BOOK REVIEWS - NOVELS

The Shadow of the Sword from The Guardian (1 January, 1877 - p.7)

SOME NOVELS.
_____

     Whatever difference of opinion may exist as to Mr. Robert Buchanan’s literary merits, no one, we think, will deny him such credit as may be due to perseverance and enterprise. Poetry, essays, and the drama he has tried by turns, and now in The Shadow of the Sword (Bentley, London, 1876) he comes before the public as a novelist, or, as he himself puts it, a romance writer. Perhaps it may be necessary in a generation which is not careful about definitions to remind the reader that novel and romance are not exactly convertible terms. The novel is held to deal more with the manners, fashions, and scenery of the hour; the romance with the greater and simpler passions, the play of which may be supposed not to have varied greatly at any time. Hence the romance approaches nearer to poetry, and is allowed a certain rather grandiose style and language which in an ordinary novel would be much out of place. The greatest living writer of romances—perhaps one of the greatest who ever lived—is, of course, Victor Hugo, and students of Mr. Robert Buchanan know that the latter has been a diligent, if not altogether a successful, follower of Victor Hugo in many things. Accordingly it will not surprise anyone to find in “The Shadow of the Sword” a very considerable smack of the great Frenchman’s vintage, more especially of the “Travailleurs de la Mer.” Mr. Buchanan, whose fancy has always been strongly influenced by the history of the Napoleonic family, has chosen for his subject the last years of the great Napoleon’s reign and the merciless conscription which then scourged France. Rohan Gwenfereo, a Breton and the only son of his mother, has, partly from independent thought and partly from the influence of an old Republican schoolmaster, contracted an almost insane abhorrence of the tyrannical rule which is draining his country of her blood. He is an ardent fisher and fowler, and spends almost all his time on the cliffs and in the caverns of the wild Breton coast, usually alone, but not seldom accompanied by his cousin, Marcelle, whom he loves deeply, and who returns his love. Unluckily, Marcelle, under the influence of her uncle, an old soldier, has been brought up to worship the Emperor. Rohan’s horror of the conscription (which owing to the exemption attaching to widows’ only sons has been hitherto abstract and theoretical) is soon put to the test by the withdrawal of that exemption after the retreat from Moscow. He perseveres in his resolve, refuses to attend the drawing, and when Marcelle in his absence has drawn a “bad number” for him absconds. He hides in the sea caverns, supplied by stealth with food by his mother and Marcelle, and blockaded by the gendarmes, whom when the blockade is turned into a storm he vanquishes, unluckily killing their leader, Sergeant Piprive, an old friend of his father’s and his own unwilling persecutor. Remorse for this act, committed in self-defence though it was, and the hardships and privations of his ghastly sojourn in the caves drive him to intermittent madness; but an inundation at his native village, in which he gallantly saves Marcelle and many others, and thus proves to his friends that his (to them incomprehensible) conduct springs from nothing less than from cowardice, restores him somewhat. The persecution is relaxed, and of course dropped altogether at the return of the Bourbons. But the escape from Elba again puts his life in danger and overturns his reason. He again absconds, makes his way to Flanders, and is on the point of assassinating his tyrant, but relents. The book leaves him united to Marcelle, and gradually but slowly returning to sanity, though still haunted by the idea of Napoleon. There is no doubt that this is a very powerful “fable,” and it is only fair to say that the treatment also is by no means lacking in power. It is exactly the sort of story which Mr. Buchanan can treat well. He is thoroughly at home in the description of the endless cavern-realms which Rohan discovers, and in which he roams with the restlessness and the wild fancies of a madman; his misty and turbid style is not badly adapted to the visions and thoughts of his half-frenzied hero; and in Marcelle he has created a character who may stand not so very few below the Déas and Déruchettes who undoubtedly suggested her. It is hardly necessary to say that the whole book is pitched in a key which suggests the perilous neighbourhood of the sublime and the ridiculous, that there are a good many faults both of style and language, and that there are long passages of sheer balderdash. The chapter entitled “The Red Angel” would supply texts for endless sarcastic comment is we cared to avail ourselves of them. But it seems to us much more to the point to say that here is a book which, with very many faults, is a good attempt in a kind not common in English, and that Mr. Robert Buchanan seems at last, as a Frenchman would say, to have “found his way.” He has written a little good and a great deal of atrociously bad poetry; he has shown himself to be possessed of hardly any critical faculty; and his dramas have, to use the mildest term, gone to limbo. But he has produced a really good romance, and has shown that he could produce a still better.

___

The Shadow of the Sword from The Times (9 January, 1877 - p.3)

RECENT NOVELS.

