ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

THE FLESHLY SCHOOL CONTROVERSY

Other Accounts of the Fleshly School Controversy - 4

From Dramas of the Law by Horace Wyndham
(London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1936)

pp.83-131

AUTHORS AT LOGGERHEADS

1

“THE most melancholy chapter in the History of Literature,” once wrote Sir Walter Besant, “is that which relates to the attacks made upon authors by their contemporaries. Among all the professions, that of Letters is the only one in which its members are permitted to attack, to deride, to abuse, to misrepresent each other. In every other calling the dignity of the Fraternity first, and the self-respect of the individual member next, prohibit this unworthy and unseemly practice.”
     On the same subject some remarks of Isaac Disraeli are, for all that more than a century has elapsed since they were written, still applicable:
     “If, in the heat of controversy, authors impudently attack each other with personalities, they are only scattering mud and hurling stones; and will incur the ridicule or the contempt of those who, unfriendly to the Literary Character, feel a secret pleasure in its degradation.”
     But such counsel is one of perfection; and authors of all degrees, smarting under real or fancied wrongs, seldom have scruples about airing them in print. The fact is, literary men as a class (and literary women, too, for that matter) are apt to be touchy and given to seeing covert assaults where none are intended. Apart from the historic cases described by Disraeli, there have been many modern examples. Conspicuous among such occur the differences ⁸⁴ of opinion between Browning and FitzGerald, Thackeray and Yates, and Whistler and Ruskin.
     Time was when such quarrels were settled at the point of the rapier or the muzzle of the pistol. But recourse to these weapons has long gone out of fashion; and nowadays an action for damages, with a financial solatium for the victor, is the recognised balm for the wounds of injured dignity.
     Nobody is really safe from an angry author. There are books, indeed, that would almost appear to be charged with high explosives. Thus, within recent years, a lady novelist brought an action for libel against the British Museum in respect of a certain volume on its shelves. Sir Charles Russell, who himself happened to be one of the Trustees, submitted that the Museum authorities had acted in accordance with their statutory powers in giving the book shelf-room; and further that, on a complaint being made to them, had locked up the offending work and apologised to the plaintiff. None the less, a jury awarded her 20s. damages. This decision, however, was afterwards upset.
     Delvers into the pages of Lemprière and the learned Dr. Smith will note that Archilochus, when he felt annoyed with the City Fathers of Paros, relieved his feelings by penning vigorous lampoons about them; and these efforts being taken amiss by his victims, he was banished from his native country. More than two thousand years later, a second poet, Robert Buchanan, followed his example, but with less serious consequences to himself.
     It was to the medium employed by Archilochus that Robert Buchanan betook himself when he happened to be at loggerheads with certain of his literary brethren. Considering that he had been libelled in turn by one of their number, nothing but a resolve to have the matter thrashed out before a judge and jury would placate him. ⁸⁵ The result, however, was to do nobody any good, and to injure the cause he professed to have at heart.

2

     Robert Williams Buchanan, who was to come into the glare of the limelight by reasons of his differences of opinion with Rossetti and Swinburne, was born in 1841. The son of a small tailor with socialistic leanings, he was brought up in Glasgow. There the paternal shears were dropped for journalism, missionary endeavour (in support of Robert Owen), and lecturing. The combination did not prove a financial success; and, at the age of nineteen, the youth, who had inherited his father’s love of books (but nothing else) set off for London, where, “with no capital, but a sublime self-assurance,” he proposed to adopt a literary career. As he had already contributed to the “Poets’ Corners” of certain obscure Glasgow papers, and had written a pantomime for a local theatre, he felt that he was fully equipped to conquer the metropolis. His optimism on the subject was shared by a friend, David Gray, a young pupil teacher, whose parents, in humble circumstances, had destined him for the Kirk. But, preferring poetry to the pulpit, he decided to accompany Buchanan to London and there storm the publishing world.
     If possessed of nothing more substantial, David Gray certainly had a “good conceit” of himself, for he once wrote to a stranger whom he was pestering for introductions, “I am a poet. Let that be understood distinctly. I tell you that, if I live, my name and fame shall be second to few of any age, and to none of my own.”
     With this equipment, and a carpet-bag stuffed full of rejected manuscripts, he arranged to accompany Buchanan ⁸⁶ to London, or “Babylon,” as they called it. But there was an unfortunate misunderstanding at the start; and, unable to grapple with the intricacies of Bradshaw, they left Glasgow from different stations. The result was, Buchanan travelled by himself, and Gray followed without knowing his address. Being short of money and thrifty of disposition, he spent his first night in London on a bench in Hyde Park. It was poor economy, for, while he saved an hotel bill, he caught a cold, which developed into consumption. Still, as he had written, after a visit to Westminster Abbey, “If I live, I shall be buried there,” perhaps he considered this a step towards his self-appointed goal.
     Buchanan eventually discovered his friend wandering about the streets, and took him off to “a dear, ghastly, bankrupt garret” he had secured in the purlieus of Blackfriars. But, beyond offering him temporary shelter, he could do little else, for he himself had not yet secured a footing. However, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), got him some reviewing work, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to persuade Thackeray to print one of his poems in the Cornhill. But David Gray was difficult to help. For one thing, his health was precarious; and, for another, he had too lofty an opinion of his powers. At last, unable to continue the struggle any longer, he went back with his dreams unrealised to Scotland, where he died at the age of twenty-three.
     Left alone in London, Robert Buchanan, like many before him, found the streets paved with any substance but gold. His experience, however, was the common one of literary beginners, a hard struggle at the start and a constant succession of disappointments and rebuffs. He wrote in his wretched attic from morning to night; and bombarded the newspapers and magazines with stories and essays and poems (the majority of which were ⁸⁷ returned), and the publishing world with novels. But Paternoster Row, like Grub Street, was inhospitable to his early efforts. “It was about this time,” he afterwards said, “that I seriously thought of winning instant and certain immortality by killing a publisher.” He withstood the temptation. At a critical juncture, Barry Cornwall gave him some good advice, and, as he left him, slipped a couple of sovereigns into his hand. He next approached the stage, and, after a rebuff from the Lyceum, was lucky enough to sell a blood-and-thunder melodrama for £20 to the manager of a Shoreditch theatre. This was not a fortune, perhaps. Still, it was a much better send off than that of the average budding playwright.
     “It’s dogged as does it”; and, by dint of keeping his nose to the grindstone, the newcomer found himself gradually making headway. He met “useful” people; and G. H. Lewes, Westland Marston, John Morley, and W. G. Wills held out a helping hand and put him in touch with editors and publishers. Among the latter was John Maxwell (afterwards the husband of Miss Braddon) who gave him the editorship of one of his minor periodicals, and he also did some reviewing for the Athenæum at 10s. 6d. a column. While he was thus employed, Dickens accepted some of his articles for All the Year Round, and Edmund Yates opened the columns of Temple Bar to him. “I became a constant contributor,” he once said in an interview, “and the pay, compared to what I had hitherto received, was princely.”
     In 1863 Buchanan had so far established himself as to secure a publisher for his first book. This was a slim volume of verses, Undertones, which was brought out by Edward Moxon, a favourite accoucheur among the younger bards at that period. Its reception by the critics was distinctly encouraging, and brought him considerable prestige, if not much cash. His next volume, ⁸⁸ Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, appeared in 1865, under the auspices of another firm, and was still better received. The Sunday Times reviewer went into raptures about it, and declared that the author’s position would be “greatly enhanced by this latest production of his ripening muse. . . . The voice of poetry seldom spoke more plainly or more loud.”
     Other volumes, both prose and verse, followed in quick succession; and, by the time he had been ten years in London, Buchanan had a dozen books to his name. This, however, was not quite the same thing as having them to his credit; for, to be truthful, some of them were sad examples of pot-boiling, being little beyond uninspired hack work.

3

     Just as birds in their little nests do not always agree, so with bards. On account, perhaps, of his early struggles (which, by the way, were not nearly so severe or so prolonged as he imagined), Robert Buchanan was “difficult.” He was quick to take offence, and inclined to exhibit jealousy of such of his contemporaries as had not “been through the mill.” Relations between himself and certain of his brother poets whose hold on the public was more pronounced than his had long been strained. But this was not to be wondered at, for, as a reviewer, he belittled them whenever the chance offered. In 1866 his special bête-noire was Swinburne, who had given him two separate causes for offence. One was that he had not held a lofty opinion of David Gray’s muse. The other was that he had been selected, instead of himself, to write a study of Keats. Here, as it happens, Buchanan did have a legitimate grievance, for he had been asked by the publisher to undertake the volume. William Michael Rossetti, ⁸⁹ however, who was editing the projected series, went behind his back and transferred the commission to the author of Poems and Ballads. Thereupon, Buchanan retaliated by declaring, when he reviewed it in the Athenæum, that his Life of Shelley was “the worst ever written.”
     But, in his brush with William Michael Rossetti, he did not forget Swinburne and the other poets of whom he had fallen foul; and in September 1866 he published, under the pseudonym of “Caliban,” some doggerel at their expense. On the grounds (a trifle inadequate, it would seem) that they consisted of “clever, satirical verses,” this effort was printed in the Spectator. A portion of it ran as follows:

THE SESSION OF THE POETS

At the Session of Poets held lately in London
     The Bard of Freshwater was voted to the chair;
With his tresses unbrush’d, and his shirt collar undone,
     He loll’d at his ease like a good-humoured Bear;
‘Come, boys!’ he exclaimed, ‘we’ll be merry together!’
     And lit up his pipe with a smile on his cheek:
While with eyes, like a skipper’s, cock’d up at the weather,
     Sat the Vice-Chairman Browning, thinking in Greek.

