Robert Buchanan | Page 8

sort of share in the proprietorship of the Sentinel.
William Love was a cripple, with one leg much smaller than the other. He had been the mainstay of a large family of brothers and sisters, and was destined in after years to become the largest bookseller in Glasgow. At the time of which I write he was in a very small way of business indeed, but what his occupation lacked in one way was amply made up for in another. On that dingy counter lay the whole armoury of the new moral world, tracts for the times, Owen's speeches, Holyoake's debates, all the literature of Socialism. There, from time to time, gathered the local apostles of freethinking--Lloyd Jones, Alexander Campbell, William Turvey, and Mr. Buchanan, sen. Thus, as a boy, Robert Buchanan listened to the oracles and drank in the atmosphere of unbelief.
To understand the boy's position at that period of his life it is necessary to remember that Glasgow was at that time the very stronghold of Godliness and more particularly of Sabbatarianism. The men of whom I am writing were looked upon as social outcasts. When they appeared upon the platform to face the champions of orthodoxy, it was often at the peril of their lives. Even when walking in the streets they were frequently assailed with insulting epithets, and threatened with personal violence. The poet's father was an object of special detestation, and he himself, as the son of a notorious unbeliever, was very often taught the lesson of social persecution. If he made an acquaintance of his own age, that boy was generally warned against him and taught to give him the cold shoulder. "Don't play with yon laddie," the boys themselves would say, "his father's an infidel!" Ridiculous as the record of this persecution may appear, it caused the lad at the time a great deal of misery, and later on, when we spoke together of those days of his youth, he assured me that many a time he had prayed with all his soul that his father would mend his ways, go to church, and accept the social sanctities like other men!
Meantime the boy was sent to a small day school in the suburb of Glasgow where the family had taken up their abode. It seems to have been a poor establishment compared to the college at Merton, but he learned in it the rudiments of Latin and mathematics, and throve under the strict yet kindly care of the master, one of those zealous pedagogues to be found only in Scotland. But his real education went on in his father's house, and at the house of William Love, where his father went every Sunday to read the secular journals of the week.
In his very able article, written during the poet's last illness, and published shortly before his death, Mr. Henry Murray says: "From a brief period of God-intoxication, through many doubts and battles and fluctuations, he came at last to face the facts of Life and Death, with only the thinnest veil of mysticism to hide their stern nakedness. Thin as that veil was, it was growing ever thinner. 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."1
An agnostic he undoubtedly was, but it seems to me that a man of his emotional temperament could never have become an atheist.
"For the life of me I cannot tell how the sweet spirit of natural piety arose within me. All my experience, my birth, my education, my entire surroundings were against its birth or growth, all the human beings I had known or listened to were confirmed sceptics or boisterous unbelievers. Yet while my father was confidently preaching God's nonexistence, I was praying to God in the language of the canonical books. I cannot even remember a time when I did not kneel by my bedside before going to sleep, and repeat the Lord's Prayer. So far away was I from any human sympathy in this foolish matter, that this praying of mine was ever done secretly, with a strong sense of shame and dread of discovery."2
As late as the year 1896, he wrote:--
"'The dumb, wistful yearning in man to something higher--yearning such as the animal creation showed in the Greek period to the human--has not yet found any interpreter equal to Buchanan.' These words, written by a writer in the Spectator in the course of a general estimate of modern poets, are the highest tribute I have ever received from any contemporary critic, and because I