ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)
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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901) |
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HARRIETT JAY BOOK REVIEWS
4. Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life,
2. Biography Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life,
The Aberdeen Weekly Journal (1 October, 1902 - p.10) READERS & WRITERS (By J. CUTHBERT HADDEN.) . . . I am glad to learn that we are soon to have a “Life of the late Robert Buchanan,” the novelist-poet. It should make lively reading, for Mr. Buchanan was what the Scotch people call a “braw fechter,” and was engaged in many notable controversies. His biographer will find it a somewhat difficult matter to “place” him. He had a strenuous and remarkable individuality that too often dissipated itself in futile tilting at windmills. He was at constant war with the publishers, and sometimes with the public, and he did not always carry the sympathies of the public with him. But the sincerity of his convictions could never be doubted. ___
The Edinburgh Evening News (20 December, 1902 - p.4) THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BUCHANAN. The biography of Robert Buchanan, by his sister-in-law, Miss Harriett Jay, will be one of the early books of the spring. She remembers Mr T. P. O’Connor writing that Buchanan could, better than anybody else, have told the story of his own life. This, she says, was so true that in compiling the biography she has endeavoured, as far as possible, to let the poet-novelist speak for himself. As the sub-title states, the volume is an account of Buchanan’s life, of his life’s work, and of his many literary friendships. It will be issued by Mr Fisher Unwin, with portraits. ___
The Yorkshire Post (21 January, 1903 - p.5) The “Life of Robert Buchanan,” by his sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, will be published by Mr. Fisher Unwin this month. Miss Jay inscribes it: “To the memory of Robert Buchanan, who adopted me in my childhood, and who, throughout his life, was to me the kindest of fathers, the best of friends.” ___
The Gloucester Citizen (29 January, 1903 - p.3) ROBERT BUCHANAN. ___
The Scotsman (2 February, 1903 - p. 2) ROBERT BUCHANAN. Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships. By Harriet Jay, Author of “The Queen of Connaught,” &c. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Readers of novelty will find relatively little to satisfy them in this biography, for the obituary notices given in the newspapers when Robert Buchanan died less than two years ago were well informed, and the life of that man of letters was uneventful except in the publication of books. Yet the work has its own fresh interest as a piece of literary piety. It is written by Buchanan’s wife’s sister, who had been adopted into his family when a child; and, while coloured by a partiality characteristic of familiar biographers, brings together a larger and more trustworthy body of particulars concerning the author of “The Shadow of the Sword” than is to be found elsewhere. It recounts Buchanan’s boyhood in Glasgow as the son of a busy journalist there, and his going up to London at eighteen years of age, when his father’s fortunes failed. It gives pathetic incidents of that period of early struggles in which Buchanan lived and worked in a garret, and tells over again the story of the ill-starred ambitions, the sad illness, and early death of his companion, the poet David Gray. It tells of the friendships he formed with authors, journalists, and actors in Bohemia, of his marriage, and of his first books that came out in the early sixties. The spirit of these ran counter to the orthodox theologies of their day, and the biographical narrative is at this point appropriately interrupted by a paper in which Mr Henry S. Salt gives his impressions of Robert Buchanan as a humanitarian. The writer’s services to the literature of his time were already so far recognised as to have made him the recipient of a Government pension; but his name was scarcely known to the great public until it came to be connected with the pseudonymous article and pamphlet that attacked the so-called fleshly school of poetry. The reception of invective with which this publication met at the hands of poets and critics is duly recorded by the present biographer, who, without going so far as to maintain the justice of Buchanan’s attack on Swinburne and Rossetti, explains the provocation that led to it, and puts it that Buchanan found in the pleasures of independence more than a compensation for the pains of personal martyrdom. The book then follows the author through his career as a novelist, a poet, and a writer of plays, retracing the steps of a public career known to all reading men of these days, and now supplemented by a record of the few domestic incidents, such as the deaths of Buchanan’s wife and his mother, and of the many pecuniary embarrassments that chequered its private side. Mr George R. Sims contributes to the volume a reminiscence of his dramatic collaboration with Buchanan; and Mr Henry Murray describes from personal knowledge the fondness which the humanitarian poet cherished for speculation upon the turf. As if anticipating the objections of the censorious, Mr Murray does not neglect to tell that Buchanan did not allow the race meetings to interfere with his literary work. “Nay,” he says, “he even carried his literary labours on to the turf. At the time when he was preparing a long commentary on Rénan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari about him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.” ___
The Echo (2 February, 1903 - p.1) Robert Buchanan POET AND NOVELIST. It is extremely difficult to estimate the exact place Robert Buchanan will occupy in literary history. He was a man so versatile, so gifted, yet so often pessimistic that his finest efforts were hampered by this failing. Had he concentrated all his energies upon the development of his poetic genius there is little doubt but that he could have added the distinction of a Poet-Laureateship to his already long list of achievements. It was just this final note that everybody was waiting for, and which never came, that robbed his life of final triumph. He was a Lancashire man, “a worker, yet a dreamer who fought Don Quixote-like with many windmills.” His biographer, Harriet Jay (“Robert Buchanan,” T. Fisher Unwin), speaks of him as a lonely man, “not unsociable by disposition, not unsympathetic, but seldom travelling far for sympathy.” One who was ever climbing, but never reaching his intellectual ideals. His pessimism is accounted for by the fact that for many years he was a martyr to the agonies of an overwrought nervous system, which begat isolation, friendlessness, bitterness, misconception, and despair. School Days His father was an ardent Owenite, and soon after Robert was born joined the staff of a newspaper in the capacity of reporter. This, combined with the profits accruing from the small newsvendor’s shop, provided the Buchanan home with the necessaries of life. The school days of the poet were not tinged with very tender memories, for the Scotch Socialist missionary who undertook the training of this fragile branch of the Buchanan family had not only extraordinary views concerning religion, but equally eccentric views concerning the diet of the human race. Hence all the children placed under his care ran the risk of being starved. For Buchanan once said that he had to supplement the grass meals—now called vegetarian—by eating snails gathered in the garden. This necessitated a change of school. Sunday in the Buchanan home was a great day. It was really a congregation of the apostles of progress. And during holiday time the youthful Robert saw a great deal of the strange figures that flitted about his father’s house. Amongst them was Louis Blanc, the famous exile, and Caussidiere, who had been chief of the Parisian police during the last Revolution. The former was one of the most brilliant and cultured of men. He was ever preaching the great Socialistic doctrine of solidarity, and was a stout opponent of tyranny in any form. Early Influences. But the man who contributed largely to the poetic genius of young Buchanan, during those early days, was Lloyd Jones, the famous lecturer and journalist. He it was that first taught the eager, impetuous boy to love old songs and homespun English poetry. A great portion of his boyhood and early youth was spent at Glasgow, and it was here that he “listened to the oracles, and drank in the atmosphere of unbelief.” In that stronghold of Godliness and Sabbatarianism, his father was frequently insulted when walking the streets because he held views and opinions derogatory to the common or orthodox theological Scotch mind. The persecution descended even upon the family, and Robert came in for his share. If he made an acquaintance of his own age, that boy was generally warned against him, and taught to give him the cold shoulder. “Don’t play with yon laddie,” the boys themselves would say; “his father’s an infidel.” A Thrilling Life-Story. Passing on to the beginning of his literary career, we find him, in May, 1860, in London with only a few shillings in his pocket. Prior to leaving Scotland he had sent some verses to Hepworth Dixon, who was then editing the “Athenæum,” and young Buchanan hoped that he might procure more work in this direction. Mr. Dixon gave him a few unimportant books to review, but these brought in very little money, and thus commenced the great struggle for existence. The story of his life from this point is told in a graphic manner, and the shaping of the huge mass of material at hand is wonderfully done. ___
