ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)
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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901) |
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The Athenæum (15 June, 1901) ROBERT WILLIAM BUCHANAN. THE death occurred on Monday last of Robert Buchanan, journalist, critic, novelist, and dramatist. He was born in 1841, and came to London in 1860 as, to use his own words, “a literary adventurer, with no capital but a sublime self- assurance,” and starved in what David Gray called a “dear old ghastly bankrupt garret.” He was, however, befriended by Sydney Dobell and the future Lord Houghton, and as early as 1861 was reviewing for the Athenæum, for which he wrote for several years. He contributed, for instance, a judicious criticism of ‘The Ring and the Book’ in 1868. In 1871 came the furious attack by “Thomas Maitland” on Swinburne and Rossetti in the Contemporary Review. Rossetti, to whom the results of the onslaught were disastrous, replied in our own pages. Violent writing was unfortunately only too characteristic of Buchanan. He was always at war with somebody, and spent much of his energy in making himself impossible to his friends and well-wishers. The bitterness of his early struggles was some excuse for this, but the years after he had made his position might well have brought more wisdom, more moderation of tone and language. His contempt for all contemporary criticism may be seen, for instance, in his ‘Look Round Literature,’ in 1886, and ‘The Devil’s Case,’ in 1896, when he became his own publisher for a time. In this poem he was a Lucifer railing against the cliques of Heaven, It was the lifelong complaint again of no fair criticism or recognition, false gods everywhere, a literary Inquisition! It was hardly surprising to find such assertions resulting in the record that the laws of Earth and Heaven Buchanan left singularly little praise of his contemporaries. To Charles Reade only was he generous. It is not necessary, nor would it be desirable, to write out the long list of his aversions. Such a man made it difficult for others to appreciate him. He did not, however, lack official recognition, being pensioned in 1870 “in consideration of his merits as a poet.” ___
Black and White (15 June, 1901) Robert Buchanan FIGHTERS are not always popular, and so a good deal of the applause that might otherwise have fallen to Robert Buchanan was seldom given, and even then but grudgingly. Yet there are many unprejudiced people who think that “The City of Dream” is one of the most beautiful poems of modern days, not only owing to the splendid level at which the verse is maintained, but also because of the exquisite lyrics which come in to lighten the heavier verses. As a dramatist, Mr. Buchanan was associated chiefly with the Adelphi Theatre, his sturdy soul being quite content with melodrama. Novel-writing also occupied many hours of a busy life, though Mr. Buchanan’s novels will not very likely add much to his fame. Of course, no article in a review ever made so much stir as that on The Fleshly School of Poetry. _____ Alone in London THE tale of Robert Buchanan, however, is not so much the tale of poems and dramas and romances as the tale of a man, full of vigorous independence, of sympathy and compassion and of generous appreciation of the strength and weakness of other men. His friendship with David Gray and the story of his early struggles with poverty have often been told: how he lost his friend and rediscovered him at a wretched lodging in the Borough, how poor Gray was one day forced to sleep out in Hyde Park and caught his death from exposure. De Quincey himself could not have been more lonely than was Robert Buchanan in those early days. “I seldom went out in the daytime,” he said in a recent autobiography, “except to visit the offices of the journals where I found a little work; I wrote, thought, read, and studied from dawn to dusk; and at night, when darkness had fallen, I wandered out into the streets, down by the riverside, on the lonely bridge immortalised in Hood’s piteous poem. I had a roof to shelter me, that was all.” |
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The Illustrated London News (15 June, 1901 - p.6) |
