ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)
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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901) |
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LATTER-DAY LEAVES
1. Introduction 2. From The Echo Latter-Day Leaves I - Some Memories of Boyhood (18 June, 1891) Latter-Day Leaves II - The Lost “Burton” Manuscript (26 June, 1891) Latter-Day Leaves III - A Note; and, a Choir of Singing Birds (2 July, 1891) Latter-Day Leaves IV - George Henry Lewes (9 July, 1891) Latter-Day Leaves V - Concerning Justice (16 July, 1891) Latter-Day Leaves VI - My Father; and the Owenites (23 July, 1891) Latter-Day Leaves VII - Valedictory (30 July, 1891) 3. From Chapter 29 of Robert Buchanan by Harriett Jay (first published in the Sunday Special) Latter-Day Leaves IX - The End of the Century (31 December, 1899) 4. Robert Buchanan’s Autobiography
The first mention of the title Latter Day Leaves seems to occur in The Academy of March 5th 1887: “MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN has in the press, preparing for early publication, an original series of prose and verse compositions to be issued under the general title of “Latter Day Leaves.” Each portion would be complete in itself, and published at a low price, with illustrations. The first “leaf” will be called Thro’ the Dark City, and will be illustrated by Mr. Peter Macnab.” The item was repeated in both The Echo (5th March) and The Publishers’ Weekly (19th March). Whatever Buchanan had in mind for this ‘series of prose and verse compositions’ it never saw the light of day. A Look Round Literature had appeared in February 1887 and his next books to be published were The Heir of Linne in February 1888 and The City of Dream in April 1888 (although the latter did contain an illustration by Peter Macnab). In June 1891 Buchanan was commissioned to write a weekly column for The Echo. He wrote seven articles in all, under the title, Latter-Day Leaves. Of these the first and the sixth were memoirs of his youth. In her biography of Buchanan, Harriett Jay quotes extensively from the sixth article and also uses material from the fourth article concerning George Henry Lewes. The Jay biography contains several more reminiscences from Buchanan, the source of which is given simply as Latter-Day Leaves. The ninth article, containing Buchanan’s thoughts on the end of the century, is quoted in full in the biography (and I have repeated it here). It was published in The Sunday Special on 31st December, 1899. According to Christopher Murray’s unpublished PhD. thesis on Robert Buchanan: “Is Barabbas a Necessity? is too full of bitterness and special pleading to be considered one of Buchanan’s more memorable pieces of invective. That he was still considered a polemist of power is implicit in the offer made by the editor of the newly-founded Sunday Special in early 1898 to discuss topical issues as freely as the law of libel allowed every Sunday for as long as he liked. For a year, with occasional interruptions, Buchanan fulminated on his pet topics, from capital punishment to vivisection, from militarism to scientific materialism, from Positivism to Christianity; it was his last chance to inveigh against all the ills discernible in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign. The editor was inundated with letters when Buchanan called the hero of Omdurman “a rat-catcher killing Dervishes”, and when he published his memoirs of those early benefactors of his Robert Browning, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes it was indignantly asked of him, who would not let such considerations encourage reticence in such matters, whether he knew the meaning of gratitude. Much of what he wrote was merely the repetition of opinions stated often enough before; much is of interest now only to the social historian; but some is worthy of the literary historian’s notice; and Buchanan’s honest reflections on literature and its leading figures of his day are well worth preserving.” I have not seen the Sunday Special articles, but I’m assuming that some of them were printed under the title, Latter- Day Leaves, and these account for the other material in the Jay biography. _____
The Echo (18 June, 1891 - p.1) LATTER-DAY LEAVES. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. I.—SOME MEMORIES OF BOYHOOD. I have been requested by the Editor of The Echo to furnish him once a week with some notes on subjects of my own choice, and as he has promised me that I may discuss exactly what I please, exactly how I please, without reference to any editorial agreement or disagreement, I have accepted his very kind offer. So every Thursday, until further notice (that is to say, until I am tired of writing or until the Editor is sick of his bargain), I shall amuse my friends and annoy my enemies in these columns. I shall commence with a subject I am said to be particularly fond of—Myself. The subject will embrace a short sketch of my “literary beginnings,” some record of friends and enemies, and a few expressions of personal opinion. By this means my readers will have at least a glimmering of the “sort of man I am,” and can judge how far I am entitled to the honour of being, outside politics, the most abused person of my generation. _____ It is not quite thirty years ago since I, a lad under nineteen, came to London to seek my fortune. I had neither friends nor money. My studies at Glasgow University had been broken off abruptly by the failure of my father, a newspaper proprietor and one of Robert Owen’s band of Socialists. I arrived in London one Sunday with half-a-crown in my pocket, wandered about friendless and homeless, until, in Hyde-park, I made the acquaintance of a professional thief of the “Dodger” species, with whom I struck up an immediate friendship, and who took me home with him to a “ken” in Shoreditch. I date my affection for thieves and improper characters from that moment, for my new friend treated me like a brother. Having no aptitude for stealing anything (except ideas from the poets), I parted from that good fellow, not without having acquired some little knowledge of the seamy side of London, and drifted to the house of an old friend of my father, where I found a temporary shelter. I speedily found work of a kind, chiefly on the Athenæum, then edited by Hepworth Dixon; and thus encouraged, I removed to an attic in Stamford-street, Blackfriars, where I spent a solitary but memorable year. _____ In these days Bohemia still existed; all the green trees had not been lopped down. The smile of Dickens was still making the streets sunny. Thackeray was twinkling through his spectacles, and his fidus Achates, George Augustus Sala, was young, devil-may-care, and merry. Robert Brough, a genius in posse, had only just died, but a band of merry Cockneys were still gambolling in the magazines. John Morley a grave youth, fresh from college, and of indefinite ambitions, was editing the Literary Gazette. “I well remember the time,” he wrote me some years since, “when you, a boy, came to me, a boy, in London.” He gave me books to review, and I reviewed them with the splendid insolence of youth. Later came the starting of Temple Bar, and an invitation from Edmund Yates that I should become a regular contributor. Mr. Yates, in a ferocious diatribe published some years ago, says that I came to him with an introduction from our mutual friend, Mr. John Hollingshead. That is a mistake. My first personal communication with Mr. Yates was a letter from himself, saying that he had applied to Dickens and W. H. Wills for a list of the best contributors to All The Year Round, and that my name had been given him in that list. He did not even ask what I could contribute, but naming the date of the issue of the first number, asked me “to send in my copy as soon as possible.” I had, therefore, even at that early date, acquired a certain obscure standing. Then I was asked by Mr. John Maxwell to edit the almost moribund Welcome Guest, and I did so until its death; which reminds me how Miss M. E. Braddon, whose first book, “The Secretary, and Other Poems,” I had reviewed in the Athenæum, came to Stamford-street to talk to me about her first story. She was young, interesting, and clever—a girl in a thousand. Since then she has made both fame and fortune; but I have often wondered why she abandoned altogether her first friendship for the Muses. In whatever branch of literature she had adventured she would certainly have succeeded. _____ An amusing incident occurred about this period. I procured an introduction to Mr. Samuel Lucas, then editing the Morning Star, and I was actually recommended to him as a “strong and masculine” writer on public questions! I was promised work, and invited to call. I shall never forget the editor’s amazement and horror when he recognised, in the “strong and masculine” leader-writer, a blushing and beardless boy. After that experience I put some years on to my age, and generally avoided my editors. Some time afterwards, however, I went to Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark as the correspondent of the Morning Star. The war was just ending, and I was, perhaps, the only journalist