ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

REMINISCENCES OF BUCHANAN (2)

Some Celebrities I Have Known by A. Stodart Walker (from Chambers’s Journal - 16 January and 13 February, 1909).

[Note: Archibald Stodart Walker wrote a series of four articles under this title for Chambers’s Journal, beginning in the issue of 19th December, 1908 and ending in the issue of 3rd April, 1909. The section dealing with Robert Buchanan was split over the two intervening issues.]

     At home I met many Scotsmen of letters—James Grant, William Black, Alexander Nicholson, Dr Walter Smith, Mr Barrie, Sir Noel Paton, Mr Sellar, Sir Douglas Maclagan, Dr John Brown, Robertson Smith, and others; but of all the personalities that appealed to me by its essential ‘bigness,’ that of Robert Buchanan easily came first. If there ever lived a man who on the surface was the possessor of a definite dual personality, that was the author of The City of Dream and Undertones. To the general member of the great republic of letters Robert Buchanan was often a thorn in the flesh. He seemed to possess the remarkable capacity of quarrelling with nearly every fellow of his craft; with this rider: he always maintained an easy friendship with such men as Lecky, Herbert Spencer, Browning, and Tennyson, and it must not be deduced from this that I infer that all the men with whom he crossed swords were of the smaller fry. His antagonists included Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and a few of the men of letters who hold at this moment a large place in public estimation. From his own deliberate choice he became, as he called himself, ‘The Ishmael of Song,’ and an Ishmael with the instincts of a fighter. The very curious anomaly in Buchanan’s character was that though he had the best of the combat, he complained that he was unfairly treated in having to fight at all, even though he was the first to put on the gloves. At the beginning of a campaign he, indeed, shook his plumes with fiery glee. Often have I received a letter from him commencing something after this fashion: ‘I am preparing a grand broadside for So-and-so.’ ‘Did you see that X. dares to patronise me in the ——? Look out in Saturday’s ——. You will see that I don’t take this kind of thing lying down.’ And yet, in the spirit of the coster song, ‘He would black your eye one moment and stand a pint the next.’ The spirit of pity never deserted him, and he did not conceive it possible for him to bear a lifelong enmity. One thing is absolutely certain, and is worth remembering by those who complain of Buchanan’s belligerent methods. With the single exception of his anonymous attack on Rossetti—which he withdrew and apologised for in the most graceful and poetical way—he never attacked a man in the press without putting his name on the literary weapon.
     For many years I was one of Buchanan’s most intimate friends. We were as opposite temperamentally as the poles are geographically, but during all the years I enjoyed his comradeship we never once came even to the borderland of a quarrel. In private life he was remarkably patient and sympathetic, and was possessed of that first of all virtues, a sense of humour, without which companionship is impossible. He was of a surety a triumph of personality. He seemed an anachronism in the nineteenth century. His blood was too hot, he was too impatient, too downright, too pagan, too Bohemian, too thoroughly irrespectable, for the graceful ways of modern civilisation. He was Richard Steele, Robert Burns, Heine, Charles Dickens, and Walt Whitman rolled into one, with this qualification—if it be necessary—he never was an amorist at large and he never was intemperate. His brain, indeed, was eclectic and nineteenth century, but his heart was of the seventeenth and the eighteenth. He had a marked dislike for bigwigs and crowned authorities, whether in politics, religion, or literature, and an equal disdain of the charlatan and the Pecksniff. He loved Scotland, but he was intolerant to Edinburgh; and when I was first introduced to him, and was indicated as a member of the teaching staff of the Medical Faculty of the University, he immediately labelled me ‘the village apothecary.’
     He was full of the joy of living, and heaped bushels of scorn on the dreary crowd of literary undertakers whom he labelled ‘the dismal throng.’ But even at times his own optimism—in the face of failure, neglect, and ill-health—would occasionally waver. ‘It’s all very well,’ he wrote to me once, ‘for me to croak anathema on the Dismal Folk, but I’m a dismal, self-tormenting creature myself; and as for the joy of life, my share in it is a flickering candle. Friday next is my birthday. I shall keep it in the coal-cellar, with a sheet around me and ashes on my head. Why the deuce was I ever born?’ ‘I have had the usual experience of original men,’ he wrote at another time. ‘My worst work has been received with more or less toleration, and my best work misunderstood or neglected; while the self-authorised critical pilots who haunt the shallows of journalism have agreed that I am a factious and opinionated mariner, doomed, like my own Dutchman in The Outcast, to eternal damnation because, like my prototype, I have once or twice been provoked to violent language. For nearly a generation I have suffered a constant literary persecution. Even the good Samaritans have passed me by. Yet I survive, as you know, and may even call myself contented, hating no man, fearing no man, envying no man. Few men, however, have had to struggle harder even for the merest food and air.’
     Of his kindness to me I cannot write in cold ink. It was the embodiment of unselfish generosity, and when I recall the hundreds of little acts of charity performed for others I sometimes wonder why he had so few friends. To me he seemed the most exhilarating and absorbing of men, despite our divergence at myriads of points, in conduct, thought, and belief. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that most people love the easy-souled paths of diplomatic agreement, which at any rate did not appeal to me when I was younger. He was never squint-brained or knock-kneed in his thoughts. If he were wrong his fallacies were superb. Right or wrong, he was ‘a whole-hogger.’ His inconsistencies were not puny—they were magnificent; he had not the faults of a pigmy but those of a giant. His pawns were not little fishes but big men and big things. He did not fight with a rapier but with a two-edged sword. His aspirations were not towards Chinese lanterns but towards the stars. He hated a snigger; he preferred the hearty laugh or the uncompromising frown. He had no time for an anæmic Mephistopheles, but was quite willing to try conclusions with a full-blooded Satan. This was the man as I found him, given to sad hack-work at times, but capable of superb efforts in literature; and as for his position on the slopes of Parnassus, his time has not yet come.
     When the sediment of his work has all been riddled out, it will be found that in his City of Dream, his Undertones, his Ballad of Mary the Mother, his New Rome, he has bequeathed a precious legacy to those whose literary and moral ideals are a little more ambitious than the gutter and the village pump. I have used the word ‘sediment’ advisedly, for Buchanan drew a big distinction between his serious literary efforts and his merely hack-work. And nothing irritated him more than the fact that the world was more familiar with the latter than with the former. His melodramas and his stories had a vogue, and were familiar to many who had never heard of The Wandering Jew or The City of Dream. ‘It makes me savage,’ he wrote to me, ‘when people rave over my inferior efforts and ignore the aftermath of a long life’s thought and aspiration. I find that many people are quite ignorant of my best writings even when considerably interested in me as an author. I never dream of inflicting you with my pot-boilers. I shall send you any work of mine which possesses my own affection, as this [The Devil’s Case] does. This is a book, by the way, which will be torn in pieces and boycotted, which will be thought by many to be the very acme of human blasphemy; but it is true for all that, and will live. I had just finished it when my beloved mother died, and for a time I hesitated about publishing it, and I do so now because I am convinced that she would have approved it, for even in her last illness she clearly and penetratingly held her old eclectic faith. This is the dedication to her, which I transcribe for the first time, and send to you, my dear Walker:

