BOOK REVIEWS - NOVELS

1. The Shadow of the Sword (1876) to Annan Water (1883)

The Shadow of the Sword (1876)

The Daily News (27 December, 1876 - Issue 9573)

RECENT NOVELS.
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     The keynote of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s novel, “The Shadow of the Sword” (3 vols., Bentley) is struck in some singularly strong and striking verses, which forms a proem to the story. “Who has tied Dollabella to that sword?” cried Cicero when he saw his diminutive son-in-law weighted by the insignia of his office. Mr. Buchanan has attached a hero, who is small and insignificant in conception, to a tremendous and appalling purpose. Rohan Gwenfern’s outcry of despair is supposed to raise the dead Christ from His grave, and to overthrow an empire; and what, if we come to analyse him, is Rohan Gwenfern, the lever which produces these stupendous results? He is a coward, and selfish in his cowardice. “The mere dread,” says Mr. Buchanan, “of being drawn for the conscription paralysed him with fear” (the italics are the author’s), “filled his heart with the sick horror cowards feel, seemed to touch the inmost springs of his enormous strength, and make him tremble to the very soul.” When he contemplates “vistas” of his countrymen fighting for the Fatherland, “he thanks the good God who made him a widow’s son.” He is twice a murderer, once in deed and once in thought. And to succour this abject creature Mr. Buchanan would have us believe that the dead Christ waked, and Buonaparte fell from his throne. It is difficult to feel any interest in a coward, but it is even more difficult to admire a heroine who is a mere doll. Not all the sabots, saffron coifs, and distaffs in Brittany could give Marcelle Derval life. It is small avail to dress the outside of a hero and heroine if the inner man and woman are not real. Even a picturesque background of red rock and green sea becomes raw in tone and monotonous when pressed into the service of a hero, for whom not one of his readers can feel either pity or sympathy. When Rohan’s name is drawn in the conscription, and when he will not fight, he takes refuge in a  sea-cave, where he lives in peril of his life as a deserter, till the fall of the Emperor frees him. His cheeks are famished, his form is wasted, his eyes are wild with hunger and despair. “You tell me,” cries one of his admirers, “he is a deserter and revolter; I tell you that he is a hero and a martyr.” Meanwhile “a moral shadow arises between his soul and that of Marcelle.” There are many shadows in this book to which a shadow stands godfather. But strangest of all is that “shadow of Buonaparte” which estranges the soul of Marcelle from her lover. The shadow which lay on her prophetic soul grows deeper, till on the 1st of March, when Rohan learns that the Emperor has landed at Antibes—or Cannes, as Mr. Buchanan has it—and when throwing his arms up into the air her lover “shrieks like a man shot through the heart.” He thinks of the Emperor as a “red (!) shadow;” his face becomes convulsed, and he longs “to strike Buonaparte down, to crush and kill him underneath the rock of his mortal hate.” When warned, he is, as a deserter, again endangered by the return of the Emperor, he gazes “wildly at the air, and utters that strange, unearthly laugh;” he speaks “like a raving madman;” the “light of murder is in his eyes,” and he starts to hunt the Emperor down, his hair hanging over his shoulders, his beard long and matted, his feet and arms bare, and his body wretchedly covered. After the catastrophe of Waterloo, the enemies come face to face; the deserter whets his knife; the Emperor sleeps. Ten pages describe this meeting as the melting of the assassin’s heart; and St. Helena being a matter of history the reader is spared those pangs of uncertainty which give a charm to fiction. Mr. Buchanan bids his readers farewell with the following flight into poetry—

So sit those twain, thousands of miles apart,
Each cheek on hand, gazing upon the sea!

Without pausing to remark on such marvels as a “red shadow,” or the “red hues of an eclipse,” we may conclude by noticing that the definitions of cromlech and dolmen given by Mr. Buchanan are not those usually accepted. The broom does not blossom in March; and March would be late indeed for the first violet. To upbraid the hair, too, is not a term in general use. If it is well that the cobbler should stick to his last, it is even better that a poet should stick to his poetry. Mr. Buchanan has written some brilliant and harmonious verse; and prose which is poor, gaudy, and false is altogether unworthy of him.

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The Guardian (1 January, 1877 - p.7)

SOME NOVELS.
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     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.