in London who knew Scandinavian, now a very common accomplishment. _____ All the first year, however, I was solitary, dwelling in what David Gray called “the dear old ghastly bankrupt garret” in Stamford-street. For a short period Gray stopped with me, dying of consumption; and to us, from time to time, came Richard Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, Laurence Oliphant, and Sydney Dobell. Through Dobell I made the acquaintance of Westland Marston, whose house I visited now and then, and of Dinah Muloch, the author of “John Halifax.” Miss Muloch was living in a lovely little cottage at Hampstead, and the days when I went there were days of sunshine. She lent me books, gave me good advice, and told me “I should be a great man!” Dear soul, if she could have looked forward thirty years, and realised all my follies and my sorrows! “The pity of it, the pity of it, Iago!” _____ After the first flush of youth and hope there is nothing so cruel, nothing so hopeless and sad, as the literary life, as the writer’s daily fight for bread. Never shall I forget how Bryan W. Proctor (Barry Cornwall) wrote to me, before I ventured to London, and warned me against literature. “If you pursue it, what you now enjoy will become a torture; try to secure some little independence, but never take your talents into the market.” I called on the beloved old man shortly after I came to the Metropolis. He sighed when he heard what I had done, and when I left him pressed into my hand an envelope containing six golden sovereigns—a little fortune. Another early correspondent, George Henry Lewes, had also written to me thus, after reading some of my early poems:—“Wait for three years! Write as much as you please, but publish nothing. If you publish now you will get classed, and the public is slow, very slow, to recognise in anyone so classed anything but a clever writer, whatever he may have become.” These were wise words, and came of a life’s experience. Lewes was regarded as “the cleverest man in England,” and nothing more, though he had become an open as well as a secret power. When the three years elapsed I went to him, and informed him that I had acted on his advice and waited. He was pleased, and told the tale to George Eliot as we sat together over the luncheon table in the Priory, North Bank. _____ But since I was no longer quite friendless, I hear the reader ask, why do I describe myself as solitary? Because there was no living soul near, apart from the dying friend of my boyhood, with whom I could have any real companionship; and he, after a few terrible weeks, had left me, to go home to die. Day after day, night after night, I was utterly alone. A visit to an editor’s office, a stray meeting with a superior acquaintance, a handshake, a nod, were the only events in my life. And even then my intellectual pride,— my vanity, if you please—was so colossal, my soul so full of dreams and aspirations, that all :he beings I met seemed ghastly and unreal. “I don’t like that young man,” said a well-known publisher whom I once or twice visited; “he talks to me as if he was God Almighty or Lord Byron.” The only creatures who appealed to me, who seemed to have anything in common with me, were night-birds and outcasts. I have walked for long hours by midnight between Stamford-street and the Bridge of Sighs, almost crying for companionship. The street-walker knew me, and told me of her life, as we stood in the moonlight, looking down upon the Thames. From the loafer and the tavern-haunter, as from my first friend the thief, I got help, friendliness, and comfort. But I wanted something else, and I knew not what. I was full of insane visions and aspirations. Poetry possessed me like a passion. Reticent by nature, idiosyncratic, opinionated, hating to show my heart upon my sleeve, I had no one to share my sorrows or my hopes. Sometimes a vagrant Bohemian crossed my way, chirping like Autolycus, and for a time the streets seemed full of the singing of larks. Elsewhere there were pipes and beer, Mimi, loose raiment, and loose jokes. But my yearning was not for these, but for the dead poets and the dead gods. My society was composed of phantoms—the Madonna and the Magdalen, Jesus, Balder, Vishnu, Apollo, Venus Aphrodite, Messalina, Antigone, Miranda, Rosalind, Christabel, Keats and his Dark Ladye, Heine speechless, and Milton blind. What had I in common with the Cockney gospel of cakes and ale? Much as I loved (as I still love) Dickens and his plum-pudding, I did not care for the fumes of plum-pudding in and out of season. My thoughts were rather with Esmeralda and with Rolla, with Pippa and Fra Lippo Lippi, with Œnone and Ulysses. There were to me two divine living poets—Tennyson and Browning. Clough, the sanest and the least successful singer of his generation, I did not know of till afterwards—when I had seen the other two Titans in the flesh, and had cause to be grateful for their sympathy. _____ A young Scotchman, some years younger than myself, came to stay with me—Charles Gibbon, since well-known as a story-writer. He was an earnest, open-hearted boy, and we lived together in great mutual happiness. We worked hard, indeed (for literature is never liberally paid), and more than once sat writing, without going to bed, for a fortnight at a stretch. One night he wakened up, and found me crying. “What is the matter?” he asked. “David Gray is dead,” I answered, though I had had no word of my friend for over a week. The next post from Scotland brought me the news of David’s death. “God has love, and I have faith!” were almost his last words. _____ Why do I pen these preliminary recollections? Firstly, because to go back to that time, even in imagination, is a curious pleasure; secondly, because there are many youths now fixing their gaze on the Mirage, as I did then, and they may be warned. The profession of literature is not for dreamers, or for believers in the ideal; above all, it is not for anyone who has any opinions of his own. A heterodox person might as well hope for happiness in the Church as an opinionated person may hope for happiness in literature. To bow and scrape before bogus reputations—to give no hint that Marsyas is not Apollo—never to speak the truth, but “to hint a fault or hesitate dislike”—to be amiably hypocritical and studiously conventional—is the way to success in all professions—above all, in literature. Then, again, literature, with remarkable exceptions, is vilely paid. Think of poor Sarah Tytler, the authoress of “Citoyenne Jacqueline” and countless thoughtful works, lying now, at over sixty years of age, exhausted and without the means of support. Think of Richard Jeffreys, writing his masterpieces for a hodman’s wage. Think of James Thomson, neglected and scorned until after his piteous death in University Hospital. If you are commonplace and acquiescent, if you are a clever tradesman, if you believe in no God but Cæsar, and accept the Modern Journalist as his prophet, you may live in fair comfort by your pen, and men will like you, critics will praise you—even the New Journalism will respect you. If you are made of different stuff, or if you lack the power to trample down hatred, calumny, and all uncharitableness, go and earn your living by breaking stones, but beware of literature. _____ “The wheel of fortune goes round and round.” As I write, I am asked by the Dialectic Society of Glasgow University to deliver, before the Senatus and Council of the University, and the members of the Society, the opening address in November next. Nearly thirty years ago I left that city; since then I have been living a stormy life on the waters of Literature; and now I shall go back to face a new generation, with full powers to tell them whatever truths I please. This is something. As Whitman says, “It tastes good.” For once, face to face with Scotchmen, in the land of the Covenant, I shall be able to speak my mind. A Duke who believes in the Deluge has preceded me. A Bohemian who believes in Pan, Aphrodite, and Artemis, I shall follow him. __________