DEDICATION
(Nov. 5th, 1894).

While the life-blood was spun
     From the heart in her breast,
She look’d on her son,
     Smiled, and rock’d him to rest. . . .

How swift the hours run
     From the east to the west!
Erect stood the son,
     And the mother was blest!

Of all the joys won,
     Love like his seem’d the best;
He was ever the son
Whom she rock’d on the breast.

Yet lo! all is done!
     (’Twas, my God, Thy behest!)
In his turn, the gray son
     Rocks the mother to rest.

All is o’er, ere begun!
     Oh my dearest and best,
Sleep in peace, till thy son
     Creepeth back to thy breast!’

It may he noted that this differs markedly from the poem as afterwards printed in The Devil’s Case.
     Shortly after the appearance of The Devil’s Case I prepared a study of the historical and literary Devil, and a letter which Buchanan wrote me on the subject is noteworthy: ‘What you say about the Devil is very interesting. My Devil is different from all the rest (Milton’s, Marlowe’s, Luther’s, Goethe’s, Calderon’s, and Byron’s), so far as he is really God-evolving, as the spirit of knowledge and sympathy, as opposed to the creeds which say knowledge is evil. Goethe’s Mephisto is as crude a conception as even the Scotch Deil—mere intellect without heart, whereas I hold that intellect implies heart, and true knowledge holiness. Goethe’s typical woman—e.g. Marguerite—is a fool; it is because she is ignorant, not because she is good, that she falls; whereas Goethe poses her as the type of purity and finally as the Eternal Feminine. But it is pure ignorance that makes her spell-bound by the jewels, and leads her to poison her mother and kill her child. My Devil would have saved her, Goethe’s monkey-devil destroys her easily. Goethe, in fact, took the vulgar view. Hence the vogue of his poem.’
     Buchanan’s reference to the Scotch Deil I find in another of his letters in my possession: ‘I propose to introduce you, as expressed in your stimulating and suggestive volume, The Struggle for Success, as one of the characters in a forthcoming work of mine on Burns, which I hope to get out before the Centenary. I shall also present that brave old Scot—a man in an age of pigmies—Professor Blackie, and perhaps also that other warm-hearted and big-brained Highlander, Norman Macleod. Blackie and Macleod seem to me to stand quite alone in the history of modern Scotland. My book will make some Scotsmen squirm! ’Tis an odd work, and will greatly tickle you. The following will be the title, or something like it: “The Land of ‘the Deil’: a Story for the Burns Centenary, including the Paradox of Scottish Civilisation, with a Preface by the Devil.” What do you think of that, my limmer?’ As far as I am able to gather, that suggestive volume was only planned and never carried far in its execution.
     Buchanan was a man who was constantly in difficulties in regard to money matters, and at one time his coffers were full, at another desperately empty. He would send me an urgent wire asking me to join him on his yacht or to shoot over his moor, and a year after he would be hard at work to make himself the possessor of a living wage. He was extraordinarily improvident, and gave money away right and left to those who appealed to his sympathy—broken-down actors, starving men of letters, helots of the turf, unfortunate women. I found it extremely difficult to get him to accept any money due to him for transactions undertaken for me. If I asked him, ‘How much do I owe you, Bard?’ he invariably answered in the same strain, ‘Eight thousand five hundred and nineteen pounds four shillings and seven pence,’ or ‘Give me half a million, and we will cry quits.’ If we dined together casually, one, two, six of us, he invariably managed to get hold of the bill and pay it. This trick of his, of course, became familiar, and we seldom asked him to dinner unless we had arranged the matter beforehand with the powers that be. When he discovered that fact he would say, ‘Oh, this is a duke’s affair! All right, I expect to be treated as in a ducal mansion.’ It was the same with cabs and trains. He was a large, stout man, but he had a curious faculty of reaching the cabman’s hand or the ticket-office before the slimmest of us.
     He was a confirmed turf-speculator—a strange pursuit for a singer of songs and dreamer of dreams; and it need hardly be said he lost far more than he gained; but when he was successful—and occasionally his winnings were large—he always managed to find a means of sharing his good fortune with those less privileged than himself. One of his many methods of telling white lies was this: ‘How are you, X.? I owe you twenty pounds.’ ‘This is the first I have heard of it,’ would likely be the reply. ‘Oh, I took the liberty of putting a sovereign on King Charles for you, and he started at 20 to 1;’ and forthwith he handed over the money. ‘I say, Spider,’ he once called to one of those many vagabond mercenaries who frequent the turf, ‘there’s a fiver for you. I put it on Seaton Deleval in your name, and she came in at 5 to 1.’ The lie was evident enough to us, but as it was intended to relieve the recipient of a feeling of obligation, it was generously conceived—and even in the books of the recording angel probably forgiven.
     No man that I ever knew was so loyal to friendship, no one was so imbued with the religion of blood and friend attachment, as Buchanan; and the only real fear that oppressed him, when he drew near the valley of the dark shadow, was that his loyal friend, a devoted young sister-in-law and adopted daughter, might be left penniless. The death of his mother had been the great grief of his latter days. ‘I have laid her to rest at Southend,’ he wrote to me, ‘in a beautiful graveyard by the sea, close to places where she used to be happy. What I shall do now I hardly know. My wits seem numbed, my whole grasp of things gone. Sometimes I hardly seem to grieve at all; at others all my desolation comes back like a torrent. I thought on Sunday last that my own last hour had come, I was so worn out with watching and sorrowing. I absolutely think my reason was saved by a large dose of a homeopathic drug (ignatia amara), which turned my anguish into a sort of horrid apathy, but saved my nervous system from total collapse. In my terrible trial my dear Harriet has proved a blessed comforter, and in more ways than one my darling’s death has been fraught with blessing. Friends who had grown bitter against me came back for her sake, and gave me their hands. All her influence has been good and holy, like herself. There was never such a mother. The world can never match such a love. I would give everything now for such faith as I once felt. I seem to have none. And then what is left if we abandon the idea of eternal life, as reason teaches us to do? Only a horrible nightmare, a devil’s dream.’ ‘My only prayer now is,’ he wrote at another time, ‘that I may live for a year or two to complete certain work. I am miserable, too, because if I go now my dear and only companion, the purest and sweetest angel that has ever come to me in this dark life, will be left penniless, at the mercy of the world. That is really all I care for, and all that unmans me at the thought of death.’
     My recollections of Robert Buchanan would be incomplete did I not include a fragment of his which I value highly as being the last verses he ever wrote, and which I was able to publish in a small volume sold privately, and may now reach a larger audience. They seem to me to embody the very essence of Buchanan’s final attitude to the eternities:

‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!’
I murmur’d ’mid the snowstorm of my grief;
     Dark as the sunless pall
     The folds of darkness fall,
Closing my life’s dim day, so strange, so brief!

Lord, I believe; and yet, O Lord, how chill
And frozen grows the faith I cling to still!
     Once it was bright and sweet,
     Swift as a young man’s feet,
Fair as a young maid’s smile, strong as a warrior’s will.

The dumb and wistful yearning and desire
Through these dark clouds of sense to something higher,
     All the long, lonely years,
     I’ve sung through smiles and tears,
But now my hand drops heavily down the lyre!

And lo! instead of gladsome faëry gold,
A few black withered leaves are all I hold.
     Help then mine unbelief!
     Comfort Thy child’s last grief,
Stoop to Thy wandering sheep, and bear him to Thy fold!

     The first line of the third stanza is evidently borrowed from R. H. Hutton’s criticism of the poet: ‘The dumb, wistful yearning in man to something higher—yearning such as the animal creation showed in the Greek period towards the human—has not as yet found any interpreter equal to Buchanan,’ an opinion shortly afterwards seconded by George Henry Lewes, who said: ‘He must unquestionably attain an exalted rank amongst the poets of this century, and produce works which cannot fail to be accepted as incontestably great and worthy of the world’s preservation.’ ‘Whilst such works as The City of Dream are produced by Robert Buchanan,’ said Mr Lecky, ‘it cannot be said that the artistic spirit in English literature has very seriously decayed.’