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Mr. Robert Buchanan, whose death on June 10 ended a long and painful illness, was born in 1841, at Caverswall, in Staffordshire. His father, also Robert Buchanan, was a Socialist, a missionary, and a journalist; and his more famous son inherited from him much more than his name. Robert Buchanan the younger was always a Propagandist; his was no scheme of “art for art’s sake”; he brought at times almost the biases of a fanatic to his literary tasks. His pen was that of the ready writer and the ready smiter. His education at Glasgow Academy and Glasgow University did not cool the fires, which, when he came to London, found expression in such articles as that on “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” to which Rossetti made answer, and which Mr. Buchanan himself, as the years proceeded, practically withdrew. Setting out to be himself a poet, he published a volume of verse in 1866, and in 1880 issued his “Collected Poetical Works.” His first novel, “The Shadow of the Sword,” published a quarter of a century ago, made at once apparent a new personality among popular writers. Like another novelist, whose death is simultaneously recorded, he had his ideals about methods of issuing books, and he became his own publisher in 1896, sending out “The Devil’s Case” and other works. When, however, he produced a little later a story of Irish clerical life, he had recourse again to the ordinary channels of communication between an author and his readers. In 1880 Mr. Buchanan began his career as a writer of plays, some of which have become very popular. He had his share of the “quarrels of authors” from the says of his early encounter with Mr. Edmund Yates; but the impetuosity of character which sometimes led to breaches of the literary peace was by no means abandoned by him when sacrifices had to be made and generous deeds done. ___
The Sphere (15 June, 1901 - p.6) |
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The death of Robert Buchanan from paralysis at the age of sixty will give an opportunity for the genuine literary critic to do justice where justice has perhaps long been withheld from personal reasons. Mr. Buchanan was born in Warwickshire and was educated at Glasgow University, where he had for college companion the David Gray whose pathetic life-story Robert Buchanan afterwards told. The two friends lived in London together until Gray died. Mr. Buchanan’s first volume of poems, Undertones, appeared in 1860; six years later his London Poems met with a greater measure of success. Although poetry is probably the medium through which Robert Buchanan is destined to live in literature, and, as I have said, in later years very little justice has been done to his really very considerable qualities, it is as a novelist and dramatist that he is known to the present generation. Perhaps his position as a poet was blurred for his older contemporaries by his great quarrel with Rossetti in which the latter perhaps secured too much of the world’s sympathy and partisanship. Some of the charges in Buchanan’s Fleshly School of Poetry were, however, retracted afterwards. Buchanan’s most famous novels were The Shadow of the Sword and God and the Man; they were clever, but certainly not such good literature as his poetry. His plays, again, made for a time a great reputation, Lady Clare, Stormbeaten, and Sophia being, perhaps, best known. That quarrel with Rossetti, in which Mr. Swinburne joined, a quarrel which has played a very large part in the literary small-talk of the Victorian era, was only one of many disputations into which Mr. Buchanan entered. It was a certain faculty for falling out with people that, as I have said, has somewhat blurred the critical vision of the age with regard to his poetry. But that time will do him justice, that it will place him very high among Victorian poets, I have not the slightest doubt. ___
The Academy (15 June, 1901 - No. 1519, p.504-505) BY the deaths of Sir Walter Besant and Mr. Robert Buchanan literature has suffered two very dissimilar losses. In Sir Walter Besant goes a most able writer, in whom the practical virtues of a literary man were conspicuously embodied. ... _____ OF late years Mr. Buchanan had been best known as a playwright and a novelist. As a novelist he never took high rank. His publishers may tell us that such-and-such of his recent stories have had such-and-such a circulation, and we are quite prepared to believe them; but the assertion, if made, would not be much to the point. When a man of letters disappears from among us, one seeks to ascertain what have been ephemeral and what may probably be lasting. Mr. Buchanan’s God and the Man may be dipped into for the sake of the quatrain-preface, in which he apologised to the shade of Gabriel Rossetti; but, apart from that as story, who is likely, fifty or even twenty years hence, to turn to any of Buchanan’s prose romances, from The Shadow of the Sword to Andromeda? In days when anybody and everybody can write a novel, Mr. Buchanan wrote novels—some two dozen altogether; but he wrote such things