The Echo (26 June, 1891 - p.1) LATTER-DAY LEAVES. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. II.—THE LOST “BURTON” MANUSCRIPT. Few readers can have perused without emotion the remarkable letter just contributed to the Morning Post, in which Lady Burton describes how she destroyed the manuscript of her husband’s last translation from the Arabic “The Scented Garden.” The day before he died Sir Richard said to his wife that the work on which he was then engaged was his last legacy to her—a legacy which, by its sale, would enable her to live in comfort when he was taken away. Next morning he died suddenly; and after his death Lady Burton locked herself up in his study and read the manuscript. “It dealt with,” she tells us, “a certain passion.” Although prepared by one of the best and purest of men, it horrified her; so terrible indeed did it seem that she feared it imperilled the writer’s immortal Soul! Here are her own words:— _____ A confession more pitiful, more heart-rending, has never been published to the world. Its extraordinary superstition, its passion of love and tenderness, reveal to us a nature of sublime capabilities. But après? Granted the nobility and sincerity of purpose of the doer, granted the phenomenal character of the destroyed manuscript, what of the act itself? What of an act which, if adopted as a precedent, would leave all posthumous literature at the mercy of domestic or parochial sentiment? Lady Burton feared that the work, if published, would cause incalculable mischief and corruption; her moral nature revolted against it, and in acting as she did she felt herself a saviour of Society. I take leave to say, however, that the true judge of the question of publication was Sir Richard Burton, not his wife. The destruction of that manuscript was Vandalism pure and simple—and Vandalism is Vandalism, whether perpetrated by a Torquemada or a John Knox, by a fanatic or a gentle enthusiast, by a pure, high-soul’d woman or the public hangman. Excess of Love in such a matter is as perilous as excess of Hate. _____ I put aside here all question of the nature of the book; doubtless it was horrible enough from the ordinary point of view. Sir Richard Burton, it is well known, was a man absolutely indifferent, intellectually speaking, to ordinary standards of morality. He was a scholar and a pagan, a humanist and a scientist, and chiefly in his fearless moral daring consisted his claim to rank as one of the most original men of his generation. How he himself would have smiled at the suggestion that, by translating an Arabic manuscript, he was putting his Soul in danger! How he would have laughed at all suggestions of Hell and threats of future punishment! Though chained to the rock, like Prometheus, neglected, overlooked, relegated to a miserable Consulship at Trieste (this is the measure an English Government metes to its greatest men!) he retained his only heritage—absolute mental independence. His freedom was colossal, phenomenal, Rabelaisian. He admitted no critical test but that of his own broad nature. He lived his own life, when other men live by fear or rule. Every worthy contemporary who passed by him said proudly, “Here, at least, is a Man!” Yet no sooner is the Titan dead than he is at the mercy of all the proprieties. His work is turned to ashes, his name is stained in the sight of every church-going Puritan in the land. He has written things which even his own household fairy is compelled to “burn.” He is condemned by the Soul which loves him best, as he would be condemned by the County Council, by the Bishops, by the Priests, by the Moralists, by Mr. Spurgeon, or by Mr. Stead. Under other circumstances, the judgment might have been pronounced, not by his widow, but by his housekeeper; by his valet, not his life’s companion; by the priest from round the corner, or by the policeman in the street. Setting the nobility of motive aside, the result is as lamentable as if Héloise had destroyed the letters of Abelard, as if “Stella” or “Vanessa” had burnt the “Tale of a Tub,” as if Jean Armour had made away with the manuscript of “Holy Willie,” as if poor Lady Byron had got at the cantos of “Don Juan.” _____ Let me be understood. I am not one of those who attach a supreme importance to mere works of literature; I think, on the contrary, that half the worship of mere literature is absolute cant and twaddle, and that there are very few books indeed which the world could not have done without quite comfortably. In other words, I set Humanity far above any of its own artistic triumphs. But the question here is one of Morality as well as Literature; it concerns, beyond the mere preservation of what might finally be considered a worthless Book, the right of a good man to do as he wills with his own, to express his own nature in his own way, to leave to the world exactly what legacy of manhood he chooses. This, surely, is a moral question, one of pre-eminent importance. If it is replied that a man’s life-work is to be set aside because his wife, or his valet de chambre, or the family solicitor, or the clergyman of the parish, or the critics on the newspapers, or the parish beadle, or any other functionary, does not approve of it, what becomes of the freedom of opinion, the liberty of expression, which we reserve to every sane thinker? What becomes of originality, of personality, of character—things which are the life-blood of literature itself? I will grant, for the sake of argument, that '”The Scented Garden” would be held by most readers an abominable work, outraging decency on every page. Very well. So (many think) would the “Arabian Nights,” the “Decameron,” the “Heptameron,” the tragedies of Œdipus and Phœdra, the poems of Catullus, the novels of Zola, the “Children of Adam” of Walt Whitman. Rabelais and Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, Burns, Byron, and Alfred de Musset would all, if the domestic test prevailed, accompany Crebillon Fils and Casanova to the auto-da-fé. And who, except the evangelical people who read nothing and the mock-moral prurient prudes who read everything (particularly if it is very nasty), would be the gainers? If all literature were “expurgated” to- morrow, would any living Soul be one bit the safer, one morsel the purer and better? Men do not live by literature alone. Men are not made good or bad by books, and no special Providence whatever, be it supramundane or super- matrimonial, should decide what is or is not fitting for a man to write. _____ “But surely,” I hear the reader exclaim, “there are some publications which are atrocious in themselves, and, therefore, inexpedient; publications which would corrupt the morals of youth, and bring blushes to the cheeks of modest people?” Certainly, but I contended long ago (and I have never been refuted) that the morality of a book was in exact proportion to its value as literature. To some good creatures whom the Devil has afflicted with Naresmia there are malodorous things even in the Old Testament. It is obvious on the face of it, however, that any work coming from the hand of Richard Burton would be, in the best sense of the word, “literary”—that is, human, broad, pregnant with knowledge, and fertile in the highest forms of expression. Burton touched much filth in the “Arabian Nights,” but his translation remains a masterpiece of wisdom and learning—not milk for babes and young ladies, but pabulum for the healthy stomachs of strong men. His interest in the passions and aberrations of Humanity was a scientific interest, a fearless regard of the truths of Nature and the evidences of Anthropology. We have it on his widow’s assurance, and we know it also by instinct, that the man was modest, pure, and great—a Hercules quite strong enough to handle the Hydra. Did the subject he last chose corrupt him? Did it render him any the less worthy of the worship of a good and stainless woman? Did it pollute his life, harden his heart and his understanding, degrade his nature? If it did not (and we are told it did not), why should we assume that it would poison the air, that it would bring a curse and a taint on those for whom it was written? _____ Lady Burton’s confession comes at a most unfortunate time, when what I have elsewhere called “a great Wave of Mock-morality is sweeping over England,” when statesmen and journalists are attempting to legislate for our minds as well as for our bodies, and every course of conduct, every expression of moral sentiment, is being referred to a Plébiscite of zealots drunk with social bigotry and journalists mad with sexual hypochondria. The Maw-worm of Journalism is riding rampant over Thought and Literature, and leaguing himself with the Stiggins of Little Bethel to destroy all freedom in the world. “I wants to go a-preaching,” says Maw-worm in the newspaper, as heretofore in the play; “I’m almost sure I’ve had a call; I have made several sermons lately, I does them extrumpery; I convicted a man of five oaths last Thursday, and another of three when he was playing trapball in St. James’s Fields,—I bought this weskit out of my share of the money.” It is part of the New Morality to establish an Inquisition in every house, and to put every daring book into the “Index.” What a handle is given to the mob of vulgar superstition and illiterate bigotry when the last work of a gentleman and a scholar is, on the plea that it might injure the morals of our precious community, and, moreover, imperil the writer’s salvation, burnt by his wife’s own hand! _____ I say this in all reverence for the character of Lady Burton, in all sympathy with her, and in all certainty that the great- hearted man whose spirit waits for her beyond the grave would, in the largeness of his understanding, only prize her the more for an act which was after all, dictated by Love. But it is the weakness of those who love us which we have to fear, not their strength. How common is love among women! How rare among them is the faculty of self-effacement, the perception of moral rights and spiritual obligations! Yet a man, in his battle with the world, needs something more than spoon-meat and tenderness; in his weaknesses, as in his strength, he needs, if he is to live his life, large intellectual comprehension. Many a man has been dragged down by affection from his ideals—the deeper the affection, the greater the danger. Reading this pathetic record of a mistaken devotion, I feel for the first time in my life a sympathy with Goethe, who regarded all unreasoning forms of attachment as “forms of disturbance” fatal to the artistic nature. _____ The condition of a just man’s love is absolute moral faith and intellectual sympathy. The condition of an impulsive woman’s love is absolute abnegation, on the man’s part, of freedom and individuality. The hands that love us often are the hands Few great men stand firm against the prejudices of those to whom they are bound by infinite tenderness and duty. All his life Sir Richard Burton stood firm, his feet planted on the rock. The world can well spare that lost Manuscript. What the world cannot spare is the freedom which Love itself denied to a great Spirit, even when its mortal tenement was scarcely cold! __________
