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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES
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ROBERT BUCHANAN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
The Struggle for Success; A Study in Social Compromise, Expediency, and Adaptability. Croivn Si/o, cloth ds.
Rectorial Addresses delivered before the Univer- sity of Edinburgh, 1859-1899. Edited with an Introduction by Archibald Stodart-Walker. Demy Se^i?, cloth 7s. 6d.
The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie Selected
and Transcribed from the Manuscript by his Nephew, Archibald Stodart-Walker. Crown ^vo, cloth 6s.
Physical Sanity ; A Contribution towards the Ideal of Health. [In preparation.
London : GRANT RICHARDS, 9 Henrietta Street, W.C.
ROBERT BUCHANAN
THE POET OF MODERN REVOLT
An Introduction to His Poetry
BY
ARCHIBALD STODART-WALKER
I
3 > J J J >
LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS
I HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
I9OI
I r • ( c c *
Edinburgh : T. and A. Constablb, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
J
M.
TO
T. K.
IN MEMORY OF READINGS FROM THE POET AND OTHER ASSOCIA- TIONS OF FRIENDSHIP
1-901S?
PREFACE
This book neither presumes to be of the nature of a criticism, nor of an estimation. It was conceived with the view of indicating the signifi- cance of Robert Buchanan as a poet, in the sense of the poet defined as an impassioned philosopher. There will be found nothing of the nature of comparative analysis.
The method pursued by the writer will soon be evident to the most casual reader. After a general introduction, in which a general glimpse is taken of the poet's point of view, the various poems are brought into consideration and dis- played in a panoramic fashion. In following this plan, the author obtrudes his subjectivity as little as possible, but allows the poet to speak for himself and suggest his own signifi- cance and teaching. Occasionally, as in the chapter on the Devil, it has been found ex- pedient to review in a cursory way the histori- cal and literary parallels concerned, and in the
viii ROBERT BUCHANAN
introductory and concluding chapters an attempt is made to view, in general fashion, the signifi- cance of Mr. Buchanan in the stress of con- temporary mental and spiritual searchings, and in face of the tendencies of modern economics.
The author has no concern in this place with Mr. Buchanan as a man, as a publicist, as a novelist and story-teller, or as a dramatist. He believes that in viewing him as a poet, he is con- cerned with the Buchanan that is of importance in contemporary literary aspirations ; but even in so doing, he is not bold enough, in attempting this study of his significance, to go out of his way to allot to his work any definite valuation. In his humble opinion, that cannot be done, even by the most self-confident and self-righteous of critics. Time will not vary its claim in this case to have the chief say in the matter.
It may be of interest to the reader to know that this book is written by one who has sought far different solutions for most of the problems of life, from those that have appealed to the poet. But even a scientific man can view with sympathy one who seriously aspires to reach Truth, in a fashion and in a medium foreign to his own particular methods and teaching. Though the
PREFACE ix
mystic realism of the poet be anathema to the point of view of the scientific purist, yet the latter may allow himself to be carried from the solid ground of Nature, to which the mind which builds for aye must for ever trust, to the more shadowy land where the dreamer loves to dwell, and see mirrored in the eyes of the poet the vista of newer worlds and newer hopes, without in any way blurring the face of his philosophy.
In conclusion, the author desires to express indebtedness to his friend Mr. James Cadenhead for looking over the final proofs.
30 Walker Street, Edinburgh.
CONTENTS
Chap. Page
I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION I
II. POEMS OF PROBATION (' Idylls and Legends of
Inverburn,' ' Undertones,' * London Poems ') . . 26
III. 'THE BOOK OF ORM' 62
IV. « THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 89
V. 'ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' AND
'WHITE ROSE AND RED' 112
VI. ' BALDER THE BEAUTIFUL ' AND ' THE
EARTHQUAKE* . 140
VII. BALLADS 166
VIII. 'THE CITY OF DREAM' 177
IX, 'THE WANDERING JEW' AND 'THE BALLAD
OF MARY THE MOTHER' 201
X. THE DEVIL ('The Outcast,' 'The Devil's Case') . 247
XI. 'THE NEW ROME' 284
XII. CONCLUSION-MR. BUCHANAN'S SIGNIFI- CANCE 299
CHAPTER I
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Half a decade ago, a contemporary author of dis- tinction,^ writing without prejudice either to the exaggeration of comedy or the painfulness of accuracy, asked the question— ' Are there many Buchanans whom we have all been ignorantly confounding ? ' and proceeded forthwith to picture various Robert Buchanans with more or less antagonistic methods and sympathies. * There is a poet Buchanan, Byronic and brilliant, who is only nominally the same as Buchanan the mystic (not to be confounded with Buchanan the materialist). There is also Buchanan the complete letter- writer, who is unrelated to Buchanan the author of "Christian Romances," who, in his turn, suffers from being identified with the Buchanan who writes novels for the other person, and it need hardly be said that none of these gentlemen is Buchanan the essayist, or Buchanan the business man. . . . They were all born in different years, and some of them are dead. Several are men of genius, and one or two are Philistines whom the others dislike.'
1 Zangwill. A
2 ROBERT BUCHANAN
The licence of a professional humorist is not to be called in question by a critic who poaches, and we are only grateful that we are able to discover an essential truth underlying this *jeu d'esprit.' It is a truth which, perhaps in a partial sense, accounts for the fact that the brilliance of Mr. Buchanan's genius as a poet has not received that recognition from contemporary estimation which it deserves, even if (by the poet him- self) not desired or expected. It is a truth that can hardly be disputed that the comparative brilliance of a man's more ephemeral work may detract from the proper estimation of what is more ambitious in conception, and deals more with questions that lie beyond mere ephemerae and contemporary phases. A rapidly acting, rapidly thinking, rapidly varying genera- tion, desirous chiefly of food which appeases a momentary appetite, is never particularly anxious to trouble itself with efforts of a serious or pur- poseful nature; especially when that work runs directly in the teeth of accepted beliefs and tradi- tional custom. There can also be no doubt had Mr. Buchanan been merely a poet and less of a man, had his actions and utterances in other directions been less purposeful and skilful, that probably his poetry would have had more vogue. But the man Buchanan has always counted as a force in the storm and stress of contemporary opinion, and the fact that he is like Alan Breck, 'a bonny fighter,' that he is generally to be found on the side opposite to those
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 3
who sit in the seat of custom, and that he does not swim by choice in the direction of popular and evidently successful tendencies, goes far to account for a certain hostility. Mr. Buchanan has ever been keen to discern a possible falsehood in the assumed infallibility of contemporary truth ; and the average mortal, finding happiness and comfort in the fond embrace of his own easy-souled concep- tions of life and death, looks askance and with little respect on one who tilts at intellectual, moral, and social conventions that custom and the pursuit of his own point of view have made dear. We may respect those who tell us unwhole- some truths, but we seldom love them ; and most of us, however warlike physically, are either too lazy, too tired, too stupid, or too indifferent to take any serious heed of one who desires to carry the war of the mind and of the soul into the camps we have so comfortably furnished for our own peaceful, moral, and intellectual indolence and self-satisfaction. And however much we may dislike Mr. Buchanan's persistency and method of attack, none can doubt the honesty of his pur- pose. 'Trimming,' in his eyes, is one of the cardinal vices, and no susceptibilities — moral, theological, or literary — which we may possess ever deter him from speaking the truth as it occurs to him. For compromise he has as much liking as Mr. Morley, and granted that he is satis- fied with his grasp of a particular truth, how- ever far from the mark his limitations may keep him from the ultimate truth, he feels with Whately
4 ROBERT BUCHANAN
that 'it makes all the difference in the world whether we put truth in the first place or in the second.' There are few of our national idols that he has not assailed, either with the full strength of his biggest guns, or with gentle tappings on possible feet of clay, and his attacks have not been when time has modified the absorbing attention of the particular idolatry or economy concerned, but when the soul of the people is piping hot, at moments when universal acclamation almost drowns the protesting voice which becomes, com- paratively speaking, less efficacious than the tradi- tional voice crying in the wilderness. The church of the people, the political idols of the hour ; the cherished religious and political notions of the moment, rolled like sv/eet morsels under the tongue of contemporary opinion ; the general triumphantly crowned by title, decoration, and epistolary ode ; the scientists, accepting and working on the prin- ciple of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest ; yes, even the very gods themselves, are all asked to stand and deliver, and declare whether they are not, after all, flying under false colours or running contrary to eternal moral truths. The nation itself, carried away, it may be, by the sensuousness of war, by the intoxication brought on by too long draughts at the fount of Patriotism, by the conception of universal Anglifi- cation, given to run riot in idolatries, ' congregat- ing in absurdities, drifting into vanities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly, waxing out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious,
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 5
bombastical, hypercritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate' (to quote Mr. George Meredith), may rouse the literary protest, yes, often the literary anger, of one who at any rate has never been troubled with any sham hate or sham affection. Thus a combination of personal circumstances, which though perhaps indicating a certain want of perspective, yet reflect an undoubted spirit of bravery upon the man who fears neither man, god, nor devil in the assertion of his point of view, has distracted, in no small way, the attention of con- temporary study from the poet's more ambitious work. It is not for us to attach the blame only to Mr. Buchanan's detractors. In his heart hating no man, the poet has throughout his career been at daggers-drawn with men of all classes, creeds, and professions, for the simple reason that, con- comitant with the growth and maturity of his general point of view, he has retained an almost childish sensitiveness to criticism, and a fanatical hatred of what he has deemed critical injustice The result of this want of adaptability to things as they are has been that his life has been one of continued strife ; but in recalling this fact, let us not forget that the men he has challenged to literary combat and assailed with his heaviest battalions, have not been those who were striving with feeble wings to flutter their way up the lower rungs of the ladder of fame, but those who had reached, or imagined that they had reached, to the very pinnacle of Parnassus. As he has said, * I ve popt at vultures circling skyward, I 've made the
6 ROBERT BUCHANAN
carrion-hawks a byword, but never caused a sigh or sob in the breast of mavis or cockrobin, nay, many such have fed out of my hand and blest me.' He is voluntarily, as he calls himself, * The Ishmael of Song,' and his wandering in the wilderness no doubt brought him more satisfaction than an attempt to attain contemporary success by a care- ful study of the principles of compromise, expedi- ency, and adaptability. * You must not gather,' he wrote, *from this that I am in revolt against my fellow-workers; on the contrary, I love the inky fellows immensely, when they are not spoiled by prosperity. And frankly, I myself have not escaped the charge of selling my birthright for a mess of pottage; of gaining my bread by hod- man's labour, when I might have been sitting empty-stomached on Parnassus. Yes, I of all men; I who after ten years of solitude should have gone mad if I had not rushed back into the thick of life, yet who, even there, have been haunted by the ghosts of the solitude left behind, and have never bowed my head to any idol or cared for any recompense but the love of men. My errors, however, have arisen from excess of human sympathy, from ardour of human activity, rather than from any great love for the loaves and fishes. Lacking the pride of intellect, I have by superabundant activity tried to prove myself a man among men, not a mere "litterateur." More- over, I have never yet discovered in myself, or in any man, any gift which entitles me to despise the meanest of my fellows. So I have stooped to
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 7
hodman's work occasionally, mainly because I cannot pose in the godlike manner of your lotus- eaters. I have not humoured my reputation. I have thought no work undignified which did not convert me into a Specialist or a Prig. I have written for all men and in all moods. But the birthright which belongs to all Poets has never been offered by me in any market, and my man- hood has never been stained by any sham hate or sham affection. With a heart overflowing with love, I have gathered to myself only hate and misconception,— and all this for one reason only, that I have endeavoured to avoid self- worship, and to find some slight foothold of human truth.'
But that is beside our purpose here. The object we have set ourselves to accomplish is, to view in a panoramic fashion the more noteworthy of Mr. Buchanan's poetical works, and in doing so, to make no attempt to criticise, estimate, dogma- tise, or controvert, but as far as possible to allow the poet to plead for himself, and indicate his own poetic and philosophic significance. The task is comparatively simple, for throughout his work the personality of the poet, or ra,ther the mental and spiritual evidence of it, asserts itself in no shadowy fashion, and also because Mr. Buchanan has from time to time supplied us with prose notes as to his own tentatives and his own definite outlook on life, and as to the relation of his teaching to the whole momentous question of the struggle for existence.
8 ROBERT BUCHANAN
For the more important of Mr. Buchanan's poetical utterances deal with the works of God the All-Father, as they are revealed to the con- sciousness and elaborated in the imagination of the poet. The conception of Nature and the principles which underlie its workings, as being the basis on which we view the God-Father, was early grasped by the poet, and it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that his relation to Nature is more or less the relationship of nearly all religious systems, being founded on a desire to protect the weak against the strong. It is, in fact, a protest against the principle of the All- Father — the egoistic principle of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. His sympathy with those who fall in the struggle is supple- mented by a bitterness against Nature, for what he deems to be useless cruelty and suffering, which the poet fails to recognise as being at the basis of that very evolutionary amelioration which he would be the first to herald. The struggle of life and decay which is the daily and hourly pro- cess of existence, which, as has been said by Lucretius, 'imparts to the infinite and all-per- vading movement of Nature the interest and the life of human passion on the grandest and widest sphere of action, and makes each particular object in Nature fragrant with a deeper meaning,' in- spires no sympathy in the poet. But despite his revolt against the tyranny of Nature the poet is essentially an optimist ; he believes, he affirms, he abjures negation. *I have sought only one
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9
thing in life— the solution of its Divine meaning ; and sometimes I think I have found it. But in an age when the gigman assures us there are no gods, when to believe in anything but hand-to-mouth science and dish-and-all-swallowing politics is a sign of intellectual decrepitude, when a man cannot start better than by believing that all humanity'is previous starts have been blunders, I would rather go back to Balzac and swear by Godhead and the Monarchy, than drift about with nothing to swear by at all. And absolutely I don't know whether there are gods or not. I know only that there is Love and lofty Hope and Divine Compassion, and that if these are delusions, you and I and all of us are no better than infusoria. If "this" is the only life I am to live, the devil help me !— for if the gods cannot, the devil must ' ; and again, ' I, for my part, who was nourished on the husks of socialism and the chill water of infidelity, who was born in Robert Owen's "New Moral World," and who scarcely heard even the name of God till at ten years of age I went to godly Scotland, have been God-intoxi- cated ever since I saw the mountains and the sea. Without the sanction of the supernatural, the certainty of the superhuman, life to me is nothing.'
I do believe in God : that He Made Heaven and Earth, and you and me ! Nay, I believe in all the host.
Of Gods, from Jesus down to Joss, But honour best and reverence most
That guileless God who bore the Cross.
But early enough he sees that the Calvinistic idea
10 ROBERT BUCHANAN
of God the Father as stern and inexorable is the true one. Nature works on unmoved, unchecked by any cry born of humanity.
Oh, Thou art pitiless ! They call Thee Light,
Law, Justice, Love ; but Thou art pitiless. What thing of earth is precious in Thy sight.
But weary waiting on and soul's distress ?
When dost Thou come with glorious hands to bless The good man that dies cold for lack of Thee ?
When bringst Thou garlands for our happiness ? Whom dost Thou send but Death to set us free ? Blood runs like wine — foul spirits sit and rule —
The weak are crushed in every street and lane — He who is generous becomes the fool
Of all the world, and gives his life in vain. Wert Thou as good as Thou art beautiful,
Thou couldst not bear to look upon such pain.
It is not a new cry, but it is a cry that will eternally spring from the hearts of such as desire a meaning for the existence of the in- exorable law of the survival of the fittest and the crushing of the weak. It is the helping meed, as we have said, of most religious systems, to step in and help the fallen, becoming in so doing what Mr. Buchanan has somewhere said, in a spirit of antagonism to Nature, and in consequence to God the Father. Human misery, human aims, human despair, and the long wailing cry of cen- turies to a silent creator, it is these that rouse the blood, the fire, the eloquence— yes, the disdain of the poet, tuned, it may be, to a keynote of love and pity for ' Him ' whom he addresses.
Helpless Thou seemest to redeem our plight — Thy lamp shines on shut eyes— each Spirit springs
To its own stature still in Thy despite — While haggard Nature round Thy footstool clings.
Pale, powerless, sitt'st Thou, in a Lonely Light.
^,^' GENERAL INTRODUCTION II
The poet steps in where the scientist fears, or rather refuses, to tread. The point of view of the scientist at this stage is one of acceptation— that of the poet, of questioning. Science accepts the principle, the poet asks why ? In other words, he judges the power that made him by the power that he possesses. The position of both is logical enough. The evolutionary spirit regards all in- tellectuality, all consciousness, all spiritualisation, as dependent on sensation and a certain elabo- ration of simple movements, and records in arbitrary terms accordingly without proceeding further ; the poet, regarding these as the definite preordained dispensations of a creator, demands an explanation.
This note continues throughout the poet's work, ever questioning, ever believing, ever hoping on, though at times, even in the despair of his soul, crying, * Adonai ! Lord ! art thou a Phantom too ? '
Black is the night, but blacker my despair ; The world is dark— I walk I know not where ;
Yet phantoms beckon still, and I pursue, Phantoms still phantoms ! there they loom— and there,
Adonai ! Lord ! art thou a Phantom too ?
i- He ever seeks an explanation^ and with Browning counts this life but a stuff to try the soul's strength on — educe the man ! — * What,' he asks, * were such faith worth if this low earth were all, if the tangled threads of our strange human experience were not to be gathered up again, after death's ascendency, by the God that made man in His likeness— yea, immortal like Himself? Without that certain hope of a divine explanation, without
12 ROBERT BUCHANAN
that last hope of heavenly meeting and eternal reconciliation, the life we live would be profitless — as a book left unfinished, as a song half unsung, as a tale just begun.'
His position to dogmatic Christianity will be revealed as we study the many poems in which Christ, and the Church that was founded in his name, are incidentally considered. For the Church the poet has no pity, little sympathy, and often much contempt; for the Christ he has ever human love and brotherly sympathy for * his dream of the world's salvation.'
In a prose note appended to the 'City of Dream,' Mr. Buchanan supplies us with a key- note, not only to the particular poem concerned, but to the spirit of his whole work. * To compare small things with great ; the " City of Dream " is an epic of modern revolt and reconciliation. My book attempts to be for the inquiring modern spirit what the lovely vision of Bunyan is for those who still exist in the fairyland of dogmatic Christianity ; but dealing as it must with elements more complex and indeterminate, touching on problems which to the orthodox believer do not even exist, it is necessarily less matter of fact, and in all probability less sufficing. Be that as it may, the sympathetic modern will find here the record of his own heartburnings, doubts, and experience, though they may not have occurred to him in the same order, or culminated in the same way; though he may not have passed through the Valley of Dead Gods at all, or looked with
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 13
wondering eyes on the spectre of the Inconceiv- able ; though he may never have realised to the full, as I have done, the existence of the City without God, or have come at last, footsore and despairing, to find solace and certainty on the brink of the Celestial Ocean. To the orthodox believer in Christianity there is but one righteous Book, the Old and New Testaments. To the present writer all books are righteous which, in one way or another, help the soul on its heavenward pilgrim- age, sound the depths of spiritual speculation, and habituate the ear of conscience to the harmonies of some brighter and some more perfect life.'
From what we have indicated, it will be gathered at once that the poet's work is not to satisfy those who * seek their trim, poetic academe.'
I do not sing aloud in measured tone
Of those fair paths the easy-soul'd pursue.
That he leaves to those who reflect the tendencies of their age, to the poets who mirror the evident present alone, rather than discern the gigantic problems which are growing in the womb of the future. To those who, like the late Mr. Huxley, would confine writers of 'merely im- aginative literature,' to singing of what they see, or have been taught to see, in the more sensuous side of Nature, Mr. Buchanan must appear the first of heretics. He has the damning quality of being something of a philosopher, not of the academic type, nor of the type that speaks in terms of common men with common experience.