The Daily Telegraph (2 February, 1903 - p.5) ROBERT BUCHANAN. Among English men of letters of the second half of the nineteenth century there were few with greater literary power than Robert Buchanan, who, after a troubled, disappointed life, passed away eighteen months ago in his sixtieth year. His biography, written by his sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, who lived with him for many years is published to-day by Mr. Fisher Unwin, and fully confirms the general impression which he made upon his contemporaries. She says quite frankly, “His life was a lonely one, he was from first to last a lonely man; not unsociable by disposition, not unsympathetic, but seldom travelling far for sympathy—always climbing, climbing, but never quite reaching the heights on which he had set his intellectual ideals. . . . For many years he suffered a martyrdom from ill-health, from the infinite delicacies of an overwrought nervous system; thence came isolation, friendlessness, bitterness, misconception, and despair.” Those sentences account for much; Buchanan’s life was a sad one, and this is a very sad, though a very interesting book. Buchanan was always in revolt; he was “born in the strangest odour of infidelity”; he was always fighting someone. And yet, as his biographer shows, he was a most unselfish soul, loyal and honest above all things. “No man needed kindness so much and received so little. He was stabbed again and again, and scarcely one arm was ever stretched out in his defence.” In a word, he misunderstood others and was himself misunderstood. People don’t seem to understand me. . . . Westminster Abbey; I was there all day yesterday. If I live I shall be buried there—so help me, God! A completely defined consciousness of great poetical genius is my only antidote against utter despair and despicable failure.’ When Gray wrote that he was dying of consumption. Buchanan plunged into literature headlong, reading and working hard. He was made editor of the long-since dead “Welcome Guest,” and published therein Miss Braddon’s first novel, but he was often perilously near starvation, and lived precariously. Yet he made the acquaintance of many of the leading men of letters of his day and soon, by means of his contributions to the magazines, earned a tolerable income. It was in 1863 that he published his first volume of verse, “Undertones,” followed by a steady succession of other volumes, for which he received considerable sums. Buchanan had certainly no right to complain of want of public appreciation. But by 1868 he was in serious financial difficulties. “When he had money,” says his biographer, “he spent it like a lord; when he hadn’t it he lived upon credit, and then, finding himself in difficulties, he endeavoured to extricate himself by hard work and speculation.” His wife was equally unpractical, and “so, like a couple of babies, they muddled through life, tasting sometimes of its joys, but oftener of its sorrows.” At the time when he was preparing a long commentary on Renan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari round him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray, apparently greatly refreshed by his studies. Once, at Lingfield, when he meant to lay £100 upon an outsider, he and his friends did not notice the flight of time. The horses were off before they started to invest the money, and they were just too late. The carelessness cost them £2,000, which would have saved “The Society Butterfly” at the Opéra Comique and himself from bankruptcy. Such stories could be multiplied. But to return to Buchanan’s literary achievements. In the winter of 1893 he published “The Wandering Jew,” a poem of bold and startling originality. This he had begun as far back as 1866, on the death of his father, and for years after it was finished Buchanan kept it locked in his desk. It was taken out from time to time, pondered over, then carefully replaced, for it was ever his favourite child. His reason for withholding it from the world was a curious one, inexplicable even to himself, for he was not a superstitious man. In some unaccountable way the idea had taken hold of him that with the publication of this work his career would come to an end. . . . I remember his telling with a curious smile that while he was correcting the last proofs a dog came and howled mournfully under his study windows. Its publication made a great stir. The clergy took the poem up, preached upon it and against it, and it gave rise to abundant controversy. But its power was undeniable, even by those who most disliked its central conception. ___
The Standard (2 February, 1903 - p.2) THE LIFE OF ROBERT BUCHANAN.* We are somewhat disposed to place Miss Jay’s memoir of the late Robert Buchanan under that large class of modern biographies which might conveniently have remained unwritten. It seems to be the accepted convention that every literary person of any standing must be honoured with an elaborate “Life”; and if the arrangement gratifies the deceased author’s friends, and is found profitable by his publisher, there is no great reason to object to it. But in too many of these cases the interest, whether historical or psychological, is too slight to justify the performance on its merits: and this, we fear, must be said in the present instance. The career of Robert Buchanan needs more artistic treatment than it receives from the hands of his admiring sister-in-law to invest it with interest. Nor does the study throw much light on Buchanan’s literary works. Of these the majority were ephemeral productions which are already deservedly forgotten. There remains a residuum of beautiful poetry, finely conceived and exquisitely expressed. To the understanding of the great—but, alas! undeveloped and uncompleted—poet that was in Buchanan, this volume does not contribute much, though, perhaps, it does enable us to realise why the man, with all his gifts, and with all his feverish industry, did so little that was really worth doing. Miss Jay seems to think that Buchanan was a kind of hero and martyr, and his life the tragedy of a noble soul struggling vainly against unmerited misfortune, and the obloquy of an envious world. But that is not the impression most readers will gather from her pages. The tragedy is of another kind—that of misused opportunities, of wasted talents, of genius deliberately lowering itself to the dust. Buchanan might have said with Cassius: “The fault is not in the gods but in ourselves, if we are underlings.” If during a large part of his life, and particularly towards the close, he was in financial embarrassments, if the more reputable of his friends had long dropped his acquaintance, if the public declined to regard him with respect, or to take him seriously, the causes lie on the surface. He had abandoned his ideals, he had drifted into the frame of mind in which he would do any “shoddy” work for money, and he was, moreover, vain, egotistical, unscrupulous, and recklessly improvident. Those are not the qualities to make a man honoured and happy, whether he be a poet or a fishmonger. “She posed behind a curtain, and Lewes acted as showman. No one could approach the oracle save with reverence, fear, and bated breath. If she was ‘composing’ she must not be disturbed; if she descended from the tripod, it was a godlike condescension; if she deigned, in that deep voice of hers, to make a remark about the weather, it was celestial thunder; if she joked, which she did ‘wi’ difficulty,’ as we say in Scotland, her joke was summer lightning on Minerva’s brow. This state of affairs was complicated by the fact of her peculiar relationship to Lewes. She had few female acquaintances, and those only worshippers, and her attitude towards the outside world, while sternly contemptuous, was at the same time morbidly uneasy. I am obliged to confess that my attitude towards the Sybil, when I was introduced to her by Lewes, was always somewhat irreverent. I was an impudent youngster, but I hated absolutism in any form. Towards any godhead which I really worshipped—towards Dickens, for example—I could have abased myself in the dust. But it unluckily happened that the works of George Eliot had never stirred me very deeply, and that I was rather amused than awed by her personality. With Lewes himself, moreover, I had to be very careful; he was very kind to me, but as the price of his sympathy he demanded a certain acquiescence which I could not always give, and my impudence more than once provoked him into angry remonstrance. Once, indeed, when I asserted myself a little too strongly, he threatened that if I did not behave myself he would give me the cold shoulder, to which my reply was, I fear, ‘Give me the cold shoulder, and be hanged.’” With Browning he had relations which began pleasantly and ended rather disagreeably. The poet was pleased by the enthusiastic admiration of the clever young versifier, and was inclined to encourage intimacy with him. Later on, he disapproved, like other people, of Buchanan’s ways, both in literature and in life, and quietly dropped him. Buchanan revenged himself by one of his venomous insinuations:— “My last meeting with him was at one of the Royal Academy soirées, which follow the annual dinner. By that time we had fallen asunder a good deal, though we never had had any open disagreement; but as years wore on my enthusiasm had lessened, and I was not in the way of being useful to him as a friendly critic. We had only exchanged a handshake and a few words, but I felt that his manner was a little chilly. I was informed afterwards that at the Academy dinner, when Lecky, in responding to the toast of Literature, had startled the company by generously and warmly eulogising my ‘City of Dream,’ Browning had murmured to his next neighbour, ‘Of whom is he speaking? Of Buchanan, the writer of plays?’ I was just then collaborating with Sims on a melodrama for the Adelphi, and the question was construed by those who heard it as an expression of ironical contempt. Naturally enough, Browning may have fancied that in writing plays for the market I was selling my birthright for a mess of pottage; but he knew better than most men that I had no option—it was either that or practical starvation. . . . . On former occasions he had proclaimed his admiration for my work in terms as strong as any used by Lecky, and I cannot help thinking that, had I still been writing criticism, he might have been more tolerant of my occasional backslidings in literature. I well remember our meeting just after I had published ‘White Rose and Red’ anonymously. He bounded into my rooms with outstretched hands, and almost before we had exchanged a word launched out into eager eulogy of the work. I said something in smiling deprecation, but he did not listen. ‘O, it’s a beautiful poem! a beautiful poem!’ he cried again and again, with florid emphasis on the adjective. I think he was honest, and I am sure I hope so; but I had powerful organs at my command at that time, and he knew it.” This aspersion on a character so manly and simple that of Robert Browning exhibits Buchanan in one of his least estimable aspects. He had more envy and suspicious ill-nature than could be excused even in the genus irritabile, and he made many of his contemporaries the object of rancorous—and, as some of them thought, underhand and unfair—attacks. In the early ’Seventies be published, in a magazine, a fierce pseudonymous essay, in which Swinburne, Rossetti, and other writers of the day were virulently abused. The authorship was discovered, and the article roused against Buchanan wide-spread resentment, and gave him an evil reputation in literary circles which was not wholly undeserved. “It is a curious fact that, despite his many struggles, he never could master the art of compound addition, so that whatever his income was he always managed to be a little in arrear. He could no more help being prodigal with his great gains than the sun can help shining. I have known him go to Trouville with 200 pounds in his pocket and return at the end of a week without a penny of it, even although that £200 happened to be his last, and the spending of it meant that he had to shut himself up in his study, and work incessantly till the deficiency could be made good.” But he had even more effectual ways of getting through his money. Mr. Henry Murray, who contributes to the book a chapter on Buchanan’s Turf experiences, tells us that he was a born gambler. “Whenever he had a little money he never rested until he had ventured it in some speculation, and, whatever that speculation might be, he never, by any chance, came off an eventual winner.” He took to the Turf in the brief heyday of his success as a playwright, “when he was making money hand over hand,” plunged into it with ardour, and lost consistently and heavily. He contrived to combine the pursuit of sport with his unceasing literary activity:— “At time when he was preparing a long commentary on Rénan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes, we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari about him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray, apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.” The result of it all was a steady decline in the quality of his work. After the publication of “God and the Man,” we are told that “his great ambition was to make money,” and he became more and more careless of the means. He “scribbled at fiction,” turning out two or three novels of varying degrees of badness in the course of a year, in the midst of much poor journalism and hack play-writing. His dramatic versions of his own novels, “The Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man,” met with considerable success. He believed he had found a gold-mine on the stage, and for the remainder of his life devoted much of his attention to it. He wrote Adelphi melodramas in collaboration with Mr. G. R. Sims, turned “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews” into modern plays, adapted Ohnet’s “Maitre de Forges” and Miss Broughton’s “Nancy,” and various other novels by himself and other people, wrote A Society Butterfly for Mrs. Langtry, and The Charlatan for Mr. Beerbohm Tree, and was a kind of general utility dramatist for the London theatres. He made money fast, and lost most of it by unlucky theatrical speculations. In the end “his house of cards collapsed,” and “he was standing in the Bankruptcy Court,” after all his gains, “a practically ruined man.” In the midst of all this confusion of life and feverish work, he now and again produced something more worthy of his powers. Such was the beautiful little Greek fairy drama, in blank verse, The Bride of Love, performed at the Lyric Theatre, with choral odes by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, and with Ada Cavendish in the part of Aphrodite; and the sombre powerful agnostic poem, “The Wandering Jew,” which appeared on the eve of his financial crash. His poems, indeed, even at his worst period, showed a trace of the divine fire which, in verse, Buchanan could never quite lose. He should have been the great romantic, idealist poet of the later Victorian era, instead of wasting himself too often, and for unworthy reasons, over what his indulgent biographer herself can only call “ignoble pot-boiling.” * “Robert Buchanan.” By Harriet Jay. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1903. ___
The Daily Chronicle (2 February, 1903 - p.3) AN UNCERTAIN WRITER. Robert Buchanan. Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships.” By Harriett Jay. (London: Fisher Unwin. 10s. 6d.) [PUBLISHED TO-DAY.] The “Life” of Robert Buchanan, written fully and sincerely by one who had followed its course intimately from the cradle to the grave, would present a wide and picturesque panorama of the literary life of his generation. Indeed, there are few literary interests of the time which it would not touch; few living men-of-letters who would fail to find mention of themselves in its pages. For Buchanan’s talent was extraordinarily reflective, his relation to current events invariably close and sensitive. Whatever was passing in the world of letters and of journalism became for the moment his absorbing interest; and, either in the way of friendship or of combat, he touched hands with almost every writer and thinker of the day. Essentially the product of his surroundings, he was yet always in conflict with them; and half the impossible loyalties and forsaken enthusiasms of the time were associated, in some respect or other, with his momentary advocacy or opposition. In short, his life was lived in the heart of the literary life of the Victorian Era, and its record might well extend to a study of the intellectual interests and anxieties of the whole period through which he moved upon his troubled, emotional, and uncertain pilgrimage. ___