[Note: The Lost “Burton” Manuscript - additional material The response to Buchanan’s other articles consisted of the odd letter, so in those cases, the letters will be added after the article.] __________
LATTER-DAY LEAVES. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. III.—A NOTE; AND, A CHOIR OF Before proceeding to “fresh woods and pastures new,” I should like to say a few words by way of note to my paper of last week, “The Lost Burton Manuscript.” The correspondents who have written to The Echo on the subject entirely miss the point of my argument, which in no way concerned the character of the Manuscript itself (of that I knew and know nothing), but which went to show that Lady Burton’s conduct was likely to establish a dangerous precedent. On the same plea as hers, a Roman Catholic wife might consider herself justified in destroying a masterpiece written to expose the evils of Roman Catholicism; or a Protestant daughter, left heiress of a Roman Catholic father’s unpublished writings, might suppress and burn a work framed from the Romish point of view. In either case, there would be a sincere desire to save the beloved one from eternal damnation, to “cut the cords” which prevent his poor Soul from “ascending to Heaven.” Now, questions of Morality are far more difficult to determine than questions of dogmatic Religion, and little or no good is gained by the Podsnapian method of putting all such questions aside as “offensive,” “improper,” '”not to be discussed by decent people.” “No man. can save another’s Soul, says the poet; and if Sir Richard Burton left a base book as his legacy to mankind, no post-mortem action on the part of his wife could save or absolve him. We who plead for freedom of individual expression, however, deny the right of any person to tamper with literature and to set aside the will of a great personality. We decline to let the voice of homely virtue or superstitious prejudice penetrate to our death-chambers. Had Sir Richard Burton said to his wife—“Here is a book—but you must decide whether or not it is fit for publication,” the matter would have been very different. He gave her no such choice. In burning the work of his mature and deliberate creation, and in afterwards announcing to the world that she had done so because the work was foul, she stultified her own devotion and she stigmatised its object in the eyes of all mankind. _____ I am no advocate for the circulation of “erotic” or “banal” literature, and personally, as I have said, I sympathise with Lady Burton, who did exactly what she considered right and just in destroying what she esteemed a loathsome book. One of your correspondents charitably suggests that Sir Richard Burton must have been “insane.” Well, Rousseau was considered insane when he wrote the “Confessions”; Voltaire, when he wrote “La Pucelle” and the “Philosophical Dictionary”; Shelley, when he wrote “The Cenci”; Goethe, when he wrote the “Elective Affinities”; Diderot, when he wrote his tales; Heine, when he wrote some of his criticisms and poems; Whitman, when he wrote “Calamus”; Zola, when he wrote “La Curée”; Tolstoi, when he wrote the “Kreutzer Sonata”; Doskoiewsky, when he wrote “Crime and Punishment”; and Gautier, when he wrote “Mademoiselle de Maupin.” Each one of these works would be considered “loathsome” from certain points of view, and in so far as any work is absolutely so, it is worthless as literature, as the material for great thought and feeling. It is just and fitting, moreover, that such books should be exposed to all the assaults of adverse criticism, torn open and exposed, and publicly denounced and reprobated. Such treatment, however drastic, cannot destroy anything which is spiritually alive. _____ But public opinion is quite powerful enough without any auxiliary aid from an Author’s own relations. The common instinct of Humanity is in favour of purity and decency, and no man who is merely sensual and unclean has any chance of permanent appreciation or even passing tolerance. Great literature, indeed, is its own disinfectant; nothing base, nothing common, nothing foul can abide within it. If the works I have above cited continue to exist, in spite of all that has been urged against them by prejudice, by Ignorance, by Superstition, or even by Social Purity itself, it is because they transcend the limits of the domestic categoric imperative, and answer some spiritual need of human nature: not my need or your need (I don’t want Mademoiselle de Maupin, and, possibly, you don’t want Calamus), but the need of intellectual beings somewhere. Let such books live, if they can. Tell us of all the evil in them, point out all their folly, but don’t, we beseech you, hand them over to Mr. Podsnap, Mr. Stead, the monthly nurse, or the public hangman. Give Literature a chance. Remember the penalty which every man has to pay for any breach of the social proprieties. Remember how many just and worthy souls would have killed and tortured Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, Gibbon, Byron, Shelley, and all for “the love they bore them,” all for the sake of “saving their poor Souls.” Remember how even good John Calvin compassed the burning of Servetus. Remember how fondly Torquemada loved his victims. Remember how the matrons of the Potteries clamoured for the blood and bones of Robert Owen. Remember how St. Simeon of the Journalistic Pillar has shrieked for the lives of certain statesmen. Remember how good Mr. Parkinson has cried anathema on the wicked marionettes, and thought the World’s Morals in danger because a mechanical clown sat on a mechanical butterfly! _____ And now to our “new pastures.” Let me change a subject which is, at its very best, unpleasant. _____ In these days of cheap Manuals for the Uninstructed, when shilling guides to such abstruse and inaccessible classics as Goldsmith and Byron are in extraordinary demand; when no one consults literature at the fountainhead, and when everyone gets his knowledge of great books in driblets from the mouths of cocksure cicerones; when no edition of a Familiar Author can appear without an impudent preface by a living Criticaster, telling us what it is the right thing to admire and the correct thing to depreciate — in these days, I say, of critical Lilliputians swarming over the prone and mighty Dead, the appearance of a new Anthology is not particularly welcome. It was with no anticipation of intellectual pleasure, therefore, that I took up the first two volumes of a series called “Poets of the Century,” edited by Mr. A. H. Miles—the first volume devoted to deceased singers, from “George Crabbe to S. T. Coleridge”; the second to writers most of whom are still living, from “William Morris to Robert Buchanan.” _____ Before the tomb of each dead Poet I see the usual Cicerone, wand in hand, glibly introductory,—as if no human reader were sane enough to read English verses without official assistance. Even Coleridge, it seemed, needed a recommendation, and Wordsworth an exordium, before either could be studied in comfort. Then turning to the selection from Poets chiefly living, some fifteen in all, I find each Poet attended by his Famulus, or Expositor, in most cases (as is right and fitting) an admirer. Perhaps, as some of us are not very well known to the general public, such an Expositor is useful, but I think he should have stopped short of criticism, and confined himself to a few biographical facts. It is not much use, for example; informing Mr. Swinburne that “If he had only half as much difficulty in writing poetry as the most fluent of his predecessors, he would have written considerably less, but some of his work would have been much better.” This may be all very true, but we get enough of the same sort of thing in the newspapers, and fastened to a Poet’s coat-tails it is an impertinence. The prefatory words concerning myself are so kind and generous, so thoroughly appreciative, that I should be a churl to complain of them; but on the whole, I should have been content with a brief introductory note, something like the following:— _____ I have known several of these Poets personally, and have loved two of them. I used to get valuable botanical hints from Leicester Warren, now Lord de Tabley, and walked and talked with him on the fringes of Bohemia. That he had written “Philoctetes,” perhaps the most truly Greeky bit of mosaic in our language, was enough to frank him