no better than did half-a-hundred of his contemporaries, and assuredly it is not as a prose story-writer that he has any chance of being permanently remembered. We may take for granted that he wrote novels as pot-boilers, and without any self-deception as to his capacity for the work. He produced them pretty steadily from 1881 onwards, at the rate occasionally of three a year. He brought out three in 1882, two in 1884, three in 1885, three in 1893, two in 1894, three in 1898, and so forth; but from 1881 his chief business was that of the concocting of plays. _____ AND he was not at all a bad playwright as playwrights go. He had a considerable command of the technique of the theatre, of which he had always been more or less a devotee. There is record of a drama of his, written in collaboration with his friend MacGibbon (softened down to Gibbon), which was performed at the Standard Theatre, London, when Buchanan was not yet “of age.” A play written wholly by himself “faced the footlights” three or four years later. Unquestionably he knew how to put together a stage-piece, and out of some of his adaptations from Fielding and the French a good deal of money must have been made by somebody. He was also very successful when working with the late Mr. Augustus Harris, Mr. G. R. Sims (with whom, for a time, he ruled the Adelphi audiences), and Miss Harriett Jay, who has so often hidden herself under the nom-de-guerre of “Charles Marlowe.” But what that was lasting or first-rate did Mr. Buchanan do for the theatre? There was, no doubt, some literary merit in his blank-verse play, “The Bride of Love,” but it is no longer in the theatrical repertory, having disappeared in company with such pieces as “That Doctor Cupid,” “Marmion,” “The Gifted Lady,” “Dick Sheridan,” and the like. On the whole, we dare say, Buchanan reaped more pecuniary reward from the seed he sowed in the playhouse than from any other literary crop. He was wise in his generation. He recognised in good time that if money was to be made anywhere nowadays, it was in the theatre. That his heart was either in his play-writing or in his novel-writing it is difficult to believe. He began his literary life as a poet, and it is as a poet that he will be remembered, if at all. _____ As a poet, the younger generation know Buchanan only as the author of such books as The New Rome, The Devil’s Case, The Outcast, The City of Dream, The Earthquake, and so on; but it is not by these querulous and spasmodic productions that his position as a verse-writer is to be fixed. His career as a poet came to an end, virtually, in 1874—the year previous to that in which he made his first appearance as a fictionist. It was as a poet that Buchanan started (in 1863, when only in his twenty-second year), and it was as a poet, we may be sure, that he desired to excel and make himself “for ever known.” It was as a poet that he was accepted and praised by the press for a whole decade. His Undertones, his Idylls and Legends of Inverburn, his London Poems, his Ballad Stories of the Affections, all made for him many friends and admirers. This vogue culminated in North Coast, and Other Poems, the volume in which, as a verse-writer, he is seen at his best. There was very considerable pathos in “Meg Blane,” and a good deal of genuinely satiric humour in the English and Scotch eclogues. The lyrico-dramatic dialogue between the dying Meg and her half- witted adult son still appeals to the heart: “O bairn, when I am dead, “O bairn, it is but closing up the een, Excellent, again, were some of the “Sonnets written by Loch Coruisk, Isle of Skye,” with their touch of mysticism and their modern note. Even more mysticism was there in The Book of Orm, and merit of a kind was to be noted in St. Abe and White Rose and Red, both of them issued anonymously. There is vivacity and sprightliness in “The Wedding of Shon Maclean,” and to other fugitive pieces by Buchanan attention might very profitably be drawn. Assuredly it is upon his verse that Buchanan’s title to remembrance rests. ___