What was said? What was done? was there prosing or rhyming?
     Was nothing note worthy in deed or in word?—
Why, just as the hour of the supper was chiming,
     The only event of the evening occurred.
Up jumped, with his neck stretching out like a gander,
     Master Swinburne, and squeal’d, glaring out thro’ his hair,
‘All Virtue is bosh! Hallelujah for Landor!
     I disbelieve wholly in everything!—There!’

With language so awful he dared thus to treat ’em—
     Miss Ingelow fainted in Tennyson’s arms,
Poor Arnold rush’d out, crying ‘Soecl’inficetum!’
     And great bards and small bards were full of alarm;
Till Tennyson, flaming and red as a gipsy,                                         90
     Struck his fist on the table and utter’d a shout:
‘To the door with the boy! Call a cab! He is tipsy!’
     And they carried the naughty young gentleman out.

     Beyond calling this the “last word of blackguardism,” Swinburne took no notice. Browning and Tennyson followed his example.

4

     In the year 1871 the newly issued poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne were being received with rapture by both the critics and the public. Robert Buchanan, however, had another, and less complimentary, opinion of their merits. He considered that the “salvoes” accorded them were the result of log-rolling. Apart from this objection, he, with his characteristically Glasgow and muddled mind, held that a number of these poems were “immoral” and that he himself had a special mission to rebuke such offerings. In fact, the author of “Nell,” “The Little Milliner,” and “The White Rose and Red,” who had taken “the great strong current of English poetry” under his wing was saddened to discover Rossetti’s volume “full of fantastic figures of the fleshly school.”
     Obviously, something had to be done about it. Despite the fact that he himself had sailed perilously near the wind in some of his own verse, Buchanan did it. He took thought; he took pen; and he took paper; and, as a result, was delivered of a fierce tirade, “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti.”
     It was a frontal attack, directed upon all the most vulnerable points in the armour of the Pre-Raphaelites. Professing chapter and verse for his indictment, Buchanan quoted extensively. But he was careful to limit his ⁹¹ quotations to small and carefully selected extracts torn from their originals. It was thus a simple matter to make out a “case.”
     In addition to offering examples of alleged “fleshliness,” the Buchanan criticism was plentifully interlarded with such terms as “affectedness,” “morbidness,” “shallowness,” “shamelessness,” and “trashiness.” The gravamen of his charge against Swinburne (“with his borrowed rubbish”) and Rossetti—and against the latter in particular—was that they extolled “fleshliness” above all other qualities. “We question,” announced Buchanan solemnly, “if there is anything in the unfortunate Poems and Ballads quite so questionable on the score of thorough nastiness as many pieces in Mr. Rossetti’s collection.” It was, however, the “amorous sensations” of the “Nuptial Sleep” sonnet that disturbed him above everything else in the volume. “He is fleshly all over, from the roots of his hair to the tip of his toes,” was his considered opinion of the author of this item.
     “Here,” he bleated, “is a full-grown man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on record for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a desire to reproduce the sexual mood, so careful a choice of epithet to convey mere animal sensations, that we merely shudder at the shameless nakedness. . . . In poems like ‘Nuptial Sleep,’ the man who is too sensitive to exhibit his pictures, and so modest that it takes him years to make up his mind to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before a coarse public, and is gratified by their applause. . . . In petticoats or pantaloons, in modern times or in the Middle Ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly person, with nothing particular to tell us or teach us, with extreme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a careful choice of diction.”
⁹²     Strong as they were, hot-tempered critics had used much harsher terms than had Robert Buchanan towards those who had upset them. Thus, it is on record that Johnson broke a lance with Decker; Burnet labelled Byron “a monster of immodesty and impurity”; and Swift dubbed Steele “the Iscariot of hackney scribes.” Then, in later days, Byron called Keats “John Ketch”; Christopher North wrote of a contemporary as “a bandy-legged dwarf”; Lord George Bentinck’s description of an editor was “an uncircumscribed renegade”; Carlyle considered Herbert Spencer “a never-ending ass,” and, as was his custom, said so; and Tennyson once alluded to Churton Collins as “a louse on the locks of literature.”
     Having, as a finishing touch to his indictment, added a reference to the superior qualities of his own works, Buchanan left London and betook himself to the purer atmosphere of the Outer Hebrides. Before starting, however, he sent off the essay to the Contemporary Review, which was then being conducted by Alexander Strahan, his own publisher. He had delivered his thrust unsigned, “in order,” as he subsequently announced, “that it might be judged on its merits.” Strahan, while welcoming the offering, objected to anonymity, and tacked on to it a signature. The one he selected was “Thomas Maitland,” under which pseudonym the article appeared in the issue for October, 1871.

     The “Fleshly School of Poetry” article stirred up a hornets’ nest. Never had the literary dovecotes been so fluttered. Feathers flew in every direction. On all sides people were enquiring who was this “Thomas Maitland” (a name until then unknown among the critics) who was ⁹³ rushing in where none had hitherto trodden and administering such vigorous thwacks and resounding thumps in disparagement of established reputations. The wildest shots imaginable were made at his identity. But it was left for Frederick Locker to pierce the carefully guarded secret. He disclosed it to Rossetti’s publisher, Ellis; and Ellis imparted it to Rossetti, who thereupon wrote to his brother, William:
     “What do you think?—Ellis writes me that Maitland is—Buchanan! Do you know Buchanan’s prose, and can you judge it to be so? If it be, I’ll not deny myself the fun of a printed Letter to the Skunk.”
     As a preliminary, he relieved his outraged feelings by dashing off a limerick:

As a critic, the Poet Buchanan
Thinks Pseudo much safer than Anon.
     Into Maitland he’s shrunk,
     Yet the smell of the skunk
Guides the shuddering nose to Buchanan.

     As was to be expected, the Contemporary article attracted a flood of criticism, and “Thomas Maitland” was pilloried far and wide. Taxed by the Athenæum with sheltering himself behind a pseudonym, Buchanan protested that the omission of his signature was due to “editorial inadvertence.” A figure of speech, this, for he had given explicit instructions that his name should be suppressed.
     The Athenæum announced, a little incautiously, that Sidney Colvin was “preparing an answer.” When, in the next issue, Colvin disclaimed any such intention, on the grounds that he had no desire to puff the author, Buchanan registered annoyance. “I cannot,” he wrote, “reply to the insolence of Mr. ‘Sidney Colvin,’ whoever he is. My business is to answer the charge implied in ⁹⁴ the paragraph you published ten days ago, accusing me of having criticized Mr. D. G. Rossetti under a nom de plume. I certainly wrote the article on ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ but had nothing to do with the signature. Mr. Strahan, the publisher of the Contemporary Review, can corroborate me thus far, as he is best aware of the inadvertence which led to the suppression of my own name.”
     Unfortunately, this burst of candour was discounted by the appearance in another column of the same number of the Athenæum of a letter from the retiring Mr. Strahan himself.

                                                                                                               “December 6, 1871.

     “In your last issue you associate the name of Mr. Robert Buchanan with the article ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ by Thomas Maitland in a recent number of the Contemporary Review. You might with equal propriety associate with the article the name of Mr. Robert Browning, or of Mr. Robert Lytton, or of any other Robert.”

     The Athenæum had a caustic note about this impudent attempt on the part of Strahan to throw dust in the editorial eyes:

     “Mr. Buchanan’s letter is an edifying comment on Messrs. Strahan’s. Messrs. Strahan apparently think that it is a matter of no importance whether signatures are correct or not, and that Mr. Browning had as much to do with the article as Mr. Buchanan. Mr. Buchanan seems equally indifferent, but he now claims the critique as his. It is a pity the publisher of the Contemporary Review should be in such uncertainty about the authorship of the articles in that magazine. It may be only a matter of taste, but we prefer, if we are reading an article by Mr. Buchanan, that it should be signed by ⁹⁵ him, especially when he praises his own poems; and that little ‘inadvertencies’ of this kind should not be left uncorrected till the public find them out.”