14 ROBERT BUCHANAN
He has insight, like all poets and seers. * He is indeed a student as other students are (and a philosopher as other philosophers are), but he is emphatically the student and philosopher who sees, who feels, who sings ; he is,' as he has described Mrs. Browning, * unique in these days— specifically a poet — one troubled by the great mystery of life, and finding no speech adequate but song.' As we shall find later, nothing that affects the welfare and interest of humanity, nothing that touches on the drama of life, on the world's tragedies and comedies — not even the terrific commonplaces and sublime vulgarities of great cities— nothing that affects his spiritual and mental yearnings, aspira- tions, and depressions, is outside the spiritualising, idealising, and philosophising of the poet. The hopelessness of the struggle for existence, yet the grandeur of struggling at all; the tyranny of circumstance, with its underlying pathos ; the fretting, the fever, the joy, the glamour, the revelations of life ; the mystery, the meaning, the end of life ; the dreams of the dreamers, the song of the singers, the hands of the helpers ; the cries for life, the cries for death ; the stillness of God, and the human eyes of Christ ; the passions and the envy ; the compassion and the sympathy brought on earth by faith in revealed religion ; all are seen and sung and taught in the language of the poet or seer. * It may safely be affirmed that no subject is unfit for poetic treatment which can be spiritualised to musical form of harmonious and natural numbers.' Not that Mr. Buchanan is
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 15
blind as to the dignity of the revelation. * Accord- ing to the dignity of the revelation will be the rank of the poet or seer in the temple. The epic poet is great because his matter is great in the first place, and because he has not fallen below the level of his matter. The dramatist is great by his truth to individual character not his own, and his power of presenting that truth while spiritualis- ing into definite form and meaning some vague situation in the sphere of actual or ideal life. The lyric poet owes his might to the personal char- acter of the emotion aroused by his vision. Then, there are ranks within ranks. Not an eye in the throng, however, but has some object of its own, and some peculiar sensitiveness to light, form, colour. To Milton, a prospect of heavenly vistas, where stately figures walk and cast no shade ; but to Pope (a seer, though low down in the ranks), the pattern of teacups, and the peeping of clocked stockings under farthingales. While the rouge on the cheek of modern love betrays itself to the languid yet keen eyes of Alfred de Musset, Robert Browning is proclaiming the depths of tender beauty underlying modern love and its rouge ; each is a seer, and each is true, only one sees a truth beyond the other truth. After Wordsworth has penetrated with solemn-sounding footfall into the aisle of the Temple, David Gray follows, and utters a faint cry of beautiful yearning as he dies upon the threshold.*
Mr. Buchanan, as we have said, has essayed many themes, but there can be no doubt that his
l6 ROBERT BUCHANAN
latter work, dealing boldly with questions which touch the very heart of religions and theologies, is that upon which the uniqueness and distinction of his position must depend. Over thirty years ago, when he sang only of Pan and his brother gods, of Scottish village life, and * of the quiet wonders of the unsung city streets,' he was concerned with the fact of the scantiness of the artistic treatment of morality and religion in modern art. * Religion,' says Goethe, * stands in the same relation to art as any other of the higher interests of life. It is a subject, and its rights are those of all other subjects.' * Yet,' adds Mr. Buchanan, ' how scantily are morality and religion represented in modern art! Why, for instance, is our Christianity for- gotten as a " subject " ? Where is the great poem, where the noble music built on that wondrous theme? Milton, with all his power, is academic, not modern, and with the exception of a few faint utterances of Wordsworth, all our other religious poetry is conventional and inartistic. We hear, indeed, the metallic periods of the didactic teacher, and the feeble wail of the religious enthusiast, but seldom, indeed, are our nobler intellectual and spiritual strivings phrased into perfect song. The reticence of false culture steals over the life of many who might instruct us deeply by their expe- rience, who, if they do speak, are moved by the retrograde spirit of another civilisation, and use the formal periods of an alien tongue. Why, in the name of our new gods, are we still to be bound by the fetters of Prometheus ? We are, if not quite
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 17
Celts, more Celts than Greeks, and, thank Heaven, not altogether an intellectual nation. . . . We are a modern people, slightly barbaric in matters of art ; but our natures have a glow of emotion quite unknown to the frigid spirit of Athenian inquiry. There is a great emotional and spiritual life yet unrepresented, there are rude forces not yet brought into play, but all of which must sooner or later have their place in art ; and the indigenous product of our experience, however inferior to other civilisations, is yet vastly superior to all exotics grafted on the weakened trunk of what was once a noble tree.'
From this we cannot but draw the inference that in these early days the poet had in view not only ' The Book of Orm ' and * The City of Dream,' but also the conception of 'The Wander- ing Jew ' and 'The Ballad of Mary the Mother.'
Dealing with Mr. Buchanan's general method throughout his work, if one can speak of a general method, one might seize hold of his own words and dwell on the ' Mystic Realism ' that pervades the whole. In a prose note attached to the 'Drama of Kings,' the poet says: 'In the present work, and in the works which have preceded it from the same pen ("Undertones," "Inverburn," "London Poems," and "The Book of Orm "), an attempt is made to combine two qualities which the modern mind is accustomed to regard apart — reality and mystery, earthliness and spirituality. The writer dropped into a world a few years ago like a being fallen from another planet. His first impression
B
i8 ROBERT BUCHANAN
was one of surprise and awe: he stood and wondered, and here on the same spot he stands and wonders still. What is nearest to him seems so sublime, unaccountable, and inexhaustible, and occasionally, indeed, so droll and odd, that he has never ceased to regard it with all the eyes of his soul from that day to this. Others may go to the mountain-tops and interrogate the spheres. Wiser men may peruse the Past and see there, afar away, the dreamy poetry for which the spirit eternally yearns. More aquiescent men may look heavenward, slowly and strangely losing the habit of earthly perception altogether. With all these, with all who love beauty near or afar away, in any shape or form, abide the twofold blessing of reverence and love. But the Mystic is occupied hopelessly with what immediately surrounds him. Minuter examination only leads to extreme joy and wonder. To him this ever-present reality is the only mystery, and in its mystery lies its sub- lime fascination and beauty. Only what is most real and visible and certain is marvellous, and only that which is marvellous has the least fascination. What he sees may be seen by every soul under the sun, for it is the soul's own reflec- tion in the river of life glassed to a mirror by its own speed. . . . He looks on into the eyes nearest to him, and ah ! what distance does he not find there? Approaching each creature as ever from the mystic side, he becomes, in spite of himself, an optimist. The moment he seizes for examina- tion is the divine moment when the creature
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 19
under examination — be it Buonaparte, Bismarck, or "Barbara Gray"— is at its highest and best, whether that "best" be intellectual beatification or the simple vicarious instinct which merges in the identity of another. He sees the nature spiri- tualised, in the dim, strange light of whatever soul the creature possesses. This light is often very dim indeed, very doubtful— so doubtful that its very existence is denied by non-mystic men whose musings assume the purely spiritual and unimaginative form. But be the teaching true or false, be the light born in the subject examined, or in the human sentiment that broods over it, this mystic approach to the creature at his highest point of spiritualisation, this mode of approach which seems unnatural to many be- cause it involves the most minute enumeration of details and the most careful display of the very facts which artists try most to conceal, is the only procedure possible to the present writer. . . . Imagination is not, as some seem to imply, the power of conjuring up the remote and un- knowable, but the gift of realising correctly in correct images the truth of things as they are and ever have been. He who can see no poetry in his own time is a very unimaginative person. The truly imaginative being is he who carries his own artistic distance with him, and sees the mighty myths of life, vivid yet afar off, glorified by the truth which is Eternal. How many people can walk out on a starry night, or sit by the side of the sea, unmoved.^ But let
20 ROBERT BUCHANAN
a comet appear, or a star shoot, and they ex- claim, "How beautiful!" Let a whale rise up in the water and roar, and they think **How wonderful are the works of God ! " These are the people, and their name is legion, who lack as yet the consecrating gleam of the imagina- tion. As for the mystic, he needs neither a comet nor a whale to fill his soul with a sense of the wonderful ; he needs still less the dark vistas of tradition or the archaic scenery of ob- scure periods. Go where he may, his path swarms with poetic forms. Faces! how they haunt him with their weird and divine significance! What is nearest seems of all the most sublime and un- accountable. ... In "The Drama of Kings " etc., one view is adopted ; not the point of view of the satirist, nor of the historian, but that of the realistic mystic, who, seeking to penetrate deepest of all into the soul, and to represent the soul's best and finest mood, seizes that moment when the spiritual or emotional nature is most quickened by sorrow or by self-sacrifice, by victory or by defeat.' And it will be seen as we proceed further that this mystic realism is never lost sight of. To the very last note of ' The New Rome ' it is the pervading spirit ; and the imaginative spirit is strongest and best when it touches those * nearest realities ' of which the poet speaks.
Even in the unsung city's streets Seem'd quiet wonders meet for serious song, Truth hard to phrase and render musical. For ah ! the weariness and weight of tears, The crying out to God, the wish for slumber, They lay so deep, so deep ! God heard them all
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 21
He set them unto music of His own ;
But easier far the task to sing of kings,
Or weave weird ballads where the moon-dew glistens,
Than body forth this life in beauteous sound.
This mystic realism of the poet reaches its supreme moment perhaps in the poem 'The Man Accurst,' the Envoi to 'The Book of Orm,' and it is here that by the poet's own confession the personal keynote is most definitely struck. The same spirit is at work in *The Wandering Jew,' that epos of the world's despair, in a manner haunting to the extreme.
For lo ! I voice to you a mystic thing
Whose darkness is as full of starry gleams
As is a tropic light ; in your dreams
This thing shall haunt you and become a sound
Of friendship in still places, and around
Your lives this thing shall deepen and impart
A music to the trouble of the heart,
So that perchance, upon some gracious day,
You may bethink you of the song, and pray
That God may bless the singer for your sake !
And in the core of the whole work of the poet lies a great human sympathy, not a vague, altruistic universality of feeling, academic and cold, but the sympathy of a man with gnawing fears, aspiring hopes, and common temptations for men with like experiences. The gift of tears never fails him: tears, and a note of hope and eternal reconciliation for the meanest. The sense of the tragedy of common life is ever a pressing load, and the faces in the street— the faces of the lost, faces sacred on the altar of infamy and lust — burn into his soul.
22 ROBERT BUCHANAN
These are the Lost, waifs which from wave to wave Drift lone, while yonder on the yellow strand
The laughing children run from cave to cave And happy lovers wander hand in hand.
The sun shines yonder on the green hillside, The bright spire points to Heaven through leafy trees,
The Maiden wears the glory of a Bride, The bright babe crows on the young Mother's knees.
O happy Bride ! O happy Mother ! born
To inherit all the light that life can give. Here ye these voices out of depths forlorn ?
Know ye these Lost, who die that ye may live f
Is not the last line the discovery, or at least the first truly poetical expression, of a great social truth? Down the deep waters of Death and Despair the poet wanders, finding the foul upas- trees of butcheries and lust casting their shadow, dark and dread, on the Cross of Calvary ; until, in the summit of his despair, in a moment of great soul and heart burning, after giving vent to Philippics, gorgeous in the splendour of their rhetoric, against a Church which for ever had kept the Christ from its doors, he sentences Christ through the voice of the spirit of mankind to walk for ever through the world with all the woes of earth upon his head, searching vainly for a Father God.
What is asked is the general tenor of the poet's song ?
I do not sing for maidens. They are roses
Blowing along the pathway I pursue : No sweeter things the wondrous world discloses,
And they are tender as the morning dew. Blessed be maids and children : day and night Their holy scent is with me as I write.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 23
I do not singf aloud in measured tone Of those fair paths the easy-soul'd pursue ;
Nor do I sing for Lazarus alone, I sing for Dives and the Devil too.
Ah, would the feeble songs I sing might swell
As high as Heaven and as deep as Hell !
I sing of the stain'd outcast at Love's feet- Love with his wild eyes on the evening light ;
I sing of sad lives trampled down like wheat Under the heel of Lust, in Love's despite ;
I glean behind those wretched shapes ye see
In the cold harvest-fields of Infamy.
I sing of deathbeds (let no man rejoice Till that last piteous touch of all is given !) ;
I sing of Death and Life with equal voice, Heaven watching Hell and Hell illumed by Heaven.
I have gone deep, far down the infernal stair —
And seen the heirs of Heaven arising there !
And yet behind all this sense of the blackness, despair, and apparent injustice of living, the poet is at heart an optimist. ' To every Soul beneath the sun wide open lies a Heaven of Love.' Vicarious love and suffering- are the refining powers, the very salvation of man, and at the end of all things * Man shall arise Lord of all things that be. Last of the Gods, and Heir of all things free.' While the bloodhounds of war are loose, his cry is a despairing one, his song the song of the slain, and his place by the mighty bivouac of the dead ; while the scientist pursues his search for truth in the hope of adding one more drop to the great flood of human emancipation, he sings only the song of the beasts which are to him the martyrs in this evidence of the struggle for existence ; but in the long-run he knows, that over all a beckoning hand gleams from the
24 ROBERT BUCHANAN
lattices of heaven — however vague and untranslat- able the beckon may be.
Pest on these dreary, dolent airs !
Confound these funeral pomps and poses ! Is Life's, Dyspepsia's, and Despair's,
And Love's complexion all chlorosis ? A lie ! here 's Health and Mirth and Song-,
The World still laug-hs and g-oes a-Maying. The dismal, doleful, droning Throng
Are only smuts in sunshine playing !
Writing to Charles Warren Stoddard, he said : * Let us share this secret between us— that though the Gods may be dead, as men say, their wraiths still haunt the earth. Even here in this Babylon, this London, they walk nightly and fulfil their ghostly ministrations. Pan flits through the darkness of Whitechapel ; under the cupola of St. Paul's, I have seen Apollo face to face. Aphro- dite has pillowed my head upon her naked breast ; and as for the weary, world-worn God of Galilee, he is everywhere, still pleading for us, still wonder- ing that his Father shuts himself away. Was not our Elder Brother out yonder on the Pacific with Father Damien, and is he not here incarnate whenever the bread of charity is broken? The last word of the Soul is not yet said. When it is uttered in the midst of this Belshazzar's Feast of modern Culture, both Gods and Poets will live again.'
In more or less of a systematic way, we now propose to deal with the various poetical works of Mr. Buchanan, seeing him more clearly in the lights we have indicated, and viewing him in other
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 25
garbs as satirist, humorist, and lyrist. For the bard can kick his heels with the merriest of us, whether inspired by Shon Maclean, Vander- decken, or instigated by the Devil incarnate himself. The latter gentleman, with Mr. Buchanan as his sartorial architect, may not be recognised by those who have studied him in the pictures of Milton, Goethe, or Moliere, but he certainly is a living creature, gifted with human eyes and human sympathies. Has not Mr. Buchanan been told that Hell is now the only place where any- body believes in Heaven ?
CHAPTER II
POEMS OF PROBATION
Three volumes, published between the ages of twenty - two and twenty - five, are what Mr. Buchanan has himself described as his ' Poems of Probation,' wherein ' I have fairly hinted what I am trying to assimilate in life and thought.* 'Undertones,' dedicated to John Westland Mar- ston, was published in 1863 ; * Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,' in 1865 ; and * London Poems,' with a note dedicatory to W. Hep worth Dixon, in 1866. The biographical details which surround the publication of these volumes with more than a pathetic halo have been supplied to us on more than one occasion by the poet. Two years after the publication of ' London Poems,' a small volume entitled * David Gray, and other Essays,' left Mr. Buchanan's hands. To lovers of the poet's work there is much that is touched with sacredness in this volume ; and in the biographical notice of David Gray, 'the young poet of the Luggie,' one learns of the dismal material outlook that met the two friends as they walked * in the spring, at the golden gates of morning.' And directly enough for all
26
POEMS OF PROBATION 27
purposes of fidelity, two of these volumes of poems are laid with almost breaking heart on the cairn of the dead friend. The prologue *To David in Heaven ' of the ' Undertones,' and * Poet Andrew ' in 'The Idylls and Legends'— in which, in the metaphor and language of the imaginative writer, the poet takes a backward glance over the life and work of the dead friend— are both tributes to David Gray. To the former must be ascribed more than an ordinate place in the roll of Mr. Buchanan's personal notes. There is so much of the poet's own tentatives and aspirations, and so sure a sign of that splendid fidelity to friendship which has always been a characteristic of Mr. Buchanan's life, that we need not trouble our- selves with apologies for rather voluminous quotations. Of poems written *In Memoriam,' though not elaborately analytical like the work of the late Laureate, nor possessing the academic stateliness of *Lycidas,' in its personal warmth, its unrestrained yet simple confessions of love, its unfettered avowal of the doubts and fears and hopes which meet the searcher after truth at the very threshold of the outlook, it is unequalled. An occasional halt, an occasional line written in despite of ' mere ' literature, does not detract from the sincerity, literary and personal, of the young poet's first published lines :
Lo ! the slow moon foaming
Thro' fleecy mists of gloaming-, Furrowing with pearly edge the jewel-powder'd sky !
Lo, the bridge moss-laden,
Arch'd hke foot of maiden, And on the bridge, in silence, looking upward, you and I !
28 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Lo, the pleasant season Of reaping and of mowing— The foam-fringed moon above— beneath, the river duskily flowing !
Do I dream, I wonder?
As, sitting sadly under A lonely roof in London, thro' the grim square pane I gaze ?
Here of you I ponder,
In a dream, and yonder The still streets seem to stir and breathe beneath the white moon's rays.
By the vision cherish'd,
By the dark hope braved. Do I but dream a hopeless dream, in the city that slew you, David ? • •■••••
Poet gentle-hearted,
Are you then departed, And have you ceased to dream the dream we loved of old so well ?
Has the deeply cherish'd
Aspiration perish'd. And are you happy, David, in that heaven where you dwell ?
Have you found the secret
We, so wildly, sought for, Is your young soul enswath'd, at last, in the singing robes you fought for ?
The meaning, the Divine meaning of life and living action, was in these younger, as in these latter, days all that he sought :
Whether it be bootless. Profitless and fruitless — The weary aching upward strife to heights we cannot reach ;
and again he cries :
Has the strife no ending ? Has the song no meaning ?
And touching reverently the volume of the dead poet-friend, he continues^:
The aching and the yearning, The hollow, undiscerning, Uplooking want I still retain, darken the leaves I touch—
POEMS OF PROBATION 29
Pale promise, with sad sweetness
Solemnising incompleteness, But ah, you knew so little then— and now you know so much !
By the vision cherish'd.
By the dark hope braved, Have you, in heaven, shamed the song, by a loftier music, David ?
Tho' the world could turn from you.
This, at least, I learn from you : Beauty and Truth, tho' never found, are worthy to be sought,
The singer, upward-springing.
Is grander than his singing. And tranquil self-sufficing joy illumes the dark of thought.
This, at least, you teach me,
In a revelation : That gods still snatch, as worthy death, the soul in its aspiration.
Noble thought produces
Noble ends and uses. Noble hopes are part of Hope wherever she may be.
Noble thought enhances
Life and all its chances, And noble self is noble song— all this I learn from thee !
And I learn, moreover,
'Mid the city's strife too. That such faint song as sweetens Death can sweeten the singer's life too !
• ••••••
But ah, that pale moon foaming
Thro' fleecy mists of gloaming. Furrowing with pearly edge the jewel-powder'd sky,
And ah, the days departed
With your friendship gentle-hearted, And ah, the dream we dreamt that night, together, you and I !
Is it fashion'd wisely.
To help us or to blend us, That at each height we gain we turn, and behold a heaven behind us?
"We have quoted at some length, for it seems to us that here, ' in the spring, at the golden gates of morning,' we catch a clear note of the upward striving and the yearning for a solution which is never absent from Mr. Buchanan's more ambitious
30 ROBERT BUCHANAN
work. It is a sincere note throughout, and never sincerer than when it touches on the personal relationship of the poets. It is not a subject for the cold pen of one whose claim is only that of sympathy ; but it cannot be released from our passing observation, that never was poet more faithful to heart ties. His friend, his wife, his father, his mother, to these sacred ties he ever remained faithful, and the heart and the voice never tire of pouring forth some personal tribute, either to the
Father on earth for whom I've wept bereaven,i Father more dear than any father in heaven ;
to his mother:
One deathless flame, one holy name, One light that shines where'er I move, Are thine, out of whose life I came, Through whom I hve and love ;
or his wife :
So, sweetheart, I have given unto thee Not only such poor song as here I twine, But Hope, Ambition, all of mine or me. My flesh and blood and more, my soul divine. Take all, take all.
The three volumes which have their right place in our consideration at present, although not revealing in any marked degree the light of mysticism and of mystic realism that make 'The Book of Orm,' 'The City of Dream,' and 'The Wandering Jew' so distinctive in modern imaginative literature, are of value not only as
1 A word which, despite much criticism, the poet refused to surrender.
POEMS OF PROBATION 31
recording the first-fruits of what the poet was assimilating from Nature without and God within, but as the first links of a chain of ideas unbroken in sequence. From the proem to David Gray in 'Undertones,' published in 1863, to the last line of ' The New Rome,' published in 1899, the same tendencies are at work, the same views are conceived, though evolved and elaborated under the growth of the poet's personality, and the variation of environment and circumstance. We have the same yearning, the same hopes, virtually the same beliefs :
I end as I began,
I think as first I thought.
