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{Robert Buchanan - The Poet of Modern Revolt by Archibald Stodart-Walker}
Reviews of Robert Buchanan: The Poet of Modern Revolt
The Scotsman (1 April, 1901 - p. 2)
ROBERT BUCHANAN. The Poet of Modern Revolt. An Introduction to His Poetry. By Archibald Stodart-Walker. London: Grant Richards.
The many-sidedness of Mr Robert Buchanan has astonished and bewildered his contemporaries. He has achieved distinction in so many different walks of literature that many of his admirers have been tempted to believe that if he had concentrated his genius in one or two channels, and shown more sanity of judgment in choice of theme and of expression, he might have taken an easy first place among the seers and singers of the day. His verse poetry alone provides a field sufficiently rich, spacious, and curious for the researches and analysis of a host of critics of poetry and investigators of the spirit of the age, who have yet as a class shown a marked disinclination to enter upon the task. Dr Stodart-Walker is bolder; but even he begins by carefully guarding himself from the charge of presuming to attempt a criticism or an estimation of Buchanan. His method is the “panoramic;” he seeks to look at things in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth from the point of view of the poet—no easy thing to do, especially by one whose own point of view towards the seen and the unseen is, as is indicated, almost diametrically different from that of Robert Buchanan. In a brief introduction and concluding chapter an endeavour is made to discover and explain “the significance” of Buchanan, whose great merit is considered to lie, “not so much in that he has dreamed often, and has fluttered his poetical wings often, but in that he has dared to bring the charm of poetical expression to bear on themes which were originally considered the sole property of philosophers and speculators.” It is just possible that the judgment of posterity, like the judgment of the past and present generations, may be given against this employment of poetical expression as confusing and out of place; in which case the merit would become only a reproach. But this is the significance of the author of the “Book of Orm” and of “The City of Dream” summed up:—
“While Tennyson is the mirror of the present age, Carlyle its censor, and Macaulay its panegyrist; while Herbert Spencer is its recording angel and George Meredith the true decerner of its comic spirit, Robert Buchanan is the herald of its revolt, the mouthpiece of a sphinx-like woe, which, as a seer, he knows to be hidden deep down in the heart and soul of contemporary thought.”
Granting—which is perhaps a large admission—the existence of this “sphinx-like woe” as underlying the cheerful- seeming surface of our times, one may still take exception to the peculiar expression which it finds from the lips of Buchanan as disagreeably querulous and egotistical, and almost wanting in the saving grace of humour. One may think that the times and the laws of nature are out of joint without holding it to be his duty to assume the role of a “minor Devil”—a title which Dr Stodart-Walker believes would please Mr Buchanan—and flout and insult the Creator. In fact, one suspects it is Mr Buchanan’s transgression of the canons of taste rather than his aggressive heterodoxy that has stood, and may continue to stand, in the way of the popularity of poetry which is full of beauty and infused with the spirit of love for suffering humanity. Dr Stodart-Walker has gone conscientiously over Buchanan’s poems, and by the aid of paraphrase, explanation, and liberal extract has opened what for many readers is still a sealed book; and, although he appears sometimes to be struggling with ideas that are too big or too vague for him to master, he has produced what may on the whole be described as an able as well as a sympathetic study of the typical poet of the “Zeit-Geist.”
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The Oban Times (6 April, 1901 - p.3)
ROBERT BUCHANAN
THE
POET OF MODERN REVOLT.*
Robert Buchanan, poet, dramatist and novelist, is the victim of his early training. His father was a Socialist missionary, and doubtless with his mother’s milk he imbibed the doctrine which has for its text, disintegration and not conservation. “I, for my part,” he says “who was nourished on the husks of Socialism, and the chill water of infidelity, who was born in Robert Owen’s ‘New Moral World,’ and who scarcely heard even the name of God till about ten years of age, I went to godly Scotland, have been God-intoxicated ever since I saw the mountains and the sea.” On searching through Mr Buchanan’s writings for the meaning of this “God-intoxication,” or Nature-intoxication, we find it again and again reiterated that “God’s Laws are never broken,” and the corollary, that he (speaking for himself of course), “finds no love in the great struggle for life—therefore he sees none in the will of the God-Father.” . . . “Nature works on, unmoved, unchecked by any cry born of humanity.”—
Oh, Thou art pitiless! They call Thee Light,
Law, Justice, Love; but Thou art pitiless.