     The “Shadow of the Sword” is a prose poem in idea as well as expression, a wistful appeal to the Prince of Peace, who seemed still to sleep in his tomb in the garden and delay his coming. The verses of the proem are graceful and mellifluous, though they might savour of Paganism or even profanity were they rendered into literal prose:—
          “Nineteen sad sleepless centuries
          “Had shed upon the dead Christ’s eyes
          “Dark blood and dew, and o’er them still
          “The waxen lids were sealèd chill.
          “Drearily through the dreary years,
          “The world had waited on in tears,
          “With heart clay-cold and eyelids wet,
          “But he had not arisen yet.
          “Nay, Christ was cold; and, colder still
          “The lovely shapes he came to kill
          “Slept by his side. Ah, sight of dread!
          “Dead Christ, and all the sweet Gods dead!
          “He had not risen, though all the world
          “Was waiting; though with thin lips curled
          “Pale Antichrist upon his prison
          “Gazed yet denying, He had not risen;
          “Though every hope was slain save Him,
          “Though all the eyes of Heaven were dim,
          “Despite the promise and the pain!
          “He slept—and had not risen again.
          “Meantime, from France’s funeral pyre
          “Rose, god-like, girt around with fire,
          “Napoleon.”
     The Shadow of the Sword of the great Conqueror is falling over suffering Europe. In France at least this Antichrist of the Gospel revelation bears sway with the horrid tyranny of a Moloch, claiming his human victims by hundreds of thousands. Glory and ambition are the watchwords of his dispensation, although patriotism and promises of peace are more often on his lips and in his bulletins. The conscription becomes more and more exacting. He has still his hosts of devoted worshippers, in the survivors of the soldiers who have died for him on countless battle fields, and he has come to weigh like a relentless and irresistible fate on the population, who are being drained by the blood tribute. There may be murmurings or even bitter expostulations, but there is no open revolt. Men may denounce the criminality of the autocrat’s ambition, but they dare only do so under their breath; and when the lot has fallen the victim must march. The main conception of Mr. Buchanan’s poem is novel, in the opposition of indignant and resolute reason to this iron will and its crushing machinery. The scenes are laid in the wilder districts of “La Bretagne Bretonnante.” A simple fisherman, Rohan Gwenfern, refuses to obey the behests of the tyrant. Partly enlightened by the teachings of an erratic missionary, who escapes the consequences of his opinions by passing with the people for half-mad, Rohan has long been cherishing a profound resentment against this system that is bereaving all the households about him. In an exaltation of the feelings he has brooded over among the savage precipices of the Breton coast, he swears that for himself he will never submit. When his turn comes he keeps his oath. He is put to the ban and hunted like a wild beast. Thanks to his strength and his daring as a cragsman, he saves himself by a series of hairbreadth feats; he lies hid in almost inaccessible lurking places known only to himself. After a course of the sufferings which make him hate his kind, he does become very much of a wild animal. But he has a glimmer of happiness with the better times which come with the exile of the oppressor to Elba, though the glimmer expires again in darkness with the reaction of the hundred days.
     It is this central conception of Rohan Gwenfern that makes the book a poem rather than a novel. The novel, as we understand it, professes to reproduce actual life, without indulging too far in ideal possibilities. Now Rohan Gwenfern is legitimate and even admirable as an ideal creation of poetical licence—nay, he is faithfully and vigorously worked out in his details as a representative of the sturdy Breton fisherman; but it is difficult even to dream of his acting as he did, nor is it much easier to give credit to the extraordinary contradictions in his temperament. How came it, we ask, that what must be or is meant to be a direct revelation of the mind of the God of Peace should have descended into his soul and transformed his mind and his character? How should he learn to think and feel with a man who passed for a feeble-brained fanatic, and whose preachings in their practice were all that was most repugnant to a rough, fierce, hot-blooded race, that set light by human life, and was little disposed to reflection. Rohan, the hardiest cragsman and boldest sailor in the commune, belies the whole of his previous training and habits, while he shows an example of such sublime self-abnegation as has scarcely been practised by mortal before. He refuses, on principle, to go to the war, though no one of his neighbours understands him, although he is universally scouted as a coward in a community to which courage comes naturally, and although the maiden who holds his happiness in her hands adores the “good Emperor” as a deity. Nor is his conduct made more conceivable by the suggestion that he feels an instinctive shrinking from bloodshed on the battle field. Rohan is the bravest of the brave in all other circumstances, nor can we imagine him a physical coward in any way. The morbid sentiment attributed to him can only be cowardice under a pseudonym, or else it is the sickly growth of such nervous natures as we only meet in artificial states of society.
     But if we are content to take Rohan Gwenfern as a creature of poetry, we may give the highest praise to the rest of the book in point both of scenery and characters. Marcelle Derval, his cousin and sweetheart, is both charming and natural, while she is made pretty and winning enough to turn cowards into heroes, to say nothing of persuading a brave man that he may serve his country with a clear conscience. Rohan never showed more the qualities of an ascetic St. Anthony than when resisting that particular form of temptation. Marcelle’s faith in the great and good Emperor is the first article of her religion. She is sure he would gladly make peace, if it were not for those English and Prussians. When her lover resists the conscription and goes into hiding, her first idea is to break for ever with him. He appears to her as an atheist and a blasphemer, and possibly a coward to boot. The first thing that whispers in his favour is the apprehension that he must be touched in the brain. Then love slowly assumes the upper hand again, as she begins to be haunted by tender recollections. Finally, all the woman in her nature comes to his help, when she sees that all the world has turned against him. Slowly and dimly when she snatches her stolen conversations, Mr. Buchanan represents her as beginning to believe that possibly Rohan may be in the right. She cannot rise to his motives, but she has an idea that there may be motives above her comprehension. Marcelle has been brought up in the Imperial creed by her uncle, Ewen Derval, an ancient corporal of the Grand Army, and a capital character, though by no means a novel one. The veteran’s end is really touching, when his religion is rudely outraged in the revulsion of feeling that follows the Restoration; and when he breaks down under the agitations and disasters of the Waterloo campaign. Sergeant Pipriac, who has the charge of securing Rohan, is a worthy pendant to his comrade the corporal. Pipriac has a tongue as rough as his war-worn exterior, but he has a warm heart all the same, and he never forgets that the fugitive is the son of a friends, though he has the consigne to seize him dead or alive. The chase after the deserter and his manifold escapes necessarily involve a good deal of sensation, and lead on to many picturesque and poetical descriptions, which are tinged by the legends and superstitions of the country; for Rohan, of course, burrows under dolmens and conceals himself behind menhirs, and vanishes for weeks out of sight and hearing in mysterious suites of subterraneous caverns.
     Next to his fisherman hero, Mr. Buchanan, as is fitting, has bestowed most pains on the portraiture of the Emperor. Not that, except on rare occasions, we ever see the deity of battle very near. For the most part he hovers on the lurid horizon of the story, as the giant Providence that casts the shadow of the sword, and we have vaguely to imagine the shape and features through the smoke and bloody haze of the battlefield. Mr. Buchanan, as we have implied, adopts the Lanfrey view very strongly, and he depicts the disastrous effects of the war on populations that would gladly be peaceful with the homely minuteness of Erckmann-Chatrian. He carries his detestation of war to such lengths as apparently to argue that it can in no case be justifiable—nay, that each uneducated peasant like Rohan Gwenfern may exercise the right of private judgment and decline to come to the assistance of his country in her need. So at least, with the context, we may interpret the passages—”Blood he might have shed (had he submitted to the conscription), but only the blood of enemies, which, as all good patriots know, would have been of small consequence! It was not for simple women like these to grasp the sublime truth that all men are brothers, and that even stanch patriots may wear the livery of Cain.” Bonaparte was the incarnation of the war spirit in the most baneful shape of a deliberate frenzy; nor is Mr. Buchanan by any means sparing of the eloquence of unmeasured denunciation. Yet the romantic soul of the poet cannot always resist the spell of the hero, criminal and even base as the hero may have often been. So he makes the itinerant preacher, Arjoll, involuntarily submit to that ascendancy in a pathetic description he gives of the adieux of Fontainebleau. “Corporal, my heart was changed at that moment,” says Arjoll, “and I felt that I could have died to serve him. He is a great man.” So he depicts the Emperor dropping on his knees in a Flemish farmhouse on the eve of playing his last tremendous stake, and rising with a peaceful smile on his face to sink into an hour or two of untroubled slumber. “God made him and God sent him; bloody as he is, he, too, is God’s child;” and so the knife drops from the hand of the crazed assassin who has glided to his side; and the man is spared to fulfil his destiny. The story is told with force and fire; and if you open it at random, after having read it through, there is scarcely a chapter that will not repay a second perusal.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