Though imbued by early training with the classic spirit, Mr. Buchanan does not often wander in the garden of Academus, nor has he much parley with the reader's soul through the medium of the poetic Academe. 'Care for statuesque woes and nude intellectualities moving on a background of antique landscape' has never troubled Mr. Buchanan much. But in his article entitled from *iEschylus to Victor Hugo,' it is easy to comprehend the depth — rather width — of his classical skill, and in his first volume he essays the use of his Celtic imagination to flights in Arcady and in other groves where the Pagan gods dwell, with Pan, with Polypheme, Selene, and even with Ades, King of Hell. In 'Under- tones,' if we have nothing else, we have atmo- sphere and drama. No one but a dramatist
32 ROBERT BUCHANAN
could have written * Polypheme's Passion,' nor even * Pygmalion the Sculptor,' and seldom if ever have we come nearer to feeling the glow, the spirit, and the abandon of paganism than in the poem called ' Pan,' and in the poetical ' jeu d'esprit ' * The Satyr ' ; and if the volume, with all its fine workmanship and dramatic power, was justified by nothing else, we would dare to quote a short effort, 'Antony in Arms,' as combining dramatic action, char- acterisation, and truth to literary and historic tradition unequalled in poems of the kind. We give it in full.
ANTONY IN ARMS.
Lo, we are side by side !— One dark arm furls Around me like a serpent warm and bare ;
The other, hfted 'mid a gleam of pearls, Holds a full golden goblet in the air :
Her face is shining through her cloudy curls With Ught that makes me drunken unaware,
And with my chin upon my breast I smile
Upon her, darkening inward all the while.
And thro' the chamber curtains, backward roll'd By spicy winds that fan my fever'd head,
I see a sandy flat slope yellow as gold To the brown banks of Nilus wrinkling red
In the slow sunset ; and mine eyes behold The West, low down beyond the river's bed,
Grow sullen, ribb'd with many a brazen bar,
Under the white smile of the Cyprian star.
A bitter Roman vision floateth black Before me, in my dizzy brain's despite ;
The Roman armour brindles on my back.
My swelling nostrils drink the fumes of fight :
But then, she smiles upon me ! — and I lack The warrior will that frowns on lewd delight,
And, passionately proud and desolate,
I smile an answer to the joy I hate.
POEMS OF PROBATION 33
Joy coming uninvoked, asleep, awake, '
Makes sunshine on the grave of buried powers ; jj
Ofttimes I wholly loathe her for the sake < Of manhood slipt away in easeful hours :
But from her lips mild words and kisses break, j
Till I am like a ruin mock'd with flowers ; i
I think of Honour's face— then turn to hers— j
Dark, like the splendid shame that she confers.
Lo, how her dark arm holds me ! — I am bound
By the soft touch of fingers light as leaves : I drag my face aside, but at the sound
Of her low voice I turn— and she perceives The cloud of Rome upon my face, and round
My neck she twines her odorous arms and grieves. Shedding upon a heart as soft as they Tears 'tis a hero's task to kiss away !
And then she loosens from me, trembling still
Like a bright throbbing robe, and bids me ' go ! '— When pearly tears her drooping eyelids fill.
And her swart beauty whitens into snow ; And lost to use of hfe and hope and will,
I gaze upon her with a warrior's woe, And turn, and watch her sidelong in annoy- Then snatch her to me, flush'd with shame and joy !
Once more, O Rome ! I would be son of thine —
This constant prayer my chain'd soul ever saith — I thirst for honourable end — I pine
Not thus to kiss away my mortal breath. But comfort such as this may not be mine —
I cannot even die a Roman death : I seek a Roman's grave, a Roman's rest- But, dying, I would die upon her breast !
In 'Pan' the 'white-haired, low-lidded, gentle, aged god' sings forth, in his most gloriously egoistic way, his own perfection and his own powers. The poem is on the whole the most ambitious and the most successful in the volume. To use conventional terms, we might say that the spirit of the poem is maintained throughout, the imagination of the poet seldom flags, and
c
34 ROBERT BUCHANAN
altogether there breathes a joy of living which contrasts strangely with our own Western gloom, born under newer gods and newer civilisations. From this pagan joy of life we can well ap- preciate the fact that in 'The Wandering Jew' the poet puts into the mouth of the accuser the charge that, at the birth of the new religion,
All other g-entle gods that g-ladden'd man Faded — fled away ! the priests of Pan That, singing by Arcadian rivers, rear'd Their flowery altars, wept and disappear'd ; And men forgot the fields and the sweet light, Joy, and all wonders of the day and night, All splendours of the sense, all happy things, Art, and the happy Muse's ministerings. Forgot that radiant house of flesh divine Wherein each soul is shut as in a shrine ;
and also understand why in 'Pan at Hampton Court' in 'The Earthquake' there is this song (dramatic of course in its conception and utter- ance) :
Oh, who will worship the great god Pan
Here in the streets with me ? Sad and tearful and weary and wan
Is the god who died on the tree ; But Pan is under and Dian above.
Though the dead god cannot see, And the merry music of youth and love
Returns eternallie !
And though we digress, it is wise that we should recognise from the first that to the poet the human body is no ' lazar-house of flesh.' It is the temple in which our Godhood dwells. The essence of God is viewed through our own souls. Human pas- sions, human desires, human aspirations are not the evidences of our birth as miserable sinners, but
POEMS OF PROBATION 35
are the sacred fires of Nature. Lust, treacheries, and butcheries are born of the conventional devil certainly, but to confuse human passions and desires, born of a Godhead, with unholy lust is, in the mind of the poet, to put a premium on the latter.
Although one can hardly speak of 'splendid imagery ' in ' Undertones,' and although we miss the mystic weirdness of the maturer work of the poet, there is much in 'Pan' and other poems in this volume which essays picturesqueness and beauty of imagery in a language which is of the simplest.
When the cool aspen-fingers of the Rain Feel for the eyelids of the earth in spring-,
When Thunder, waving wings, Groans, crouching from your lightning spears, and then Springs at your lofty silence with a shriek !
The following two extracts will give some idea of Mr. Buchanan's method :
I, Pan, with ancient and dejected head
Nodding above its image in the pool,
And large limbs stretch'd their length on shadowy banks,
Did breathe such weird and awful ravishment,
Such symmetry of sadness and sweet sound,
Such murmurs of deep boughs and hollow cells,
That neither bright Apollo's hair-strung lute.
Nor Herd's queenly tongue when her red lips
Flutter to intercession of love-thoughts
Throned in the counsel-keeping eyes of Zeus,
Nor airs from heaven, blow sweetlier. Hear me, gods
Behind her veil of azure, Artemis
Turn'd pale and listen'd ; mountains, woods, and streams
And every mute and living thing therein,
Marvell'd, and hush'd themselves to hear the end —
Yea, far away, the fringe of the green sea
Caught the faint sound, and with a deeper moan
Rounded the pebbles on the shadowy shore.
36 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Whence, in the season of the pensive eve,
The earth plumes down her weary, weary wings ;
The Hours, each frozen in his mazy dance,
Look scared upon the stars and seem to stand
Stone-still, like chisell'd ang-els mocking- Time ;
And woods and streams and mountains, beasts and birds,
And serious hearts of purbhnd men, are hush'd ;
While music sweeter far than any dream
Floats from the far-off silence, where I sit
Wondrously wov'n about with forest boughs —
Through which the moon peeps faintly, on whose leaves
The unseen stars sprinkle a diamond dew—
And shadow'd in some water that not flows.
But, pausing, spreads dark waves as smooth as oil \
To listen ! f
And
Wherefore, ye gods, with this my prophecy I sadden those sweet sounds I pipe unseen. From dimly lonely places float the sounds To haunt the regions of the homeless air. Whatever changeful season ye vouchsafe To all broad worlds which, hearing, whisper, ' Pan ! ' And thence they reach the hearts of lonely men, Who wearily bear the burthen and are pain'd To utterance of fond prophetic song. Who singing smile, because the song is sweet, Who die, because they cannot sing the end.
Of other poems, the metre of ' The Satyr ' rattles on like a highland burn after rain, and is rich with Pagan colour and the joy of living. * The dews and rains mingle in his blood, the wind stirs his veins with the leaves of the wood, he drinks strength from the sun ' :
The changes of earth.
Water, air, ever stirring.
Disturb me, conferring My sadness or mirth.
' Polypheme's Passion ' is, considered dramatically, a fine piece of art, the poetic protests of love which the Cyclops conceives for Galatea, 'she
POEMS OF PROBATION 37
alone who is worthy of the conversation and serious consideration of such a god as he,' being punctuated by the alternating sceptical and admiring Silenus. Here is a description of Bacchus :
I know no thing more beautiful than he When, dripping odours cool,
Deep-purpled, like a honey-bosom'd flower For which the red mouth buzzes like a bee. He bursts from thy deep caverns gushingly.
And throws his pleasure round him in a shower, And sparkles, sparkles, like the eyes that see, In sunshine, murmuring for very glee.
And bursting beaded bubbles until sour Lips tremble into moist anticipation Of his rich exultation !
And here is Galatea :
Her voice hath gentle sweetness, borrowed
From soft tide-lispings on the pebbly sand, 'Tis Hke the brooding doves in junipers ;
White as a shell of ocean is her hand. Wherein, with rosy light, the pink blood stirs ! Her hair excels the fruitage of the beech Wherein the sun runs liquid gleam on gleam ; Her breasts are like two foaming bowls of cream, A red straw-berry in the midst of each !
And the soft gold-down on her silken chin Is like the under side of a ripe peach —
A dimple dipping honeyly therein !
Speaking of Love's influence on his heart, Poly- pheme says :
' My heart is . • . It is as mild as patient flocks in fold. I am as lonely as the snowy peak Of Dardanos, and, like an eagle. Love Stoops o'er me, helpless, from its eyrie above. And grasps that lamb, my Soul, within its beak.
The imagery is sustained throughout the volume,
1901S7
38 ROBERT BUCHANAN
and occasionally the poet rises to heights of great dignity, as, for instance, in the stately periods addressed by Penelope to her absent Ulysses, commencing :
Whither, Ulysses, whither dost thou roam, Roll'd round with wind-led waves that render dark The smoothly-spinning circle of the sea ?
Lo ! Troy has fallen, fallen like a tower, And the mild sun of a less glorious day Gleams faintly on its ruins.
• ■••••
And all the air is hollow of my joy. '(
But thy deep strength is in the solemn dawn And thy proud step is in the plumed noon, And thy grave voice is in the whispering eve.
• ■ • • • •
Behold, now I am mock'd !— Suspicion Mumbles my name between his toothless gums ;
• ••••■
And when the winds Swoop to the waves and lift them by the hair. And the long storm-roar gathers, on my knees I pray for thee. Lo ! even now, the deep Is garrulous of thy vessel tempest-tost.
My very heart has grown a timid mouse. Peeping out, fearful, when the house is still. Breathless I listen thro' the breathless dark. And hear the cock counting the leaden hours. And, in the pauses of his cry, the deep Swings on the flat sand with a hollow clang ; And, pale and burning-eyed, I fall asleep When, with wild hair, across the wrinkled wave Stares the sick Dawn that brings thee not to me.'
In * Pygmalion the Sculptor' we have a dramatic poem full of much of the purple light, the glow, the never-ending gleam of a daring imagination. The imagery is not fantastic, and is obtained by the simplest means.
i;
r
POEMS OF PROBATION 39
Day by day my soul Grew conscious of itself and of its fief Within the shadow of her grave : therewith, Waken'd a thirst for silence such as dwells Under the ribs of death : whence slowly grew Old instincts that had tranced me to tears In mine unsinew'd boyhood, precious dreams That swing like censers spilling balmy oils O'er poppy flowers of sleep, mild sympathies Full of faint odours and of music faint Like buds of roses blowing !
So held I solemn tryst with Memory—
Who, with the pale babe Hope upon her breast,
Sits haggard, hooded underneath blue night,
Looking on heaven, and seeking evermore
To call to mind her dwelling-place
Where Hope was born, beyond the silent stars.
• •••"•
Then at last Fair-statured, noble, like an awful thing Frozen upon the very verge of life. And looking back along eternity With rayless eyes that keep the shadow Time.
Of other poems in this volume, * Fine Weather on the Digentia,' which tells of idleness spiced with philosophy, is full of Grecian wisdom and Athenian fire, and the Bard concludes with a touching poem to his wife :
To one wild tune our swift blood went and came—
In an essay *0n My Own Tentatives,' in the volume ' David Gray, and other Essays,' Mr. Buchanan briefly enumerates the principles which have regulated his own tentative attempts at the poetry of humanity, as expressed in * Inver- burn' and 'London Poems,' the remaining two volumes of this probation period : ' That the whole significance and harmony of life are never
40 ROBERT BUCHANAN
to be lost sight of in depicting any fragmentary form of life, and that, therefore, the poet should free himself entirely from all arbitrary systems of ethics and codes of opinion, aiming, in a word, at that thorough disinterestedness which is our only means to the true perception of God's creatures. That every fragmentary form of life is not fit for song, but that every form is so fit which can be spiritualised without the introduction of false elements to the final literary form of harmonious numbers. That failing the heroic stature and the noble features, almost every human figure becomes idealised whenever we take into consideration the background of life, or picture, or sentiment on which it moves ; and that it is to this background a poet must often look for the means of casting over his picture the refluent colour of poetic harmony. That the true clue to poetic success of this kind is the intensity of the poet's own insight, whereby a dramatic situation, however undignified, however vulgar to the unimaginative, is made to intersect through the medium of lyrical emotion with the entire mystery of human life, and thus to appeal with more or less force to every heart that has felt the world. . . .'
It was the poet's business, not to preach morality, not to inculcate intellectuality, not to describe this or that form of life as finally and significantly holy, but to be just, without judgment to the pathos and powers of all he saw or apprehended. The accessories must be laid aside, the conventionalities disregarded,
POEMS OF PROBATION 41
and the deep human heart laid bare. The only bond incumbent on the poet was the artistic one. It was not enough merely to represent life — it was necessary that the representatives should be beautiful. It was not enough to mirror truth— the truth must be spiritualised. It was not enough to catch the speech of man or woman — that speech must be subtly set to music.
With these views he wrote the poems of 'Inverburn,' a series of dramatic soliloquies put into the mouth of certain poor folk — figures seen on the background of a familiar Scottish village :
The clachan with its humming sound of looms, The quaint old gables, roofs of turf and thatch, The glimmering spire that peeps above the firs, The stream whose soft blue arms encircle all, — And in the background heathery norland hills, Hued like the azure of the dew-berrie, And mingling with the regions of the Rain !
Of the fifteen poems in this volume of ' Idyls and Legends,' in both 'Willie Baird' and 'Poet Andrew' Mr. Buchanan, in his own words, attempts perfect ideal backgrounds, the power and dreamy influences of Nature in the one case, and the intense glow of great human emotion in the other. Of the whole series, Mr. George Henry Lewes said : * If we look closely into these poems, we shall be struck with the fact that, although quite free from mannerism or eccentricity, his thought and style are distinctly his own. While reading the poems you never think of the poet. It is only in the afterglow of emotion you think of him, and then you know what rare power was needed to
42 ROBERT BUCHANAN
produce so genuine an effect.' The poems are, to echo Mr. R. H. Hutton, 'simple and transparent in structure as a crystal. No one can know what true poetry is who does not feel its breath in every line.'
'Willie Baird,' the first of the poems, 'a winter idyl and an old man's tale, a tale for men grey-haired, who wear, through second childhood, to the Lord,' is the soliloquy of a Scottish dominie, of no particular Micht,' neither Erastian nor Moderate, but a dominie with the pathos and dreaminess of those born and evolved amongst the hills, one who, when he went to college and heard the murmur of the busy street round him in a dream.
Only saw The clouds that snow around the mountain-tops, The mists that chase the phantom of the moon In lonely mountain tarns,— and heard the wrhile, Not footsteps sounding hollow to and fro, But winds sough-soughing thro' the woods of pine.
In the construction of this tragedy of simple Scottish life, the poet has not put forth any great wings for ambitious flight. The story is a simple one of affection between dominie and boy, and a third — a dog, about whom, in the intervals of Bible instruction, the boy asks, *Do doggies gang to heaven?' The dominie is a man of an uncom- plicated type, but with a gift of insight and a hand close gripping the mysteries of Nature, who yearns for
Such tiny truths as only bloom Like red-tipt gowans at the hallanstone, Or kindle softly, flashing bright at times, In fuf&ng cottage fires 1
POEMS OF PROBATION 43
And as for the boy :
When I look'd in Willie's stainless eyes I saw the empty ether floating grey O'er shadowy mountains murmuring low with winds ; And often when, in his old-fashion'd way, He question'd me, I seem'd to hear a voice From far away, that mingled with the cries Haunting the regions where the round red sun Is all alone with God among the snow.
We hear much of their talks about the simple things of Nature, and, the dominie's tales of men of old, of Wallace and Bruce, and the sweet lady on the Scottish throne,
Whose crown was colder than a band of ice, Yet seem'd a sunny crown whene'er she smiled ;
the poem ending with the tragedy of the snow- storm, and Willie's death; and we are told that in death, on his face was
A smile — yet not a smile — a dim pale light Such as the Snow keeps in its own soft wings ;
while his soul was
Far far away beyond the norland hills. Beyond the silence of the untrodden snow.
None of these idyls lend themselves well for the purposes of extraction. The simplicity and direct- ness of the story is as a web that binds line to line, and their success is achieved by the very uncon- sciousness of the effort which shuns rhetoric.
* Poet Andrew,' though not to be read as liter- ally interpreting all the facts of David Gray's life, yet has for its groundwork a true experience.
44 ROBERT BUCHANAN
It holds, along with * Willie Baird,' the places of honour in the collection, and tells of how the poet, doomed for the inevitable pulpit (the cherished career for the son of every Scot, weaver or farmer, with an ambition), drifted into poetry and was crowned dying. The ambition is expressed thus:
And years wore on ; and year on year was cheer'd By thoughts of Andrew, drest in decent black, Throned in a Pulpit, preaching out the Word, A house his own, and all the country-side To touch their bonnets to him ;
followed by the 'horrible discovery' that the lad was bent on idle rhymes.
The beauteous dream Of the good Preacher in his braw black dress. With house and income snug, began to fade Before the picture of a drunken loon Bawling out songs beneath the moon and stars, — Of poet Willie Clay, who wrote a book About King Robert Bruce, and aye got fou. And scatter'd stars in verse, and aye got fou, Wept the world's sins, and then got fou again, — Of Fergusson, the feckless limb o' law, — And Robin Burns, who gauged the whisky-casks And brake the seventh commandment.
Then comes the story of the illness, the creeping on of Death, the shadowing of those that watch, and the last words, * Out of the Snow, the Snow- drop—out of Death comes Life,' words that reflect the steadfast faith of the poet.
Of other poems, 'The English Huswife's Gossip,' according to the poet himself, 'lacks the back- ground, touches nowhere on the great universal chords of sympathy, and is insomuch unsuccessful
POEMS OF PROBATION 45
as a poem.' 'The Two Babes' is also, as the poet describes, ' a mixed business.'
'Hugh Sutherland's Pansies' can be classed with 'Willie Baird' in its idyllic tenderness and beauty ; and ' The Widow Mysie,' an idyl of love and whisky, is as fine a piece of pastoral humour as is to be found outside of 'A Midsummer- Night's Dream.' We are told of him who
Rather iVould have sat with crimson face Upon the cutty-stool with Jean or Grace, Than buy in kirk a partner with the power To turn the mountain dew of Freedom sour,
and who went a-courting the Widow Mysie,
An angel in a cloud of toddy steam,
who proved so unfaithful and, need we add, so canny, as to marry the lover's father — for that way lay the ' siller,' and yet, in meditating on the iron rule of the grey mare, and on his own single blessedness, is content. Besides these poems of the village, the book is enriched by several very characteristic poems of Gnomes, Elfins, and Fays, and includes one of the most often quoted of Mr. Buchanan's poems, 'The Legend of the Stepmother.'
