgrim’s Progress” was to an age of God-fearing Puritanism. The pilgrim of the poem is an agnostic in search of the Unknowable God who, in the vocabulary of modern scepticism has replaced the Unknown God of the Athenians to whom Paul preached. The legendary beliefs of his childhood have deserted him, and sick and weary of the unsatisfying dogmas of a theology that ignores the evil and the misery it is impotent to explain or to remedy, he wanders through the enchanted mysteries of the old superstitions and the lonely and loveless realities of modern philosophy with unresting aspiration until from the borders of “the Celestial ocean” he beholds a “Ship of Souls vanishing into the distance of everlasting Light.” In the books entitled “The Outcast, Esau,” “The Groves of Faun,” and “The Valley of Dead Gods,” and “The City Without God,” the poet strikes a succession of chords which resolve themselves into a majestic harmony at the close, and if his unsparing boldness of denunciation may sometimes shock the pious ear, the most religious spirit will be content with the final reconciliation and resignation of the Pilgrim whose dream “seemed no dream at all.” To the critic of form there is an appearance of hasty execution here and there in Mr. Buchanan’s work, as if he had found no time to revise or recast the rough copy. There are iterations, and some doubtful “quantities” perhaps, which demand revision in a poem that deserves to live.

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The Scottish Art Review (April, 1889 - Vol. I, No. 11, pp.332-334)

‘THE CITY OF DREAM.’ ¹

CERTAIN votaries of literary art, who apparently desire to keep their goddess within the contracted ‘sphere’ which man is apt to assign to his mortal and immortal divinities, have recently protested against her inclination to overstep the barriers which confine her—or, let us rather say, to wander from the shrine in which she is worshipped. She may weave graceful patterns of emotion and incident, but woe to her if she touch the proscribed subjects of religious and philosophic doctrine! One of her most zealous guardians, Mr. W. L. Courtney, tells us that the problem of art ‘is the action and reaction of circumstances upon’ human character, and that ‘the particular religious opinions are, from the point of view of art, either of secondary importance, or absolutely immaterial.’ ² It would be interesting to apply this canon to the Divina Commedia, Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s Faust. But, without appealing to these illustrious precedents, it is surely clear that phases of belief act and react on character not less effectively than the trivial incidents which are the small change of the novelist, or the play of sunshine and shadow which mirrors the poet’s moods. The devout and rigid Puritanism instilled into Catherine Leyburn’s mind had a greater share in moulding her character than the outward influences of her mountain home. Greater tragedies than any depicted by Mrs. Humphry Ward have resulted from the close interweaving of dogmas with moral principles; but whether such tragedies are more or less interesting than those which spring from animal passion or from insensate jealousy, must, of course, depend on the mental habits of the reader. In the meantime, if we may judge from such works as Robert Elsmere, Mr. Alfred Austin’s Prince Lucifer, and Mr. Robert Buchanan’s City of Dream, Literature is enfranchising herself with or without the permission of her warders. If authors insist on producing works of genius which not only mean something, but mean it with obvious intention; if they refuse to concentrate their powers on millinery and scandal, on balls and flirtations, and obstinately busy themselves with recent developments of the human mind, it would seem that the critic must acquiesce in their decision. Criticism, however leonine may be its preliminary growls, always ends by following the footsteps of genius in a truly lamblike fashion. ‘This will never do’ becomes in the course of a generation ‘Nothing else will do.’ It is wise, therefore, to examine poems like the City of Dream as nineteenth-century products, without inquiring into their legitimacy—an inquiry which is always futile, as the canons of art are inductions from actually existing forms of art, and are liable to modification every time an original

     ¹ The City of Dream: An Epic Poem, by Robert Buchanan.
     ² ‘The Agnostic in Fiction,’ Universal Review for September. The italics are Mr. Courtney’s.

type makes its appearance. It is, however, permissible to speculate upon the class of readers who will welcome the new intellectual poetry with genuine appreciation, and upon the measure in which the especial poem before us is likely to gain their sympathy.
     In a prose note appended to his book, Mr. Buchanan states that it ‘attempts to be for the inquiring modern spirit what the lovely vision of Bunyan is for those who still exist in the fairyland of dogmatic Christianity’; and further, that it ‘represents the thought and speculation of many years.’ These two sentences indicate the strength and weakness of the entire poem. It is the work of a man who has passed through many stages of belief and emotion, and whose mind has reflected with varying clearness the different tendencies of his day. Yet there must be a defect of earnestness and profundity in one who can apply the epithet ‘lovely’ to Bunyan’s allegorical version of his grim spiritual experiences, and who can regard orthodox Christianity, with its stern Calvinism, its deep conviction of sin, and its everlasting hell, as a fairyland of æsthetic gratifications.
     The poem, dedicated ‘to the sainted spirit of John Bunyan,’ openly challenges comparison with the Pilgrim’s Progress, as the story of a soul’s pilgrimage. Ishmael, born in a City by the Sea, has heard that