     Buchanan did not sit down under this belabouring. In a letter to the Athenæum he once more strenuously denied that he had “praised his own poetry,” and protested that his publisher’s “vindication of the nom de plume seems to be complete. . . . I should certainly,” he added, “not have hesitated to affix ‘Thomas Maitland’ to the article if I had thought it worth while. I was merely recording the experience, almost novel to the public in this instance, of a person who had not the honour of Mr. Rossetti’s personal acquaintance. I am sorry that this gentleman’s friends, who have done so much for him in other ways, did not dissuade him from publishing so inconsequent a letter.”
     This effusion attracted a devastating response:

     “We cannot compliment Mr. Buchanan on his temper or his accuracy. His onslaught on ‘The Fleshly School’ contains at least two allusions to his own poetry—one which he mentions above, and another at the very outset. . . . As Mr. Strahan has taken refuge in the columns of a contemporary, we must decline to follow him; but Mr. Buchanan must be easily contented if Mr. Strahan’s ‘vindication’ satisfied him.”

     The “contemporary” to which Strahan had sent his version was the Pall Mall Gazette. What he had said there was that his original letter was not concerned with the authorship of the article, but was “simply intended as a protest against the intolerable system of gossip-mongering to which our firm has been so frequently subjected.

                                                                                                                                                               96

6

     Although admitting that “the temptation was considerable,” William Michael Rossetti, when consulted by him, suggested that his brother would “find it in the long run more to his comfort and dignity to take no public steps whatever for the scarifying of Mr. Maitland.” But the counsel was not adopted. Rossetti’s blood pressure had reached boiling point, and he composed a furious response in the form of a pamphlet. On being warned, however, that it was libellous, he withdrew it before actual publication. But, resolved to “have a shot at Buchanan,” he sent an emasculated version of it, headed “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” to the Athenæum, where it filled four columns. In this he certainly discharged a broadside at the soi-disant “Thomas Maitland.” Thus, he dubbed him a “minstrel in mufti” and a “fretful poet critic”; and complained of a “preposterous imputation” in the Contemporary article, where he found “a species of critical masquerade,” and an “immense amount of personal paltriness,” together with much “pure nonsense” and “covert rancour,” and a good deal more to the same effect.
     Until, however, he got properly into his stride, this “Stealthy School of Criticism” response was a little involved. Thus, the first paragraph ran:
     “For here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice, however, not by enunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism was—as itself originally inculcated—but an early caterpillar stage, the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who likes to sport in sunlight and yet to elude the grasp, is after all the pseudonymous.”
⁹⁷     This has been described by A. C. Benson in his study of Rossetti (English Men of Letters) as “most dignified in manner,” and also as an example of “simple, nervous, unaffected English.” Hall Caine declared it to be “temperate, but not very effective”; and William Michael Rossetti said, in brotherly fashion, “To me it appears a very sound and telling piece of self-vindication.” Nobody, however, pointed out that it was hysterical, over emphasised, and calculated to defeat its object.
     William Michael Rossetti, by the way, had already upset Buchanan by dubbing him “a poor and pretentious poetaster who was causing storms in tea cups.” This rankled. “From that instant,” said Buchanan, “I considered myself free to strike at the whole Coterie, which I finally did, at the moment when all the journals were sounding extravagant pæans over the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. My criticism in the Contemporary Review was not conscientiously dishonest; I really believed then that Rossetti was an affected, immoral, and overpraised writer.”
     A few months later Buchanan, his malice and prejudice unabated, returned to the attack. He then republished his Contemporary article as a two-and-sixpenny pamphlet under his own name, but in expanded form and with an additional touch of venom and a special slap at Swinburne. During the interval things had not improved. “Fleshliness” was still rampant. Sensuality in all directions. “Look which way I will,” he moaned, “the horrid thing threatens and paralyses me. It lies on the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne’s tale.”
     This was bad. Yet, worse was to follow. “Never,” ⁹⁸ declared a second passage, “was this Snake, which not all the naturalists of the world have been able to scotch, so vital and poisonous as now. It has penetrated into the very sweetshops; and there, among the commoner sorts of confectionary, may be seen this year models of the female Leg, the whole definite and elegant article as far as the thigh, with a fringe of paper cut in imitation of the female drawers and embroidered in the female fashion!”
     A disturbing vision. In fact, not far removed from exhibitionism. When he first encountered it, poor Buchanan very nearly took to his bed. However, he cheered up by reflecting that things were not quite so deplorable as they seemed; and that “the pure soul of English maidenhood still blooms as brightly as ever.”
     The Athenæum thought very little of this full-dress pamphlet; and finished up a long review by calling it “a worthless and discreditable treatment of what might have been a perfectly just and interesting question of criticism.” A really sound comment was that of Richard Horne. “Supposing,” he wrote, in the preface to his Orion, “there were such a school, why should it not exist as well as schools that preach exclusively of the spirit?” A reasonable question, but one to which nobody was prepared to furnish an answer.
     William Michael Rossetti says that his brother was “in the first instance annoyed and partly amused . . . but in the sequel, when the same article, in an extended form, was republished as a pamphlet, he was unfortunately very much more annoyed and not amused at all. On the contrary, he foolishly and blameably took very much to heart this ill-conditioned attack, with its many imputations or implications of low and bad moral tone in his writings, and of low and bad moral motives conducing to that ⁹⁹ tone.” Dante Gabriel also wrote to Joseph Knight: “You may be sure that these monstrous libels—both the pamphlet and its press results—cause me great pain.” Yet Buchanan had the effrontery to declare that his pamphlet was “a mere drop of gall in an ocean of eau sucrée.”

7

     There seemed to be no end to the ripples Buchanan had stirred up by the Contemporary article. A second one, “The Fleshly School Scandal,” appeared in Tinsley’s Magazine. This, which was from another pen, had some acid things to say about his bona fides, and even charged him point blank with having been inspired by pique at the comparative non-success of his own poems. But the contention, while shared in several quarters, was not definitely established.
     “In spite of the shriek of protest raised,” declared Buchanan with smug assurance, “the blow was decisive, and the Coterie collapsed like a house of cards.”
     But here Buchanan was wrong. The “Coterie” did not collapse. Something had evidently gone astray; and it was Buchanan himself who was in danger of “collapse.” As a result of the rumpus, his stock rather fell. Publishers and editors and theatrical managers were getting a little shy of him, and did not want to be embroiled in his disputes. “Safety first.”
     John Coleman, an actor-manager of the Vincent Crummles pattern, says that “‘The Fleshly School’ criticism had barred the doors of the theatre to him.” However, preferring Buchanan to Shakespeare, he commissioned him to write an “inaugural ode” for a revival of Henry V at the Queen’s. Hearing of this, a well-wisher offered Coleman friendly counsel. “If the ‘Fleshly ¹⁰⁰ School’ gang,” he said, “learn to whom you have given the job, they’ll go for you bald-headed. Better keep it dark, my boy.” Coleman did better than “keep it dark.” He spread a cunning story to the effect that the lines were written by Swinburne. Apparently, this was swallowed, for, when it was delivered in the theatre, the address had a rapturous reception. Charles Reade’s friend, Mrs. Seymour, told Coleman that, on the first night, she met “an eminent critic, who gushed over ‘Swinburne’s magnificent composition,’ alleging it worthy of Shakespeare himself, When, however, she informed this pundit that the real author was Robert Buchanan, he exclaimed in a flush of indignation, ‘A fraud, madam, a vile fraud! Had I known it was written by that red-headed Scotsman, I’d have crucified the wretch!’”
     A somewhat similar experience also befell Buchanan at the hands of another critic. He had published, under a pseudonym, a ballad of more than average quality. Struck by its power, Thomas Purnell, praised it highly in the Athenæum. When Swinburne took him to task for thus giving Buchanan a “lift,” Purnell had to confess that he was unaware of the real authorship.
     Despite these set-backs, the stirrer up of all this rumpus was not without his champions. Conspicuous among them were Cardinal Manning, Leicester Warren (afterwards Lord de Tabley), and the editor of the Christian World. Support from each of them. Thus, the Cardinal sent him “a private message, approving what he had done and desiring to make his acquaintance”; the peer designed a cover for his pamphlet; and the editor declared that “Mr. Buchanan had, by his masterly article, done a real service to literature and morals, while the efforts of Swinburne and Rossetti to discredit him, both as a man and a poet, will form one of the most humiliating episodes in the literary history of our generation.” ¹⁰¹ Thus was healing balm poured into Buchanan’s wounds.
     He was also given a public dinner by a select body of sympathisers. They meant well. The staff work, however, was clearly at fault, for the musical programme with which the feast was punctuated included a ballad, of which Rossetti was the author.
     In addition to the attack on Rossetti, the Buchanan pamphlet had a special slap at Swinburne. This, said the author, was “because he had gone out of his way to print, in a note in one of his prose essays, an insulting allusion to the friend of my boyhood, David Gray, whose premature death I still mourned deeply.” Here he was not far wrong, for Swinburne had certainly been unnecessarily slighting and contemptuous towards this youth and “his poor little book,” as he called it.
     But Buchanan at his worst was never as bitter and offensive about Swinburne as was a much more obscure writer. This was Mortimer Collins, who, in a singularly ridiculous novel, Two Plunges for a Pearl, introduced him as “Mr. Reginald Swynfen, favourite poet of the ladies and the Pre-Raffaelites.” He could also write of him in this manner: “It was hard to criticise Swynfen’s face, for the vast amount of bright yellow hair which he wore wherever hair would grow; but his eyes, small and deep-sunk, were of an intense blue, like the first flame of a lucifer match. Swynfen firmly believed himself the greatest poet; and his fury, if anybody ventured to doubt this, was exquisitely amusing. His excitable brain could stand but little wine; a pint of claret made him as mad as the Atys of Catullus.”
     Well, so far as this goes, it is on record that Collins himself was once arrested and hauled off to Bow Street for being drunk at the Alhambra. “An unsavoury creature,” was Rossetti’s verdict.
¹⁰²     Another critic (but one of a very different calibre) to cross swords with Swinburne was Churton Collins. When the poet, annoyed at having an essay he had written disparaged by him in the Quarterly Review, said so in the colums of the Athenæum, all the satisfaction he got was that his “diatribe” consisted of “ribald abuse, deliberate misstatement, deliberate misrepresentation, and sheer nonsense.” Having delivered himself of this opinion, Churton Collins blandly remarked that he “thought highly of the author of ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’ I trust,” he added, unabashed, “Mr. Swinburne will forgive me for speaking so plainly.” So far, however, from extending forgiveness, Swinburne wrote back: “May the God of Letters preserve me from the deep disgrace of ever deserving your commendation.”

