Robert Buchanan; some account of his life, his life's work, and his literary friendships

Front matter

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

Preface

" TV T OBODY could tell the story of his life so well 1 \| as Robert Buchanan himself" (wrote Mr. T. P. O'Connor in M.A.P.), and I feel this statement to be so absolutely true that I have endeavoured in compiling these Memoirs, to allow the Poet as far as possible to speak for himself With this object in view I have been most careful to gather together every scrap of reminiscence which he has published from time to time in various newspapers and magazines. He knew himself better than any man or woman could possibly know him, no matter how intimate their acquaintance with him might be, and so I have endeavoured to allow him to reveal himself to the world.

I suppose no one knew him better than I did, and yet even I was debarred from the knowledge of some of his most sacred thoughts and feelings until after he had been laid to rest. A careful study of his diaries, and some of the private papers which he left behind him revealed to me certain phases of his character of which I had had no previous knowledge whatever.

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The task, though an arduous one, has been to me a labour of love, and if, after a perusal of this volume the heart of the reader is touched by the struggles of a man who fought so bravely for the good of Humanity, I shall have reaped my reward.

I wish to tender my best thanks to my brother and sister artists who have so generously assisted me in my work. To Mr. G. R. Sims, Mr. R. E. Francillon, Mr. Henry S. Salt, and Mr. Henry Murray, I am specially indebted for certain pages of reminiscence which have been written for this work, and which I feel sure will be of exceptional interest to the public.

I have also to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr. Walter Scott for permission to quote from a Preface written by Mr. Buchanan to the Poems (Canterbury Edition) of the Hon. Roden Noel ; of Mr. T. P. O'Connor for permission to quote from " M.A.P." ; of Mr. Philip Welby for permission to quote from an article on Mr. Buchanan, written by Mr. Henry Murray and issued by Mr. Welby in book form, under the title, "Robert Buchanan and other Essays " ; to Mr. William Freeland for permission to quote from the Glasgow Evening Times. I am also indebted to the Right Hon. W. E. H. Lecky, M.P., to Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. William Canton, Mr. Alexander Strahan, Mr. Lionel Gowing, Mrs. Macanally, Dr. Harry Campbell, Dr. Gorham, Dr. Stodart Walker, and the Rev. T. Varney and Miss Wylie for permission to quote from letters, and I wish also to publicly acknowledge my indebtedness to my dear friend. Miss Edith Francillon, whose advice and help during the progress of this work have been of the utmost value to me. Though her name does not appear in the following pages, she was a constant visitor at our house, and was intimately

Preface ix

acquainted with and much esteemed by both the Poet and his wife.

My own association with Mr. Buchanan has been of so exceptional a character, that a word or so concerning the position which I held in his household may not be out of place here. In the eye of the law I was his sister-in-law, but that relationship could not possibly convey any idea of the tie which bound us together. Briefly told, the story is as follows : When my sister had been married some three or four years, and was still childless, she resolved to adopt me. In doing this she was anxious that any love which I might have to give should be given to herself and to her husband, so I was taken from my home at a very tender age and for many years was never allowed to revisit it. When at length I was permitted to see my mother I remember looking at her very much as little Paul Dombey looked at Miss Pipchin, wondering all the time whether she could possibly be my mother, or whether she was some " strange person " whom I was told to regard in that light. I turned away with a great sob and threw myself into my sister's arms, clinging to her as the only mother whom I was thenceforth to know. As to the Poet, I was always taught both by his wife and his mother, to look up to him as a model of all the virtues, and my line of conduct was invariably determined by his approval or the reverse. If I proffered some childish request it was always met with, " Yes, if Robert says you may," or " No, I don't think Robert would like that," and though I was sometimes wayward and wilful as children too often are, I never wavered, I trust, in that great love which it was my duty as well as my pleasure to give. His frown always made me wretched, his smile made me glad, and I was never so