. . . . . .
Walk abroad; and mark
The cony struggling in the foumart’s fangs,
The deer and hare that fly the sharp-tooth’d hound,
The raven that, with flap of murderous wing,
Hangs on the woolly forehead of the sheep,
And blinds its harmless eyes;
Buchanan complaisantly calls himself the “Ishmael of Song,” and by ghastly implication places himself on a pinnacle that he refuses to the Almighty. He says, “I’ve popt at vultures circling skyward, I’ve made the carrion hawks a byword, but never caused a sigh or sob in the breast of mavis or cock robin, nay many such have fed out of my hand and blest me.”
Then in verse he sings not unmusically
If I were a God like you, and you were a man like me,
And in the dark you prayed and wept and I could hear and see,
The sorrow of your broken heart would darken all my day,
And never peace or pride were mine till it was smiled away,—
I’d clear my Heaven above your head till all was bright and blue,
If you were a man like me, and I were a God like you!
. . . . . .
Poor Buchanan! He is for ever kicking against the pricks of life. While other men endure and ennoble their lives, Buchanan wastes his time and genius in vain cries after a false and sickly sentimentality. The pretty throat of his mavis which “he never caused to sob” is just as voracious of worms as the vulture is of a decaying carcase. That the mavis sings more sweetly than the vulture, seems to be in this instance, the guarantee to the poet’s favour. The “God-ism,” to coin a word, of Buchanan, we fear, is many degrees lower than the angels.
Dr. Japp in enumerating Robert Buchanan’s undoubted power and literary ability neatly sums up his intellectual temperature thus—“He is in touch with all that makes men feel, that makes men suffer, that makes men lonely, dissatisfied, and despair and doubt.” Exactly. He is not in touch with all that makes men feel happy, as they will, when they have worked and done their duty; that makes men love their fellow creatures, and be satisfied, whole-hearted, and trustful of the future.
Mr Buchanan places Truth in front of all the virtues. Truth is the string he harps upon continually; but, unfortunately, he mixes up this inestimable quality so closely with his own particular sentiment, that we do not always arrive at a clear estimate of his precise meaning. A poet juggles with words too much to be invariably taken seriously. There is the truth which vaunts itself, and the truth which is humble-minded. Mr Buchanan is not humble-minded. He is insistent of his own opinions, critical, and impatient of opposition to what he conceives to be truth. He believes entirely in his own powers of perception and observation; and in this he may be taken as honest and truthful. But no further. His lines do not always ring true, his argument is often faulty, his prejudice immense. In this sense we cannot accept him as the absolute apostle of Truth he would fain make us believe he is. A great mind perverted by false sentiment to which his early training has largely contributed, is the readiest way in which to describe Robert Buchanan’s genius. For Buchanan is a genius. He is dramatic, realistic and often mighty in his grander moods. While the witchery of song contained in such poems of his as “The City of Dream,” “The Book of Orm,” “Ballad of Mary, the Mother,” almost, but not quite, drives one into the meshes of his complex thought. But, in his blacker moods, may we say it without offence, his aggressively truthful moods, he is repellant for the darkness which encompasses his thought for the future of humanity. “Spero in Deo” is no watchword of hope for him.
Dr. Archibald Stodart Walker, the interpreter of Buchanan’s poetry, will be known to many in the Highlands as the nephew of the late Professor Blackie. Dr. Walker has taken a very comprehensive and sympathetic grasp of his subject. Indeed, were it not that Dr. Stodart Walker distinctly says that “by training, by instinct, and in the general conduct of life,” he is “at nearly opposite poles to Mr Buchanan,” we should esteem him a wholesale panegyrist of “this Poet of Revolt.” Dr. Walker’s literary style is good; but his meaning is often obscure. Take this sentence for instance culled at random—
No longer shall Christ walk in the wilderness, where despair, melancholy, and gloom dwell, but in the purified groves of Pan; and at the gateway of the new heaven Prometheus, Balder, Bhudda shall sing with the Nazarene a new song of Hope.