     In my many wanderings with Buchanan he took me to see two men whose personalities interested me deeply. These were the Hon. Roden Noel and Mr Herbert Spencer. Mr Noel was essentially the man as poet, gentle, retiring, unassuming, and cultured; he had no axes to grind nor logs to roll. He reminded me, with his big flap-collar and the lock of hair which made vagabond wanderings over his finely shaped forehead, of certain portraits of Byron, though it need hardly be said that there was little likeness between the two men either in literary quality or in character. Mr Noel was no publicist, and shunned at all times the methods of the artistic adventurer. He had all the traditional characteristics of the reticent and diffident poet, though in private the warmth of his nature and the generous enthusiasm of his ideals made of him a man beloved. Mr Herbert Spencer was a different counter altogether. The mathematical precision with which he carried out his scheme of life has already been noticed by more than one writer. When first I went to call upon him alone, he took his watch from his pocket and laid it on the table beside him, and remarked, ‘I must not allow myself to speak to you for more than a quarter of an hour.’ Consequently, at the end of the appointed time our conversation ended suddenly, and we both fell back upon a marked silence, like the ends of a snapped elastic. I rose to go, but he permitted himself to explain that he hoped his silence would not rob him of the pleasure of my staying to lunch. I accordingly picked up a book till such a time as the oracle would deign to speak. At that time I think I was as convinced a Spencerian as Tolstoi’s hero in Resurrection or Kipling’s ‘Harry Chunder Mookergee.’ Like many another, I fancy, at that time I could have as little omitted the name of Mr Spencer from any of my quondam philosophical writings as the modern woman-novelist could omit quoting from Omar Khayyám. I remember our conversation dealt chiefly with the absence of the cult of satire from modern literature, and he expressed himself in much the same language as he used in a letter to Robert Buchanan which I have in my possession: ‘Why do you not devote yourself to a satire on the times? There is an immensity of matter calling for strong denunciation and display of white-hot anger, and I think you are well capable of dealing with it. More especially I want some one who has the ability, with sufficient intensity of feeling, to denounce the miserable hypocrisy of our religious world, with its pretended observances of Christian principles side by side with the abominations which it habitually assists and countenances.’ He referred to wars and the machinations of the Stock Exchange. ‘In our political life, too, there are multitudinous things which merit the severest castigation: the morals of party strife, and the way in which men are, with utter insincerity, sacrificing their convictions for the sake of political and social position.’ Mr Spencer struck me as being terribly in earnest even about small matters—so much so as to suggest that he had not yet been introduced to Mr George Meredith’s Comic spirit; but at the same time he was a man of large imagination, and in many ways a dreamer. He was no pessimist, but as full of the joy of life as Walt Whitman. He seemed a solitary figure, sitting apart from the world, ‘holding no form of creed, yet contemplating all.’ He was as brave as Heine and as Spinoza in the face of constant illness, giving himself over, even when the light of life grew dim and uncertain, to the completion and perfection of his System. He seemed to me the most simple of men in the youthfulness of his outlook on life, in his buoyant joy in humanity and its possibilities. That he was an optimist cannot he denied, and I remember how he poured disdain upon my views that the altruistic spirit has not evolved in man. He held that the race grew nearer and nearer to ultimate perfection, while I ventured to suggest a series of epicycles as representing the moral action of the centuries; and even he admitted once to me that he believed the present tendency was a drifting back to a moral and intellectual barbarism. It is impossible for me to recall many of his exact dicta; but I do recall one sentence, which rang in my ears for some time; it was spoken with so much modulated care that it echoed in my brain months after: ‘I do not regard,’ he said, ‘a thing as known unless it can be presented in consciousness under some quantitative or qualitative limitation, and for this reason I distinguish the unknowable as that of which we remain vaguely conscious when the limitations implied by knowledge are absent.’ A truly Spencerian deliverance!
     I can recall only one visit which Mr Spencer paid to our home—it was at Alta-na-craig, in Argyllshire. There was much domestic terror evinced at the entertaining of such a ‘philosophical monster,’ but matters soon became adjusted when Mr Spencer dashed into a very human and light disquisition on the Highlands and Highland innkeepers, whom he abused frankly; concluding with a special onslaught upon those who tipped railway porters ‘and so contrived every railway disaster ever recorded.’ A battle-royal ensued, and Mr Spencer, with his distaste for heated argument, soon stole, like the Arab, silently away. ‘We have had a very stormy interview, Mrs Blackie,’ were his parting words. During the long and last illness of Mr Buchanan, he wrote frequently to me with anxious and tender inquiries after the health of the poet, and begged of me to assure him that no financial difficulty stood in the way of the careful and skilful nursing of his old friend.

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Recollections of Fifty Years by Isabella Fyvie Mayo (Edward Garrett) (London: John Murray, 1910, pp. 215-217)

     On the day when Queen Victoria went to St. Paul’s to return thanks for the Prince of Wales’s recovery from dangerous illness, we were invited to witness the procession from 56, Ludgate Hill, the offices of Good Words and the Sunday Magazine. We were then living in Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate, and we were advised that, as our way would be hampered both by crowds and barricades, we had better put in an early appearance. So we arrived in Ludgate Hill soon after St. Paul’s clock struck 6 a.m. We were not at all too soon; the street was already full, and we heard afterwards that some of the people had taken up their positions the night before, and had come well provided with food! Among the guests at our destination we were not the first. A party of four was before us—three ladies and a gentleman. We were unknown to each other, but, being shut up together in the otherwise empty room, it seemed only proper that we should exchange slight civilities, and accordingly my husband addressed the gentleman with some remark about the crowd. The only answer was a growl, and we made no further advance. This gentleman was a man of about thirty, wearing a short jacket and a soft rough hat, and he had his hands in his pockets. One of the three ladies was decidedly elderly, plain in dress and appearance, and not conciliatory in demeanour. The youngest lady was little more than a girl. The intermediate lady had a sweet face and a gentle manner. Such were the observations I made, not dreaming who these people were. I was much interested when I learned that they were Robert Buchanan, his mother, wife, and
sister-in-law.
     Afterwards, when the rooms filled with people—all artists or authors and their belongings—I did not see Robert Buchanan enter into conversation with anybody. I saw his wife speak to one and another, and I heard his mother addressing Miss Strahan in a way that caused some of us to whisper to each other, with some secret rejoicing, that she was letting the publisher’s sister know that she was the poet’s mother!
     I own I was disappointed in the appearance and manners of Robert Buchanan, for whose work I had had an intense admiration ever since Mrs. S. C. Hall had lent me “Undertones,” with its poignant dedication. That dedication, “To David in Heaven” I had copied out and had preserved among my literary treasures. My admiration had been increased by “London Poems,” with their keen and fearless sympathy with what lies in the depths of human life.
     I had, however, heard from Mrs. S. C. Hall that Robert Buchanan was a young man of forbidding manners. She knew him during his very brief time of struggle, when he and David Gray were living together. He sent some poems to the St. James’s Magazine, which she was then editing. She told me that Mr. Maxwell, the proprietor of the magazine, had treated his young contributor with an inconsideration amounting almost to cruelty, and that, Robert Buchanan having appealed to her, she had spoken to the publisher very plainly.

