Robert Buchanan | Page 8

from
generation to generation, has been of much avail."1
1 "Latter Day Leaves."
CHAPTER III
BOYHOOD, 185056
THE poet was about ten years of age when he left the French and
German College at Merton, and accompanied his parents to Glasgow,
where his father had undertaken to edit a newspaper of advanced liberal
views, the Glasgow Sentinel. It was in Glasgow, therefore, that he spent
a large portion of his boyhood and early youth. The newspaper office
was up a dingy street in the neighbourhood of the Trongate, and all
around stretched the darkest slums and dens of the city. Just below it
was the newspaper shop of William Love, who had some 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