Mr Grant Richards, the well-known publisher, has produced a well-appointed volume, which by its admirable clear print is sure to please every reader.
QUEX.
* “Robert Buchanan: the Poet of Modern Revolt.” An Introduction to his Poetry. By Archibald Stodart-Walker. Price six shillings. Published by Grant Richards, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London.
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The Academy (20 April, 1901 - p.341)
A Poet of the Too-Much.
Robert Buchanan: an Introduction to his Poetry. By Archibald Stodart-Walker.
(Grant Richards. 6s. net.)
MR. STODART WALKER is nothing if not an enthusiast. He expressly disclaims in his preface any critical value for his work: it is not even an “estimation.” He wants to explain what Mr. Buchanan’s poetry is, and for this purpose allows him as much as possible to speak for himself. Well, he attains his aim. After laying down the volume, you understand pretty well the nature and scope of Mr. Buchanan’s poetical work, even if you were previously a stranger to it. And that is no small thing to say for Mr. Stodart-Walker, especially since his own views (he states) incline towards canonic science rather than Buchanonic science. But he writes as a convinced admirer of the poet, and no man undertaking such a task can avoid expressing his own estimate of the writer with whom he deals. Mr. Stodart-Walker is certainly not that man: his estimate of Mr. Buchanan as a philosophic poet is writ large over these pages—large and loud; and it is seldom out of superlatives. Most things that Mr. Buchanan has done appear to be the finest of their kind in the language. In what he says Mr. Stodart-Walker is obviously too fiery a guide to be a safe one; but he explains and illustrates so well that every reader has the opportunity of forming his own judgment—if he have a judgment to form.
Leaving out of view his restless other activities, even as a poet Mr. Robert Buchanan has in his time played many parts; so many that it becomes a necessity to keep the main line of his work. There can be no doubt, fortunately, what he would himself regard as the main line, and that is also what we consider his typical work. He threw himself, an unknown young Scot, on the conquest of London in the early ’thirties. It was a time when form was little studied in poetry—the Tennyson influence not yet having induced English poets to set their artistic house in order. The Dobells and Alexander Smiths and others of the earlier time between the setting of Shelley and the culmination of Tennyson were reckless violators of order, symmetry, proportion. Mr. Buchanan only too readily received, and has only too defiantly retained, the stamp of that day. The long poems, which are the deliberate and representative achievement of his maturity, trample symmetry under foot. The “Book of Orm,” for instance (perhaps the best), is a tangle of variegated metres, almost surpassing the manifold metrical forms of Shelley’s “Prometheus,” without the choral-dramatic convention which imposes shape and keeping on that poem, as without the metrical genius which gives justifying music to its various versification. “Orm,” indeed, seems born from the mingled influence of “Prometheus” and “The Excursion,” and makes harder reading than either. Yet in his first volumes, “Undertones,” together with poems loose and diluted enough, there were others, on classic themes such as have not since tempted him, which showed a very different spirit and influence—much of Keats, somewhat perhaps of Tennyson. Here are things fine, ordered, and with an even distinction of knitted phrase, as this, describing the effect of Pan’s music:
Whence, in the season of the pensive eve,
The earth plumes down her weary, weary wings;
The Hours, each frozen in his mazy dance,
Look scared upon the stars, and seem to stand
Stone-still, like chisell’d angels mocking Time;
And woods and streams and mountains, beasts and birds,
And serious hearts of purblind men, are hush’d;
While music sweeter far than any dream
Floats from the far-off distance, where I sit
Wondrously wov’n about with forest boughs.
Or this other, a personification of Memory:
Fair-statured, noble, like an awful thing
Frozen upon the very verge of life,
And looking back along eternity
With rayless eyes that keep the shadow Time.
Here, also, one lights upon noble imagery, while the images at most times are seldom less than effective. “Antony in Arms” (too long to quote) is a fine and strongly dramatic little poem, level from first stanza to last.