In ' London Poems,' wrote Mr. Buchanan, * I was at least a great deal juster to the rude forces of life, my sympathy was bolder and more con- fident, my soul clearer and more trustworthy as a medium, however poor might be my power of perfect artistic spiritualisation. As common life was approached more closely, as the danger of
46 ROBERT BUCHANAN
vulgarity threatened more and more to interfere with the reader's sense of beauty, the stronger and tenderer was the lyrical note needed. In writing such poems as "Liz" and "Nell," the intensest dramatic care was necessary to escape vulgarity on the one hand, and false refinement on the other. " Liz," although the offspring of the very lowest social deposits, possesses great natural intelligence, and speaks more than once with a refinement consequent on strange purity of thought. Moreover, she has been under spiritual influences. She is a beautiful living soul, just conscious of the unfitness of the atmosphere she is breathing, but, above all, she is a large-hearted woman, with wonderful capacity for loving. She is,' on the whole, quite an exceptional study, although in many of her moods typical of her class. " Nell " is not so exceptional, and since it is harder to create types than eccentricities, her utterance was far more difficult to spiritualise into music. She is a woman, quite without refined instincts, coarse, uncultured, impulsive. Her love, though profound, is insufficient to escape mere commonplace ; and it was necessary to breathe around her the fascination of a tragic subject, the lurid light of an ever-deepening terror. In the "language" of both these poems I followed Nature as closely as possible— so far as poetic speech can follow ordinary speech. I had to add nothing, but to deduct whatever hid, instead of expressing, the natural meaning of the speakers ; for to obtrude slips of grammar, misspellings, and other mean-
POEMS OF PROBATION 47
ingless blotches— in short, to lay undue emphasis on the mere language employed, would have been wilfully to destroy the artistic verisimilitude of such poems. Every stronger stress, every more noticeable trick of style, added after the speech was sufficient to hint the quality of the speaker, was so much over-truth, offending against the truth's harmony. The object was, while clearly conveying the caste of the speakers, to afford an artistic insight into their souls, and to blend them with the great universal mysteries of life and death. Vulgarity obtruded is not truth spiritual- ised and made clear, but truth still hooded and masked, and little likely to reveal anything to the vision of its contemplators. By at least one critic I have been charged with idealising the speech a little too much. Both ''Liz" and "Nell," it is averred, occasionally speak in a strain very un- common in their class. In reply to this, I may observe how much mispronunciations, vulgarisms, and the like, have blinded educated people to the wonderful force and picturesqueness of the language of the lower classes. They know nothing of the educated luxury of using language in order to conceal thought, but speak because they have something to say, and try to explain themselves as forcibly as possible.'
The * London Poems,' for which Mr. Buchanan was upbraided by a contemporary for having written ' Idyls of the gallows and the gutter, and singing songs of costermongers and their trulls,' completes the trilogy of probation poems. In the
48 ROBERT BUCHANAN
year 1866, tales of mean streets were not yet idealised in the medium of artistic expression, although * the good genie of fiction,' Charles Dickens, was already reaping the harvest of his masterpieces. In these latter days it is dif- ferent, and it needs even no idealising and spiritualising to secure the approbation of the critics as long as art is conceived for art's sake. To the present writer, if he may be allowed to enter a personal note on the subject, there is in these poems the record and the suggestion of ex- periences and sensations sufficient to paint most of the comedies and tragedies of life. Down many infernal stairs the heirs of heaven are seen arising. And looking back across the whole field of the poet's work, the recollection of these poems, tragic in their interests, true in their perspective, and eloquent beyond words in the very simplicity but forcibleness of their language, 'becomes a sound of friendship in still places.'
The story of 'The Little Milliner,' the first of the series, is a simple story of ' love in an attic,' spoken in the language of a city clerk.
She on the topmost floor, I just below ; She, a poor milliner, content and wise, I, a poor city clerk, with hopes to rise.
'The Little Milliner,' far from drooping in the city, found there a constant round of joy from day to day.
And London streets, with all their noise and stir, Had many a pleasant sight to pleasure her. There were the shops, where wonders ever new, As in a garden, changed the whole year through.
POEMS OF PROBATION 49
Oft would she stand and watch with laughter sweet
The Punch and Judy in the quiet street ;
Or look and listen while soft minuets
Play'd the street organ with the marionettes ;
Or joined the motley group of merry folks
Round the street huckster with his wares and jokes.
Fearless and glad, she join'd the crowd that flows
Along the streets at festivals and shows.
In summer time she loved the parks and squares,
Where fine folk drive their carriages and pairs ;
In winter time her blood was in a glow
At the white coming of the pleasant snow ;
And in the stormy nights, when dark rain pours,
She found it pleasant, too, to sit indoors,
And sing and sew, and listen to the gales,
Or read the penny journal with the tales.
She was a large-hearted little woman, with no scorn for * those who lived amiss ' :
The weary women with their painted bliss ;
only wondering * if their mothers lived and knew,' and speaking a gentle word if spoken to. It is a simple story, without any of the deeper chords of 'Nell,' or *Liz,' or 'Jane Lewson.' 'It was,' says Mr. Buchanan, * clearly my endeavour, in this poem, to evolve the fine Arcadian feeling out of the dullest obscurity, to show how even brick walls and stone houses may be made to blossom, as it were, into blooms and flowers — to produce, by delicate passion and sweet emotion, an effect similar to that which pastoral poets have pro- duced by means of greenery and bright sunshine. In close connection with all that is dark and solitary in London life, the little milliner was to walk in a light such as lies on country fields, exhibiting, as a critic happily phrases it, ' all the
D
50 ROBERT BUCHANAN
passion of youth, modulated by all the innocence of a naked baby.'
*Liz' is a very different business. Here we have the 'wearying, ever wearying for sleep,' which is the keynote of much of the poet's insight. It is a soliloquy put into the mouth of a flower- girl of nineteen years of age, dying on the morning of her child's birth. She tells her simple story to the Parson :
It does not seem that I was born. I woke,
One day, long, long ago, in a dark room. And saw the housetops round me in the smoke,
And, leaning out, look'd down into the gloom. Saw deep black pits, blank walls, and broken panes.
And eyes, behind the panes, that flash'd at me, And heard an awful roaring, from the lanes,
Of folk I could not see ; Then, while I look'd and listen'd in a dream,
I turn'd my eyes upon the housetops grey. And saw, between the smoky roofs, a gleam
Of silver water, winding far away. That was the River. Cool and smooth and deep,
It glided to the sound o' folk below.
Dazzling my eyes, till they began to grow Dusty and dim with sleep. Oh, sleepily I stood, and gazed, and hearken'd !
And saw a strange, bright light, that slowly fled,
Shine through the smoky mist, and stain it red, And suddenly the water flash'd, — then darken'd ; And for a httle time, though I gazed on, The river and the sleepy light were gone ; But suddenly, over the roofs there lighten'd
A pale, strange brightness out of heaven shed. And, with a sweep that made me sick and frighten'd.
The yellow Moon roll'd up above my head ; — And down below me roar'd the noise o' trade, And ah ! I felt alive, and was afraid,
And cold, and hungry, crying out for bread.
And then she dwells on what she counted the pleasures of life up in their attic near the sky :
i
POEMS OF PROBATION 51
Yet, Parson, there were pleasures fresh and fair, To make the time pass happily up there : A steamboat going past upon the tide,
A pigeon lighting on the roof close by.
The sparrows teaching little ones to fly. The small white moving clouds, that we espied.
And thought were living, in the bit of sky —
With sights like these right glad were Ned and I.
How one day, sick of hunger, cold, and strife, she took a sudden fancy to see the country, and, like a guilty person, stole out of the smoke into the sun :
I '11 ne'er forget that day. All was so bright
And strange. Upon the grass around my feet The rain had hung a million drops of light ;
The air, too, was so clear and warm and sweet. It seem'd a sin to breathe it. All around
Were hills and fields and trees that trembled through
A burning, blazing fire of gold and blue ; And there was not a sound,
Save a bird singing, singing in the skies. And the soft wind, that ran along the ground.
And blew so sweetly on my lips and eyes. Then, with my heavy hand upon my chest,
Because the bright air pain'd me, trembling, sighing, I stole into a dewy field to rest,
And oh ! the green, green grass where I was lying Was fresh and living— and the bird sang loud. Out of a golden cloud —
And I was looking up at him and crying!
But she never saw the country more.
I would not stay out yonder if I could.
For one feels dead, and all looks pure and good, —
I could not bear a light so bright and still.
She breathed happily only in the deep miasma of the city, and all she cared for was sleep.
All that I want is sleep, i
Under the flags and stones, so deep, so deep ! i
God won't be hard on one so mean, but He, ]
52 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Perhaps, will let a tired girl slumber sound There in the deep cold darkness underground ;
And I shall waken up in time, may be,
Better and stronger, not afraid to see The great, still Light that folds Him round and round !
Two companion pieces, * The Starling ' and
* The Linnet,' are what the poet calls ' bird poems,' where by natural laws of association, and in very different ways, a caged starling and a caged linnet are made to flash upon their owners wild or bright glimpses of the outlying districts from which they come. The starling was the property of a little lame tailor, who ' sat stitching and snarling,' and whose end is expressed thus :
Felt life past bearing. And shivering, quaking. All hope forsaking. Died swearing ;
the linnet belonging to a sempstress, and recall- ing for her the scenes and airs of her old life in the country.
* Jane Lewson ' is a study in the holy self-abne- gation of motherhood, and is painted in lines vigorous and inspiring. Jane Lewson is a veritable
* heir of heaven,' although at times in her woe
She thought the great cold God above her head Dwelt on a frosty throne and did not hear.
The basis of the story is a familiar one of seduc- tion, but the tragedy and the nobility lie in the effort made by the mother to hide from her child the secret of its birth and her ' shame.' The child was
A passion-flower !— a maiden whose rich heart Burn'd with intensest fire that turn'd the light
POEMS OF PROBATION 53
Of the sweet eyes into a warm dark dew ;
One of those shapes so marvellously made,
Strung; so intensely, that a finger-press,
The dropping of a stray curl unaware
Upon the naked breast, a look, a tone,
Can vibrate to the very roots of life,
And draw from out the spirit light that seems
To scorch the tender cheeks it shines upon ;
A nature running o'er with ecstasy
Of very being, an appalling splendour
Of animal sensation, loveliness
Like to the dazzling panther's ; yet, withal,
The gentle, wilful, clinging sense of love.
Which makes a virgin's soul.
With steadfast idea the mother kept silent :
The dull nature clung Still unto silence, with the still resolve Of mightier natures,
and bore the insults and contempt of two prim 'holy' sisters with the never-despairing fortitude of an unconscious martyr,
* Edward Crowhurst,' labourer, writes poems with
A crystal clearness, as of running brooks, A music, as of green boughs murmuring, A peeping of fresh thoughts in shady places Like violets new-blown, a gleam of dewdrops, A sober, settled, greenness of repose, — And lying over all, in level beams, Transparent, sweet, and unmistakable. The light that never was on sea or land ;
and echoed
The pathos and the power of common life.
A simple man, he is a sky-gazer and a dreamer. His poems are published, and then
Every morn Came papers full of things about the Book, And letters full of cheer from distant folk ; And Teddy toil'd away, and tried his best
54 ROBERT BUCHANAN
To keep his glad heart humble. Then, one day
A smirking gentleman, with inky thumbs,
Call'd, chatted, pried with little fox's eyes
This way and that, and when he went away
He wrote a heap of lying scribble, styled
' A Summer Morning with the Labourer Bard ! '
Then others came : some, mild young gentlemen,
Who chirp'd, and blush'd, and simper'd, and were gone ;
Some, sallow ladies wearing spectacles,
And pale young misses, rolling languid eyes.
And pecking at the words my Teddy spake
Like sparrows picking seed.
And following that begins the downward path, the journey to London, the feasting, the old story of the flattery of genius by commonplace— Burns over again,— the return to the country, and then that other change which comes in the lives of most men of untutored genius :
A change had come. As dreadful as the change within himself. The papers wrote the praise of newer men. And strange folk sent him letters scarce at all. And when he spake about another book. The man in London wrote a hasty ' No ! '
His fine-day friends like swallows wing'd away, The summer being o'er.
* Artist and Model ' is interesting as expressing more than once, in simple terms, the relation of the artist to his work.
Nay, beauty is all our wisdom,— We painters demand no more.
Since the truth we artists fail for, Is the truth that looks the truth.
Enough to labour and labour. And to feel one's heart beat right.
POEMS OF PROBATION 55
Yet the beauty the heart would utter
Endeth in agony ; And life is a climbing, a seeking
Of something we never can see ! And death is a slumber, a'dreaming
Of something that may not be !
And when God takes much, my darling, He leaves us the colour and form, —
The scorn of the nations is bitter. But the touch of a hand is warm.
Of other poems, 'Barbara Gray' has a distinct genius of its own. The story is of a woman loved for the first time late in life, soliloquising over the dead body of her * dwarf lover.
For where was man had stoop'd to me before. Though I was maiden still, and girl no more ? Where was the spirit that had deign'd to prize The poor plain features and the envious eyes ? What lips had whisper'd warmly in mine ears ? When had I known the passion and the tears ? Till he I look on sleeping came unto me. Found me among the shadows, stoop'd to woo me, Seized on the heart that flutter'd withering here, Stung it and wrung it with new joy and fear. Yea, brought the rapturous light, and brought the day, Waken'd the dead heart, withering away. Put thorns and roses on the unhonour'd head, That felt but roses till the roses fled ! Who, who, but he crept unto sunless ground. Content to prize the faded face he found ? John Hamerton, I pardon all— sleep sound, my love, sleep sound !
On the whole, it is the most original of the poems in the volume, and is gifted with a fine disdain, an abandon and a pathos which render it quite perfect as an artistic effort.
At the end of these poems of the city is appended a series of lines entitled * London, 1864 ' which are of so directly personal a nature, and
56 ROBERT BUCHANAN
express so clearly the condition of the poet's soul, that we are constrained to print them here in full, notwithstanding their length. It will help those who know the poet only slightly, if at all, to grasp at a keynote of his aspirations that may assist them to understand more clearly many things expressed before, and more things to be expressed or hinted at later.
Why should the heart seem stiller,
As the song grows stronger and surer ? Why should the brain grow chiller,
And the utterance clearer and purer ? To lose what the people are gaining
Seems often bitter as gall, Though to sink in the proud attaining
Were the bitterest of all. I would to God I were lying
Yonder 'mong mountains blue, Chasing the morn with flying
Feet in the morning dew ! Longing, and aching, and burning
To conquer, to sing, and to teach, A passionate face upturning
To visions beyond my reach, — But with never a feeling or yearning
I could utter in tuneful speech !
II.
Yea ! that were a joy more stable
Than all that my soul hath found, — Than to see and to know, and be able
To utter the seeing in sound ; For Art, the Angel of losses, i
Comes, with her still, grey eyes, Coldly my forehead crosses,
Whispers to make me wise ; And, too late, comes the revelation.
After the feast and the play. That she works God's dispensation
By cruelly taking away :
POEMS OF PROBATION 57
By burning the heart and steeling,
Scorching- the spirit deep, And changing the flower of feeling.
To a poor dried flower that may keep What wonder if much seems hollow,
The passion, the wonder dies ; And I hate the angel I follow.
And shrink from her passionless eyes, — Who, instead of the rapture of being
I held as the poet's dower- Instead of the glory of seeing.
The impulse, the splendour, the power- Instead of merrily blowing
A trumpet proclaiming the day, Gives, for her sole bestowing,
A pipe whereon to play ! While the spirit of boyhood hath faded.
And never again can be, And the singing seemeth degraded.
Since the glory hath gone from me, — Though the glory around me and under,
And the earth and the air and the sea. And the manifold music and wonder.
Are grand as they used to be !
III.
Is there a consolation
For the joy that comes never again ? Is there a reservation ?
Is there a refuge from pain ? Is there a gleam of gladness
To still the grief and the stinging ? Only the sweet, strange sadness.
That is the source of the singing.
IV.
For tke sound of the city is weary.
As the people pass to and fro. And the friendless faces are dreary.
As they come, and thrill through us, and go ; And the ties that bind us the nearest • Of our error and weakness are born ; And our dear ones ever love dearest
Those parts of ourselves that we scorn ;
58 ROBERT BUCHANAN
And the weariness will not be spoken,
And the bitterness dare not be said, The silence of souls is unbroken,
And we hide ourselves from our Dead ! And what, then, secures us from madness ?
Dear ones, or fortune, or fame ? Only the sweet singing- sadness
Cometh between us and shame.
V.
And there dawneth a time to the Poet,
When the bitterness passes away, With none but his God to know it.
He kneels in the dark to pray ; And the prayer is turn'd into singing.
And the singing findeth a tongue. And Art, with her cold hands clinging.
Comforts the soul she has stung. Then the Poet, holding her to him,
Findeth his loss is his gain : The sweet singing sadness thriUs through him.
Though nought of the glory remain ; And the awful sound of the city,
And the terrible faces around. Take a truer, tenderer pity.
And pass into sweetness and sound ; The mystery deepens to thunder.
Strange vanishings gleam from the cloud, And the Poet, with pale lips asunder,
Stricken, and smitten, and bow'd, Starteth at times from his wonder.
And sendeth his Soul up aloud !
In later editions there are included several additional poems, of which 'The Wake of Tim O'Hara' is perhaps the most characteristic, and conveys in a striking sense the gift of tears mingled with the gift of laughter, Mr. Buchanan's never-failing possessions. Of the others, 'Kitty Kemble' is a noteworthy piece of poetical bio- graphy, full of knowledge of the startling blend- ing of footlight egoism with the tragedy of
POEMS OF PROBATION 59
the merely human. How true to life are these touches :
The town's delight, the beaux', the critics', Kitty ! The brightest wonder human eye could see In good old Comedy : A smile, a voice, a laugh, a look, a form, To take the world by storm ! A dainty dimpling intellectual treasure To give old stagers pleasure ! A rippling radiant cheek— a roguish eye- That made the youngsters sigh ! And thus beneath a tinsell'd pasteboard Star At once you mounted your triumphant car, O'er burning hearts your chariot wheels were driven, Bouquets came rolling down Uke rain from heaven, And on we dragged you, Kitty, while you stood Roguish and great, not innocent and good. The Queen Elect of all Light Womanhood !
And in contrast :
As we had done ; so our poor Kitty came To be the lonely ghost of a great name — A worn and wanton woman, not yet sage Nor wearied out, tho' sixty years of age. Wrinkled and rouged, and with false teeth of pearl, And the shrill laughter of a giddy girl ; Haunting, with painted cheek and powder'd brow, The private boxes, as spectator now ; Both day and night, indeed, invited out To private picnic and to public rout. Because thy shrill laugh and thy ready joke Ever enlivened up the festal folk.
And then :
And here 's the end of all. And on thy bed Thou Uest, Kitty Kemble, lone and dead ; And on thy clammy cheek there lingers faint The deep dark stain of a life's rouge and paint ; And, Kitty, all thy sad days and thy glad Have left thee lying for thy last part clad. Cold, silent, on the earthly Stage ; and while Thou Hest there with dark and dreadful smile,
6o ROBERT BUCHANAN
The feverish footlights of the World flash bright
Into thy face with a last ghastly light ;
And while thy friends all sighing rise to go,
The great black Curtain droppeth, slow, slow, slow.
God help us ! We spectators turn away ; Part sad, we think, part merry, was the Play. God help the lonely player now she stands Behind the darken'd scenes with wondering face, And gropes her way at last, with clay-cold hands, Out of the dingy place.
Turning towards Home, poor worn and weary one. Now the last scene is done.
In addition to the 'London Poems' there are included in the volume four other pieces of a miscellaneous nature, of which 'The Death of Roland' and 'The Scaith o' Bartle' are the more ambitious. Consideration of these we must postpone till we come to consider in a separate chapter several other poems that can be placed in the same category, of which 'The Battle of Drumliemoor' and 'The Lights of Leith' are notable examples.
In the three volumes which have been thus subjected to such a hurried consideration, we have caught sight of some of the tendencies which are the foundation of the Buchanan of the later periods. Beliefs and hopes that in those days were glaring in their simplicity, may have become, if not dimmed, yet modified, but in the spirit of the work there is little altera- tion except that which springs from a natural growth. And if, says the poet :
I list to sing of sad things oft.
It is that sad things in this life of breath
POEMS OF PROBATION 6i |
Are truest, sweetest, deepest. Tears bring forth '
The richness of our nature, as the rain I
Sweetens the smelling brier, and I, thank God, ]
Have anguish'd here in no ignoble tears,
Tears for the pale friend with the singing life, '
Tears for the father with the gentle eyes
(My dearest up in heaven next to God)
Who loved me like a woman. I have wrought
No garland of the rose and passion-flower
Grown in a careful garden in the sun ;
But I have gathered samphire dizzily
Close to the hollow roaring of a sea.