Annan Water from The Scotsman (28 December, 1883 - p. 3)

NEW NOVELS.

     The novelists of the day have in increasing numbers taken to dramatising their productions. It must be admitted that many of them do so on the smallest possible provocation, and with the slightest possible excuse. Their novels too often do not lend themselves to dramatic treatment, and they are not likely to interest any body of playgoers. With Mr Robert Buchanan it is different. Though some of his plays, may not meet with general approval, it is beyond all question that he has the true dramatic instinct. He has shown this in a novel, which he calls a romance, entitled Annan Water. In a notice prefixed to the first volume he states that it has been dramatised and represented, and the copyright of it as a drama is reserved to himself. It is easy to understand that as a drama this romance will be extremely effective. It is a story simple in one sense in its construction, and yet having an interesting plot and many good situations. The heroine is introduced to us as an infant, and her fortunes are traced with a light and delicate touch through many years. Her surroundings are all interesting; that is to say, there is not one of the men or women with whom she comes in contact who has not a distinct and strongly marked individuality. This, we take it, is one of the best tests of the novelist’s power, as assuredly it is one of the best tests of the dramatist’s power. From what has been said, so far, it will be understood that the romance is one calculated to please readers of fiction. But there has to be added that it is written with exquisite care, that its style is simple and elegant, that the touches descriptive of scenery are such as only a man with a poet’s eye could produce, and that its sketches of character are such as to place the men and women sketched almost in bodily presence before the reader’s eye. It is a well-devised story and well worked out, and it deserves the highest praise; for assuredly it will give very great delight to those who read it.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

The New Abelard from The Times (11 April, 1884 - p.5)