The Daily Record and Mail (2 February, 1903 - p.4) ROBERT BUCHANAN. PUBLICATION OF MISS JAY’S BIOGRAPHY. There is published to-day the biography of not the least considerable of nineteenth century men of letters, one in whose career and works Scotland generally, and Glasgow in particular, must always retain a lively interest. The controversies in which Buchanan engaged with the abandon of an eager and impulsive nature did not a little to embitter his life and they tended to unsettle the public judgment in regard to his purely literary merit; but those controversies were well nigh forgotten before he died, and the account of them given in Miss Harriett Jay’s admirable biography will prevent future generations remembering them to Buchanan’s hurt, if there ever was any possibility of that. Early Glasgow Days. Miss Jay quotes from “Latter-Day Leaves” this passage dealing with Buchanan’s association with the actors in the Glasgow of that day. “To the boy on the threshold of life, still a student in his quieter hours, these men were wonderful beyond measure, for they were, as I have suggested, Shakespeare’s men—virile, reckless, and strangely merry—and their presence in that sad Sabbatarian City, from whose blessings and sympathies they were outcast, was to all seeming as wonderful as themselves. I learned to know them well, and, as I have said, to love them, and I still think that the hours I spent with them were far from wasted. Among them, for a short period, drifted a young player of another nature, afterwards known to the world as Henry Irving. A quiet, studious young man, even then ambitious, but exhibiting little talent even as a ‘walking gentleman,’ I was much drawn to him by his thoughtful personality, so different to the wilder personalities of his companions, and I took him to my father’s house and introduced him to my mother. He went away suddenly, and the last message I had from him came in the shape of a long letter dated from the British Museum in London.” It was on the failure of the elder Buchanan’s newspapers—he had added the “Glasgow Times” and the “Penny Post” to the “Sentinel”—that his son set out for London. He had arranged to go in the company of David Gray, but a mistake as to the station sent them on their travels separately, and was one of the contributory causes to Gray’s misfortunes. It was some time before Buchanan knew of his friend’s presence in London, and when they did meet the mischief was in great part done. Buchanan was having his own struggle with coy Fortune, but the manner in which he devoted himself to his gifted but unfortunate friend is not the least admirable incident in English literature, and had Buchanan no other claim on Scottish gratitude and affection, his kindness to Gray, and after his death to the young poet’s father, would be not a slight one. Domestic Sorrows. One of her most interesting chapters is that in which Miss Jay describes how Buchanan turned to prose fiction, his first idea being that of collaboration with Mr. William Canton, then engaged in journalism in Glasgow. The letters to Mr. Canton indicate what progress was made with the project, which finally broke down. Later Buchanan took up novel writing with much success, and later returned to an early fancy, dramatic work, in which both alone and in collaboration he produced notable work. One of the pantomimes produced by Mr. Glover at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, was from his pen, and it may safely be said that such pantomime writing is not common nowadays. ___
The Daily News (2 February, 1903) THE POET AND THE WORLD. (Published To-day.) “Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships.” By Harriett Jay. 10s. 6d. net. T. Fisher Unwin. “He had few friends and many enemies, and received from the world many cruel blows.” She posed behind a curtain, and Lewes acted as showman. No one could approach the oracle save with reverence, fear, and bated breath. If she was “composing” she must not be disturbed; if she descended from the tripod, it was a godlike condescension; if she deigned, in that deep voice of hers, to make a remark about the weather, it was celestial thunder; if she joked, which she did “wi’ difficulty,” as we say in Scotland, her joke was summer lightning on Minerva’s brow. Through them he came to know Browning, whose violent wrath he drew down by his admiration of Walt Whitman . He began to publish poetry of his own, his first volume being “Undertones,” in 1863. In 1868, however, came a breakdown in health, due partly to his early privations in London and partly to overwork, for he and his wife as housekeepers were a feckless pair, and he had to do much ignoble “pot-boiling” to keep the house going. In 1870, perhaps losing his judgment through worry, and offended by an attack by Swinburne on the work of an early friend of his, he published anonymously in the “Contemporary” an article on “The Fleshly School of Poets,” bitterly attacking Rossetti, Swinburne, and their “coterie.” The authorship became known; he was denounced in the “Athenæum” as a “disguised assassin,” and, though Tennyson, browning and Cardinal Manning, we are told, privately agreed with him—Tennyson describing one of Rossetti’s poems as “the filthiest thing he had ever read”—Buchanan had to fight the battle himself in public all alone. He was so bitterly attacked that he was driven to publish his own work anonymously. W. E. H. ___
St. James’s Gazette (2 February, 1903 - pp.16-17) ROBERT BUCHANAN. * Miss Harriett Jay’s “Life” of her brother-in-law, Robert Buchanan, poet, novelist, and playwright, is in many respects a sadly pathetic book. Its intense human interest inevitably manifests itself upon every page since its subject was a man whose life, as the author tells us at the outset of her monograph, “was chiefly occupied with the child’s puzzle of natural religion.” He was “a worker, yet a dreamer who fought Don Quixote-like with many windmills; a lover of truth and beauty, yet darkly doomed to much ignoble pot-boiling, a dweller between the fringe of literary Bohemia and the beginning of mere cloudland, who, while giving a careless glance at the present generation, ever fixed a long, hopeful, wistful look towards posterity.” Whatever opinion we may hold respecting Robert Buchanan’s place in literature, however poignantly we may regret his heterodoxy in matters religious, it may at least be said for him that he was sincere as he was courageous, and that “he always tried to preach the truth as he saw it, never counting the cost to himself.” The cost was a heavy one. He had few friends and many enemies, but among his friends, as this book conclusively proves, he had some who were staunchly loyal and whose faith in him was unquenchable. But as one or another of these companions were removed from him by death—first the friend of his youth, David Gray, then his wife, to whom he was devotedly, passionately attached, and last his mother, whose loss reduced him to the depths of woe—there came bitterness, misconception, and despair. The story of Buchanan’s life-long struggle with doubt, with human frailty, and with personal misfortune is one of the saddest in modern literature. Miss Harriett Jay has presented a complete picture of the man—condoning no fault that could be justly levelled against him, without extenuating, and without exaggerating anything:— Perhaps no man has been oftener abused, yet no man needed kindness so much and received so little. He was stabbed again and again, and scarcely one arm was ever stretched out in his defence; yet he bore his burthen with cheerfulness and infinite hope, and now, in reviewing his life, I can truly say that it was honest even in its utmost blindness; unselfish in its one lingering aspiration to be truthful, and not to fear the truth. He was never an ambitious man; he reaped what he sowed, and it was a blessed harvest; for, in spite of many trials and temptations, he never lost the deep poetic heart which he brought with him into the world as his only birthright. It has generally been supposed—but, as Miss Jay shows, quite erroneously—that Robert Buchanan had to struggle against poverty and privation from his earliest youth. His father was for many years a well-to-do journalist and newspaper proprietor, and the future poet had an adequate and not inexpensive schooling. It was not until financial misfortune befel his father that he determined to try his fortune in London:— For eighteen years he had never known what it was to suffer privation or to want money; he had been reared in comparative luxury, in a bright and happy home, the spoiled darling of a loving mother, but he felt that in arranging to go from home, even under circumstances so disadvantageous, he surely could not come to harm. Thus it was that on Saturday, the 5th of May, 1860, he set forth from the Central Railway Station, Glasgow, and, after he had paid his third-class fare to London, had only a few shillings in his pocket with which to face the world. In one respect, however, he was better equipped than most young literary adventurers—he had an excellent stock of clothes, and amongst it a sumptuous silk-quilted dressing-gown, which his mother had bought for him just before his father failed. Once fairly started on his journey he sat in a corner of the carriage as miserable a lad as could be. “As one by one my companions fell asleep in the darkness my heart swelled and my eyes were dim with tears as I realised for the first time that I was quite friendless and alone. I thought of my dear mother praying for me at home, and I longed to turn back and ask her forgiveness for the pain I had caused her. Even now I never take a railway journey in the night without again realising the dismal heartache of that midnight journey to London.” His first experiences of London were not propitious; his attempt to live by literature did not meet with immediate success, and for a time he had to be content with such comfort as could be found in a top garret in Stamford-street, Blackfriars, and such bodily sustenance as could be derived from strong tea and bread and butter and occasionally coffee and muffins, saturated with butter. But “it was only now and then that a sense of resolution came upon him and he realised his helplessness in the world.” Before long name and fame came to him. He contributed to the “Athenæum,” “Temple Bar,” and the “St. James’s Magazine,” and in this way gained enough to live upon. The “St. James’s