ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)
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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901) |
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The Critical Response - R. A. Forsyth
1. Nature and the Victorian City: The Ambivalent Attitude of Robert Buchanan 2. Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the Brave New Victorian World
‘Nature and the Victorian City: The Ambivalent Attitude of Robert Buchanan’ by R. A. Forsyth
NATURE AND THE VICTORIAN CITY: BY R. A. FORSYTH It would scarcely be consistent with the plan of this work to omit noticing the wondrous development of a new agent or element of civilization, the astonishing results of which are daily rising in fresh and unexpected forms before our eyes—the use of steam as a motive power, the progress of machinery and manufactures, and the rapid accumulation of large masses of people in manufacturing districts, are formative powers, almost created before our eyes. There can be no doubt that these circumstances are producing an immense and increasing influence on the destinies of Europe, and that they will modify if not direct the civilization of the coming age. But experience will give us little help in determining the nature of the influence they may exercise, for the steam-engine, the cotton-mill, and the railroad, have had no precedents; history furnishes no rule for their management. So rapidly did they pass through their stage of infancy, that they had taken their position in society and firmly established themselves before there was time to prepare a place for their reception. Such potent novelties, developing themselves with equal force and rapidity, necessarily dislocated and disturbed all existing institutions; and a considerable amount of suffering must have been produced, and perhaps may still be expected, before the nice process of adjustment between the old and the new elements of society can be fairly arranged.1 W. Cooke Taylor, 1840. I The emergence of industrial cities is the predominant historical fact of the Victorian Age. Their proliferation stands as a visible symbol of what Karl Polanyi calls “the great transformation,”2 unprecedented in the life of any nation, from a rural to a market economy. Michael Wolff has defined the process in present-day terms by regarding Victorian England “as the first of what we _____ 1 W. Cooke Taylor, The Natural History of Society (London, 1840), vol. II, pp. 261-262. _____ 383 now call the emerging nations,” one important aspect of which is the “psychological effects of modernization on those who find themselves suspended between traditional values and modern facts.”3 And Polanyi points to the real implications of Wolff’s description when he observes that although “Several authors have insisted on the similarity between colonial problems and those of early capitalism . . . . they failed to follow up the analogy the other way, that is, to throw light on the condition of the poorer classes of England a century ago by picturing them as what they were—the detribalized, degraded natives of their time.”4 The true nature of Disraeli’s “two nations,” that is to say, was a type of spiritual “apartheid.” And again, in an essay concerned generally with “The Victorian Self-Image and the Emergent City Sensibility,” I have suggested that the City “became for some the image not only of ‘man’s inhumanity to man,’ but was also intimately related to the urgent search for individual values and a sense of identity in a world made increasingly alien, not only by materialism and rationalism, but also, and more importantly, because the established incorporation of Man in the traditional cosmological trinity with God and His Nature had been dislocated.”5 _____ 3 M. Wolff, “Victorian Study: an Interdisciplinary Essay,” Victorian Studies, VIII (1964), 62. _____ 384 “the moral and cultural catastrophe of the English cottager or copyholder of decent ancestry, who found himself hopelessly sinking in the social and physical mire of the slums of some factory neighbourhood.”7 This points up the crucial consideration of the relationship between the individual and the community, which lies at the heart of the social disaster of detribalization, and which leads to the realization that although any diatribe against urban corruption and hypocrisy would be largely sentimental and irrelevant, certainly the new cities are of prime importance in focussing the changes that comprise the revolution. In short, some examination of the dynamics of cultural change should provide a necessary framework of reference for further understanding the two-way interaction between individual men and their emergent industrial environment. For, in the words of Alexander Goldenweiser, “In its constituent elements culture is psychological and, in the last analysis, comes from the individual. But as an integral entity culture is cumulative, historical, extra- individual. It comes to the individual as part of his objective experience, just as do his experiences with nature, and, like these, it is absorbed by him, thus becoming part of his psychic content.”8 _____ 7 Polanyi, pp. 173-174. _____ 385 in the social process.”10 Whilst these modes were steadily assimilated into daily behaviour to form a cultural pattern distinctively urban, that process might, by virtue of historical continuity, also validly be regarded as a re-orientation of the superseded rural ethos. “Since the city is the product of growth rather than of instantaneous creation,” as Louis Wirth observes, “it is to be expected that the influences which it exerts upon the modes of life should not be able to wipe out completely the previously dominant modes of human association. . . . This historic influence is reinforced by the circumstance that the population of the city itself is in large measure recruited from the countryside, where a mode of life reminiscent of this earlier form of existence persists.”11 These observations are corroborated by the comments of Melville J. Herskovits on detribalization and consequent urbanization in present-day Africa, where “sanctions and values of a given tradition under contact with another are applied to new forms, combining and recombining until syncretisms develop that rework them into meaningful, well-functioning conventions.”12 That is to say, cultural development proceeds by the simultaneous loss of old elements of behaviour rooted in and reflecting an earlier environment, and the incorporation of new elements characteristic of an emergent environment. The resultant pattern of new absorbing old has a complexity which would be illuminated by myriad individuals’ daily existences, throwing into sharp relief the self-image and sense of identity of each. The process, then, as Goldenweiser stresses, affects both community and individual; its operation is both cultural and psychological. And when related to individual behaviour the most appropriate term is “ambivalence,” the “co-existence within a person, to a similar degree, of opposed traits, attitudes, or sentiments,”13 that simultaneous looking before and behind that typifies the “suffering” state of mind of an individual caught in a transitional culture before, as Taylor suggested, “the nice process of adjustment between the old and the new elements of society can be fairly arranged.”14 _____ 10 Ibid., p. 230. _____ 386 In the context of the dynamics of cultural change, as I have briefly outlined them, I want to suggest this ambivalent mode of thought and behaviour as a representative response in particular to the multiple revolution that characterises Victorian England, and predicate it as the framework of reference through which we may further understand the interaction between individual men and their emergent industrial environment. That framework is precisely delineated by