“THE NEW ABELARD.”*

     People who hold to the old-fashioned notion that novels are primarily meant to amuse, and those who object to melancholy endings, à la “The Bride of Lammermoor,” will do well to avoid “The New Abelard.” We have seldom read a sadder, a stranger, or a more fanciful story. There is little of real life as we know it. There is a great deal of imaginative life as it might be made and marred by the fantastic play of ill-regulated passions. If we had briefly to define Mr. Buchanan’s very original piece of work, we should describe it as a tale of the new-fangled “isms.” There is much of humanitarianism, of course, of which Mr. Buchanan has been the poet, the priest, and the prophet; there are spiritualism, agnosticism, and scepticism as well, though the cold lights of philosophy and reason are relieved by a colouring of sensuousness that sometimes verges on sensuality. We have an abundance of fervent embraces with warm kisses; we have hapless lovers with heart-rending partings; and there are more than enough of bare necks and arms, and studies generally of the semi-nude that might have seduced a Saint Anthony. At the same time we hasten to add that the story is laudably free from the positive improprieties that flavour too many of the stories by our lady novelists. When Saint Anthony is tempted—for there is a clergyman who plays the part—he does not feel the slightest inclination to fall, and though he is undoubtedly guilty of conscious bigamy, he has succeeded in silencing his conscience by sophistry. The tone of the book in the beginning is disagreeable to any one of strong religious feelings, or, at least, of sound orthodox convictions. But as we read and as the details of the story work themselves out, the Christianity of revelation triumphs over the hollow creed of humanitarianism; and a sufferer who is in bitter need of consolation finds it where he would formerly have sought it in vain. So far as the style of the composition goes, we do not know that Mr. Buchanan has ever shown to greater advantage. There are many pages of his prose which are really eloquent poetry; and his scenes and scenery are sometimes painted with extraordinary force and fire. But with all that, returning to the point from which we started, we may regret that the book is not more readable. The philosophy of this new Abelard is a puzzling study; nor does the brain, even after it has been seriously strained, always come to clear conclusions as to the author’s meaning, or the points towards which his misty speculations have been tending.
     The story opens dramatically with the meeting of the new Abelard and his Heloise in a ruined abbey by moonlight. To Abelard, or the Rev. Ambrose Bradley, the ruins appear to be typical of the wreck of the Established Church of England, through its failure to reconcile dogma and superstition with the researches of philosophy and science. The vicar of Fensea, at loggerheads with his common-place flock, is bracing himself to bear martyrdom for advanced opinions. His strong-minded Heloise, with her emotional sensibility, sympathizes deeply in his prospective sufferings and only longs to cast in her lot with him. The sketch of Alma Craik, an heiress by the way, foreshadows her future relations with her clerical lover. “Looking into the grave eyes of this woman, you would have said she was some saint, some beautiful Madonna; looking at her mouth and lips, you would have said it was the mouth of Cytherea, alive with the very fire of love.” Her beliefs are broad and emotional; his faith, in so far as it has survived, is narrow, frivolously contradictory, and æsthetic. He would not only marry religion to science, but would engage art and beauty as the handmaids of the wedded pair. So when he answers a solemn official communication from his bishop, we need not say that the venerable divine is scandalized. The interview between the hot-headed young priest and his frail and rigidly orthodox diocesan is one of the best things in the book. Had he been really a Christian, we should have said that the vicar takes up his cross courageously; at all events, he resigns his living, throws off his surplice, and leaves the Church. His sacrifice to his spiritual crotchets is temporarily rewarded; he becomes a light of secularism and a popular preacher or lecturer, drawing crowds to admire his eloquence and eccentricities. Had his worldly prosperity continued, he might have been confirmed in his heterodoxy. But his love has always been dearer to him than fame; and the strength of his love is the only excuse for the deliberate sin he expiates so dearly. He marries Alma at her urgent desire, knowing that he is wedded to another woman. He argues that a shamelessly faithless wife has broken the consecrated ties that bound them; and he believes that it will be her interest to keep a promise of hers and never trouble him again. Circumstances make the woman violate the pledge, and he awakens from his dream of love to misery. His remorse over the wreck of his Alma’s life, with the agony with which he approaches the inevitable confessions to her, are powerfully and naturally painted; and the expiation of his sin and of her misfortune is terrible, though it is the innocent woman who suffers most severely, since we are told that he found comfort before his death.
     It will be seen that the story is an extremely sad one, although there are one or two characters who, in their lighter aspects, are almost comic—especially an American professor of spiritualism, and an elderly spinster, the companion of Miss Craik, who, with a singularly feeble brain, delights in dabbling in the inscrutable mysteries that deeply interest her intellectual superiors. Moreover, not unfrequently Mr. Buchanan is unconsciously amusing when, with confident pretensions to exact research, he betrays his ignorance of club life and London society. And if he is content, as a novelist, that his undeniable talents should be admired, we may congratulate him, on the whole, on his latest production.

     *”The New Abelard.” By Robert Buchanan, author of “The Shadow of the Sword.” Chatto and Windus; 1884.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

The Master of the Mine from Overland monthly and Out West magazine (Vol. 7, Issue 39, March 1886 - p. 320)

RECENT FICTION.

     WE spoke last month of the generally slim character of the English pamphlet reprints among our collection of new novels, and mentioned B. L. Farjeon’s as the only one of any value whatever. We must add to this now The Master of the Mine, which, being by Robert Buchanan, can hardly fail to be a more or less pleasant story, and possessed of character and intelligence. It has a fine young fellow for a hero, and fine young women for heroines, and some excellent Cornish folk. The chief incident in the plot is the old and ugly one of the “gentleman” scoundrel and the cottage girl, which is not to American ideas appropriate for use in any but a seriously tragic spirit—as in “Adam Bede,” for instance. It is useless to expect this, however, of the English light novel, in which it seems to be indispensable to about one half of the limited number of plots that constitute their stock in trade. Mr. Buchanan has, in fact, so far presumed upon his ability to make all that he writes about reasonably entertaining, as to use stock incidents very freely, including the fishing of the wicked rival out of a flooded mine by the good rival at the extremest peril of his life, in the most old-fashioned manner.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

The Moment After: a tale of the unseen from The Scotsman (22 September, 1890 - p. 2)

NEW NOVELS.

     No one who knows the literature of to-day need be told that Mr Robert Buchanan is a bold man. His new story, The Moment After, has little more to recommend it than its undoubted audacity. When stripped of the dressing in which its author’s skill has wrapped the central idea, the story is simply another attempt to imagine what happens to a man’s spirit when the man’s body dies. But Mr Buchanan is not content with the plain question. His man is a murderer; and, of course, what happens to a murderer’s spirit ought to be more blood-curdling than what happens to anybody else’s spirit. The story is cleverly enough done; but it is rather like trying to make a Death’s head out of a turnip and a candle-end after all. Any one who finds Mr Buchanan’s poem “Judas Iscariot to his Soul” impressive, will find this story also impressive. But unless the reader consents to be frightened, he cannot but find the tale ridiculous when it is meant to be awful. It is a horrible thing to know that a man has been twice hanged without being killed. But there must be no doubt about the matter, else the horrible becomes the funny. Mr Buchanan’s man, while he is being hanged twice, is kept (if the expression be permissible) so much in suspense, is represented so strongly as neither dead nor alive, that a reader perforce loses faith in any possible existence for him; and smiles at the author’s attempts to make him probable.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

The Wedding Ring: A Tale of To-day from Catholic World (Vol. 53, Issue 314, May 1891 - pp. 301-302)