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The Graphic (6 January, 1877 - Issue 371)

     “THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD:” a Romance, by Robert Buchanan (3 vols.: Bentley).—Mr. Buchanan’s “romance” is uneven, and sometimes extravagant and even spasmodic, but it is a work, we think, that no one but a poet could have written. Its strength and attraction lie in the depth of the author’s feeling for Nature, especially for Nature in her wilder and weirder aspects, as she shows herself in “the melancholy ocean,” and the awful cliffs and gloomy caverns of a stormy and solitary coast. Mr. Buchanan undoubtedly possesses in a high degree the Celtic turn for what Mr. Matthew Arnold terms “natural magic,” the turn for “catching and rendering the charm of Nature in a wonderfully new and vivid way.” The scene of the story is laid at Kromlaix, “in the loneliest and saddest corner of the Breton coast,” and the sea and the crags form an abiding background to the pictures here shown to us which we are never allowed to lose sight of for long together. The tale opens in the early spring of 1813, the spring that followed on Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow, when the “Shadow of the Sword” was in truth growing large over all Europe. The characters in the piece are many, but only three of them seem drawn with force and distinctness of outline, the hero and heroine, Rohan Gwenfern and Marcelle Derval, and their common uncle, Corporal Derval, one of Napoleon’s veterans, discharged with a pension after losing a leg at Austerlitz, who has retired to his native village there to burn incense perpetually on the altar of his idol, the Great Emperor, who in his eyes and those of his niece, Marcelle, stands almost on a level with the good God. The case is far otherwise with Marcelle’s cousin and lover, Rohan, who, first in strength and physical beauty among the village youths, is altogether matchless for skill and daring as a sailor and a cragsman, “he swims like a fish, he crawls like a fly, and his joy would be complete if he could soar like a bird.” But, chiefly through the teachings of one Master Arfoll, an itinerant schoolmaster—a character Mr. Buchanan has rather tried to paint than succeeded in painting, for he remains almost as shadowy and unsubstantial as if he were veritably a supernatural being—Rohan has imbued sundry heterodox opinions, among them an utter hatred of all war as evil and abominable, and has sworn to himself that under no compulsion will he ever submit to be made a soldier. Up to this year he has held himself safe, for the conscription has spared the only sons of widows, but now the Emperor’s needs demand even these, and in the new conscription for the campaign of 1813 Rohan’s name is drawn in his absence by his sweetheart, Marcelle. The greater portion of the story is taken up with the events that follow on this turn of fate— Rohan’s refusal to yield obedience to the Emperor’s mandate, though it cost him the loss of all that men hold dear, and he is but as one man against the world; his escape to fastnesses known only to himself, where, though suffering great privations, he hides so successfully that he is long supposed to be dead, and his discovery by an enemy in an almost inaccessible cave in a natural recess on the coast called the Cathedral of St. Gildas, and the siege in miniature he there sustains from the gendarmes who endeavour to scale his eyrie, and against whom he defends himself desperately by hurling down on them huge stones and fragments of rock—but these things, as well as the marvellous discoveries Rohan subsequently makes in his wanderings in the heart of the earth, the episode of the inundation which nearly sweeps Kromlaix into the sea, and Rohan’s bravery therein, and how it finally fares with the valiant deserter we must leave our readers to learn in detail for themselves. We cannot, however, pass over without a word of protest the dangerous, if not immoral doctrine which Mr. Buchanan seems to lay down, that Rohan, because his private conscience disapproved of a law, was justified even in slaying the officer who in the discharge of his duty attempted to execute it—a theory which would justify the Fenian murderers of Sergeant Brett, if not any rough who might kick a policeman to death for interfering with what he might be pleased to think his lawful amusements. However, Mr. Buchanan’s questionable ethics and somewhat random and exaggerated rhetoric on the subject of the great Napoleon need not spoil any reader’s appreciation of his really fine and powerful romance, to whose many beauties in the way of picturesque description we regret our space will not allow us to do justice.

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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.

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A Child of Nature (1881)

The Academy (19 March, 1881 - No. 463, p.204)

     The appearance of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s Shadow of the Sword some years ago made some critics think that his considerable but unequal literary power had found a field more suitable than poetry to exercise itself in. A Child of Nature does not altogether discountenance that idea, but it does not confirm it quite so strongly as might be wished. Like its predecessor, A Child of Nature is called a romance; but it hardly justifies the title according to the ordinary acceptation of the word, in which romance is taken to imply a story dealing more with adventure and with the tragic passions than with analytic character-drawing and observation of manners. A Child of Nature, except that its scene is laid in an out-of-the-way place (the north of Sutherland), and that at least one scene (the sawing asunder of a bridge by an ancient Highland foster-father in the desire to destroy a person who is, as he thinks, baleful to his foster-child), does not differ much in style from most novels of the day, and indeed is not nearly so much of a romance as Macleod of Dare or Sunrise. However, there is nothing particular in a name. As a novel A Child of Nature is good, but not of the best. The earlier scenes, which, if our memory does not play tricks with us, Mr. Buchanan published some years ago under the title of The Fair Pilot of Loch Uribol or something of that kind, are perhaps the best part; and two sketches in them, Doctor John and Angus of the Dogs, are either very clever studies from the life or still cleverer imaginations. The heroine, too, Mina Macdonald, is good. Her brother and uncle are more conventional. Her lover, a young landlord who pays his first visit to his property under an assumed name, is a somewhat fragmentary and disappointing sketch in point of character, while his adventures are not particularly striking. The least successful figures in the book, however, are the selfish English aristocrat, Sir Charles Sedley, and his daughter Ethel. Mr. Buchanan may rest assured that no English gentleman of Sir Charles’s class, in speaking to his daughter of her cousin, Lord Arranmore, would talk about “his lordship;” and the young lady’s behaviour to Mina in her first interview with her is the very reverse of probable or characteristic. There is some good description in A Child of Nature—description in which the author produces a fair effect without lavish use of the word-palette. But Mr. Buchanan has been less careful of the minor touches than he might have been. Macdonalds and Macphersons in the north of Sutherland as ancient owners of the soil are surely out of place.
                                                                                                                 GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