The Era (15 June, 1901 - p.13) DEATH OF ROBERT BUCHANAN. Mr Robert Buchanan, poet, novelist, and dramatist, died on Monday morning, at the residence of his sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, 90, Lewin-road, Streatham. He was in his sixtieth year. In the middle of October, last year, Mr Buchanan was struck down by paralysis without any warning. He had been in indifferent health for some time before, and had been obliged almost to give up work, depending upon the assistance of friends and a small Government pension. His savings had been swept away in a disastrous speculation which obliged him to go through the Bankruptcy Court and to part with all his copyrights. Just before the stroke of paralysis, however, he had begun to gain strength and to recover his spirits, and had taken up work again. In his helpless state he had once more to rely upon the aid of friends. He had been a very generous man when he was prosperous himself. He had never refused help to anyone in distress, and in his time of need he was generously assisted. His old friend Mr John Coleman, actor and author, busied himself in starting a fund, and enough money was raised to meet the immediate needs of the case. It was seen from the first that no permanent recovery could be hoped for, and the end has come as a merciful release from a state of the most pitiful helplessness and living death. _____ THE FUNERAL. Close to the sunlit sea, with the great and gorgeous sky sending all its glory down, Robert Buchanan was laid to rest at Southend yesterday afternoon in the grave where lie his mother and wife. The first part of the funeral service was held at St. John the Baptist’s Church, the interment taking place in the cemetery. The chief mourners were the sister-in-law of the deceased, Miss Harriet Jay, Miss Bernardy, Miss May Jones, Mrs Bassett, Dr. Gorham, Mr Stoddart-Walker, Mr John Ross, Mr Pelham Wormsley, and Mr Henry Herman. ROBERT BUCHANAN. And so we can say, after a turbulent life, Peace to his ashes. The only actors present were those who were playing in the town. ___
The Saturday Review (15 June, 1901 - p.764) ROBERT BUCHANAN. ROBERT BUCHANAN was a soldier of fortune who fought under any leader or against any cause so long as there was heavy fighting to be done. After a battle or two, he left the camp and enlisted elsewhere, usually with the enemy. He was, or aimed at being, a poet, a critic, a novelist, a playwright; he was above all a controversialist; he also tried being his own publisher. As a poet he wrote ballads, lyrics, epics, dramas, was realist and transcendentalist, was idyllic, tragic, pathetic, comic, religious, objective, subjective, descriptive, reflective, narrative, polemic, and journalistic. He wrote rhetorical and “Christian” romances before Mr Hall Caine; his plays were done entirely for the market, some of them in collaboration with Mr G. R. Sims; his criticism was all a kind of fighting journalism. “Lacking the pride of intellect,” he has said of himself, “I have by superabundant activity tried to prove myself a man among men, not a mere littérateur.” And, indeed his career shows an activity not less surprising than superabundant. He took himself so seriously that he considered it legitimate to “stoop to hodman’s work”; thinking, he tells us, “no work undignified which did not convert him into a Specialist or a Prig.” He never doubted that he might have been “sitting empty-stomached on Parnassus,” if he had cared for the position. He defended himself, perhaps unnecessarily, for not having done so. “I have written,” he said, “for all men and in all moods.” He took the day’s wages for the day’s work, but was not satisfied. From the first his books were received with serious attention; they were considered, often praised greatly, often read largely. Whenever he had anything to say, people listened. When he hit other men, the other men usually paid him the compliment of hitting back. “For nearly a generation,” he lamented, ten years ago, “I have suffered a constant literary persecution.” Well, it is difficult to do justice to one who has never done justice to another. But persecution is hardly the word to be used for even a hard hit, when the hit is received by a fighter of all work. [Note: ___
The Spectator (15 June, 1901 - p.3) We have noticed the death of Sir Walter Besant elsewhere, but must record here the death of Mr. Robert Buchanan (born in Glasgow in 1841) on the next day. Mr. Robert Buchanan, though he never gave his undoubted genius its rights, was a man of very remarkable powers. There was a touch of genuine originality as well as of true poetic passion in his verse. We quote in another column a portion of a very striking poem which Mr. Buchanan contributed to the Spectator in the year 1866. One would have said that the man who could write verse of that kind at twenty-five must be going to do really great things. Yet Mr. Buchanan was in the end known neither as a poet nor as a critic, but as a kind of literary pugilist,—famous for his fights rather than for his creative work. _____ We shall publish next week an article by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, entitled “A Village Rifle Club,” which will not only interest those of our readers who are believers in rifle clubs, but will, we trust, further the cause that they and we have at heart.