to the heart of any Poet. The splendour of Putney criticism dazzled my eyes while I ate mutton-chops in the neighbourhood of Holywell-street with Theodore Watts, now Cockaigne’s greatest authority on Swinburne, sonnets, and swimming. I realised that Watts was a good little man, who meant no harm to anybody, even when he was most eulogistic. Symonds I had encountered—earnest, enthusiastic, and learned. I had watched young Mr. Garnett (now Doctor of something or other) gazing dreamily into the laps of gifted ladies, and telling of the day when Cockney criticism hailed him as “the poet.” I had seen Swinburne long before Thomas Maitland—but stay! That matter must be reserved until I discuss the Great Fleshly Iliad in extenso. _____ Of David Gray I need say nothing. His “poor little book” (so described with fine manly sympathy by a brother-poet) has gone over the world, and not a week passes but unknown correspondents, from all parts of this planet, write to me tenderly of the friend who fell dead on the threshold of the House of Fame. But of another whom I am not alone in loving I may say a little more. I cannot add to the eulogy passed upon Roden Noel by his friend Symonds, but I can ask my readers to read A Little Child’s Monument, and tell me where in English literature they can find anything so consecrated by the very spirit of Divine Sorrow? Knowledge deep and true, patience grand and simple, manliness, tenderness, wisdom, the power of insight, the gift of colour, are all there, as elsewhere in the poems of Roden Noel. _____ Returning to the Anthology itself, I find it specially valuable as a first introduction to other Poets with whom I had scarcely even a bowing acquaintance. Of Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse, for example, I knew almost nothing, but I have been stirred to the depths by the lordly sweep and splendid cadence of his Last March. In all literature I know nothing more beautiful. What can be more delightful, in quite another way, than the selection from Mr. Austin Dobson, whose verses are as pure as old porcelain, and as suggestive of the Past as old tapestry? Of Wilfrid Blunt, again, it is a delight to know something; for here surely is a man of strong sanity and abundant originality. Indeed, the whole Anthology reminds me how rich contemporary literature is in neglected reputations, in fine talent, in verses that will surely live. I looked for a cage of parrots and parroquets, and I find a whole aviary of real singing-birds. I don’t include myself in this eulogium, but I am glad to find that, with or without me, Victorian poetry is so fertile in genuine song. _____ I have written elsewhere apropos of the posthumous apotheosis of Browning:—“The World, which, in fits of post- mortem enthusiasm professes to respect Poets, insults them daily and hourly by shameful comparisons. This Poet is greater than that, forsooth, and that Poet sings more prettily than this. For not even yet does the World know what a Poet is. Among the Singers of Humanity, there can be no rank and no competition. The only honour they seek is the love and sympathy of the few who understand them, and to whom they minister in secret joy.” This truth is borne strongly in upon me as I turn over the present book. The man who wrote The Last March is fitted to stand in the company of any Poet, living or dead. The man who wrote “Proverbs in Porcelain” carries his note of introduction to any company of Immortals. The man who wrote “Thalatta” need fear no comparison with any bard, crowned or crownless, who ever wrote about and loved the Sea. _____ If the Critics, the Cicerones, the Busybodies, would only let these and all other Poets alone! If Mr. Theodore Watts (instead of filling the Athenæum with a sort of weekly Memorial wherein Mr. Swinburne’s head is dominant instead of that of Charles I.) would content himself with writing more odes to “Mother Cary’s Chickens” and more amiable sonnets! We do want new poems; we certainly do not want further prosings about Poetry. Meantime, more power to the elbows of the fifteen Singers included in this Anthology. I would apologise humbly for making one of them, but after all they ought to thank me, for without me and my lost comrade they would have been an unlucky number—thirteen! _____ As I write, Mr. Lewis Morris favours the public (through the pages of Murray’s Magazine) with a paper on the Future of English Poetry. The great faults he finds in the poetry of the present day are “prolixity” and “obscurity,” and he is rather inclined to believe that henceforward Poets will devote themselves to the production of unrhymed verse, dealing with the great ideas and problems of contemporary life. From what Mr. Morris hints, rather than says, I should gather that he personally means to startle us with some unrhymed masterpieces, and has given up all thought of repeating the chaste classical triumphs of The Epic of Hades. He cannot, surely, mean to suggest that our living poets have neglected the Age in which they live, and have not at least endeavoured to deal with modern thoughts and problems. At no period, I fancy, were verse writers so alive to the influences of their environment. Whatever their subjects may be, the atmosphere surrounding those subjects is certainly fin de siècle. Personally, I find just as much modern “inwardness” in Atalanta as in Gwen, in The Ring and the Book as in The Gardener's Daughter. _____ There is Poetry and Poetry. There is Poetry which delights the souls of Statesmen and Bishops, and there is the Poetry which irritates all people who are professionally good and moral. If I were a Laureate in perspective, like Mr. Lewis Morris, I should confidently solicit the suffrages of those who are both moral and good, who like to read about King Charles the Martyr in the Prayer Book and in the Christian Year, and who regard John Inglesant as a tremendously profound and “epoch-making” production. I should not care particularly about the form of my verse, but I should be very careful about the propriety of its matter. I would avoid obscurity and prolixity, devoting myself to the production of short Songs of Sixpence and epitomised epics of Mother Goose. Then, having, like two famous predecessors, uttered nothing base, I should confidently await the Laurel, to be worn amid the hosannahs of the Young Men’s Christian Association. All this, I say, I should do, if I were a truly representative Poet of the Period, certain of the episcopal blessing. __________
[Note: A letter from Buchanan to Alfred Henry Miles concerning Poets of the Century is available here.] __________
LATTER-DAY LEAVES. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. IV.—GEORGE HENRY LEWES. At about the same time when my friend and companion David Gray was in busy correspondence with Sydney Dobell, I was first opening up communication with George Henry Lewes. Lewes was well known to me as a man of letters and a powerful critic, as well as the friend and adviser of “George Eliot”; and I was attracted to him by a certain catholicity or liberality of temper which animated those of his works with which I was familiar. About that time I had completed, in addition to divers poems in the classical manner, a number of blank verse idyls or pastorals, in which I had utilised to some extent my knowledge of Nature, and which, though crude enough, were certainly attempts in a praiseworthy direction. Altogether undecided as to the value of my attempts, and anxious to secure an authoritative opinion, I one day despatched to Lewes a formidable parcel, consisting of all sorts of poems, and accompanied with a letter in which I requested him to tell me honestly if, in his opinion, I was a Poet. The reply came very speedily, in a long and kindly letter, which began by putting my pseudo-classical efforts as comparatively unimportant, and then proceeded as follows:—“But in the pastorals I recognised a different talent, and, perhaps, a future poet. I say perhaps, because I do not know your age, and because there are so many poetical blossoms which never come to fruit; but these poems are original, or, at any rate, individual. If you would keep them by you for a time, strengthening the weak lines, as Tennyson elaborately does, I have no doubt that the best sort of success would attend them. If my advice is of any value, however, write as much as you feel impelled to write at present, but publish nothing. If you publish now, you will get classed. The public will come to know you as a clever verse-writer, and will be slow very slow, to believe anything else, whatever you may have become.” He ended by conjuring me to wait, at any rate some years, before thinking of publication. _____ It so happened that for some time after arriving in London, and, indeed, until after the publication of my first volume of poems, I took no steps to remind Lewes of our correspondence; but at last, after the lapse of nearly four years, I wrote to him and sought his acquaintance. His answer was cordial, and one morning, at his request, I presented myself at his residence—The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s-park. Remembering Douglas Jerrold’s description of him as “the ugliest man in London,” who had caused