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Mid-Victorian Memories by R. E. Francillon (London, New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914, pp. 222-224, 226-228)

     In the Annual for 1875 I was given the collaboration of Senior for one of the seven chapters, and of Robert Buchanan for a poem to be written in such wise as to harmonise with my plot; indeed to be one of its essential portions. That part of the plan did not strike me as promising. I had never met the poet, and I was considerably prejudiced against him personally by my association with the circle of Swinburne and Rossetti. I recalled certain advice ²²³ 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’ll be best to get it over as soon as you can.” Well, there was nothing for it but to send him the subject of my story, with a deferential suggestion (one does not dictate to poets) that, as the scene was to be laid in Merionethshire, he might find inspiration in the legend of the Fairy city at the bottom of the Lake of Bala. That would have suited me very well indeed. His answer is among a few letters that have contrived to escape loss or destruction; and I give it here, partly out of vanity, partly because it is so unlike any that my mental portrait of the writer had allowed me to look for:—

     “MY DEAR SIR,—I am obliged to you for your kind letter concerning the ‘Legend.’ I see no difficulty just now—if any occurs to me afterwards you shall know—of incorporating in it the elements you suggest; and the Bala Lake Tradition, too, might be utilised. But, in truth, I have hardly yet had leisure to shape the plan definitely. When I do so I will follow your views as far as I can.
     “I presume Mr. Gowing has told you that the authorship is to be, and to continue, anonymous, so far as I am concerned. I have undertaken it ²²⁴ chiefly with a wish to oblige him and the proprietors of the magazine.
     “May I take this opportunity of saying how much I enjoyed your ‘Olympia’—nearly all of which I read in the magazine? Your article on ‘Physiology of Authorship’ entertained me greatly; but in the story I found a charm and freshness very unusual in modern fiction. I hope the ‘Legend’ will be worthy of its ‘setting’ by you; and, believe me, I am        
                                               “Very truly yours,
                                                             “ROBERT BUCHANAN.”

     Now how on earth could the recipient of such a letter dream of knocking its writer down? Especially as there were certain physical obstacles to the process, for Buchanan was then living in a remote part of Connaught, whence the letter was dated; and, when I afterwards met him in person, it needed no second look to show me that, should it ever come to blows between us, it was I, not he, who would come to the floor. ...

²²⁶     Not until the very latest allowable moment did Buchanan’s poem arrive; and then, to my dismay, it would no more incorporate with my story than oil with water, while the story, being more than half written, could not possibly be adapted to the poem, if only for want of time. He had evidently forgotten all my requirements and suggestions, and had written “The Changeling” à propos of nothing but his own inspiration. I had got something infinitely better than I had asked for, seeing that “The Changeling,” with its later introduction, “The Asrai,” lives and will live, whereas the story of “Streaked with Gold,” though the cause of its birth, has been dead and buried these nearly forty years. But I was anything but grateful at the time: especially when the absolute necessity of dragging it into the story somehow compelled recourse to the clumsy and always objectionable machinery of an irrelevant dream.
     I first made the poet’s personal acquaintance at a supper-party at the Gowings’, which also included William Black, with “A Daughter of Heth” still but four years old, and “A Princess of Thule” only two; Charles Gibbon, who had come well towards the front with “In Silk Attire”; and Buchanan’s young sister-in-law, ²²⁷ Miss Harriett Jay, in the first flush of the success, while she was still in her teens, of her novel “The Queen of Connaught,” and now famed throughout the theatrical world as the fortunate author of “When Knights were Bold.” With Buchanan himself my subsequent intercourse was rather intermittent: at some periods it was much or frequent, at others little or seldom; it never amounted to intimacy, but to amply sufficient knowledge on my part to dissipate every prejudice, and to estimate the real Robert Buchanan. The happiness of his home life was patent to everybody who entered it. He was obviously worshipped by his womankind, mother, wife, and wife’s sister who held the place of daughter, with the worship not of fear, but of devoted affection amply returned. He was possibly indeed over-domesticated: it might have been better for him had he cared to mingle more in a world less absolutely his own. Gentleness and courtesy are certainly not characteristic of the legendary Buchanan, but of my recollection of him they as certainly are; nor did I so much as once hear from this literary Ishmael an unkindly word. Of envy, hatred, or malice, he was as incapable as if there were no such things. Then how came he to be a by-word for offensiveness and ferocity? That obvious question I cannot answer better ²²⁸ than by a quotation from a contribution of my own to Miss Harriett Jay’s Life of him:

     “The right reading of Buchanan was, I am convinced, that his very genius had prevented him from outgrowing, or being able to outgrow, the boyishness of the best sort of boy. . . . And the grand note of the best sort of boy is a sincere passion for justice, or rather a consuming indignation against injustice—the two things are not exactly the same. The boy of whatever age can never comprehend the coolness with which the grown-up man of the world has learned to take injustice as part and parcel of the natural order of things, even when himself the sufferer. The grown-up man has learned the sound wisdom of not sending indignation red-hot or white-hot to the post or the press, but of waiting till it is cool enough to insert into a barrel of gunpowder without risk of explosion. But the boy rebels, and, if he be among the great masters of language, hurls it out hot and strong, in the belief that no honest feelings can be so weak as to be wounded by any honest words. Of course he was wrong”—

Of course he ought to have always had somebody at his elbow with sufficient influence to delay the posting of indignation until to-morrow. To-morrow would never have come.

[Note: R. E. Francillon’s chapter in the Harriett Jay biography (essentially a longer version of the above) is available here.]

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My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London by George R. Sims (London: Eveleigh Nash Company Ltd., 1917, pp. 165-166, 181-182, 203-211, 239-240)

pp. 165-66:

Then Pettitt went out and Robert Buchanan came into partnership with me, and our first play, The English Rose, was produced on August 2, 1890. Then came The Trumpet Call, which was produced on August 1, 1891, and was a great success, with Leonard Boyne and Elizabeth Robins as the hero and heroine, Lionel Rignold as a travelling showman, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Astrea, his clairvoyant.
     But before I come to the Buchanan days—and nights—and the story of one of the most remarkable personalities of his time, let me say a word or two about my lifelong friend and brilliant workfellow, Sydney Grundy.

