Is Buchanan Still Possible?

Truth, 4 April 1889, pages 624-626, 1,827 words

The French talk of vice with laughter, we talk of vice in low and unctuous voices; but the ears of both nations are pricked as sharply when the delicate subject is introduced, and both relish it equally. It is, therefore, imperative for the Daily Telegraph to supply its readers with the essential traffic, and at certain intervals a hunt is organised in its columns. Last summer the sport was great and glorious, and so natural and unprecedented was the crowd that gathered above that superb truffle, "Is Marriage a Failure!" and so enthusiastic was the scratching around and about it, that the proprietors of that excellently edited journal were fain not to let the winter pass without once more showing sport. To find the truffle this time a large Sootch truffle-finder was led forth, and it was not long before he stopped, grunted, and began to root. From his manner those who knew him best were convinced that the truffle he had discovered must be one of the very finest, and sure enough it proved to be none other than our old friend, the Magdalen. Oh, what paeans that unerring snout poured forth! and though I knew well the animal's capabilities, I had not believed it capable of such a magnificent jubilation. Every note was rich and deep. All were so perfect that it is hard to select, but since I must choose one for special commendation, I will choose this one. Any man, said the snout, who buys himself a love should have a label put on his back and a clapper put on his head. Now, if Mr. Buchanan be sincere, it must be clear to every one of the smallest superficial intelligence that he is, at least on one point, an impossible lunatic; and, if he be not sincere, it must be equally clear to any one of eritical intelligence that he is playing the smallest part of the jackal to the "largest circulation in the world."

Which is it? Let me throw him on the dissecting. table and make an exact analysis.

Mr. Buchanan's case presents some interesting and highly-developed symptoms which, I think, will repay study. He in a man of wide rending; he is a soholar; he is a man of imagination, having a command of rich and varied vocabulary; he possesses apparently all the gifts that go to make a great writer; he is also a man of untiring industry; and yet he has never produced a book, nor yet a page, that is vital in the mind of to-day. He has written fifty volumes, and if we ask of what he is the author no one can tell us. His work is even like the "snows of yester-year." We find all qualities in Mr. Buchanan except sincerity. An indefinable, but easily recognisable, falseness pervades his writings; never do we find there that accent of truth which makes the world akin; never do we say: "He thought that, he felt this." In art, insincerity is a microbe, and it eats away the finest mental organism. Neither lofty, nor profound thoughts can resist it, nor yet wisdom nor learning; nor can the future of the race and the purity of women save the writer who is afflicted with it; it withers the best intelligences. In spite of his eloquence, philosophy, and erudition, Southey is now forgotten and discredited, but Miss Austen, with naught but sincerity for literary equipment, blooms still a fresh and beautiful flower. Poor Villon's literary attainments were few and his time short, but he was sincere before a sheet of white paper, and such sincerity has carried him triumphantly into the nineteenth century. Mr. Buchanan is grievously stricken with the disease of insincerity; he can never think, feel, or see truly; pure artistic truth is as impossible to him as whiteness to a rook, or as warmth to a snake.

The first symptom of the disease declared itself twenty years ago in the Contemporary Review in an article entitled the "Fleshly School." In this article Mr. Buchanan denounced the youth of that day as effete, lascivious, cold-blooded, and superfine, and, while assuring his readers that the young man of his day was virtuous and enthusiastic, he now stigmatises the young men of 1889 as effete, lascivious, cold-blooded, and superfine. In the first article he talked pompously of virtue, youthful enthusiasm, and rapturous belief, but it was impossible to read many pages without becoming convinced that he was only really angry, because he had not thought of writing like Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Rossetti; and it is equally impossible to read his diatribe in the Universal Review without seeing that he is angry with the young authors of to-day for exactly the same reasons as he was angry with Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Rossetti — namely, that their writings are more popular than his.

"Strength without hands to smite" has ever been the fate of Mr. Buchanan; two generations have turned from him, two generations have passed him by. The triumphant microbe has eaten through all his fine gifts, and the enthusiastic versifier is now the discontented scribbler-of-all-work, who goes about the world raving and raging that God did not create him a genius. Daily he sinks lower in literary estimation, and he is less considered by the young men of 1889 than he was by those of 1869; they do not call him rough names, as did Mr. Edmund Yates and Mr. Swinburne, but they read, and talk, and think of him less and less every day.