                                 ‘up among the hills
There stands the City christened Beautiful,
Green-sited, golden, and with heaven above it,
Soft as the shining of an angel’s hair’—

a somewhat weak and inadequate comparison. He hastens forth, is blindfolded by Evangelist, relieved of the bandage by Iconoclast, meets the gentle nature-worshipper Eglantine, and enters the glorious city of Christopolis. But even

‘Amid the shining temples, silver shrines,
Solemn cathedrals, shadowy cloister-walls,’

he encounters terrible forms of poverty, hunger, and disease; he finds men’s hearts full of rapine and cruelty; he sees ‘a hunt of kings, with bloody priests for hounds,’ chasing a heretic. In neither division of Christopolis can he find peace, and he is at last driven forth as a blasphemer to the dreary region without the walls. With ‘the outcasts of all the creeds’ the wanderer takes refuge in a dreary wayside inn. Journeying onward, he joins ‘the wild horseman, Esau,’ an outcast more fiery and untamable than the rest. Pictures of weird and vivid power abound in this section of the book; and the midnight ride with Esau is, perhaps, unsurpassed in its swift motion and gleaming chiaroscuro. But in the ‘Wayside Inn’ there is at least one faulty personification. A ‘marble-featured serving-maiden, . . . sleepy, half-yawning, holding in her hand a dismal light,’ is an absurdly poor embodiment of that deadly paralysis of the soul which we call Despair. No writer, possessing either a sense of humour or real tragic power, could be satisfied with so paltry a conception. Compare the figure of ‘Melancholia’ in that great poem, the City of Dreadful Night.
     The ‘Groves of Faun’ are magically delineated, with that luxury of colour and picturesqueness of effect which here find their appropriate place. Not only the ‘vain delight’ of sense appeals to the Pilgrim, but the pure ideal of art, which rejects the sensual, aspires beyond the sensuous, and craves union with the highest spiritual beauty. The ideal is typified in a shepherd-maiden, Dian’s child; her love is the immortal Eros, who bears Ishmael away through scenes of enchantment, and shows him, in a gigantic amphitheatre among mountains, a series of tableaux culminating in the ‘Sacrificial tragedy of Cheiron,’ and intended ‘to adumbrate the entire spirit of Greek poetry and theology.’ The taste of the double transformation scene, in which Cheiron, who relieves Prometheus from his age-long tortures, is changed into the likeness of Christ, who is again imaged by the ‘transfigured’ Eros, even to the stigmata and the aureole, may be questioned even by those whose susceptibilities are moral and æsthetic rather than religious. It is a mistake in art to treat any serious reformer, much more the founder of a great religion, as the central figure in a pantomime. Again, in the ‘Valley of Dead Gods’ there is a revolting picture of a half-reanimated Christ, supported by ‘three woman-forms,’ who wail aloud ‘He hath arisen!’ The idea is clear enough, but the details of sightless eyes, hanging jaw, helpless body swinging to and fro in the women’s arms, give an effect both painful and ludicrous, not only offending the sensitive reader, but defeating the poet’s intention.
     Sylvan, child of nature and naïve pantheist, converses with our wanderer, and the mountaineer Nightshade leads him upward through the Divine Dark of Mysticism, where thought seeks vainly to image the unimaginable. ‘The Spectre of the Inconceivable’ flashes before him for a moment—

                     ‘the Light that is the Life
Within us and without us, yet eludes
Our guessing—fades and changes, and is gone.’

The ‘Open Way’—the haunt of prosaic and unaspiring folk, unlearned or pedantic—leads to a second glorious city. The ‘City without God’ is the ‘latest and fairest of any built by Man.’

                             ‘Down every street
A cooling rivulet ran, and in the squares
Bright fountains sparkled; and where’er I walked
The library, the gymnasium, and the bath
Were open to the sun; virgins and youths
Swung in the golden air like winged things,
Or in the crystal waters plunged and swam,
Or raced with oilëd limbs from goal to goal.
     .         .          .         .          .         .

And never a sick face made the sunlight sad,
And never a blind face hungered for the light,
And never a form that was not strong and fair
Walked in the brightness of those golden streets.’