But in his next volume, London Poems, he struck a realistic vein which made a name for him, and there was no further chance of his developing on the lines of the poems just quoted. As a whole, this second volume seems to us overrated. We prefer the longer poems which followed, for all their defects. In these he gave free play to his growing mysticism, while he was still intent on ultra-modernity, to be gained by treating the problems of modern life. “The Book of Orm,” we have said, appears to us best, and it is, at any rate, typical. It has deep thought, and is full of meaning, if the meaning be remote and difficult. It has imagination, too, on a large scale: conceptual imagination, we might call it. In execution, the imagination is much thinner than in the early poems already quoted; and fine imagery, though it exists, is much wider apart. Diffuseness, indeed, is the radical sin of this and the longer poems generally. They are diffuse in plan and in execution. Rarely you come across a single passage which keeps its feet throughout, like this striking imagination of what the world would be if the physical preludings of death were absent:
And suddenly my little son looked upward,
And his eyes were dried like dew-drops; and his going
Was like a blow of fire upon my face.
There was no comfort in the slow farewell,
Nor gentle shutting of belovèd eyes,
Nor beautiful brooding over sleeping features.
There were no kisses on familiar faces,
No weaving of white grave-clothes, no last pondering
Over the still wax cheeks and folded fingers.
The whole from which we quote these lines is beautiful, and original in conception. But, for the most part, we never get sustained distinction in workmanship; a passage promising to be fine is marred by interspacing with weaker matter; we have well-cut stones set in rubble, or, rather, the edges crumble away into the rubble, leaving none of them well cut. The poet can never stop in time. So there is a general laxity and loquacious dilution about the verse, leaving it distinction only in moments and for a short lifting of the wing. Which is a pity; for here is a poet of no inconsiderable power, whose “vaulting ambition” and revolt against all restraint and measure have shorn his most earnest work of its potential effect; so that it seems doubtful to us whether it can last much longer than “Kehama.” Now, that is an injustice done by Mr. Robert Buchanan to Mr. Buchanan’s self; for he is a poet, and Southey was not.
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The Echo (27 April, 1901 - p.1)
’TWEEN COVERS.
_____
(By Our Own Bookworm.)
Robert Buchanan! “Bonny fighter,” novelist, publicist, dramatist, and poet. What a congeries of qualities the name conjures up. Truly a knight of the pen if ever there was one. Ever ready for the joust and the tournament, he smoked for the affray, for the lists where sarcasm, satire, and wit were the weapons of offence and defence. His career (for alas! it must be spoken of in the past tense) has been so comet-like, so brilliant and changeful, so errant and evanescent that it has never had time to impress itself as anything uncommon or extraordinary on our somewhat obtuse and impervious intelligences. But here was a fine and a rare genius, clouded indeed to our view by aberrations perverting to our vision, although comforting to our baser metal that genius is after all like unto other men except in its genius. It is, however, less humiliating to him than to us that his imperfections have partially blinded us to the unalloyed excellence of his work.
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If greatness is to be measured by the hostility of other men, then assuredly Robert Buchanan is one of our most heroic figures. Even in his novels and dramas he has not been able to lay aside his love of fire-eating. In his political, social, and religious essays he has thrust us in our most cherished beliefs, and over-toppled the idols we have most idolised. But it is in his poetry that we find his true self, the revelation of the spirit of “the poet of modern revolt.” It is in this light that Mr. Buchanan’s poetry has to be considered if we are to find his true significance, and we are therefore grateful to Mr. Stodart-Walker for the fine judicious discrimination and judgment he displays in his estimate (Grant Richards) of the poetical attainments of one who must undoubtedly be placed in the front rank of modern poets. Mr. Walker wisely believes that in viewing Mr. Buchanan as a poet he is concerning himself with the Buchanan that is of importance in contemporary literary aspirations.
_____
What was Robert Buchanan’s mental attitude? An attitude of revolt against accepted traditions, of opposition to conventional formula. He could never bring himself to believe that the opinion of the majority was necessarily right. It was thus he set himself against the national idols, the Church, our political and ethical nostrums. The impostor who had foisted himself into high position was his especial object of attack. In his own picturesque and forcible language he said, “I’ve popt at vultures circling skyward, I’ve made the carrion hawks a byeword, but never caused a sigh or sob in the breast of a mavis or cock robin.” In another place he says, “My errors have arisen from excess of human sympathy, from ardour of human activity.” Indeed, it was this excess of human sympathy for the downtrodden and the helpless that raised in him the spirit of revolt.