the chimpanzee in the Zoological Gardens to die out of “jealousy” that there existed close by “a more hideous creature than itself,” I was agreeably surprised to meet a little, bright, not ill-looking man of between forty and fifty, with a magnificent forehead, bright, intelligent eyes, and a manner full of intellectual grace. True, he was not physically beautiful. The great defects of the face were the coarse, almost sensual-looking mouth, with its protruding teeth, partly covered by a bristly moustache, and the small, retreating chin; but when the face lighted up, and the eyes sparkled, and the mouth began its eloquent discourse, every imperfection was forgotten. The great charm of the man was his frank, unaffected geniality, and utter absence of intellectual pretence. The time had been, not very long before, when he had been affected and pretentious enough; but that was in the days of “Ranthorpe,” and its plethora of new culture, of Charles Kean and the “Leader.” “Vivian,” as he used to subscribe himself in those memorable diatribes, which were so unjust to Kean’s genuine talent, had sobered down, become a philosopher, was secretly directing the ponderous movements of George Eliot’s somewhat pompous muse. On a first acquaintance I found him thoroughly delightful. _____ The acquaintance so begun soon ripened into friendship—such friendship, that is to say, as could exist between a mature littérateur and a mere boy. I was then living in a small cottage on Haverstock-hill, and thither Lewes came now and then, accompanied generally by a formidable bull terrier. To the Priory I in my turn went frequently, and was among the few people favoured, during such visits, with the society of Mrs. Lewes, the author of “Adam Bede.” “George Eliot,” at that time, was a powerful-looking, middle-aged woman, with a noticable nose and chin, and a not ungraceful form, realising both in face and form the description I afterwards gave of her, in the “Service of the Poets”:— George Eliot gazed on the company coldly I had been particularly struck by her resemblance to the portrait of Locke, engraved as a frontispiece to the famous Essay. For the rest, she possessed a pleasing personality, was a clever, if somewhat flat, conversationalist, but struck one as not being without self-consciousness. Living the life of a recluse, and possessing few friends of her own sex, she was encouraged, I fancy, to pose as a tenth Muse, or Sybil. I am still under the impression that she owed at least half her literary success to the co-operation and supervision of her brilliant companion, who was at that time (as Patrick Alexander aptly described him to me) “the cleverest man in England.” _____ In fact, George Lewes was much too clever for his own reputation. His own words concerning myself, slightly paraphrased, would have admirably described his own position. “The public knew him as a clever and brilliant writer, despite what he had become.” He had turned his hand to almost everything. He had written poems, plays, novels, essays, dramatic and literary criticisms; in fact, he was so marvellously and splendidly versatile that when he settled down to serious scientific work he was discredited through his own dilettanteism. To his numerous other accomplishments he added those of an excellent actor and inimitable mimic. He wrote fluently in French and German, as well as English. He was an excellent Greek and Latin scholar. There was nothing, in short, he could not do, except convince the public that he had original genius. Yet no one who knew him well, and followed the workings of his mind, can fail to detect, through much that his partner wrote the very outcome of his peculiar sympathies in life and thought, or to be convinced that the so-called Novels of “George Eliot” were a dual composition, in which Lewes himself showed very often the dominant and master hand. _____ I am perfectly well aware, of course, that Lewes always deprecated the idea of having any share in the memorable novels. I have heard him asseverate so much again and again, while setting to his friends the good example of inordinate heroine-worship. But I, for one, never took these protestations seriously; they were part, I believed and believe, of an elaborate attempt to build up a mysterious reputation for “George Eliot.” I dare go one step farther, and assert from my general knowledge that, in liberality of disposition and breadth of human insight, Lewes was greatly his wife’s superior, that, in all discussions where our common humanity was involved he was the wiser and more tender thinker, that, in a word, the novels received from his influence that which was their most valuable and salient characteristic—their sympathy, much of their humour, and their peculiar art of moral exaltation. _____ I am almost afraid to confess that I had never been a very zealous admirer of these very novels, though, in common with all the world, I recognised their cleverness and their reserve of power. They seemed to me to fall short of genius, and to be far too pretentiously intellectual. When I came to know the author, I saw in her, as I thought, some of the defects which disfigured her literary work. It may have been my foolishness, but I found her, too frequently, a superior person. I remember on one occasion, when I had been rapturously praising Dickens, she delivered herself as follows:—“On the whole, I think Dickens has done a great deal of good,” which was very kind and liberal on her part, though I am afraid the words concealed a covert sneer. Yet no one was more accustomed to reproduce the Dickens manner than “George Eliot”; even in her essays, as in the one where she describes at a spiritualistic séance “the figure of an elderly gentleman foreshortened against the ceiling,” she is remembering the master and copying his felicity of verbal expression. _____ Lunching one day at the Priory, tête-à-tête with “George Eliot” and Lewes, I told, among other stories of my youthful experience, the story of David Gray—his wild, dreamy youth, his strange ambition, his early death. Both of my hearers were deeply moved; and Lewes, with tears in his eyes, exclaimed when I had finished, “Tell that story to the public too! Tell it as simply and vividly as you have told it to us this morning, and let Smith and Elder publish it in their magazine.” Upon this hint I wrote my little memoir, which was eagerly accepted for publication in the Cornhill, then under the editorship of Frederick Greenwood. _____ About this time I was busily engaged in writing, or, rather, completing, a series of Scottish stories in verse, afterwards published under the title of “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn.” Not without trepidation, I showed one of the poems, “Willie Baird,” to Lewes, and, to my great delight, he praised it enthusiastically. “Publish a volume of such stories,” he said, “and your fortune is made.” I then sent him the long narrative poem, called “The Two Babes.” “Better and better!” he wrote, immediately upon reading it. Not content with empty praise, he communicated with Mr. George Smith, of Smith and Elder, and urged him to secure the work without delay. _____ When the Fortnightly Review was started, under the editorship of Lewes, I was among its first contributors, and published in it one of the longest of my “London Poems,” the story of the flower-girl, “Liz.” Afterwards, when my poems of London life appeared in a volume, I sent an early copy to my friend and critic, who replied to the gift in a letter expressing disappointment. He did not like the book, and frankly said so—a serious blow to me, despite the praise of the journals and the work’s phenomenal popularity. A few weeks afterwards, however, came a letter of cordial recantation. “I’ve been in the country,” Lewes wrote, “and have read your poems amidst different surroundings, in a fresh spirit, and in solitude. I cannot now convey to you my full impression concerning, but it is enough for the present to say that they moved and delighted me.” Another illustration of the truth that a good critic may form very contradictory impressions of the same work, according to the spirit in which he reads and the nature of his environment. _____ Lewes never recovered entirely from the privations of his early life, when he was an omnivorous student, and starved his stomach in order to purchase books. He was a sufferer from nervous headaches, consequent on nervous exhaustion and indigestion. He died in his prime, when his intellectual faculties were at their brightest. The grief of “George Eliot,” then Mrs. Lewes, was strangely violent; for many hours she was hysterical, and her screams could be heard all round the house in North Bank. To her the loss was irretrievable; for, throughout her career, she had been upheld by a hand that never trembled, and helped by a heart that never faltered in its loving faith. The Sybil, whom the High Priest had surrounded with such mystery of power, was helpless and alone. Then, perhaps, for the first time, she realised her utter helplessness and the barrenness of human Fame. She drifted in the stream of life a little longer, but her time soon came, and in Death, as before Death, these two were joined together.
