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BOOK REVIEWS - POETRY (6)
London Poems (1866)
London Poems (1866)
The Atlas (30 June, 1866 - p.5)
We are glad to observe that Mr. Strahan promises for next week Mr. Robert Buchanan’s long promised “London Poems.” The same gentleman has also in preparation “The Poet: An Essay, a Criticism, And a Biography,” the central figure of which, we presume, will be David Gray, Mr. Buchanan’s early friend, on whom he wrote a fine prose epithalamium in the “Cornhill.” Second and enlarged editions of this rising (risen, rather) poet’s “Undertones,” and “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn,” have also been called for.
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The Athenćum (21 July, 1866)
LITERATURE
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London Poems. By Robert Buchanan. (Strahan.)
It is only fair to the poet that we should say at once, these ‘London Poems’ are not meant to be taken, in any sense, as poems about London. The capital of England is, indeed, a very fine subject for poetical picture-making. lts long renown, its stirring annals, its vast extent, its natural beauty, its varied life—the streets, the quays, the parks, the river, the surrounding hills—its docks in which the navies of a world may ride, its population larger than that of many a royal state, its churches, gardens, theatres, and palaces—its letters, legislation, commerce, art and science—its multitudinous society, with their genius, virtues, sufferings, passions—all these things go to make up a whole of first-rate capabilities for a poet who might be in search of a tempting theme. Parts of this theme have been seized by many poets as inexhaustible lodes of poetic gold: the pictorial effect by one, the solemn pathos by a second, the stirring romance by a third. The Elizabethan poets, with their eye for pomp and motion, for outward beauty and animal spirit, rejoiced their hearts in London, in its gay river-banks, in its busy streets and winding lanes, in its houses and gardens, in its holy wells, and in its pleasant taverns. Ben Jonson’s love of London is pictured in almost every page of his verse; and, in fact, the London of every age may be found mirrored in the freshest poetry of the time, from Chaucer down to Wordsworth. It would be safe to say that the man who is blind to the beauty, the romance, and the pathos of London has no imagination, and will never be a poet.
But London as a joyous visible fact—a great city, the centre of a nation’s life—is not meant to be the theme of Mr. Buchanan’s song. When the young poet thinks of London, his fancy is not filled, like that of an old rhymester, with dreams of the Cheapside taverns, of the Bankside plays, of the Fleet strawberry- gardens; he rather dwells upon the miseries crowded into Mile End courts and Westminster slums, on the secret griefs of poor milliners’ girls, and on the open shame of costermongers’ homes. We hear a good deal about streets and squares; occasionally we catch a glimpse of the river flowing by; and feel, as by an instinct, that a rich and mighty world is round about us; but, in all these hints of a great city, there is nothing local and peculiar; nothing that suggests a reason why these tragedies and epics might not have had their scenes laid a hundred miles from the Strand. London seems to be an accident in them, rather than a shaping, colouring force; the people who breathe and suffer in these pages being such as might have breathed and suffered otherwhere than in Islington and Southwark, without forfeiting one claim upon our tears and smiles. Such a picture gives us any city crowd:—
The crowd had voices, but each living man
Within the crowd seem’d silence-smit and hard:
They only heard the murmur of the town,
They only felt the dimness in their eyes,
And now and then turn’d startled, when they saw
Some weary one fling up his arms and drop,
Clay-cold, among them,—and they scarcely grieved,
But hush’d their hearts a time, and hurried on.
The poet has a loftier purpose than to write a book on London. ‘Langley Lane’ might be a suburb of Manchester. ‘The Starling’ would have chirped his innocent oaths in the Salt Market. ‘Edward Crowhurst’ is, in fact, a rustic bard. ‘The Little Milliner,’ whose life of busy innocence is so exquisitely suggested,—
Fear nor shame nor sin hath she,
But, like a sea-bird on the Sea,
Floats hither, thither, day and night:
The great black waters cannot harm her,
Because she is so weak and light,—
might have been put into a Glasgow garret, without losing any particle of her tender story. ‘Liz’ has more of London in her; and the tale of her escape from Southwark into country air for a single day, when she found
The air so clear and warm and sweet
It seemed a sin to breathe it,
is terribly pathetic. Poor Liz going back to die in the rank city,—
I could not bear a life so bright and still,
All that I want is sleep,—
is a very sad, a very true touch of nature. ‘Nell,’ too, has also much of London in it,—a powerful and tragic poem, showing none of the silver lining of the cloud. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. ‘Barbara Gray’ might have lived her little life in Leeds; for it is not in any one place that people “suffer and grow strong.” Again, the emotions stirred in the reader’s heart by such a tale as that of ‘Jane Lewson’ would be no less solemnly pathetic if the scene of her temptation and repentance were laid in Exeter or in Dublin. The interest roused by these domestic dramas is never local and narrow, but rather human and broad.
What appears to have struck Mr. Buchanan in the tragedy of London life, is the sin into which poor men and women fall from habit, from necessity, from affection, not from vicious desire; and to this error in the passions, which is seldom or never a misleading of the passions, he gives a singularly intense and tragic utterance. Of this little drama in humble life, we have a bright example in ‘Barbara Gray,’ a poem which we can happily quote entire:—
“Barbara Gray!
Pause, and remember what the world will say,”
I cried, and turning on the threshold fled,
When he was breathing on his dying bed;
But when, with heart grown bold,
I cross’d the threshold cold,
Here lay John Hamerton, and he was dead.
And all the house of death was chill and dim,
The dull old housekeeper was looking grim,
The hall-clock ticking slow, the dismal rain
Splashing by fits against the window-pane,
The garden shivering in the twilight dark,
Beyond, the bare trees of the empty park,
And faint gray light upon the great cold bed,
And I alone; and he I turn’d from,—dead.
Ay, “dwarf” they called this man who sleeping lies;
No lady shone upon him with her eyes,
No tender maiden heard his true-love vow,
And pressed her kisses on the great bold brow.
What cared John Hamerton? With light, light laugh,
He halted through the streets upon his staff;
Halt, lame, not beauteous, yet with winning grace
And sweetness in his pale and quiet face;
Fire, hell’s or heaven’s, in his eyes of blue;
Warm words of love upon his tongue thereto;
Could win a woman’s Soul with what he said,
And I am here; and here he lieth dead.
I would not blush if the bad world saw now
How by his bed I stoop and kiss his brow!
Ay, kiss it, kiss it, o’er and o’er again,
With all the love that fills my heart and brain.
For where was man had stoop’d to me before,
Though I was maiden still, and girl no more?
Where was the spirit that had deign’d to prize
The poor plain features and the envious eyes?
What lips had whisper’d warmly in mine ears?
When had I known the passion and the tears?
Till he I look on sleeping came unto me,
Found me among the shadows, stoop’d to woo me,
Seized on the heart that flutter’d withering here,
Strung it, and wrung it, with new joy and fear,
Yea, brought the rapturous light, and brought the day,
Waken’d the dead heart, withering away,
Put thorns and roses on the unhonour’d head,
That felt but roses till the roses fled!
Who, who, but he crept unto sunless ground,
Content to prize the faded face he found?
John Hamerton, I pardon all—sleep sound, my love, sleep sound!
What fool that crawls shall prate of shame and sin?
Did he not think me fair enough to win?
Yea, stoop and smile upon my face as none,
Living or dead, save he alone, had done?
Bring the bright blush unto my cheek, when ne’er
The full of life and love had mantled there?
And I am all alone; and here lies he,—
The only man that ever smiled on me.
Here, in his lonely dwelling-house he lies,
The light all faded from his winsome eyes:
Alone, alone, alone, he slumbers here,
With wife nor little child to shed a tear!