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The Graphic (2 April, 1881 - Issue 592)

     IT is some years now since Mr. Robert Buchanan wrote his first novel—“The Shadow of the Sword.” Really great work, such as that was has always to be waited for, and is not turned out once or twice a year like the chronic fiction of the usual machine pattern. But then its memory remains, and the reader who has ever once read “The Shadow of the Sword” will be a little surprised, and at first by no means pleasantly, by Mr. Buchanan’s “A Child of Nature” (3 vols.: Bentley and Son). It seems hardly credible that the two novels should have come from the same hand. The first had all the air of being written by a man charged to the full with the enthusiasm of a great subject, and so, by main strength, fascinating into interest the tamest of readers and the most unwilling of admirers. It was the splendid tragedy of a battle waged by one man against mankind and nature combined—as unlike the sentimental romance as the ocean is unlike a saucer. On the other hand, in “A Child of Nature” Mr. Buchanan has gone to work as if he had come to the conclusion that, after all, it is not worth while to write great novels in the face of the inexhaustible demand for little ones. So he has turned out the usual sort of Gaelic story, only differing in character from its fellows by being a good deal better than most of them. When we have once realised the fact that “A Child of Nature” professes to be nothing higher than this, we may put our first bitter disappointment away, and gain from the book a great deal of wholesome pleasure. Oddly enough, considering the hands from which it comes, there is something feminine, in the best sense of the word, about both plot and style. The manner in which Graham Macdonald storms and conquers the heart of Ethel Sedley is true and natural; but Graham is a woman’s ideal, rather than a man’s, of what such a man would be and feel. On the other hand, Ethel, and her contrast, Mina, throw their two lovers’ entirely into the shade. All the incidental sketches of character and coast scenery in the far North are admirable, so far as they go, but we think Mr. Buchanan has carried reticence in description a little too far. It looks as if he had set himself the task of writing a popular novel, and had, with that view, made a point of saying nothing which  might possibly raise the work above what he has taken to be the popular level. It is not altogether agreeable to read an author who has the air of consciously writing down to the assumed level of his readers. Popular the novel is certain to be, and that deservedly. At the same time, we feel convinced that Mr. Buchanan has in this instance done justice neither to his own genius nor to the intellectual calibre of readers in general. One would have been content with lower work from almost any other novelist; one has a right to demand infinitely nobler and more durable work from the pen that wrote “The Shadow of the Sword.”

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God and the Man (1881)

The Graphic (10 December, 1881 - Issue 628)

     MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN’S “God and the Man” (3 vols. : Chatto and Windus) is, indeed, a novelty in modern fiction. It reads as if written, not out of a man’s brain—far less from any of the more ordinary sources and causes of novels—but straight and full out of a man’s soul. Whatever its faults may be, from a coldly critical point of view, there can be no question of its overflowing earnestness of purpose, and of the enthusiasm which inspires every page. The Romance (as it is called) deals with strong passions in their simplest and therefore most violent forms: not with the sentiment which pretends to be love, nor with the feeble dislike or collision of interests which imagine themselves, with a certain sort of comfortable self-conceit, to be hate, nor with shufflings between feeble faith and feebler reason, but with love, hate, despair—and with these nakedly, and in their extremes. And it lays them bare with the grasp of one who, if only by poetic insight, knows what they are and all that they can mean—all that they might mean if freed from the common conditions which for the most part veil and bind them. “God and the Man,” we are told, “is a study of the vanity and folly of individual hate, and is prefaced by two poems—one a graceful personal dedication which those who are better versed than we care to be in the quarrels of authors may possibly understand; the second a powerfully passionate overture, in which the motive of the romance is suggested and foreshadowed. This poem should be read first and last: it is the setting of the whole. To adequately trace the plot of the novel itself would need some of the grasp and power with which it is treated in Mr. Buchanan’s hands. Step by step, the two deadly enemies, Christian Christianson, who hates like a hero, with what seems to be the most just and righteous reason, and Richard Orchardson, who hates back in the style of a poisonous snake, are left “by themselves, alone with God” in the midst of a frozen sea. Christian’s prayer has been answered, and his enemy is given into his hands, and by his hands. It was hatred that had brought them there. How Christian comes to save the life of the foe whom he had brought there to kill, finally tends his death-bed with more than a brother’s love, and prays over his grave in the snow, is told with very little of the sentiment which such a subject might seem to demand, but in the very spirit and manner of tragedy. A great deal is made of the personal influence of John Wesley, who is even, by a curious and not very commendable caprice, introduced as an annotator of the story. And this influence also Mr. Buchanan appears completely to comprehend, even so far as to evolve from it his delicate portrait of Priscilla Sefton, the young saint for whose sake, more than for the hundred other causes, Christian and Richard hated one another. It must not be supposed that “God and the Man” is by any means a faultless work. It might easily have been better and more effectively constructed, and it nearly resembles “The Shadow of the Sword” in its want of relief by light or humour. But it is easy to understand that Mr. Buchanan went to work less in the spirit of an artist than of a man who had something to say. What he loses in trenchancy he gains in depth of reach and breadth of power; and we have to thank him for the strongest, sincerest, and wisest romance that has appeared for more years than there is any need to say.

