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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841-1901) |
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BOOK REVIEWS - NOVELS 2. The New Abelard (1884) to The Charlatan (1895)
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 New Abelard.” By Robert Buchanan, author of “The Shadow of the Sword.” Chatto and Windus; 1884. ___
The Graphic (26 April, 1884 - Issue 752) |
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IN his preface to “The New Abelard: a Romance” (3 vols.: Chatto and Windus), Mr. Robert Buchanan announces the purpose of making his leading character, Ambrose Bradley, dramatically resemble, both in his strength and in his weakness, the great Abelard of history. “For this very reason he is described as failing miserably, where a stronger man might never have failed, in grasping the Higher Rationalism as a law for life.” In several details, also, Mr. Buchanan has been careful to maintain a biographical parallel. For example, he has a Héloïse, in the person of Alma Craik, who, for her lover’s sake, consents to a secret marriage, and dies a nun, after having been broken-hearted by the selfish cowardice of the Reverend Ambrose. The latter, gifted with sensuously artistic tastes, and a fervidly religious temperament, but with only the vaguest purposes, and, unlike his original, with no logic and scanty brains, begins his heretical career by a quarrel with his Bishop, continues it as an eloquent Christian free-lance, and ends by conversion to personal belief through the sight of an Oberammergau actor in costume. Unquestionably, however much of how little he may resemble the great victim of the great St. Bernard, the Rev. Ambrose Bradley represents a type with which a large number of readers will feel themselves in more or less mental sympathy. He is young-minded, and revels in the delusion that he has discovered how to reconcile all the supposed conflicts between Art, Nature, Philosophy, and Christianity. The appropriate mixture of genuine enthusiasm with unquestioning self-conceit, and of indefinite aspiration with slavery to impulse, is effectively developed; and so would be his willingness to face martyrdom for conscience’s and vanity’s sake, if Mr. Buchanan were able to make out that the lot of the contemporary heretic were otherwise than enviable, considered from a commercial point of view. All this is interesting enough; the principal weakness of the novel lies in the obscurity of its drift. The book is obviously intended as something much more than a mere piece of portraiture, either of a typical or exceptional personality; but it is easy to find in it almost whatever views any reader may please. We have already said that the attitude assumed by the hero to the Church and the world will win him all the sympathy which is apparently intended to be excited, especially as his opponents are held up to contempt—the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells being as feeble a representative of Pope Innocent as can well be imagined. On the other hand, the abject cowardice, ingratitude, and selfishness of Ambrose Bradley, whenever he can find no support in vanity, renders not only himself but his cause as despicable as anybody may desire to think it. No doubt there are no limits to apparent inconsistency: but then it is the office of fiction to show the real harmony of all seeming discord. This Mr. Buchanan has scarcely attempted; and the work remains as incoherent as it is otherwise able. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan desires his readers to discover his purpose for themselves, and to draw their own conclusions. If so, he has supplied them with plenty of mental exercise, as well as with human and intellectual interest of a high order. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Academy (20 September, 1884 - No. 646, p.179) Fox-Glove Manor. By R, Buchanan. In 3 vols. (Chatto & Windus.) MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN is one of our most prolific, and not one of our least powerful, writers of moral fiction. His novels have always some great ethical purpose, and we may cheerfully concede that this purpose is always high. But this does not commit us to approval of his methods, and in Fox-Glove Manor the vices of treatment with which readers of his former novels are familiar seem to have become aggravated. The motive of the plot is sufficiently unpleasant; nor can one say that the art of the author overcomes its unpleasantness. That Mr. Buchanan should have had personal experience—as he tells us in his Preface he has—of a type of man like the Rev. Charles Santley, is melancholy enough; but no amount of such personal experience can fully justify a writer in presenting us with an elaborate study of the human character in its most absolute corruption. That is not the province of art; there is neither beauty nor goodness to be had from raking out moral dungheaps. If M. Buchanan would but apply his unquestioned powers to some worthier object of study, he might give us a book we should be glad to read, even to read more than once; a book not full of the portraiture of degrading vices and unhealthy imaginings, which do not wholly lose their evil influence because they are depicted only to be condemned. A clergyman in the Church of England who seduces a girl in his congregation, and refuses to marry her because his attention is too much taken up with trying to seduce another man’s wife, is a character that may exist—Mr. Buchanan says he does—but of such, and such like, non ragionam di lor. ___