Little, indeed, to him did nature give;
Nor was he good and pure as some that live,
But pinch’d in body, warp’d in limb,
He hated the bad world that loved not him!
Barbara Gray!
Pause, and remember how he turn’d away;
Think of your wrongs, and of your sorrows. Nay!
Woman, think rather of the shame and wrong
Of pining lonely in the dark so long;
Think of the comfort in the grief he brought,
The revelation in the love he taught.
Then, Barbara Gray!
Blush not, nor heed what the cold world will say;
But kiss him, kiss him, o’er and o’er again,
In passion and in pain,
With all the love that fills your heart and brain!
Yea, kiss him, bless him, pray beside his bed,
For you have lived, and here your love lies dead.
All that story is made up of coarse and common stuff. A plain woman is wooed, not “honestly,” by a poor little dwarf, who is not good and pure, even to the woman who is in love with him; he casts her off; and dies like the dog he is. That is the truth, told as a respectable parish officer would put it. Does the parish officer’s view contain the whole? Is there not another side to this dismal truth? The poet says so; and in his utterance, while he never tampers with the sin and shame, the poor human frailties get such hearing for themselves, before just and true men, as they might never gain from their own halting powers of speech. It surely is a gain for human nature when genius puts a new interpretation on the things which seem amiss. Consuelo going out, in her failing years, to be again a wanderer of the streets and lanes, is a passionate appeal to our noblest feelings for the homeless poor; and so, in its degree, is this frantic kiss of Barbara Gray on her dead and unworthy lover’s lip an appealing note of pity in behalf of all who have gone astray.
It is the life of London—and mostly the life of poor and erring people—which has drawn the poet into song: into giving a musical utterance and a recognized poetic life to the deep and sombre morals which underlie so much of what looks like the dull and common waste of sin.
This service of humanity against itself (so to say) is one of the highest ministries on earth. We are apt to forget that we have the poor always with us. We are still more apt to forget that the poor throb with the same pulses, wither in the same wind, suffer under like temptation with ourselves. We are most of all apt, when we catch the poor tripping in their affections, to consider their conduct as a liberty, an intrusion, and to preach and lecture them upon their gross impertinence in being wicked. That social habit, of which Shakspeare gives us so many hints—the habit of measuring offences by the offender’s station, so that what is a merry jest in the Captain is rank blasphemy in the subaltern—is with us early and late; and it is well, we think, that clearer and deeper-seeing eyes should sometimes peep beneath our social draperies and tell us what we have been lazily content to hide. A little fresh, original truth is sometimes good.
We may be wrong in feeling, and if so, heaven forgive us; but we sometimes think that poor Barbara Gray in her sin and shame has still a good deal of the angel left in her.
The story of Jane Lewson is another of these trials of courage which have scarcely ever yet found a voice. It is a tale of sin and of the suffering sin brings with it; but the weight of the story lies in the picture of endurance shown by the weak and failing woman when the better side of her nature comes to the fore. As the poet says—
Ah, strong and mighty are we mortal men!
Braving the whirlwind on a ship at sea,
Facing the grim fort’s hundred tongues of fire,
Ay, and in England, ’neath the olive branch,
Pushing a stubborn elbow through the crowd,
To get among the heights that keep the gold;
But there is might and might,—and in the one
Our dames and daughters shame us. Come, my friend,
My man of sinew,—conscious of your strength,
Proud of your well-won wrestles with the world,—
Hear what a feeble nature can endure!
Jane is the youngest of three sisters, who have been left alone with a small competence arising to them from cottage rents; the two elder sisters are old, withered and Calvinistic; stronger in head, colder in heart, than the younger born. This little peep into their household gives us all the figures in a scratch, much like one of Albert Dürer’s interiors:—
A little yellow woman, dress’d in black,
With weary crow’s-feet crawling round the eyes,
And solemn voice, that seem’d a call to prayer;
Another yellow woman, dress’d in black,
Sad, too, and solemn, yet with bitterness
Burn’d in upon the edges of her lips,
And sharper, thinner, less monotonous voice;
And last, a little woman auburn-hair’d,
Pensive a little, but not solemnized,
And pretty, with the open azure eyes,
The white soft cheek the little mindless mouth,
The drooping childish languor. There they dwelt,
In a great dwelling of a smoky square
In Islington, named by their pious friends,
And the lean Calvinistic minister—
The Misses Lewson, and their sister Jane.
Their joyless life is pictured in a fashion attesting the closest observation of actual life in what is commonly thought to be its least romantic aspects and conditions:—
Miss Sarah, in her twenty-seventh year,
Knew not the warmer passions of her sex,
But groan’d both day and night to save her soul;
Miss Susan, two years younger, had regrets
Her sister knew not, and a secret pain
Because her heart was withering—whence her tongue
Could peal full sharp at times, and show a sting;
But Jane was comely—might have cherish’d hopes,
Since she was only twenty, had her mind
Been hopefuller. The elders ruled the house.
Obedience and meekness to their will
Was a familiar habit Jane had learn’d
Full early, and had fitted to her life
So closely, ’twas a portion of her needs.
She gazed on them, as Eastern worshippers
Gaze on a rayless picture of the sun.
Her acts seem’d other than her own; her heart
Kept melancholy time to theirs; her eyes
Look’d ever unto them for help and light;
Her eyelids droop’d before them if they chid.
A woman weak and dull, yet fair of face!
Her mother, too, had been a comely thing—
A bright-hair’d child wed to an aged man,
A heart that broke because the man was hard,—
Not like the grim first wife, who brought the gold,
And yielded to his melancholy kiss
The melancholy virgins. Well, the three,
Alone in all the world, dwelt in the house
Their father left them, living by the rents
Of certain smaller houses of the poor.
And they were stern to wring their worldly dues—
Not charitable, since the world was base,
But cold to all men, save the minister,
Who weekly cast the darkness of his blessing
Over their chilly table.
How many poets would dare to enter such a dwelling in search of true material for their art? Everything in that house appears to be forbidding; all but repulsive. The narrow fortunes, the narrower intellect, would seem to exclude all sympathy of the poetic kind. To clothe it with gold and colour would, of course, be possible; and genius could easily throw a light into the darkness that would glow into flame. But this would be false to nature and to art. An inferior workman would be tempted to put a glory into that sordid dwelling which never shone there; not so Mr. Buchanan. He takes things as they are, calls them by their true names, and is not afraid of Nature, whether he takes her on the brighter or the darker side:—
Jane felt lonesome in the world: and oft,
Pausing amid her work, gazed sadly forth
Upon the dismal square of wither’d trees,
The dusty grass that grew within the rails,
The garden-plots where here and there a flower
Grew up, and sicken'd in the smoke, and died;
And when the sun was on the square, and sounds
Came from the children in the neighbouring streets,
She thought of happy homes among the fields,
And brighter faces.
Into this dreary home there comes a light,—a wildering and deceiving light,—in which the dull, unspiritual girl is scathed:—
Love is as cunning as disease or death,
No doctor’s skill will ward him off or cure,
And soon he found this pale and weary girl,
Despite the cloud of melancholy life
That rain’d around her. In no beauteous shape,
In guise of passionate stripling iris-eyed,
Such as our poets picture in their songs,
Love came;—but in the gloomy garb of one
Whom men call’d pious, and whose holy talk
Disarm’d the dragons. ’Twere but idle, friend,
To count the wiles by which he won his way
Into her heart; how she vouchsafed him all
The passion of a nature not too strong;
How, when the first wild sunshine dazzled her,
The woman loved so blindly, that her thoughts
Became a secret trouble in the house;
And how at last, with white and frighten’d face,
She glided out into the dark one night,
And vanish’d.