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The Martyrdom of Madeline (1882)

The Graphic (24 June, 1882 - Issue 656)

     IN spite of the highest admiration for Mr. Robert Buchanan as a novelist, we cannot help regarding “The Martyrdom of Madeline” (3 vols.: Chatto and Windus) as a blunder. “The Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man” are great tragedies.“The Martyrdom of Madeline,” though evidently written in the grimmest earnest, is unfortunate in its subject, its method, and its style.Its purpose is to place men and women upon the same level in so far as moral judgments are concerned. That purpose is certainly not served by illustrating the privileges of manhood by means of an extravagantly exceptional coward and scoundrel, and the weakness of womanhood by a no less extravagantly exceptional simpleton. The general social moral of a work of fiction should, to be effectual, be always drawn from common and typical cases—not from monsters like Gavrolles or from simpletons like Madeline. According to Mr. Buchanan, what are called the “Society Journals” are the most mischievous wheels of the modern social machine, and no doubt, as at every period, a not unimportant portion of the press comes well within the range of unsparing satire. But the manner in which Mr. Buchanan points his lash by very thinly veiling the names of particular papers and their reputed editors is suggestive of spitefulness, and savours of the very form of unconcealed personality which he most justly condemns. In short, the novel is angry: and anger is inconsistent with power. Many readers will obtain a good deal of ill-natured amusement by retranslating the names of his characters into those of the real persons satirised or caricatured, and by comparing his venomously ugly portraits with their obvious originals.The cant of æstheticism has seldom received more telling blows than in these pages, or the nauseousness of its extremes been displayed more clearly or more severely condemned. But even these blows are weakened by their direction against persons instead of against the things themselves. These matters are altogether of more importance than the story itself, which is moderately interesting, occasionally pathetic, and, from first to last, eminently disagreeable. We use the word in no prudish spirit, but because it attempts to prove a universal case of wrong by means of an imaginary instance of exceptional folly and sin. Neither are bad men such complete villains, nor good women such simpletons, as Mr. Buchanan would have us believe. With the justice of his brief for woman against “the diabolic ingenuity of a strong sex tortured to devise legal means for sacrificing a weaker sex,” literary criticism has little, if any, concern. And of the taste which can “construct” scandals about real persons of whom the author admits that he knows “absolutely nothing,”the less said the better. On the whole, “The Martyrdom of Madeline” is altogether unworthy of a pen that has hitherto won no warmer admiration than ours.

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The Pall Mall Gazette (18 July, 1882 - Issue 5423)

SOME NEW STORIES. *

“THE MARTYRDOM OF MADELINE.”

MR. BUCHANAN writes with a purpose; but he does not write very effectively. He tells us in his preface—for he is not content to allow his novel to explain itself—that these volumes are intended to preach purity, as “The Shadow of the Sword” was intended to preach peace. It is, indeed, an excellent theme, and one that can never have advocates enough; but those who mean to advance it must use other methods than Mr. Buchanan’s. His plot is more than improbable; his characters are conventional in the extreme; his satire is cheap; his knowledge of much of the world which he describes is but the echo of echoes. Our friend the æsthete is present in great force, as he has been present in fifty novels of the past three or four seasons; and, lest there should be any mistake, Mr. Buchanan introduces us to persons so near the real thing as “Omar Milde, the poet, and his mother, Lady Milde.” Poor Madeline, the martyr, has indeed a bad time of it. A waif to begin with, she is taken in and cared for by a pious bargeman and his wife at Grayfleet, near the Essex marshes. The bargeman is drowned, and she is thrown upon her quasi-guardian, a nondescript literary man, who “adapts” for the theatres. She is happy here; but is expelled from one school and elopes from another; is tricked into a sham marriage with a wicked Frenchman, who first throws her over and then, when she is happily wedded in London, comes down upon her with a forged certificate and the news that the marriage is not a sham after all—and so forth, through a number of experiences that none but a heroine could possibly survive. There is a suicide, a fatal duel, and much else hat is exciting; but Madeline is fortunate enough to get through her troubles after all, and to find peace where all tempest-tossed modern heroines ultimately do—“on the banks of a great American river.” On the whole, Mr. Buchanan’s novel cannot be called successful. There are good scenes in it, and one or two of the persons concerned might have been developed into something interesting; but nothing comes of them, and the whole impression left by the work is much the same as that left by a not very good melodrama at the Princess’s Theatre.

