Robert Buchanan | Page 9

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 think they are true, in so
far as they recognise what I have at least attempted to do in poetry, I
am proud to quote them. I am ready to admit au rest, that my religion is
only a yearning, my hope only a hope, born even out of a certain kind
of despair; but through all the aberrations of a stormy personal career,
and amid all the vicissitudes of fame and fortune, I have never ceased

to cherish it, and the day it dies within me will be the day of my
intellectual and moral extinction. It includes, I need not say, the forlorn
and perhaps foolish faith of my childhood--the faith (to be carefully
distinguished from belief) in personal immortality, in a supreme God or
Good, and in the Life after Death. A faith very much out of fashion. To
many good and wise men, to many more men who are neither good nor
wise, such a faith is merely a survival from the lower forms of
intelligence, and will become less and less possible as human beings
realise the actual conditions of existence and energise more and more
unselfishly for the good of the great and perfect being, Humanity. But
to me, a dreamer of dreams, the 'dumb, wistful yearning' is born solely
and wholly, not out of love for the race, but out of acute, intimate,
possibly selfish personal love; my religion, like my charity, begins at
home, and my philanthropy is only the generalisation of individual
experience and affection. It is this fact which has made me, after thirty
years of thought on religious subjects, see in the Christian religion, as
still preached and taught, the hereditary enemy of human aspiration.
Christianity is not dead; it will never die so long as the deductive
method, arguing from generalisations to particulars, possess any
fascination for the human mind, in preference to the method which
instructs religion on the basis of particular and individual proofs and
discovers in it the only possible solution of an eternal enigma."
In writing to Mr. Leslie Stephen, in the year 1896, he said:--
"I always feel that this life is worthless without the idea of permanence
in the affections, and I am afraid I reiterate the thought too often in my
writings. And the very idea of Evolution, if upbuilt of limitless death
and suffering, is horrible without some further explanation. . . . I know
that I am struggling in deep waters and can land on neither side--neither
on the side of orthodox Religion, nor on that of outright
Materialism--so that I am in danger of pleasing no one. But I have a
very clear idea, nevertheless, of where I am drifting. Intellectually
speaking, I find no ground whatever for believing in a Divine solution
of this Puzzle--emotionally, I feel surer. I cannot say that I am of your
opinion that this life is worth anything without another and a higher.
Frankly I hope I shall never think so."

Meanwhile his father's editorship throve, and he soon became the
proprietor of the paper. By that time the Glasgow Sentinel, though still
of limited circulation, was a recognised power in Glasgow. The leaven
was slowly working. After the abolition of the stamp duty on
newspapers the Sentinel acquired, with a large increase of subscribers
and purchasers, an increase of influence in due proportion. Meantime,
for the better furtherance of the boy's education he was sent to a
boarding-school at Rothesay, in the Island of Bute.
It was a small school, kept by a person named Munro, whom Robert
afterwards recalled as a delicate, gentle, pink-complexioned man, who
would sit in the middle of the schoolroom bathing his poor aching head
with cold water, and suffering all the martyrdom of nervous headache.
The boarders were chiefly boys from Glasgow or the neighbourhood,
but there were a couple of dingy-complexioned lads from Demerara,
and several little girls from the same mysterious region. If the boy's
religious studies had been previously neglected, they were now
vigorously and rigorously pursued. The good schoolmaster, catering for
pious parents, dosed