Ralph Turner when he writes: If the industrial city, considered as the social milieu of a new structure of behaviour and thought, is influencing ever larger parts of national populations, this influence is evident, on the one hand, in the dislocation of old forms of behaviour and thought in the several national traditions and, on the other hand, in the appearance and spread of new forms. However, at the moment, because the dislocation of the old forms intensifies the emotional attachments to them, the new ones are not recognized. If at the moment such is the case, the prevailing confusion is understandable in the feeling that, although the old modes of behaviour and thought no longer serve life, there is nothing to replace them.15 These statements read like a prose comment from a cultural point of view on that characteristic Victorian situation defined by Matthew Arnold as, Wandering between two worlds, one dead, And it is not by chance that this is so, for the earnest critic of society and reforming School-Inspector struck as the most characteristic note in his poetry a wistful nostalgia for a faded “Golden Age” associated with rural millennialism. _____ 15 Turner, p. 232. _____ 387 one may regard the very extremism of that response as a measure of the gravity of the threat. Outstanding, and conveniently divergent, examples of this reaction are provided by William Barnes and James Thomson (B. V.). Whilst on the one hand we have the reclusive Barnes, immured within the fastnesses of Eden-like Dorset, stolidly refusing at all levels of thought and behaviour to participate in “the great transformation,” on the other we have the response of Thomson, immersed in the dreadful City, for whom industrialism, aggravated by a sense of evolutionism being implacably materialistic, became the dark night of his soul.17
II Robert Buchanan is generally remembered on two main counts: firstly, as the pseudonymous protagonist of “The Fleshly School of Poetry” controversy which stemmed from his revengeful attack in 1871 on the poetry of Rossetti and Swinburne;19 and secondly, as the “ingenious young Scotch writer” whose uncultured _____ 17 See further in this connection R. A. Forsyth, “The Conserving Myth of William Barnes,” Victorian Studies, VI (1963), 325-354; and “Evolutionism and the Pessimism of James Thomson (B. V.),” Essays in Criticism, XII (1962), 148-166. _____ 388 rationalisation of swarming over-population in terms of “divine philoprogenitiveness”—incongruously most active among urban slum-dwellers whose desperate poverty and hunger made them the least suitable to exemplify an obsolescent theory of plenitude—led to his being classed amongst those “liberal practitioners” whom Matthew Arnold scarified in his bitterest vein of irony.20 His reputation has not always been thus tangential, however; during his lifetime his stature as a literary figure, and more particularly as a poet, was considerable. Arthur Symons observed that “from the first his books were received with serious attention; they were considered, often praised greatly, often read largely. Whenever he had anything to say, people listened.”21 His early poetry was highly regarded by R. H. Hutton22 and by Robert Browning and G. H. Lewes;23 and even Rossetti, at the height of the “Fleshly School” controversy, acknowledged the poetic talents of his assailant.24 His “The City of Dream” (1888) was singled out from current poetry in a speech by W. E. H. Lecky at the Royal Academy Banquet as proof “that the artistic spirit in English Literature has [not] very seriously decayed.”25 He was granted a Government pension by Mr. Gladstone in 1869 and at his death in 1901 was hailed as “the poet of modern revolt”26 and was even ranked with Tennyson and Browning as one of the three major poets of the age.27 _____ 20 M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1938), p. 202. _____ 389 an unprecedented, semi-divine power over time and space, but led also to the rapid proliferation of cities of almost inhuman dimensions. The increasingly discredited God-orientated rural ethos, retrospectively treasured by many as paradisal, was, then, supplanted by the city, which came to be the palpable symbol of the transformation that had overtaken the traditional relationship between God, Man and Nature, demanding in the process a new orientation amongst the components of that fundamental trinity. The context of that demand was the sense of human alienation from a universe whose remorseless and amoral processes were thought to be regulated by “laws” of such implacable indifference to spiritual idealism and aspirations as to reduce them to merest sentimentality. And this sense of alienation was exacerbated by fortuitous circumstance or by the perverse humour of the Maker that rendered its recognition the painful birthright solely of human consciousness, which was also, ironically, Nature’s evolved masterpiece. Disillusion and frustrating indirection characterized the response of many to this situation, forcefully described by Conrad as late as 1897 in a letter to Cunninghame Graham, where he likens the universe to a machine that evolved itself “out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider, —but it goes on knitting. . . . The infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight . . . without heart. It is a tragic accident,—and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. . . . It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair, and all the illusions,—and nothing matters.”28 Buchanan was as little content as most of his contemporaries to be knitted haphazardly into this “horrible work” whose separate threads seemed to be chance mutation and a process of amoral survivalism. He too would have liked the machine “to embroider.” And much of his creative energy, exuberant and often undisciplined, was directed at effecting this transformation. _____ 28 Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London, 1927), vol. I, p. 216. _____ 390 that he “[threw] down goose and scissors” to become his apostle, “following his gentle leader into perilous places where the new gospel was hateful or unknown.”29 His mother was Margaret Williams, whose father, a philanthropic solicitor of Stoke-upon-Trent, was an advanced free-thinker, from whom she acquired a strong Socialist orientation towards political, religious and social problems. Despite the pervasive atmosphere of sceptical unbelief of his formative years—during which, as he later described them, he “was nourished on the husks of socialism and the chill water of infidelity”30 —and despite his high regard for his parents, Buchanan early discovered within himself “the sweet spirit of natural piety.”31 But this did not anchor him in any calm and enduring conviction regarding the religious significance of his personal existence. He became involved, rather, as did many of his contemporaries, in a tormented struggle between emotional needs and intellectual convictions, fought in terms of human alienation from Nature and on the field of a discredited theodicy. Personal immortality became the pin-point of dissatisfaction with the emergent dispensation because it located precisely the painful paradox of human consciousness in relation to the imprisonment of man within the amoral “laws” of nature. “What is left if we abandon the idea of eternal life, as reason teaches us to do?” asks Buchanan, distraught at the death of his adored mother. “Only a horrible nightmare—a devil’s dream.”32 The path of disenchantment travels full circle if we recall Conrad’s vision of the universe as an infamous knitting-machine that has “knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair, and all the illusions,” not into a complex pattern of metaphysical ingenuity and religious consolation, but into a satanic nightmare, a wild imbroglio of values where “nothing matters.”