Who needs to be told the fate into which she passes out of sight? The sisters hardly seek her; they fear she will come back; and of course she comes:—
It was a dark and rainy night; the streets
Were gleaming watery underneath the lamps,
The dismal wind scream’d fitfully without,
And made within a melancholy sound;
And the faint knock came to the door at last.
The sisters look’d in one another’s faces,
And knew the wanderer had return’d again,
But spoke not; and the younger sister rose,
Open’d the door, peer’d out into the rain,
And saw the weary figure shivering there,
Holding a burthen underneath her shawl.
And silently, with wan and timid look,
The wanderer slipt in. No word of greeting
Spake either of the sisters, but their eyes
Gleam’d sharply, and they waited. White and cold,
Her sweet face feebly begging for a word,
Her long hair dripping loose and wet, stood Jane
Before them, shivering, clasping tight her load,
In the dull parlour with the cheerless fire.
Till Susan, pointing, cried in a shrill voice,
“What are you carrying underneath your shawl,
Jane Lewson?” and the faint despairing voice,
While the rain murmur’d and the night-wind blew,
Moan’d, “It’s my Baby! ” and could say no more,
For the wild sisters scream’d and raised their hands,
And Jane fell quivering down upon her knees,
The old shawl opening show’d a child asleep,
And, trebling terror with a piteous cry,
The child awaken’d.
They make the mother enter into a compact that she shall rear the child of shame, not as her own, but as a forsaken and adopted bairn; and out of this living lie to which Jane submits, comes all the long agony of her mother’s life. This story is told in strong and tender words, simple as rocks and musical as tides. We scarcely know of any narrative poetry greater than is found in some of these sad and mourning lines:—
Soon, when the sound of little feet were heard
In the dull dwelling, and a baby-voice
Call‘d at the mother's heart, Jane thrill’d and heard,
But even as she listen’d the sweet sounds
Would seem to die into the cloud that hid
The great cold God above her. Margaret
Grew to a little wildling, quick and bright,
Black-eyed, black-hair’d, and passionate and quick,
Not like its mother; fierce and wild when chid,
So that the gloomy sisters often thought,
“There is a curse upon it;” yet they grew
To love the little wildling unaware,
Indulged it in their stern and solemn way,
More cheer’d than they believed by its shrill laugh
Within the dismal dwelling. But the child
Clung most to Jane.
The old times and fears come back as Margaret grows into girlhood:—
As the years went on,
The mother, with the agony in her heart
She could not utter, quietly subdued
Her nature to a listening watchfulness:
Her face grew settled to expectant calm,
Her vision penetrated things around
And gazed at something lying far beyond,
Her very foot linger’d about the house,
As if she loiter’d hearkening for a sound
Out of the world. For Margaret, as she grew,
Was wilder and more wilful, openly
Master’d the gloomy virgins, and escaped
The pious atmosphere they daily breathed
To gambol in a freër, fresher air;
And Jane would think, “’Twill kill me, if my child
Should turn out wicked.” Mindless though she was,
And feeble, yet the trouble made her sense
Quick, sharp, and subtle to perceive and watch.
A little word upon the girlish tongue
Could sting her,—nay, a light upon the face,
A kindling of the eye, a look the child
Wore when asleep, would trouble her for days,
Carrying strangest import. So she waited,
Watching and listening,—while the young new life
Drew in the air, and throve, absorbing hues
Out of a thousand trivial lights and shades
That hover’d lightly round it. Still to Jane
The habit of submission clung: she watch’d
The wiser sterner faces oftentimes,
Trembling for confirmation of her fears;
And nightly pray’d that God, who was so just,
So hard to those who went astray at all,
Would aid her sisters, helping them to make
The little Margaret better as she grew,—
Waking her secret trouble evermore
With countless, nameless acts of help and love,
And humble admonition, comforted
By secret fondlings of the little arms,
Or kisses on the tiny, wilful mouth
Apart in childish slumber.
At length came love, the trial most of all feared by the erring and enduring Jane:—
In its season came
That light which takes from others what it gives
To him or her who, standing glorified,
Awaits it. ’Tis the old, sad mystery:
No gift of love that comes upon a life
But means another’s loss. The new sweet joy,
That play’d in tender colours and mild fire
On Margaret’s cheek, upon the mother’s heart
Fell like a firebrand.
For to Jane, her friend,
Her dearest in the household from the first,
Her mother, her worn mother, whom she knew not
To be her mother, Margaret first told
The terror—how she loved and was beloved;
And seated at Jane’s feet, with eyes upturn’d,
Playing with the worn fingers, she exclaim’d,
“I love him, Jane! and you will love him too!
I will not marry any other man!”
And suddenly Jane felt as if the Lord
Had come behind her in the dark and breathed
A burning fire upon her. For she thought,
“My child will go away, and I shall die!”
But only murmur’d, “Marry, Margaret?
You are too young to marry!”—and her face
Was like a murder’d woman’s.
And the pain,
The agony, deepen’d, when the lover’s face
Came smiling to the dwelling, young and bright
With pitiless gladness. Jane was still, and moan’d,
“My child will go away, and I shall die!”
It would be quite unfair to the poet, who has a right to have his story judged in the whole as a work of Art, for us to quote the beautiful sequel of ‘Jane Lewson.’ The tale of how the mother and daughter came to know each other, to forget the past, and to fill the present with unutterable love, is one to bring tears into the eyes of the strongest men and the gentlest women.
About a third part of this volume is filled by four poems which have no relation to the title; ‘The Death of Roland,’ ‘The Scaith o’ Bartle,’ ‘The Glamour,’ ‘The Gift of Eos,’ each a notable work, tempting us into separate analyses; and we venture to predict that many persons will find in these poems their favourite reading. ‘The Scaith o’ Bartle’ is a narrative of extraordinary force and pathos; and here, again, we have the epical grief arising from a lapse in the affections.
On the whole these ‘London Poems’ make good the promise of ‘Undertones.’ They are true and genuine work; the result of real observation and personal emotion. Nothing is here derived from the moral consciousness; no make-believes, no dreams, and no composing. These verses have been lived before they were written down.
[Note: This review was written by William Hepworth Dixon.]
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The Spectator (28 July, 1866, p.16-18)
BOOKS.