The Pall Mall Gazette (25 September, 1884 - Issue 6098) “FOXGLOVE MANOR.” * THE art of fiction, as understood by Mr. Robert Buchanan, is not without its mysteries. He has eulogized the late Mr. Charles Reade as the master of “Homeric story-telling,” and therefore a Triton among such minnows as his over-rated contemporaries. It is to be presumed, then that Mr. Buchanan himself aspires, however humbly, to something of this Homeric art, and indeed the influence of Charles Reade may be traced, not obscurely, in his manner. But we must frankly confess that we find more of Charles Reade than of Homer, and that certain other non-Homeric influences seem likewise in the ascendant. The heroes of Homer do not confide their crimes and meannesses to their diaries, padding them with vivid descriptions of scenery and other irrelevant matter; but this is a characteristic practice of the heroes of Mr. Wilkie Collins. Homer does not carry on his action through a systematic course of eavesdropping; Mr. Wilkie Collins does. As for an “elixir of death” which induces all the symptoms of dissolution down to the rigor mortis without in the least injuring the person who indulges in it, this is a Shakesperean rather than a Homeric touch. It is futile of Mr. George Haldane to pretend that the elixir is the invention of “Dr. Dupré, of Paris;” Friar Laurence, a Franciscan, of Verona, is known to have held the patent early in the fourteenth century, and it has been a drug in the melodramatic market ever since. * “Foxglove Manor.” A Novel. By Robert Buchanan. (London: Chatto and Windus. 1884.) ___
The Graphic (4 October, 1884 - Issue 775) |
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MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN’S “Foxglove Manor” (3 vols.: Chatto and Windus), is equal in power to any of its predecessors. It has not the fascination of what still remain his great prose works, “The Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man,” but only because its subject is by nature wanting in the elements of picturesqueness and adventure. As a study of morbid anatomy it reaches the highest level to which work of that kind can possibly attain. From a dramatic point of view there is genius shown in the gradual transmutation of our original sympathy with, and liking for, the Reverend Charles Santley first into pity, thence into contempt, thence into disgust and loathing, and finally into the renewed pity that must needs come when the whole of any human soul is opened fully before our eyes. The process of exhaustive dissection is never pleasant, even when exercised by genius; nor can “Foxglove Manor” be honestly recommended as pleasant reading. But a reader who follows it to the end without an increase of wisdom and widened sympathies must be a very strange sort of reader indeed. Moreover there is real need of such books as these at a time when there is so little manliness in fiction generally, and when the outlines between sentimentality and duty, and between right and wrong, are so commonly blurred. In his preface, Mr. Buchanan not unnecessarily vindicates himself beforehand from any possible charge of making the clergyman whom he has chosen for his subject in any way represent his calling. We should never, however, have made such a charge, because the ecclesiastical framework of the story was so obviously required by the construction of the story. It does away at once with a number of difficulties appreciable by artists and critics alone, into which therefore there is no need to enter. It, moreover, brings out into stronger relief the contrast between Charles Santley and the Agnostic philosopher, George Haldane: nor can it be said that Mr. Buchanan, however he deals with the men, sways the theological balance one way or the other. Mrs. Haldane, also, though studied only from the outside, is an admirable portrait, as showing how sin is, as George Haldane is made to put it, a moral leprosy, extending beyond the sinner. The manner in which the lost priest is brought at last face to face with conscience is certainly melodramatic, but not the less powerful, as an escape from the threatening tragedy. It is to be wished that Mr. Buchanan would realise the necessity for relief in fiction. His lurid monotone, without it, becomes oppressive at times, and would gain marvellously from an occasional breath of fresh air. But, with this solitary drawback, which indeed seems inseparable from Mr. Buchanan’s genius, “Foxglove Manor” is a work to be grateful for: though that it may be misunderstood we can readily believe. Perhaps it may help in some measure against this danger to note that it refuses to recognise any possible compromise, however purely sentimental, between conscience and passion. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