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His song is always for the poor and the distressed, of “The Little Milliner” and her lover, the poor clerk, of Liz, whose “all I want is sleep, under the flags and stones,” and the dreamy labourer,
Who toiled away, and did his best
To keep his glad heart humble.
It was said of him by a supercilious critic, who meant it unkindly, that his idylls were of the gallows and the gutter, of costermongers and their trulls. Such an impeachment would be rather out of date if brought forward now. But Mr. Buchanan could write of other things when he chose. Some of his poems, as, for instance, “To Galatea,” have an almost Ovidian lusciousness and voluptuousness. Others again have a Byronic gloominess and mysticism. For poetic idealism and for a sympathetic and reverential treatment of a subject for which he was not commonly reputed to have much reverence, his ballad of “Mary the Mother” stands alone and unrivalled. While the hostility and enmity aroused by his strenuously expressed opinions continue to exist we can hardly hope that his work will receive the consideration it deserves. But with the rise of a new generation it may be confidently hoped that he will be assigned his proper place.
D. M. S.
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The Speaker (4 May, 1901)
Mr. Robert Buchanan as a Diabolist
Robert Buchanan: The Poet of Modern Revolt. By A. Stodart-Walker. London: Grant Richards. 6s.
It is a very dangerous and even destructive thing to have a large supply of righteous indignation. Having a large supply of unrighteous indignation hurts nobody; it is merely a series of human interludes. But righteous indignation possesses the whole man, and that way madness lies, particularly when the man has a surplus stock of ideal passion, and nobody in particular to work it off upon. This one essentially noble frailty is the chief of the difficulties of Mr. Robert Buchanan, a study of whose distinguished poetical career now lies before us. He has constantly been led by a mere inward prompting for battle, and struck out powerfully right and left at his contemporaries, often without disagreeing with them, and always without listening to them. This would matter little, for it is only one phase of an otherwise humane man, but that the author of the sketch of Mr. Buchanan now under our consideration selects this ferocious aspect of the matter for special study, and calls his book “Robert Buchanan: The Poet of Modern Revolt.”
Now, this resounding title does not impress us by any means. It may be questioned whether poets, as a class, are the better for being poets of revolt, or whether, as a class, they ever are poets of revolt. Poets sing of the common and therefore of the ancient things. Even where they do celebrate a kind of revolt, their revolt is commonly rather a reaction. They are a kind of Legitimists; when they rebel against the very stones of the street it is commonly in the interest of the rightful dynasty of trees. Few poets have ever rebelled against the oldest things; few have ever criticised the colour of the grass or the pattern of the stars, and Mr. Buchanan would certainly be the very last to do this. His mind is of the loyal type essentially; he defends the elementary charities against a mushroom crop of kings and priests. To call him a poet of revolt is simply to state his philosophy in negative instead of positive terms. Nor is there anything intellectually creditable in being in a constant condition of revolt. A thinker who calls himself simply a revolutionist is as foolish as a surgeon who should call himself an “amputationist”: it can mean nothing except an enduring mania for extreme measures. But Mr. Stodart-Walker has chosen to treat Mr. Buchanan from this, as it seems to us, frivolous and pugnacious point of view, and it is necessary for us to follow him.
The idea that the glory of Mr. Buchanan consists in being in “revolt,” is most strongly and completely expressed in the chapter called “The Devil,” which is devoted to the study of Mr. Buchanan’s poem entitled “The Devil’s Case.” We are used nowadays to sombrely sympathetic studies of Satan, and are perhaps inclined to ask for a little more devilry in our devils. We ourselves doubt very much whether the Devil is as white as he is painted. But literature has never seen so thoroughly impeccable a fiend as Mr. Buchanan’s, who is described as a “spirit of pity” leading men to light and knowledge, praising Christ for his tenderness and helping the weak and humble. This certainly impresses us, not as revolt, but as the most aimless sort of sentimentalism. To justify Satan against the saints by making him saintly seems to have no intellectual significance whatever. And we lose patience altogether when Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Stodart-Walker openly vaunt their emasculated Arimanes over the sublime lost spirits of Milton and Goethe. This is what Mr. Buchanan, in one of his worst moments, we suppose, says about the conception of Mephistopheles in “Faust”:
“Goethe's Mephisto is as crude a conception as even the Scotch ‘De’il,’ 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. . . ‘My’ Devil would have saved her; Goethe’s monkey-devil destroys her easily. Goethe, in fact, took the vulgar view held by every parson. Hence the vogue of his poem.”