So naturally, so inherently, so hopelessly insincere is he, that I doubt if it ever occurred to Mr. Buchanan while he was accusing others of indecency, cynicism, and sterility, to ask himself how his own performances stand in relation to theirs. I wonder if he feels quite sure that "A New Abelard" is a better book than "A Portrait of a Lady." Does no faint suspicion ever haunt him that perhaps after all "The Master of the Mine" is not very much superior to "Pierre et Jean" and "Une Vie"? But it goes without saying that “never in his wakening moments” did he hold in question the supreme beauty of "Dr. Cupid," that valentine in three acts, or forget to place it on a higher plane than "Ghosts"; nor is it probable when he penned those high-faluting sentences in which he describes himself as having dreamed wildly of fame, of fair women and beautiful books, that he remembered he had written "Foxglove Manor," — that silly imitation of the school which he elects to despise, in which a clergyman of the Church of England contemplates the seduction of one of his parishioners with a view of bringing her nearer to God. It is not even probable, when Mr. Buchanan declared that his youth had been filled with high aspirations, that he remembered that he had written those unhappy plays, "Alone in London" and "A Sailor and his Lass," nor is it probable when he wrote that "the world was an enchanted place with a God above him," that he remembered that he had recanted all the evil he had written against Swinburne and Rossetti, when he found that he could no longer harm, and might gain, by being on terms with them.

For five-and-twenty years Mr. Buchanan had been false to his friends, false to his art, false to himself, and yet he once again ventures to pose, as the upholder of those virtues which he more than any one else has shamefully outraged; for five-and-twenty years the microbe has thriven and multiplied in him; and the disease which first declared itself in the Contemporary (then it might have been but that wave of bitterness, filling to overflow a soul conscious of power, which, by a strange mischance, it could never use) has become inveterate and constitutional. The spectacle is a pitiful one: a genius manqué rushing about the world, in straits to bite all who would help him out of his delusions, and so out of his misery, by judicious criticism of his deficiencies. For three out of the five names mentioned in his article are blinds —- colourable assurances of his sincerity. The truth is that, wishing to revenge himself on Mr. Archer for criticism passed on his plays and novels in "About the Theatre," and upon Mr. George Moore for what he wrote of him in his book, "Confessions of Young Man," and knowing that no editor would place a dozen pages at his disposal for so personal a purpose, he bethought himself of throwing Mr. Henry James, M. Guy de Maupassant, and M. Bourget into the pot, and of saucing up the dish with pessimism and the Eternal Feminine. This would have been enough of insincerity for Blifil, but it was not enough for Mr. Buchanan. Determined to boom his articles, and finding that the Telegraph would allow him to do so if he complied with the regulations of the hunt, he stopped at once grunting before the Magdalen. At first his grunts were but vague words of general commiseration, but at the first murmur of approval he broke forth into the regeneration of the race through women, not omitting to spice the regeneration with anecdotes about a couple of clergymen's daughters, who left their simple home and came to London with the fixed intention of throwing themselves on the streets. What is this but obvious fishing for a dish of filth in the waters of purity?

Tinker Smollett as you tinkered Fielding, say of him as you said of Fielding, that, in removing the dirt, you are rendering him signal service, that you placed his genius in a purer light; gather about your portly self all hysterical females, and make yourself grand master of all that is prurient in purity, of all that is mean in man; make women your disciples if they will accept you as apostle — you have failed among men. Rossetti and Swinburne cast you off. Their successors cast you off. You have not got, and you will never get, their literary esteem — no, not even if you apologise, and you will apologise if you live (with you all things are a question of time) for what you wrote of them last week, as you apologised for what you wrote of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Rossetti twenty years ago. In the meanwhile drink the wormwood and gall of failure; remember that each of the five whom you spit at has a literary public that follows him; meditate on the fact that your poems are forgotten, that your novels are read by servant-girls, that your plays are only heard by the patrons of the Vaudeville Theatre, and that your critics are an occasional acting-manager and a music conductor, who, before the evening performance, at dinner at Simpson's, discuss your chances of being next Poet Laureate.