III In his earliest poetry, Buchanan took what can only be called a fashionable interest in writing descriptively about the natural scene. That he could do so is indicative of the general acceptance by about 1860 of the suitability of this as a subject for poetry. _____ 29 Jay, pp. 2-3. _____ 391 The Romantics, superficially understood, had set the seal of authority on it; Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites had established the improving moral results of fervent attention to visual detail, and with the wide-spread if somewhat limp support of illustrated albums and the mystique of “the language of flowers” the subject had become the substance of a popular literary tradition. Buchanan in his early poems is completely encompassed by this tradition—he writes of the countryside as a visiting literary gentleman, in no way to be confused with such authentic literary countrymen as John Clare and William Barnes. This may be observed in the following representative passage where the influence of Keats transmuted by the rhythms of Tennyson is patent; The air is hotter here. The bee booms by The Spirit of Nature as presented in this painted countryside is little more than a literary figment, and nothing of a Presence. Motivated by neither the mystical intensity of Romantic visionary gleams nor the elegant vigour of the “picturesque,” such verse remains derivative merely, rhetorical in the sense of W. B. Yeats’s definition: “the will trying to do the work of the imagination.”34 _____ 33 “Up The River,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan (London, 1901), 2 vols. This edition of the poems has been used throughout. _____ 392 Tennyson’s “Dora” and “The Miller’s Daughter.” His treatment of the emotional responses of simple people to extraordinary events which confront them, without being psychologically subtle and revealing of the protagonists, is nevertheless dramatically effective within the somewhat sentimental framework of his intentions. And often he shows quite shrewd insight into the characters of his narrative, as when, for instance, the stern Calvinistic father of “Poet Andrew” describes his son’s clandestine scribblings as, Words pottle-bellied, meaningless, and strange, But even in these poems Buchanan is not truly concerned with country people and their way of life, as were Barnes and Clare, but rather with the eccentric or the psychologically curious. This is not to imply that the sentiments of his “personae” or the atmosphere of the tales are spurious but rather that Buchanan here shows himself as a poetical journalist primarily concerned with “human interest” stories. This sense of detachment, a lack of imaginative involvement in his themes, is an extension of the artificiality that characterized his earlier writing and is also, more importantly, a reflection of that deeper alienation of man from the “horrible work” of the universe. _____ 36 R. Buchanan, “David Gray, a Memoir,” in A Poet’s Sketch-Book (London, 1883), p. 51. _____ 393 man in his social and religious aspects and the interaction between these. And his method in presenting this “modern” poetry of revolt was the attempted vindication of the apparently faithless ways of urban and scientific men to the unworthy God of Nature who had hitherto been the apex of the cosmological Trinity.
IV Buchanan was conscious of the difficulty involved in the transition to new poetic themes, as is apparent from the important “Bexhill, 1866” with which he opened his London Poems, the urban counterpart of the rural Idyls and Legends of Inverburn. In this poem Buchanan attempts to present a poetic credo acknowledging his indebtedness to Wordsworth, the guiding light of his youth, but at the same time intimating the shortcomings in the contemporary world of his mentor’s poetic philosophy. Buchanan’s awareness of those limitations resulted from his urgent sense of the necessity, despite “The buying, and the selling, and the strife/Of little natures” that characterized much of urban existence, to make, The busy life of London musical, The poem takes the form of an interplay, discursively lyrical rather than dramatic, between the “pastoral solitude” of the Scottish hills with their “serener air . . . [and] pure sunshine” and the “unsung city’s streets.” This interplay is suggested by the echoes throughout, in diction and rhythms, of passages from “Tintern Abbey,” the manifesto counterpart in the Wordsworthian canon. It becomes quite explicit, however, in the persistent contrast of the rustic serenity of “Scottish dales and dells” and the “great roar . . . [of] London streets” as he recounts his vacillation between these fascinating opposites. The “humming of the town,” for instance, reminds him of “the sound I used to hear/In Scotland, when I dwelt beside the sea”; and again, . . . from time to time, the hum of life And whilst singing his “modern song” he was “haunted . . . (by) the presence of the mountains” and . . . the murmur of the sea 394 Wordsworth, too, had felt . . . the heavy and the weary weight and, hearing “The still, sad music of humanity” from what Buchanan would have regarded as the distance of philosophic seclusion, had idealised the natural perfection of the dalesmen of Cumberland, those “humble sons of the hills . . . a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists . . . [who] had a consciousness that the land, which they walked over and tilled, had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood.”37 Buchanan, on the other hand, compassionate for the impoverished crowds of the “terrible City,” attempts, though perhaps inadequately equipped, to shoulder the burden of the “unsung city’s streets” believing them to be the true contemporary source of “the weariness and weight of tears.” . . . an ecstasy, that he is able to continue the search in . . . the mirror of my soul for shapes _____ 37 W. Wordsworth, “Guide to the Lakes,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. Knight (London, Vol. VIII), p. 242. _____ From glamour of green branches, and of clouds 395 Although, therefore, the Wordsworthian nature philosophy has for Buchanan been largely discredited as a viable one in an urban-industrial context, it remains the shadowy framework of his poetic investigation of his problems. . . . those sweet places in the fields, Such poems never become true Pastoral, for in them reference to the countryside amounts to a picnic view of rural life, a week-end nostalgia for a faded Arcadia rather than the imaginative focus through which effective criticism of the emergent cities might be made. Mainly, however, Buchanan’s enduring attachment to the rustic dream and all its metaphysical consolations becomes apparent in a more oblique, even paradoxical, way through the pervasiveness of misery, poverty and death in his numerous poems based on urban themes. For the pattern of virtually unrelieved gloom and depravity leads to the realization that in Buchanan we have, in fact, not a minor Baudelaire accurately presenting his imaginative response to the city, but rather a man morally outraged at drunkenness, cruelty and prostitution, which are by implication the evil flowers of urban society alone. The point is nicely made through his turgid use of “rural” imagery in the “L’envoi to London Poems,” I sing of the stain’d outcast at Love’s feet,— With a few exceptions, such as the lyrics “The City Asleep,” “To the Moon” and “These Voices,” these city poems are cast in the form of dramatic monologues, but they rarely achieve the artistic excellence of Browning’s exemplars, as they generally lack variety of poetic skill and psychological acuity. In addition, the “personae” in Buchanan’s poems are often discovered near death, yet, despite physical extremity and the depraved circumstances in which we invariably find them, they remain only too articulate to the end. Especially this double sentimentality militates against the autobiographical veracity which is the hallmark and strength of the mode. Furthermore, he proceeds to use the form largely for the expression of personal views rather than for the illumination of character and situation. So repeatedly he defeats his own poetic purpose—but in a most revealing way. Although the real