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MR. BUCHANAN'S "WANDERING JEW."

A STRINGER " Christmas Carol " was, perhaps, never written. Mr. Buchanan's poem may be fairly called a half-tremulous,

half-wistful wail over the gigantic failure of Christ, rather than a triumph over his victory. If we were to attempt to sum up the rather obscure and inconsistent elements of its burden in a few words, we should call it a long lamentation that Jesus Christ had accomplished so little; that so much evil had been done under the false assumption of his authority ; that the gracious promises he had made in his Father's name,.

had not as yet been redeemed, and that the power behind the veil to which he had appealed, bad not hitherto thought fit openly to justify his claims and to glorify his teaching. This is, we say, the main drift of the poem,—love for Christ, impatience with the Eternal Father for his delay in securing him the triumph and exaltation which had been predicted for his Gospel. But undoubtedly there are frequent passa ges which look as if Mr. Buchanan did mean to claim some intrinsically super- natural power for Jesus,—some personal control over the natural laws of the universe ;—the elements, for instance, seem instantly to obey him, while the greater part of the world of man is represented as setting him absolutely at defiance. The poem opens with a dedication of it by Mr. Buchanan to his own

dead father, of whom he speaks as emphatically "more dear than any Father in Heaven" in the following lines:— "Father on Earth, for whom I wept bereaven, Father more dear than any Father in Heaven, Flesh of my flesh, heart of this heart of mine, Still quick, though dead, in me, true son of thine, * The Wandering Jew : a Christmas. Carol. By Robert Buchanan. London: Mush* and Windt's.

I draw the gravecloth from thy dear dead face, I kiss thee gently sleeping, while I place This wreath of Song upon thy holy head.

For since I live, I know thou art quick not dead, And since thou art quick, yet drawest no living breath, I know, dear Father, that there is Life in Death.

This, too, my Soul hath found—that if there were No hope in Heaven, the world might well despair, That thro' the mystery of my hope and love I reach the Mystery that dwells above Father on Earth, still lying calm and blest After long years of trouble and sad unrest, Sloop,—while the Christ I paint for men to see Sooketh the Fatherhood I found in thee I"

And it closes with the following sentence passed upon the wandering and sorrowful phantom of Jesus of Nazareth, who turns out to be "the Wandering Jew " of this strange " carol," by "The Spirit of Man : "- "Then, pointing with dark Roger thro' the gloom On him who stood erect with hoary head,

The Judge gazed down with dreadful eyes, and said: `Ere yet I speak thy Doom that must be spoken Before the World whose great heart thou hast broken, Hast thou another word to say, 0 Jew P`' And the Jew answer'd, while the heavenly blue Fill'd like an eye with starry crystal tears, ' Far have I wander'd thro' the sleepless years— Be pitiful, 0 Judge, and let me die V 'Death to him, Death ' I heard the voices cry Of that great Multitude. But the Voice said : 'Nay Death that brought peace thyself didst seek to slay ! Death that was merciful and very fair, Sweet dove-eyed Death that hush'd the Earth's despair, Death that shed balm on tir6d eyes like thine, Death that was Lord of Life and all Divine, Thou didst deny us, offering instead

The Senn; fierce famine that can ne'er be fed—

Death shall abido to bless all things that be,

But evermore shall turn aside from thee—

Hear then thy Doom I ' He paused, while all around The Sea of Life lay still without a sound, And on the Man Divine, Death's Sing and Lord, The sacrament of heavenly Light was pour'd.

Since thou hast quicken'd what thou canst not kill, Awaken'd famine thou canat never still, Spoken in madness, prophesied in vain, And promised what no thing of clay shall gain, Thou shalt abide •while all things ebb and flow, Wake while the weary sleep, wait while they go, And treading paths no human feet have trod Search on still vainly for thy Father, God; Thy blessing shall pursue thee as a curse To hunt thee, homeless, thro' the Universe; No hand shall slay thou, for no hand shall dare To strike the godhead Death itself must spare! With all the woes of Earth upon thy head, Uplift thy Cross, and go. Thy Doom is said.'

And lo while all men come and pass away, That Phantom of the Christ, forlorn and grey, Haunteth the Earth with desolate footfall God help the Christ, that Christ may help us all I "

And there we have the real drift of the poem. Jesus of Nazareth is depicted throughout as wandering through the world in sorrow and anguish, finding no rest for himself, beholding helplessly all the crimes that had been done in his

name, and appealing wistfully, but hitherto in vain, to the silent Eternity to vindicate the good faith of his pledges, and to redress the glaring injustice of that" Prince of this world" who had nothing in Christ. Even the very last words of the carol are not words of joy, but, as we have just seen, words of passionate appeal to a persistently silent Deity who answers nothing, to intervene at last, like the passionate appeals of the Jewish prophets : "Oh that thou would'st rend the Heavens that thou would'st come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence." In short, the carol, as Mr. Buchanan chooses to call it, is a carol of reproach from beginning to end. There is no accent of joy in the poem, and very little of hope. There is much more of Shelley's "passionate tumult of a clinging hope," than of the thankfulness and jubilation of a grateful heart. Indeed, the mere conception of introducing Jesus Christ in the disguise of the Wandering Jew, and then revealing him,—for thus he is revealed early in the poem,—as " hat diviner

Who like a Phantom passetT ev

heverywhere The world's last hope and bitterest despair, Deathless yet dead,"

--betrays the attitude of mind in. which the poem is written.