Magazine” was at this time owned and edited by Mr. John Maxwell, who had the faculty of rubbing Buchanan the wrong way. This the budding poet keenly resented, and he conceived the idea that Maxwell had used him very badly:— I had called once or twice and failed to see him, and the style in which the publisher’s myrmidons received me deepened in me a sultry sense of wrong. So one morning, after several hungry days, I packed up a parcel of manuscript, procured a thick cudgel, and left my lodging with this intimation to my companion in wretchedness, the late Charles Gibbon: “I am going to see Maxwell—I will see him, and if he is offensive as usual, I will beat out what brains the ruffian possesses and offer him up as a sacrifice to the Muses.” My friend laughed and thought I was joking, but I was really in earnest, and contemplated assault and battery. Off I strode, cudgel in hand, on this truly Christian errand. I cannot tell how it came about, but on entering the publisher’s shop and asking for its master, I was received with effusion, shown up at once into the presence, and—well, then and there in the friendliest manner imaginable, Mr. Maxwell bought my manuscript and handed me his little cheque! Many a time since then I have laughed over this episode, wondering what would have happened if I had proceeded to extremities. I daresay I might have come off worse, for Maxwell was a powerful man, and the weights were tremendously in his favour. But if I had assaulted him successfully, how all my future life would have been changed! I might even have been hanged for killing a publisher and gone to the gallows with a flower in my buttonhole, sure of the worship of future generations of impecunious authors! Buchanan soon began to make important literary acquaintances—among others, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, and Robert Browning. He first met Browning at the Lewes’s house:— We had a long and pleasant talk together, and after we had shaken hands with an arrangement to meet again, George Eliot took me aside, and said, smiling, “Well, are you disappointed? Does he realise your expectations?” My reply was candour itself. I said that I was disappointed, though heaven knows what I had expected! I was little more than a boy, very full of Quixotic fancies, and very ignorant of the world, and perhaps I expected to find in the poet, whom I so greatly admired and revered, a less commonplace and more romantic personality. According to Lewes, with whom I afterwards discussed my new acquaintance, Browning was morbidly sensitive to criticism, and eager for any kind of praise; indeed Leigh Hunt had said, Lewes assured me, that Browning was so hungry for general approval, that he “coveted that even of his own washerwoman!” There can be no doubt whatever that the poet was somewhat disheartened by his continuous failure to reach the great public, and by the contemptuous treatment generally accorded him by the newspaper critics. He had just published “Dramatis Personæ,” and I had reviewed it at considerable length, with boyish ardour and enthusiasm, in a monthly magazine. It was the remembrance of this earliest enthusiasm that caused Browning to describe me, in answer to the statement that I had no appreciation of my own contemporaries, as “the kindest critic he had ever had!” For Lewes Buchanan seems to have had great respect, but he was not so well disposed towards the lady of the house. He disliked the airs and mysterious greatness which George Eliot thought fit to assume. In his “Latter-Day Leaves,” from which Miss Jay quotes extensively throughout her memoir, Buchanan writes:— I am obliged to confess that my attitude towards the Sybil, when I was introduced to her by Lewes, was always somewhat irreverent. I was an impudent youngster, but I hated absolutism in any form. Towards any godhead which I really worshipped—towards Dickens, for example—I could have abased myself in the dust. But it unluckily happened that the works of George Eliot had never stirred me very deeply, and that I was rather amused than awed by her personality. Of course I kept my heterodoxy to myself as much as possible, but I am afraid that it oozed through my otherwise respectful manner, and at times I frankly suggested that not even great Genius had any right to assume airs of superiority towards broad Humanity. With Lewes himself, moreover, I had to be very careful; he was very kind to me, but as the price of his sympathy he demanded a certain acquiescence which I could not always give, and my impudence more than once provoked him into angry remonstrance. Once, indeed, when I asserted myself a little too strongly, he threatened that if I did not behave myself he would give me the cold shoulder, to which my reply was, I fear, “Give me the cold shoulder, and be hanged!” Miss Jay devotes a chapter to Buchanan’s early love of sport—his shooting and his fishing—though she confesses that she “never could understand how it was that he, a man full of loving impulses, ever came to pursue the savage pleasures of the average Britain” (sic). Probably Miss Jay means “Briton.” Afterwards Buchanan became a “Humanitarian” and joined the League of that name. Adverting to Buchanan’s vicious and historic attack on the “Fleshly School of Poetry,” Miss Jay contends that it was provoked by his bitter resentment of the onslaught made by Mr. Swinburne on the poetic efforts of Buchanan’s youthful friend, David Gray. “His motive was, I know, primarily revenge, his opinions dictated by a wrath which he considered righteous, as well as by a literary antipathy which he considered just.” But Buchanan had raised a hornet’s nest. The critical journals described him as a “Disguised assassin,” and though Tennyson and Browning were on his side, tacitly, if not openly, he was left to fight his battle with the coterie alone:— For months, nay, for years afterwards, he was assailed with every insult that malice could invent for his destruction. So cruel indeed and so relentless was this persecution of him that when, in the year 1872, he published his poem “St. Abe and His Seven Wives,” he found it expedient not only to issue the book anonymously, but to take every precaution to prevent the name of the author from becoming known. The secret was so well kept that when a representative of a leading London daily newspaper went to Mr. Strahan (the publisher of the book), showed him the proof of a highly laudatory review two columns in length, and promised that it should appear the very next day if he would tell him (in strict confidence of course) the name of the author, Mr. Strahan refused to speak, and as a consequence no notice of the poem appeared in the columns of the journal in question. The book however (since it could not be proved to be written by Robert Buchanan), did not fail to make its mark. Indeed both “St. Abe” and its successor, “White Rose and Red,” were welcomed by the public and received by the journals with such roars of applause as certainly would not have greeted them had the secret of their authorship become known. In matters of religion Miss Jay admits that Buchanan was an Agnostic, but she thinks that a man of his emotional temperament could never become an atheist. Among all the deeply interesting passages in the book none are more striking than those written by Buchanan himself which Miss Jay found pinned to his diary. These pages were written while the wound caused by his mother’s death was still open, and they deal with the problem over which he pondered all his life. The following extract seems to sum up his position:— Cardinal Newman himself admitted with a sigh that Nature as we know it gave no indication whatever of divine goodness or beneficence, and that to believe in God at all blind faith was necessary. I have no such faith; but I retain my hope, simply and solely because without it life is unexplainable. If this is the only life we are to know there is certainly no God, and if there is no God life is certainly, as I have said, a mere drunkard’s dream. This, I must repeat, is merely my personal impression. Other men are content to accept the world and its fleeting joys and sorrows, and to ask no more; at least they say so, and I must believe them. We postulate another life, therefore, because this life is incomplete and horrible without it; but when all is said and done the belief remains unverified, even contradicted, daily by practical experience. It is a nebulous hope, not a belief at all. As a hope it helps and strengthens us; as a fixed belief, connected with any possible dogma, it would continue to do infinite harm as it had done in the past. Robert Buchanan was all his life, as he himself confessed in a letter to Sir Leslie Stephen, struggling in deep waters; he was not without hope, but his doubt was a very real part of his existence. * “Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships.” By Harriett Jay. (T. Fisher Unwin.) ___