Matt: A Tale of a Caravan (1885)
The New York Times (24 February, 1885) —Matt. A Tale of a Caravan. By Robert Buchanan. New-York: D. Appleton & Co.—Mr. Buchanan’s story is somewhat in the Bressant manner. For love of art, with an inclination to lead a wandering life, Brinkley buys a caravan, a house on wheels, with the necessary horse, and accompanied by his servant, Tom, wanders through Wales. Of course his caravan is a centre of attraction for the village yokels, and Brinkley sometimes gets into trouble, because he gives no performances. One day a handsome, wild looking, and uncouth mannered girl comes to the caravan. Brinkley wants a model, and paints her. Matt is a nautical girl, and lives with William Jones, a wrecker, who is her adopted father. Mr. Monk, of Monkhouse, is the rich man of the neighborhood. Brinkley finds out that Matt, as a little child, was the only survivor of a shipwreck. Matt falls in love with the owner of the caravan, and wants Brinkley to marry her. Though he cares for her, he is a well-bred man and is rather indifferent to such a misalliance. Then Monk proposes to take Matt for his wife. Brinkley and Monk have had a quarrel. William Jones is very mysterious. He is always wandering around the sand dunes. Determined to discover the mystery of Matt’s origin, Brinkley finds a cave where Jones has concealed the spoil of his wreckage, and a Bible is discovered, which shows that Matt is Monk’s niece and the owner of all the land. Monk tries to kill the owner of the caravan, fails, and when Matt has been educated she becomes Mrs. Brinkley. If the story had been put back a century its possibility would have been greater. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Academy (28 February, 1885 - No. 669, p.147-148) The quality to which, a good many years ago, the meaningless and absurd name of “sensationalism” was given, is again making itself very observable in contemporary fiction of the second rank. The extraordinary popularity of Called Back may have done something—and, in one instance, to which we shall refer, certainly has done something—to revive an old and rather discredited fashion; or novelists may have a suspicion that their readers are pining for nutriment a little more savoury than the long-drawn-out analyses of Messrs. Howells and James; but, whatever be the true explanation, the fact remains, and no fewer than three of the six novels in our list this week are distinctly “sensational”—that is to say, their interest centres in the unravelling of a tangled skein of circumstance rather than in the presentation and evolution of character. Stormy Waters is one of the three, and not the best of them; for the work of Mr. Buchanan, who is distinctly a man of genius rather than of mere talent, is only good work when it is congenial work—when it runs in the line of his special endowments—and it seems to us evident that his recent stories have been written not from an inward impulse, but in answer to a supposed demand from without. They are accordingly painfully unsatisfactory, especially to those who, like the present writer, have derived more pleasure than they can adequately acknowledge both from his memorable verse and from those prose writings in which his imaginative endowment has “ample room and verge enough” to display itself freely. Stormy Waters deals with the doings and misdoings of a secret society established for the purpose of furthering the cause of socialism by the beneficent agency of dynamite; and Mr. Buchanan exhibits courage which surely crosses the borders of temerity by making one of his characters the perpetrator of the explosion at the Government offices in Charles Street. The criminal, Michael Morton, is a farmer who, in a fit of passion, has murdered his landlord, being urged to the deed partly by a notice to quit his farm, but mainly by a suspicion—which turns out to be altogether baseless—that the landlord is the unknown scoundrel who has seduced and deserted his daughter. The murder is witnessed by the real seducer, a certain Richard Kingston, who is the heir of the victim, and also the leading spirit in the secret society; and Morton, who is, of course, in Kingston’s power, is compelled by him to give his assistance in carrying out the designs of the Brotherhood. Suspicion falls upon a young sailor named Hastings, who is finally captured, tried, and condemned to death; but on the eve of his execution the truth is discovered, Kingston is unmasked, Hastings is reprieved on his way to the scaffold, and poetical justice is done all round. Some of the chapters devoted to the plottings of the dynamitards are exciting enough, and will just now be specially attractive to some readers; but, from an artistic point of view, the subject is not well chosen, and the treatment has occasionally a clumsiness which seems the result of haste. There are good things in the story—Bob, the cabman, is admirable—but it gives no indication of the true nature of its author’s power. ___