8

     If Buchanan hurled brickbats and flourished a bludgeon, Swinburne’s weapons were needle-pointed arrows. These, however, inflicted much more damaging wounds. For one thing, his aim was surer; for another, his public was larger. When, too, it came to invective, he had nothing to learn from anybody. Thus, to him, Byron was “the most affected of sensualists and the most pretentious of profligates”; George Eliot was “an Amazon sprawling over the crupper of her spavined and spurgalled Pegasus”; and John Addington Symonds was “the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers.” He was no less uncomplimentary about Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, and ribald at the expense of such small fry as Arthur Clough and Andrew Lang; while his recorded opinions of Emerson and Froude were such as to make Victorian whiskers quiver and their owners gasp.
¹⁰³     The still remembered smart of what Buchanan had said about him five years earlier in the colums of the Spectator led Swinburne to deal with the “Fleshly School Poetry” criticism in a pamphlet. This, which was called “Under the Microscope,” had a Rabelaisian fluency combined with a Voltairean sting. A prose Dunciad, it tore its subject to ribbons, and left him with scarcely a rag to his back.
     Among the revelations of the “microscope” were the following:

     “A living critic of no less note in the world of letters than himself has drawn public attention to the deep and delicate beauties of his work; to ‘the intense loving tenderness of the coarse woman Nell towards her brutal paramour, and the exquisite delicacy and fine spiritual vision of the old village schoolmaster,’ etc. etc. This pathetic tribute to the poet Buchanan was paid by no less a person than Buchanan the critic.
     “It is really to be regretted that the new fashion of self-criticism should never have been set till now. How much petty trouble, how many paltry wrangles and provocations, what endless warfare of the cranes and pigmies might have been prevented—and by how simple a remedy! How valuable would the applauding comments of other great poets on their own work have been to us for all time! All students of poetry must lament that it did not occur to Milton, for example, to express in public his admiration of ‘Paradise Lost.’ It might have helped to support the reputation of that poem against the severe sentence passed by Mr. Buchanan on its frequently flat and prosaic quality.
     “In that singularly interesting essay on ‘his own tentatives,’ from which we have already taken occasion to glean certain flowers of comparative criticism, Mr. ¹⁰⁴ Buchanan remarks of this contemporary that he seems rather fond of throwing stones in his (Mr. Buchanan’s) direction. This contemporary, however, is not in the habit of throwing stones; it is a pastime which he leaves to the smaller fry of the literary gutter. . . . Mr. Buchanan and his nursing journals have informed us that, to his other laurels, he is entitled to add those of an accomplished sportsman. Surely he must know that there are animals which no one counts as game— which are classed under quite another head than that. Their proper designation it is needless here to repeat; it is one that suffices to exempt them from the honour and the danger common to creatures of a higher kind.”

     Dealing with Buchanan’s suggestion that Rossetti, William Morris, and himself “have long been banded together in a dark and unscrupulous league to decry all works and all reputations but their own,” Swinburne is delivered of a real gem:

     “The only atonement that can ever be made for such a rascally form of malevolence is that which is here offered in the way of confession and penance; the only excuse that can be advanced for such a viperous method of attack is that envy and hatred of his betters have ever been the natural signs and the inevitable appanages of a bad poet, whether he had studied in the fleshly or the skinny school. Remembering this, we can but too easily understand how Mr. Buchanan may have excited the general ill-will of his inferiors; we may deplore, but we cannot wonder, that the author of ‘Liz’ and ‘Nell’ should have aroused a sense of impotent envy in the author of ‘Jenny’ and ‘Sister Helen’; it would not surprise, though it could not but grieve, us to hear that the author of ‘The Earthly Paradise’ was inwardly consumed by the canker of ¹⁰⁵ jealousy when he thought of the ‘Legends of Inverburn’; while, with burning cheeks and downcast eyes, it must be confessed that the author of ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ may well be the prey of rancour yet more keen than theirs when he looks on the laurels that naturally prevent him from sleeping—the classic chaplets that crown the author of ‘Undertones.’”

     The last passage in the Swinburnian dithyrambics explored a fresh field of research:

     “Poor then as it may be in other things, the very lapse of years which has left it weak may help it more surely to determine than stronger ages could the nature of the critical animal. Has not popular opinion passed through wellnigh the same stages with regard to the critic and the toad? What was thought in the time of Shakespeare by dukes as well as by peasants we may all find written in his verse; but we now know on taking up a Buchanan that, though very ugly, it is not in the least venomous, and assuredly wears no precious jewel in its head. Yet is it rather like a newt or blindworm than a toad; there is a mendacious air of the old serpent about it at first sight; and the thing is not even viperous; its sting is as false as its tongue is; its very venom is a lie. But when once we have seen the fang, though innocuous, protrude from a mouth which would fain distil poison and can only distil froth, we need no revelation to assure us that the doom of the creature is to go upon its belly and eat dust all the days of its life.”

     Misled by its title, or possibly confusing the author with research work in another field, several German laboratories sent for copies of “Under the Microscope.” The egregious George Augustus Sala, by the way, ¹⁰⁶ declared this pamphlet to be “one of the finest examples of English prose extant.” Edmund Gosse, however, who did know what he was talking about, says that “it suffers from an inordinate abuse of ironical invective.” A sound criticism.
     Buchanan’s reaction to this took the form of some doggerel verse in St. Paul’s Magazine:

THE MONKEY AND THE MICROSCOPE

A clever Monkey—he can squeak,
Scream, bite, munch, mumble, all but speak;
Studies not merely monkey-sport,
But vices of a human sort.
Is petulant to most, but sweet
To those who pat him, give him meat.
Can imitate to admiration
Man’s gestures, gait, gesticulation;
Is amorous, and takes no pain
To hide his aphrodital vein ;
And altogether, trimly drest
In human breeches, coat and vest,
Looks human, and upon the whole
Lacks nothing, save perchance a Soul.

A clever Monkey!—worth a smile!
How really human is his style;
How worthy of our admiration
Is such delicious imitation!
And I believe with all my might
Religion wrong and Science right,
Seeing a sight to slay all hope
A Monkey use a Microscope!