T. P.’s Weekly (6 February, 1903 - p.1-2) THE BOOK OF THE WEEK. Robert Buchanan.* I. “The story of his life,” writes Miss Harriet Jay, “is in many respects a sad one.” Indeed it is; I know few sadder. It is the second time, within a few weeks, that I have to deal with the life of a Scotchman, and a second time I have to speak of that life as ruined by the want of some of the most distinctive of Scotch virtues. Robert Buchanan, unlike poor Burns, was born into a time when literature had its full market price. He worked incessantly; no fewer than fifty-one volumes were published by him, while the whole output of Burns can be contained in one not very large volume. Burns was a poet alone; while Buchanan was dramatist, novelist, and journalist, as well as poet; and though Buchanan died prematurely according to our standard of to-day, there is a difference between dying at thirty-seven, as Burns did, and at sixty, as did Buchanan. And yet there is sadness throughout all the story of the one man as of the other; and Buchanan, almost as much as Burns—except that the vice of drinking was absent, died in bankruptcy of hope and pocket. Burns had one great consolation entirely unknown to Buchanan. His generation recognised the supreme genius of Burns; the reputation of Buchanan always seemed to slip away from him; he never attained the literary position to which his extraordinary and varied gifts entitled him. To miss genius and the highest fame altogether is a more tolerable lot than to just miss them; and that was the fate of Buchanan. He just missed genius; he just missed supreme fame. He made a great deal of money in his time; he had some very brilliant moments of success; his name was known all over the world; but if you compare his position, say, with that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, you will see how far he was from reaching the heights. It was partly because, owing to faults of temper and temperament, his reputation was of noise, conflict, apparently boisterous and not always considerate self-assertion; and trying three great branches of literary effort, he was regarded as missing the highest in them all. And thus it was that he spent his life in struggle—much of it ignoble; that he was embittered; that he had, as Miss Jay says, “few friends and many enemies”; that somehow or other, with all his notoriety, there was a sense of ineffectiveness and of baulked achievement; and thus it was that he ended in something like darkness and ruin. II. There are several factors that go to the unmaking of so richly endowed a nature; and some of these factors belong to forces and times which lay beyond Buchanan’s control. Poor Buchanan, as Miss Jay says, was never able to learn the art of compound addition; his expenditure was always beyond even his occasional princely income; he was an incurable dreamer who saw the realities of life, and especially of money, in no rigid lines of accuracy, but in the confused limning of his imagination. And of this the chief secret is that he came from a family of dreamers. He was a dreamer by the mighty and resistless force of heredity; his fate was fashioned for him in this rough world before he entered upon it. When his words of promise—wrote Buchanan—sounded like a trumpet-note to so many youthful sons of toil, one of the first to respond was a poor journeyman tailor in Ayrshire, who, throwing down goose and scissors, straightway aspired to the rôle of Socialist reformer; was soon welcomed and appreciated for his keen Scottish intelligence, his wide, if uninstructed reading, and his rugged eloquence on the platform; in due time became one of Owen’s most valuable Missionaries; and before many years had elapsed was famous among his own people, and infamous among the orthodox, as Robert Buchanan, poet and iconoclast. That man was my father. On the mother’s side Buchanan came also from the race of rebel dreamers; his mother was a daughter of “lawyer Williams,” a solicitor of Stoke-upon-Trent, and, like Buchanan’s father, a freethinker and a Socialist. III. The father of Buchanan suggests most of the son’s career. The two had the same incapacity for measuring money, of realising ways and means; they had the same recklessness and unconquerable hopefulness; they were both gamblers. Indeed, it was the faults and weaknesses of the father that did much to create the misfortunes of the son. His father, as proprietor of the “Glasgow Sentinel,” was doing well and becoming a prosperous man, when, fired by ambition to achieve a huge fortune, he started two other journals, and this brought him to the Bankruptcy Court. That inauspicious change in the fortunes of the family did not come till Robert Buchanan was nearly twenty years of age, and until he had been brought up in all the luxurious habits and wants of that first heritage of our time, the proprietorship of a successful newspaper. It was characteristic of both father and son that both accepted this vast change of fortune with considerable equanimity. “Even if I never loved my father before,” wrote Buchanan many years afterwards, “I should have loved and venerated him then for the patience and gentleness with which he accepted the blow.” “He was as weak as water,” is another of the son’s comments on the father. But looking back over the years I see in him who had so many faults a nobility, a loving-kindness which I have scarcely seen in any other man. For the rest he was a childish creature, dear and simple as a child. His very faults were childish, nay, his very vices, but it is much to be able to say of him—what could not be said of one man in a thousand—that in all my recollection of him. I cannot remember one cruel or unkind act, or even one unkind word. It is characteristic of Buchanan’s father that after his failure he calmly settled down to writing serial stories, and there is little record of any break almost to the end in the perfect equanimity with which he received Fortune’s different phases. IV. It is easy to see, then, where Buchanan got this recklessness about money; but it is a curious instance of the somewhat contrary effects which come from early upbringing, that Buchanan, who never heard even the mention of the word God till he was a grown boy, who was brought up in a home in which, on both sides, all existing religions were regarded as mere childish superstitions, should from almost the first have had undefinable and uncertain, but strong leanings toward some form of religious faith. For the life of me I cannot tell how the sweet spirit of natural piety arose within me. All my experience, my birth, my education, my entire surroundings were against its birth or growth, all the human beings I had known or listened to were confirmed sceptics or boisterous unbelievers. Yet while my father was confidently preaching God’s non-existence, I was praying to God in the language of the canonical books. I cannot even remember a time when I did not kneel by my bedside before going to sleep, and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. So far away was I from any human sympathy in this foolish matter, that this praying of mine was ever done secretly, with a strong sense of shame and dread of discovery. To this vague faith in a Creator, Buchanan, though he never approached even orthodoxy, clung throughout all his life; his poems and his most intimate writings agree in always proclaiming the immortality of the soul, a life after death. V. When the crash came in the fortunes of the family, young Buchanan showed the courage to strike out for himself, and on May 5, 1860, he started from the once luxurious home in a third-class carriage to fight for fortune in London. He had only a few shillings in his pocket; in one possession only was he rich; it is worth mentioning as characteristic. This was an excellent stock of clothes, and amongst it a sumptuous silk-quilted dressing-gown which his mother had bought for him just before his father failed. He had the usual experiences of the young literary provincial who comes to London in similar plight; he settled down finally in a top room in a lodging-house in that unsavoury district of Stamford Street, Blackfriars. He dreamed, he worked, he starved, and he was not unhappy for some years in this wretched abode. It was at that period that he made the acquaintance of Charles Gibbon—a novelist of much charm, now, I fear, almost forgotten, and together the two lived and worked, hoped and starved, in the “bankrupt garret” in Stamford Street. Although their earnings at that time were not great they were both at work far into the watches of the night, reading, writing, studying like young fellows cramming for an examination. Every night a pot of strong coffee was set upon the hob, and out of this pot they refreshed themselves, fighting hard against the natural desire for sleep, and again and again tumbling off into a troubled doze till daylight came and they crept wearily to bed. VI. Buchanan’s parents had meantime drifted to London, the father “trying his hand at the manufacture of cheap fiction,” and Buchanan went to live with them at the little house they had taken in Kentish Town. Already Buchanan had shown some talent for writing for the stage. He had written and been paid for a pantomime when he was but fourteen, and now he, with Gibbon, adapted a piece out of Banim’s powerful story, “Crohoore of the Billhook.” It was accepted and produced at the Standard Theatre; the fee of the authors was £20! It was in the production of that play that an amusing episode in the life of Buchanan took place; I alluded to it in writing about him after his death, but I did not state the facts