X Preface

happy as when I had earned his praise. When my sister died, it was her dying wish that I should remain with him, when his mother died the request was again whispered into my ear by Hps which were fast growing cold. During his last sad, terrible illness my friends wrote to me praising me for what they called my " generosity and self-sacrifice," when indeed there was neither generosity nor self-sacrifice to praise. The greatest pleasure in life, it seems to me, is to be able to minister to the wants of those we love, and I did what I did because in the doing of it lay my only chance of happiness. When at length my task was ended I felt only as if all the happiness had been taken out of my life, but for his sake I rejoiced that his pains were ended, and that he had gone to rejoin those whom he had so passionately loved.

HARRIETT JAY.

Southend-on-Sea.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE . . . . . . vii

I. HIS BIRTH ..... I

Chapter I

ROBERT BUCHANAN, poet, novelist, dramatist, was born at Caversvvall in Lancashire on the i8th of August, 1841.

An unworldly man, whose life was chiefly occupied with the child's puzzle of natural religion. A worker, yet a dreamer who fought Don Quixote-like with many windmills ; a lover of truth and beauty, yet darkly doomed to much ignoble pot-boiling, a dweller between the fringe of literary Bohemia and the beginning of mere cloudland, who, while giving a careless glance at the present generation, ever fixed a long, hopeful, wistful look towards posterity.

The story of his life which to the best of my ability I am about to set down, is in many respects a sad one. He had few friends and many enemies, and he received from the world many cruel blows. From the beginning I fear he lacked the true literary temper, but he always tried to preach the truth as he saw it, never counting the cost to himself. A fearless, upright, honest man, whose life, if rightly studied, cannot fail to be of interest to the world.

It was perhaps because he heard the name of God for the first time so late in boyhood that the mention

2 '

of that name never grew tiresome to him. He was born in the strangest odour of infidelity, hence infidehty amused him less than most men, but for infidels and revolters he had ever a kindly feeling quite irrespective of their creed or his. His life was a lonely one — he was from first to last a lonely man ; not unsociable by disposition, not unsympathetic, but seldom travelling far for sympathy — always climbing, climbing, but never quite reaching the heights on which he had set his intellectual ideals. Had his father not broken down in health and fortune all might have been very different with him; he would at least have had a foothold apart from the dangerous quicksands of literature. For many years he suffered a martyrdom from ill health, from the infinite delicacies of an over-wrought nervous system, thence came isolation, friendlessness, bitterness, misconception, and despair.

Perhaps no man has been oftener abused, yet no man needed kindness so much and received so little. He was stabbed again and again, and scarcely one arm was ever stretched out in his defence ; yet he bore his burthen with cheerfulness and infinite hope, and now, in reviewing his life, I can truly say that it was honest even in its utmost blindness ; unselfish in its one lingering aspiration to be truthful, and not to fear the truth. He was never an ambitious man ; he reaped what he sowed, and it was a blessed harvest ; for, in spite of many trials and temptations, he never lost the deep poetic heart which he brought with him into the world as his only birthright.

As far back as the year 1891, when giving some account of his early experiences, he wrote : —

"At the time when the benign Don Quixote of modern Socialism, Robert Owen, was issuing his propaganda of a New Moral World, and when his words of promise sounded like a trumpet-note to so many youthful sons of toil, one of the first to respond was a poor journeyman tailor in Ayrshire, who, throwing down goose and scissors, straightway aspired to the role of Socialist reformer ; was soon welcomed and appreciated for his keen Scottish intelligence, his wide, if uninstructed reading, and his rugged eloquence on the platform ; in due time became one of Owen's most valued Missionaries ; and before many years had elapsed was famous among his own people, and infamous among the orthodox, as Robert Buchanan, poet and iconoclast. That man was my father.