     Annoyed by them as he was, it was not so much the vulgar references to himself in “The Session of the ¹⁰⁷ Poets” and “The Monkey and the Microscope” that had really stirred Swinburne to wrath as an anonymous ballad, “Jonas Fisher,” which appeared in 1876. An odd production, this. Despite the fact that the Pall Mall Gazette found it “a complete manual of theological chit-chat,” and the Daily Telegraph to be “full of plain, solid Saxon words,” its reception was somewhat less enthusiastic elsewhere. Indeed, one critic remarked point blank, “This poem consists of 240 pages of the most dreary doggerel that was ever yet published.”
     A review copy which reached the Examiner was dealt with in the following fashion:
     “This anonymous poem is said by the ‘London Correspondents’ to be the work of either Mr. Robert Buchanan or the Devil; and delicate as may be the question raised by this double-sided supposition, the weight of probability inclines to the first of these alternatives. That the author, whichever he is, is a Scotchman may be inferred from one or two sneers at the characteristics of his countrymen. . . . There are other and more specific circumstances which favour the report that ‘Jonas Fisher’ is another of the aliases under which Mr. Buchanan is fond of challenging criticism, rather than one of the equally numerous disguises of the Enemy. There is no reason why the Devil should go out of his way to abuse the ‘Fleshly School.’ Now, the hero of this poem has views on some of the tendencies of modern poetry and art which coincide very closely with Mr. Buchanan’s, exhibiting the same nicely balanced and carefully differentiated feelings of scorn for effeminate voluptuousness and delight in that voluptuousness which is manly.”
     The Examiner, by the way, was rather given to caustic criticism, and “a literary dung-fly” was its description of a member of the Civil Service who devoted his spare ¹⁰⁸ time to dabbling in magazine articles. But, where “Jonas Fisher” was concerned it went altogether astray, since responsibility for this particular contribution attached to neither Robert Buchanan nor the Devil. As a matter of fact, the author was the Earl of Southesk. “I wrote the ballad,” he said, when the secret was out, “to put on record my honest opinion of the writings of the Fleshly School.” This “honest opinion” covered a considerable range; and, among the subjects touched upon were art, drama, “fleshliness,” literature, marriage within the prohibited degree, philanthropy, and woman.
     The eponymous protagonist of his lordship’s effort was an Edinburgh shop-assistant who had been “converted.” A step in the right direction, this, for, speaking of his own unregenerated past, he says that:

In former days at eight o’clock,
The shutters closed, the goods put by,
The shop made fast with bar and bolt,
Along the pavement I would hie:
And at a favourite place of call,
Some godless lads I used to meet
From different shops across the way,
And then we swaggered down the street.

All arm in arm we pushed along;
We swore and spat and smoked cheroots,
Kissed modest girls and whistled loud,
And laughed and screeched and yelled like brutes.
And then if money could be raised,
To some low haunt of vice we went,
Where each, according to his mind,
His health consumed, his money spent.

     Happily, he did not persist in these equivocal courses, since he adds:

But now my days in comfort run,
In better things I find my joys;
Good books displace the pipe and glass,
And mission-work my time employs.

¹⁰⁹     But not all of it, for other pursuits have their niche. Thus, he meets a “Christian Irishman,” a tailor who spouts philosophy, and discusses the ethics of self-advertisement.

“Well, Sir, why not?” said I. “The man
Who makes a pair of pants for fame
Deserves reward far more than he
Who runs his bayonet through the same.”

     There were several more verses—hundreds of them— for, “wielding his pen with the easy negligence of a nobleman” (as was once said of Byron), the “narrative” ran to 6,000 lines.
     Across the Border, where the author’s foot was on his native heath, so to speak, the reviewers went into raptures. My Lord was “another Robbie Burns,” declared the Scotsman. “No one who knows what poetry is can doubt that here is poetry of a very high order”; and a Glasgow expert, not to be behindhand, could say that Lord Southesk’s assault upon Parnassus was “rich in suggestiveness as regards the most important problems of human life, blending effectually the humour and the pathos, the meanness and sublimity, the sorrow and the mystery of human life.”
     “Whaur’s your Wullie Shakespeare noo?” demanded whiskered savants in Thrums when they read these pæans.
     But the Examiner had not yet done with Buchanan. Another and more vigorous pin-prick soon appeared in its columns. This was a letter, headed “The Devil’s Due,” which was published there during the following week. “An author,” ran one passage, “haunted by such a horror of the bloodthirsty critics who lie in wait for him has evidently yet to learn the new and precious receipt discovered by Mr. Robert Buchanan (if that be his name) ¹¹⁰ of ‘Every Poeticule his own criticaster,’ a device by which Bavius may at once review his own poems with enthusiasm under the signature of Mævius, and throw dirt up, in passing, with momentary security, at the windows of Horace or of Virgil.
     “I notice also that the present writer has adopted as the object of his servile but ambitious imitation an inimitable contemporary model of original burlesque on which I am not aware that the multifaced idyllist of the gutter has yet attempted to form himself.”
     This screed was signed “Thomas Maitland,” and purported to have come from St. Kilda. A special sting was added by a postscript to the effect that “the writer of the above is at present away from London, on a cruise among the Philippine Islands in his steam yacht Skunk, Captain Shuffleton, master.”
     There was only one pen that could have written this. Buchanan had no difficulty in identifying Swinburne as its wielder.
     Objecting, naturally enough, to being saddled with the futilities of the aristocratic poetaster, Buchanan promptly issued a disclaimer. The Examiner affected to be disturbed thereby. “May we suggest to him,” said an editorial note, “that his talents, which are considerable, would meet with more respect if he would not take to such questionable ways of keeping his name before the public?” Another comment appeared in the World:
     “Mr. Buchanan denies the authorship. Therefore, the readers of the Examiner—the socialist shoemakers of Leicester and the Scotch family to whom it is sent gratis— must believe that ‘Jonas Fisher’ was written by the Devil.”
     Robert Buchanan could deal out hard knocks, but he disliked receiving them. He had bitten other people often enough. Now he was being bitten himself. The “Devil’s ¹¹¹ Due” letter in the Examiner filled him with fury. Rushing off hot foot to his solicitors, he instructed them to “have the law” on the paper’s proprietor.
     This individual was one, Peter Alfred Taylor, a radical politician and Member for Leicester. He was also a zealous champion of unpopular causes. At Westminster he espoused national education (so long as it was unsectarian), the freedom of the Press, and the opening of the museums on Sundays; and he strenuously opposed such bulwarks in the Constitution as the game laws, flogging in the Navy and Army, and the provision of marriage grants for the Royal Family. It was to get a wider publicity for his views than he could secure by his speeches in the House (where he was never taken very seriously) that, in 1873, he bought the Examiner. The best thing he did with it was to appoint William Minto, a versatile writer and stimulating critic, to the editorial chair. Unfortunately, he did not leave him alone there, but insisted on filling the columns with absurd theories of his own. As a result, the paper lost the prestige it had once enjoyed, and was finally wrecked.
     During his regime, Taylor was unpopular with some of his fellow journalists. One of them, Joseph Hatton, had a specially sharp sting for him in the Hornet:
     “It is difficult to this day to know whether he is more despised by the Tories of Leicester or distrusted by the Whigs. . . . He does not possess an Englishman’s instinct for sport, and therefore he cries ‘Down with the Game Laws’; and he has lost some money over one of the most forcibly feeble periodicals, and, we may add, one of the least scrupulous, the world has yet seen. We mean the Anti-Game Law Circular, in which his hirelings did not hesitate to slander the Prince of Wales (through the agency of a Norfolk spy) in the capacity of a country gentleman, , . . He appears to fairly revel in ¹¹² the companionship of the unsexed women who scream out on the platforms their indignation at Acts of Parliament designed to extirpate one of the greatest scourges that affect civilised humanity. He has even figured in a cohort of three on a division to oppose a grant to one of the junior members of the Royal Family.”
     Threatened with an action for libel, Taylor lost his nerve; and, when challenged on the subject, had no scruples about disclosing Swinburne’s authorship of the letter. He also urged the proceedings, if any, should be taken against his contributor, and not against himself. This pusillanimous suggestion, however, was very properly rejected by Buchanan.