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MR. BUCHANAN’S LONDON POEMS.*
MR. BUCHANAN is far more than a minor poet. The volume before us would seem to prove that there is scarcely any eminence, short of the very highest, in our poetic literature which he may not hope to reach. He has not shown as yet the highest order of lyrical genius nor the highest fertility of dramatic conception, but his peculiar province is the union of lyrical with dramatic conceptions so that he seems, to use a mathematical metaphor, to hit the locus of the points of intersection between the genius of Wordsworth and the genius of Browning. What Wordsworth called “the power of hills” is on him; and he has not a little also of Wordsworth’s power of conceiving a typical character in essence, or rather of painting its reflected image in another mind, as Wordsworth conceived Hartley Coleridge at three years of age, painted Coleridge himself in the lines written in Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence,” and delineated character in “Michael,” and “The Happy Warrior,” and many others. But while Wordsworth, led by his meditative genius, always painted the reflected image of others in himself, always holding up the same clear, deep, solitary intellectual mirror,—like the face of some mountain lake,—to the subject he was occupied with, Mr. Buchanan’s method, though narrative, is more dramatic, more like that of Mr. Browning. He approaches his subjects at second hand through some other mind naturally related to the one he wishes to image, and delineates not, like Wordsworth, his own view,—which perhaps it would puzzle him to give,—but a view rendered distinct and determinate by the natural relations of the character he is studying to some other person, so that he is not compelled as it were to have a view of his own, or meditations of his own, on the subject at all. Thus he combines many of the beauties of Wordsworth with something of the dramatic vivacity and realism of Mr. Browning; and the glory of nature gives a sweetness, a melody, and melancholy to his verses, which is seldom or never to be found in Browning’s shrewd, loquacious “apologies” for all sorts of characters. The lyrical poet is far deeper and sweeter in Mr. Buchanan than in Mr. Browning. Nor is Mr. Buchanan so fond of argumentative and almost formally intellectual apologetic writings. For while Browning loves to make his Bishop Blogram, or his Fra Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban, defend himself, which is necessarily a shrewd, hard, self-love-showing process, Mr. Buchanan prefers to give only such apology for his characters as the love of another very near and dear would naturally devise. By this means he manages to combine the definite, determinate, sharply drawn dramatic delineation of Mr. Browning with a sweet sad note of yearning and of love that permits the introduction of an exquisite thread of lyrical beauty. Even when, as in one or two of ths poems, and perhaps the finest of them, the main subject of the poem is the emotion of the person supposed to be speaking, even then the emotion expressed is not self-respecting and therefore hard and argumentative, as generally with Browning, but is all centred on some external object of love and solicitude. Thus the two poems called “Liz” and “Nell,” the finest perhaps in the volume, and in their way some of the finest poems of the present generation, are the expressions of the feelings of two poor London women, the one dying after the birth of her first child, born not in wedlock, but still in what the woman regarded as wedlock, with Joe, a costermonger,—the other such as the woman who lived with poor Wright (who was hanged for murder) might have spoken had he been hanged for the murder of some one other than herself, instead of, as it happened to be in that case, that she herself was the victim of his habit of drinking. We do not mean of course that either of these beautiful poems,—poems unique in their mixture of city-life realism with lyrical beauty, —could actually have been spoken by the women whom they delineate. “Art,” as Mr. Buchanan says, with a somewhat different drift, in the very fine poem called “London, 1864,” “works her end not by giving, but by cruelly taking away,”— and she has taken away accordingly from the bizarre language in which these poor creatures would probably have endeavoured to clothe the thoughts that arose in them, all that hid, instead of really expressing, those thoughts, and left two poems such as we should not find it easy to match in any language for making us see
“Flowing beneath the blackness of the streets,
The current of sublimer, sweeter life,
Which is the source of human smiles and tears,
And melodized, becomes the strength of song.”
There is nothing finer, as we have intimated, in these poems than the strength with which Mr. Buchanan combines what Wordsworth called “the power of hills” with “the power of cities. Those who feel the one often feel the other,— Wordsworth himself did so, as he showed in the exquisite sonnet written on Westminster Bridge,—but rarely indeed has the same man the faculty of giving voice to both. The great feature in the most striking of these poems which we have already named,—”Liz” and “Nell,”—is the force with which both of them express the peculiar and mighty attraction of a great city,—London most of all great cities,—for those who have become familiar with it. As the heart leaps up at the sight of ”the old revisited mountains,” so we will not say it always leaps up,—for sometimes it may cower down,—but it will always feel the strange spell of London after any considerable absence. This spell breathes through most of Mr. Buchanan’s London Poems, and gives us that ground-swell of London that corresponds to the ground-swell of the sea which underlies the life of its waves. He expresses in his own person with great power this fascination of London in the fine opening stanzas dated Bexhill. He could not sing of London, he says, while London was still present with him. Then the roar of London sounded in his ears like the roar of the waves near his old Scotch home, and brought back the pictures of his native hills; but when he settled quietly beside the Sussex sea, the life of London grew upon his imagination, and he expresses thus finely its effect:—
“Hither to pastoral solitude I came,
Happy to breathe again serener air
And feel a purer sunshine; and the woods
And meadows were to me an ecstasy,
The singing birds a glory, and the trees
A green perpetual feast to fill the eye
And shimmer in upon the soul; but chief
There came the murmur of the waters, sounds
Of sunny tides that wash on silver sands,
Or cries of waves that anguish’d and went white
Under the eyes of lightnings, ’Twas a bliss
Beyond the bliss of dreaming, yet in time
It grew familiar as my mother’s face;
And when the wonder and the ecstasy
Had mingled with the beatings of my heart,
The terrible City loom’d from far away
And gathered on me cloudily, dropping dews,
Even as those phantoms of departed days
Had haunted me in London streets and lanes.
Wherefore in brighter mood I sought again
To make the life of London musical,
And sought the mirror of my soul for shapes
That linger’d, faces bright or agonized,
Yet ever taking something beautiful
From glamour of green branches, and of clouds
That glided piloted by golden airs.
“And if I list to sing of sad things oft,
It is that sad things in this life of breath
Are truest, sweetest, deepest. Tears bring forth
The richness of our natures as the rain
Sweetens the smelling brier; and I, thank God!
Have anguish’d here in no ignoble tears—
Tears for the pale friend with the singing lips,
Tears for the father with the gentle eyes
(My dearest up in heaven next to God)
Who loved me like a woman. I have wrought
No girlond of the rose and passion-flower,
Grown in a careful garden in the sun;
But I have gather’d samphire dizzily,
Close to the hollow roaring of a Sea.”
The last two lines express, not only grandly, but we think truly, the powerful fascination which the great city exerted upon Mr. Buchanan’s imagination. In the poem which, on the whole, we incline to think the finest of the volume, called “Liz,”— for, it borrows less from the fascination of a tragic subject than the almost equally fine one called “Nell,”—he describes with a force that long haunts the imagination of those who read it the need for the stimulus of London which grows into the heart of a poor woman born and bred there, and who has lived from the first the life of the streets, and the awe with which the solitary splendour of Nature strikes upon her:—
“For I was sick of hunger, cold, and strife,
And took a sudden fancy in my head
To try the country, and to earn my bread
Out among the fields, where I had heard one’s life
Was easier and brighter. So, that day,
I took my basket up and stole away,
Just after sunrise. As I went along,
Trembling and loath to leave the busy place,
I felt that I was doing something wrong,
And fear’d to look policemen in the face.
And all was dim; the streets were gray and wet
After a rainy night: and all was still;
I held my shawl around me with a chill,
And dropt my eyes from every face I met ;
Until the streets began to fade, the road
Grew fresh and clean and wide,
Fine houses where the gentlefolk abode,
And gardens full of flowers, on every side.
That made me walk and quicker—on, on, on—
As if I were asleep with half shut eyes.
And all at once I saw, to my surprise,
The houses of the gentlefolk were gone,
And I was standing still,
Shading my face, upon a high green hill;
And the bright sun was blazing,
And all the blue above me seem’d to melt
To burning, flashing gold, while I was gazing
On the great smoky cloud where I had dwelt.
“I’ll ne’er forget that day. All was so bright
And strange. Upon the grass around my feet
The rain had hung a million drops of light;
The air, too, was so clear and warm and sweet
It seem’d a sin to breathe it. All around
Were hills and fields and trees that trembled through
A burning, blazing fire of gold and blue;
And there was not a sound,
Save a bird singing, singing in the skies,
And the soft wind, that ran along the ground,
And blew full sweetly on my lips and eyes.
Then, with my heavy hand upon my chest,
Because the bright air pain’d me, trembling, sighing„
I stole into a dewy field to rest.
And oh, the green, green grass where I was lying
Was fresh and living—and the bird sang loud,
Out of a golden cloud—
And I was looking up at him and crying!
“How swift the hours slipt on! And by and by
The sun grew red, big shadows fill’d the sky,
The air grew damp with dew,
And the dark night was coming down, I knew.