CHAPTER III
'THE BOOK OF ORM '
An interval of four years brings us in 1870 to the publication of 'The Book of Orm,' in other words, 'The Book of the Visions seen by Orm the Celt.' In this volume, which, by the poet's own confession, strikes the personal keynote to all his work, the poet enters boldly into the lights and shadows of mystic realism. Here, in the character of Orm the Celt, the poet brings himself face to face with the mysteries of life and death ; here he attempts to grapple with the unseen ; dreams of an uplifted veil ; has visions of man's birth, rise, and fall ; and sees with the eye of the poet the lonely God who neither can nor will help the human sufferer in his desire for knowledge, peace, rest, and, perhaps, forget- fulness :
There is a mortal, and his name is Orm, Born in the evening of the world, and looking Back from the sunset to the gates of morning.
In 'The First Song of the Veil' we are told how ' Ere Man grew, the Veil was woven bright and blue,' and how this veil * the beautiful Master ' drew over his face :
62
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 63
Then starry, luminous,
Rolled the Veil of azure j
O'er the first dwellings j
Of mortal race ; '
—And since the beginning j
No mortal vision, |
Pure or sinning, j
Hath seen the Face i
Yet mark me closely ! j
Strongly I swear, ,
Seen or seen not, j
The Face is there I I
When the Veil is clearest j
And sunniest, !
Closest and nearest ,
The Face is prest ; I
But when, grown weary
With long downlooking, |
The Face withdrawing I
For a time is gone, i
The great Veil darkens,
And ye see full clearly ]
Glittering numberless I
The gems thereon. i
For the lamp of his features ,
Divinely burning, Shines, and suffuses
The Veil with light, ,
And the Face, drawn backward With that deep sighing Ye hear in the gloaming,
Leaveth the Night.
And thus men as they journeyed graveward, 'evermore hoping, evermore seeking, nevermore guessing, crying, denying, questioning, dreaming,' nevermore certain, evermore craved to look on a token, to gaze on the Face, in vain. Next we ;
have a picture of Earth the Mother : \
Beautiful, beautiful, she lay below, j
The mighty Mother of humanity. Turning her sightless eyeballs to the glow
Of light she could not see. '
64 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Feeling the happy warmth, and breathing slow
As if her thoughts were shining tranquilly. Beautiful, beautiful the Mother lay, Crowned with silver spray, The greenness gathering hushfully around
The peace of her great heart, while on her breast The wayward Waters, with a weeping sound,
Were sobbing into rest. For all day long her face shone merrily. And at its smile the waves leapt mad and free : But at the darkening of the Veil, she drew
The wild things to herself, and husht their cries. Then, stiller, dumber, search'd the deepening Blue
With passionate blind eyes ; And went the old life over in her thought, Dreamily playing as her memory wrought
The dimly guess'd at, never utter'd tale, While, over her dreaming, Deepen'd the luminous, Star-inwrought, beautiful,
Folds of the wondrous Veil.
And the poet tells us how
In the beginning, long ago.
Without a Veil looked down the Face ye know.
And Earth, an infant happy-eyed and bright,
Look'd smiling up, and gladden'd in its sight.
But later, when the Man Flower from her womb
Burst into brightening bloom,
In her glad eyes a golden dust was blown
Out of the Void, and she was blind as stone.
And since that day
She hath not seen, nor spoken,— lest her say
Should be a sorrow and fear to mortal race, And doth not know the Lord hath hid away,
But turneth up blind orbs— to feel the Face.
The voices of the Children of Earth are heard crying :
' O Mother ! Mother
Of mortal race ! Is there a Father ? Is there a Face ? '
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 65
She felt their sorrow
Against her cheek, — She could not hearken,
She could not speak ;
and although the Master answers from the thunder-cloud, ' I am God the Maker, I am God the Master, I am God the Father,' Earth and her children neither saw nor heard. The Wise Men are called into view, and looming there lonely, they search the Veil wonderful 'with tubes fire- fashioned in caverns below,' and we are told in a striking line that
God withdrew backward,
and after long searching, in which blindness met some, and death others, the remainder creep slowly back from the heights to which they had ascended, crying out :
' Bury us deep when dead — We have travelled a weary road, We have seen no more than ye. 'Twere better not to be — There is no God ! '
And the people, hearkening-, Saw the Veil above them. And the darkness deepen'd.
And the Lights gleamed pale. Ah ! the lamps numberless, The mystical jewels of God, The luminous, wonderful,
Beautiful Lights of the Veil !
Part II. is entitled 'The Man and the Shadow.'
On the high path where few men fare, Orm meeteth one with hoary hair. And speaketh, solemn and afraid, Of that which haunteth him — a Shade.
E
^ ROBERT BUCHANAN
The lonely man sitteth with downcast eyes, motionless :
Thou broodest moveless, letting yonder sun Make thee a Dial, worn and venerable. To show the passing hour.
The old man's 'withered flesh is scented with a Soul,' and Orm is filled with joy
To meet A royal face like thine ; to touch the hand Of such a soul-fellow ; to feel the want. The upward-crying- hunger, the desire, The common hope and pathos, justified By knowledge and grey hairs.
He talks to him of life and its meaning, of the shadows which haunt us to the grave, and of the mystery beyond. They climb together higher, yet higher, though the path is steep, and take a view of the many-coloured picture before them, the immeasurable mountains, the glassy ocean like a sheet of mother-o'-pearl, and the sky— that field of dreamy blue 'wherein the rayless crescent of the midday Moon lies like a reaper's sickle '—and there Orm asks :
What magic ? What Magician ? O my Brother, What strange Magician, mixing up those tints, Pouring the water down, and sending forth The crystal air like breath, showing the heavens With luminous jewels of the day and night, Look'd down, and saw thee lie a lifeless clod. And lifted thee, and moulded thee to shape, Colour'd thee with the sunhght till thy blood Ran ruby, poured the chemic tints o' the air Through eyes that kindled into azure, stole The flesh tints of the lily and the rose To make thee wondrous fair unto thyself, Knitted thy limbs with ruby bands, and blew Into thy hollow heart until it stirred,—
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 67
and pointing to the vales, he continues :
Below, a Storm of people like to thee
Drifts with thee westward darkly, cloud on cloud,
Uttering a common moan, and to our eyes
Casting one common shadow ; yet each Soul
Therein now seeketh, with a want like thine,
The inevitable bourne. Nor those alone,
Thy perishable brethren, share thy want.
And wander haunted through the world ; but Beasts,
With that dumb hunger in their eyes, project
Their darkness — by the yeanling Lambkin's side
Its shade plays, and the basking Lizard hath
Its image on the flat stone in the sun, —
And these, the greater and the less, like thee
Shall perish in their season : in the mere
The slender Water-Lily sees her shape,
And sheddeth softly on the summer air
Her last chill breathing ; and the forest Tree
That, standing glorious for a hundred years.
Lengthens its shadow daily from the sun,
Fulfilleth its own prophecy at last.
And falleth, falleth. Art thou comforted ?
Orm speaks on, of the wild desires of the soul, and of the eternal shadow which haunts it; of the blank eyes and blank souls which the seeing soul meets, as it wears
Westward, to the melancholy Realm
Where all the gather'd Shades of all the world
Lie as a cloud around the feet of God.
It sees the ox eye, the blank faces of brute beasts and small-eyed kings, the former the happier, * because never nameless trouble filled their eyes.'
Lift up thine eyes, old man, and look on me :
Like thee, a dark point in the scheme of things,
Where the dumb Spirit that pervadeth all —
Grass, trees, beasts, man— and lives and grows in all —
Pauses upon itself, and awe-struck feels
The shadow of the next and imminent
6S ROBERT BUCHANAN
Transfiguration. So, a living- Man I That entity within whose brooding brain Knowledge begins and ends — that point in time When Time becomes the Shadow of a Dial, — That dreadful living and corporeal Hour, Who, wafted by an unseen Hand apart From the wild rush of temporal things that pass, Pauses and listens, — listening sees his face Glassed in still waters of Eternity, — Gazes in awe at his own loveliness. And fears it, — glanceth with affrighted eyes Backward and forward, and beholds all dark. Alike the place whence he unconscious came, And that to which he conscious drifteth on, — Yet seeth before him, wheresoe'er he turn. The Shadow of himself, presaging doom.
The old man speaks and calls out that he sees
Shadows ! I see them— all the Shadows— see !
Uprising from the wild green sea of graves
That beats forlorn about the shores of earth.
Shadows— behold them !— how they gather and gather.
More and yet more, darker and darker yet ;
Drifting with a low moan of mystery
Upward, still upward, till they almost touch
The bright dim edge of the Bow, but there they pause.
Struggling in vain against a breath from heaven,
And blacken. Hark ! their sound is like a Sea !
Above them, with how dim a light divine,
Burneth the Bow,— and lo ! it is a Bridge,
Dim, many-colour'd, strangely brightening,
Whereon, all faint and fair and shadowless.
Spirits like those, with faces I remember.
With a low sound like the soft rain in spring.
With a faint echo of the cradle-song.
Coming and going, beckon me ! I come !
Who holds me ? Touch me not. O help ! I am called !
Ah!
And dies, and as his soul passes, Orm asks :
Art thou free ? Dost thou still hunger upward seeking rest. Because some new horizon, strange as ours. Shuts out the prospect of the place of peace ? Art thou a wave that, having broken once,
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 69 i
Gatherest up a glorious crest once more, j
And glimmerest onward, — but to break again ; i
Or dost thou smooth thyself to perfect peace i In tranquil sight of some Eternal Shore ?
No answer comes, and espying the Rainbow, he !
thus addresses it, as the Shadows gather round ]
him: j
The beautiful Bow of thoughts ineifable, |
Last consequence of this fair cloud of flesh ! j
The dim miraculous Iris of sweet Dream ! i
Rainbow of promise ! Colour, Light, and Soul ! ,
That comes, dies, comes again, and ever draws i
Its strangest source from tears— that lives, that dies — !
That is, is not— now here, now faded wholly — ']
Ever assuring, ever blessing us, i
Ever eluding, ever beckoning ; j
Born of our essence, yet more strange than we. '
Part III. is entitled ' Songs of Corruption.' The first of these, * Phantasy,' telling of death which comes to take the pale wife. In the face of the I
mystery of death, the poet asks : j
What art thou —
Art thou God's angel ?
Or art thou only
The chilly night- wind,
Stealing downward From the regions where the sun '
Dwelleth alone with his shadows
On a waste of snow ? Art thou the water or earth ? j
Or art thou the fatal air ? '.
Or art thou only
An apparition
Made by the mist Of mine own eyes weeping?
the poet marvelling that one so gentle as Death
should cast a Shadow so vast,— she, the pointing i
of whose finger j
Fadeth far away, ,
On the sunset-tinged edges, i
Where Man's company ends, And God's loneliness begins. ;
i \
70 ROBERT BUCHANAN
The second poem has for its title * The Dream of the World without Death,' in which vision is pictured the possible despair of humanity at the absence of the signs of death. Instead of the bloomless face, shut eyes, and waxen fingers — nothing but wondrous parting and a blankness.
I could not see a kirkyard near or far ;
I thirsted for a green grave, and my vision
Was weary for the white gleam of a tombstone.
And the world shrieked, and the summer-time was bitter, And men and women feared the air behind them ! And for lack of its green graves the world was hateful.
Women pour forth their cries to God to restore the signs of death :
The closing of dead eyelids is not dreadful.
For comfort comes upon us when we close them.
And tears fall, and our sorrow grows familiar ;
And we can sit above them where they slumber, And spin a dreamy pain into a sweetness. And know indeed that we are very near them.
But to reach out empty arms is surely dreadful, And to feel the hollow empty world is awful. And bitter grow the silence and the distance.
There is no space for grieving or for weeping ; No touch, no cold, no agony to strive with. And nothing but a horror and a blankness !
'Whither, and O whither,' said the woman,
' O Spirit of the Lord, hast Thou conveyed them,
My little ones, my little son and daughter ?
' For, lo ! we wandered forth at early morning, And winds were blowing round us, and their mouths Blew rose-buds to the rose-buds, and their eyes
' Looked violets at the violets, and their hair Made sunshine in the sunshine, and their passing Left a pleasure in the dewy leaves behind them ;
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 71
' And suddenly my little son looked upward,
And his eyes were dried like dew-drops ; and his going
Was like a blow of fire upon my face.'
There was no comfort in the slow farewell,
Nor gentle shutting of beloved eyes,
Nor beautiful brooding over sleeping features.
There were no kisses on familiar faces,
No weaving of white grave-clothes, no last pondering
Over the still wax cheeks and folded fingers.
The vision ends :
But I awoke, and, lo ! the burthen was uplifted,
And I prayed within the chamber where she slumbered,
And my tears flowed fast and free, but were not bitter.
I eased my heart three days by watching near her, And made her pillow sweet with scent and flowers, And could bear at last to put her in the darkness.
And I heard the kirk-bells ringing very slowly.
And the priests were in their vestments, and the earth
Dripped awful on the hard wood, yet I bore it.
And I cried, ' O unseen Sender of Corruption, I bless Thee for the wonder of Thy mercy. Which softeneth the mystery and the parting.
' I bless Thee for the change and for the comfort, The bloomless face, shut eyes, and waxen fingers, — For Sleeping, and for Silence, and Corruption.'
Part IV. * The Soul and the Dwelling,' is a fine imaginative flight dealing with the loneliness of humanity, and the vanity of the wish that soul can ever really mix with soul. * Pent in each prison must each miraculous spirit remain.'
Not yet, not yet. One dweller in a mortal tenement Can know what secret faces hide away Within the neighbouring dwelling. Ah beloved, The mystery, the mystery ! We cry For God's face, who have never looked upon The poorest Soul's face in the wonderful Soul-haunted world.
72 ROBERT BUCHANAN
And speaking of the soul he had sought in heart's blood, that of the beloved one, he tells how each cried to the other in vain.
A spirit once there dwelt Beside me, close as thou— two wedded souls, We mingled— flesh was mixed with flesh— we knew All joys, all unreserves of mingled life — Yea, not a sunbeam filled the house of one But touched the other's threshold. Hear me swear I never knew that Soul ! All touch, all sound, All light was insufficient. The Soul, pent In its strange chambers, cried to mine in vain— We saw each other not : but oftentimes When I was glad, the windows of my neighbour Were dark and drawn, as for a funeral ; And sometimes, when most weary of the world. My Soul was looking forth at dead of night, I saw the neighbouring dwelling brightly lit, The happy windows flooded full of Ught, As if a feast were being held within. Yet were there passing flashes, random gleams. Low sounds, from the inhabitant divine I knew not ; and I shrunk from some of these In a mysterious pain. At last. Beloved, The frail fair mansion where that spirit dwelt Totter'd and trembled, through the wondrous flesh A dim sick glimmer from the fire within Grew fainter, fainter. ' I am going away,' The Spirit seemed to cry ; and as it cried. Stood still and dim and very beautiful Up in the windows of the eyes— there linger'd,
First seen, last seen, a moment, silently |
So different, more beautiful tenfold Than all that I had dreamed— I sobbed aloud ' Stay ! stay ! ' but at the one despairing word The spirit faded, from the hearth within The dim fire died with one last quivering gleam — The house became a ruin ; and I moaned ' God help me ! 'twas herself that look'd at me ! First seen ! I never knew her face before ! . . . Too late ! too late ! too late ! '
Part V. 'Songs of Seeking,' contains 'The Happy Earth' 'O Unseen One!' the 'World's Mystery'
?
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 73
(the mystery of pain and suffering) ; * The Cities,' in which the anomalies and injustices of life are mirrored ; ' The Priests,' in which eternal con- demnation is poured forth by 'priests in divers vestments ' on the wicked ; ' The Lamb of God ' bleating like a thing in pain, with its bloodstains still bright ; and ' Doom,' in which the poet again reiterates his steadfast belief in the immortality of all creation, to be so eloquently elaborated later in * The Vision of the Man Accurst * :
Master, if there be Doom,
All men are bereaven ! If, in the universe, One Spirit receive the curse,
Alas for Heaven ! If there be doom for one, Thou, Master, art undone.
This division also includes the beautiful 'Flower of the World.'
Wherever men sinned and wept, ' I wandered in my quest ;
At last in a Garden of God j
I saw the Flower of the World. ;
This Flower had human eyes,
Its breath was the breath of the mouth ;
Sunlight and starlight came.
And the Flower drank bliss from both.
Whatever was base and unclean. Whatever was sad and strange. Was piled around its roots ; It drew its strength from the same.
Whatever was formless and base Pass'd into fineness and form ; Whatever was lifeless and mean Grew into beautiful bloom.
74 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Then I thoug-ht, ' O Flower of the World, Miraculous Blossom of things, Light as a faint wreath of snow Thou tremblest to fall in the wind.
' O beautiful Flower of the World, Fall not nor wither away ; He is coming- — He cannot be far — The Lord of the Flow'rs and the Stars.
And I cried, ' O Spirit divine ! That walkest the Garden unseen, Come hither, and bless, ere it dies. The beautiful Flower of the World.'
Part VI. 'The Lifting of the Veil,' tells how in a dream Orm sees the Veil lifted, and the effect the revelation had upon the world. 'The Face was there: it stirred not, changed not, though the world stood still amazed ; but the eyes within it, like the eyes of a painted picture, met and followed the eyes of each that gazed.' At once the eyes of all the world are held in an hypnotic trance by the awful eye of the world ; all action ceases, and everywhere 'tis a piteous Sabbath :
Each soul an eyeball, Each face a stare.
There is no bartering, no trafficking, only staring ; and of the faces some were glad, some pensive, and some mad — 'twas everywhere a frozen pleasure and a frozen pain— and in his vision Orm seems to see the mortal race building covered cities to hide the Face ; the common sorrow, yearning, and love passed from the earth ; the heart of the world had no pulsation— * 'twas a piteous Sabbath every- where.' Part VII. comprises the 'Coruisken Sonnets,'
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 75
in which for the first time the poet essays the Sonnet as a form of poetical expression. They are thirty-four in all, and the general 'motif which underlies them is the Soul's direct expres- sion to a silent, pitiless, lonely, beautiful God. The * mise-en-scene ' is Loch Coruisk, in the island of Skye, a woodless, barren, hill-topped waste of Celtic country — the very 'back of beyont' of tradition. The corry by the water, which in plain English is the name for this Western haunt of mists and shadows, was a fit place for the gathering of possible mystic forms, seeking to find in the eternal hills the silent and lonely God from whose breath springs the essences of natural growth. Fit place this for Die Walkyrie, for the ghostly visitations of Walpurgisnacht, the ideal sporting-ground of witches and water-kelpies, 'the blackest mountain-side,' to use Sir Walter Scott's words, in the island ; ' black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone. I think,' writes Mr. Buchanan, ' this is the very stillest place on all God's earth.'
Ghostly and livid, robed with shadow, see !
Each mighty Mountain silent on its throne,
From foot to scalp one stretch of hvid stone, Without one gleam of grass or greenery. Silent they take the immutable decree —
Darkness or sunlight come,— they do not stir ; Each bare brow lifted desolately free,
Keepeth the silence of a death-chamber. Silent they watch each other until-doom ;
They see each other's phantoms come and go. Yet stir not. Now the stormy hour brings gloom,
Now all things grow confused and black below, Specific through the cloudy Drift they loom,
And each accepts his individual woe.
76 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Desolate ! How the Peaks of ashen gray,
The smoky Mists that drift from hill to hill, The Waters dark, anticipate this day
That sullen desolation. Oh, how still
The shadows come and vanish, with no will ! How still the Waters watch the heaven's array ! How still the melancholy vapours stray,
Mirror'd below, and drifting on, fulfil Thy mandate as they mingle ! — Not a sound,
Save that deep murmur of a torrent near, Deepening silence. Hush ! the dark profound
Groans, as son- a gray crag loosens and falls sheer To the abyss. Wildly I look around,
O Spirit of the Human, art Thou here ?
Here in this rugged temple, the God whom the poet pictures is faced with invocation and prayer. Joining with the Jewish psalmist, he cries, 'The heavens declare the glory of God'; yet asks, 'What is all this glory to those who work and pray, who suffer and weep?' and prays for one warm touch from a Father who neither hears nor speaks. The immemorial Heavens bend sweet eyes down, but cold are ' they as clay.'
But I have found a voice, and I will pray.