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pp.181-182

     It was through the “Dagonet Ballads” that I first came in touch with Robert Buchanan, the poet, who in later years was my companion and friend and my collaborator in four or five Adelphi dramas.
     In the Contemporary Review he reviewed a number of volumes which had recently been published, and he made a very charming reference to my modest effort, for which I was very grateful.
     In some of his earlier reviews Buchanan had not pleased the poets upon whom he sat in judgment.
     I have somewhere safely put away—so safely that I cannot find it—“The Fleshly School of Poetry,” by Thomas Maitland. “Thomas Maitland” was Robert Buchanan, and Robert Buchanan afterwards expressed his deep regret for the pain which his criticism had caused Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
     I have also somewhere safely concealed Swinburne’s reply to “Thomas Maitland.” It was entitled “Under the Microscope” and was a savage denunciation of “Thomas Maitland,” upon whose head torrents of invective were poured forth by the mighty master of words. This titanic battle of the bards took place in 1870.

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pp. 203-211

CHAPTER XXIII

I HAVE said that it was through the “Dagonet Ballads” that I first came in touch with Robert Buchanan, but our collaboration at the Adelphi commenced many years after.
     Buchanan had made a big success with A Man’s Shadow, a version of Roger la Honte, which he did for Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket, and the Brothers Gatti suggested that he should be my next collaborator at the Adelphi.
     Our first melodrama, The English Rose, was a great success, with Leonard Boyne, Evelyn Millard, Lionel Rignold, and Katey James in the cast, and J. D. Beveridge, whose delightful impersonation of the Knight of Ballyveeny is a dear remembrance of old playgoers.
     Leonard Boyne, always a splendid horseman on and off the stage, rode one of his many successful mounts to victory in the big scene.
     Buchanan was not quite happy about himself as a melodramatist. I am not sure that it was not a remark of Robert Browning that first made him unhappy at the Adelphi.
     At the Academy dinner Lecky, in responding to the toast of literature, made an enthusiastic reference to Buchanan’s beautiful poem The City of Dream. Browning, when he heard Buchanan’s name mentioned, turned to his neighbour and in an audible voice exclaimed, “Buchanan! Buchanan! Is he talking about the man who writes plays with Sims at the Adelphi?” The usual d—d good-natured friends told Buchanan, and it was soon afterwards that he began to urge me to let him adopt a pseudonym in our collaboration. I did not like the idea, and I told him so. Soon after I received the following letter:

     “DEAR SIMS,—Thanks for your letter. Now that you realize exactly what I mean, and feel that it implies no forgetfulness of our friendship, I’m sure you’ll help me. I should feel so free for stage purposes if I worked under a pseudonym, and it wouldn’t matter at all whether or not the public knew it to be such (as they would)—it would keep the two kinds of work completely distinct. And after all it is your name, not mine, which attracts to the Adelphi, for you are a popular writer, and I a d—d unpopular one.
     “I should work with ten times the heart if my dramatic work were kept altogether apart from my poetical, so far as my name is concerned. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to be a poet only—I wish I could, for poetry alone gives me real happiness, not for any reward it yields in pence or praise, but solely because it was my first love and is my last.
     “Nor have I any scorn for the stage. On the contrary, I honour and delight in it, and as for you, I’ve always held you to be one of the choicest spirits of the time, far higher in thought and power than many of us poets. Dramatic work falls justly and finely into your broad sympathy with life for life’s sake. I, on the other hand, am a dreamer, a whiner after the Unknown and Unknowable. I was ‘built that way.’
     “You’ve given me many, many happy days. I love you personally, and would do anything in the world to bring you happiness and honour. So you mustn’t, mustn’t misconceive me! Set me down as a fool if you like, but never doubt the friendship which makes me subscribe myself, yours always, “
                                                                                             “ROBERT BUCHANAN.”