Well, I was more afraid than ever, then,
And felt that I should die in such a place,—
So back to London town I turn’d my face,
And crept into the great black streets again;
And when I breathed the smoke and heard the roar,
Why, I was better, for in London here
My heart was busy, and I felt no fear.
I never saw the country any more.
And I have stay’d in London, well or ill—
I would not stay out yonder if I could,
For one feels dead, and all looks pure and good—
I could not bear a life so bright and still.
All that I want is sleep,
Under the flags and stones, so deep, so deep!
God won’t be hard on one so mean, but He,
Perhaps, will let a tired girl slumber sound
There in the deep cold darkness under ground;
And I shall waken up in time, may be,
Better and stronger, not afraid to see
The great, still Light that folds Him round and round!”
The poem from which this is taken was first published months ago in the pages of the Fortnightly Review, and it has grown upon us so much in memory that we are able to apply to it a severer test—the test of time—than to any quite new poem. The best critic that ever lived would not probably know exactly the comparative value of new poems. For often that which takes hold of us most at first sight relaxes its hold gradually as we become more and more familiar with it, till at last it becomes poor, while that which but half impresses us at first grows like a seed in the imagination till it becomes one of the permanent shelters and beauties of our inner world. Both the poems which we recognize here as formerly published elsewhere have taken this hold upon us, and hence we feel less doubt in asserting their poetic strength and value. “The Starling” is a poem of less imaginative body altogether, yet it is singularly fine of its kind. The clearness and singleness of its intention,—to express the sort of animal misanthropy which possesses some of the more wretched dwellers in great cities who feel, like a crippled bird in a grimy cage, some vague longing for the freer life they have lost, and who express their misery in a sort of hoarse vicious swearing which is rather selfish woe than malignity,—is not surpassed in any other of these London Poems. Perhaps we may venture to extract this much of it intelligibly without spoiling the whole:—
“A haggard and ruffled
Old fellow was Jack,
With a grim face muffled
In ragged black,
And his coat was rusty
And never neat,
And his wings were dusty
From the dismal street,
And he sidelong peer’d,
With eyes of soot too,
And scowl’d and sneer’d,—
And was lame of a foot too!
And he long’d to go
From whence he came;—
And the tailor, you know,
Was just the same.
All kinds of weather
They felt confined,
And swore together
At all mankind;
For their mirth was done,
And they felt like brothers,
And the swearing of one
Meant no more than the other’s;
’Twas just a way
They had learn’d, you see,—
Each wanted to say
Only this—’Woe’s me!
I’m a poor old fellow,
And I’m prison’d so,
While the sun shines mellow,
And the corn waves yellow,
And the fresh winds blow,—
And the folk don’t care
If I live or die,
But I long for air,
And I wish to fly!’
Yet unable to utter it,
And too wild to bear,
They could only mutter it,
And swear.”
There are poems which have little or no relation to London life amongst the London Poems, as, for example, that called “Edward Crowhurst,” and written on the fate of poor John Clare, which only just touches the literary life of great cities in its power to disenchant a rustic poet of his vision and faculty divine. But on the whole those which are most penetrated with London impressions, like those we have mentioned, and also “The Little Milliner,” and “Artist and Model,” seem to us the finest. The poem on John Clare, though beautiful, has a far less intense life, a far more straggling life,—like its subject,—than most of the others, and “Jane Lawson” in parts falls below the general level of Mr. Buchanan’s poetry. “The Death of Roland,” widely different in style and subject as it is from the others, has a singalar grandeur of its own—grandeur of a weird, romantic sort. Another piece of the kind furthest removed from the London Poems, called “The Gift of Eos,” is a sort of supplement to Mr. Tennyson’s Tithonus, a poetic defence for the immortality conferred on a mortal by his ambitious love of a goddess, against Mr. Tennyson’s representation of it as a boon of pure misery. The idea of the poem is concentrated finely in the stanza which Mr. Buchanan extracts from it as a motto, but which is also much the finest stanza in the poem:—
“Not in a mist of loveless eyes dies he,
Who loveth truly nobler light than theirs;
To him, nor weariness nor agony,
Purblind appeals, nor prayers;
To him, the priceless boon
To watch from heights divine till all be done:
Calm in each dreamy rising of the Moon,
Glad in each glorious coming of the Sun.”
We suspect that Mr. Buchanan wrote the poem in elaboration of this fine stanza, but if so he has scarcely written up to his own motto for it. As a whole it does not satisfy the imagination excited by so fine an overture. Mr. Buchanan takes as his motto Goethe’s fine lines:—
“Greift nur hinein in’s volle Menschenlebeu!
Ein jeder lebt’s, nicht vielen ist’s bekannt,
Und wo ihr’s packt, da ist’s interessant,”
—and nobly on the whole does he work out the idea so often reiterated in our generation, so seldom successfully applied, at least in poetry. No volume of poems has appeared for many years in London which so certainly announces a true poetic fame. Unquestionably the volume is a great advance on the Idyls of Inverburn, clear, sweet, and beautiful as they were. We trust the splendour of the daylight may not be belied by the brilliant promise of the dawn.
___________
* London Poems. By Robert Buchanan. London: Alexander Strahan.
___
Glasgow Herald (4 August, 1866)
LITERATURE.
_____
LONDON POEMS. By Robert Buchanan, author of “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn,” “Undertones,” &c. London: Alexander Strahan.
IN a fine poem, introductory to “London Poems,” Mr. Buchanan describes what he has and has not done:—
“I have wrought
No girlond of the rose and passion-flower,
Grown in a careful garden in the sun;
But I have gathered samphire dizzily,
Close to the hollow roaring of a sea.”
This “gathering of samphire,” to which the poet alludes, is one of the boldest experiments that has been attempted in modern poetry—the boldest, certainly, since Wordsworth dared to strike precedent in the face, and sing of subjects which had been almost wholly neglected in a language which many of the critical oracles hated and despised. But there is always a knowledge beyond knowledge, and a wisdom beyond wisdom—accessible mainly to the poet—and it turned out, as most appropriately it should, that the humble, almost mean-looking subjects about which Wordsworth sang so wisely and well, were not the insignificant and fruitless things they had been so unwisely deemed. Nor was the language in which the poet uttered himself the despicable English which many clever people called it, and which it might actually seem to be when compared with the brazen jingle which had so often passed for the legitimate vehicle of poetic thought. But the oracles are dumb; and Wordsworth’s thought and music have mingled with the universal English tongue.
We suspect that Mr. Buchanan’s experiment will be regarded as far more audacious than that of Wordsworth. It is certainly more difficult. We all see now, and understand, and of course can devoutly acknowledge, the poetical nature of Wordsworth’s themes. But this is after the poet has taught us to see and understand, which the poet has done from the beginning, and must do to the end—it being the supreme function of poetry to open first the eyes of sense, and through them the eyes of the soul. Mr. Buchanan has just begun this process of teaching. Most bravely has he sung, but has he sung well, truly, and beautifully? These are the questions to be solved; and those who have read his poems from the beginning will readily acknowledge that they contain a most satisfactory answer. There are forces in nature which seem always about to enter into a state of being, and to utter themselves in language. To these forces, in his volume of “Undertones,” did Mr. Buchanan, exercising the functions of poetic creator, or using the creatures of antique mythology, give splendid embodiment and beautiful speech. The field was not a new one, but he made new flowers spring up in it, and he gave to its air a new fragrance. In the “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn,” Mr. Buchanan entered a higher because human field, and gave a local habitation and a name to certain phases of humble country life, the full significance of which poetry had not hitherto cared to weave into the tissue of song. Both these volumes were highly successful as poetic adventures. In his new volume he takes a more daring flight. He enters the city, and, heedless of many warning voices which mutter of failure, he grapples with some of the most profoundly tragic phases of modern life—sinful, miserable, hopeless—phases which the daintier muse would shudder even to name. But of all living poets, Mr. Buchanan is, we think, the most courageous and uncowardly. In a moral point of view, indeed, his boldness amounts to a distinct originality. This, too, not merely because it is unique, but because it is allied to that kind of intense earnestness which springs from a deep sense of the value of human rectitude and human purity. Woman in the city in her unhappiest relation to man—how few would seek in that direction a theme for poetry! Yet, if it be true, as Mr. Buchanan practically assumes, that it is hardly possible for woman wholly to fall, even as a voluntary victim, the very singularity of the fact makes it profoundly poetical, and gives to the poet a theme steeped in the tears of unrecorded agonies, and sharp with the bitter truths. Not every poet, however, would venture into such regions, where already the souls of men and women seem to suffer purgatorial penalties. But thither, Dante-like, Mr. Buchanan has penetrated, and has brought back several pictures, black with the hues of moral eclipse, yet revealing a thin gleaming edge, which affords a golden guarantee that even in these regions human souls never wholly die, but live in moral obscuration, with the ever-lingering chance of emerging into a serene dawn of redemption.