To the dim and rambling mind of Goethe it never occurred, we conceive, that the object of a devil was to save people. Goethe had uncommonly little respect for that amateurish “spirit of revolt” which can tolerate an angel perfectly so long as he is called a devil. His object in describing Mephisto was not to gain the boyish delights of a Devil-worshipper, but to give a high and philosophic version of what he conceived to be actually the evil and baffling element in things. And this was the object of all the great poets who have dealt with the Devil in literature, and whose various performances Mr. Stodart-Walker passes in lofty and disdainful review. Milton, for instance, asked himself the question, “What force can be conceived as really fighting against and often frustrating the normal health and order of things?” His answer was that Will, or the deification of Will, was such a force: that the Devil was the personal unit who would not be reconciled or assimilated or destroyed or even forgiven. To Milton, as to many modern Socialists, the Devil was the Individual. Then came Goethe and asked the same question, but gave a different answer. The Will, he said in effect, was essentially right in its tendency: but the utterly sterile and uncelestial element in things was the cold and cruel intellect, which seems to itself to see everything from heaven to hell, but cannot even see the heart of man. Both these devils are real devils, for they are forces broken loose and blindly fighting against good. But Mr. Buchanan’s devil is nothing at all but a sort of shadowy Christ. To say that “intellect implies heart” is merely to take refuge in vague words. It is painfully like “the vulgar view held by every parson.”
But in truth Mr. Robert Buchanan is not what Mr. Stodart-Walker designates him, a poet of revolt, but something very much better. In some cases he has even carried conservatism too far, as in the case of “The Fleshly School,” in which he treated other poets of revolt as purely revolting. But from Mr. Stodart-Walker’s book alone could be deduced a sufficient mass of evidence to show that Mr. Buchanan’s genius is, at its best, as cheerful a champion of the beaten paths as that of Aristophanes or Mr. Anstey. The beautiful poem which deals with the sorrows of the Virgin Mary is profoundly conservative, and only has the appearance of theological audacity because motherhood is a much older thing than Christianity. Mr. Buchanan shows his bitter and abiding Toryism in the quatrains about contemporary writers which Mr. Stodart-Walker quotes
“There’s Ibsen puckering up his lips,
Squirming at Nature and Society;
Drawing with tingling finger-tips
The clothes off naked Impropriety.”
This is entirely unworthy of Mr. Buchanan; in fact, we have a suspicion, in reading it, that he has never read any Ibsen. Ibsen has many defects; in some moods we would give all his clear and callous criticisms for one featherheaded song by Mr. Buchanan. But the theory of Ibsen’s indelicacy of language is an entire invention of the Daily Telegraph. There is not, so far as we can remember, one sentence in the whole of Ibsen which approaches to the coarseness of the above four lines. But whether this note on the great Norwegian be justifiable or no, no one can question the reactionary sentiment, the almost rich antiquity, of the mental attitude. The truth is that Mr. Buchanan has made one of the few mistakes of his life in attempting to be blasphemous and novel. It does not come from his heart, which is emphatically in the right place. Swinburne could do this sort of thing, because he had really “wearied of sorrow and joy” at a certain period: Mr. Buchanan is no more weary of sorrow and joy than when he was a boy catching butterflies. There will always be those who really are what Mr. Stodart-Walker would call “poets of revolt.” It is the chief aim of most of us to adapt ourselves to the universe; there will always be a certain number of persons who spend an exciting, if brief, career in endeavouring to adapt the universe to themselves. But Mr. Buchanan is not one of these pitiable irreconcileables. He has had his frenzies and his denunciations, and his storms in a tea-cup, but he is, at the end of all, a man with a clean and universal appetite. Purity would always touch him, if it were not legalised; sanity would be his motto if it were not the motto of the Philistines; Christianity would enrapture him if it had not succeeded. Whatever may be his faults, he has nothing in common with that race of bloodless sensualists who sicken of the plain colours of earth and sky as a man might sicken after a heavy meal. The carnation in his button-hole is red.