correctly. Here they are, as given by Miss Jay authoritatively:— Before the play was drawn from representation the authors appeared in it themselves, Mr. Gibbon taking the part of a young lover, and Mr. Buchanan that of the hero, called Shadrack the Shingawn. As they knew the play by heart they had no rehearsals. The part played by Mr. Buchanan was that of a hunchback falsely accused of murder, and he made the character so hideously disfigured a monster that somebody inquired whether he was representing Shakespeare’s Caliban. However, the audiences out eastward were not critical, and the performance passed off with a certain measure of applause. The crux of the performance came in the penultimate act, when Shadrack had to rescue the heroine from a violent death, descending by a rope from the top of a precipice, seizing the heroine in his arms as he swung over the abyss from the branch of a tree, and ascending with her to the cliffs above. For this effect, which demanded an athlete rather than an actor, there had, as I have said, been no rehearsal, and it is more than probable that the aspiring actor showed some little doubt and trepidation, for the lady whom he was to save was in agonies of terror. However, all went well. Shadrack descended by a rope from the flies, clasped the lady in his arms, and was drawn back amid round after round of deafening applause. VII. In 1864 Buchanan published “London Poems.” The book took the town by storm, obtained him the acquaintance of some of the leading literary men and women of his time, and a Civil List pension of £100 a year. From that time forward Buchanan never had to complain of neglect. He jumped into fame, and if he had been a different man he would equally have jumped into a great fortune. But, as Miss Jay says, A taste for luxury of all kinds had been instilled into him by his mother, while from his father he inherited a love of speculation. From neither had he learned the value of money; when he had it he spent it like a lord, when he hadn’t it he lived upon credit, and then, finding himself in difficulties, he endeavoured to extricate himself by hard work, or by plunging into hazardous speculations which very often had the effect of sinking him still deeper in the mire. VIII. Extravagance, indeed, often took the shape of reckless gambling. There is a chapter of this book written by his friend Mr. Henry Murray, with that writer’s usual brilliancy, which is one of the most painful in the whole volume. It is a description of Buchanan as a gambler on the racecourse. The chapter ought to have been written; the biography and the picture of the man would have been incomplete without it; and in biography I am for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But all the same there is something infinitely saddening in seeing this very fine fellow—with all his wonderful powers, his pathos, his humanity, his mastery of so many literary arts, his love of truth and his influence over the hearts and consciences of men—to find him on a racecourse taking and giving the odds, and risking hundreds of the money he had earned in blood and tears, on so uncertain a chance as the running of a horse. It must not be supposed—writes Miss Jay—that all his money went in the purchase of mere personal pleasures. His generosity was without parallel, and he never refused a request for help if it was in his power to grant it. If a friend happened to be in “Queer Street” he would lend him a hundred pounds with as little hesitation as he would lend ten, and it was a peculiarity with him that he never looked for the return of such money, no matter how large the sum might be, but always regarded it as so much to the good if it happened to come his way again. And so it was that this man of genius was “darkly doomed,” as Miss Jay puts it, “to much ignoble pot-boiling.” Let us be charitable; for he paid the penalty for his weakness. * “Robert Buchanan, Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships.” By Harriet Jay. (Fisher, Unwin.) ___
The Academy (7 February, 1903) Reviews. A Literary Man. ROBERT BUCHANAN: SOME ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE, HIS LIFE’S WORK, AND HIS LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. By Harriet Jay. (Fisher Unwin.) THIS biography of Robert Buchanan, diffuse in its very title, is written by his sister-in-law, who was also his adopted daughter. Trained (as she says) from her earliest years to look up to him with reverence as the embodiment of all the moral—and other—virtues, she is therefore the last person in the world to write his life in any true sense. She is at the same time well fitted to produce the usual domestic “great and good man” record. And being a novelist, she is also able to make her biography readable—for which we are thankful exceedingly. It is on the usual principle of letting the man “speak for himself,” and is quite a capable piece of work in its kind, which we love not. “While my father was confidently preaching God’s non-existence,” says he, “I was praying to God in the language of the canonical books. I cannot even remember a time when I did not kneel by my bedside before going to sleep, and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. So far away was I from any human sympathy in this foolish matter, that this praying of mine was ever done secretly, with a strong sense of shame and dread of discovery.” He was in after-life, of course, an Agnostic, with “a strong sense of natural religion”—which vague phrase you can interpret for yourself. Sent to a boarding-school at Rothesay, in the Isle of Bute, he began to develop all the characteristics of his after self. Worshipping his mother, he was bitterly homesick. He also fell in love. He was twelve, and she was nine; and they parted—never to meet again. “Again and again my youthful Juliet rushed into my arms,” he writes,” again and again our tears mingled together.” Naturally, being Robert Buchanan, he began to write verse, for the first time. He met a dazzling vision (let us hope it was before the “youthful Juliet”); her name was Rebecca, and he rhymed it with “deck her.” Did not Tennyson write— I wove a crown before her, or something like it? Let us excuse poor Robert at twelve. The spirit of revolt which was his throughout life came with those of love and poetry. “Were you that devil of a boy who was at school with my daughter at Rothesay?” wrote to him a gentleman some years later. He was. he made up his mind to get expelled (having first tried jumping off a steamer, coming home dripping, and saying he had fallen overboard) and he got expelled—perhaps the only time he got his desire. Morals they had none to boast of; they tippled, they swaggered, they ran after petticoats and petticoats ran after them; but the spirit of the savage old literature ran in their veins like blood, and they had the fine qualities of their defects. Their very speech was archaic, their very oaths were reminiscent of Bardolph and Pistol . . . . Among them, for a short period, drifted a young player of another nature, afterwards known to the world as Henry Irving. A quiet, studious young man, even then ambitious, but exhibiting little talent even as a “walking gentleman,” I was much drawn to him by his thoughtful personality, so different to the wilder personalities of his companions, and I took him to my father’s house and introduced him to my mother. His father’s sudden and complete failure made him risk the venture of throwing himself on London, whither his poetic ambitions drew him. With plenty of clothes but little in his pockets he reached Euston, to have his luggage impounded on account of a lost ticket. He had no friends, did not know where to go. Lying in Regent’s Park, with tears in his eyes, he saw a youth looking at him; a close-cropped youth with a pugilistic aspect and a short clay:— He reminded me instantly of . . . the Artful Dodger, and by that token he was quite as ragged and disreputable-looking. We got into conversation, and . . . hearing that I was without a home, he invited me to accompany him to his quarters in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch . . . Late that afternoon I found myself in the east of London, in a sort of low lodging-house, or thieves’ kitchen. It is all like a dream now, but I remember my new friend was very kind to me, and saved me from impolite attentions on the part of my companions. The whole place reminded me of Oliver Twist, and I fancy Fagin was there as well as my friend the Dodger, whose bed I shared that night, throwing myself full dressed upon it and sleeping like a top till morning. There were other beds in the wretched room, and other youths and men of my friend’s persuasion, but no one molested me, and, what is more wonderful, no one robbed me of the small sum in my pocket. I rose up in the early dawn, and shook hands with my friend, who was half asleep. I never saw him again. It is not “the cheese,” as Buchanan might have been told, for one gentleman in misfortune to prey on another. The account shows some of the weaknesses which explain Buchanan’s want of success. It is over-wordy in the original (he cannot say “rose” without adding “up”). He conveys no idea, gets no grip of the scene he visited; an alert writer would have seized it in a few strokes. ___