" Sometimes stumping the country as a controversialist on the side of Free-Thought, sometimes travelling from town to town with a magic lantern (one of his great feats being the exposure of the popular theory of ' ghosts,' through the production of a mystic Skeleton which he sent dancing among his affrighted audience), sometimes following his gentle Leader into perilous places where the new gospel was hateful or unknown, he laboured pertinaciously in the good cause till, in or about 1840, well known to Socialists as the Communistic Year, he married Miss Margaret Williams, daughter of a well-known solicitor (of Socialistic leanings) in Stoke-upon-Trent. Robert Owen himself honoured the civil ceremony before the Registrar, and gave Miss Williams away. About a year afterwards I was born — if not in the odour of sanctity, at least in the full and increasing daylight of the New Moral World.

" It was, as the reader is doubtless aware, a stirring time. The wave of the great Revolution had not yet spent itself, and every day some doomed structure was subsiding into the waste of troubled waters. Many failures had not yet daunted the apostles of Liberty and Co-operation. Instead of the stagnant pessimism which now covers the green fields of Democracy with loathsome pools, an ardent optimism was everywhere at work. Owen's clear call to arms had been heard all over the land, bringing recruits from the tailor's shop, the smithy, the cobbler's bench, the manufactory, the plough-tail, from every place indeed, where the poor sons of toil had learned to read and think. Many of these men, my father among the number, had splendid gifts ; all had the courage of their opinions.

" Those who had the happiness to know Robert Owen knew him as the most benign of men, in whom the enthusiasm of humanity was combined with the most extraordinary powers of practical business. In the words of Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, ' Mr. Owen looked for nothing less than to renovate the world, to extirpate all evil, to banish all punishment, to create like views and like wants, and to guard against all conflicts and all hostilities.' His benevolence, however, was entirely scientific — he was, in fact, the father and founder of modern social science. His success, for a time at least, was phenomenal. In a letter to the Times newspaper in 1834 he said, addressing his friend Lord Brougham : ' I believe it is known to your lordship that from every point of view no experiment was ever so successful as the one I conducted at New Lanark, although it was commenced and continued in opposition to all the oldest and strongest prejudices of mankind. For twenty-nine years we did without the necessity for magistrates or lawyers ; without a single legal punishment ; without any known poor's-rate, without intemperance or religious animosities. We reduced the hours of labour, well educated all the children from infancy, greatly improved the condition of the adults, diminished their daily hours of labour, paid interest on capital, and cleared upwards of ^300,000 of profit ! ' So far his mission had been practical, and had succeeded ; but in 1837 he delivered a formula which made him thenceforth the avowed enemy of all who held orthodox opinions.

" ' All the religions of the world,' he said, 'ARE wrong ! ' From that time forth the influential classes entirely deserted him. He became at once an apostle and a martyr. Personally a Theist, he preached universal toleration, a form of toleration which is, and always has been, to nine-tenths of mankind, quite intolerable.

"Only those who have carefully followed the history of the Socialistic movement under Owen can have any notion whatever of the condition of England in those troublous times. A freethinker, a proclaimer of the right to private judgment, often carried his life in his hand. The priest and the capitalist, the bigot and the landowner, worked everywhere against the new doctrines, which, they contended, were poisoning the air — the missionaries of Socialism were very generally regarded as agents of the Prince of Darkness conspiring to plunge the country into anarchy and revolution. Owen's views on religion were generally considered blasphemous, horrible, atheistical, but it was his ideas on marriage, in the moral programme which he advanced with persuasive eloquence, that aroused the most frenzied opposition, particularly among the women of the lower classes, who were firmly persuaded that the object was to rob them of their husbands and by reducing all sexual union to a simple contract, revokable at pleasure, to leave them at the mercy of male caprice and to bastardise their children. This delusion drove the wives and mothers of the toiling classes to absolute frenzy, and made them the chief leaders and abettors of the many acts of violence to which Owen's missionaries were subjected." ^

The poet's grandfather, known throughout the Midlands as " Lawyer Williams," was a very remarkable man. Quite early in his career he had come under the influence of Robert Owen and had accepted that philanthropist's ideas on social, political, and religious problems — in fact, he was a freethinker of the most advanced school. He fearlessly proclaimed his opinions in and out of season, and this exceptional candour, so far from hindering his progress in his profession, gained for him the respect of his most bitter opponents. It was a favourite dictum of his, that there was no such anachronism as an " honest lawyer," but he himself was honesty incarnate, a living refutation of his own dictum ; and his fearlessness, his unselfishness in helping the weak and in denouncing every form of injustice, earned for him the title of the " poor man's friend."