* 1. “The Martyrdom of Madeline.” By Robert Buchanan. Three vols. (London: Chatto and Windus. 1882.)

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Liverpool Mercury (21 July, 1882 - Issue 10772)

LITERARY NOTES.
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...

     It is now some years since Mr. Mallock published his “New Republic,” and the sensation excited by it has long subsided. Whatever body of fundamental excellence in conception or execution that work displayed will doubtless remain, but the factitious notoriety which was superinduced by the caricature portraits it contained of living celebrities has of course gone off with the momentary social excitement which may be said to have given rise to it. And equally ephemeral must all works be that aim primarily to catch the public ear by jaunty interludes on the pipe of public gossip. It would be unfair to Mr. Robert Buchanan to say that his recent “Martyrdom of Madeline” has much in common with the book we have named, and yet something in common it indubitably possesses, and so far as its scope is similar its fate is likely to be akin. In his prefatory note Mr. Buchanan tells us that in this story he has aimed to touch one of the greatest and saddest of human problems—as great and sad, he thinks, as the problem which forms the central purpose of his “Shadow of the Sword.” What the creed of peace is to the State, the creed of purity is to the social community. So long as carnal indulgence is recognised as a masculine prerogative, so long as personal chastity is a supreme factor in the fate of women, but a mere accident in the lives of men, so long as the diabolic ingenuity of a strong sex is tortured to devise legal means for sacrificing a weaker sex—so long, in a word, as our homes and our streets remain what they are—the creed of purity must remain as forlorn a dream as that other dream of peace. Such purpose as is here shadowed forth was worthy the best efforts of a gifted mind. The gross and palpable injustice of our social system, which not only palliates impurity in the man but encourages and abets it, and yet visits with everlasting shame and infamy not only the slightest transgression on the part of the woman, but those very necessities which the misdeeds of the other sex have placed upon her, is a wickedness and barbarity which daily cries out upon those who truly see it in all its ghastliness and horror, for exposure and redress. To uncover the whited sepulchres of so much impurity as constantly flaunts itself before the gaze of a public that will not know it for what it is, to tell the story of all the misery that lies hidden beneath a smooth coverlet of so-called gay or fashionable life, was a task to which any man might consecrate his highest gifts—a task worthy of Balzac or Hugo, or of that best of English moralists and social teachers, Dickens. And Mr. Buchanan has been equal to his office. He has afforded us a picture such as few can forget, of a beautiful and innocent young girl, made, by the villany of a monster not too monstrous for humanity, the decoy of a gambling hell, the outcast from a pure and otherwise happy home. So far he has done well.
     But, not content with this plain but noble social purpose, he has endeavoured at a single effort to compass a twofold satirical purpose also; and here we fear it must be said that he has not entirely succeeded. He tells us that he has aimed to construct out of the editorial chit-chat of a journal an amusing personality not, he hopes, ungenerously conceived; further, that he has endeavoured to satirise not æstheticism proper but the cant of æstheticism—a very different thing as he truly says. What he has really done, however unconsciously, is to avail himself of this social problem to interweave two other problems that have no natural relation to it, but which are of immediate interest to the author himself; the first of these is the problem of modern paragraph journalism, its functions, uses, and abuses, and the other is the problem of modern æstheticism, its origin and excesses. Now, the journals of society and criticism are, as Mr. Buchanan has elsewhere admitted, his Quixotic windmills. Well, what are they, and what in their regard is Mr. Buchanan? The journals published at the beginning of this century either honestly were, or pretended to be, absorbed wholly in the discussion of general principles and of individuals only in that degree in which they were the representatives of principles. But this condition of things did not last long, and already in the earliest days of the Edinburgh Review covert personal allusions had become more frequent and more enjoyed than abstract discussions. Journalism gravitated more and more towards two goals, first the personal tone and next the aggressive tone, and these tendencies ultimately found a rallying-point in the Saturday Review. Fifteen years ago, however, signs were not wanting that even this condition of things was capable of yet further development, and out of the personal aggressive temper of early Saturday reviewing arose then the satirical paragraph-journalism with which we are all familiar. What was the precise note of that satirical paragraph-journalism, and how did it originate? It was a mock imitation of what may be called the ha-ha tone of the lower and looser English aristocracy, and it originated with the tradesmen class of writers and readers. Now, how did Mr. Buchanan collide with this newest thing in journalism? He was first of all a native of Glasgow, and from thence at an early age he came to London, in company with the gifted and hapless David Gray. Together the young writers struggled together in obscurity, but presently they emerged, and Buchanan became known as a writer of lyrics of London life. There had always been an underlying basis of the old Scotch Puritanism in his nature, and if, as some allege, there was a spice of old Scotch envy too, what matter now? One thing became obvious—that though very capable of ardent attachments, Buchanan was among those who loved an enemy. After hitting out somewhat recklessly in various directions, he at length hit out at the personal paragraph of the society journal, and thereupon arose a struggle which has never since come to a close.
     In the “Martyrdom of Madeline” he satirises, under the names of “Lagardere” and the “Plain Speaker,” a journalist and journal familiar to most readers; but it must also be said that nearly every journal of criticism or society is introduced, more or less unfavourably, in these pages; and, also, that the reader thinks he recognises nearly every prominent personality in the world called Bohemia.
     But Mr. Buchanan had yet another purpose, and that was to satirise the cant of æstheticism. In doing so, he introduces reminiscent silhouettes—for portraits they can hardly be called—of many æstheticists, and of these Burne Jones seems the most prominent, and a friendly sketch, after all, it must be adjudged to be. Mr. Pater, Mr. Gosse, Mr. W. G. Wills, Mr. Oscar Wilde, the editor of the Athenæum, and sub-editor of the Saturday Review seem all, to do duty under thinly disguised cognomens, though it should be allowed that in each case they are tenderly treated, and that the full bitterness of the novelist’s wrath is reserved for one Gavrolles, who must be understood to be a creature of the writer’s fancy. The only prominent contemporary whom Mr. Buchanan certainly does not introduce is the one he has been repeatedly accused of satirising under the name of Blanco Serena; and here we are again reminded of the peculiarly unfortunate slip made by our London correspondent—for which in another column he makes his personal amende—in attributing to Mr. Buchanan the adverse article on Rossetti in the British Quarterly. We can well understand the pain it must have occasioned the sensitive poet to find that, at a moment when he was trying to make reparation for an injury done by himself in error ten years ago, he was (by implication at least) accused of pursuing his “old enemy” to the grave itself. Per contra, however, we have this to say—that we were the first to give publicity to the absolute recantation which Mr. Buchanan published six months ago; that we did so in terms of generous recognition of the magnanimity of an opponent who sought honestly and humbly to atone for a past mistake; that on two separate occasions since (in the course of our “Literary Notes”), and again to-day, we have dealt with Mr. Buchanan in a spirit of ungrudging appreciation; and, finally, that the paragraph in which we attributed to him an article he did not write was the honest if erroneous estimate of a writer who, as is obvious from what he says, bore no malice. What Mr. Buchanan wrote of Rossetti in the Contemporary Review was, as he well knows, a cruel wrong, such as no apology can entirely remove, and it will stand. What he wrote of him in his noble dedication to his fine romance entitled “God and the Man” will, as he has himself said, also stand. Mr. Buchanan as an author is, and has for years been, at open war with his critics; and, although we cannot but plead guilty to having unwittingly given him some cause for annoyance, it is due to ourselves to say that the Mercury has repeatedly spoken up heartily and unfalteringly for the man and his work.