10

     Ten days before the action was set down for hearing, Swinburne, quite unperturbed, wrote to Theodore Watts (afterwards Watts-Dunton) that he had received a supœna from Buchanan’s solicitors. Henry Hawkins, Taylor’s counsel, wanted a preliminary consultation with him, but he refused to leave the Garden of Proserpine and give one. Edmund Gosse attributes this obstinacy on his part to the fact that Minto had annoyed him by publishing an article in the Examiner which upset the feelings of Mrs. Lynn Linton. Wheels within wheels.
     As required by his solicitors, Buchanan delivered a statement of claim. This document was of a portentous description and neatly as long as one of his own novels. After setting out in detail the alleged libel in Swinburne’s letter, an extract (full of shockingly bad grammar and tautological jargon) read as follows:
     “The plaintiff says that the said letter was written, printed and published with the malicious intention and ¹¹³ purpose of injuring the plaintiff’s position and reputation as a writer, and of defaming, vilifying, and abusing his personal character; and the plaintiff further says that the said letter was written, printed, and published in pursuance of a wicked and malicious scheme made and devised against the plaintiff as hereinafter described; and with reference to the postscript to said letter above quoted, the plaintiff says that in the year 1871 the plaintiff prepared and handed to the editor of the Contemporary Review a criticism upon a certain school of poetry in England, with a request to the said editor to publish said criticism without any name, as the plaintiff was desirous of not introducing any personal feeling into a question of purely public and general interest.
     “Immediately thereafter the plaintiff left London; and the editor of the said Contemporary Review, with the view of meeting the wish of the plaintiff, and at the same time of preserving the uniformity of his magazine, in which a name is appended to each of the articles, printed plaintiff’s said criticism with the name of Thomas Maitland appended thereto. This the editor did without the knowledge and without the consent of the plaintiff.
     “The plaintiff afterwards explained the circumstances as aforesaid under which the name of Thomas Maitland had been thus appended to his paper aforesaid; and by the said postscript the plaintiff says that it was intended, and was understood by those by and to whom it was published, to accuse the plaintiff of skulking, shuffling, and deceitful conduct with reference to the said article, and of falsehood in his explanation aforesaid.”
     A second passage in this rigmarole added further details:
     “And the plaintiff says that in the course of his public duty as a critic and writer, he has had occasion to examine the works of certain writers of English verse, and to point ¹¹⁴ out that some of the works of these writers were obscene, indecent, and offensive to sound moral and religious taste; and the plaintiff says that, in revenge for the said criticism, and for the purpose of injuring and destroying, as far as in them lay, the influence of the plaintiff as a writer, author, and critic, though the plaintiff had in the said criticism confined his remarks to the works of the said writers and carefully avoided any reference to their private character, certain persons, both the said writers of verse, have for a long time past in several numbers and in several parts of many numbers of the said Examiner persistently, unjustly, and maliciously abused, libelled, and defamed the plaintiff in his professional and personal character; and the defendant has deliberately, knowingly, and maliciously lent himself and his review, the Examiner aforesaid, to this malicious and wicked scheme for the purpose of abusing, vilifying, and defaming the plaintiff as aforesaid, to the plaintiff’s great annoyance, hurt, and damage.”
     Altogether, Robert Buchanan distinctly suggested that the references to himself in the columns of the Examiner did not meet with his approval.
     The defendant had pleaded “justification” for what had appeared in the columns of the Examiner; and to support this contention he submitted a long response to the various interrogatories that had been put him:
     “The defendant says that the articles alleged as libels in the plaintiff’s statement of claim were written and published for the public good, and are fair and bona fide comments on the plaintiff, and on his conduct as a critic, and that they in no way refer to the plaintiff’s private character or to his conduct in private life. The defendant also says that, before the publication of the alleged libels, the plaintiff, in his capacity of a critic, had written under certain assumed names divers criticisms on well-known ¹¹⁵ authors, which criticisms were unfair; and that the plaintiff, under such assumed names, had referred to his own works and written of himself as being amongst writers of the highest repute; and that the alleged libels refer solely to the plaintiff’s conduct herein and not to his character or conduct in private life; and that they are fair and bona fide comments on his conduct herein and were published for the public good.”

11

     Letters having been written by the dozen, and interrogatories administered, answers filed, and red-tape unrolled by the yard, the action, Buchanan v. Taylor, began on June 29, 1876; and was heard before Mr. Justice Archibald and a special jury in the Court of Common Pleas, where it lasted three days. The plaintiff had the services of Charles Russell, Q.C., and the defendant was represented by Henry Hawkins, Q.C.
     The defendant pleaded justification, and alternatively that the matter complained of was not libellous, but fair comment. Of the alleged libels published by the Examiner, the first was in the review which attributed the authorship of the “ Jonas Fisher” ballad to “either Mr. Robert Buchanan or the Devil”; and the second was in the letter headed “The Devil’s Due,” with the signature “Thomas Maitland” attached to it.
     Charles Russell, in his opening address, had a good deal to say about the “Fleshly School.” That he thought very little of it was obvious. It was, he told the shocked jury, “disgraced by an amount of sensation and subtle indecency such as was common among literary men in France, but, happily, seldom to be met with in England.” His client, he said, was the author of an article on the ¹¹⁶ subject, “written in good masculine English,” that had appeared in the Contemporary Review. As a result, he was disparaged by Swinburne in a pamphlet, “Under the Microscope,” and also in a letter, “The Devil’s Due,” that was published in the Examiner. This called him “skulk,” “shuffler,” and “liar,” and several other objectionable things. Although Mr. Swinburne was the author, the action was brought against Mr. Taylor, because it was he who was the proprietor of the paper in which the offending letter had appeared.
     The Earl of Southesk, called by Russell, said that he was “the onlie begetter” of the “Jonas Fisher” poem, and that there was “nothing in it to justify the charge that he sneered at the virtues of Scotsmen.” Hawkins did his best, but was unable to extract anything else from him.
     Buchanan then went into the box, to support the opening statements of his counsel. He had written, he said, the “Fleshly School” criticism “in order to put on record his honest opinions of its members.” As to his previous “Session of the Poets” ballad, that had been inspired by Suckling: “I have never,” he declared, “puffed myself under assumed names, nor have I adopted any improper method of keeping myself before the public.” He admitted, however, that he had at times signed his work “Thomas Maitland,” “Walter Hutcheson,” “Caliban,” and “Senlac.” This course, he said, was adopted “to protect myself from the constant persecution of a clique of literary Mohawks.”
     As the “Devil’s Due” letter did not bear Swinburne’s signature, he was asked how he knew him to be the author of it. ‘‘I recognised his style,” he said. The deduction was an elementary one, for nobody else would have employed such characteristic epithets as “multifaced idyllist” and “polypseudonymous lyrist.” 
¹¹⁷     “Did you,” enquired Hawkins, in the gruelling cross-examination that followed, “tell the editor of the Examiner that he was better acquainted with the devil’s literary style than you were?”
     The question was disallowed by the judge. “I know nothing about that individual’s style,” he said.
     “I hope,” was the bland response, “that your Lordship will continue ignorant of such knowledge.”
     “Laughter in Court!” scribbled the pressmen.
     “Are you aware,” continued Hawkins, “that Mr. Swinburne is an Oxford man and a gentleman?”
     “A gentleman could not possibly have written such a book as Poems and Ballads,” announced Buchanan.
     Hawkins let this assertion pass, and took up a fresh point.
     “In your ‘Session of the Poets’ contribution you describe Mr. Tennyson as saying of him, ‘To the door with the boy. Call a cab. He is tipsy.’ Was Mr. Swinburne drunk?”
     “He was drunk to publish his Poems and Ballads. But in this instance I was referring to his literary character. When I wrote my ‘Session of the Poets’ I had not heard that he exceeded the bounds of moderation. Still, I might have mentioned it as indicative of his character in combination with other things.”
     “Well,” went on Hawkins, “you also said that he had ‘a neck stretching out like a gander.’ Has Mr. Swinburne a specially long neck?”
     “I don’t know.”
     “Still, you said he had one. Then you also say, ‘Master Swinburne glared out of his hair.’ How does a man do that?”
     This was a poser. The witness could not answer it. He had the sense not to try.
     Swinburne had written “Under the Microscope,” and ¹¹⁸ Buchanan had written “The Monkey and the Microscope,” as a rejoinder.
     “Was it intended to wound Mr. Swinburne?” he was asked.
     “It was written while I was smarting under my own wrongs.”
     “Do you now regret it?”
     “I have always regretted it.”
     “Here is an extract from something else written by you,” went on Hawkins remorselessly, turning to another page of his brief:

When Judges in white hats to Epsom Down
Drive, gay as Tom and Jerry, folk don’t frown.