[Note: The lines from the ‘Service of the Poets’ quoted in this article proved impossible to track down, and I believe they were included in an original version of ‘The Session of the Poets’, but omitted from the version published in The Spectator on 15th September, 1866. I came across the following item (an extract from Buchanan’s short-lived journal, Light) in The Fife Herald of 23rd May, 1878, which would seem to confirm this.] |
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The Echo (16 July, 1891 - p.1) LATTER-DAY LEAVES. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. V.—CONCERNING JUSTICE. During the past few weeks there have occurred two Events of extraordinary significance, for evil on the one hand, and for good on the other. The first Event has been regarded as one of almost national importance; it has been the theme of general discussion in Society and the newspapers; both classes and masses have been stirred by it, and it has culminated in a kind of barbaric Pageant, recalling the earliest traditions of absolute monarchy founded on militancy and the type militant. Even the scandals of the Divorce Court and the glories of the Race-course have been temporarily forsaken for the contemplation of a Theatrical Performance, in which the highest personages of the realm have taken part, but the leading rôle of which has been assumed by a young foreign gentleman in uniform. To me, as an isolated spectator, the phenomena of this first Event were sad beyond expression. I realised to the full the folly and triviality of our modern life. I heard crowds cheering the Royal Mummers, as they would cheer travelled actors in a show. The piece, however badly stage-managed, was fully to the taste of the general audience, which shouted itself hoarse as the young Hamlet of the Hour swept by. Turning from the sorry sight, I was reminded of the other Event, which filled no newspapers, awoke no pæans, gathered no crowds, delighted neither masses nor classes—which, indeed, passed about as unnoted as a small bird in the air. But, to some few eyes, at least, this small bird was the winged messenger bearing in its mouth the olive-leaf, as a token that the Waters were subsiding, and that some green land had been found at last. _____ In the dim future, the first Event, if it is remembered at all, will be regarded as of little or no real importance to Humanity; while the second Event, in so far as it embodies the highest wisdom and insight of the present Age, will be remembered as of paramount significance. The first Event was the triumphal entrance of the young German Emperor into London; the second was the publication of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s book on Justice. _____ I was among the crowd on Friday last, when the young Kaiser made his imperial progress through the streets of London, and as he passed quickly on, with bodies of gaily bedizened troopers preceding and following his carriage, the show almost equalled that of a pantomime at Drury Lane, but was not altogether, to my mind, as convincing. I noticed with satisfaction that, while the Kaiser looked quite at home in his uniform, the members of our own Royal Family appeared to very doubtful advantage. The Prince of Wales was uncomfortable in his clothes, the plumed hat especially seeming (as it doubtless felt) rather an absurd nuisance. The Duke of Connaught, in his hussar’s dress, gave one the idea of an amiable amateur. Even the Duke of Cambridge, a real live feather-bed soldier of the kind we breed best in England, would have been quite as imposing, as well as more funny, with his umbrella. With the exception of the foreign contingent, all the Royal Personages appeared out of place and rather ashamed of themselves, and the loudest cheers of the day were evoked by the gentle wife and mother who sat smiling at the Prince’s side. On the whole, the entire affair was far less stirring than a well-conducted Lord Mayor’s Show. Our paid fighting-men, especially the Scots Guards and the Dragoons, looked magnificent; trained to war, spick and span, good-humoured, well-regulated machines, they awoke the kind of admiration which we all feel for fine fellows in perfect training, and which has been always felt for the type militant, from the Roman gladiator to the Christian soldier. For the rest, it was all the merest “mumming”; but I said to myself, “So much the better! Far hence be the day when our Princes can wear martial uniforms with distinction, and when our Rulers can look like soldiers to the manner born.” _____ At the Mansion House, for the edification of the Lord Mayor, Mr. Sheriff Harris, and the newspapers, his Imperial Majesty of Germany made a little speech, which was printed next day in leaded large type. All his soul hungered for, he said; all his heart palpitated for under that lovely uniform; all his object in organising and presiding over great armaments, was universal “PEACE!” And this sentiment, so full of graciousness and subtle humour, everybody applauded to the echo; while yonder across the narrow strip of water the armed battalions of France were glaring with eyes full of hate and envy, and remembering Sedan. Only a night or so before (so full was the atmosphere of peaceful and loving sentiment) certain Singers of French nationality had peremptorily refused to perform before the young Kaiser at the Opera, and their conduct had been wildly approved by the whole militant French nation. All this added point and pregnancy to the Imperial Joke at the Mansion House. That night, surely, Sir Garnet Wolseley, who holds up the German people to us as a glorious example and advocates a compulsory military conscription, must have felt serenely happy. _____ Next day came the Review at Wimbledon, which I was saved from seeing. I had had enough and to spare of the pantomimic Kriegspiel. For over a week all London had been given up to a noisy Farce, and the newspaper editors—those dear, good guardians of our manners and our morals—had been crawling on their stomachs before a young German Student, whom fitful Fortune had, in one of her pranks, made Emperor. They too, these good Editors, had circulated the Imperial Joke with the hugest approbation; and not one of them, not a solitary writer for the Press, seemed aware of that other Event of which I have spoken. While the great newspapers were overcrowded with solemn matter, from the cut of the young Kaiser’s breeches to the menu at the Mansion House (a menu occupying about as much space as a righteous editor would devote to a review of a great work by a great thinker), while the journals were all pæans, and the journalists all real turtle, no whisper was heard of the deadliest philosophical indictment ever made against Militancy and the Militant Idea. _____ I am perfectly aware that Philosophy is not interesting, and that a wise man’s dissertation on “Justice” is far less attractive to rightly-constituted Englishmen than a foolish man’s description of the dresses worn by people of title at a Court Ball. Nevertheless, I take leave to express my satisfaction that Mr. Spencer’s new work, in which our great Philosopher of Evolution sums up the thoughts of a lifetime, has appeared at the present moment, and at no other. Amidst the very Belshazzar’s Feast flashed the Handwriting on the Wall. Though the festal persons did not appear to see it, and though the gentlemen were too occupied with their uniforms, and the ladies with their diamonds, to notice a warning so faint and phantasmic, it nevertheless was there. Perhaps some of my readers will take the trouble to regard it for themselves; if they do so, they will be well repaid. Less startling and sensational than Mill’s famous Essay on Liberty, Mr. Spencer’s Justice is at once as masterly, and even more reasonable. Although, for many reasons, it is unlikely to stir the dove-cots to the extent that Mill’s Essay did, it summarises profoundly the complex intellectual problems of its period. _____ This is no place for a formal examination of the principles, many of them already familiar to students of Mr. Spencer, advocated in the new treatise. It is necessary to