The poet goes on to mourn that he has not found the Father by the starved widow's bed, nor in sick-rooms, nor in the bloody and bleared eyes of cities, where innocence cried with feeble voice, strangled in the grip of treachery and lust. The Home is fair, yet all is desolate, because the Father comes not ; the clouds of fate sodden above us ; like children in an empty home sit all, castaway children, lone and fatherless. The anguish and the suffering, the hopelessness conceived under the merciless hand of an inexorable environment,
*THE BOOK OF ORM' 77
drive the poet to utter words that seem to suggest a failing regard for the eternity of things :
When He returns, and finds the World so drear —
All sleeping, — young and old, unfair and fair, j
Will he stoop down and whisper in each ear, I
' Awaken ! ' or for pity's sake forbear, — 1
Saying, ' How shall I meet their frozen stare j
Of wonder, and their eyes so full of fear ? I
How shall I comfort them in their despair, \
If thej' cry out, " Too late ! let us sleep here "?' I Perchance He will not wake us up, but when
He sees us look so happy in our rest, i
Will murmur, ' Poor dead women and dead men ! I
Dire was their doom, and weary was their quest. ' Wherefore awake them unto life again ?
Let them sleep on untroubled— it is best.'
And praying, he cries :
And wise, and gentle, oh come down, come down ! ]
Come like an Angel with a human face, ]
Pass through the gates into the hungry Town, ;
Comfort the weary, send the afflicted grace,
Shine brighter on the Graves where we lay down Our dear ones, cheer them in the narrow place !
Carried away by the splendour of the world itself, the grandeur of the scene o'er which the God !
broods with loveless eye for humanity, the poet j
speaks :
Oh, Thou art beautiful ! and Thou dost bestow Thy beauty on this stillness — still as sheep The Hills he under Thee ; the Waters deep Murmur for joy of Thee ; the voids below Mirror Thy strange fair Vapours as they flow.
The sonnets throughout contain many fine efforts at word-painting.
See ! onward swim
The ghostly Mists, from silent land to land. From gulf to gulf ; now the whole air grows dim —
Like living men, darkling a space, they stand. But lo ! a Sunbeam, like the Cherubim,
Scatters them onward with a flaming brand.
78 ROBERT BUCHANAN
O hoary Hills, though ye look aged, ye
Are but the children of a latter time—
Methinks I see ye in that hour sublime When from the hissing cauldron of the Sea Ye were upheaven, while so terribly
The Clouds boiled, and the Lightning scorched ye bare. Wild, new-born, blind, Titans in agony.
Ye glared at heaven through folds of fiery hair ! . . . Then, in an instant, while ye trembled thus, A Hand from heaven, white and luminous,
Pass'd o'er your brows, and husht your fiery breath. Lo ! one by one the still Stars gather'd round, The great Deep glass'd itself, and with no sound
A cold Snow fell, and all was still as death.
• • • • • ■ *
O Rainbow, Rainbow, on the livid height,
Softening its ashen outlines into dream, Dewy yet brilliant, delicately bright
As pink wild-roses' leaves, why dost thou gleam So beckoningly ? Whom dost thou invite
Still higher upward on the bitter quest ? What dost thou promise to the weary sight
In that strange region whence thou issuest ? Speakest thou of pensive runlets by whose side Our dear ones wander sweet and gentle-eyed,
In the soft dawn of some diviner Day? Art thou a promise ? Come those hues and dyes From heavenly Meads, near which thou dost arise, [
Iris'd from Quiet Waters, far away !
The appeal to the inexorable Father, which is continued throughout the sonnets, is sometimes drowned in tears of helplessness, and sometimes roused to the pitch of fiery anger and remorse :
Oh, what have sickly Children done, to share Thy cup of sorrows ? yet their dull, sad pain Makes the earth awful ;
The Angels Thou hast sent to haunt the street Are Hunger and Distortion and Decay.
• • • . • • •
Over and over again, the poet harps back to the helplessness of God. * There is no death ; powerless
*THE BOOK OF ORM' 79
even God's right hand, full arm'd with fate, to slay the meanest thing beneath the sky.'
Yet hear me, Mountains ! echo me, O Sea !
Murmur an answer, Winds, from out your caves ;
Cry loudly. Torrents, Mountains, Winds, and Waves — Hark to my crying- all, and echo me — All things that live are deathless— I and ye.
The Father could not slay us if He would ;
The Elements in all their multitude Will rise against their Master terribly. If but one hair upon a human head
Should perish ! . . . Darkness grows on crag and steep, A hollow thunder fills the torrent's bed ;
The wild Mists moan and threaten as they creep ; And hush ! now, when all other cries are fled,
The warning murmur of the white-hair'd Deep.
If love could only spring between Maker and man, if man could see that love worked, instead of law, all would be well with the poet.
Here in the dark I grope, confused, purblind ; I have not seen the glory and the peace ;
But on the darken'd mirror of the mind Strange glimmers fall, and shake me till they cease — Then, wondering, dazzled, on Thy name I call,
And, like a child, reach empty hands and moan. And broken accents from my wild lips fall.
And I implore Thee in this human tone ; — If such as I can follow Him at all
Into Thy presence, 'tis by love alone.
Part VIII. ' The Coruisken Vision ' is cast on the same stage, with a dramatis personse of Orm, the Spirit of Sorrow, and a chorus of voices, built on the lines of the Greek tragedies. Here Orm, led by the Spirit of Sorrow,^ is shown under the 'white smile of the ghostly Moon, an edifice that whirls on serpent columns heavenward, at whose gates
1 Satan. See 'The Devil's Case.'
8o ROBERT BUCHANAN
sits a little Child, turning the dim leaves of a Prayer Book :
With fingers light, as are a rose's leaves, And smiling on the things it sees therein.
Here in this edifice sit the Kings of Thought in meditation, while Bael, the immortal Child at the door, who sat on Eve's shoulder, and is immortal because he has not eaten of the Tree of Sorrow, reads on. Here we find Menu, the son of Brahm, who grew so wise, they took him for a god; Orpheus, who 'having swept each circle course divine ' :
Whirl'd like a moth around an altar lamp, A moment round that inmost flame of all,
then fell to Lesbos, blind with light; Socrates, who, tasting the bitterness of wisdom, smiled glori- ously, and so passed up to God, wise in his dying ; Diogenes :
Who stole the wondrous fruit.
And munched it in the mud, and scowled on all,
Because it tasted sourly ;
Plato, with great eyes dim with dream of all who ever lived and died :
The one who loved the quest for its own sake Because it led him into paths so fair ; Married his days and nights to thought, and left Broods of angelic dreams attesting all, That by the unassisted mind of man Could be conceived of immortality, Saw Truth in open daylight, face to face. And would have loved and understood her too, Had he not thought knowledge so beautiful.
David, king of Israel, 'with blue eyes looking down on the pale youth swinging by hair of gold
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 8r
to the black branches of a forest tree '—all these seeking the Eternal wisdom, striving to open the Book of the World which abideth under the waters. All
Search'd for the same from birth to the grave, And wearily westering perished !
while the little one at the gate points with hand to a passage in the book :
' Verily I say, Except a man be born again, he shall not Enter the kingdom of God.'
Then, while voices sing :
The smile of a little child
Disturbs us where we sit On our thrones— the Wise and the Mighty.
Never heretofore
Have our thrones been shaken.
Never heretofore
Did we know and wonder ! We are, and we are not, we know and we know not,
We come and we go at thy bidding ;
the child kisses the Spirit of Sorrow and the Temple vanishes, and in a mist Orm seems to see the shadow of a cross— which the Spirit tells him is the shadow of his thought crossing the luminous silence of the stars. Bidding him fare- well, Satan cries :
And when thou prayest, pray for me. Pray for the outcast Spirit ! Pray for all Strong Spirits that are outcast !
And falling on his knees, Orm prays :
Father God, Forgive thy child ! behold him on his knee ! Evil is Evil, Father, Good is Good, Darkness is dreadful, and the Light Divine.
82 ROBERT BUCHANAN
'The Devil's Mystics' comprises Part IX., in which 'The Tree of Life' deals with the three gardeners, Regret, Hope and Memory, and the setting and feeding of the Seed by the world's smiles and tears bringing forth a blossom which the Angels named * Spirit,' a flower which is to bear no seed, but is to be plucked by the Sun and worn till it withers in his hair.
The second of this series is * The Seeds,' with its recurring lines :
till:
' Grow, Seed ! blossom, Brain ! Deepen, deepen, into pain ! '
When standing in the perfect light
I saw the first-born Mortal rise — The flower of things he stood his height
With melancholy eyes. ' Grow, Seed ! blossom, Brain ! Deepen, deepen, into pain ! '
From all the rest he drew apart, And stood erect on the green sod,
Holding his hand upon his heart. And looking up at God !
' Grow, Seed ! blossom. Brain !
Deepen, deepen, into pain ! '
He stood so terrible, so dread, With right hand lifted pale and proud,
God feared the thing He fashioned, And fled into a cloud.
' Grow, Seed ! blossom. Brain !
Deepen, deepen, into pain ! '
And since that day He hid away Man hath not seen the Face that fled,
And the wild question of that day Hath not been answered.
' Grow, Seed ! blossom. Brain !
Deepen, deepen, into pain ! '
Following this are the poems of 'The Philo-
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 83
sophers,' the drinkers of hemlock, 'worn and old, who drink and dream, each with the sad forehead, each with the cup of gold'; and the * Prayer from the Deep.' The series ends with two prayers, one a general invocation of pity for those who weep and weep, for those who have passed through the gate, and for those who wander free after the passing through, with a final note that the Son may help all those who go before the Father, and a second personal prayer of Orm the Celt.
In the time of transfiguration,
Melt me, Master, like snow ;
Melt me, dissolve me, inhale me
Into Thy \wool-white cloud ;
With a warm wind blow me upward
Over the hills and the seas,
And upon a summer morning
Poise me over the valley
Of Thy mellow, mellow realm ;
Then, for a wondrous moment,
Watch me from infinite space
With Thy round red Eyeball of sunlight.
And melt and dissolve me downward
In the beautiful silver Rain
That drippeth musically,
With a gleam hke Starlight and Moonlight,
On the footstool of Thy Throne.
'The Vision of the Man Accurst' is the fitting peroration of this splendid piece of spiritual eloquence. The rhetoric, which has seldom failed throughout the whole book, reaches its highest pitch in the stately diction of this remarkable poem. 'Thou shalt not cast away any man' serves as the text of the whole, which com-
84 ROBERT BUCHANAN
mences with 'Judgment was over; all the world redeemed save one Man,' and ends with
' The Man is saved ; let the Man enter in ! '
It is the embodiment, the central fire, of all the poet's philosophy, of the one belief to which he has clung with a fierce tenacity. This man, 'the basest mortal born,' 'who had sinned all sins, whose soul was blackness and foul odour,' had in him, in the poet's view, the seeds of immortality like all children of the Godhead, and must be saved.
Like golden waves That break on a green island of the south, Amid the flash of many plumaged wings, Passed the fair days in Heaven. By the side Of quiet waters perfect Spirits walked, Low singing, in the star-dew, full of joy In their own thoughts, and pictures of those thoughts Flash'd into eyes that loved them ; while beside them, After exceeding storm, the Waters of Life With soft sea-sound subsided. Then God said, ' 'Tis finished— all is well ! ' But as He spake A voice, from out the lonely Deep beneath, Mock'd !
Then to the Seraph at the Gate, Who looketh on the Deep with steadfast eyes For ever, God cried, ' What is he that mocks ? ' The Seraph answered, ' 'Tis the Man accurst ! ' And, with a voice of most exceeding peace, God ask'd, ' What doth the Man ? '
The Seraph said : ' Upon a desolate peak, with hoar-frost hung. Amid the steaming vapours of the Moon, He sitteth on a throne, and hideously Playeth at judgment ; at his feet, with eyes Slimy and luminous, squats a monstrous Toad ; Above his head pale phantoms of the Stars Fulfil cold ministrations of the Void, And in their dim and melancholy lustre
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 85
His shadow, and the shadow of the Toad Beneath him, linger. Sceptred, thron'd, and crown'd, The foul judgeth the foul, and sitting grim. Laughs ! '
With a simple directness the poet proceeds to tell of the daring defiance which the foulest of mankind hurls at the Throne, and still
The Waters of Life, The living, spiritual Waters, broke. Fountain-like, up against the Master's Breast, Giving and taking blessing. Overhead Gather'd the shining legions of the Stars, Led by the ethereal Moon, with dewy eyes Of lustre : these have been baptized with fire, Their raiment is of molten diamond. And 'tis their office, as they circhng move In their blue orbits, evermore to turn Their faces heavenward, drinking peace and strengfth From that great Flame which, in the core of Heaven, Like to the white heart of a violet burns. Diffusing rays and odour. Blessing all, God sought their beauteous orbits, and behold ! The Eyes innumerably glistening Were turned away from Heaven, and with sick stare, Like the blue gleam of salt dissolved in fire, They searched the Void, as human faces look On horror.
The Master is petitioned to send forth His fire to wither up ' the worm ' who repenteth not but blasphemeth; but He answers, 'What I have made, a living Soul, cannot be unmade, but en- dures for ever,' and says, ' Call the Man ! ' and ere the man could fly, the wild wind in its circuit swept upon him, and like a straw whirled him and lifted him and cast him at the gate. The Lord asking what the man doeth, learns that he thirsts, and gives him water, having
86 ROBERT BUCHANAN
partaken of which * the Man, looking up out of his drooping hair, grinned mockery at the Giver.' Then saith the Lord, *Doth the Man crave to enter in ? ' ' Not so ; he says his Soul is filled with hate of Thee and of Thy ways he loathes pure pathways ; and he spitteth hate on all Thy Children. ' ' What doth he crave ? '
t
' Neither Thy Heaven nor by Thy holy ways. He murmureth out he is content to dwell In the Cold Clime for ever, so Thou sendest A face to look upon, a heart that beats, A hand to touch — albeit like himself, Black, venomous, unblest, exiled, and base : Give him this thing-, he will be very still. Nor trouble Thee again.'
The Lord mused.
Still, Scarce audible trembled the Waters of Life- Over all Heaven the Snow of the same Thought Which rose within the Spirit of the Lord Fell hushedly ; the innumerable eyes Swam in a lustrous dream.
Then said the Lord : ' In all the waste of worlds there dwelleth not Another like himself— behold he is The basest Mortal born. Yet 'tis not meet His cruel cry, however piteous. Should trouble my eternal Sabbath-day. Is there a Spirit here, a human thing. Will pass this day from the Gate Beautiful To share the exile of this Man accurst,— That he may cease the shrill pain of his cry, And I have peace ? '
Hushedly, hushedly, Snow'd down the Thought Divine— the hving Waters Murmured and darkened. But like mournful mist That hovers o'er an autumn pool, two Shapes, Beautiful, human, glided to the Gate And waited.
'THE BOOK OF ORM' 87
* What art thou ? ' in a stern voice The Seraph said, with dreadful forefinger Pointing to one. A gentle voice replied, ' I will go forth with him whom ye call curst ! He grew within my womb— my milk was white Upon his lips. I will go forth with him ! ' And thou ? ' the Seraph said. The second Shape Answered, ' I also will go forth with him ; I have kist his lips, I have lain upon his breast, I bare him children, and I closed his eyes ; I will go forth with him ! '
Then said the Lord : ' What Shapes are these who speak ? ' The Seraph answer'd. The woman who bore him, and the wife he wed— The one he slew in anger— the other he stript. With ravenous claws, of raiment and of food.' Then said the Lord, ' Doth the Man hear?' ' He hears,' Answer'd the Seraph ; ' like a wolf he lies, Venomous, bloody, dark, a thing accurst, And hearkeneth, with no sign ! ' Then said the Lord : 'Show them the Man,' and the pale Seraph cried, ' Behold ! '
Hushedly, hushedly, hushedly, In heaven fell the Snow of Thought Divine, Gleaming upon the Waters of Life beneath. And melting,— as with slow and lingering pace, The Shapes stole forth into the windy cold. And saw the thing that lay and throbbed and lived. And stooped above him. Then one reach'd a hand And touch'd him, and the fierce thing shrank and spat, Hiding his face.
' Have they beheld the Man ? ' The Lord said ; and the Seraph answer'd ' Yea ' ; And the Lord said again, ' What doth the Man ? '
' He lieth like a log in the wild blast. And as he lieth, lo ! one sitting takes His head into her lap, and moans his name. And smoothes his matted hair from off his brow, And croons in a low voice a cradle-song ; And lo ! the other kneeleth at his side. Half-shrinking in the old habit of her fear. Yet hungering with her eyes, and passionately Kissing his bloody hands.'
88 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Then said the Lord, ' Will they go forth with him ? ' A voice replied, ' He grew within my womb — my milk was white Upon his lips. I will go forth with him ! ' And a voice cried, ' I will go forth with him ; I have kist his lips, I have lain upon his breast, I bare him children, and I closed his eyes ; I will go forth with him ! '
Still hushedly Snowed down the Thought Divine, the Waters of Life Flow'd softly, sadly ; for an alien sound, A piteous human cry, a sob forlorn Thrill'd to the heart of Heaven,
The Man wept.
And in a voice of most exceeding peace The Lord said (while against the Breast Divine The Waters of Life leapt, gleaming, gladdening) : ' The Man is saved ; let the Man enter in ! '
CHAPTER IV
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS'
Turning from the 'unsung city's streets,' and leaving for a space the eternal hills, the poet published in 1871, on the very morn almost after the curtain had fallen on the Franco-German struggle, his poetic play, ' The Drama of Kings.' It was, as the poet himself said, the first serious attempt ever made to treat great contemporary events in a dramatic form, and very realistically, yet with something of the massive grandeur of style characteristic of the great dramatists of Greece. * In minor points of detail, the author is sanguine that it is not all Greek, nor in any sense archaic. The interest is epic rather than tragic ; but what the leading character is to a tragedy, France is to "The Drama of Kings," a wonderful genius, guilty of many sins, terribly overtaken by misfortune, and attaining in the end perhaps to purification.' It is necessary to notice here the cautious use of the word 'perhaps,' as the light of recent events rather points to the historical accuracy of the doubt of any salvation coming to the Gaul, as expressed in the words put by
S9
90 ROBERT BUCHANAN
the dramatist into the mouth of the Prussian Chancellor :
On this side Time, there is no hope for France.
The whole drama deals with the struggle between Teuton and Celt, from the days of the First Napoleon to the fall of Paris. In this, as in the poet's other work, the one point of view adopted is, not that of the politician, the satirist, or the historian, 'but that of the realistic Mystic, who, seeking to penetrate deepest of all into the soul, and to represent the soul's best and finest mood, seizes that moment when the spiritual or emotional nature is most quickened by sorrow or self- sacrifice, by victory or by defeat. In good honest truth, the writer has had far greater difficulty in detecting the spiritual point in these great leaders than in the poor worms at their feet. The utterly personal moods of arbitrary power, the impos- sibility of self-abnegation for the sake of any other living creature, the frightful indifference to all ties, the diabolic supremacy of the intellect, make the first Emperor a figure more despairing to the Mystic than the coster-girl dying in childbed in a garret, or the defiant woman declaiming over the corpse of her deformed seducer. It is in this sense of the superlatively diabolic that has made the author, in the epilogue, attribute the perform- ance of the three leading characters to Lucifer himself;— only, let it be understood, not to the irreclaimable and Mephistophelean type of utter evil, but to the Mystic's Devil, a spirit as difficult
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 91
to fathom individually, but clearly in the Divine service, working for good. Perhaps the super- natural machinery of Prelude and Epilude is a defect, like all allegory, but if it serves to keep before the reader the fact that the whole action of the drama is seen from the spiritual or divine auditorium, he will not regret its introduction, and in using it without perfect faith, he may plead the example of the greatest poetic sceptic of modern times. No one did fuller justice to mystic truths than the great positivist who wrote the first and second "Fausts."'
As for the metrical combinations used in the choruses, most of them are quite new to English poetry.
The Drama of Evolution, as the poet calls it in his dedication to the Spirit of Auguste Comte, opens with a Prelude before the curtain, in which the Lord, the Archangels, Lucifer, and Celestial Spectators form the 'preludi personae,' Lucifer informing us that he has selected the fairest and the sweetest-voiced cherubs to play the part of Chorus.
Following this is the Prologue spoken by Time, cloaked and hooded, leaning on a staff; Time snow'd upon by many winters, but faring west- ward still, and ever looking backward to the east. Upon his ears strike the cries of * Liberty ! Liberty ! '
God knows and hears That one word and none other hath been cried By men from the beginning. I have heard The sound so long, I smile ; but at the same
92 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Kingdoms have fallen like o'er-ripen'd fruit,
Realms wither'd, heaven rain'd blood and earth yawn'd graves,
The seasons sicken'd changing their due course,
The stars burnt blue for many awful nights,
The corpse-lights of a v?orld that lay as dead.