Is that poetry?”
     “I trust,” interrupted Mr. Justice Archibald, “it is not considered wrong to wear a white hat. I wear one myself, sometimes.”
     Once more, the automatic entry, “Laughter in the Court!”
     During his evidence, it transpired that, despite his horror of “fleshliness,” wherever it existed, Buchanan was a stout champion of Walt Whitman, for whose benefit he had once headed a subscription. This was a pill which some of his staunchest admirers had a difficulty in swallowing. But he stood up for him, and, when questioned on the subject, he declared Whitman to be a “collossal mystic, in the highest sense a spiritual person,” and that “his indelicacy could be excused on the grounds of his youth at the time his first books were published.” Thereupon, Hawkins invited the jury to consider a number of extracts from these works. On account, however, of what (tempus 1876) he dubbed “their deplorable filthiness,” they were not read aloud, but were merely shown to them.
¹¹⁹   “It is impossible,” was the austere comment of one reporter, “to give some of the questions put to the plaintiff by the learned counsel. This is because they were founded on passages occurring in books and poems that cannot be reproduced in our columns. As it was, a number of ladies occupying the public seats were so embarrassed that they left abruptly when Mr. Hawkins was quoting from Messrs. Swinburne, Rossetti, and Walt Whitman, and also from the works of Mr. Buchanan himself.”
     Under the circumstances, it was perhaps as well that women jurors were not, at this date, part of our legal system.
     When, however, Russell re-examined him, Buchanan said that he had given public readings from his own poems, in the Hanover Square Rooms; and that on one such occasion the audience had included the Duchess of Argyll, and that her Grace had not experienced any untoward result from their recital.
     “Perhaps she did not understand them,” suggested the learned judge when this point was made.
     The fact that no witnesses were called by the other side gave Russell an opportunity. He made the most of it. His point was that, notwithstanding his plea of justification, the defendant had not contradicted the plaintiff in any particular, or put Minto, the editor of the Examiner, or Swinburne, the author of the “Devil’s Due” contribution, into the box. As for the Contemporary article, about which so much fuss had arisen, this, he contended, was “marked by moderation and ability.” He also advanced a theory, hitherto unaccepted by philologists, viz., that “polypseudonymous” was an expression derived from the Latin. However, nobody contradicted him.
     It was because he wanted to have the last word that Hawkins had not called any witnesses. This was a tactical ¹²⁰ error, since it prevented him getting the jury’s opinion on the merits of certain of Buchanan’s own compositions. Possibly, if they had studied his “Nuptial Song” and his “White Rose and Red” they might have thought he had nothing of which to complain in respect of the output of his brother bards. Still the alleged “fleshliness” of a poet was, argued Hawkins, not a matter that really concerned the jury. Their business, he pointed out, was merely to settle if the plaintiff had been libelled in the Examiner; and, if so, what degree of responsibility attached to the proprietor of that journal. In his submission, no such responsibility attached to him. Peter Taylor had not written the article, and it had not been shown that he bore any malice. It was true, he remarked, that Mr. Gladstone had given the plaintiff a Civil List pension, but he felt that “if the Right Hon. gentleman were familiar with certain of his poems, he would not have been very favourably disposed towards their author.” Counsel also argued that “a man who could extol the infamously indecent works of Walt Whitman had no right to condemn the fleshly school. Nor,” he added, “has Mr. Buchanan himself come into court with clean hands, since certain of his own poems are characterised by suggestiveness.”
     When he came to sum up the evidence, Mr. Justice Archibald made it abundantly clear that he himself strongly disapproved of anything even remotely connected with “fleshliness.” He also went rather out of his way to deliver a disquisition on literary ethics. “There was nothing,” he declared in solemn tones, “more deplorable than to see men of high ability choosing degrading subjects for the themes of their writings instead of others which would not stimulate and inflame the lowest passions.” He also observed that “a great deal of the poetry written by persons belonging to the ‘Fleshly School’ had ¹²¹ better never have been written at all, and that if it had been committed to the flames the world would have been much purer and better.”
     Since he was the proprietor of the paper in which they appeared, the fact that the defendant had not himself written the libels did not, the judge pointed out, absolve him from legal responsibility. “None the less,” added his lordship, “it would have been more satisfactory if Mr. Swinburne, instead of Mr. Taylor, had been the defendant.” Having said this (and several other things), he left it to the twelve men in the box to settle among themselves if the plaintiff was entitled to damages, and, if so, to what amount.
     Thus instructed, the slightly be-fogged jury retired to consider their verdict. At the end of fifteen minutes they announced that they found for the plaintiff.

12

     Buchanan had claimed £5,000 as a plaster for the wound to his feelings inflicted by Swinburne’s description of him as a “polypseudonymous lyrist and libeller of the gutter.” The jury, however, had considered £150 to be adequate for the purpose, thereby implying that they only held 3 p.c. of his claim to be good and 97 p.c. of it to be bad.
     Nobody (except the lawyers) was any the better for the result of the action. It is true that Buchanan was awarded damages, but he was not “rehabilitated,” as he declared; and Swinburne was told from the Bench that much of his poetry should be put in the fire. Theodore Watts, always anxious to pour oil on troubled waters, suggested that he should contribute towards the cost in which his employer had been involved. Swinburne, however, ¹²² flatly refused to entertain the suggestion. He was quite unrepentant, and even proposed to publish “The Devil’s Due” letter in a collection of essays. Fearful of further proceedings being launched, his friends managed to stop him in the nick of time.
     There was, however (apart from the well-fee’d lawyers and their myrmidons) one individual who did perhaps gain something. This was the proprietor of the Examiner. Although he lost the action, he none the less secured, on comparatively reasonable terms, much valuable knowledge as to what could, and what could not, appear in his columns.
     As for the plaintiff, some equally sharp things were said about him in other papers. “How far it was worth Mr. Buchanan’s while,” announced one of them, “to submit on these terms to his ordeal at the hands of Mr. Hawkins is a point on which different opinions will be held. The general feeling, however, will be that between the literary purity of Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Swinburne there is nothing to choose; and that it was merely by a technicality that the positions of the plaintiff and the defendant were not reversed. The squabble is one which should never have been ventilated in the law-courts; and the proceedings there can only be regarded as a scandal to literature.”
     “Some untutored people,” remarked another austere publicist, “may need to be told who Mr. Buchanan is. He has afforded the student of life and works plenty of autobiographical material. Sometimes, we have had him writing on the loves and deaths of costermongers and their wenches; and on this theme he has poured himself forth with a great deal of energy and feeling.”
     This stern critic was not alone, for Watts-Dunton, writing to Swinburne in December 1872, refers to “the offal called ‘Buchanan’s poetry,’” and to the author himself ¹²³ as “this Barnum of Literature” and “that superlative cad.”
     Clearly, no love lost between them.
     Still, Robert Buchanan was not without his stalwarts. Conspicuous among them was the Rev. Mr. Wylie, editor of the Christian World.
     “All the damage that could be inflicted on the plaintiff by such an ingenious cross-examiner as Mr. Hawkins,” declared this authority, “was employed to discredit his case. But I am happy to say that the cause of justice triumphed, even before a special jury in the Court of Common Pleas.”
     Everything depends on the point of view.
     Experience was wasted on Buchanan. He could not leave well alone. During the following year the Contemporary Review published an article, “The Newest Thing in Journalism.” Although anonymous, Robert Buchanan, who had written it, might just as well have put his name to it at once, for there was no mistaking his authorship. What it amounted to was a covert sneer at “Society papers” in general, and in particular at Edmund Yates and the “haunting gentility and familiar gossip” of the World which he had just established. There were also gibes at Henry Labouchere and the columns of Truth, an organ referred to as “exclusively devoted to articles in which vulgar women delight.”
     Labouchere took no notice, but Yates, stung to the quick, riposted with an account of the circumstances under which he had first met Buchanan in 1861. It was not flattering to him:
     “At the outset of his (Buchanan’s) career I had the opportunity for many months of rendering him service of a real and practical kind; so far real and practical that it was solely through me that he did not actually die of starvation, and add one more to the number of those ¹²⁴ self-sufficient low-born lads who, confident in their own genius, exchange the dung fork and the country farmyard for the London grave.
     “. . . . To my private house one evening, bearing a letter of introduction from a common acquaintance, came Mr. R. W. Buchanan, then a mere youth of two or three-and-twenty, very shabbily dressed, very dirty, very ‘creepy’ altogether. Mr. Buchanan is in the frequent habit of quoting Mr. Browning’s phrase about a ‘scrofulous French novel’; but I am of opinion, having tried both, that a scrofulous Scotch poet is a far more unpleasant object in a room. He told me of his woes, of his poverty (which was positively appalling) and made a most piteous appeal to me to give him work. . . . I obtained for him not only constant remunerative work, but advances of money from his employer, Mr. Maxwell, who, in his own person and through his wife Miss Braddon, is sneered at and ridiculed in the Contemporary article. . . . I, who stepped out of my way to do this man a kindness, and out of my own small means lent him money to buy bread for his stomach and sulphur for his back, am a ‘retailer of gossip,’ with whom no society of respectable men—not to say, gentlemen—would associate for ten minutes, while Mr. Robert Buchanan, who stings the hand that succoured him, and anonymously stabs those who saved his tainted life, is a ‘Contemporary Reviewer,’ the sot-disant guide, philosopher and friend of all cleanly people who respect honest literature and live earnest lives.”
     The subject of this scarifying did not appear to be upset. “Happily,” he wrote to Hall Caine, “I have a thick epidermis, and the courage of an approving conscience.”
     A staunch admirer of Buchanan protests that this attitude on the part of the editor of the World was entirely ¹²⁵ unjustifiable. “Yates,” he says, in a book of somewhat fatuous memoirs, “fell foul of Robert Buchanan for some reason, and published the most outrageous attack on the poet that had been written since the scurrilities of the last century. . . . Yates had no proper justification.” Unfortunately, this champion is scarcely convincing, for he adds: “Buchanan wrote good poetry, and was credited with founding the Fleshly School.”
     “Save me from my friends!” Buchanan might have echoed when he saw with what he was “credited.”
     Buchanan bided his time and had “another whack” at Labouchere and Yates. This was in one of his novels, The Martyrdom of Madeline, where, in clumsy fashion, he caricatured the pair as “Lagardere, of the Plain Speaker,” and “Edgar Yahoo, of the Whirligig.”
     It does not sound particularly rib-rending.