state, however, that here, as elsewhere, the writer sees in the gradual growth of State legislation the certain loss of individual life, freedom, and character, and in the gradual limitation of such legislation the one hope of arriving at the most perfect of human conditions—the condition of permanent Peace. Still holding firmly by the inductive method, and moving from point to point of luminous verification, he describes the evolution of the idea of Justice in the human mind, and proves that exactly in proportion to the freedom of communities and individuals from violent aggressions is the growth and development of that idea. Where men are subject to the discipline of a peaceful social life only, uninterfered with by the discipline which inter-social antagonisms entail, they quickly develop this consciousness. Entirely pacific tribes, uncivilised, in the common sense of the word, as some of them are, show a perception of that which constitutes equity far clearer than that displayed by civilised peoples, among whom the habits of industrial life are qualified, more or less largely, by the habits of military life. “It is only,” Mr. Spencer insists firmly, “where the ethics of amity are entangled with the ethics of enmity that thoughts about conduct are confused by the necessities of compromise.” _____ Mr. Spencer, of course, avoids contemporary references. He is content to search for proofs among the records of primitive and uncivilised races, to go back to the human origins for illustrations. Here and there, however, he lets us perceive his shame and sorrow at the barbarity and inconsistency of our higher civilisation, and he more than hints that civilisation in Europe is being arrested by the so-called triumph, a militant triumph, of the German nation. If he had been writing a work of history instead of a philosophical treatise, he would have pictured to us, as no other writer could with equal power, the European history of the last century, its wars, its barbarisms, its hysterical cruelties, its wholesale bloodshed, and its illimitable hypocrisies. _____ In another place I have placed on record my own perception that our so-called Christianity, our boasted civilisation, our practice of cant and compromise based on our ghastly theory of Love, is nothing less than a living Lie. What I have uttered as a simple publicist, writing for my contemporaries, Mr. Spencer formularises for the thinkers of all time. We are not Christians. Neither our thoughts nor our deeds have anything in common with the cardinal Christian tenets. It is not that we have ceased to believe in Supernaturalism, it is not that we consider the Christian evidences insufficient; it is not even that we are content to accept the Christian type of character, shorn of all miraculous pretensions, free of all dogmatic terminology; it is not, in a word, that we deny the letter, while affirming its spirit. It is simply that, as a nation, we are heathens; and if not heathens, hypocrites; and if not hypocrites, savages. And why? Because amid the complications of modern life, in the base retrogression towards barbaric forms of conduct, we lose the consciousness of Justice. _____ Let Mr. Spencer speak:—“Throughout a Christendom full of churches and priests, full of pious books, full of observances directed to fostering the religion of Love, encouraging mercy and insisting on forgiveness, we have an aggressiveness and a revengefulness such as savages have everywhere shown. And from people who daily read their Bibles, attend daily services, and appoint weeks of prayer there are sent out messages of peace to inferior races, who are forthwith ousted from their lands by filibustering expeditions organised in Downing-street; while those who resist are treated as ‘rebels,’ the deaths they inflict in retaliation are called ‘murders,’ and the process of subduing them is called ‘pacification.’” He adds, in words which deserve to be printed in letters of gold:—“While War is the business of life, the entailed compulsory co-operation implies moulding of the units by the aggregate to serve its purposes”—(as in Germany to-day.—R.B.)—“but when there comes to predominate the voluntary co-operation characterising Industrialism, the moulding has to be spontaneously achieved by self-adjustment to the life of voluntary co-operation.” _____ It is a strange satire on our Religion and our Religious Teachers that there should arise, in the person of an avowed Agnostic, in a philosopher who accepts the natural Law of Evolution in place of any written or spoken Gospel, the only great Christian teacher of our time. Many arguments have been advanced by clerical adversaries to show that Mr. Spencer, in proclaiming the scientific truth of “the survival of the fittest,” is promulgating a heartless and inhuman creed of laissez faire. But not one of these arguments has pierced the armour of a philosophy which embodies, after all, the old Christian formula that “the wages of sin”—the wages, in other words, of defect inherited or acquired, of incapacity to hold one’s own in the struggle for life—“is Death.” More than any other writer living, Mr. Spencer has upheld the truth that in individual love and charity, in the purifying and sweetening of the individual character, is the way to both personal and social happiness and peace; that even Death cannot touch the foundations of Humanity’s spiritual being; that brute strength and brute organisation are nothing compared with the strength of personal character, the idea of human Justice. Into the mystery which has so constituted the world as to make its history a slow succession of sufferings and pains the philosopher does not attempt to penetrate. He offers no sugared lies to Humanity. He tells us simply, in words as clear as those of any gospel ever penned, that men advance by Love and fail by Hate, and that Happiness and Justice are convertible terms. _____ There are questions on which I, among others, disagree somewhat with Mr. Spencer—as, for instance, on the Land Question and the rights of Property in general. Here, I think, the premises are wrong, and the reasoning consequently fallacious. But, in the main, I am content to follow my Leader to the end of his high argument; for elsewhere—among philosophers, at least—I can find little or no help. _____ “And I went unto the Angel, and said unto him, Give me the little Book. And he said unto me, Take it and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little Book out of the Angel’s hand, and ate it up.” He who accepts this book of Mr. Spencer will realise the experience of John, and, having eaten, will feel inclined to prophesy apocalyptically! The bitterness of the human problem will remain within him, though the wisdom of philosophy has been sweet in his mouth. When all is said that can be said, when all is known that can be known, we shall still be face to face with an awful and an inscrutable Mystery, we shall still think of the waste of life, the failures of race upon race, the carnage of Death flowing wildly hither and thither. But, surely, it is better to listen to the teachings of a benign Thinker, in sylvis Academi quærens verum, than to shout with the crowd at the spectacle of a Militant Emperor followed by Princes in motley, or to attend the garden-party of a jovial Bishop entertaining the high priests and magnates of Christian Heathendom? _____ I think of the Prince of Wales’s ill-balanced cocked hat and of the Duke of Cambridge’s umbrella with renewed satisfaction. Granted, we are a nation of Shopkeepers. Better to be even that than a nation of Marionettes, following the lead of a young Martinet who coquettes with the lower Socialism. We have only to glance towards the armed hosts of Germany, France, and Russia to realise what modern Barbarism means. But what of Justice? To think that, in very despair, we have to look for it, not amid the rabble of crowned and uncrowned men and women, but in a little unnoticed Book. __________
[Notes: ‘The Emperor’s Visit to the City of London’
Herbert Spencer’s Justice is available at the Internet Archive. ] __________
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