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The Daily News (22 August, 1882 - Issue 11342)

RECENT NOVELS.
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     That Mr. Robert Buchanan is a powerful writer, with a mind of poetic cast and remarkable command of language, will scarcely be disputed. He employed these gifts with distinguished effect in his novel, “The Shadow of the Sword,” in advocacy of the reign of peace on earth, and in another even finer work, “God and the Man,” of goodwill towards men. In the novel he has lately published, “The Martyrdom of Madeline” (3 vols., Chatto and Windus) he has undertaken to deal with what he truly calls “one of the greatest and saddest of human problems,” the position of fallen women. The subject is one which from its very nature demands to be approached with reverence and austerity. We fail to find either in Mr. Buchanan’s treatment of this story, a story which is meant to convey high moral teaching, and which only succeeds in being nauseous. The character of Madeline, who if a martyr to man’s treachery should, in moral and artistic keeping, have been a sinless one, is entirely without elevation. Her sufferings lose their value as illustrations of the profoundly unjust attitude of society towards tempted women by the fact that they are the result of her own want of self-restraint, gratitude, and right feeling. Madeline is the victim of a designing French adventurer, and is herself answerable for one half of her misery. Not for a moment can she claim a place beside that other sister in fiction who pleads for the unhappy fallen, Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth. Besides this, true feeling of the depth and gravity of the “saddest of human problems” with which he was dealing would have restrained an author from making the story intended to throw healing light upon it the medium for social persiflage and personalities which can be called nothing but gross. In some instances Mr. Buchanan may plead that he is dealing with men who have sanctioned by example this mode of warfare. But he goes beyond this. Private persons known in society are satirised by Mr. Buchanan, under disguised names which are no disguises at all, in a way which calls for unmistakable rebuke.