     The letter shows plainly enough the condition of mind with which Buchanan approached Adelphi melodrama.
     But he wanted money. He had been foolish enough to take the Lyric Theatre in order to run a poetic play, The Bride of Love, in which his charming and talented sister-in-law, Miss Harriett Jay, had scored a distinct success at a matinée.
     The poet, who was never a very far-seeing man in business matters, thought that a matinée production was good enough for a regular run, which, of course, it was not, and his mistake saddled him with a heavy burden of debt.
     Directly one of our Adelphi dramas had been produced, a first night success scored, and the box-office had begun to talk promisingly, Buchanan was anxious to realize—in other words, to sell for cash.
     I endeavoured to dissuade him, pointing out that a successful melodrama might be a property for twenty or thirty years, but he said he could not afford to wait for twenty or thirty years for his money, and if I could arrange to buy his share for two thousand five hundred down that sum would be most useful to him and relieve his mind of considerable anxiety.
     I submitted the proposition to the Messrs. Gatti, and we bought the Bard out between us at his own earnest request.
     The same thing happened with The Trumpet Call. The moment it had proved a success Buchanan wanted to sell. It would not have been wise for the Gattis or myself to allow a share of the property to pass into the hands of a stranger, so again we bought the poet’s share for the ready money of which he seemed to be perpetually in desperate need.
     We wrote together The White Rose, in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell made such an artistic success as Elizabeth Cromwell, one of the gentlest and sweetest performances she has ever given to the English stage.
     This was followed by The Lights of Home, with Mrs. Campbell as the heroine and Kyrle Bellew as the hero, and then came The Black Domino.
     While The Black Domino was running Arthur Pinero—he was not “Sir” then—came to the Adelphi and saw in Mrs. Patrick Campbell the ideal Paula for The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a play that George Alexander was about to put in rehearsal at the St. James’s.
     The happenings which led up to the engagement of Mrs. Patrick Campbell for the part of Paula make quite a little romance of the stage. Here are the facts of the romance.
     The story of the early adventures of Sir Arthur Pinero’s world-famous play is interesting.
     After he had written it he sent it to John Hare. What the eminent actor and manager said about it was not
encouraging. It met with no more favourable reception when Beerbohm Tree read it. Then Pinero took it to George Alexander.
     The illustrious three must forgive me the omission of the “Sir.” It was an honour they all deserved, but had not then received.
     Alexander was then playing R. C. Carton’s Liberty Hall to splendid business, and he shook his head.
     By this time Pinero was getting rather tired of taking the lady round the houses, so he said to George Alexander, “Put it up at a matinée and I won’t ask for any fees. I want it done.”
     Alexander agreed, and little paragraphs began to appear in the Press about a new Pinero play which was to be put up at a matinée.
     Mr. Carton very naturally objected that this was not fair to Liberty Hall. It gave the idea that the “Hall” would soon be “at liberty.”
     The manager of the St. James’s saw the difficulty and had an idea. “Look here,” he said to Pinero, “if you don’t mind waiting till late in the season I’ll put the play up for a run.”
     And that is how the wonderful play came to its own at last.
     But before Tanqueray was produced there was considerable difficulty in “finding the lady.”
     The author’s original idea was Miss Winifred Emery. Miss Emery was Mrs. Cyril Maude. When the time came to put the play in rehearsal Mrs. Maude was not well enough to appear.
     Olga Nethersole was suggested, but she was playing, and her manager refused to release her. With Julia Neilson there was the same difficulty.
     Then Pinero remembered having seen Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the provinces when she was acting with the Ben Greet Company, and he knew that she had made a success at the Adelphi, and was then playing there in The Black Domino, so the distinguished dramatist came to the Adelphi, saw the play, saw Mrs. Campbell, and asked the Gattis if they would release her, and the Gattis very politely but very firmly declined.
     In the meantime Miss Elizabeth Robins had scored a great success in Hedda Gabler, and the part of Paula was soon afterwards offered to her and accepted by her.
     But Mrs. Patrick Campbell was very anxious to go to the St. James’s, a theatre she thought would suit her better than the Adelphi.
     She came to me and asked me if I would use my influence with the Gattis and get them to alter their decision, and the Gattis, because we had been good friends privately and in business for so many years, said that if I personally wished it they could not refuse.
     But Elizabeth Robins was already engaged, and was invited with the company to the St. James’s on a certain afternoon to hear Pinero read his play.
     About two hours before the play was to be read Miss Robins heard that her friend Stella Campbell was free to play the part, and then she did a very noble and a very generous thing. She voluntarily resigned the part in which she believed that she had one of the finest chances of her career, and she resigned it in order to give an opportunity to her friend.