source of these poems, as suggested, is moral outrage at the hellish city—thereby invoking its shadowy counterpart of heavenly ruralism—it seems to me neither satisfactory nor sufficient merely to dismiss them as escapism, or the lurid titillation of one wishing to expose the “shame of the city.” For what we have here, rather, is an ambivalence of attitude where the complexity and strain of a chosen role—the poet of the “unsung city streets”—is so imaginatively demanding that Buchanan, almost unconsciously, uses the defensive strategy of reviling the subject while continuing to play the role. _____ 38 Jay, p. 127. _____ 397 however, is the long section in which Liz speculates on the nature of heaven. This would have seemed an apt opportunity for expansive and glowing ruralism. Instead we find her so thoroughly urbanised that she associates her single visit to the countryside, despite its beauty for eye and ear, with loneliness and isolation, from which she recovers only when she “crept into the great black streets again; / And when I breathed the smoke and heard the roar.” Habit and daily usage had alienated her from the rural dream of bright innocence, because of her sombre childhood spent mainly in a garret from which she . . . saw the housetops round me in the smoke, The countryside for Liz, therefore, is an unreal place, merely that which happens to be outside the city, and yet the city, the real and unavoidable centre of living to which she must return, is harsh and cruel, the “wicked town,” where she is “Moved on and hunted through the streets of stone” like a human pariah. But she is not simply caught between conventional alternatives, for there is a further element in the poem that becomes the crux of the issue. And that is the moral courage and spiritual integrity which characterise Liz’s reactions to the tough circumstances of her daily existence, to the physical ugliness which is its environment, and to her final sad predicament. Whilst the city as institution is presented through these repeated miserable autobiographies as the very image, economically, socially and spiritually, of man’s inhumanity to man, many of the most suffering of its members rise up with a remarkably Wordsworthian resolution and independence to “overcome” the city’s unconcern by virtue of their innate pity and courage and love. And it is not only Liz’s moral fortitude and wise forbearance that one may evidence, but also the charitable kindness of the “tall, pale lady” who helped her in various ways without ever patronising or moralising, and again the tolerance of the parson who sits at her death-bed listening to her life-story. Similar patterns may be found, for instance, in “Jane Lewson,” where the real hero is human courage and love (associated with ruralism) and the villain is hypocritical religiosity, cruelty and loneliness (associated with the grimy, 398 harsh city), or in “Nell,” a tale of love and charity, flourishing, as Buchanan describes it, by “the lurid light of an ever-deepening terror”39 in the most unpropitious environment of the London slum of Seven Dials. _____ 39 Ibid., p. 128. _____ 399 quality of the whole way of life . . . a radical human dissent. At the level of social character, the society might be confident of its assumptions and its future, but these lonely exposed figures seem to us, at least, the personal and social reality of the system which in part the social character rationalized. Man alone, afraid, a victim: this is the enduring experience.”41 Although he is unable to present any compensating equivalent of Dickens’ humanised and benign labyrinth of Todgers, that protective urban macrocosm in which “every man comes out freely in his own character,”42 this radical human dissent is, in a minor way, the enduring experience also of Buchanan’s urban poems. And it is manifested most strongly in his concern with “fallen women,” one of the great social problems resulting from urbanisation.
V The enormous increase of prostitution in Victorian England was directly related to the congestion of living conditions endured by the urban under-privileged. As T. E. James has observed, “. . . the question of prostitution began to assume a problematic form as the industrial revolution set its mark upon the world: mass movements took place away from the country to the towns, where people were crowded together under wretched housing conditions, their leisure occupations restricted and their everyday work monotonous and emotionally unsatisfying. The modern problem of prostitution is essentially an urban one, its character largely depends on the size and locality of the town.”43 The problem aroused to active good works of redemption the consciences of men as diverse as Dickens and Gladstone. It appeared as the central theme of numerous mid-Victorian novels,44 treated at first obliquely, but later with an increasing directness. And the protracted discussion, both bigoted and informed, that was devoted to its eradication made it pre-eminently one of those “modern subjects” fundamental to the pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, as evidenced in such paintings as Millais’ “Virtue and Vice,” Holman Hunt’s “The Awakened Conscience” and Rossetti’s “Found.” _____ 41 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961), p. 68. _____ 400 Such widespread social and artistic interest in the problem suggests that Buchanan was not being idiosyncratic in paying it considerable attention in his urban poems. There are in his particular case, however, considerations that qualify what appears to be simply an alert interest in “the great social evil” of the times. _____ 45 Jay, p. 8. _____ 401 “putting on record for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection,” for obtruding “such things as the themes of whole poems.”50 And the issue becomes patent when he complains of Rossetti’s “Jenny,” significantly about a prostitute: “Its fleshliness is apparent at a glance; one perceives that the scene was fascinating less through its human tenderness than because it, like all the others, possessed an inherent quality of Animalism.”51 Certainly Buchanan would not be alone in idolising the image of pure womanhood, epitomised typically in mother and wife, for this protective device against animalism was an established attitude, particularly amongst the middle classes.52 In his personal case, however, this social attitude seems to have been aggravated to an extreme psychological degree by his Oedipus attachment. And, seeing them from this viewpoint, we might validly assume that in his city poems he often projected his love on to the errant women of the streets, not out of “human tenderness” for them as lapsed sisters, but because he believed their fall resulted from their innate purity being sullied through contact with “wretched animalism.” Animalism is here conceived in urban terms as a harsh and depriving paternalism, his submerged sexual hostility to his father being identified with the city whose squalid conditions in turn had “caused” the fall of his ideal of pure womanhood. For the calamity of that fall is, in Buchanan’s view, properly understood only when it is seen as an aspect of the total situation of modern man’s translation from rural paradise to urban hell, where the desolate cries of the “sisters of midnight” echo the remorse of banished Eve. _____ 50 R. Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in R. Peters, Victorians on Literature and Art (London, 1964), pp. 246-247. My italics. _____ 402 turgid rhetoric, of fallen women implies a view of masculinity as libidinous, animalistic, an evil inherent in the natural dispensation. And his sense of the brutal sexuality of the mass of men, it is not surprising to discover, subsumes a fear of social rampage and political insurrection. Why should not these great Sirs was, in the words of C. F. G. Masterman, “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 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.”55 Buchanan, too, feared that new era, finding in mobocracy a powerful threat to “individualism” in all branches of social and political life. “Our governing classes no longer really govern,” he wrote in “The Coming Terror”; “if they still occupy the high seats of Olympus, it is in impotence of Godhead, trembling at Demogorgon-Socialism, _____ 53 Taylor, p. 274. _____ 403 the Mob, the Plebiscite . . . . Woe to [man] if, to appease his thirst and hunger for the loaves and fishes of the earth, he sacrifices to Social Despotism the freedom of his living soul!”56 The situation seemed little changed from those earlier decades when, as Charles Kingsley bluntly stated, citizens felt they might be called on at any time to fight their “natural enemies . . . the masses . . . for the safety of their property and the honour of their sisters.”57 Kingsley’s formulation (in the preface to Alton Locke) is a remarkable corroboration of the cleavage between Disraeli’s “two nations” in its definition of impoverished compatriots as the “natural” enemies of an embattled bourgeoisie armed with “laissez-faire” and the profit motive against disruption of their “divine” stability. For as he stated in another context, “the laws of trade and of social economy, just as much as the laws of nature, are divine facts.”58 The main significance of his formulation for us here, however, is that in its reference to the safeguarding of “the honour of their sisters” as well as property, it points to the inter-connection between the two spheres, the political and the sexual, within which Buchanan also mainly experienced his fear of “the coming terror.” _____ 56 R. Buchanan, The Coming Terror and Other Essays and Letters (London, 1891), p. 26 and p. 39. _____ 404 boot was unclean and belonged to a denizen of “Temple Street and Lewin’s Mead,” which, though physically near, were “as strange to most Londoners as a village in the African forests.”61 _____ 61 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963), p. 62. _____ 405 politic. And their political fears for their property and personal safety were complemented by the largely suppressed fear, most common one would expect in those numerous homes where sex was “the skeleton in the parental chamber,”66 of sexual outrage by the libidinous lower orders of humanity. _____ 66 Ibid., p. 353. _____ 406 Freudian theory has suggested, there exists a fundamental antagonism between society and the naked “homo brutus,” because he has certain basic drives which are anti-social, and which society, through mechanisms of restraint and education, attempts to integrate into acceptable patterns of behaviour. It is this alienation between natural man and society, presented in political terms, that informs Buchanan’s fears of “the coming terror” at the hands of the uncivilized masses. And the mechanism through which those fears would become operative is precisely defined in Steven Marcus’ comment on Dickens’ prophetic understanding in Barnaby Rudge of the real nature and implications of Chartist violence: “. . . he saw beyond it into what we have seen happen in the twentieth century—that politics and the life of society come more and more to resemble externalizations of the life of the unconscious mind, and that the disorders in society and personal life are confluent and interpenetrating and grow steadily more difficult to bear and control, and steadily more dangerous.”67
VI John Crowe Ransom has defined religion as a “system of myths which gives a working definition to the relation of man to nature.”68 In this sense of the term the Wordsworthian ethos is clearly religious, with “Michael,” perhaps, as its most memorable presentation. The poem is complemented by Wordsworth’s prose description in his Guide to the Lakes of “the almost visionary mountain republic . . . of Shepherds and Agriculturists . . . this pure Commonwealth . . . towards the head of these Dales [of Cumberland] . . . the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society or an organized community whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it.”69 The “system of myths” which supported “this pure Commonwealth” had been debilitated mainly by what some, such as Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s tutor at Cambridge, regarded as the disease of evolutionary theory. And Sedgwick it was who pointed accurately to the consequences that Victorians feared would flow from the system’s discredit. Darwinism, in his view, by treating the order of living _____ 67 S. Marcus, Dickens: from Pickwick to Dombey (London, 1965), p. 211. _____ 407 nature as an historical and self-sufficient system, could lead to “nothing but ruin and confusion. . . . It will undermine the whole moral and social fabric” by destroying the “essential link” between the moral and material worlds.70 _____ 70 S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London, 1965), p. 224. _____ 408 Order of Nature” is clearly associated with the tenet of natural theology in which microcosm and macrocosm had been correlatives in the scheme of things. And it is precisely that concept which endured, despite his formal repudiation of the Wordsworthian ethos, as the substantial basis of Buchanan’s hostility to the replacing industrial environment with its corrupting effect on human personality and traditional values and standards. Buchanan’s main poetical consideration of these issues is the lengthy, rambling “The Book of Orm” (1870), a type of Ossianic allegory on Evolution, which, in the poet’s own words, “strikes the personal keynote to all his work.”73 The theme of the poem is essentially the same as the question which faced his own typical Modern in “The Outcast” (1891), How shall he yonder heavens afar win Specific parts of the autobiographical “Book of Orm” and its tone in general are reminiscent of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and indeed the poems deal basically with the same type of problem. Buchanan’s attempt is “to vindicate the ways of God to man” (he quotes the line as one epigraph), as in a sense was Tennyson’s also. Characteristically enough for a Victorian, however, Buchanan is neither persuaded beforehand of possible success in comprehending the mechanism and purpose of God’s mystery of Life and Death, nor that his is a heaven-sent task. _____ 73 Stodart-Walker, p. 62. _____ 409 from the scheme of things. So the frustrating configuration emerges in which the sensible world of natural phenomena is simultaneously conceived of as the key to God’s presence, and yet as the Veil behind which He hides, unable to save men from “the fangs/Of His own bloodhounds, Death and Force and Law” (“The Earthquake,” 1885). Fools, one life is all God grants you, This alteration of the ends towards which men’s aspirations were to be directed in order to give significance to their earthly activities, is clear in Orm’s contemporary formulation. He dramatises the position as an interminable conflict between a Wind (the Soul) and the Shadow (Death), which, now that eternal life seemed unlikely, really amounted to a struggle between the spirit of industrial-urbanised man and death as a representative of natural forces. Under the traditional Christian dispensation, this central conflict would normally have been pictured as occurring between the spirit and the flesh, a clash of a personal and moral nature through which the individual enhanced his spiritual worth. The new formulation depersonalizes the issue by making one of the protagonists an absolute in all men’s lives, and furthermore, a terrestrial conclusion instead of a heavenly beginning. The discredit by scientific theory of ancient ends, therefore, also circumscribed the means traditionally associated with their achievement. Buchanan’s case, though disguised by the mock-serious tone of his approach (as often also in “The Earthquake” and “The Outcast”) is here basically compatible with that which the Devil vehemently pronounces, . . . If such a Ruler, The question of man’s distinctive consciousness and the growth of his spiritual awareness and the needs consequent upon it are central to Orm’s vision and to the development of Buchanan’s thought. And in constantly reverting to the matter, he is really stressing the basic paradox of man’s new cosmological position. In this immediate correlation between man’s evolved consciousness and his capacity for pain lies the significance of Orm’s curious dream in which he sees consecutively, and yet confuses because of their