But in this seeming paradise are asylums where all who dare to believe in God are chained as madmen; hospitals of birth where blind or sickly infants are put to death; lecture-halls where animals are vivisected for the instruction of students. A tortured hound seems as though transformed into the crucified Christ before the Pilgrim’s eyes, and he hurries wildly away to a ‘beauteous garden of the dead,’ where white urns, each with its handful of ashes, are ranged on grassy terraces. Adam the Last, the watcher of the fire, tells him that hope has fled from the fair city, and that

                                             ‘Death alone
Remains the one cold friend and comforter.’

Mad with despair, Ishmael plunges into the land of darkness beyond, peopled with saurians and pterodactyls, and other monsters of the ‘primæval slime.’ But at last, in company with a repentant founder of the godless town, and guided by an angel child, he reaches the brink of the celestial ocean, and sees the ship of souls bound for an unknown city on the further shore—the city of his dream.
     The gravest flaw of this brilliant poem is all the more serious because it is one which most readers will fail to detect. I refer to its gross caricature of the spirit and aims of modern physical science. The ‘City without God’ should rather bear the more positive title of the ‘City of Man’; and it is at least highly improbable that a community governed on humane and hygienic principles would unnecessarily torture sensitive creatures, much less make a public exhibition of their sufferings, or extinguish sickly lives, unless on clear proof that the good of such a practice outweighed the evil. Nor would the citizens ‘surge wildly’ round a ‘pallid wight’ who chanced to utter the name of God, and denounce him as a ‘blasphemer.’ There could be no priesthood, no ‘inquisitors.’ And where Hygeia reigns, Hope, ‘with all the other angels,’ will continue to dwell, quite irrespective of eschatological theories.
     Just as the devout believer will be more revolted than the mere literary critic by the appearance of Christ in a theatrical tableau, so the thinker whose conceptions are founded on scientific data will turn in disgust from untrue or inadequate presentations of his ideal world. Even the decorated Truth may displease him, and the attempt to invest the sublimity of cosmic order with beauty and melody may seem little short of profanation.
     Not from the very loftiest minds will the City of Dream find a cordial welcome; nor, as we have seen, from the most refined and fastidious. In Mr. Buchanan’s writings we look in vain for fine discrimination and terse felicity; there is a certain showiness which does not atone for the lack of delicacy and precision of touch. A fault at least equally striking is the hysterical tone of the whole poem. It contains throughout not a single virile character. There is, indeed, a curious sameness in the forms of effeminacy which pass before us. The Pilgrim himself shakes with ‘exceeding fear,’ moans, shudders, screams, cries aloud, weeps, and trembles like a leaf, all within the course of the first book, and continues to make similar manifestations of feeling through the whole fifteen. His roadside acquaintances are not less epicenely demonstrative. Shrieks, cries, and wails are common; so are eyes ‘red with tears,’ or ‘suffused with dew of easy tears,’ or ‘filled with tearful dew.’ Prometheus himself trembles and moans at the sight of the bleeding Cheiron. Such conduct is doubtless to be expected from beings of the pallid, golden-haired, emaciated type which Mr. Buchanan affects; but it grows monotonous by repetition, and the healthy-minded student is glad to escape into a saner world.
     Still, when all deductions are made, this powerful and splendid poem may find appreciation from readers whose convictions are as yet uncrystallised, who are passing through some of the intellectual and emotional phases here depicted, and whose taste is catholic rather than critical. For the City of Dream, though imperfect as an artistic production, and unsatisfactory as a philosophical allegory, is still a work of genius, and wins admiration by its picturesque force and its frequent verbal music. The lyrics scattered through the volume constitute one of its greatest charms. I quote the first, though hardly the most beautiful, stanza of one of these exquisite songs:—

‘Come again, come back to me,
     White-winged throng of childish Hours,
Lead me on from lea to lea
     Ankle-deep in meadow flowers;
Set a lily in my hand,
     Weave wild pansies in my hair,
Through a green and golden land
     Lead me on with fancies fair.
White-wing’d Spirits, come again,—
     Heal my pain!
Through the shadows of the rain
     Come again!’

                                                                                                         CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN.

[I have to thank Clare Stainthorp for letting me know about this review by Constance Naden, and for the link to this volume of The Scottish Art Review at the Internet Archive.]

Back to Reviews, Bibliography, Poetry or The City of Dream

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Book Reviews - Poetry continued

The Outcast (1891) to The Wandering Jew (1893)