—G.K.C. (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
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The New York Times (11 May, 1901)
LONDON LITERARY LETTER.
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Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW by
William L. Alden.
LONDON, May 3.—
. . . Mr. Robert Buchanan is still living, though in a state which makes it certain that he will do no more literary work. Mr. Stodart-Walker has just written a book in praise of Mr. Buchanan as a poet, and, although most people will be of the opinion that he overestimates the worth of Mr. Buchanan’s verse, the book is, on the whole, just and discriminating. The question suggests itself whether Mr. Stodart-Walker would not have done better to have waited for Mr. Buchanan’s death before publishing his book. It is the sort of book that is frequently published after an author’s death, and the reader inevitably finds himself looking upon Mr. Buchanan as already dead. Is it quite in good taste thus to assume that because a man is very ill he is virtually dead? I merely make the inquiry, for in the circumstances I am by no means sure that Mr. Stodart-Walker has made a mistake in publishing the volume, although some of the critics evidently think he has. On the other side, it might be said that it can do an author no harm to print while he is living the praises which we are so ready to print after he is dead. Why should we not give an author the happiness of feeling that he is appreciated? If he is already vain, it will not make him any the worse, and if he is not vain it will encourage and help him.
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Pall Mall Gazette (20 June, 1901 - p.11)
ROBERT BUCHANAN.*
THIS is a well-meant and laborious piece of work, conceived and executed with much mental and verbal confusion. We gather that what Mr. Walker would have liked to produce was an appreciation of the late Mr. Buchanan’s poetical works, but that he did not feel equal to the task. In the preface he calls his book a study of the poet’s “significance,” but hastens to add that he “is not bold enough to allot to his work any definite valuation.” In fact, he goes so far as to say that no contemporary critic could do this, as though the sole or chief function of criticism was to determine the value which posterity will attach to literature. Accordingly, the book is neither “of the nature of a criticism nor of an estimation,” and our author’s plan is to allow “the poet to speak for himself, and suggest his own significance and teaching.” The reader is destined to become very tired of the word “significance” before he finishes the volume.
In practice Mr. Walker’s plan breaks down. No further than the second page we find him referring to himself as a critic, and he is very soon at work “appreciating” and “estimating” with entire unconcern. The early poems are pronounced to be “tragic in their interests, true in their perspective, and eloquent beyond words in the very simplicity and forcibleness of their language.” It is true that we have to wait till we reach the last chapter before we are told, of these same poems, that Mr. Buchanan’s “spiritualized conception of life on the ‘unsung cities’ streets’ is, after all, drawing us away from the true philosophical perspective of the lives he is dealing with; and his belief in the immortality of every living thing does not afford a very helpful solution to the problem of the higher improvement and evolution of nature” (!)
There is, we must note, a good deal of unconscious humour in Mr. Walker’s announcement that he is going to let Mr. Buchanan “speak for himself.” No such permission was needed, as reticence on the subject of himself and his works was by no means one of the poet’s characteristics. This book teems with Mr. Buchanan’s views on the subject of his won publications; and we doubt if he has written anything in verse without furnishing, at the same time or later, a prose commentary on its “significance” or on the spirit in which it was composed.
We are not now concerned with the criticism of Mr. Buchanan’s works, and will merely state our opinion that Mr. Walker has overrated their importance, and that the “significance” of their author is, in fact, summed up in the homely fact that a pint pot cannot contain a gallon. The astonishing egoism of the man does not seem to have struck his admirer, who reproduces, without a sign of queasiness such remarks as these: “My manhood has never been stained by any sham hate or sham affection;” “My errors have arisen from excess of human sympathy;” “Lacking the pride of intellect, I have by superabundant activity tried to prove myself a man among men.” It is these trumpet solos in the key of mi, together with his notable lack of sweetness, that have prevented Mr. Buchanan from winning such popularity as he deserves; not any profundity (or repulsiveness) in the doctrines which he has expounded at length in many volumes of verse.