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The British Quarterly Review (Vol. 76, July/October, 1882 - p.230)

     The Martyrdom of Madeline. By ROBERT BUCHANAN. In Three Volumes. (Chatto and Windus.)
Mr. Buchanan has weighted himself with a ‘purpose,’ and not only so, but he proclaims it in the forefront of the story; worse still, his purpose is one that bears on a ‘social evil’ which demands the most sober and reserved treatment. Another doubtful point is that Mr. Buchanan has, pace the partial disclaimer in the Preface, introduced too many real persons for the impression of repose and disinterestedness at which fiction should aim. Lagardère we know, and the author does not wish to conceal his identity; but Edgar Yahoo—who is beaten as with scorpions in his short appearances— we know also, and Lady Milde and Omar Milde, the æsthete, we know, and not a few others. The treatment of Lagardère is humorous and human, if some of the others are more one-sided and sardonic, and will no doubt cause talk. As for the broader aspects of the novel, it can only be said that it is conceived in a high spirit, that the construction is excellent, that the main characters are well discriminated, and that there is due variety of interest, incident, pathos, passion, humour, and decided grasp. Madeline herself is well conceived and as well sustained. She remains faithful to herself, untainted amidst foulness and shame. Her guardian, Marmaduke White, the hard-working, easy-going, Bohemian artist, whose success is inscrutably far below his deservings, is a fine study, and so are several of his friends, notably, James Forster, the cultured London merchant, who falls in love with and finally marries Madeline, notwithstanding her candour in letting him know the pit into which she had fallen through the wiles of others. The novel, then, is marked by many of Mr. Buchanan’s best qualities; but the subject is unfortunate, and the work is thus more fit for the perusal of old than of young people.

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Glasgow Herald (22 November, 1882)

(7) The Martyrdom of Madeline.

     It is to be regretted that in “The Martyrdom of Madeline” Mr Buchanan has abandoned, temporarily at least, the epical breadth of conception and the poetic style which distinguished “The Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man.” By doing so he has indeed amply proved his ability to compete with the foremost of our sensational writers, but it may be doubted whether he has added to his reputation or contributed in any way to the development of his own powers. The novel will probably be one of the successful books of the season, for it holds the attention of the reader from the first page to the last, but when the third volume is completed it will be found impossible to escape the contrast which the story makes with its predecessors. Unfortunately, in this connection, the author himself suggests comparison in the prefatory note in which he briefly summarises the purpose of his story. Whether that purpose can possibly be achieved by the writing of fiction is a matter on which considerable doubt may be entertained; at the same time, “one of the greatest and saddest of human problems” is legitimate ground for fiction, and a novelist is worthily occupied in seconding the pulpit when he inculcates the hollow mockery of the theory of purity in social conditions in which “personal chastity is a supreme factor in the fate of women, but a mere accident in the lives of men.” It would hardly be fair either to the reader or the author to enter into the particulars of the plot, but it may be mentioned that the scene opens with an attractively idyllic picture of Madeline learning to dance on a tombstone in a quiet corner of Grayfleet Churchyard, and a quaintly humorous account of the Easter solemnities of the United Brethren, which reminds one of the genial drollery of Dickens. In these early chapters only is it that Mr Buchanan indulges in any play of fancy or humorous delineation of character. Henceforth he attends almost rigorously to the winding and implicated thread of his narrative. Incident and situation leave him no time to pause and cull wild flowers. Madeline’s foster parents die, and she is taken away from her idyllic home and placed at school in France by a friend of her father’s. She elopes with one of her Professors, who turns out to be the villain of the piece, and who inveigles her into a sham marriage. She is used as an unconscious decoy for a gambling-house, is cast off by her pseudo-husband, takes to the stage, and finally finds refuge from the pressure of life in marriage with a kindly merchant. Her dream of tranquillity and domestic safety is broken by the re-appearance of the Frenchman, who claims her as his wife, and this situation leads to an exciting denouement. About this point the author lays himself open to twofold criticism. If a woman’s opinion on her own sex be worth anything, we have been assured that no woman would have been driven to extremities by the unsupported claim of a scoundrel such as Gavrolles, and that no woman would have fled from her husband’s protection in the way in which Madeline fled. The reader, and possibly the author, may, on the other hand, object that if Madeline had defied Gavrolles to substantiate his claim, or had appealed to her husband, the story would have been brought to a premature close. The second critical count is connected with the supposed suicide of Madeline. From the prologue to the story it is clear to the reader that the dead body found in the Thames and buried as Madeline’s is that of another woman. It may be that Mr Buchanan deliberately decided to avoid an ancient device of the sensational novelist, but the destruction of the element of surprise seriously damages the interest of the closing chapters of the story. Perhaps the most entertaining portion of the book to readers who have some curiosity as to the “behind-scenes” of Metropolitan journalism is that in which the author has “endeavoured to construct out of the editorial chit-chat of a journal an amusing personality—not, he thinks, ungenerously conceived.”