The Star (7 February, 1903 - p.1) BOOKS AND BOOKMEN. Robert Buchanan, Rossetti, and Tennyson. Is biography a lost art? That is the question I always ask when I lay down a life of a modern somebody by a modern anybody. Since Froude’s “Carlyle” and Trevelyan’s “Macaulay” we have not produced a single biography worthy of standing on the same shelf as Boswell’s “ Life of Johnson” or Lockhart’s “Life of Scott.” (I am not forgetting Masson’s “Milton” or Dowden’s “Shelley” or Sidney Lee’s “Shakespeare,” for these are the products of desiccated scholarship rather than “bleeding slices of life.”) What is the explanation? Is it to be found in the chaotic incoherence of modernity, that incoherence which is reflected in every department of our literature? Few of us can see life steadily and see it whole. Is it strange, then, that few of us can see a life steadily and see it whole? The multiplicity of our interests blurs our vision. We are dazed and distracted by the perpetual whirr of the perpetual cinematograph. We have lost the strength of ignorance without gaining the strength of knowledge. The central core of a mighty indifference no longer hardens our soul. We melt into a million attentions. Intellectual liquefaction is the curse of our time. Robert Buchanan lived his whole life in a state of intellectual liquefaction. He was a literary flux, iucoherence incarnate, It is hard to make a snow man in a thaw, and I fear that Miss Harriett Jay has but resolved Buchanan liquid into Buchanan gas. The very title is vaporous, “Robert Buchanan: Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships” (Fisher Unwin). 1t is also paradoxical, for I have sought in vain for the “literary friendships.” Miss Jay has done the worst with the best intentions. Her loyalty to “the kindest of fathers” does her honor, but filial affection does not preserve her from indiscretion, in spite of her resolute efforts to efface herself, and to “allow the Poet as far as possible to speak for himself.” I do not think Buchanan “knew himself better than any man or woman could possibly know him.” On the contrary, he never “knew himself.” His life was spent in the hopeless attempt to be other people. He was a male Bashkirtseff, drunk with ambition, dashing himself to pieces against a thousand impossibilities. The fiery futility, the indomitable despair, the unconquerable failure of the man might have made a theme for a modern epic, but Miss Jay nobly misreads and misconstrues defeat as victory, and turns tragic pathos into comic bathos. If Mr. Henry Murray had written the whole life with the trenchant realism of the brief picture which he paints of Buchanan, the Born Gambler, this book might have been a masterpiece. Mr. Murray extenuates nothing; Miss Jay extenuates everything. She valiantly idealises the unidealisable, with the result that her “Life” flies into fragments. It is a fragmentary record of a fragmentary career. In the chapter entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry” Miss Jay does her best to find an excuse for what is inexcusable, but she admits that she “would gladly, if she could, wipe this episode from the record of so large-hearted and high-minded a man as Robert Buchanan, or, failing that, persuade herself and her readers that his motives in this attack were consistently honest and high-minded.” I realise the difficulty which confronted her, but I fear that in her zeal to defend her friend she has dug up a dead controversy which might otherwise never have been exhumed. There is documentary evidence, I think, against her theory that “the first blow was struck by the other side,” and it is hard to believe in a universal critical conspiracy against one man. Buchanan, indeed, was singularly unfortunate in his relations with his contemporaries, and Miss Jay errs grievously in republishing his monstrous libels on Browning. He says:—“We had fallen asunder a good deal, though we never had had any open disagreement, but as years wore on my enthusiasm lessened, and I was not in the way of being useful to him as a friendly critic. . . . I cannot help thinking that, had I still been writing criticism, he might have been more tolerant of my occasional backslidings in literature. I well remember our meeting just after I had published ‘White Rose and Red’ anonymously. He bounded into my room with outstretched hands, and almost before we had exchanged a word launched out into eager eulogy of the work. I said something in smiling deprecation, but he did not listen. ‘O, it’s a beautiful poem, a beautiful poem!’ he cried again and again, with florid emphasis on the adjective. I think he was honest, and I am sure I hope so; but I had powerful organs at my command at that time, and he knew it.” Surely, Miss Jay would have done well to let that venomous insinuation lie in its original obscurity. A still graver indiscretion is the reproduction of Buchanan’s attribution to dead men of certain statements about dead men. Buchanan says:—“Shortly after the publication of my review Tennyson avowed to me vivà voce that he considered Rossetti’s sonnet on ‘Nuptial Sleep’ the ‘filthiest thing he had ever read.’ Browning in private talks had been equally emphatic.” Now, if there is one rule which ought to be scrupulously observed by men of letters it is the rule that forbids the affiliation on dead men of injurious utterances which cannot be verified. To attempt to stab a dead enemy by citing against him the private utterance of a dead friend is surely the very worst offence which a man of letters could commit. The injury to Rossetti is great but it is nothing compared with the injury to Tennyson. For Tennyson has actually praised the very sonnet which Buchanan represents him as condemning. According to Palgrave (see his “Personal Recollections” in Lord Tennyson’s “Memoir,” Vol. II., p. 505) Tennyson told him that “the passion and the imaginative power of the sonnet ‘Nuptial Sleep’ impressed him deeply.” If we are to believe Buchanan’s statement that Tennyson avowed that he considered the sonnet the “filthiest thing he had ever read,” what are we to think of Tennyson? Surely, the man who could say that one thing to Palgrave and that other thing to Buchanan must be deemed the most contemptible of cowards and the most dastardly of hypocrites. I confess that to me it is nauseous even to consider the possibility of such abysmal turpitude in Tennyson. What, then, is the alternative? Did Palgrave lie? That alternative seems equally untenable, for apart from his high character, there is a complete absence of motive for a falsehood so meaningless. The only alternative left is a painful one, and all that can be said is that Buchanan allowed his rancor against Rossetti to carry him beyond the confines of literal accuracy. What he said Tennyson said is what he would have liked Tennyson to say, and so he said he said it. It is necessary to protest against so gross a violation of the code of conduct which alone makes “literary friendships” possible. If such outrages are tolerated a new terror will be added to death. JAMES DOUGLAS. ___
The Referee (8 February, 1903 - p.11) From the ‘Mustard and Cress’ column by Dagonet (George R. Sims): Quite the book of the week is Miss Harriett Jay’s Life of her brother-in-law, Robert Buchanan. It is the deeply-interesting story of a strange and fascinating personality. I knew Buchanan the poet and Buchanan the playwright intimately. Though during the later years of his varied career I was constantly his workfellow and companion, I never quite knew Buchanan the man. There are two professional friendships the breaking of which, both, alas! by the same swift stroke of doom, left me for a time with a void in my life. One was my friendship with Frederic Clay, the composer, the other my friendship with Robert Buchanan, the author. Few men have had such staunch friends and such Bitter Enemies as the burly Scottish poet, novelist, and dramatist, who was tender as a child in his affections, fierce as a tiger in his hatreds. He did most of his work with enthusiasm, but some of it was uncongenial. It was the uncongenial work that brought him perhaps the most money. He was a rapid writer, filling sheet after sheet with his small, neat handwriting at a speed which would have rendered my caligraphy indecipherable, even to myself. He wrote usually at a little table, but when he felt weary of the position he would write for an hour or two standing at a high desk. He smoked cigarettes incessantly, and he always wore a white waistcoat. These are little personal details. That which I love best to recall of The Fine Old Highland Raider —we called Buchanan that sometimes in jest—was his beautiful homeliness. In his home he was at his best. Many a time when the dear old mother and his devoted sister-in-law had bidden us good night have I stayed on until two, three, and four o’clock in the morning and listened while he rearranged the whole social system and gave me his frank views of men and things. His life was at times a drama—at times a fantasy. Alas! that it should have ended in a tragedy. _____
Harriett Jay Book Reviews continued Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, or back to Harriett Jay Bibliography
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