Mr. Walker admits few if any spots on his sun; he even says that that melancholy exhibition of rancour called “Kiplingson” contains “subtle humour.” But then we must remember that he calls “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” “a great ballad,” and thinks that by future ages Robert browning may be remembered only as its writer. This kind of obiter dictum is encouraging to those who differ from Mr. Walker in his opinion of the other “R. B.” He is himself, as he tells us, a man of science (or, as he would say, a “scientist”), and is presumably more skilful in managing a microscope than a pen—at least we hope so. He speaks of Bismarck’s “hatred-stenched” words, and of “virtuosity” when he appears to mean “virtue.” He says that somebody “soliloquizes a sleeping figure,” and refers to questions “that lie beyond mere ephemeræ.” Some of his sentences are almost, and others quite, unintelligible; for instance:
It is the helping meed, as we have said, of most religious systems, to step in and help the fallen, becoming in so doing what Mr. Buchanan has somewhere said, in a spirit of antagonism to Nature, and in consequence to God the Father.
If there is a want of the sense of humour, it springs from a belief that there is a likelihood of any radical changes taking place in human paradoxes.
But we must not forget, in indicating the significance of a seer or a teacher, that circumstances and influences are capable of modifying the possibility of permanency in the quality of the significance.
Language of this foggy kind wraps up a great many disquisitions on such lofty matters as eclecticism, nature’s evolutionary end, and the higher mentality. We do not profess to understand them all, but they produce in us (like the “phenomena” of the professional medium) a profound scepticism as to their value.
* “Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt: An Introduction to his Poetry.” By A. Stodart Walker. (London: Grant Richards.)
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The Yorkshire Post (24 July, 1901 - p.5)
The recent death of Mr. Robert Buchanan may direct attention to Mr. A. Stodart-Walker’s volume, “Robert Buchanan: The Poet of Modern Revolt” (Grant Richards, 6s. net). The book is neither a biography nor is it a complete survey of Mr. Buchanan’s literary work. It is an attempt to view him as a poet, and to understand his message to the world. In this way it will be helpful to those who wish quietly and fairly to judge a curiously complex character. Probably the author reads into the poet’s words a good deal they were not meant to convey; and his sense of the importance of Mr. Buchanan seems rather exaggerated. But the work has its interest, and to the critical mind its value.
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The British Medical Journal (31 March, 1934)
The death took place in London, on March 13th, of Dr. ARCHIBALD STODART-WALKER of Denham, Bucks. He was born in 1870 at St. Fort, Fife, and was a nephew of Professor John Stuart Blackie, the celebrated professor of Greek at Edinburgh University. Dr. Stodart-Walker was educated at Liverpool College and at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated M.B., C.M. in 1891. He studied also in London, Paris, and Bologna. After acting as resident house-physician to the late Professor Grainger Stewart in the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, he subsequently became assistant professor in physiology and clinical tutor at Edinburgh University. He joined the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh as a Member in 1895, proceeding to the Fellowship in 1897. After considerable research in the subjects of psychology and neurology Dr. Stodart-Walker abandoned the profession of medicine for that of literature in the year 1898. During his medical course at Edinburgh University he took an active interest in student affairs, being president of the Students’ Representative Council in 1890 and president of the Students’ Union in 1891; he also acted for a time as editor of The Student. He served in the R.A.M.C. during the war with the rank of major, being mentioned in dispatches and receiving the M.B.E. for his services. From 1919 to 1925 he acted as president of the Joint Survey Board at the Ministry of Pensions. Dr. Stodart-Walker published many works dealing with literary subjects, including The Letters of John Stuart Blackie in 1909; The Struggle for Success, 1900; Habit and Control, 1901; Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt, 1901; A Volunteer Haversack, 1902; A Beggar’s Wallet, 1905; and Occasional Verse, 1920. He was a keen art critic, and founded in 1907 the Scottish Modern Arts Association, of which he was appointed chairman.
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