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS

     Mr. Robert Buchanan’s new novel is sensational as a matter of course, yet not so much so as some of his previous work. There is an ill-assorted couple in it who are severed in the first place by what the man mistakes for murder or very near it. He knocks his wife down in order to rob her of money bestowed by an Anglican curate for the purpose of saving their sick baby’s life, and leaves her bleeding and unconscious. We mistake, however, in employing the word “rob”—in England, it seems, if Mr. Buchanan’s version of the law is correct, a man cannot rob his wife, since all that she has, no matter how obtained, is his, not hers. The wife recovers after the husband has fled, and presently falls heir to an independent fortune, in the enjoyment of which she and her little girl are living when the story takes them up again seven years later. The woman lives under an assumed name, so as to evade her husband should he be still living. Her nearest neighbor, Sir George Venebles, has been seeking her hand in marriage for some years, but has always been refused it. Presently Mr. Bream, the Anglican curate of the first act of the drama, turns up again as assistant to the very High Church and celibate rector of the village where Sir George is magnate. He and Mrs. Dartmouth recognize each other, but keep their secret until an accident reveals to the curate the death of the first husband. He makes known the fact to the widow and Sir George, who immediately affiance each other.They have barely done so when the husband reappears, as plausible a villain as ever, demanding not merely the property and the child, to which English law entitles him, but also the affection, respect, and obedience to which he has also a clear legal title. The story is an old one, and Mr. Buchanan has not greatly varied it in presentation, except in the use he makes of the rector and the curate. The former is on the husband’s side in every particular, takes his repentance for genuine, and rates his once-esteemed parishioner, the wife, as a very poor specimen of what Christianity can do, because she even hesitates as to her duty. In his view she ought to reserve nothing; her plain obligation is “to receive with tenderness the gentleman to whom she owes a wife’s duty, a wife’s obedience.” The curate, on the other hand, goes in energetically for divorce and her remarriage to Sir George, a programme not carried out in the end only because the returned prodigal is murdered on his wife’s doorstep by a man whose domestic happiness he had ruined and whose wife he had abandoned as well as betrayed.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

Diana’s Hunting from The Times (5 November, 1895 - p.11)

     Somebody is certainly needed to supervise the orthography of our novelists. Mr. Robert Buchanan may write about “a pitch-battle,” if he pleases, but he should not write about “dypsomania.” An author who quotes the Greek Testament in the original, as Mr. Buchanan does, must know that “dypsomania” is wrong. Mr. Buchanan’s tale DIANA’S HUNTING shows us Diana returning bredouille, like Gyp’s Paulett. The situation is one not uncommon; we have a successful young playwright wedded to one of these excellent women, full of affection and misplaced aspirates, whom clever men often do marry. Add Diana, a handsome girl of 22, a successful actress in the hero’s first successful piece, and the nature of “Diana’s Hunting” needs no explanation. Though flattered by “many a gilded scion of nobility” (as Mr. Buchanan says finely) and accustomed to be “elegantly attired in a light pink morning gown,” the fair Diana embraces the hero in her dressing room, dines out alone with him, sits on his knee, reads his books (a thing impossible to his wife), and asks him to accompany her to America. But a Mr. Short, one of the bluff, brusque, benevolent brutes of fiction, prevails on the hero to stay at home with the wife without the aspirates. As Diana was an underbred minx the hero acted with sagacity, as well as in accordance with the moral law.

___

Diana’s Hunting from The New York Times (15 February, 1896)

Robert Buchanan’s Clever Story.

DIANA’S HUNTING. By Robert Buchanan. 18mo. New-York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. 75 cents.
_____

     It was only while he was drinking “a lemon squash” that Marcus Aurelius Short, the dramatic critic of The Trumpet, told Frank Horsham that he was going straight to the devil. Horsham had just written a play, “The Daughter of Circe,” and in that piece Miss Diana Meredith was the leading lady, and the play had been an uncommon success. Diana, elated by her success, because, like Horsham, both of them had been trying ever so long to do something brilliant, has quite lost her head—and so has the dramatist. It was after the fall of the curtain when the author had been called for and greeted with rounds of applause, that he went to pay his respects to Diana, and to thank her for the genius she had shown. Then, in a moment of impulsiveness, Diana had kissed Horsham.
     Horsham ought to have been with his quiet, gentle wife and taken her and his little girl Mabel home. It was Short who had to act as Mrs. Horsham’s escort. Poor Mrs. Bessie Horsham! She was uncertain as to the placing of her h’s, and she said “worrit,” and she did not know B from a bull’s foot, and yet she had been so good and loving and trustful, for her husband was her worship.
     Diana was unhappy. She had a silly mamma and a ridiculous papa, and Mrs. Meredith had noticed Diana’s predilection for Horsham—and dreaded it. Half forgetting his Bessie—Diana nothing loath—she led on the man. From a few shillings a week the playmaker was now in receipt of £50 a week. He was constantly forgetting his Bessie. Diana’s ideas of morality were uncertain. Then it was proposed by an enterprising American manager, that the piece and the entire body of performers should move from London to New-York for a season. The condition Diana exacted was that Horsham should go with her. Then the man would have been lost and Mr. Marcus Aurelius Short stepped to the front. Mrs. Short was a drunken creature, but her husband made her a kind of object lesson. Horsham retreated just in time, otherwise Diana would have had him in her toils. So he returns to Bessie, who, if oblivious of her h’s, never for a moment has suspected how near her weak husband was to leaving her and their child. Mr. Buchanan’s story is cleverly handled. Possibly Diana bagged some other game.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

Lady Kilpatrick from The Times (5 November, 1895 - p.11)