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1 March 1885 - Issue 2206) FICTION. Those who remember the Drury Lane drama, A Sailor and His Lass, by Robert Buchanan and Augustus Harris, will discover exactly the same plot and incidents in the new three-volume novel just published by Messrs. John and Robert Maxwell, under the title of “Stormy Waters,” by Robert Buchanan. It is described as “a story of to-day,” and deals with Irish conspiracies and murders, dynamite outrages, and other equally exciting criminal events. Mixed up with them is a complicated family history, beginning with a daughter’s betrayal, and leading up to the father’s tragic end, after confessing that he is guilty of an assassination for which his second daughter’s sailor sweetheart has been condemned to death. There is abundance of action in the story, and it will thus appeal to all who enjoy rapidity of movement and sensational excitement. ___
The Academy (28 March, 1885 - No. 673, p.222) THE Roman Rassegna is issuing in its feuilleton a translation of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s Stormy Waters, under the title “I Dinamitardi di Londra.” This novel—an expansion in narrative form of the Drury Lane play, “It was a Sailor and his Lass”—was not regarded by English critics as a very favourable sample of Mr. Buchanan’s work, but it seems it is thought likely to prove attractive to Italian readers. ___
The Graphic (4 April, 1885 - Issue 801) Mr. Robert Buchanan is a novelist of genius, who has written some of the finest works of fiction of our time, and occasionally amuses himself, we can only assume, by showing the world how badly a man of genius can write if he tries. “Stormy Waters: A Story of To-Day” (3 vols.: J. and R. Maxwell), is a supreme example of this class of Mr. Buchanan’s literary pastimes, and demonstrates that practice does really enable a man to approach perfection.Perhaps it requires as much genius to produce absolutely perfect rubbish as to produce perfection in the other direction. As for tracing the hand that wrote those really great works, “The Shadow of the Sword” and “God and the Man,” and that, only the other day, with such terrible power laid bare the whole soul of a sinner in “Foxglove Manor,” such a thing cannot be done. Mr. Buchanan no doubt made an error of judgment in thinking that the story of his sensational play “A Sailor and his Lass” could be converted, as it stands, into a sensational novel. The utter unreality of all the characters and the staginess of all the incidents are the most striking features in a work written by one whose knowledge of human nature and whose power of reproducing all its harmonies and discords have few rivals. Bald talk and slipshod English come strangely from one of our masters in poetry and prose. All this is very sadly grotesque; but there is comfort in reflecting that Mr. Buchanan, having done his worst, has no more worlds left in that direction to conquer, and will content himself with his proper mission—that of letting us know that the giants of fiction are not all dead and gone. ___
The Era (4 April, 1885 - Issue 2428) STORMY WATERS: A Story of To-day. Three Vols. By ROBERT BUCHANAN.—The late Charles Reade quoted on one of his title-pages a passage from Horace, to the effect that he (Mr Reade) would form a novel which should be a real work of art, from materials taken from the events of the passing time; and added that others would endeavour to do the same and fail. Charles Reade abundantly justified his boast; and Mr Buchanan has fulfilled Mr Reade’s prediction. Mr Buchanan has collected a goodly store of materials from back numbers of the newspapers; but he has not made these dead bones of contemporary fact to live. The power of drawing character and the knowledge of human nature are required for this miracle of the fictionist’s art, and in this novel Mr Buchanan has not displayed the possession of either. From Mr Buchanan’s poetical work, and from the literary power he has displayed as an essayist, we should have at least expected that a novel from his hand would show style of execution, if not genius of conception and treatment. But “Stormy Waters” appears, like the horse mentioned by Artemus Ward, to have been “somewhat hastily constructed,” and the literary element is conspicuous by its absence. The raw material for a thrilling novel certainly exists in such themes as the agricultural labourer, the dynamiters, and “coffin”-ships; but though at times the incidents are sensational, the pleasure derivable from them is discounted by our lack of interest in the characters, and the inartistic way in which the strong points are utilised. The result is simply irritating. The book is one which a reader of penny dreadfuls would peruse without annoyance. To ourselves the jerky, inconsequent way in which the story is told; the occasional inconsistencies and lack of firm, distinct drawing of the characters; and the aggravating way in which good situations are manqué’s for the want of proper preparation and artistic treatment, quite discounted the interest which we occasionally felt in the sensational pictures of the dynamite plotters, and the excellent description of the “coffin”-ship and its adventures. The novel points the moral that it is not sufficient to invent or collect incidents, however striking; these must be suplemented by bold character drawing, artistic treatment, and good literary style. ___