[Note: The poem referred to in the ‘obituary’ above is ‘The Session of the Poets’, five stanzas of which are printed on Page 17, prefaced by the following: “The following stanzas are taken from a poem by the late Mr. Robert Buchanan which appeared in the Spectator of September 15th. 1866. We reprint them as a reminder to our readers of how remarkable was the store of wit, imagination, and poetic force with which Mr. Buchanan was endowed.” ] ___
Bexhill-on-Sea Observer (15 June, 1901 - p.2) Musings by the Sea. Mr. Robert Buchanan. I DID not expect to find much literary gush over the death of Mr. Robert Buchanan, novelist and poet. He was too unorthodox, too independent of mind to please the sycophants of English society, but those who are above sordid considerations, and can laugh the opinion of the world to scorn, knew how to appreciate his remarkable genius, the precious jewel which was hidden beneath the rough exterior. Some narrow-souled Bexhillians took offence at his open letter to Lord De La Warr, published some years ago, in which the poet lamented in eloquent words the destruction of the sylvan beauties of Bexhill, and its change from “a green and gentle retreat, full of sunshine and sweet music, into a hideous monstrosity of red brick and mortar, with impudent hotels, bran-new boarding establishments, a genteel esplanade, a priggish kiosk, and the inevitable Viennese band.” Understanding the temperament of Mr. Robert Buchanan, who forty years ago received his first inspiration from Nature in the beautiful Arcadia of the old village, I absolutely revelled in his chapter of lamentations, and thought it one of the cleverest things I had ever read in my life. The idea of the article being written against Bexhill, or doing it any harm as a seaside resort, was of course grotesquely absurd. I fancy that on the occasion of his last visit Mr. Robert Buchanan stayed at Pevensey, where he found the rural neighbourhood more suited to his poetic tastes. He was a man of wide sympathies. From being a Secularist, he came to write in sympathetic terms of the grand social and spiritual work which is being carried out by that noble organisation, the Salvation Army. His Work. DICKENS was his hero. Of him he wrote:—“Two or three times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing Cross Station to the office of ‘All the Year Round,’ in Wellington-street, came the good, the only Dickens. From that good Genius the poor straggler from Fairyland got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was then to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight; the Gospel of Plum-Pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia.” His first published volume of poetry was called “Undertones.” It was followed with a volume of “Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,” and a few years later with his volume of “London Poems” in 1866. He established his reputation as a poet of real inspiration. His first novel was published in 1874, and since then almost innumerable essays, plays, and stories have come from his pen. Robert Buchanan was always a fighter. In 1871 he issued his famous attack on Rossetti in “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” and in a later book he launched vigorous criticism on, among other people, Mr. George Moore and Mr. William Archer. Modern drama he would have none of. “For myself,” he said, “I infinitely prefer Lottie Collins to ‘Hedda Gabler’ and Little Tich to ‘Rosmer of Rosmerholm.’” He wrote plays in collaboration with Miss Jay, Mr. George R. Sims, and Sir Augustus Harris, but he had no real gift for the stage, and “The Man’s Shadow,” adapted by him from “Roger La Honte,” and his versions of “Tom Jones” and “Clarissa Harlowe” are his only noteworthy contributions to the drama. In 1896 he started as his own publisher, with disastrous results; and his later years were darkened with financial troubles. He had been suffering for a long time with cerebral hæmorrhage, resulting in paralysis of the right side and complete loss of speech, and his death must have been a happy relief. Partly from misfortune, partly from the defects of his qualities, Robert Buchanan never gained in his lifetime the fame he deserved, and there is a good deal of pathos in a remark he made a few months ago: “This is a badly stage-managed world.”