similarity, a proud king holding court and an ape in “A mighty forest of primeval growth.” It is hardly necessary for Orm to elaborate his intentions by observing that “Brute-beast and the small- eyed King/Seem’d brethren,” or to remark on their Darwinian origins. But what is of importance is that to Orm “the brute-beast was the happier . . . . Since never nameless trouble filled his eyes . . . while he poised above/With philosophic swing by claws and tail.” The beast, then, completely at ease in Nature’s dispensation, was neither tormented by spiritual questionings, nor haunted by the awareness of an inevitable and absolute end in death. This is one facet of the demand laid upon man in the new cosmological scheme—a thorough acceptance of his animal origins and of his mortality. But the paradox and the pain of his situation arose, of course, directly from that very acceptance in that it implied the concomitant development of the highest form of consciousness, spiritual awareness, which made man the distinctive animal he was. “What makes mankind tragic,” as Conrad wrote in a letter in 1898 to Cunninghame Graham, “is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well,—but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife,—the tragedy begins.”74 Such a tragedy, Conrad suggested, would have resulted had he “educated” Singleton, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1898), who, except for his lack of education, achieved in the view of _____ 74 Jean-Aubry, p. 226. _____ 411 Cunninghame Graham the heroic ideal of democratic perfection. “. . . I think Singleton with an education is impossible,” replied Conrad. “Then he would become conscious,—and much smaller,—and very unhappy. Now he is simple and great like an elemental force. Nothing can touch him but the curse of decay. . . . Nothing else can touch him, —he does not think. O birth betoken’d in that windy hour, Man’s position in Nature according to Buchanan’s interpretation of the “revised version” of creation, then, was far removed from the dramatic one between angel and beast he had traditionally assumed in “The Great Chain of Being.” In his “proper study” he is now shown, rather, as a refractory “sport” in the evolutionary process, “a dark point in the scheme of things,” That entity within whose brooding brain The mocking echoes of Alexander Pope’s definitive antitheses76 point up the radical alteration envisaged in the very quality of human experience. For man is here presented not as gazing through the glass of temporal life to the hope of life eternal, but as scanning the mirror of his own consciousness, seeing reflected only the bitter self-knowledge of his own isolation and bewilderment, disastrously placed as he is on “this isthmus of a middle state,” _____ 75 Ibid., pp. 214-215. _____ . . . [he] glanceth with affrighted eyes 412 This paradoxical conception of the “unnaturalness” of man, the chance evolution of his soul, was the root cause of Buchanan’s need “to justify the ways of God to man.” The cony struggling in the foumart’s fangs, and in the City, the “Sisters of Midnight”—whose lament suggests that basically their depraved existence in its origins and quality is the same as the “fierce blind fight for life” of Nature’s lesser creatures— Laugh at the world, all the foulness and vanity, Accordingly Buchanan repudiated the Maker, “the principle of the All-Father,” as he called Him, “the egoistic principle of the _____ 77 Quoted by Stodart-Walker, p. 328. _____ 413 struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.”78 And he replaced that principle with Christ, “The Wandering Jew,” the supreme figure of pity and love, who, by virtue of his thaumaturgy which defied the inflexible absoluteness of natural law, became for him a revolutionary secularist, an “audacious unbeliever” rather than the Son of the “inexplicable, pitiless God of the Universe.”79 “He led the war against Nature,” wrote Buchanan, “against the God of Nature . . . . the great unknown God who is at once the master and servant of His own inexorable Will.”80 Macrocosm—comprised of the twin systems of evolutionary Nature and the industrial City—and microcosm are, therefore, completely at odds, and Christ, despite his inevitable failure in his role as the “new Prometheus,” becomes the poet’s ideal of what one might term “divine humanity.” Christ’s unconstitutional partner in this remarkable inverted theodicy is the Devil, who is motivated by almost identical principles in his efforts to uphold the weak against the inflexibly strong. He emerges, in Archibald Stodart-Walker’s description, as the epitome of enlightened modern secularism: “The Devil of Buchanan is the spirit of Revolt, the spirit of Eclecticism, the spirit of Science as opposed to the spirit of Theology, the inspirer of research as opposed to the upholder of authority and tradition.”81 And because Love is not born of any token bright Buchanan looks towards the emergent perfection of humanity as his ideal of godliness, the . . . God emerging and evolved at last In vindicating his “The Wandering Jew” (1893), which some considered to be sacrilegious, Buchanan wrote, “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 . . . . mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into a science of life . . . . Human love and _____ 78 Quoted ibid. p. 8. _____ 414 self-respect, human science and verification, human perception of the limitation 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.”82 These remarks, if the italicized words were omitted, could, as Henry Murray observed, have been written by a scientific humanist such as Thomas Huxley. And it is clear from such late works as “The Earthquake,” “The Outcast,” and “The Devil’s Case,” that Buchanan increasingly regarded scientists, because of their elucidation of natural law, as the deliverers of mankind from the bondage of God’s malicious tyranny. He never became an atheist, however, despite numerous poetical statements—the most noteworthy being, perhaps, the savagely iconoclastic “The Devil’s Prayer”—which might be taken as evidence to the contrary. So it is the presence of those italicized words that really makes the remarks curious and interesting. For their incongruity points to Buchanan’s continued emotional need for the guidance in human affairs of a supernatural Power—“a dumb, wistful yearning . . . to something higher”83 —even though he had in fact ceased to believe in the “omnipotent Impotence” of the traditional Godhead, finding the “logic of the Christian message . . . a miracle of clear reasoning raised on false premises.”84 And yet despite his scientific-humanist views, and despite his grasp of the general intellectual situation,85 he seemed unable fully to integrate the fact that it was the very discovery of those laws that had led directly to the discredit of religion and the traditional view of nature, and indirectly to the establishment of the industrial-urban ethos, just as he failed to realize that what he considered to be useless cruelty and suffering in nature were the basis of that very evolutionary amelioration in whose workings he recognized intellectually the source of progressive hopes for mankind. He was, as H. N. Fairchild neatly puts it, “a perfect specimen of the Victorian believing unbeliever.”86 _____ 82 Quoted in H. Murray, p. 108. _____ 415 And his confusion—leading him to adopt characteristically the ambivalent posture we have remarked throughout— springs from his reliance, often emotional and unconscious, on the tenets of natural theology, which led him, armed thus with obsolete categories of thought, to a hopeless grappling with man’s “cosmological dislocation.” He was able on occasion to repudiate those tenets at a conscious level—as in the sardonic observation of his modern protagonist, the Devil, . . . ’Tho ’tis written But at a deeper level, influenced by his typically Victorian moral view of experience, he is unable, usually, to interpret Tennyson’s “ape and tiger” as more than aspects of evolutionary heritage; and quite beyond his imaginative range looms that emergent view of them as ontological elements in a new self-image of mankind, which D. H. Lawrence was later to formulate as an ethical creed: That I am I.