The subjects of such poems as “Liz,” “Jane Lewson,” “Nell,” and “Barbara Gray,” in this volume, wear on the surface, a forbidding aspect; but the humanity of them, and the skill with which the stories are worked out to their coincident, poetical, and moral end, abundantly justify the selection of them, and testify to the original genius of the poet. It seems unquestionably a bold stroke to make “Liz,” who has lived a year with Joe, the costermonger, and is dying, having given birth to a baby, tell her own story to the parson on her deathbed. We fear that the story is terribly true, and that Liz alone can tell it with proper emphasis, her experience in misery lending her courage and language, and her scarcely roused or unsuspicious moral sense giving her such curious freedom of thought in speaking to the clergyman. Poor Liz is speaking to this last visitor about the class to which she belongs, and the old truth comes out in her conversation that it is easier to see and understand sin than be sinless. She says:—
But I’ve no call to boast. I might have been
As wicked, Parson dear, in my distress,
But for your friend—you know the one I mean?—
The tall, pale lady, in the mourning dress.
Though we were cold at first, that wore away—
She was so mild and young,
And had so soft a tongue,
And eyes to sweeten what she loved to say.
She never seem’d to scorn me—no, not she;
And (what was best) she seem’d as sad as me!
Not one of those that make a girl feel base,
And call her names, and talk of her disgrace,
And frighten one with thoughts of flaming hell,
And fierce Lord God, with black and angry brow;
But soft and mild, and sensible as well;
And oh, I loved her, and I love her now.
She did me good for many and many a day—
More good than pence could ever do, I swear,
For she was poor, with little pence to spare—
Learn’d me to read, and quit low words, and pray.
And, Parson, though I never understood
How such a life as mine was meant for good,
And could not guess what one so poor and low
Would do in that sweet place of which she spoke,
And could not feel that God would let me go
Into so bright a land with gentlefolk,
I liked to hear her talk of such a place,
And thought of all the angels she was best,
Because her soft voice soothed me, and her face
Made my words gentle, put my heart at rest.
Thus it is clear that, in spite of the great misery of her life, Liz is neither wholly miserable nor wholly bad. Yet it is terrible to hear her utter such words as these:—
It sounds half-wicked, but poor girls like me
Must sin a little to be good in aught.
In order to appreciate the peculiar power of the following account of Liz’s only visit to the country, it ought to be remembered how more completely than any other class such people as she live and die in the city:—
I’ll ne’er forget that day. All was so bright
And strange. Upon the grass around my feet
The rain had hung a million drops of light;
The air, too, was so clear and warm and sweet,
It seem’d a sin to breathe it. All around
Were hills and fields and trees that trembled through
A burning, blazing fire of gold and blue;
And there was not a sound,
Save a bird singing, singing, in the skies,
And the soft wind, that ran along the ground,
And blew full sweetly on my lips and eyes.
Then, with my heavy hand upon my chest,
Because the bright air pain’d me, trembling, sighing,
I stole into a dewy field to rest,
And oh, the green, green grass where I was lying
Was fresh and living—and the bird sang loud,
Out of a golden cloud—
And I was looking up at him and crying!
How swift the hours slipt on!—and by and by
The sun grew red, big shadows fill’d the sky,
The air grew damp with dew,
And the dark night was coming down, I knew.
Well, I was more afraid than ever, then,
And felt that I should die in such a place,—
So back to London town I turn’d my face,
And crept into the great black streets again;
And when I breathed the smoke and heard the roar,
Why, I was better, for in London here
My heart was busy, and I felt no fear.
I never saw the country any more.
And I have stay’d in London, well or ill—
I would not stay out yonder if I could,
For one feels dead, and all looks pure and good—
I could not bear a life so bright and still.
All that I want is sleep,
Under the flags and stones, so deep, so deep!
God won’t be hard on one so mean, but He,
Perhaps, will let a tired girl slumber sound
There in the deep cold darkness under ground;
And I shall waken up in time, may be,
Better and stronger, not afraid to see
The great, still Light that folds Him round and round!
“Jane Lewson” is another tale of the city, quite different from “Liz,” but deeper, more dismal, and more intense in its pathos. It is told with great skill and power. Jane Lewson lives with her two unmarried pious sisters in Islington. Look at their portraits:—
A little yellow woman, dress’d in black,
With weary crow’s-feet crawling round the eyes,
And solemn voice, that seem’d a call to prayer;
Another yellow woman, dress’d in black,
Sad, too, and solemn, yet with bitterness
Burn’d in upon the edges of her lips,
And sharper, thinner, less monotonous voice;
And last, a little woman auburn-hair’d,
Pensive a little, but not solemnised,
And pretty, with the open azure eyes,
The white soft cheek, the little mindless mouth,
The drooping childish languor.
The sisters are hard and stern, and Jane’s life is as hard and dull as any human life can be. It becomes unendurable, and one night she is missed from the house:—
The sisters gave a quick and scandall’d cry,
And sought a little for the poor flown bird;
Then, thinking awful things, composed their hearts
In silence, pinch’d their narrow natures more,
And waited. “This is something strange,” they thought,
“Which God will clear; we will not think the worst,
Although she was a thing as light as straw.”
Nor did they cry their fear among their friends,
Hawking a secret shame, but calmly waited,
Trusting no stain would fall upon their chill
And frosty reputations. Weeks pass’d by;
They pray’d, they fasted, yellowing more and more,
They waited sternly for the end, and heard
The timid knock come to the door at last.
It was a dark and rainy night; the streets
Were gleaming watery underneath the lamps,
The dismal wind scream’d fitfully without,
And made within a melancholy sound;
And the faint knock came to the door at last.
The sisters look’d in one another’s faces,
And knew the wanderer had return’d again,
But spoke not; and the younger sister rose,
Open’d the door, peer’d out into the rain,
And saw the weary figure shivering there,
Holding a burthen underneath her shawl.
And silently, with wan and timid look,
The wanderer slipt in. No word of greeting
Spake either of the sisters, but their eyes
Gleam’d sharply, and they waited. White and cold,
Her sweet face feebly begging for a word,
Her long hair dripping loose and wet, stood Jane
Before them, shivering, clasping tight her load,
In the dull parlour with the cheerless fire.
Till Susan, pointing, cried in a shrill voice,
“What are you carrying underneath your shawl,
Jane Lewson?” and the faint despairing voice,
While the rain murmur’d and the night-wind blew,
Moan’d, “It’s my Baby! ” and could say no more,
For the wild sisters scream’d and raised their hands,
And Jane fell quivering down upon her knees,
The old shawl opening show’d a child asleep,
And, trembling terror with a piteous cry,
The child awaken’d.