13

     Like a good many other controversialists, Buchanan mellowed with the passage of years. His opinions then changed, and he withdrew or recast judgments he had once pronounced with such glibness.
     “Nobody knows better,” he wrote, “than I how, in these random flights of the literary arena, a man loses his temper and strikes harder than he needs. I have many such sins on my conscience.” His attitude towards Rossetti pressed heavily on this organ; and, with a view to healing the wounds he had once inflicted, he dedicated to him, figuring for the purpose as “An Old Enemy,” a novel, God and the Man, prefaced by a couple of verses:

TO AN OLD ENEMY

I would have snatch’d a bay leaf from thy brow,
     Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and charity I bring thee now
     A lily-flower instead.

Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,                                    126
     Sweet as thy spirit may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
     And take the gift from me.

     Buchanan called this amende “a sacred thing between his spirit and mine.” Unfortunately, it fell rather flat, as Rossetti affected to think it was really intended for Swinburne. But Buchanan was not upset by this attitude. “It is,” he declared, “a melancholy pleasure to me to reflect that he understood the dedication and accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered.” Then, when Rossetti died, he wrapped himself in a white sheet and once more took back everything he had said to his detriment. Thus, in the Academy for July, 1882, he wrote: “Mr. Rossetti, I freely admit now, never was a Fleshly Poet at all; never, at any rate, fed upon the poisonous honey of French art.” As if this were not enough, he complained that somebody, “in a religious review,” had served up afresh “all the hasty expressions and uninstructed abuse that I published in hot haste ten years ago, and have since, as my readers know, repented. . . . That I should have ranked myself with the Philistines and encouraged them to resist an ennobling and refining influence (of which they stood and stand so mournfully in need) must remain to me a matter of permanent regret.”
     In a second edition of God and the Man there was another dedicatory verse:

I never knew thee living, O my brother!
     But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
And by that token we shall know each other
     When God’s voice saith ‘Arise!’

     The respective authors of “The Fleshly School” and “Nuptial Sleep” exchanging opinions and chatting amicably in the Elysian Fields conjures up an odd picture.
¹²⁷     Buchanan, thinking it high time to bury the hatchet in other quarters, also endeavoured to make his peace with Yates and Labouchere, whom he addressed in a ballad:

So, Edward, Henry, pax vobiscum,
     Arcades ambo, here’s adieu!
All strife, all hate, at last to this come—
     The silent grave, the sunless yew.
The scandal-monger, the truth-seeker,
     The man of this world or a fairer,
Must drink at last of the same beaker,
     Whereof a skeleton is bearer.

Afoot or horse-back, proud or prone,
     Continue beautiful and brave,
And take a smile, and not a stone
     From him who walketh all alone
     The common highway to the grave.

It was not a very successful effort.

14

     All said and done, Robert Buchanan was largely his own enemy. If he were—as he often protested—something of an Ishmael among his brethren, it was he himself who was mainly responsible. Spiteful and cantankerous, and aggressive and petulant, his jealousy and conceit led him to quarrel with and insult people who had done him a good turn, in particular Edmund Yates and John Maxwell. He was rude to Mrs. Langtry during the rehearsal of one of his plays, and “indulged in an unseemly fracas” with Clement Scott who had criticised it unfavourably; he fell foul of Walter Besant and George Moore; and he was annoyed with Rudyard Kipling. In fact, so much so that he was once delivered of a flatulent article, describing his work as “The Voice of the ¹²⁸ Hooligan,” with a long tirade to the effect that it was “chiefly devoted to the affairs of idle military men, savage soldiers, frisky wives and widows, and flippant civilians, and banalities about the English Flag, strongly seasoned with suggestions of social impropriety.” When Besant challenged these views, and said in temperate language why he did so, Buchanan lost his temper. He made a point or two, certainly; unfortunately, the points were blunted.
     But, despite the lofty opinion he entertained of his merits, Buchanan’s own niche in the world of letters was a humble one. A certain amount of his poetry was perhaps fair to middling; much of his prose was the merest twaddle, a hotch-potch of rhodomontade and fustian. One of his novels, indeed, was declared by Froude to be “the worst he had ever read.” He is not mentioned in the encyclopædiac anthology of Garnett and Gosse; and the Cambridge History of English Literature grades him among the “lesser poets and novelists.”
     It was Mrs. Lynn Linton who said of Robert Buchanan that “he wrote sentimental bunkum with splendid literary power.” He also wrote very quickly. Far too quickly. “His faculty of execution,” says his fugleman, Henry Murray, “was something astounding—almost disquieting. I have known him produce a one-volume novel of the length of 50,000 words in twelve days, and a three-act comedy, which ran for over a year in London, was invented in less than a week. . . . His professedly poetical work alone makes something like the bulk of Browning’s, and many times the bulk of Tennyson’s. Add to this the writing (and personal production) of over fifty plays; the writing of more than thirty novels, and of a camel-load of critical, polemical, and sociological et ceteras.”
     Although he was always complaining of not being ¹²⁹ “recognised” at his proper value, Buchanan, as a matter of fact, really had very little of which to complain. Everybody who seeks a footing in the congested literary market has his struggles at the start; and those of this one were soon surmounted. On the threshold of his career he was given employment by editors and publishers, when better qualified applicants were hammering at the doors and being repulsed. He was allotted a Civil List pension before he was thirty; his novels enjoyed a ready sale; his poems were appreciated far beyond their merits; and he also made considerable sums from his dramas. But his successes did him little good. He threw away his prospects by quarrelling, and his money by ill considered speculation and gambling. The Turf proved a costly lure. “At one moment,” says George R. Sims, with whom he had collaborated for the theatre, “he would, in a fit of poetic exaltation, imagine himself conversing with the Almighty on Hampstead Heath; and the next moment he would be rushing to the telephone, to ask if such-and-such a horse had pulled off the big race. . . . He was a born gambler and when he began to make money in the theatre he took to the Turf, and most recklessly when he was in financial difficulties.”
     Yet, despite these, and a number of less endearing, qualities, Buchanan had his points. If a fierce and unforgiving enemy, he was a warm-hearted friend and generous to a fault where his sympathies were aroused. “He could,” says Henry Murray, “hear of no case of poverty or suffering and rest until he had relieved it; and for many years he was the milch-cow of every impecunious scribbler in London. His nationality must have cost him many scores of pounds per annum, because at all times open to the moving influence of a tale of woe, he would always reward with a double gratuity any such ¹³⁰ tale that was told with a Scotch accent. The actor who had fallen on evil times dined sumptuously on the day he met Buchanan.”
     R. E. Francillon, a mid-Victorian novelist, once found Buchanan allotted to him as collaborator in a Christmas Annual. He approached the task with misgiving.
     “I had,” he says, “never met the poet, and I was considerably prejudiced against him by my association with the circle of Swinburne and Rossetti. I recalled the advice that had once been given me: ‘ If you are ever introduced to Buchanan, knock him down then and there. You’ll have to do it sooner or later, so it will be best to get it over quickly.”
     When, however, the introduction was effected, Francillon was agreeably surprised.
     “Gentleness and courtesy,” he says, “are not characteristic of the legendary Buchanan; but of my recollection of him they certainly are. Nor did I so much as once hear from this literary Ishmael an unkindly word. Of envy, hatred or malice he was incapable as if there were no such things.”
     But this opinion was delivered before the Examiner action had been heard.
     “He had a contempt for money,” says somebody else. Well, when people have a contempt for money, money is apt to have a contempt for them. It was so in Buchanan’s case. Financial troubles and business anxieties dogged his last years. He took characteristic steps to remedy them. Convinced that he was being “boycotted,” he tried publishing his books and producing his plays at his own expense. The result was that he had to seek the cold shelter of the bankruptcy court and relinquish his copyrights for the benefit of his creditors. Then, although he was scarcely sixty, ill-health settled upon him; and he suffered much from angina and was often ¹³¹ in paroxysms of pain. This was followed by a paralytic stroke, which left him helpless. Hence, it was perhaps a merciful release when, in June 1901, death came to him. He was buried at Southend, where his wife, to whom he had been devoted, had died twenty years earlier.

_____

Other Accounts of the Fleshly School Controversy - continued