     The mythopœic faculties of the human mind are sadly limited. All the nations of the earth tell practically the same story. Therefore, when Mr. Robert Buchanan again obliges us with an Irish narrative, we know exactly what is inevitable. Here are the old Irish peer, and his son by a betrayed young colleen (drowned long ago), here are the false marriage, the odious attorney, the diabolical kinsman (hostile to the true heir), here is the noble but reckless and ruined squire, and here is the uncompromising old butler and faithful family retainer. We miss nobody, none of our oldest Irish friends, except the omadhaun (or village idiot), for the attorney is probably a gombeen man, if all was known. It is superfluous to inform any discreet and learned reader that the false marriage, after all, was a genuine marriage; that the broth of a boy was legitimate; that the colleen, the cratur, was never drowned at all; and that the attorney came to a bad end. Mr. Buchanan has added a “moving bog” to the ordinary persons and properties of Hibernian romance, and when the attorney is driven to his end by aid of this awful scourge of nature and of potato plots, then the virtuous characters come to their own. If the student thinks that he has somewhere heard or read of not dissimilar events in Irish romance or melodrama, we can only repeat that the mythopœic faculties of mankind have a tendency to run in grooves. To the scientific mythologist a very subtle problem is presented. He has to ask himself whether the similarities between Mr. Buchanan’s and other people’s Irish novels are the result of diffusion from a common centre (perhaps in Central Asia), or whether they have been independently, spontaneously, and, as it were, fatally developed in Mr. Buchanan’s imagination? It may be that some obscure yet potent law of the human intellect compels novelists to introduce the sham marriage which is a valid marriage, the drowned colleen who is not drowned, the wicked attorney, the villanous kinsman, the uncompromising butler, and all the other stock persons and incidents.

___

Lady Kilpatrick from The Guardian (7 November, 1895 - p.9)

     Lady Kilpatrick (Chatto and Windus, 8vo, pp. 279, 6s.) has a nice old plot, which we have long known and loved on the shelves of the circulating libraries, told again by Mr. Robert Buchanan in a very lively manner. The legitimate heir of the Earl is brought up in the castle, his relationship being only guessed at by the local gossips. He is, of course, the son of a real marriage, which his father believed to be a sham one. The Earl’s brother knows the facts, and tries to destroy all proofs in favour of his own son. Then we have the good old servant who tracks the priest and the wife, and the high-bred heroine who is in love with her injured cousin, all described in a lively and not too hackneyed manner.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

A Marriage by Capture from The Scotsman (23 March, 1896 - p. 4)

Mr T. Fisher Unwin, London, has published in his “Autonym Library” a story by Mr Robert Buchanan entitled A Marriage by Capture. It is a wild Irish story about the abduction of an heiress by a man who loved her honourably. It is cleverly and naturally written, and easily sustains a strong interest during the short period occupied in the reading of it.

___

A Marriage by Capture from The Guardian (5 May, 1896 - p. 4)

     It seems that Mr. Robert Buchanan is not to be his own publisher invariably. The new volume of the Autonym Library, A Marriage by Capture (T. Fisher Unwin, 8vo, pp 208, 1s. 6d.), bears his name, only removed by a few inches from that of one of the publishing fraternity of whom we were led to believe he had washed his hands altogether. The stories in the Autonym Library are as a rule slight and readable. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan is only going to publish his serious and epoch-making books without the intervention of a professional publisher, and will relax his principles when he is in lighter vein. “A Marriage by Capture” is an Irish romance. It has excitement and interest at first, but ends weakly, and the cleverness of the incidents is counterbalanced by the want of drawing in the characters. Mr. Buchanan describes the startling adventures of Catherine Power, a young girl who has been left a fine property, accompanied by a millionaire’s income, in a wild part of Connaught. She elects to live at Castle Craig quite alone, and is subjected to treatment which even in a romantic story is generally situated in the fifteenth century, not in the nineteenth. If the property had been entailed it would have come to Catherine Power’s cousin, a rough young Irishman with a pedigree warranting the motto “Not we from kings, but kings from us” and tastes as low as a loafer whose antecedents do not date back so far as his father. This person, whom Mr. Buchanan fails to make much of, having made an unsuccessful attempt to win Catherine’s consent to a marriage by fair means, determines to force it by foul. Several attacks on her are made by kidnappers in crape masks and she is obliged to ask for police protection. When at last she is carried off the reader naturally believes that her cousin Patrick Blake is the offender. But he is mistaken, and in that mistake lies the chief triumph of “A Marriage by Capture,” so it would be unfair to unlock the mystery here. If the characters were not smudged in with apparent haste and thoughtlessness the story would be a really excellent one. As it is, it is pleasant to read, and the Irish brogue is not unbearably unintelligible.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

Effie Hetherington from The New York Times (17 May, 1896)

EFFIE HETHERINGTON. By Robert Buchanan. Boston: Roberts Brothers. $1.50.

_____

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, who is endowed with a strong and vigorous style, has peculiar penchant for the writing of unpleasant romances. In “Effie Hetherington” all is stress and storm, illumined by the fitful flare of lightning.
     Richard Douglas, the laird, is a “dour” and sour “chiel.” With the best blood in Scotland running through his veins, he holds himself aloof from all social intercourse. He lives in a gloomy old house on the seashore, not far from Castle Lindsay. His only friend is his old serving woman, Elspeth. Why Douglas should be such a cynic you can hardly tell. He has traveled all over the world, has acquired much learning, and with it a contempt for humanity. At Castle Lindsay lives the Earl of Durmshairu, a grim, melancholy man.
     There is some slight intercourse kept up between the Earl and Douglas, for, had the laird so willed it, he would have been a welcomed guest at the Castle. One stormy night a small cavalcade asks shelter of the laird. The party is composed of Miss Effie Hetherington, Lady Bell, and Mr. Arthur Lamont. Effie afterward disappears, abandoning her child, and Douglas fathers it. Some eighteen years afterward, taking the child, who is now a young lady, to Paris, Douglas sees Effie in a theatre. His former enchantress is now an abandoned woman. A floating corpse drawn out of the Seine terminates the career of this wretch. Even then, notwithstanding all her crimes, Douglas saves her from exposure in the morgue. Some novels are written to amuse, others to impart a moral. If the latter is Mr. Buchanan’s intention it has been carried out by massing together many horrors.

