in good company 18

in good company 18

I never saw thee living, oh, my brother,

But on thy breast my lily of love now lies,

And by that token we shall know each other,

When God’s voice saith ‘Arise!’

 

“That this is very beautiful every one will admit, but is it true

to picture those who most loved Rossetti as placing Buchanan’s

lily of song in his dead hand? I think not. Nor can those

who know anything of the last days of Rossetti reconcile the

facts with Buchanan’s imaginary picture of a sort of celestial

assignation in which, by means of a lily, Rossetti and his

ancient enemy and brother poet shall identify each other on the

Last Day?

 

“I am well aware that I shall be accused of bad taste, even of

brutality, in saying this; but, as Mr. Murray himself alludes

to this ancient quarrel, I must protest that false sentiment

is equally abhorrent--as Buchanan would have been the first to

admit. Now that Buchanan has followed Rossetti where all enmities

are at an end, it is right that the truth about the matter be

spoken, and this unhappy assault and its not altogether happy

sequel be alike forgotten.

 

“Robert Buchanan’s last resting-place is within sight of the sea.

And rightly so. It is his own heart that Old Ocean seems most to

wear away in his fretting and chafing, and the wearing away of

their own heart is the most appreciable result of the warfare

which such men as Buchanan wage against the world.

 

“That he did not fulfil his early promise, that he frittered

away great gifts to little purpose, is pitifully true, but if he

flung into the face of the men whom he counted hypocrites and

charlatans, words which scorched like vitriol, he had, for the

wounded in life’s battle, for the sinning, the suffering, and the

defeated, words of helpful sympathy and an outstretched hand of

practical help.

 

“Mr. Murray has shown Buchanan to us as he was; no hero perhaps,

certainly not a saint, but a man of great heart and great brain,

quick to quarrel, but as quick to own himself in the wrong; a

man intensely, passionately human, with more than one man’s

share of humanity’s weaknesses and of humanity’s strength, a

sturdy soldier in the cause of freedom, a fierce foe, a generous

friend, and a poet who, in regard to that rarest of all gifts,

‘vision,’ had scarcely an equal among his contemporaries.

 

“I must conclude by a serious word with Mr. Murray. Disagree

with him as one may and must, one cannot but admire his fearless

honesty. None the less I am of opinion that in the following

passage Mr. Murray’s own pessimism has led him to do his dead

friend’s memory a grievous injustice.

 

“‘From the broken arc we may divine the perfect round, and it

is my fixed belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which

struck him down but spared him for a little longer time, he would

logically have completed the evolution of so many years, and have

definitely proclaimed himself as an agnostic, perhaps even as an

atheist.’

 

“Mr. Murray’s personal knowledge of Buchanan was intimate, even

brotherly; mine, though dating many years back, was comparatively

slight. But I have read Buchanan’s books, and I know something of

the spirit in which he lived and worked, and I am convinced that

Mr. Murray is wrong. It is not always those who have come nearest

to the details of a man’s daily life, who have come nearest to

him in spirit, as Amy Levy knew well when she wrote those lines,

_To a Dead Poet_, which I shall be pardoned for bringing to my

readers’ remembrance:

 

I knew not if to laugh or weep:

They sat and talked of you--

’Twas here he sat: ’twas this he said,

’Twas that he used to do.

 

‘Here is the book wherein he read,

The room wherein he dwelt;

And he’ (they said) ‘was such a man,

Such things he thought and felt.’

 

 

I sat and sat, I did not stir;

They talked and talked away.

I was as mute as any stone,

I had no word to say.

 

They talked and talked; like to a stone

My heart grew in my breast--

I, who had never seen your face,

Perhaps I knew you best.

 

“Buchanan was, as every poet is, a creature of mood, and in

certain black moods he expressed himself in language that was

open to an atheistic interpretation. There were times when he

was confronted by the fact that, to human seeming, iniquity

prospered, righteousness went to the wall, and injustice, vast

and cruel, seemed to rule the world. To the Christian belief that

the Cross of Christ is the only key to the terrible problem of

human suffering, Buchanan was unable to subscribe, and at times

he was tempted to think that the Power at the head of things

must be evil, not good. It seems to me that at such times he

would cry out in soul-travail, ‘No! no! anything but that! If

there be a God at all He must be good. Before I would do God the

injustice of believing in an evil God, I would a thousand times

sooner believe in no God at all!’ Then the mood passed; the man’s

hope and belief in an unseen beneficent Power returned, but the

sonnet in which he had given __EXPRESSION__ to that mood remained.

And because the __EXPRESSION__ of that mood was permanent, Mr. Murray

forgets that it was no more than the __EXPRESSION__ of a mood, and

tells us that he believes, had Buchanan lived longer, he would

have become an atheist.

 

“Again I say that I believe Mr. Murray to be wrong. Buchanan,

like his own Wandering Jew, trod many dark highways and byways

of death, but he never remained--he never could have remained--in

that Mortuary of the Soul, that cul-de-sac of Despair which we

call Atheism.

 

* * * * *

 

“This is not the place in which to say it, but perhaps my editor

will allow me to add how keenly I felt, as I stood by the

graveside of Robert Buchanan in that little God’s acre by the

sea, the inadequacy of our Burial Service, beautiful as it is, in

the case of one who did not profess the Christian faith. To me it

seemed little less than a mockery to him who has gone, as well as

a torture to those who remain, that words should be said over his

dead body which, living, he would have repudiated.

 

“Over the body of one whose voice is silenced by death, we

assert the truth of doctrines which living he had unhesitatingly

rejected. It is as if we would, coward-like, claim in death what

was denied us in life.

 

“In the case of a man whose beliefs were those of Robert

Buchanan, how much more seemly it would be to lay him to rest

with some such words as these:

 

“‘To the God from Whom he came, we commend this our friend and

brother in humanity, trusting that what in life he has done

amiss, may in death be forgotten and forgiven; that what in life

he has done well, may in death be borne in remembrance. And so

from out our human love, into the peace of the Divine love, we

commend him, leaving him with the God from Whom, when we in our

turn come to depart whither he has gone, we hope to receive like

pardon, forgiveness and peace. In God’s hands, to God’s love and

mercy, we leave him.’”

 

Re-reading this article many years after it was written, I see

nothing in it to which friendship or even affection for either

Rossetti or Buchanan could reasonably object.

 

This was not the view taken by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton. It so

happened that I encountered the latter in the Strand a morning or

two later, and more in sadness than in anger he reproached me with

“disloyalty to Gabriel, disloyalty to Algernon, and disloyalty to

myself.”

 

I replied that touching Rossetti, as he did not happen to be the

King, had never so much as heard of my small existence, nor had I

ever set eyes upon him, to accuse me of disloyalty to him, to whom

I owed no loyalty, struck me as a work of supererogation. And, as

touching Swinburne and Watts-Dunton himself, honoured as I was by

the high privilege of their friendship, I could not admit that

that friendship committed me to a blind partisanship and to the

identification of myself with their literary likings or dislikings or

their personal quarrels.