Daily News (26 September, 1885 - Issue 12312) It is almost equally impossible to believe either that Mr. Robert Buchanan can have written the novel “Stormy Waters” (three vols., John and Robert Maxwell), or that a writer of his established reputation can have lent his name to place on the title page of so worthless a production. It is true that some of Mr. Buchanan’s later novels have been disappointing and more, but they have not hitherto been destitute of sense, interest or capacity. None of these qualities do we find in the present work, which would be indeed unworthy of notice did not the well-known name attract attention. Unfortunately it attracts it only to excite surprise and pity. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Graphic (16 January, 1886 - Issue 842) Of a very different order of interest is Robert Buchanan’s “The Master of the Mine” (2 vols.: Bentley and Son). Full of romantic and even sensational interest, it supplies all the materials for theatrical representation. As a story, it is by no means to be classed among the greater works of its bewilderingly-unequal writer; but neither does it take the lowest place, and its weaknesses are obviously due to careless hurry, and not to any lack of strength in its motive. It would be only too easy to make a long catalogue of inexcusable blemishes, both in its construction and in its treatment of the English tongue; but no doubt a master of the art of fiction like Mr. Buchanan is perfectly aware of the natural effects of hurry, and the novel evidently appeals to a public that is anything but critical. To that widest of all literary circles we recommend it, in the assurance that they will be in no wise disappointed with its wealth of incident and the strongly-labelled characters of whose adventures Cornwall has a traditional monopoly. ___
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 Graphic (13 November, 1886 - Issue 885) Mr. Robert Buchanan’s principal literary fault is—apparently at least—that he sets too little store by his own reputation. “That Winter Night; or, Love’s Victory” (Bristol: Arrowsmith and Co.), seems due to the supposed necessity on the part of every novelist, with or without a name, to bring out at least one piece of rubbish for a shilling. Some, of course, are very good hands at rubbish; others very bad ones. And Mr. Buchanan yields to nobody in incapacity for writing rubbish—when he tries he is foredoomed to fail. The strange part of it is that he should be so perversely fond of trying. These episodes of the Franco-German War might have been turned out by almost any unskilled hand in the market; and therefore ought not to bear the name of Robert Buchanan. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Graphic (25 February, 1888 - Issue 952) |
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MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN has taken the name, but not the theme, of the good old ballad, “The Heir of Linne,” for that of his latest story (2 vols.: Chatto and Windus). The ballad suggests many obvious adaptations to real life, but Mr. Buchanan has preferred to give us an original story of his own. And an admirable story it is—the only fault we have to find with it is that it has not an original title instead of one with such precise and definite suggestions of a particular plot as that which he has so inappropriately chosen. His story is exceedingly simple, and, in a peculiar happy manner, its sympathetic character is largely due to its simplicity. The most open of mysteries, the most direct and natural of love stories, the most single-minded and simple-hearted of heroines, obtain in his hands all the qualities of romantic interest. But, like a real artist, he has employed this almost excess of simplicity for a purpose—as a framework for a highly striking piece of complex portraiture. Willie Macgillvray is the real subject and centre of “The Heir of Linne”—a strange and bewildering combination of fanaticism and worldly wisdom, of strong courage and weak will, of prophet and sot, of reverence in feeling and daring in thought and expression. We must say we prefer this extraordinary being in his most pronounced moods, and before an interval of twenty years, combined with what, we fear, was in his case a highly improbable practice of total abstinence, tamed him down into a hermit. But he is a picturesque figure even to the close; and, when fairly launched into his prophetic moods, he is positively sublime in his poetic audacity. One never knows what he is going to say next, beyond that it is certain to be something one never heard before; and his flights of phrase are often as stimulating to the thought as they are exciting to the imagination. That he may be misunderstood is likely enough: but he is worth the understanding. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Moment After: a tale of the unseen (1890)