___

Effie Hetherington from The Guardian (23 June, 1896 - p.4)

     With all its faults—and it abounds in them—Effie Hetherington (Fisher Unwin, 8vo, pp. 264, 6s.) is a better piece of work than anything Mr. Robert Buchanan has given us for a long time. The outline of the story inevitably suggests Stevenson’s unfinished story “Weir of Hermiston”—a fact which is not to Mr. Buchanan’s advantage. But there is some force in the portrait of Richard Douglas, the gloomy, unpolished Scotch laird, and some intensity in the love-scenes between him and the falsely fair Effie. The country, too, is described with knowledge and appreciation. But though Richard Douglas himself is alive and well planted on his feet, the general impression left by the book is one of unreality, and one feels all the time that Mr. Buchanan cared no more about writing it than we do about reading it. Mr. Buchanan, in fact, needs a burning question to rouse his faculties into life, and an ordinary tale of love and passion, however lurid, is not sufficient to provide him with the stimulus which he requires.

___

Effie Hetherington from The Times (31 July, 1896 - p.3)

RECENT NOVELS.

     The Quarterly Reviewer of “Endymion” frankly proclaimed that he had not read through the whole of that celebrated poem. This candour is unusual, but a critic who has read the first 50 pages of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s EFFIE HETHERINGTON might be tempted to imitate the old example; the task seems not worth while. In some 50 or 60 pages a critic can collect feebleness and inconsistencies and commonplaces enough to justify him almost in positively declining to go further. The book begins in the weirdest conventionalities, the most sombre and antiquated banalité. On Hallow E’en, 1870, Richard Douglas, of Douglas, a ruined laird of ancient, very ancient, family, is glooming and glowering over the waters of the Solway Firth. We know all about him already, by long practice in novel-reading. Mix up “The Master of Ravenswood” and Mr. Black’s “Macleod of Dare”; the desolate manor, the single servant, a doited old foster-mother and housekeeper (“Elspeth,” of course; the name “is indicated”), with one of the appalling moonlit thunderstorms so common in Scotland at the end of October, and the hero and mise en scène are before the student. Let the hero exclaim, “Damn the women! Damn their soft, smooth faces, and their scented hair, and all their winsome ways! Ay, damn them all—save one!” Then the least experienced amateur knows what to expect. The “one” who is “barred” in the brief but comprehensive private ejaculation comes to the hero’s door with Lady Bell Lindsay and the young man they both want to marry. They are staying at the Castle (Lady Bell being, indeed, the Earl’s daughter), and what more natural than that they should start, at night, for “a gallop to Dumfries, and be riding back to the Castle for Halloween” in the dark. As there is to be “a ball, a supper, and all the stupid old customs of Halloween,” the stupid old custom of going home to dinner seems to have been overlooked, unless they galloped through the night after dinner. Lady Bell and her lover ride away. Effie Hetherington (who rides in a petticoat of lace) is left with the hero. “He’s harnessing,” says Elspeth, “the only beast he keeps—a beast that tholes only saddle and bridle, and not them, unless the rider is a Laird o’ Douglas.” This exclusive animal none the less presently jogs demurely over to Castle Lindsay, conveying safely, in a ramshackle old gig, the darkling Laird of Douglas and the coquettish Miss Effie, who has partaken of some toddy. “Are you a spirit or are you a woman?” asks Mr. Douglas—much the kind of question Odysseus put to Nausicaa in an age less scientific than ours. Miss Effie is dressed for the dance by Lady Bell’s maid, who “had been in the service of the earl for many years.” We expect, therefore, to find her a second edition of Elspeth, but no, “she was a short, sturdy looking woman of about five and twenty,” who spoke broad Scots. Such are the maids of the daughters of a hundred earls, as everybody knows. Mr. Douglas had, apparently, gone home across the moor, but he returned, not dressed indeed, still, “it was clear that he had had recourse to soap and water and a clothes brush; his hair, too, was brushed carefully.” “Please, papa,” cried Lady bell, “we all owe Mr. Douglas a debt of gratitude.” Now, the daughters of a hundred earls, or even of one earl, do not say “Please, papa!” The general public of tenants and guest, contemplating Mr. Douglas, remarked, “Lord save us all! See till the mud of his boots!” Now, what with the conventionality of Mr. Douglas, his foster-mother, and his thunderstorm; what with the unconventionality of the darkling “gallop to and from Dumfries,” and “Please, papa,” and a lace petticoat under a habit, we maintain that, whether as a melodrama, or a study of manners and character, Mr. Buchanan’s work does not seem to deserve to be read to its bitter end—in the Morgue. To be fair, let us offer one specimen of Mr. Buchanan’s gnomic wisdom—”It is the man of power and insight who, penetrating to the sources of female caprice, and reading the female heart like a book, stands aghast at his discoveries, and lets slip each golden opportunity.” The discoveries to be made in Effie’s character and conduct do, indeed, astonish the reader. Once well embarked in the melodrama of a man’s constancy, a woman’s caprice, a murder, an addition to the illegal population of romance, and a suicide, Mr. Buchanan is more at home with his materials, and the reader who survives the early chapters may derive some gloomy entertainment from the novel.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