At the time that the war against Capital and Superstition was raging, "Lawyer Williams" followed his profession as a solicitor in Stoke-upon-Trent, and his house became the temporary home of every wandering preacher of the cause who visited the district. He entertained the lecturers, he presided at their meetings, he furthered, both publicly and privately, the dissemination of the new doctrines, and only his great popularity with the lower classes saved him from personal violence. Again and again when the ' " Latter Day Leaves."

mob rose in its fury, when public halls were wrecked and Owen's lecturers were compelled to fly for their lives, the only refuge in Stoke was the house of " Lawyer Williams," and while some trembling apostle of freethought was being smuggled away through the back door, the " poor man's friend " faced the furies and diverted their attention to his own person. Any other man's house would have been burned down or razed to the ground ; any other man would, in all likelihood, have been torn to pieces. Both the men and women of Stoke respected the man who had befriended them in a thousand ways, who had sacrificed time and money and reputation to the legal defence of the poorest and most wretched among them, and much as they loathed the opinions which he fearlessly shared, not one hand in all the crowd was raised against him. Nor was it among the poor and wretched alone that his name was a synonym for honesty, kindliness, and philanthropy. Even amongst the clergy, his bitterest opponents, he had sympathisers and well-wishers. Doctor Vale, the Vicar of Stoke, was the intimate friend of the lawyer and his wife, and on one occasion Mr. Williams protected him from the wild mob of hungry men and women who would otherwise have had his life.

To the lawyer and his wife were born two children, a son and a daughter, the latter of whom became the poet's mother. She was a very beautiful girl — blueeyed and golden-haired. Almost with her first breath she inhaled the atmosphere of Socialism and freethought. Throughout her long life she had two supreme objects of idolatry — her father, who reciprocated her passionate attachment, and Robert Owen, whom she had been taught to regard as the wisest and best of men.

To the house of " Lawyer Williams " came from time to time all the preachers of the cause. Among these men was the poet's father, who, when quite a boy, had run away from home to seek his fortune. He was a dark, somewhat reserved young man, an omnivorous reader, and a fairly fluent speaker, but it was in the height of fiery argument on the public platform that he appeared at his best. Some of his fellow missionaries excelled him in oratorical gifts, but in knowledge of the subjects discussed, and in range of general information he had no equal among them. His manners were far from courtly, but his strong intellectual qualities attracted Miss Williams, and before they had been very long acquainted they were engaged to be married. The marriage took place in the autumn of 1840, and on the i8th day of August, 1 84 1, Robert, their only son, was born. About twelve years later Mrs. Buchanan gave birth to a little girl, who died in infancy, so Robert was practically their only child.

The fact that his parents had no other surviving children was, I think, the chief misfortune of his life, as well as its crowning blessing. An only child, he became the idol of his mother, whose affection for him he returned with absolutely overmastering intensity. His feeling towards his father, he often said, was one of ordinary, though strong affection, but towards his mother it was far from ordinary. His earliest memories were of her beauty and quite girlish grace. She was a particularly young-looking woman at all times, and he could never, at any hour of his life, realise the fact that she was growing old. In looking at her even when she was close upon eighty years of age, he saw only the soft blue eyes and golden hair as he had seen them long ago, and I