These marble sisters command Jane to be gone; but, after a most piercing scene of beseeching on the part of the poor girl, they consent to let her stay, but on the most cruel conditions—
The child herself
Must never know Jane Lewson is her mother:
Neither by word nor look nor tender folly,
Must you reveal unto the child her shame,
And yours, and ours.
This proves a fearful trial to poor Jane; but of course, although the lapse of time never wholly dulls her secret sorrow, she is not without consolation, especially as she watches the growth of her child into a beautiful girl, “a maiden flower full- blown:”—
A passion-flower!—a maiden whose rich heart
Burn’d with intensest fire that turn’d the light
Of the sweet eyes into a warm dark dew;
One of those shapes so marvellously made,
Strung so intensely, that a finger-press,
The dropping of a stray curl unaware
Upon the naked breast, a look, a tone,
Can vibrate to the very roots of life,
And draw from out the spirit light that seems
To scorch the tender cheeks it shines upon;
A nature running o’er with ecstasy
Of very being, an appalling splendour
Of animal sensation, loveliness
Like to the dazzling panther’s; yet, withal,
The gentle, wilful, clinging sense of love,
Which makes a virgin’s soul. It seem’d, indeed,
The gloomy dwelling and the dismal days,
Gloaming upon her heart, had lent this show
Of shining life a melancholy shade
That trebled it in beauty. Such a heart
Needed no busy world to make it beat:
It could throb burningly in solitude;
Since kindly Heaven gave it strength enough
To rock the languid blood into the brains
Of twenty smaller natures.
But Jane’s secret, that she is Margaret’s mother, and dares not whisper of the fact, is an abiding agony to the poor creature. She is at length stricken down with a fever, and in her delirium she mutters such words in the hearing of Margaret, who attends upon her, as make the young girl suspicious and watchful. The sisters hear of the unconscious revelations made by Jane in her fever, and when she recovers sufficiently they again hold a parley with her:—
Then Sarah took
Jane’s hand, and spake more gently, sisterly,
(Such natures, friend, grow kinder as they age,)
Than she had done for many years, and told
Of those wild words utter’d while she was ill;
Jane moan’d and hid her face; but Sarah said,
“We do not blame you, and perchance the Lord
Spake through you! We have thought it o’er, and pray’d:
Now listen, Jane. Since that unhappy night,
We have not spoken of your shame, yet know
You have repented.” With her face still hid,
Jane falter’d, “Let me die!” but Sarah said,
“We do not think, Jane Lewson, you will live;
So mark me well. If, ere you go away,
You feel that you could go more cheerfully,
If you are certain that it is not sin,
Poor Margaret shall know she is your child;
We will not, now you die, deny you this;
And Margaret will be silent of the shame,—
And, lest you break your oath upon the Word,
Our lips shall tell her.” Still Jane Lewson hid
Her face; and all was quiet in the room,
Save for a shivering sound and feeble crying.
But suddenly Jane lifted up her face,
Beauteous beyond all beauty given to joy,
And quickly whispering, press’d the chilly hand—
“I will not speak! I will not hurt my child
So cruelly!—the child shall never know!
And I will go in silence to my grave,
Leaving her happy,—and perhaps the Lord
Will pardon me!” Then, for the first last time,
The sisters look’d on Jane with different eyes,
Admiring sternly, with no words of praise,
Her they had scorn’d for feebleness so long.
Even then the watchers in the chamber heard
A sound that thrill’d them through,—a rustling dress,
A deep hard breathing as of one in pain;
And pointing with her hand Jane scream’d aloud;
And turning suddenly the sisters saw
A face as white as marble, yet illumed
By great eyes flashing with a terrible flame
That made them quail. And in a dangerous voice,
As low as a snake’s hissing, Margaret said,
“I have heard all!” Then the great eyes were turn’d
On Jane, and for a moment they were cold;
But all at once the breathless agony
Of recognition struck upon her heart,
The bosom heaved and moan’d, the bright tears burst,
And Margaret flung herself upon the bed,
Clasping her shivering mother; and at first
Jane shrank away,—but soon the wondrous love
Master’d her,—she could smile and kiss and cry—
And hear the dear wild voice cry, “Mother, mother!”
And see the bright face through her tears, and feel
That Love was there.
It may be sufficient to say that Jane’s special grief is considerably lightened by the marriage of her daughter, with whom she lives till she dies a year afterwards. But the story of “Nell,” what shall we say of a theme so utterly abhorrent to the staid and timid muse? Murder avenged on the scaffold has never before, we believe, been deliberately selected as a theme for poetry. Yet Mr. Buchanan succeeds in making of it one of the most powerfully pathetic pieces in his volume. The incidents are past, and Nell, heart-broken, recounts them to one who has befriended her—how one night Ned rushes in with blood-stained hands, having murdered some one in the heat of a drunken quarrel—the terrible agony of that night—“the dreadful daylight coming cold”—then the incidents of the capture, “those voices in the street, that hurrying of feet”:—
And Ned leap’d up, and knew that they had come.
“Run, Ned!” I cried, but he was deaf and dumb!
“Hide, Ned!” I scream’d, and held him—“hide thee, man!”
He stared with bloodshot eyes, and hearken’d, Nan!
And all the rest is like a dream—the sound
Of knocking at the door—
A rush of men—a struggle on the ground—
A mist—a tramp—a roar;
For when I got my senses back again,
The room was empty,—and my head went round!
The neighbours talk’d and stirr’d about the lane,
And Seven Dials made a moaning sound;
And as I listen’d, lass, it seem’d to me
Just like the murmur of a great dark sea,
And Ned a-lying somewhere, stiff and drown’d!
Not less powerfully and picturesquely is the execution managed, which the reader does not see, but is made to feel in somewhat the same manner as the audience sees and feels the murder of the silver-haired King in “Macbeth,” by a series of suggestive signs, which thrill the heart with an indefinable horror. “Barbara Gray” is another of these dark London tales of love and wrong, and death cancelling the wrong, leaving the love in Barbara’s heart for John Hamerton, the hunchback, supreme and strong, in spite of all the dead man’s neglect of her. Of the other pieces which come under the head of “London Poems,” “The Little Milliner,” “Langley Lane,” “The Linnet,” and “Artist and Model,” are full of rich colouring and fine poetical strokes. “Edward Crowhurst, or a New Poet,” is a singularly powerful and life-like story, told with great art, and marked with ever-recurring felicities of expression. “The Starling,” whose genius lies in swearing, is cleverly described. “Attorney Sneak” is, in some respects, a piece of tremendous portraiture, but to us it is wholly disagreeable, and we cannot but regard it as the only questionable thing in the volume. To “London Poems,” the author adds four miscellaneous pieces, “The Death of Roland,” “The Scaith o’ Bartle,” “The Glamour”—the last two on Scottish themes—and “The Gift of Eos,” a subject which Tennyson has also handled, and only better, if better at all, because first. All these pieces are rich with good thoughts and beauty of finish. In “The Scaith o’ Bartle,” the poet seems to have taken advantage of the Moray floods of 1829, and has worked out a very pathetic and powerful tale. The Highland superstition of second sight is most picturesquely handled in “The Glamour.” The beauty of “The Gift of Eos” can only be fully apprehended read as a whole; but one brief passage—our last quotation—will give a touch of the quality of it:—
TITHONOS.
Ah woe! ah woe!—and I am lost for aye!
EOS.
Nothing, be sure, can wholly pass away!
And nothing suffers loss if love remains!