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. ___
The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post (6 October, 1890 - Issue 13229) THE MOMENT AFTER. By Robert Buchanan. (London: W. Heinemann.) The Buddhists have a conception of the state of the soul immediately it has escaped from the body, which they call Nirvana, and modern literature contains more than one attempt to picture the experiences of those who have apparently died or have been executed and are subsequently resuscitated. Among the strange fancies of the painter Wiertz is a series of pictures illustrating the sensations of the mind during the moments following execution. Mr Robert Buchanan’s story starts from the same suggestion. An Italian, settled in England, has murdered his faithless wife and her paramour, but he is hung in as bungling a fashion as the Babbacombe murderer. He was a man who believed death to be annihilation, and who had no sort of penitence for his crime. But on his resuscitation he expressed a belief in the existence of God, and told a story of his wanderings through the fields of heaven with his victims, and of his pardon by the Crucified One, which the prison chaplain regarded as miraculous, while the prison surgeon declared it to be the dream of a maniac. These two characters are admirably worked in, because they of course represent the two views, one of which each reader of the story will take. The critic can only say that it is written with the same poetic feeling and power which have given a rare charm to Mr Buchanan’s previous prose writings; probably no one but a poet could have so delicately pourtrayed Maurizio’s vision “a moment after.” It is an eerie sort of subject, but the natural horrors of it are carefully subdued, instead of being played upon. ___
The Graphic (1 November, 1890 - Issue 1092) Nor is “The Moment After: a Tale of the Unseen” (I vol.: William Heinemann), by any means a good illustration of the genius of Robert Buchanan. It is the story of how an Atheist was converted to faith by being hanged. One Maurizio Modena, an eccentric marine-store dealer, having murdered his faithless wife, is tried and sentenced to death, and there would have been an end of it had not the bungling hangman twice failed, and the execution consequently been postponed pending a submission of the circumstances to the Home Office.But we are given to understand that there was an instant during which the murderer’s soul actually left its body and spent seeming ages in the world beyond the grave; so that it returned convinced of the truth of what the good chaplain had preached in vain, and impressed with a passionate desire for the death which human mercy withholds. All this is told in a tawdry, spasmodic style, through which occasionally flashes a strong thought or a striking phrase; and faults of taste abound. It is not for Mr. Buchanan to speak of a judge, when sentencing criminals, as “using a shibboleth of religion in which he generally disbelieves;” and the pages of a work of fancy are not the place for a personal sneer, nine pages long, at the expense of an actual official of whom Mr. Buchanan evidently knows nothing whatever. These journalistic vulgarities bring into stronger relief the worse than bad taste which finds, in Modena’s vision, nothing too sacred for making a theatrical effect. As we are concerned for the reputation of a great novelist, we hold that there are quite enough purveyors of claptrap without Mr. Buchanan’s condescending to mingle with them. ___
The Pall Mall Gazette (12 November, 1890 - Issue 8003) A BATCH OF NEW NOVELS. * IT may be taken for granted that any novel from the pen of Mr. Robert Buchanan will be written in vigorous English, and with an eye to dramatic, if not melodramatic, effect. In these respects “The Moment After” may safely challenge criticism, but the value of its subject matter is quite another question. It is a sort of De Quincey nightmare, and wanders off into the realms of the unknowable. A half-hanged murderer, who had been brought to the scaffold a staunch Atheist, is cut down in an apparently lifeless state, and, being with difficulty brought round, avows his complete conversion to Christianity. He alleges that, after losing consciousness of earthly surroundings, he was caught up into boundless realms of space, suffered various penalties for his crime through many hundreds of years, and finally saw the golden gates of the Heavenly City opening to receive him, when he was suddenly recalled to his earthly tenement. The prison chaplain joyfully recognizes in this vision a complete vindication of Christian belief, while the prison doctor regards it as an indication of deranged intellect. Probably readers of the book will be similarly divided in opinion. * “The Moment After.” By Robert Buchanan. (Heinemann.) Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Wedding Ring: A Tale of To-day (1891)