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Love Me For Ever (1883)

The Derby Mercury (21 February, 1883 - Issue 8771)

     The Christmas number of the Illustrated London News for 1882-3 included a romance from the pen of Mr. Robert Buchanan, entitled “Love Me for Ever.” That story has now been reproduced by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in very attractive volume-form. It is neatly printed, and nicely bound; and, by way of illustration, there is a frontispiece by Mr. P. Macnab. The tale is one of the best that Mr. Buchanan has ever written. Taking for the basis of it the old legend of the Flying Dutchman, he has modernized, expanded, and embroidered it into a present-day story, of which the reader will perhaps not gather the full significance until the end. Then he will begin to realize how clever has been the writer’s treatment of his theme:—
     “And you are not Philip Vanderdecken,” she said, looking up at him and sweetly smiling, “but my Philip still. O Philip! was it only a dream?”
     He kissed her tenderly.
     “A dream, and no dream;” he replied, “for did it now foreshadow the living truth? My life was even as his, my doom no fairer, since, until your love redeemed me, I was truly outcast and unblest.”
The reader has here the key to a tale which, if he has not read it already, he will be glad to read again.

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Annan Water (1883)

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.

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The Graphic (9 February, 1884 - Issue 741)

     Were “Annan Water: a Romance” (3 vols.: Chatto and Windus), the work of any ordinary novelist, it would be sufficient to give it due praise or blame as just a commonplace piece of work, and to note how far a usual writer had satisfied the requirements of the usual easily contented reader. But it is from the pen of Mr. Robert Buchanan, who wrote “The Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man;” and he has no manner of right to compete with inferior rivals on their lower ground. He, in justice to himself, has to be judged according to his best; and, judged by less than his best, “Annan Water” is a piece of very feeble work indeed. It is not good enough, because it is absurd to suppose that Mr. Buchanan could not have done infinitely better work with infinitely more ease. However, putting the authorship by, and assuming that the shafts of a cab are a proper and dignified position for a racer, “Annan Water” is a fair specimen of the conventional kind of book-making. A dedication to Miss Leigh, of the English Mission in Paris (who is introduced under another name among the dramatis personæ), leads to disappointment, inasmuch as her work is dragged in without necessity only to be dropped without description; while by reducing this element to a mere episode, the raison d’être of the story seems to fail. The author’s pathetic power becomes visible for a season during his heroine’s wanderings among the poorest of the Paris poor; but this episode again serves but to throw the remainder of the so-called romance into a yet more shadowy condition. In short, to avoid saying more of the work than there is need, “Annan Water,” while fairly readable, is a woful disappointment as coming from the pen of one who has written some of the finest and strongest fiction of our age. Homer, it is true, may be privileged to nod now and then, but not to indulge in what looks very much like wilful slumber.

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The British Quarterly Review (Vol. 79, January/April, 1884 - p.215-216)

     Annan Water. A Romance. By ROBERT BUCHANAN, Author of ‘The Shadow of the Sword,’ ‘God and the Man,’ &c., &c. In Three Volumes. (Chatto and Windus.) 
Though Mr. Buchanan describes this work as a romance, it can be accepted as such only in a modified sense. Doubtless some of his incidents are romantic enough, as well as the imaginative atmosphere in which he endeavours to steep the whole; but the leading characters are in no sense romantic. On the contrary, they are specimens of very genuine Scotch human nature, as one would find it in the district in which Mr. Buchanan lays his earlier scenes, and to which he returns after the painful episodes in Paris just before and during the period of the Commune. The minister of the parish, Mr. Lorraine, the minister’s man, Solomon Mucklebackit (an unfortunate name that suggests other creations), and Miss Hetherington of Annandale, with her painful secret and her isolation and stern manners veiling a tender heart, are vigorously portrayed by one who has studied such from life; and so likewise is John Sutherland, the artist, who is of a much more tender though in nowise of a romantic type. The romance element circles round a foundling, Marjorie Annan, who turns out to be the daughter of Miss Hetherington, though nobody suspects it save a Frenchman, who is employed as the girl’s teacher; and this villain engages her affections in order the better to make use of this knowledge. Much of the association into which we are led in following him is somewhat out of keeping with the character of the earlier part. But Mr. Buchanan writes with force, and compels our interest even when the situations are most painful. Evidently he has had it on his mind to show impressively the possibilities of evil and wrong through the advantage that may be taken of the fact that in France a marriage in England or Scotland cannot be legally recognized unless followed by the civil ceremony there. He has also sought to promote the interests of Miss Leigh’s Home for Englishwomen in Paris—a most deserving institution, as we know; but the effect of the dedication to Miss Leigh, worded as it is, tends in the outset somewhat to promote a kind of prejudice for which there is no occasion. It is a very clever novel, and will certainly add to Mr. Buchanan’s credit, though it is not so good a romance as ‘The Shadow of the Sword,’ and not quite so good a novel as ‘A Child of Nature.’

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Book Reviews - Novels continued

The New Abelard (1884) to The Charlatan (1895)