The motion of mine air consumes thy clay,
My breath dries up the moisture of thy veins;
Yet have I given thee immortal being,
Thereto immortal love, immortal power,
Consuming thy base substance till thy seeing
Grows clearer, brighter, purer, hour by hour;—
Immortal honour, too, is thine, for thou
Hast sought the highest meed the gods can give—
Immortal Love hath stoop’d to kiss thy brow!
Immortal Love hath smiled, and bade thee live!
Wherefore the gods have given thee mighty meed,
And snatch’d thee from the death-pyres of thy race,
To wear away these weary mortal weeds
In a serener and a purer place,—
Not amid warriors on a battle plain,
Not by the breath of pestilence or woe,
But here, at the far edge of earth and main,
Whence light and love and resurrection flow,—
And I upon thy breast, to soothe the pain!
Immortal life assured, what mattereth
That it be not the old fond life of breath!
Immortal life assured, the soul is free—
It is enough to be!
For lo! the love, the dream, to which is given
Divine assurance by a mortal peace,
Mix with the wonders of supremest heaven,
Become a part of that which cannot cease,
And being eternal must be beauteous too,
And being beauteous, surely must be glad!
O love, my love, thy wildest dreams were true,
Though thou wert footsore in thy quest, and sad!
Not in a mist of hungry eyes dies he
Who loveth purely nobler light than theirs;
For him nor weariness nor agony,
Purblind appeals, nor prayers;
But circled by the peace serene and holy
Of that divinest thought he loved so long
Pensive, not melancholy,
He mingles with those airs that made him strong,—
A little loath to quit
The old familiar dwelling-house of clay,
Yet calm, as the warm wind dissolveth it,
And leaf by leaf it droppeth quite away.
To him the priceless boon
To watch from heights serene till all be done;
Calm in each dreamy rising of the Moon,
Glad in each glorious coming of the Sun!
Two words about the volume as a whole remain to be said. Mr. Buchanan himself regards “London Poems” as the last of what he terms his “poems of probation.” This at least reveals that he has great confidence in his power of producing better things than these. Readers of this volume will also believe in the poet’s power; yet many with ourselves will think it no easy task to surpass some of these probationary poems. As compared with Mr. Buchanan’s former productions, “London Poems” exhibit a wider acquaintance with the humanities of modern life; greater maturity of judgment; and an increased purity of expression. He seems to have got language and imagination thoroughly under the government of art. He has conquered conventionality, and can look life, in all its phases, straight in the face, without losing faith in human nature, or reverence for what is divine and holy. These are conquests which are indispensable to the poet, and which the highest poets alone can thoroughly make. Thus, with original vigour freshened and increased, we have little doubt that Mr. Buchanan will justify his self-confidence in new and greater songs to be sung in the coming years.
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Illustrated Times (18 August, 1866)
Literature.
London Poems. By ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of “Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,” “Undertones,” &c. London and New York: Alexander Strahan.
Besides the book whose title we place at the head of this article we have also before us the second edition of Mr. Buchanan’s “Idylls and Legends of Inverburn.” From this edition the poet has removed some of the weaker matter which was contained in the first, including “The Legend of the Little Fay” and the greater part of the “Preamble.” There are also some slight alterations here and there; while some poems, which the author calls “Juvenilia” (ćt. 18-19), make the volume, perhaps, larger than it was before, while greatly adding to its interest. These “juvenile” poems are, indeed, among the most beautiful things the author has given to the world; and so full of that sensuous pathos and sensuous music which are natural to adolescence and adolescent maturity (the stage at which the poet now stands) as to make us regret, at times, that the complex influences of the literature and life around him have seduced him into any sort of dictation to his muse. He is doing great, almost alarming, things; but he is dispersing his power and manipulating too much his experience. We say this, however, with the reserve which is not unfamiliar to readers of our reviewing columns—namely, that criticism may very well miss its mark in dealing with questions so delicate and products of intellectual activity so considerable.
Mr. Buchanan seems to have been working in series, and to have now completed what he calls his “poems of probation.” We suppose the meaning to be something like this:—That in “Undertones” the poet sang of life and nature as they spoke to him in such old-world myth and story as most naturally lent themselves to his sense of the beauty and meaning of things; in the “Idylls,” of life and nature as they stood before him in the myth and story of the rural life most familiar to him; while in these “London Poems” he sets to music the life of the city as he has seen and lived it.
“London Poems” we can neither analyse nor describe, simply for want of space. But the design of the poet—a most noble and beautiful design—becomes distinctly visible as soon as we have got over the first impression of wonder at the largeness of his intelligence, his power of dramatic individualisation (so to speak), the beneficent daring with which he paints, the generous humanity of his painting, and the originality of his music. In this last particular—the music of verse—we do not find that he has quite mastered himself, or knows his own weak points; but in some kinds of measure he exhibits a princely power of rhythmic movement. In the present volume, the “Little Milliner,” “Bexhill, 1866,” “Attorney Sneak,” some portions of the “Gift of Eos,” and the whole of “The Death of Roland,” are instances of what we mean. “Langley-Lane” is wonderfully musical, too; but we do not think it will bear scrutiny either as to the psychology or the sentiment.
The writings of Mr. Buchanan, however, present to the most careful, as well as to the most superficial, observation every “note” or characteristic of the true poet; and when we observe how flexible and deep are his sympathies with all that is human (take “Attorney Hart,” “Liz,” “Nell,” and “The Starling,”) we may well slide into the use of the adjective alarming in speaking of such a poet. If this is only the “spring” of the arch, what is its course to be? We may well rejoice, meanwhile, in the prospect that we are to have a very great poet, who has that first of characteristics so lately insisted upon as essential to the poet (in the Saturday Review)—beneficence, boundless sympathy with sorrow, and with every effort to remove or lessen the pain of living things.
What shall we quote? We will try our hands at
THE LITTLE MILLINER.
My girl hath violet eyes and yellow hair,
A soft hand, like a lady’s, small and fair;
A sweet face, pouting in a white straw bonnet,
A tiny foot, and little boot upon it;
And all her finery to charm beholders
Is the grey shawl drawn tight around her shoulders,
The plain stuff-gown and collar white as snow,
And sweet red petticoat that peeps below.
But gladly in the busy town goes she,
Summer and winter, fearing nobodie;
She pats the pavement with her fairy feet,
With fearless eyes she charms the crowded street;
And in her pocket lie, in lieu of gold,
A lucky sixpence and a thimble old.
We lodged in the same house a year ago:
She on the topmost floor, I just below—
She, a poor milliner, content and wise,
I, a poor City clerk, with hopes to rise;
And, long ere we were friends, I learnt to love
The little angel on the floor above,
For, every morn, ere from my bed I stirr’d,
Her chamber door would open, and I heard,
And listen’d, blushing, to her coming down,
And palpitated with her rustling gown,
And tingled while her foot went downward slow,
Creak’d like a cricket, pass’d, and died below;
Then peeping from the window, pleased and sly,
I saw the pretty shining face go by,
Healthy and rosy, fresh from slumber sweet—
A sunbeam in the quiet morning street.
All winter long, witless who peep’d the while,
She sweeten’d the chill mornings with her smile;
When the soft snow was falling dimly white,
Shining among it with a child’s delight,
Bright as a rose, though nipping winds might blow,
And leaving fairy footprints in the snow.
And upon this poem we will make the only criticism of detail for which we have room. Let the reader notice the delightful art with which the poet has modulated the innocent sensuousness of the young man in the parts of the poem which we have not quoted, but in which there is all the passion of youth and all the innocence of a naked baby.
Let nobody go into “the country” without taking with him Mr. Buchanan’s “London Poems.”
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Book Reviews - Poetry continued
London Poems (1866) - continued
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