It may be said, perhaps, to inculcate or to imply that the attenuated ghost of the Christian faith is better worth clinging to, than the bold and substantial reality of any less spiritual creed ; but as for any note of exultation in the power of Christ to fulfil his own solemn promises, there is no vestige of it from the opening to the end of the poem. It rather aims at expressing the spirit of the only cry of desolation ever uttered by our Lord, in the words of that psalm which fore- casts the moment of his agony : " My God, my God, why halt thou forsaken me " But could any utterance of his be selected which less adequately describes the significance and tenor of hie life and teaching

As a poem, we cannot say that we think this " Carol" more successful than we do as an expression of Christian feeling. Mr. Buchanan has embodied in it many fine lines ; here and there, there are passages of much power ; but the imaginative con- ception is as wavering as the spiritual conception. In the early part of the poem, the narrator is continually interrupt- ing himself by trances and visions which add little or nothing to the effect. He has visions of the inner life of London,— visions of the wrecks and skeletons at the bottom of the sea, —visions of the thrill which passes through the city at the word " arisen," when he asks : " Lord of life, bast thou arisen ? "—visions of the Virgin and her child,—and none of them add anything to the drift, while they distract the reader's attention from it. Nor, again, when the witnesses are called to witness against the Son of Man, is there any coherence in the conception of those witnesses. We can understand the com- plaints of those who maintain that by the false hopes which the promise of Christ had raised in the heart of man, they had been led to sacrifice modest earthly pleasures for imaginary spiritual bliss. But where is the meaning of citing wretches like Tiberius and Nero, or stately Stoics like Aurelius, to witness against a Christianity which they had never pretended to under- stand, and had never felt the smallest inclination to accept? It seems to us that Mr. Buchanan wanted to get an excuse for a pageant representing the powers of the world, and summoned a number of Roman Emperors who had no more special witness to give against Jesus of Nazareth than they had against Socrates or Epietetus, or any other teacher who had witnessed against their manner of life without their knowledge, and without their having been, even in their own view, misled by his promises. So, too, the witness offered by Mahomet, by Buddha, by Zoroaster, with a long list of others, seems as inappropriate to an accusation levelled against our Lord for having led the world astray,—which is what we under- stand the accusation formulated by the Spirit of Man to have been,—ae any testimony could possibly be. The greater number of those who constitute the cloud of witnesses arrayed. against Christ in this poem have absolutely no evidence to give which any Court, natural, preternatural, or supernatural, if it admitted only what was in some sort of fashion germane to the charge, would so much as have listened to for a moment. We can understand the accusation brought by the great astronomers like Galileo and his comrades, that Christ's teaching had made their researches into the natural laws of the universe seem at once dangerous so far as they called in question the physical assumptions of Scripture, and profane, so far as they diverted men from their deepest spiritual interests to matters of mere intellectual curiosity. We can admit as at least not entirely unmeaning the charge of the licentious Popes that they, while breaking all the spiritual laws of Christ, had not been supernaturally struck down from the blasphemous position of authority which they dared to abuse. We even appreciate the significance of such assertions as those of Montezuma and the Incas, that they had been slaughtered without scruple in the name of a religion which enforced charity as its first law, and yet with- out any intervention on the part of the Divine Master. But what the long succession of merely non-Christian rulers, of heathen and secular teachers, and religious fanatics, has to do with any charge against Christianity, we cannot understand. Nor do we comprehend why Christ's own followers, like St. Paul and the other apostles, speak for him rather than against him, when St. Paul's own argument had been : If Christ be not risen, then we of all men are the most miserable ; while in his sense certainly, the assumption of the whole poem is that Christ had not risen, or had only half-risen,—had risen enough to startle the conscience into uneasy and feverish dreams, not enough to demonstrate the glory and omnipotence

of God. Even the personal disciples cry to Jesus to take up his godhead, which, according to the assumption of the poet, has lain dormant through all the centuries, and has failed to keep the pledges it had given to his first followers. Surely, in that case, they, much more than his false servants, should have been his accusers.

In a word, we do not think that Mr. Buchanan's own conception of his design was at all clear to himself when he wrote. His ideas are confused. He wishes to represent the claims of Christ on the Eternal Father as still crying to the throne of the universe in vain, and the world as still crucifying afresh the spirit of the pilgrim of Eternity who pleads with a silent God. But he mixes up with this conception much that is quite irrelevant to it, and he ignores entirely all that runs counter to it, all that witnesses to the steady triumph of the spirit of holiness and love over the spirit of coarse worldly ambition and of sensual worldly lust. If Christ's conception of the coming of his own kingdom as a very gradual coming, which was to leaven the universe slowly but surely, and which could not be hurried by human impatience, is to be accepted at all, it is not clear how the greater part of the drift of this poem is to be under- stood and justified, unless it be as finding a voice for the undue and passionate impatience discernible in the present attitude of Christian thought. This picture of Christ as a weak, aged, and helpless spectre, wandering feebly through the ages, suffering afresh at every fresh crisis of history, never pre- vailing, but always gazing mutely at the distant horizon for the evidence of a divine intervention which never comes, is surely the quaintest specimen of a Christmas "carol" which poet ever conceived. It seems to us false alike to history and to poetry. It represents neither what is great in Christianity nor what is great in imaginative life.

As regards the mere execution of the poem, Mr. Buchanan too often gives way to the love of what is startling and outré. There is, of course, precedent for " pathic " Popes (p. 62), but the ex- pression is hardly intelligible now. Where will Mr. Buchanan find any modern use of "to stench " as an active verb in the sense of to make of evil odour P---as in 1! Stenching the cities where- soe'er they trod,"—a very ugly line, not a bit the more forcible for its revival of an obsolete usage. How can Heaven "yearn its heart of stars out on" any one's hoary head P And where will Mr. Buchanan find any authority for Golgotha with the " o " long, as his metre requires it to be Ei The Greek version of the word certainly makes the " o " an omicron, not an omega : yaw&