The Rev. Annabel Lee: a tale of to-morrow from The Scotsman (24 March, 1898 - p. 9)

     Mr Robert Buchanan has in his new story, The Rev. Annabel Lee, taken a flight into the twenty-first century. The opening, as he himself in a preface suggests, may fairly be regarded as somewhat puzzle-headed, and however clear his theme may become to one who would study the book as a speculative treatise in sociology, to the novel reader who likes his thinking done for him, the problem of life, as the author would read it, is not so clear as could be wished. Less importance is given to the conditions of life in the twenty-first century than to the views held regarding death, a life beyond, heredity, and the belief or denial of the supernatural. People who had eliminated the unfit by the aid of a chamber of euthanasia, who forbade the marriage of persons who did not satisfy a board of sanitation as to their mental and physical soundness, who had no poverty or drunkenness, having discovered a secret principle of nutrition and could do with one meal a week, who had flying machines to convey them from one European capital to another in a few hours, and so on, had time on their hands apparently to reason themselves into the belief that their barbarian ancestors of the nineteenth century were meat-eating, beer-drinking sordid sots, and cherished some old world superstitions. One is in doubt sometimes as to the direction in which Mr Buchanan’s sympathies lie, though there is no mistaking his occasional very pointed ironies. The “Rev.” Annabel Lee is a true child of nature—childhood, the reader will thankfully learn, will be unaltered in the twenty-first century—and she is much puzzled about the death of her little brother. She becomes acquainted with a little boy named Uriel, an invalid who has escaped the euthanasia chamber, and in whom lurks no small share of the old beliefs in the supernatural and the deity, and his talk seems to tone the mind of the gentle girl. Uriel and his Annabel Lee, indeed, form a pretty story, and when in after years, in the liberty of the twenty-first century, Annabel begins to teach and to preach a form of Christian ethics and beliefs it comes to be discovered that the sum of wisdom found in the very modern halls of the religion of humanity is simply that of the “Inquisition” writ very large. The story merits careful reading.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

Father Anthony: A Romance of To-day from The New York Times (11 March, 1899)

LONDON LITERARY LETTER.
_____

Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES’S SATURDAY REVIEW by
William L. Alden.

     LONDON, Feb. 28.—
     .....Mr. Robert Buchanan’s “Father Anthony” does not do him credit. For that matter, few of his later novels are worthy of mention by the side of two or three of his first stories. Not that those were works of genius. Most certainly they were not, but they were readable stories, and his last three or four novels have been unreadable except by that curious class of readers who will read anything that is called a novel. “Father Anthony” is on the whole the worst mistake Mr. Buchanan has yet made. The plot is weak and the story is told in a way that ought to make it a specific for insomnia. I don’t admire Mr. Buchanan’s poetry, but it is infinitely preferable to the most of his novels.

___

Father Anthony: A Romance of To-day from The New York Times (15 September, 1900)

Robert Buchanan.*

     Dr. Charles Sutherland of Wigmore Street, London, had a remarkable dream. It was a regular nightmare. But, what was worse, the doctor kept on dreaming the same horrors. A woman was drowning and crying for help. That dream affected the health of the doctor, and so he made up his mind to take a holiday. He went to Ireland. In the car he meets a beautiful young lady. It strikes him at once that the lady resembles the drowning spectre of his dreams. Miss Eileen Craig of Craig is in great trouble. The doctor, taking advantage of his dream acquaintance, has her secret confided to him. It is sad enough. She is in love with Michael Creenan. Michael is in Castlebar Prison accused of having murdered Eileen’s father. Dr. Sutherland determines to solve the mystery. The story of “Father Anthony” is of the detective kind. Michael has a brother Anthony who is a priest. It looks as if one of the brothers had shot Eileen’s father. Both brothers are under suspicion. Neither of them did the crule deed. The crime is laid to Rory Bournes. He was drunk when he shot his man. There is a great deal of whisky absorbed by the personages in the story. You learn that a dram is called “shnifter.” The virtues of potheen are vaunted, but is it really better than Jamieson’s? Mr. Robert Buchanan is unquestionably a sound authority.

__________

* FATHER ANTHONY. A Romance of To-day. By Robert Buchanan. New York: G. W. Dillingham & Co.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels

_____

Andromeda: an idyll of the Great River from The Guardian (21 March, 1900 - p.3)

NEW NOVELS.

     To many of those who know Mr. Robert Buchanan in very different moods and in other characters it will be refreshing to meet him as the author of ANDROMEDA (Chatto and Windus, 8vo, pp. 413, 6s.), an old-fashioned romance of love, art, and mystery which carries us back to the early sixties by its plot, and still more by its manner and execution. The heroine is a child of the sea, the nursling, ward, and wife of a truculent, open-handed, hard-favoured mariner who has not been heard of for many a long day when a weak-minded young artist falls in love with her on Canvey Island, near Gravesend. Charlie Somerset is engaged to a cousin, and an elderly comrade of the palette gives him excellent advice. He follows it for a little; but fate will have it that Andromeda receives, with news that her ferocious husband is dead or dying, a considerable fortune from Californian mines. Somerset jilts his cousin, and the lovers are to be married; but just then, of course, Matt Watson comes ashore safe and sound. What happens then we shall not say, but it is very exciting, and though there is a little uncertainty about the end, Mr. Buchanan manages his plot with the hand of a master of suspense. There is no subtlety about the characters; in every feature and every phrase they are in the tradition of mid-century sentimentalism. But the story has more life and rapidity than half the psychological “studies” can show; there is some admirable landscape from the mouth of the Thames,  and the pictures of Bohemian Bloomsbury in the sixties have all the air of being done from life.

Back to the Bibliography or the Novels