ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

BUCHANANALIA

“This damnable want of pence is the saddest saltest thing I know: it spoils everything—thought, hope, fellowship. My life is a fiery struggle to get money at set periods to meet claims.”
Letter to Robert Browning, 26th May, 1869.

“Dont think that I will ever develope the aesthetic instinct at the expense of conscience & feeling. I would rather die. Truth first; afterwards, if possible, Beauty.”
Letter to Robert Browning, 7th December, 1870.

“Whatever Ruskin may say on any conceivable subject is to me a matter of such supreme indifference that the only wonder to me is that any intelligent thinker can quote the words of such a foolish gibbering person.”
Letter to Roden Noel, 1st August, 1871.

‘Surely, however, no reader who has followed my representation of divine agencies throughout the Drama will do me the injustice of supposing that I consider man by any means the highest of beings. There are times, indeed, when I doubt if he is the highest of animals. We find on examination that those gentlemen who insist most on the superiority of man in the scale of nature, insist quite as much on the adjective “white,” and coming a little nearer home, on the adjective “British.” The formula that man is highest of beings, when uttered here in Britain, then generally resolves itself into this other formula—“the British white man is the highest of beings.” Conceive a chain of development culminating in Mr. Carlyle at one point, at another in Mr. Disraeli, and at another in ex-Governor Eyre.’
Notes to The Drama of Kings, 1871.

“It was about this time that I seriously thought for the first time in my life of winning instant and certain immortality by killing a publisher! ”
From ‘Latter Day Leaves’ quoted in Chapter VIII of Harriett Jay’s biography.

“We are all gamblers. Man is a gambler by nature and predestination, and life itself is a gamble. The tradesman, the City man, the professional man, the artist, are gamblers alike, and the artist is the biggest of all, for he stakes his brains against the public stupidity, and the odds are heavily against him.”
Quoted in Chapter XXVI (‘On The Turf.’ Written by Mr. Henry Murray) of Harriett Jay’s biography.

“The day after being weighed at the chemist’s and scaling 16st. 8lbs., I went on the pier and weighed myself on one of the automatic things, scaling exactly 15st. 8lbs., so that I am losing a stone a day, and at the end of a week shall weigh about 8st. odd and be able to ride in flat races!”
Letter to Dr. Harry Campbell quoted in Chapter XXIX of Harriett Jay’s biography.

“I don’t think the new cycle cure for heart-disease wholly commendable! I have had several accidents—once being chucked at a dead wall in trying to avoid child-slaughter and only two days ago being nearly run over! In the last affair I was walking, wheeling the bike, and I got into trouble in trying to save Betsy, and only escaped by turning a summersault under the carriage wheels!”
Letter to Dr. Gorham quoted in Chapter XXX of Harriett Jay’s biography.

“In trying on more than one occasion to do justice to his [Zola’s] sincerity, while seriously finding fault with his method, I have had to be constantly reminded that he is a Frenchman; and a Frenchman, from our insular point of view, is synonymous with everything that is unclean and detestable. Despite the fact that we have derived for hundreds of years all our ‘ideas,’ such as they are, from France, despite the fact that Frenchmen have been the pioneers of Freedom and Free Thought all over the world, we still preserve the old superstition that a Frenchman is born a ‘light’ person, whose sole conception of life is derived from his experiences as a boulevardier. The English race has no ‘ideas’ whatever; indeed, it abominates ‘ideas,’ and is thoroughly practical and pragmatical in its views, of social subjects especially.”
From ‘On Descending Into Hell: A Protest against Over-legislation in Matters Literary’.

“Personally, I claim the right of free deliverance, free speech, free thought, and what I claim for myself I claim for every human being.”
From ‘On Descending Into Hell: A Protest against Over-legislation in Matters Literary’.

“With a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of my own period, I can honestly say that I have scarcely met one individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary Fame. For complete literary success among contemporaries, it is imperative that a man should either have no real opinions, or be able to conceal such as he possesses, that he should have one eye on the market and the other on the public journals, that he should humbug himself into the delusion that book-writing is the highest work in the Universe, and that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of expediency. If his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in Society or in Literature itself, he must be silent. Above all, he must lay this solemn truth to heart, that when the World speaks well of him the World will demand the price of praise, and that price will possibly be his living Soul.”
From ‘My First Book’.

“The Christian Religion, if we put aside the Miracles, is not rich in Humour; even the good old joke about Eternal Damnation is somewhat too grisly to be entertaining.”
‘Some Pistol Shots. In reply to those of Dr. Joseph Parker’. The Echo, 30 January 1893.

“Why should he be denied the sedative of the harmless cigarette, more than ever necessary to a smoker in times of great mental anxiety?”
Letter to The Star, 20 April 1895, in defence of Oscar Wilde.

“But when, with the finger of blood on every door, and the cry of the Hooligan in every street, and the mad cry of Cain in the market-place, and the shadow of death passing from land to land, this shallowest of literary knights non- combatant assures me that there are ‘‘worse things than war,” I answer him again from the bottom of my heart that there is only one thing worse—that thing being the cultivated stupidity, the hopeless, senseless folly and obtusity, against which even the very gods still strive in vain.”
From ‘The Ethics of Criticism, A Word to Sir Walter Besant’, 1900.

“I must explain, therefore, despite the strong prejudice which the statement will awaken, that I am unable to conjure up any more enthusiasm for war itself than for its leading expositors and poets, and that even the glory of men who die bravely upon the battlefield leaves me comparatively cold. A soldier, to my mind, is not necessarily a hero; he enters the game of killing other people at the risk of being killed himself, and if he loses he pays the forfeit; if he were not killed he would be killing, and I personally see nothing heroic in that. Nor am I, in the new sense of the word, a patriot. Although I love my country and, if necessary, would die in its defence, I would not stir one foot to help my countrymen in any cause which I believed to be cowardly, treacherous, and merely homicidal.”
From ‘The Ethics of Criticism, A Word to Sir Walter Besant’, 1900.

“In his closing years he became sadly embittered with his stormy fortunes, and railed against the world. ‘It is a badly stage-managed world,’ he said to me scarcely more than a year ago. ‘Oh, it will be all right on the night,’ I replied, quoting from a well-known play. ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Buchanan; ‘it is not rehearsing it needs, but reconstruction.’
From ‘Reminiscences of Mr Buchanan by One who knew Him’ attached to Buchanan’s obituary in The Scotsman, 11 June, 1901.

“I can remember myself at a much later date, but no later than the beginning of the present century, when, perhaps, the best-known dramatic critic of that time was Clement Scott. He created an extraordinary sensation by saying that a woman could not be an actress and a respectable woman at the same time; and the controversy went on until the poet, the late Robert Buchanan, settled it. He said, ‘This is a monstrous calumny. No respectable woman on the stage! There are thousands of respectable women on the stage and only about six actresses!’”
George Bernard Shaw: ‘Excerpts of address on actors and acting delivered before Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’, 6 January 1929, (New York Times).

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