[Note: Buchanan’s “open letter to Lord De La Warr”, originally published in The Sunday Special in September 1899, was reprinted in this edition of the Bexhill-on-Sea Observer and is available in the Letters to the Press section.] ___
The Entr’acte (15 June, 1901 - pp.5-6) The late Robert Buchanan, who has just gone over to the majority, was, I suppose, a difficult person to get on with at times, but he was a very gifted man, and looking at the good work he did in his varied literary walk, it seems wonderful that he failed to feather his nest more satisfactorily. His temperament was spiced with an amount of pugnacity that warred against his winning the position which his intellectual gifts should have obtained for him. When anybody fell a little foul of Robert Buchanan he hit back. And he could hit very hard. I am very sorry to believe that his condition in recent times had been of a disturbed and none too happy a nature. Charles Dickens was the writer to whom he paid the greatest and most loyal homage. If he had lived till August he would have completed his 60th year. Peace to his memory! *** The late Mr. George Conquest was a wealthy man at the time of his death, and this I gave my readers to understand weeks ago. £71,000 odd is not a bad fortune to accumulate. ___
The People (16 June, 1901 - p.4) THE ACTOR. The announcement of the death of Mr. Robert Buchanan came, after all, somewhat as a surprise, for it was thought that he might possibly linger on for an indefinite period of time. Death must, in a sense, have been a happy issue out of his afflictions, for it was certain that he could never have done any further work in the world. His death is a sad one. To playgoers his name is well known, even better, perhaps, than to the world of readers. His fictions took no very high place; his plays were, for a time, very successful. p.6 DEATH OF MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. Mr. Robert Buchanan, who died on Monday at the house of his sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, Lewin-rd., Streatham, was born in the Potteries on Aug. 18, 1841. He worked for some time in the office of the Glasgow “Sentinel,” then owned by his father, dreaming of poetical fame and writing letters to George Henry Lewes, Philip Hamerton, and other celebrities. In one of his letters to the latter he declared:—“I mean, after Tennyson’s death, to be Poet-Laureate.” With this ambition he set out for London, when he was barely 17. In London, Buchanan had for years a terrible struggle to get a bare living. He lived in Stamford-st., and had for his friends David Gray, a young Scotch poet, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), Laurence Oliphant, and Sydney Dobell. He gradually got work on “The Athenæum,” “The Literary Gazette,” and “Household Words,” then edited by Charles Dickens. His first published volume of poetry was called “Undertones.” It was followed with a volume of “Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,” and a few years later with his volume of “London Poems,” in 1866. He established his reputation as a poet of real inspiration. His first novel was published in 1874, and since then almost innumerable essays, plays, and stories have come from his pen. Robert Buchanan was ALWAYS A FIGHTER. In 1871 he issued his famous attack on Rossetti in “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” and in a later book he launched vigorous criticism on, among other people, Mr. George Moore and Mr. William Archer. Modern drama he would have none of. “For myself,” he said, “I infinitely prefer Lottie Collins to ‘Hedda Gabler.’ and Little Tich to ‘Rosmer of Rosmersholm.’” He wrote plays in collaboration with Miss Jay, Mr. George R. Sims, and Sir Augustus Harris, but he had no real gift for the stage, and “The Man’s Shadow,” adapted by him from “Roger La Honte,” and his versions of “Tom Jones” and “Clarissa Harlowe” are his only noteworthy contributions to the drama. In 1896 he started as his own publisher, with disastrous results, and his later years were darkened with financial troubles. ___
The Referee (16 June, 1901 - p.1) ROBERT BUCHANAN. Our Latest Literary Loss. It cannot be said that literature has sustained a loss by the death of Robert Buchanan. That loss was suffered many months ago, when a paralytic stroke robbed him of the faculty of speech, and brought a life of vivid intellectual energy to a lingering and most mournful close. My comrade DAGONET, who knew the deceased poet a hundred times more intimately than I did, deals with their dramatic partnership in the page with which his name has been associated since the foundation of the REFEREE. But it is in my mind to offer one word in protest against the critical conclusions which have been generally expressed with regard to Buchanan’s rank as a poet. The “Daily Telegraph,” for instance—and I cite it only as a sample—expresses the opinion that with a little more care and craftsmanship he might have become a poet of the second rank. I cannot help thinking that, even when all the defects of his style are taken into consideration, he is something more than that already. It was not a poet who was struggling to enter the second rank who wrote “St. Abe and His Seven Wives,” or the ballad of “Judas Iscariot,” and I cannot now recall without a thrill of feeling that extraordinarily fine passage in which the Flying Dutchman