*    *    *    *    *

     Robert Buchanan, poet, man of letters and dramatist, was one of the most interesting personalities of his generation.
     At one moment 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 won the big race.
     I have listened spellbound in the afternoon to some beautiful poem he had just written, and have met him at midnight disguised as a monk at a Covent Garden ball.
     He was a born gambler, and when he began to make money in the theatre he took to the Turf, but he always took to it most violently and most recklessly when he was in financial difficulties.
     He had, with the insanity of genius, taken the Opera Comique in order to run a play written by himself and Henry Murray, The Society Butterfly, in which Mrs. Langtry was appearing.
     When it became a question of closing down or getting the money to carry on, Buchanan, with his friend Henry Murray, went off to Lingfield races with a pocketful of bank-notes in order to back a certain horse which had been privately tipped to him as a good thing and certain to start at a long price. The name of the horse was Theseus.
     Theseus ran in the fourth race. Some little time before the start Buchanan gave Murray a hundred pounds in
bank-notes. He was to go to the ring and back Theseus.
     But they remained chatting for a time as they had not seen the horses go by for their preliminary canter. They did not know that instead of parading as usual before the stands and carriages the horses had passed through to the starting-post. Murray and Buchanan were still talking when they heard a roar of “They’re off!”
     Murray ran with all his speed towards the ring, hoping that he might be able to get the money on, but he had to fight his way through a crowd and through the police, and he just reached the ring with the notes grasped in his hand as the first horse dashed past the winning-post.
     And the first horse was Theseus. It had started at 20 to 1.
     When Murray went back to Buchanan with the uninvested bank-notes still crumpled in his hand, the Bard received the news with a smile, and said, “Better luck next time. You look bowled over, old man. You’ll find some whisky in the hamper.”
     And the money that Theseus would have won them would have saved The Society Butterfly from failure and Buchanan from bankruptcy.
     Out of doors I rarely saw Robert Buchanan without a white waistcoat and never without an umbrella. He wielded his umbrella as his Scotch ancestors wielded their battle-axes.
     It was the oddest thing in the world to see him directing a rehearsal with that umbrella. He leaned upon it as a
support, he waved it around, generally unfolded, to indicate positions on the stage, he swayed it gently to and fro during the sentimental scenes, and he banged it on the prompter’s table to emphasize the declamatory passages.
     He was quite a good stage-manager in his own dreamy and poetical plays, but at the Adelphi, where we painted real life in vivid colours, his ideas did not always harmonize with those of the “producer.”
     In The English Rose we had real soldiers from Chelsea Barracks. The men were under the command of a real sergeant.
     “Now,” said Buchanan to the sergeant, “what you’ve got to say to your men is: ‘Enter that church.’”
     “Can’t do it that way.” said the sergeant, and he proceeded to give the military command, which the men obeyed and entered the church.
     Buchanan had them back. “Speak the line,” he said. “Say to your men, ‘Enter that church.’”
     “It wouldn’t be military, sir,” said the sergeant.
     Then the Bard flourished his umbrella and said, “All right, then.”
     But he was not convinced, for that night when we adjourned as usual to Rule’s, in Maiden Lane, for a few minutes’ rest and refreshment, he started the argument again, and maintained with many bangs of the umbrella that he was right.
     But in his home he was the gentlest and most amiable of men, though some of us, and we were generally a fairly large party at his hospitable supper-board, loved to draw him out by contradicting him.
     Those evenings at Merkland in Maresfield Gardens, South Hampstead—he named his house after the Scotch home of the loved companion of his youth, David Gray—lasted till far into the night, and it was often between three and four in the morning before our host bade us adieu.
     The Merkland Sunday afternoons were always interesting because interesting people came from near and far to them.
     Rochefort was a frequent visitor. I knew Rochefort as a near neighbour—he lived at No. 4 Clarence Terrace—and I used to see his two horses led every morning to the front door to be fed by him and his niece with lumps of sugar.
     The horses used to step half-way into the hall, and on one occasion one of them, when the sugar supply gave out early and Rochefort went for some more, followed him into the dining-room.
     Rochefort asked me one day to take him to see something that was peculiarly English in the way of amusement, and I took him to the Moore and Burgess Minstrels. I fancy Ivan Caryll and M. Johnson, the London correspondent of the Figaro, were with us. The performance left Rochefort in a condition of amused amazement. “It’s wonderful!” he said to me. “A company of undertakers singing songs about the dead, and then the undertakers at each end begin to rattle cross-bones! I expected every minute to see the undertaker in the middle bang a skull.”
     Rochefort never learned English. He told me that it would spoil his style. And he never put the articles he sent to his paper in the post. They were always handed to the conductor of the Paris Mail at Charing Cross and in this way they travelled by hand until they were met at the Gare du Nord by a special messenger from the newspaper office. At least that was what Rochefort told me.
     Fierce fighter as he was in his work, there was no more modest or less self-assertive man among his friends and guests than was Robert Buchanan.
     He was at his best when the day’s work was done and the night was well on its way and he sat with a cigarette between his lips and John Jameson by his side and smiled and laughed and listened.
     He had many beliefs—one of them was in the Salvation Army as a fighting force for the uplifting of the masses—and he had one abiding superstition.
     He imparted his superstition to me during a trip we had made to Southend. We were writing a play together. Buchanan was a bit run down, and suggested that we should take a week-end off together.
     He had lived once near Southend, and his wife lay in the little churchyard there.
     One moonlight night as we sat looking across the water he told me of a work upon which he had been engaged for many years. It was finished, but he feared to have it printed.
     “I believe,” he said, “that when that poem is published it will be my last. I shall never do anything great again.”
     The poem was eventually published. It was the last great work he ever gave to the world.
     One afternoon he said to his sister-in-law, Miss Jay, “I should like to have a good spin down Regent Street.”
     They were the last words Robert Buchanan ever uttered. A few moments afterwards he was stricken down, and from that day to the day of his death, eight months later, he was as helpless as a little child.
     He was buried at Southend with his wife and his mother. After the funeral service we adjourned to a small building in the churchyard, and there the poet’s old friend, Mr. T. P. O’Connor, delivered a brief and touching address, and carried us back to the old days of poverty and struggle when two young Scotsmen, poets both and enthusiasts both—Robert Buchanan and David Gray—starved in a garret in Stamford Street.
     Some time ago I went into the little churchyard at Southend and stood by my old friend’s grave. Over it is a marble pedestal, and on the pedestal a bust of the poet. Across the bust a spider had spun its web. There were cobwebs in the marble eyes.
     It was through a web that the dead genius had looked upon the world, but through that web he had seen glorious visions. How glorious they were his generation did not know.
     But in the years to come the laurels denied him in life will be laid upon his tomb.

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pp. 239-240

     The paper came out, and Lord Randolph Churchill wrote an article, and so did several other aristocratic and political celebrities, but Short Cuts was not one of the short cuts to success.
     But while it was still alive the prospective member for North-West Ham invited me to dine at his house with a few friends. I found when I arrived that they were political friends, and among them were several lights of the Liberal Party.
     Three of them—I did not know it at the time—were barristers, and one of the barristers was Mr. H. H. Asquith, Q.C.
     By the time of coffee and cigars the conversation had become political, and the prospects of the Liberal Party—they were not in office then—were discussed.
     Greatly daring, but in perfect innocence, I joined in the conversation.
     “One thing I do hope,” I said, “and that is that when the Liberals come into power again they won’t have too many confounded lawyers in the Cabinet.”
     For a moment there was silence, then Mr. Asquith smiled and said quietly, “That’s pleasant for me!”
     You see I had quite forgotten that Mr. Asquith was a lawyer. I only knew him as the gentleman who then lived next door to Robert Buchanan in Maresfield Gardens, Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and whose little boy was always knocking a ball over into the bard’s garden.
     Whenever Buchanan went into the garden to dream poetry, over would come a ball, and young Master Asquith would climb on to the wall and say, “Please will you give me my ball?”
     Then the amiable poet would forget his dreams and go foraging about to find and return the ball.
     One day Buchanan was writing at the big desk which stood against a window looking on to the garden. Suddenly there was a smash of broken glass, and through the window came a ball that struck the inkstand and sent the contents flowing over the poet’s manuscript.
     Before the poet had recovered from the shock the voice of the young gentleman next door floated bardwards on the breeze, “Please, sir, will you give me my ball?”

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