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 _____
Come Live With Me And Be My Love (1892)
The Morning Call (San Francisco) (5 June, 1892 - p.9) BUCHANAN’S LATEST NOVEL.—Under the attractive title of “Come Live With Me and Be My Love,” Robert Buchanan has written an English pastoral worthy to rank with the best of his previous works. While less dramatic than “The Shadow of the Sword” or “God and the Man,” this story will appeal to a wider circle of readers, for it possesses in a greater degree than either of the others mentioned the element of sympathetic interest in our common nature. Geoffrey Doone, the farm overseer, despite his apparently subordinate position, is really the leading character and reminds one in many of his qualities of Adam Bede. He exhibits the same rugged honesty and unswerving devotion to the object of his affection, yet in no respect do the incidents of his life resemble those related by George Eliot in depicting the career of her self-sacrificing hero. Catherine Thorpe, who may be called the leading lady, so natural it is to consider Buchanan’s stories as dramas in embryo, is a woman of fine qualities, with a poetic nature, dominated by prosaic surroundings. It is always unfair to reveal the plot of a novel, but the scheme of this pastoral is so simple that its sustained interest must be attributed primarily to the literary skill of the author, whose prose is always pure and graceful, perhaps more so than his attempts at verse. ___
The Pall Mall Gazette (24 September, 1892 - Issue 8584) “COME LIVE WITH ME.” * MR. BUCHANAN’S new novel is an essay in the genre of Mr. Thomas Hardy. It is by no means a failure. Mr. Buchanan has the gift of bright picturesque writing: he knows how to present his story; he is at home in the country and loves it. Only the comparison is a dangerous one to evoke. The relations between the girl-farmer Catherine and her overseer Geoffrey Doone must needs remind one of those between Bathsheba and Gabriel Oak; but the subtle insight into the waywardness, the tortuous workings of woman’s heart, which made the heroine of “Far from the Madding Crowd” so marvellous a creation, is not here. And one misses that complete rendering of the spirit of pastoral life, with its pagan sensuousness, its primitive joys, and its primitive tragedies, which is Mr. Hardy’s crowning quality. The best piece of work in the book is perhaps the study of the shepherd Jasper, the cunning man in simples and weather-lore; the shrewd, cynical philosopher, upon the solitary heights of a Weald sheepfold. In the evolution of the story psychology is something to seek; the rashness of Jasper in entrusting belladonna to the Gaffer, the audacity of the Gaffer in making use of it, are a little inexplicable. Possibly, however, psychology is not of the essence of pastoral. Mr. Buchanan tells us in a preface that “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” is founded upon his drama “Squire Kate,” itself based on a French original. “Squire Kate” is soon to appear in London. * “Come Live with Me and Be My Love.” By Robert Buchanan. (London: Heinemann. 1892.) ___
The Graphic (15 October, 1892 - Issue 1194) “COME LIVE WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE” Mr. Robert Buchanan very properly explains that his story, under the above title (I vol,; W. Heinemann), is taken from a play of his own, which has been, in its turn, taken from a French original. It is not at all difficult to read the story back into a play, and its scenes, incidents, and characters into the French. The peasant life described, despite the English names of the dramatic personæ, is so essentially and characteristically French, as to make it strange that so little of the original colour should have evaporated in the process of a double adaptation. The exceedingly amusing comic man, the sentimental and lady-killing tax-gatherer, does not become in the least British by being called Mr. Marsh; nor does the miserly old peasant who buys poison of a “white wizard” in order to make away with the girl whom he does not wish his son to marry. The same may be said of all the characters, who enact among them a really strong piece of stage-work—always theatrical in the best sense, and, though between covers, presenting all the illusion of the stage. One constantly, at the close of the chapter upon some telling situation, listens for the sound of applause. The plot is thoroughly interesting, and it has certainly been constructed with remarkable skill. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
Rachel Dene: a tale of the Deepdale Mills (1894)