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have heard him remark again and again that it always gave him a shock if any one happened to refer to her as "old," " I cannot imagine my mother old," he would say, and again, the very day after she died, " I do not feel that she is dead, for I cannot imagine the world without my mother ! " As I have said, he adored her, and was in turn adored. Thus reared and sheltered from every harsh influence, he grew sensitive beyond measure, and his naturally nervous temperament became so highly strung, that he was ill prepared for the struggles of the world. This was a misfortune, and the cause later on of infinite pain and heartache. He was spoiled by too much tenderness and solicitude, weakened by too many gusts of childish passion which wrung his heart the more because he was not openly demonstrative, but given on the contrary to the concealment of his deepest feelings. But the influence of his mother was not merely emotional. He learned from her teaching to be sympathetic and tender-hearted, to worship goodness and to rise in revolt against any form of injustice or oppression. The words of the great Humanitarians were on her lips, she had learned them at her father's knee, and he learned them in turn at hers.

From his parents he had no religious training whatever, yet slowly and imperceptibly there grew in him a deep and abiding sense of natural religion, of awe and reverence for the mysterious Power which moves the world. He could never remember when he first began to say his prayers, but he knew that as a child he said them, and later on to my knowledge on two memorable occasions he said them — first, by the dead body of his wife, next by the dead body of his mother, she who to him was the symbol of all that was beautiful and loving in humanity.

Chapter II Early Memories, 1841-50

"'' I ^HE reward of Socialist missionaries in those 1 days was, I fear, quite inadequate to their personal necessities, and my father was one of many who found it necessary to eke out a subsistence by reporting for the Press. Just after I was born he joined the staff of the Sun newspaper, combining with his occupation of reporter that of small newsvendor. A few months later, when I was still an infant, my mother went to join the community at Ham Common, in Surrey, the manager of which was Mr. William Oldham, whose chief eccentricity was a preference for wet sheets to dry ones. The inmates of Alcott House, or, as it was called, the Concordian, were vegetarians, objected to the use of even salt and tea, and, naturally, to all stimulants, and advocated entire abstinence from indulgences of the flesh, including marriage. My mother, as a married woman, was refused admission to the inner, or perfectly sacred, circle, which was presided over by Oldham, the grand " Pater." A diet consisting almost entirely of uncooked cabbage is apt to grow monotonous, and my mother did not remain at Ham Common long. A year or two later, however, when New Harmony

was established, she went on Robert Owen's special

Early Memories, 1841-50 11

invitation to Oueenvvood, near Wisbech, Norfolk, a baronial structure surrounded by spacious woods and promenades. The inmates of Queenwood, though they were all believers in the principle of association, consulted their own taste in matters of diet, but the most popular table in the Hall was the one where a vegetarian diet alone was served. It was, as I gathered, a happy and innocent community ; but infamous reports were spread concerning it by the antagonists of human progress ; it was, in fact, described as an immoral association. Members of the Church Orthodox were not likely to forgive a community founded to illustrate the doctrines of the man who denounced all religions as ' wrong,' and who on the platform and in the newspapers had so often shown the weak points in the armour of Christianity. 'Is it possible' asked an opponent of Socialism at Edinburgh, in 1838, 'to train an individual to believe that two and two make five ? ' ' We need not, I fancy, go far for an answer,' replied Owen, with his gentle smile and inimitable courtliness of manner, ' I fancy all of us know many persons who are trained to believe that three make one, and who think very ill of you if you differ from them.'

" I have often heard my mother speak of Robert Owen as the kindliest and most gracious of men, with an air of indomitable gentleness peculiarly irritating to individuals whose metier it was to discuss burning questions under burning excitement. I saw the good man often early in my life, but my recollection of him is kaleidoscopic — one tiny sparkle of memory mixed confusedly with things I have only heard. In our home, wherever it might be, he was a sort of religious presence. I heard his name long before I heard that of Jesus Christ. I was taught to think of him as of one wholly unselfish, holy, and morally omniscient. I heard again and again of his gracious deeds and inspiring words. One secret of his extraordinary power was that he was pre-eminently a 'gentleman.' Under his refining influence the rough, untutored men who flocked to his standard became gentle too. When persecution came they took it like their master, patiently and wisely. To know Robert Owen was in itself a liberal education.