Upon the stage, he declares, will be presented two mighty nations gathering up their crests against each other, smiting dimly and darkly for the great Idea. ' Phantoms cloaked by time, struggling in the name of Liberty.'
My name Is also Death ; and I am deathless. I Am Time and most eternal. I am he, God's Usher, and my duty it is to lead The actors one by one upon the scene. And afterwards to guide them quietly Through that dark postern when their parts are played. They come and go, alas ! but I abide, And I am weary of the garish stage.
The first part of the drama has for its title, 'Buonaparte, or France against the Teuton,' the speakers being Napoleon Buonaparte, Alex- ander I. of Russia, Jerome, King of Westphalia, Louisa, Queen of Prussia, the King of Saxony, Baron von Stein, Professor Jahn, the poet Arndt, and others, the time October 1808, during the great Congress of Powers, and the scene Erfurt, in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. A long and fierce storm of words are uttered, first by Stein, Arndt, and Jahn, all pouring out the agony of their souls at the bloodthirsty, tyrannical ambition of the Little Corporal of France ; Stein asking in despair if all the ghosts of the Teutons are laid for evermore, if Karl and Fritz are
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 93
forgotten, everybody in Germany dumb, fetter'd, broke, miserable, dead ?
Are this man's functions supernatural,
Divine above all life, all love, all law,
That he should walk upon the waves of earth
Casting his bloody shade as on a sea,
And they should hush themselves around his feet
Lightly as ripples on a summer pond ?
Earth, water, air — the clouds, the waves, the winds,
The stars in their pale courses, — day and night
Forgetful of their natural equipoise.
Shape their mysterious functions to his will ;
Kings lick his feet like dogs ; he lifts his finger
And epileptic in his chair the Pope
Foams speechless at the mouth ;— body and soul
Obey him as an impulse and a law ; —
The eyes, the ears, the tongues, of all the world
Are blown one way like all a forest's leaves
To see, hear, and entreat him ;— by his smile
The earth is brighten'd, — and 'tis straight fine weather !
Let him but frown, all darkens, and the sun
Uprises bloody as a vulture's crest !
Like hawks obedient to the falconer
The Kings of Europe wait, and at a sign
Soar, while he sits and smiles, in fierce pursuit
Of any wretched quarry he would slay ;
But let him whistle, and with bloody beaks
They turn, and preen their plumage, and are fed.
Cry ? I will cry to God with all my soul !
Can God keep calm, and look upon these things ?
Whilst a Chorus of Spirits sings of the rise and fall of kings :
After each reaping We see upcreeping Another master !
Another chain ! —
Stein and Jahn burst in with maledictions on the destroyers of liberty — Liberty now 'no more a living shape supremely fair, but a mere ghost, unpleasant to the thoughts of foolish kings at
94 ROBERT BUCHANAN
bedtime '—and moan that every wind is tainted by this pestilence of France. The skeleton of Law tyrannises everywhere ; France is law, fate, and death, and
All men of noble birth must flock perforce To spend three months of every year at court, There to be taught to play this mad French tune Upon the one-string'd fiddle of despair.
Stein cries 'Courage!' and swears all this shall cease when a new Teuton soul is created; and picturing the greatness of Napoleon, declares * the life of every man is a wave, and having risen its appointed height, it must descend, and then shall rise the Teuton, an Iris on the Death-cloud, springing out of the proud Imperial Austrian ruin, not a delusion and a patrician lie, a paste- board Crown and an unholy Sword, but a living man, lord of all, and then the heart of Europe will be watered by the Rhine.' In the meantime, this crowned Shape knocks like Death at every door, and enters every kingly chamber as sleep doth, bringing, instead of sleep, sleepless Despair and Fear.
And within the night's dark core where the sad Cross gleam'd before
Sits the Shape that Kings adore, upon a Throne ; And the nations desolate crawl beneath and curse their fate.
And the wind goes by and bites them to the bone.
We are next brought to face a scene in which Buonaparte and the Kings are the leading 'persons'; Buonaparte being without the help of sullen Austria, who sits like some poor cudgel- player with cracked crown, scowling upon the
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 95
victor in the game, mending the tattered realm, and tonicking the sick stomach of the time. To them enters Louisa of Prussia, who on bended knee supplicates the 'firebrand of the Earth.* Her supplication failing, she thus pours forth the agony of her soul :
Pitiless ! pitiless ! pitiless ! pitiless ! ' Earth's masters ? ' — O thrice miserable Earth If these are masters of thy continents ! Bodies without a heart ! tyrants whose thrones Are based upon unutterable pain, One on the frozen ice of the East's despair, One on the bloody lava hard and black Scatter'd by the volcano of the West ! What hope for the poor world if these join hands, Murder with Avarice, Poison with the Sword, Cunning with Hatred, Pride with Cruelty, The heir of Despots with the Parvenu, Moloch, whose cold and leaden eyeballs gloat On old familiar woes deep as the grave. With the quick soul of subtler Lucifer Ever devising novel agonies ! O Spirit of God, who with mysterious breath Dost fashion e'en the will of men-like fiends And fiend-Uke men to obey thee and to work Thy strange dim ends, thy doom, thy deep revenge. Penetrate this day into very Hell,— Into the heart of Earth that is as Hell,— Work in the council-chamber, in the ears Of these arch-tyrants whisper doubts and fears, Disturb their privy-councils, let them mark The viper on each other's smiling lips. And while they seek to cheat humanity And portion Europe's bleeding body in twain. Let each outwit the other,— Uke two thieves Fall at each other's throats, — fiery with greed Strike in new hatred at each other's hearts,— |
And struggle, to the laughter of the world, \
Till one or both fall impotent and dead ! |
'i
Here follows a dialogue between Stein and the I
Queen, in which the sorrow and agony of the time are reflected, and again the Chorus is heard
96 ROBERT BUCHANAN
singing of the rise of Napoleon and the fall of Liberty. A scene of high passion between Napo- leon and the Pope's Cardinal is to be noted, in which the Tyrant bursts forth :
Is the man mad, That he should howl in our imperial ear The flat old thunders that so long have turned The small-beer kingdoms sour with jeopardy?
and warns the Cardinal of the danger to the Pope, whom he had set up, whose 'stale scare- crow of a creed he had propt up in the Vatican ' :
Let him look to it, Or by St. Peter and his rusty Key, That turns so slowly in the lock of Heaven, This hand shall set the foolscap on his head And fix a scarecrow on the heights of Rome For all the world to point at passing by !
There is much dialectical abuse of the Romish Church in this scene, at whose end the Chorus sings of the glory of God, who is * deep and still, subtle as Love, and sure of foot as Fate,' and conveys a warning note to those who stand paralysed under the tyranny of the Emperor :
God gave ye living wills for other aim, Voices for other sounds than moans of blame, Hands for more use than folding on the breast ; Daily the sun goes down into the west — How long shall it go down upon your shame ?
We are then plunged into the whirlpool of a Napoleonic soliloquy :
The cup is overflowing. Pour, pour yet.
My Famulus— pour with free arm-sweep still,
And when the wine is running o'er the brim,
Sparkling with golden bubbles in the sun,
I will stoop down and drink the full great draught
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 97
Of glory, and as did those heroes old
Drinking- ambrosia in the happy isles,
Dilate at once to perfect demigod.
Meantime, I feast my eyes as the wine runs
And the cup fills. Fill up, my Famulus !
Pour out the precious juice of all the earth,
Pour with great arm-sweep, that the world may see.
O Famulus— O Spirit — O good Soul, Come close to me and listen — curl thyself Up in my breast — let us drink ecstasy Together ; for the charm thou taughtest me Is working Uke slow poison in the veins Of the great nations : each, a wild-beast tamed, Looks mildly in mine eyes and from my hand Eats gently.
Proceeding in the grandly heroic strain of an egoist who is conscious of his power, he draws, for his soul to gloat over, the turgid picture of his blood-clouded horizon, and conceives, with diabolic chuckle, the possibility of his becoming the Regent of the World.
Shall this be so, O Spirit ? Pour, O pour- Yea, let me feast mine eyes upon the wine, Albeit I drink not. See !— Napoleon, Waif from the island in the southern sea, Sun to whom all the Kings of the earth are stars, Sword before which all earthly swords are straws. Child of the Revolution, crown and head, Heart, soul, arm. King, of all Humanity.
It shall be a world without priests or idols in dark sacrifice, governed not by twenty thousand kings of Lilliput — little kings which he has held like insects in his hand while he inspected them — but by the one conquering heaven or hell sent Buona- parte. Yet he knows that the Spirit of mankind continually moves on :
The mighty Spirit of mankind Has stagger'd from the sick-bed to his feet,
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98 ROBERT BUCHANAN
And feebly totters, picking- darken'd steps,
And while I lead him on scarce sees the sun,
But questions feebly ' whither ? ' Whither ? Indeed
I am dumb, and all earth's voices are as dumb —
God is not dumber on His throne. In vain
I would peer forward, but the path is black.
Ay, — whither?
Before him he sees the grim Titan of Liberty, who may arise one bloody morning from his torpor, and bring down the roof of Empire on his head. Has he, he asks himself, 'been lulling the Titan with a lie ' ? Yes, he knows that the promise to lead him to the trysting-place where waits his constant love and most immortal bride — Peace — is a vague dream, and he sees how, when the awakening comes, he will be cast with the Titan's last fierce breath ' down through the gate into the pit of doom.'
Yet is this Titan old so weak of wit,
So senile-minded though so huge of frame,
So deaf to warning voices when they cry.
That, should no angel light from heaven and speak
The mad truth in his ear, he will proceed
Patiently as a lamb. He counteth not
The weary years ; his eyes are shut indeed
With a half smile, to see the mystic face
Pictured upon his brain ; only at times
He lifteth lids and gazeth wildly round.
Clutching at the cold hand of him that guides,
But with a whisper he is calm'd again,
Relapsing back into his gentle dream.
O he is patient, and he will await
Century after century in peace.
So that he hears sweet songs of her he seeks,
So that his guides do speak to him of her,
So that he thinks to clasp her in the end.
And as it must come, even to Napoleon, there sounds the footfall of the dread spectre itself.
*THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 99
O for a spell Wherewith to cheat old Death, whose feet I hear Afar off, for I hate the bony touch Of hands that change the purple for the shroud !
The Chorus follows, and the curtain drops on the first part.
A Choric Interlude, in which the Titan Liberty is heard bewailing the perfidy of the Emperor, now meets our attention, the Interlude finally picturing for us the fall and death of the betrayer. The voice of Liberty sings :
All shall forget thee. Thou shalt hear the nations Flocking with music, light and acclamations
To kiss his royal feet
Who sitteth in thy Seat, Surrounded by the slaves of lofty stations.
A rock in the lone sea shall be thy pillow.
In the wide waste of grey wave and green billow,
The days shall rise and set
In silence, and forget To sun thee, — a black shape beneath a willow
Watching the weary waters with heart bleeding ; Or dreaming cheek upon thy hand ; or reading
The book upon thy knee ;
And ever as the sea Moans, raising eyes to the still heaven, and pleading ;
Till like a wave worn out with silent breaking ; Or like a wind blown weary ; thou, forsaking
Thy tenement of clay,
Shalt wear and waste away, And grow a portion of the ever-waking
Tumult of cloud and sea. Feature by feature Losing the likeness of the living creature,
Returning back thy form
To its elements of storm, Thou shalt dissolve in the great wreck of Nature.
100 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Part II. of the drama is * Napoleon Fallen.' We are carried forward seventy-two years, to the year 1870, shortly after the surrender of Sedan ; the scene being drawn at the Chateau of Wilhelms- hohe in Cassel. Our ears are first greeted by the Chorus :
Ah, to grow old, grow old, Upon a throne of gold— Ah, on a throne, so lone,
To wear a crown ; To watch the clouds, the air, Lest storm be breeding there- Pale, lest some blast may cast
Thy glory down.
Hast thou a hard straw bed ? Hast thou thy crust of bread ? And hast thou quaff 'd thy draught
Of water clear ? And canst thou dance and sing ? — O blesseder than a King ! O happy one whom none
Doth hate or fear !
following which we are confronted with a dialogue between the third Napoleon and a Physician. The physical and mental condition of the Emperor is drawn for us in detail, * not dying — only sick, as all are sick who feel the mortal prison-house too weak for the play of the soul.' His hatred of war, his hesitation, and his feebleness at the moment of resolve, are all presented. A chorus follows, in which is indicated the fatality of building too near the Sea of Life :
How for long intervals and vast
Strange secrets hide from day, Till Nature's womb upheaves to cast
The gather'd load away ; How deep the very laws of life Deposit elements of strife.
*THE DRAMA OF KINGS' lOl
O many a year in sun and shower
The quiet waters creep ! — But suddenly on some dark hour
Strange trouble shakes the deep : Silent and monstrous thro' the gloom Rises the Tidal Wave for doom.
Then woe for all who, like this Man,
Have built so near the Sea, For what avails the human plan
When the new force flows free ? Over their bounds the waters stream. And Empires crash and despots scream.
A Bishop enters on the scene and holds parley with the Emperor, and the agony is gradually piled by the news of the cataclysm which is sweeping on the broken-hearted monarch. Un- generous France, pitiless as a sated harlot is, when ruin overtaketh him whose hand hath loaded her with gems, France, like Delilah, now betrays her lord. Many-tongued, wild-hair'd, mad, with fiery eyes and naked crimson limbs, upriseth the old Spectre of the Red to stab unhappy France ; the Chorus singing the fall of Paris. The bravery of the Parisians, the fearlessness of death, the hatred of capitulation, the heroism of the women, and the whole terrible struggle of a wounded and fallen but not ignoble foe, are told in fiery, inspiriting language. And Napoleon soliloquises thus :
O those dark years Of Empire ! He who tames the tiger, and lies Pillow'd upon his neck in a lone cave, Is safer. Who could sleep on such a bed ? Mine eyes were ever dry of the pure dew God scatters on the lids of happy men ; Watching with fascinated gaze the orbs. Ring within ring of blank and bestial light,
102 ROBERT BUCHANAN
Where the wild fury slept : seeking all arts
To soothe the savage instinct in its throes ' Of passionate unrest. One cold hand held
Sweet morsels for the furious thing to lap, i
And with the other, held behind my back, i
I clutch'd the secret steel : oft, lest its teeth )
Should fasten on its master, cunningly «
Turning its wrath against the shapes that moved i
Outside its splendid lair ; until at last, l
Let forth to the mad light of War, it sprang I
Shrieking and sought to rend me. O thou beast ! ,'
Art thou so wild this day ? and dost thou thirst }
To fix on thine imperial ruler's throat ? I Why, have I bidden thee ' down,' and thou hast crouch'd
Tamely as any hound ! Thou shalt crouch yet, '\
And bleed with shamefuller stripes ! "
And again :
O had I held the scourge in my right hand,
Tighten'd the yoke instead of loosening,
It had not been so ill with me as now !
But Pity found me with her sister Fear,
And lured me. He who sitteth on a throne
Should have no counsellors who come in tears ;
But rather that still voice within his brain,
Imperturbable as his own cold eyes
And viewless as his coldly flowing blood ;
Rather a heart as strong as the great heart
Driving the hot life through a hon's thews ;
Rather a will that moves to its desire
As steadfast as the silent-footed cloud. 1
What peevish humour did my mother mix !|
With that immortal ichor of our race
Which unpolluted fiU'd mine uncle's veins? ,|
He lash'd the world's Kings to his triumph-car i
And sat like marble while the fiery wheels
Dript blood beneath him : tho' the live earth shriek'd
Below him, he was calm, and like a god j
Cold to the eloquence of human tears,
Cold to the quick, cold as the Ught of stars, j
Cold as the hand of Death on the damp brow, ' i
Cold as Death brooding on a battlefield
In the white after-dawn,— from west to east
Royal he moved as the red wintry sun.
He never flatter'd Folly at his feet ;
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 103
He never sought to syrup Infamy ; He, when the martyrs curst him, drew around him The purple of his glory and passed on Indifferently like Olympian Jove.
Yet, early or late, all fall. No fruit can hang for ever on the tree. Daily the tyrant and the martyr meet Naked at Death's door, with the fatal mark Both brows being branded. Doth the world then slay Only its anarchs ? Doth the lightning flash Smite Caesar and spare Brutus ? Nay, by heaven ! Rather the world keeps for its paracletes Torture more subtle and more piteous doom Than it dispenses to its torturers. Tiberius, w^ith his foot on the world's neck, Smileth his cruel smile and groweth grey. Half dead already with the weight of years Drinketh the death he is too frail to feel, While in his noon of life the Man Divine Hath died in anguish at Jerusalem.
Ah, old Theology, thou strikest home !
' Evil must suffer — Good ordains to suffer ' —
Sayst thou ? Did He then quaff His cup of tears
Freely, who might have dash'd it down, and ruled ?
The world was ready with an earthly crown,
And yet He wore it not. Ah, He was wise !
Had He but sat upon a human throne.
With all the kingdom's beggars at His feet.
And all its coffers open at His side.
He had died more shameful death, yea. He had fallen
Even as the Caesars. Rule the world with Love ?
Tame savage human nature with a kiss ?
Turn royal cheeks for the brute mob to smite ?
He knew men better, and He drew aside,
Ordain'd to do and suffer, not to reign.
After a Choric Interlude, in which the spirits call upon the Nations to cry * Hold, enough !' to the Teuton who stands with his spiked heel on the neck of France, and in which Interlude The Perfect State is painted, the scene is shifted to the camp outside Paris, in which the Kaiser, the Chancellor,
104 ROBERT BUCHANAN
and others play a leading part. A prolonged monologue of Bismarck is the leading force in this scene— a monologue in which is pictured the history of France and its conquest by the Teuton :
Let France walk forth in sackcloth, let her wrists
Wear gyves ; set, too, a fool's-cap on her head,
With ' Glory ' for a label writ in blood ;
Then let a trumpeter before her go.
And let him sound, and between whiles aloud
Read the long record of enormities,
And ending each, strike sharply with the scourge
On the bare shoulders of the penitent ;
And let the little children of the earth
Follow and point, while good wives raise their hands,
And honest burghers nodding pipe in mouth.
Standing at doors with broad good-humour'd stare,
Mutter aloud, ' Thank God ! the world is free ! '
The hatred of the country of the Gaul, the Messa- lina of the nations, * a thing of many lovers, luring all, constant to none, adulterous with all, constant to nothing but inconstancy,' is made apparent in every line of the Chancellor's harangue; and in contrast to the bitterness of his hatred-stenched words, is heard the Chorus :
Blessed is the Light in his hand swinging, Waving bright white pinions Uke a dove ;
Blessed is the Sword that he is bringing. Such as holy spirits wield above ;
Such another brand arose in beauty
O'er the Gate of Paradise up-springing.
Mother, hearken— it is the Sword of Duty ; Mother, hearken — it is the Light of Love !
Awakening, in one strong hand, O mother,
Take the shining weapon of the free. And the sweet Lamp grasping in the other.
Lift it high that all the world may see.
•THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 105
Bought with bloody tears and bitterest sorrow, They are thine for ever, martyr-mother ! Thou shalt wear them on some golden morrow, Dawn shall come, the storm of God shall flee.
And because thy queenly robe is riven. Thou shalt win a raiment star-en wrought—
Under the new dawn and the blue heaven Thou shalt wear this raiment blood hath bought ;
Further, since thy heart hath cast off weakness,
For thy forehead shall a crown be given.
Mother, hearken— it is the Robe of Meekness ; Mother, hearken — it is the Crown of Thought !
Bismarck, too, faces the thought of how quick events fly and how rapidly the God of to-day may lie in the dust to-morrow :
'Tis so easy To cast down Idols ! The tide so pitilessly Washes each name from the waste sands of time ! 'Twas yestermorn the Man of Mysteries fell — Whose turn comes next ?
There are many other scenes which it is impos- sible even to hint at here. The drama contains a whole system of political ethics, and a fairly complete dramatic and poetic representation of the various events of that time, when the hearts of nations were rent, and the hatred of nations blackened the face of Europe. No- where has the poet caught the spirit of battle better than in the description of the fighting round Paris, conveyed through the medium of the Chorus in variable metre. The movement in this part of the drama is irresistible, and, in more ways than one, this is the most essen- tially dramatic part of it, and approaches nearest to our conception of the choruses in the Greek
io6 ROBERT BUCHANAN
tragedies. Here are one or two passages which suggest the spirit of action and change as de- picted by the Chorus :
Onward, still nearing-
The eyes that flash on them ; Onward unfearing,
Tho' the death-bolts crash on them, Torn asunder By lightning and thunder, Though the black shells thicken
And rain red death on them, Rent and stricken.