University of Western Australia _____ 87 D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin” in Studies in Classic American Literature (London, 1964), p. 16. _____
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‘Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the Brave New Victorian World’ by R. A. Forsyth
Robert Buchanan and the Dilemma of the R. A. FORSYTH
The characteristic Victorian conflict between intellectual convictions and spiritual aspirations sprang from the need to accommodate the newly emergent concept of Nature. This concept had dual origins—evolutionism and industrial technology—and demanded adjustment of the traditional relationship between God, Man, and Nature. The man-made industrial city became the visible symbol of the new relationship. Buchanan reflected the dilemma, more particularly in The City of Dream. In the section “City Without God” the poet presents a type of scientific-humanist Utopia, the opposite, it seemed, of contemporary London from which he had fled. Unexpectedly, however, he rejects this city, seeing it as the epitome of rationalism and materialism, philosophies which offered no satisfaction in those aspirations to immortality which were his real motivation. Accordingly he also rejected political activism as mere socialistic tinkering with the grand movement of evolution, unable to appreciate the “evolutionary” nature of political legislation. He resolved the anomaly by identifying God and City as being alike hostile to spiritual man, with thaumaturgic Christ becoming a humanist opponent of the Father’s implacable “laws.” But Buchanan’s resolution was only partial because the superseded concept of a beneficent dispensation unconsciously remained his chief emotional solace in the brave new Victorian world. ONE OF THE CENTRAL concerns of the Victorian Age was the cosmological problem of defining man’s place in the emergent natural dispensation. This new concept of Nature had dual origins. On the one hand it resulted from the multifarious scientific speculation and theorizing comprehended under the term “evolutionism”; and, on the other, from the harnessing of steam for locomotion and industry that led to vast economic expansion. Furthermore these origins were interrelated. For that harnessing not only endowed men with a seemingly godlike control of time and space, but led also to the concomitant spread of cities of unprecedented size and complexity. Hitherto the English ethos had been essentially rural and God-oriented, enshrined in a pattern of values and attitudes rooted in the soil, and ritualistically determined by the cyclic demands of the seasons. With the emergence of the new man-made urban-industrial environment, however, this traditional ethos was steadily discredited as the real context of human endeavor. Understandably, the 648 supplanted ethos became increasingly associated by many with nostalgia for a lost paradise of tranquil stability. And such feelings were heightened by the broad acceptance of the Romantic philosophy of natural idealism, more especially as presented by Wordsworth. Nostalgia for a golden era buried in the life of the past clearly informs, for instance, Matthew Arnold’s characteristic advice to his Scholar-Gipsy to “Fly hence. . . . Plunge deeper in the bowering wood!” that he might escape the contamination of “this strange disease of modern life.” The industrial city, in short, came to be the visible symbol of the reversal of the time-honored relationship between God, Man, and Nature, necessitating in the process a new configuration of the components of that fundamental trinity. In turn, to revert to the dual origins, that necessity was heightened by the sense of human alienation from an “evolutionary” universe which seemed no longer to be controlled by a beneficent deity intimately concerned with the redemption of individual souls, but was governed rather by chance and amoral processes through “laws” indifferent both to spiritual idealism and justice. And this sense of alienation was aggravated by the realization that its recognition was suffered by no creature other than man, who was also, ironically, Nature’s evolved masterpiece. _____ 1 M. Arnold, Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853). _____ 649 and Free Thought leanings. As a young man his father, a poor tailor of Ayrshire, had been so deeply impressed by Robert Owen that he threw up his livelihood in order to become an apostle walking in his master’s footsteps and preaching the new and often unpopular gospel of Socialism. In 1840 he married Margaret Williams, whose father, a philanthropic solicitor of Stoke-upon-Trent, was an advanced freethinker from whom she inherited a firm Socialist orientation towards social, political, and religious questions. With parents such as these, Buchanan was inevitably reared in the sternest traditions of sceptical unbelief. And yet despite his upbringing, and despite his love for his parents and respect for their views, particularly those of his mother, he early and unexpectedly discovered within himself “the sweet spirit of natural piety”3 as he later described his burgeoning religious sentiments. This emotional aspect of his temperament may well have been nurtured by the social persecution he suffered as the son of a notorious unbeliever in Sabbatarian Glasgow—“Don’t play with yon laddie,” his potential playfellows warned each other, “his father’s an infidel.”4 It did not, however, result in any enduring religious persuasion as regards the spiritual significance of his individual existence. And personal immortality became the crux of dissatisfaction with the emergent dispensation because it pointed up man’s painful awareness of death in relation to his imprisonment within the amoral “laws” of nature which implied a final involvement rather than the prospect of eventual liberation from them into eternal life. “What is left if we abandon the idea of eternal life, as reason teaches us to do?” asks Buchanan, distraught at the death of his adored mother: “Only a horrible nightmare—a devil’s dream.”5 The anguished struggle between emotions and intellect is here clearly apparent, and Buchanan spent most of his _____ 3 H. Jay, p. 19. _____ 650 poetical life attempting to resolve this dilemma by trying to formulate a theodicy viable in the urban-industrial environment. But, as I have suggested, that environment was so opposite to the “Eden” of the rural ethos with which the Godhead had been traditionally identified, as to equate for Buchanan and many contemporaries the dreadful City with Hell, and to make of the growing complexity resulting from industrialization something of a latter-day Fall. For despite his conscientious efforts from an early stage in his career to turn from the “outmoded” rural ethos to become a type of urban Wordsworth by singing “the unsung city’s streets,”6 we find his emotional affiliations to that superseded ethos so deeply entrenched that in the end his intellectual resolve is frustrated. _____ 6 “Bexhill.1866.” _____ 651 the conclusion of his long allegorical journey that he comes upon the remarkable “City Without God,” which, in the appearance of its broad streets and handsome buildings, in the health and gaiety of its inhabitants, in the lavish social amenities and absence of poverty, seemed the opposite of its Victorian counterparts, the epitome indeed of what the Hammonds described as “the idea of the town as a focus for civilization, a centre where the emancipating and enlightening influences of the time can act rapidly and with effect, the school of social arts, the nursery of social enterprise, the witness to the beauty and order and freedom that men can bring into their lives.”10 At first sight this City seems to be a simple scientific-humanist Utopia, in its conception strongly under the influence of Comte and “my beloved master, Herbert Spencer.”11 And yet, despite his invariably hostile criticism of the inhumanity and squalor of contemporary cities, Buchanan unexpectedly rejects this imaginary City, making of it an inverted Utopia, an indictment of the spiritual effects of the rationalism and materialism which, from one aspect, were the resultant philosophies of the scientific discoveries on which industrial towns were built. For what initially delights Ishmael as a sort of Shelleyan heaven-on-earth is soon translated into an ironically “brave new world” whose ethos frustrates the religious aspirations to immortality which are the true motivation of his search. By rejecting the antiseptic sanity of this Godless city’s social and ethical constitution, Buchanan is, in fact, attempting to deny those frightening mutations in man’s traditional self-image which he felt resulted from the idea of scientific progress. This attitude is clearly similar to his placing, in his London Poems, the buoyant moral virtue of his underprivileged and browbeaten characters in opposition to the brutality of contemporary cities—a sort of variant on the Grail legend, whereby one proved in the perilous journey of life one’s essential humanity through at least moral victory, if no other, over hard times. _____ 10 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer 1760-1832. London, 1925, p. 53. _____ never sound of war, 652 To reject such humane and civilized advances seems perverse, but Buchanan is justified in doing so in the light of his view here of the organizing scientific spirit as the evil genie of the urban machine running amok to humanity’s detriment. This becomes apparent in the most “advanced” aspects of the social ethic—the euthanasia of infirm or defective infants, and the ritualistic vivisection of animals to demonstrate empirically for the gratification of assembled citizens the evolved biological supremacy of man. These are not freakish practices in the sense one would attribute to Frankenstein, nor are they wildly fanciful. Their significance, indeed, may best be understood in the light of present-day science fiction. For just as Kingsley Amis has described the current wide-spread production of this genre as the plotting of “new maps of hell,”12 so, likewise, Buchanan was exploring in his poem what he regarded as hellish, plotting fearfully man’s enforced wandering from the true image of himself. The form of inverted Utopia in which Buchanan cast his warning of the dangerous elements in uninhibited scientism has come to be the favored mode for such presentations, as one may judge, for instance, from the work of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Buchanan seems, indeed, to look forward with accuracy over a century to Nineteen Eighty-Four when we discover that the sinister psychology practised by O’Brien on Winston Smith to “persuade” rather than force him to conform to the Party ethic, is precisely that employed with frightening benevolence on Pilgrim Ishmael by the Citizens when he protests at what strikes him as cruel, perverse, or obscene—“Give up the man” they mildly urge, “We shall not slay him, but deliver him There is, however, another and equally revealing way of looking at “The City Without God.” Buchanan in presenting his _____ 12 See K. Amis, New Maps of Hell. London, 1961, passim. _____ 653 poem in the form of an inverted Utopia, it is worth noting, was not writing within the supporting structure of a long- established literary convention, as the form, popular though it has subsequently become, seems to date only from the eighteenth century, with Swift as the pre-eminent exponent. Much more common, and usually in prose, were straight Utopian fictions such as Edward Bellamy’s famous Looking Backward, a mild socialist dream which appeared in the same year as Buchanan’s poem (1888). Although none of the available sources mentions it as fact, Buchanan’s poem in some major aspects of thought appears to be a direct response to Bellamy’s book. Partial confirmation of this might be seen in his hostile reference to Looking Backward in the Preface to his The Coming Terror and other Essays and Letters, published in 1891, and particularly in the title essay, which is a fierce attack against Socialism and serves as a prose counterpart to ‘The City of Dream.’ In the Preface he states the main contention of the book to be “that no amount of political or social tinkering will complete the process Nature chooses to work out by her own slow methods of conscientious evolution and that . . . by the emergence of Mob Morality and Mob Rule, those sublime methods are being indefinitely retarded, even occasionally reversed. . . . This tinkering will lead to the ‘new Reign of Terror’.”13 _____ 13 R. Buchanan, The Coming Terror and Other Essays and Letters. London, 1891, pp. 7 and 8. _____ 654 is, whilst protesting acceptance of evolutionary theory and its “sublime methods” of adaptation and survival, Buchanan seems blind to the general applicability of the principle of development the theory gives rise to. In this situation, then, he changes roles, and, as O’Brien here presents us, a century in advance, with a neat piece of protective “doublethink” which is perhaps the true source of his fulminations against “scientific” socialism: “No man would be a free agent. . . . He will breed according to legislative enactments. . . . Life will be superintended in all departments according to Acts of Parliament. . . . England will be well lighted, well drained, moral, conventional, an excellently-regulated Machine.”14 “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. . . . Mere sentiment can never save man till it changes into a science of life. . . . Human love and self-respect, human science and verification, human perception of the limitation 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.”15 These views, if the italicized words were omitted, could, as Henry Murray observed, have been properly expressed by a scientific humanist such as Thomas Huxley, whose works Buchanan had almost certainly read, as he was ardently interested in contemporary scientific literature during the last thirty years of his life.16 But it is the incongruous presence of _____ 14 R. Buchanan, pp. 36-37. _____ 655 those words, of course, that makes the statement strange and noteworthy. For they indicate Buchanan’s unsatisfied emotional need for religious direction in his life—“a dumb, wistful yearning . . . to something higher”17—despite the fact that he had intellectually rejected the “omnipotent Impotence”18 of the Creator. Buchanan, in fact, rationalizes his distaste for the remorseless processes of evolutionary development by identifying their seeming indifference to human beings as the work of a merciless Maker unable to alter the “laws” which regulate His Creation and which have as their highest achievement the anomaly of suffering human consciousness. God becomes for him “the principle of the All-Father, the egoistic principle of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.”19 This view is paralleled exactly by his disguised hostility to the industrial city which is also seen as the oppressor of downtrodden humanity. City and Creator, then, become associated, in terms of Progress and Evolution, as twin aspects of an autocratic Fatherhood as far removed from that benevolent Paternalism traditionally associated with the fading rural ethos as was the life of the slum- dweller from his idealized rural counterpart. Despite his hostility to the Godhead, however, Buchanan found his religious aspirations too strong to allow him to become a fully-fledged atheist. We see in Buchanan, as Henry Murray cogently describes it, “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.”20 _____ 17 Quoted approvingly by Buchanan from a “Spectator” review of modern poetry, describing what he had achieved better than any of his contemporaries. H. Jay, p. 20. _____ 656 God of Nature . . . the great unknown God who is at once the master and servant of His own inexorable Will.”22 The divinity of Christ, that is, is epitomized in his essential humanity. And his unexpected lieutenant in the new “man-made” dispensation is Satan, whose rebellion against the Godhead is applauded as the precursor of Christ’s later “revolt.” Together they are presented as the main agents of enlightenment, exemplifying, as Archibald Stodart-Walker described Satan, “the spirit of Revolt, the spirit of Eclecticism, the spirit of Science as opposed to the spirit of Theology, the inspirer of research as opposed to the upholder of authority and tradition.”23 And increasingly in late works such as The Earthquake, The Outcast, and The Devil’s Case, Buchanan identifies scientists, because of their explanation of natural laws, as the liberators of mankind from the servitude of God’s dispensation. One might be led to think, then, that he had satisfactorily resolved the great dilemma of his times by answering Tennyson’s question that had crystallized the problem, “Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams?”24 But his answer is, in fact, more ingenious than satisfying. Revealed religion had been discredited for him by scientific discovery, and in his view, “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!”25 Despite such advanced views, however, he was unable finally to integrate the fact that it was precisely the elucidation of those laws that had resulted in the discredit of religion and the traditional view of nature, and had indirectly led to the establishment of the urban- industrial ethos. Equally he failed to realize that what he regarded as useless cruelty and suffering in nature was the basis of that very evolutionary amelioration in whose workings he recognized intellectually the source of progressive hopes for mankind. Indeed, the tension between his intellectual persuasions and his emotional commitments remains to the end. And it does so, as with many contemporaries, because of _____ 22 From Buchanan’s prose note to “The Ballad of Mary the Mother,” quoted by A. Stodart-Walker, p. 229. _____ 657 the continuing emotional fascination for him of the superseded rural ethos legislated by a divine benevolence which led him to grapple with the contemporary cosmological problem in the context of a natural theology whose categories of thought had been rendered obsolete by the principle of evolutionary development. UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA _____
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