is called back to the fulfilment of his doom. In the Mormon poem there is a gentle and yet poignant humour which nobody but a man of real genius ever owned. In Germany Buchanan’s name was held in much higher regard than it was at home, and this fact was significant for several reasons. The apparent bitterness of animosity with which he threw himself into controversy about all manner of questions alienated from him many of his English readers. His German admirers were not affected in this way. Again, the greatness and originality of many of his poetic conceptions was unspoiled for them by that lack of delicacy in style which frequently robbed his work of its proper value to the mind of the cultured English reader. The poet’s concept was always in advance of his expression, not because he might not have been a verbal artist had he so chosen, but because of a certain impetuous impatience which forbade him to chasten his style. Ideas seemed to have thronged upon him so swiftly that he chose for their expression the most malleable medium, in place of the sternest and most enduring. With the solitary exception of “The Tarn,” Buchanan’s work strikes the critical mind as a series of brilliant and daring sketches out of almost any one of which a patient artist could have made a work of consummate and lasting beauty. It may be acknowledged and regretted that he left nothing behind him which will carry to future generations a full sense of his abounding genius, but it will be many a day before “The Wedding of Shon Maclean,” “The Wake of Tim O’Hara,” and the “Ballad of Judas Iscariot” are effaced from the memories of English readers, and it was a poet of the first quality in sympathy and imagination who wrote each and all of these. The critic who deals rightly with Robert Buchanan will regard him as being essentially an improvisatore, and, from that point of view, only one or two rivals can be found for him. (p.11) MUSTARD AND CRESS. . . . “It is good to be alive,” I said to myself last Monday as I breathed the clear, exhilarating air and strode along the sunny street. Suddenly my eyes fell upon the newspaper placards: “Death of Lord Wantage. Two of the great dead were my intimate friends of many years, men with whom I had spent some of the happiest days of my life. Once, long years ago, Robert Buchanan. then a stranger to me, sent me a charming and sympathetic letter. He drew my attention to an article be bad written in the “Contemporary,” in which he had said many kindly things of the “Dagonet Ballads,” which were written for the REFEREE in its early days. Years afterwards I was associated with the poet-playwright on a series of dramas. and there commenced a friendship and close companionship which relieved the monotony of toil with many bright and happy hours. As a mattes of fact, only his most intimate friends knew The Real Robert Buchanan, for only those who saw him and heard him when the pan was laid aside knew what a world of gentle pity and human sympathy lay concealed under the rugged exterior of this literary Crusader. Men who did not know him hated him; men who knew him loved him. I have seen him soothe the grief of a strong man with the tenderness of a woman. I have known him, when the world was ringing with his fierce attacks upon a great reputation, take a poor brother of the pen by the hand and succour him with a delicacy that was a lesson in Christian charity. When he fought he never pinked with the rapier. He brought the claymore crashing down upon his antagonist’s skull. Of some of his furious attacks on public men he repented. But while he was fighting he always believed that his cause was just, and that the enemy was a villain. He was always St. George, and the other party was always the Dragon, whose destruction was demanded in the interests of the community. Speaking of him elsewhere I have said that he worked in the clouds and came down to Mother Earth for his relaxation. Sometimes the change in his mood was almost grotesque. I left him one night absorbed In a Poet’s Dream of a New Redemption, and met him the next morning backing horses with a Bank Holiday crowd at Kempton Park. I have seen him lost in an almost tearful ecstasy as the twilight descended on one of Nature’s solitudes, and I have sat by his side as he roared at the antics of a music-hall knockabout. Soon after he had written those wondrous lines in which a voice from Heaven called him by name as he wandered over Hampstead Heath at eventide, he was masquerading at Covent Garden in the black gown and hood of a Brother of the Misericordia. I have read what has been written of him now that he is dead. There is a good deal of The Four Cross-Roads Interment about his obituary notices. I think his failings have been emphasised and his virtues slurred. Many of his critics deny him greatness and belittle his genius. But since the giants of poetry fell, where has there been one who touched a nobler harp? That be occasionally laid it aside to brawl with rival Bards in no way alters the quality of the music that he made. _____
Next: Robert Buchanan Obituaries - continued (ii)
[The Last Months of Robert Buchanan] [Obituaries 1] [Obituaries 2] [Obituaries 3] [Obituaries 4: Buchanan and Besant] [Obituaries 5: Buchanan and Besant 2] [The Funeral of Robert Buchanan] [The Grave of Robert Buchanan]
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