With Fire's fierce breath on them, Still forward winning, But ever thinning, Onward they go,
Over dying and dead. Leaving the snow
Not white but red.
And now like a torrent,
Furious, horrent.
From his lair in the dark
Springs the foe ; and hark ! Like the waters meeting
They gather and scream. While drums are beating
And the death's-eyes gleam ! — Like trees of the forest When the storm-wind is sorest, Like waves of the ocean They meet in wild motion, They reel, they advance.
They gather — they stand ; Their wild weapons glance.
They are scattered like sand.
The light is glowing
Around blood-red. The winds are blowing. And the clouds are snowing
On the heaps of dead. The white snows cover them. The swords flash over them.
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 107
Death waits each way for thetn, — O bless them, pray for them ! They are mingled like water, They are grappled in slaughter, Face to face hke wolves glaring, With eyes fiercely staring, Grappled and crying.
Rank within rank. Dead, living, and dying,
Teuton and Frank : Like a cloud struck by lightning
And rent into rain. Darkening and brightening
They cover the plain.
And let us not omit this picture of France in her downfall :
Who passeth there Naked and bare, A bloody sword upraising ? Who with their moan GUdes past alone. At the black heaven gazing ? Limbs thin and stark. Eyes sunken and dark, The hghtning round her leaping ? What shape floats past Upon the blast. Crouching in pain and creeping ?
Behold ! her eyes to heaven are cast, And they are red with weeping.
Say a prayer thrice
With Ups of ice : 'Tis she— yea, and no other ;
Look not at me
So piteously, O France— O martyr mother !
O whither now,
With branded brow And bleeding heart, art flying ?
Whither away ?
O stand ! O stay ! Tho' winds, waves, clouds are crying- Dawn Cometh swift— 'twill soon be day — The Storm of God is dying.
io8 ROBERT BUCHANAN
She will.not speak, ;
But, spent and weak, ']
Droops her proud head and goeth ; ,
She ! she crawls past, ■
Upon the blast, i
Whither no mortal knoweth — /
O'er fields of fight.
Where glimmer white f,
Death's steed and its gaunt rider— |
Thro' storm and snow.
Behold her go, i^
With never a friend beside her — ^^
O Shepherd of all winds that blow, ■
To Quiet Waters guide her ! |
There, for a space,
Let her sad face |
Fall in a tranquil mirror — j
There spirit-sore
May she count o'er ■,
Her sin, her shame, her error, — u
And read with eyes '
Made sweet and wise j
What her strong God hath taught her, i
With face grown fair I
And bosom bare And hands made clean from slaughter —
O Shepherd, seek and find her there, Beside some Quiet Water !
Amongst other scenes, the crowning of the Kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors as Emperor of a United Germany may be noted for the vigorous and pic- turesque Song of the Sword, and for the oration of the Kaiser on the future prosperity of his country and of the peace of Europe ; the scene concluding with the voices of the Chorus singing :
O God who leadest on the mortal race. Whither they know not, through the wondrous years,
Thou mystery whose sad meaning none may trace, Light on our eyes and Music in our ears,
Spirit that punishest and scatterest grace. Lord of all losses and all doubts and fears,
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' 109
Shedding upon the self-same hour and place The doubt that maddens and the faith that cheers, — Is there ever a smile upon a living face That doth not mean some living face's tears ?
The Epilogue is spoken by Time, who re- hearses the actions of the play, and draws the moral :
' O foolish mortal race,' I hear ye cry,
' Who will, yet will not learn, and live, and take
Their birthright, and be free ! ' Ay, friends, indeed,
Man is a scholar eager indeed to learn,
But most forgetful having learn'd. His wits
Go wandering, his vacant eyes are caught
By foolish pictures and by idle gleams,
GUbly he learns and instantly forgets.
Again, again, and o'er and o'er again,
He tries the same old lesson, utters it
So loud and well that out of every star
Angels look out with gleaming eyes and hope ; —
But in a moment his bewildered brain
Shuts like a lantern, and is dark as night.
And perorates thus :
Ay, but I weary. O I weary. Sleep
Were better. Would the mighty play were o'er !
Again and yet again the same old scenes,
The same set speeches, the same blind despairs
And miserable hopes, the same sick fear
Of quitting the poor stage ; so that I lose
All count of act and scene and speech, confuse
Scenes present and scenes past, actors long still
With actors flaunting now their little hour.
How like each other all the players speak
Who play the tyrants ! how the kings and queens
Each follow each like bees from out a hive !
Still the old speeches, the old scenes, despite
The surface-change of costume and the trick
Of posture. Ay, I weary ! O to see
The great black Curtain fall, the music cease,
All darken, the House empty of its host
Of strange intelligences who behold
Our Drama, till the great Hand, creeping forth
In silence, one by one puts out the lights.
no ROBERT BUCHANAN
The Epilude contains the following ;
The Soul shall arise. Power and its vanity, Pride's black insanity, Lust and its revelry Shall with war's devilry Pass from humanity.
The Soul shall arise.
The Soul shall arise. Sweetness and sanity. Slaying- all vanity. Shall to love's holiness. Meekness and lowliness. Shepherd humanity.
The Soul shall arise.
A drama of some four hundred and fifty pages is difficult to condense for the purpose before us, but perhaps some glimpse has been obtained of the 'motif and general type of action of this play — not written, it need not be explained, for the purposes of the stage. In nearly every instance the various characters are made the mouthpiece of a fiery rhetoric, the tempering and the refining influences of the whole lying in the hands of the Chorus, which breathes the essence of the eternal lav/, in contrast to the dramatic representation of points of view by the various characters of the drama. As for its historical accuracy, it is difficult to judge, for the flight of less than thirty years seems to us to be insufficient for the assumption of the role of the estimating historian. It is only fair, however, to the poet to add that, in a note to the 'Songs of the Terrible Year,' republished in the collected edition of his poems, he says: 'The "Songs,"
'THE DRAMA OF KINGS' iii
inasmuch as they formed a portion of "The Drama of Kings," preceded by a long period the publica- tion of Victor Hugo's series under the same admirable title. "The Drama of Kings" was written under a false conception, which no one discarded sooner than the author; but portions of it are preserved in the present collection, because, although written during the same feverish and evanescent excitement, they are the distinct lyrical products of the author's mind, and perfectly complete in themselves.'
CHAPTER V
'ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES,' 'WHITE ROSE AND RED,' WITH A NOTE ON CRITICISM
The year 1873 will always have a unique place in the bibliographical history of Mr. Buchanan. It was in this year that he risked a fall with the Philistine, and succeeded even beyond his most ambitious hope. ' The Ishmael of Song ' had the courage to publish the two volumes, 'St. Abe and his Seven Wives,' and ' White Rose and Red,' anonymously, with the result that he soon had his enemies in his net. With unanimous voice those who had scourged the poet before joined in the song of praise. 'Pest on Mr. Buchanan's dreaming! to oblivion with all such aspiring versifiers! here we have a poet indeed— here is altogether the true characteristic of genius ! ' and so on. The poet was a poet of patience. ' St. Abe ' ran rapidly into four or five editions, and then the thunderbolt burst. The author of 'St. Abe' was Robert Buchanan, the Ishmael of Song, the out- cast Scotsman— he who sang of trulls and costermongers — 'the Celtic madman'; and there was sadness over the land.
The present writer cannot go back to those
112
'ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' 113
stirring days in the literary dovecots, but an inquiry into the reception which was accorded by the Press leaves him with the conclusion, that the poet reached his high-water mark of con- temporary praise in the testimony which was accorded to him in his anonymous robes. From the facts associated with the publication and critical reception of these poems, and calling to mind the aspect of the critics before and at the time of their publication, and the recoil which took place when the secret was out, are we to infer that the golden era of criticism is but an ephemeron floating in dreamland ?
There is a deadly want of the sense of humour in attacking criticism as a whole. Burke said something similar about charges against a whole nation, and an analogous remark has a general bearing. Criticism, we imagine, is no worse at present— it is probably a great deal better— than it was formerly. At any rate, the men and women who criticise have in general more culture, and con- siderably more special knowledge than we are wont to associate with the past. We are not speaking here of the greater lights, but of those who constitute the general personnel of criticism. It is the unevenness of the process which irritates, the disinterested insight of one critic, and the nebulous ignorance of another. To come into genuine emotional relation with any work, a critic must have sympathy; if he adds imagination to this, he becomes as much an artist as the man he attempts to criticise. But however sympathetic
H
114 ROBERT BUCHANAN
a critic may be, he tends to drift towards academic methods — that is to say, he becomes, unconsciously it maybe, a supporter of academies, for these exist in letters as well as in painting. These academies spring into existence through the ideals and methods set by a new writer with novel ideals of art finding a large following in the literary world, and are at first subjected to the same organised suppres- sion, at the hands of the older academies, that in a later stage they extend to other new and revolu- tionary, and therefore healthy, movements in letters, which in their turn are by the grace of a number of enthusiastic, yet generally less intelligent dis- ciples, converted into academies. As we have said in another place, 'Criticism has a tendency to become the gospel of a sort of literary trades- unionism ; all organisations have their con- ventions and their creeds, offence against the former being deemed in a sense more offensive than a disputation of the latter.'
But it is idle to deny that criticism may be viewed from a lower level than this, and in this instance let us repeat what we were called upon to say on another occasion : ^ * Though it be a mere belated platitude, it is true, nevertheless, that all criticism is futile which allows any unreasoned aversion to the personality or point of view of the author, or permits a prejudice against a former utterance, to interfere with the unprejudiced estimation of any literary effort. We must still be travelling far in the wilderness of despair, when
1 'The Struggle for Success.'
*ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' 115
an author finds it impossible to have his work presented fairly to the readers of literary criticism, owing, it may be, to the fact that the virility of his personality and the heaviness of his own critical artillery have caused offence in the critical dove- cots, and when it is an open secret that there are men resplendent in the gilded uniforms of official criticism, who day by day lie in wait for possible opportunities to cast a slur on the literary re- putations of those for whom they have a personal dislike.'
We are not attempting to preach Utopianism, nor do we fail to recognise the limitations of mere humanity. It takes a lot of dosing to cure human nature. This breaks out even in our prayers, and adds not a little to the colour and the interest of life. But this need not deter us from attempting to come a little nearer to critical salvation. In this instance we may recall an incident in the life of David Hackston of Rathillet, that might be used as a parable in any prospected literary bible. Hackston was one of the leaders, with Balfour of Burleigh, of the Covenanters at the battle of Drumclog, and is associated in history with the murder of Archbishop Sharp, but in this wise, that having beforehand had many private disagreements with Sharp, he refused to lay his hand upon him in case it might be said that the deed sprang from a personal and not a political dislike. *Verb. sap.'
For many of the worst aspects of literary criticism the public has itself to blame. Reviews that attempt a serious estimate of an author's
ii6 ROBERT BUCHANAN
work are voted dull and tasteless, and self- preservation being the first law as of yore, the result of such voting is evident. If the critic is not witty, satirical, or impertinent on recurring occasions, the public protests, with the result that some one, generally a new and sensitive author, must suffer— if not a new author, one that has been given a bad name, and who is not allowed even the benefit of a good hanging, but is put upon an everlasting rack for the benefit of the critic and the amusement of the public.
Critics are men in a world of men, not gods, and in the long-run are neither better nor worse than other men. They have generally more sense of humour, more sense of perspective, and although they have little gods of their own, they have a healthy distaste for universal idolatry. Accustomed to study many points of view, they are at least catholic, if not profound, and are often astoundingly generous. They, at least, keep us from fanaticism, and are keen to observe, when we parade our gorgeous robes, if there is a button loose.
But literary dressmaking may run to extremes, and so may the profession of literary housemaid. The long bamboo, with the feathered head, is useful enough occasionally, but to depend upon it exclusively is not to bring us to any better vision of what we are regarding. The housemaid in literature is curiously enough often a person of great culture, a person, in fact, of large historical knowledge, and may be a poet of distinction
'ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' 117
and a classicist of fame ; but history, poetry, philology will not boil the pot, and the profession of literary housemaid will at least secure for him (for as in University theatricals, the 'she' is a 'he') a most healthy-looking yearly income. Quick to discern spots in the sun and dust on the chariot-wheel— that is to say, printers' errors and grammatical slips— he is able by his adroit- ness, never-ending wit, and facility of grammar, to enlarge the spots and the dust to grievous literary sins; and the public, always ready to forgive a man if he be witty and avowedly clever, preserves for him the tenderest morsels and the chief place at the feast. We for our own part would not dismiss him for worlds, but we must remember that his natural base as housemaid is the pantry. When he has taken off his apron and changed his cloth, he may have a chair in the library.
With regard to criticism as applied to Mr. Buchanan, as we have hinted before, the blame rests not wholly with the poet's critics. Some time ago the present writer was expressing himself in language of a similar nature to the above, when a well-known London critic inter- rupted him with the remark that Mr. Buchanan was only being paid back with interest for the amount of criticism he had bestowed on an un- willing public. This, of course, gave the whole matter away, for there can surely be no justifica- tion for a professed critic to diminish the value of his own work by unfair methods of criticism.
Ii8 ROBERT BUCHANAN
because the man he is dealing with practises the art himself. We are not attempting to justify Mr. Buchanan's numerous and often highly flavoured and irrelevant literary utterances. They must be judged on the same footing as that which we have been bold enough to suggest as the proper basis of criticism. And it is as well to remember that Mr. Buchanan is not, after all, the inexorable person he is often made out. For one piece of early criticism the poet made a withdrawal and an apology that was both straightforward and noble. In the case of an old enemy he said: 'That I should ever have underrated the exquisite work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is simply a proof of the incompetency of all criticism, however honest, which is con- ceived adversely, hastily, and from an un- sympathetic point of view; but that I should have ranked myself for the time being with the Philistines, and encouraged them to resist an ennobling and refining literary influence, must remain to me a matter of permanent regret,' and in the same breath dedicates to the dead poet his greatest work of fiction, * God and the Man.'
I would have snatch'd a bay leaf from thy brow, Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head ;
In peace and tenderness I bring you now A lily-flower instead.
The first of the three volumes we have now to consider, 'St. Abe and his Seven Wives,' is a satire on the futility of Mormonism, the embodiment of the doctrines and politics of
'ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' 119
the Latter Day Saints. The poem has been made the medium of expressing the poet's admirable sense of humour, a humour touched with that breath of tenderness which is seldom wanting in Mr. Buchanan's work. In this poem the poet has allowed himself the free use of the spirit of comedy in poetry. A critic who named James Russell Lowell as the possible author, gave it as his opinion that the substance of it was as strong as anything in the entire range of English satirical literature. It is dramatic, the humour is never forced, the local colouring is painted freely and with artistic success, the metres are eminently suited to the dramatic purposes of the work, and as for its effect on Mormonism itself, we can only quote what the * Spectator ' of that day said : * We believe that this new book will paralyse Mormon resistance far more than any amount of speeches in Con- gress or messages from President Grant, by bringing home to the minds of the millions the ridiculous, diabolic side of the peculiar institu- tion. The canto called "The Last Epistle of St. Abe to the Polygamist," with its humorous narra- tive of the way in which the Saint, sealed to seven wives, fell in love with one, and thence- forward could not abide the jealousy felt by the other six, will do more to weaken the last defence of Mormonism — that, after all, the women like it — than a whole realm of narratives about the discontent in Utah.' It is not a poem that lends itself easily to
120 ROBERT BUCHANAN
quotation, but we may take one or two passages more isolated than the rest which may suggest the spirit of the context.
The poem opens with the declamatory sorrow of Joe Wilson in having his fiancee spirited away by one of the Apostles — the Apostle Hiram Higginson. He is very wroth with all the world, and especially with women :
Women is women ! Thet 's their style — Talk reason to them and they '11 bile ; But baste 'em soft as any pig-eon, With lies and rubbish and religion ; Don't talk of flesh and blood and feeling, But Holy Ghost and blessed healing ; Don't name things in too plain a way, Look a heap warmer than you say, Make 'em believe they 're serving true The Holy Spirit and not you, Prove all the world but you 's damnation, And call your kisses jest salvation ; Do this, and press 'em on the sly, You 're safe to win 'em. Jest you try !
He reproaches his Cissy as to her change of manner to him, and suspecting physical distress, has his interrogation smothered by the following :
It ain't my stomach, nor my head, It ain't my flesh, it ain't my skin. It 's holy spirits here within !
He discovers her secret, and vowing vengeance, the woman implores mercy :
' Spare him ! ' I cried, and gev a shout, ' What 's this yer shine you air about — What cuss is this that I jest see With that big book upon your knee. Cuddling up close and making sham To read a heap of holy flam ? '
Her brothers have little sympathy with the
•ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' I2i
Apostle, which fact is hinted in the following lines :
We 've done our best, don't hev a doubt,
To keep the old Apostle out :
We 've trained the dogs to seize and bite him,
We 've got up ghosts at night to fright him,
Doctor'd his hoss and so upset him.
Put tickle-grass in bed to fret him,
Jalap'd his beer and snuffed his tea too,
Gunpowder in his pipe put free too ;
A dozen times we 've well-nigh kill'd him,
We 've skeer'd him, shaken him, and spill'd him.
In the City of the Saints, whither we are led by the next canto, we have a dialogue between the Stranger and several of the Bishops. Here are some of Bishop Peter's views :
stranger, I 'm with you there, indeed :— it 's been the best of
nusses ; Polygamy is to our creed what meat and drink to us is. Destroy that notion any day, and all the rest is brittle. And Mormondom dies clean away like one in want of vittle. It 's meat and drink, it 's life, it 's power ! to heaven its breath doth
win us ! It warms our vitals every hour ! it 's Holy Ghost within us ! Jest lay that notion on the shelf, and all life's springs are frozen ! I 've half-a-dozen wives myself, and wish I had a dozen !
We hear of St. Abe, who seems to have fallen in the estimation of his brother Bishops :
And yet how well I can recall the time when Abe was younger — Why not a chap among us all went for the notion stronger. When to the mother-country he was sent to wake the sinning, He shipp'd young lambs across the sea by flocks — he was so
winning ; O but he had a lively style, describing saintly blisses ! He made the spirit pant and smile, and seek seraphic kisses ! How the bright raptures of the Saint fresh lustre seemed to
borrow, While black and awful he did paint the one-wived sinner's sorrow ! Each woman longed to be his bride, and by his side to slumber — ' The more the blesseder ! ' he cried, still adding to the number.
122 ROBERT BUCHANAN
We catch dramatic and picturesque glimpses of life in the Salt Lake City, and of the pleasures of unlimited domesticity. The calm resignation of the wives, a resignation evidently born of expediency, is pictured thus :
When in their midst serenely walks their Master and their Mentor, They 're hush'd, as when the Prophet stalks down holy church's
centre ! They touch his robe, they do not move, those blessed wives and
mothers, And, when on one he shineth love, no envy fills the others ; They know his perfect saintUness, and honour his affection— And, if they did object, I guess he 'd settle that objection !
As for St. Abe's wives, we have here quite a subject for contrast :
BISHOP JOSS.
It ain't a passionate flat like Abe can manage things in your way !
They teased that most etarnal babe, till things were in a poor way.
I used to watch his thorny bed, and bust my sides with laughter.
Once give a female hoss her head you '11 never stop her after.
It 's one thing getting seal'd, and he was mighty fond of Sealing,
He 'd all the human heat, d' ye see, without the saintly feeling.
His were the wildest set of girls that ever drove man silly.
Each full of freaks and fal-de-lals, as frisky as a filly.
One puU'd this way, and t' other that, and made his life a mockery,
They 'd all the feelings of a cat scampaging 'mong the crockery.
Bishop Joss had an aunt, Tabitha Brooks, a virgin under fifty. 'She warn't so much for pretty looks, but she was wise and thrifty ' :
She 'd seen the vanities of life, was good at 'counts and brewin' — Thinks I, ' Here 's just the sort of Wife to save poor Abe from ruin.'
He bestows her on the unwilling St. Abe :
And round his neck she blushing hung, part holding, part caressing, And murmur'd with a faltering tongue, ' O Abe, I '11 be a blessing.'
'ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES' 123
Under the (at that time) six, St. Abe has a mournful career :
His house was peaceful as a church, all solemn, still, and saintly ; And yet he 'd tremble at the porch, and look about him faintly ; And tho' the place was all his own, with hat in hand he 'd enter, Like one thro' public buildings shown, soft treading down the centre ;
until the arrival of Jason Jones's child, and then, his soul opening to love for the first time, storms brew in the household, and St. Abe is unhappier than before.
There 's vinegar in Abe's pale face enough to sour a barrel, Goes crawling up and