The Leeds Mercury (19 November, 1894 - Issue 17667) In fiction at least Mr. Robert Buchanan loves violent delights, and his latest novel is sensational enough to make Miss Braddon envious. The scene of the book is laid in Yorkshire, and the heroine, “Rachel Dene,” is a young lady with a history, for she had been snatched as a babe from destruction during the terror at Cawnpore in the Indian Mutiny. Her grandfather, in whose home she is reared, is a Quaker millowner, and there is a certain lad in the town who also, oddly enough, was rescued on the same historic occasion from the bloodthirsty Sepoys. This in itself is surprising enough, but, to put the matter briefly, it is the unexpected which happens all the way through this lively, though scarcely pleasant, romance. Mr. Buchanan dovetails one startling adventure on to another with practised skill, but in defiance of all that is known of the law of probability. There is gambling and drugged wine in the book, felony and the Assize courts, revolt in the prison, and much else that is highly dramatic and exciting, but the book, in spite of it all, lacks actuality, for the people, good, bad, and indifferent, who figure in it, are but puppets, somewhat viciously jerked by a strong though often impetuous hand. The book is readable, but neither Rachel Dene nor her sweetheart are in the least degree captivating. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Charlatan (1895)
Glasgow Herald (24 January, 1895) NOVELS AND STORIES. The Charlatan. By Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray. Two vols. (London: Chatto & Windus. 1895.)—Mr Buchanan is very economical with his ideas. When he publishes a novel he inserts a prefatory note as to the tale having already been dramatised; when he produces a drama he follows it up with a novel on the same theme as the drama. This novel belongs to the second class. “The Charlatan” as a play was produced at the Haymarket Theatre in January a year ago; now it appears as a novel. Mr Buchanan says he was indebted for the original idea, and notably for the sleepwalking incident, to an unpublished sketch by Miss Harriett Jay. We do not care much for the novel. The theme of Mahatmas is quite played out, and the Earl of Wanborough, who believes in them, impresses the reader as being a peculiarly silly old gentleman. Then the coincidences throughout the book, natural and proper enough in a dramatic work which has its own rules, are unnatural and impossible in a novel professing to depict more or less everyday life. “The Charlatan” may have been a good play, or it may not; it is not a natural novel. Mr Buchanan is too clever a writer not to provide us with pleasant reading; and Lady Carlotta is a bright and natural woman, who, we cannot but think, must have found the wax figures which Mr Buchanan labels as her father, her cousin, her friend, her Dean, and so forth, rather dreary people to live with, despite all their propriety. Why the Dean is so carefully introduced to us, and then so neatly dropped out, is one of the many mysteries of this stage-struck tale. ___
The San Francisco Call (3 November, 1895 - p.23) THE CHARLETAN. This story, by Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray, is founded on the drama of the same name. It is a tale that dips deeply into the mysteries of theosophy, hypnotism and occultism, but without producing the impression that either of the authors is particularly familiar with any one of these subjects. |
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Philip Woodford, the heavy villain of the narrative, by the exercise of hypnotism, obtains a dominating influence over a young girl, and thereby brings disaster and evil upon her. There is a great deal of high-wrought and absurd mystery in the unfolding of this idea, and the book abounds in the jargon of occultism. Woodford becomes a reformed character, and, knowing that the power he has obtained over Isabel can only end with his death, he magnanimously resolves to die, and does so, going down with a sinking ship in a haze of bravery and a perfectly delightful sea of woe and self-sacrifice. The book has no special literary value, and as a study of psychic forces it is so purely superficial as to be almost wholly negative. (Chicago and New York: F. Tennyson Neely.) ___
Sacramento Daily Record-Union (9 November, 1895 - p.5) To the student of hypnotism, “The Charlatan,” by Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray, just issued by F. T. Neely, New York, will be most fascinating, combining as it does a story of genuine hypnotism with the irregular money-getting methods of pretending theosophists. The expose of Madame Blavatsky in the character of “Madame Obnoskin” is fearless and unmistakable. It is a work of vigor and power and marvelously sustained interest. The respect and admiration which a clever humbug can win is interestingly told. The wonderful mastery of a strong and determined man over a delicately nurtured and sensitive woman, the mastery which often amounts to hypnotism, is portrayed without the usual extravagance and clap trap experiment. “The Charlatan” is full of vital present interest. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
Book Reviews - Novels continued Diana’s Hunting (1886) to Andromeda: an idyll of the Great River (1900)
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