" My first vivid recollections are of the period when my father, having established himself on the London Press, and residing permanently in London, sent me to a small school at Hampton Wick, kept by a well-known Socialist missionary, Alexander Campbell, known to his circle as the ' Patriarch.' He was a grave, simple man, with peculiar notions on the Immanence of the Deity, or what is called Being. With his peculiar religious ideas he combined, I fancy, eccentric views concerning the diet of the human race. At all events, the children under the care of himself and his daughter pined for lack of fitting nutriment. I myself, as a very little boy, must have been in danger of starvation, for I vividly remember having to supplement the school diet, which was chiefly vegetarian, by eating snails gathered in the garden. On going home for the holidays I was found to be a little skeleton, and my mother took care that I did not return to the establishment.

" I was next sent to a so-called French and German College at Merton, kept by a certain M. de Chastelain, a French gentleman and, I think, a refugee. It was a large school, excellently conducted, but resembling, in some respects, Mr. Creakle's establishment, made famous by the author of " David Copperfield." Just opposite the main entrance was a CHURCH,

Early Memories, 1841—50 13

almost the first I had ever seen, and certainly the first I ever entered. Here, I presume, I became acquainted with the national religion and its sacred terminology. I vividly recall the sense of strangeness I experienced when I listened, little heathen that I was, to the ordinary vocabulary of Christianity. I had received no religious teaching : if I had heard the name of God, it had been as a voice from far away ; and I was old enough to understand that much that was taught in churches was mostly * superstition.' But not till some years afterwards, when I was taken to Scotland, did I completely realise the gloom and narrowness of the popular Christian creed.

" My parents were now residing at Norwood, in a quaint little cottage commanding a distant prospect of St. Paul's ; and thither, chiefly on Sundays, came many of the apostles of progress — hirsute men for the most part, of all characters and of all nations. When my holidays occurred I saw a good deal of these gentlemen. Two of them I remember vividly, who generally came together : one a little miniature of a man with tiny feet and hands and an enormous head, generally covered by a chimney-pot hat three or four sizes too large for it ; the other a mighty fellow, of gigantic stature, with a chest fit for Hercules and a voice like a trumpet. The first was Louis Blanc, a famous exile: the second was Caussidiere, who had been chief of the police in Paris during the last Revolution. Both spoke English fairly, and Blanc wrote it like an Englishman. It was during a visit of this strange pair that I first heard the ' Marseillaise.' Sung by Caussidiere in stentorian tones, with kindling eyes and excited gestures, it sounded like a wild conjuration. I listened to these men for hours, as they talked of their country and its sorrows, and named the wondrous words, ' Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.'

"In after years I met Louis Blanc again, and by that time only the faintest trace of a foreign accent remained to show that he was a Frenchman. He was at once the keenest and most enthusiastic of little men, neat in his person, brilliant in his talk, and cultured to the finger-nails. He loved England, which had so long afforded him a home, and hated nothing in the world but one thing, the Empire, and one man, the Emperor. He preached the great Socialistic doctrine of solidarity, in writings which were as brilliant as they were closely reasoned ; he was an enemy of tyranny in any form ; and he lived long enough to see the foulest tyranny of modern times, a tyranny of the senses, ignominiously overthrown at Sedan.

" Another friend of my father, and a constant visitor at our house, was Lloyd Jones, lecturer, debater, and journalist. An Irishman with the mellowest of voices, he delighted my young soul with snatches of jovial song, ' The Widow Machree,' ' The Leather Bottel,' and the modern burlesque of that royal ballad, ' The Pewter Quart,' written, I think, by Macguire, and originally published in Blackwood —