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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841-1901) |
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BOOK REVIEWS - NOVELS 3. Diana’s Hunting (1895) to Andromeda: an idyll of the Great River (1900)
The Times (5 November, 1895 - p.11) Somebody is certainly needed to supervise the orthography of our novelists. Mr. Robert Buchanan may write about “a pitch-battle,” if he pleases, but he should not write about “dypsomania.” An author who quotes the Greek Testament in the original, as Mr. Buchanan does, must know that “dypsomania” is wrong. Mr. Buchanan’s tale DIANA’S HUNTING shows us Diana returning bredouille, like Gyp’s Paulett. The situation is one not uncommon; we have a successful young playwright wedded to one of these excellent women, full of affection and misplaced aspirates, whom clever men often do marry. Add Diana, a handsome girl of 22, a successful actress in the hero’s first successful piece, and the nature of “Diana’s Hunting” needs no explanation. Though flattered by “many a gilded scion of nobility” (as Mr. Buchanan says finely) and accustomed to be “elegantly attired in a light pink morning gown,” the fair Diana embraces the hero in her dressing room, dines out alone with him, sits on his knee, reads his books (a thing impossible to his wife), and asks him to accompany her to America. But a Mr. Short, one of the bluff, brusque, benevolent brutes of fiction, prevails on the hero to stay at home with the wife without the aspirates. As Diana was an underbred minx the hero acted with sagacity, as well as in accordance with the moral law. ___
The New York Times (15 February, 1896) Robert Buchanan’s Clever Story. DIANA’S HUNTING. By Robert Buchanan. 18mo. New-York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. 75 cents. It was only while he was drinking “a lemon squash” that Marcus Aurelius Short, the dramatic critic of The Trumpet, told Frank Horsham that he was going straight to the devil. Horsham had just written a play, “The Daughter of Circe,” and in that piece Miss Diana Meredith was the leading lady, and the play had been an uncommon success. Diana, elated by her success, because, like Horsham, both of them had been trying ever so long to do something brilliant, has quite lost her head—and so has the dramatist. It was after the fall of the curtain when the author had been called for and greeted with rounds of applause, that he went to pay his respects to Diana, and to thank her for the genius she had shown. Then, in a moment of impulsiveness, Diana had kissed Horsham. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Times (5 November, 1895 - p.11) The mythopœic faculties of the human mind are sadly limited. All the nations of the earth tell practically the same story. Therefore, when Mr. Robert Buchanan again obliges us with an Irish narrative, we know exactly what is inevitable. Here are the old Irish peer, and his son by a betrayed young colleen (drowned long ago), here are the false marriage, the odious attorney, the diabolical kinsman (hostile to the true heir), here is the noble but reckless and ruined squire, and here is the uncompromising old butler and faithful family retainer. We miss nobody, none of our oldest Irish friends, except the omadhaun (or village idiot), for the attorney is probably a gombeen man, if all was known. It is superfluous to inform any discreet and learned reader that the false marriage, after all, was a genuine marriage; that the broth of a boy was legitimate; that the colleen, the cratur, was never drowned at all; and that the attorney came to a bad end. Mr. Buchanan has added a “moving bog” to the ordinary persons and properties of Hibernian romance, and when the attorney is driven to his end by aid of this awful scourge of nature and of potato plots, then the virtuous characters come to their own. If the student thinks that he has somewhere heard or read of not dissimilar events in Irish romance or melodrama, we can only repeat that the mythopœic faculties of mankind have a tendency to run in grooves. To the scientific mythologist a very subtle problem is presented. He has to ask himself whether the similarities between Mr. Buchanan’s and other people’s Irish novels are the result of diffusion from a common centre (perhaps in Central Asia), or whether they have been independently, spontaneously, and, as it were, fatally developed in Mr. Buchanan’s imagination? It may be that some obscure yet potent law of the human intellect compels novelists to introduce the sham marriage which is a valid marriage, the drowned colleen who is not drowned, the wicked attorney, the villanous kinsman, the uncompromising butler, and all the other stock persons and incidents. ___
The Guardian (7 November, 1895 - p.9) Lady Kilpatrick (Chatto and Windus, 8vo, pp. 279, 6s.) has a nice old plot, which we have long known and loved on the shelves of the circulating libraries, told again by Mr. Robert Buchanan in a very lively manner. The legitimate heir of the Earl is brought up in the castle, his relationship being only guessed at by the local gossips. He is, of course, the son of a real marriage, which his father believed to be a sham one. The Earl’s brother knows the facts, and tries to destroy all proofs in favour of his own son. Then we have the good old servant who tracks the priest and the wife, and the high-bred heroine who is in love with her injured cousin, all described in a lively and not too hackneyed manner. ___
The Graphic (28 December, 1895 - Issue 1361) New Novels “LADY KILPATRICK” JUDGING entirely from internal evidence, Mr. Robert Buchanan seems to have sketched out a scheme for a play of sensation and villainy, and at last, finding his final scene of a shifting bog rather impracticable for the stage, just printed his sketch as it stood under the title of “Lady Kilpatrick” (I vol.: Chatto and Windus) in the shape of a novel. The great situation for stage purposes would be an escape from a burning mill be means of a mill-wheel: the leading characters are our old friends the peer who had married a peasant girl whom he thought dead, the girl grown into a mysterious wanderer, their son who mistakes himself for a bastard, his true-hearted sweetheart, the faithful Scotch servant who is his master’s master, the strongly villainous uncle and the weakly villainous cousin (first and second murderer), their jovial accomplice whose heart is not wholly drowned in whisky, and the rascally attorney. One sees the action and hears the stage talk across the footlights scene by scene. And it is always possible that so absurdly stagey a story might, with the help of burnt cork and limelight, obtain many rounds of applause. Could not Mr. Buchanan even now cut out the shifting bog, and manage to kill the attorney with the mill-wheel? Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Scotsman (23 March, 1896 - p. 4) Mr T. Fisher Unwin, London, has published in his “Autonym Library” a story by Mr Robert Buchanan entitled A Marriage by Capture. It is a wild Irish story about the abduction of an heiress by a man who loved her honourably. It is cleverly and naturally written, and easily sustains a strong interest during the short period occupied in the reading of it. ___
The Graphic (2 May, 1896 - Issue 1379) “A MARRIAGE BY CAPTURE” Mr. Robert Buchanan’s little anecdote of the abduction, or rather several abductions, of an Irish heiress—presumably at some period when such an event was uncommon (Autonym Library: T. Fisher Unwin)—is neither particularly worth telling nor told particularly well. The title, however, has a special point of its own, the discovery of which may not unsatisfactorily occupy an exceptionally idle half-hour. ___
The Guardian (5 May, 1896 - p. 4) It seems that Mr. Robert Buchanan is not to be his own publisher invariably. The new volume of the Autonym Library, A Marriage by Capture (T. Fisher Unwin, 8vo, pp 208, 1s. 6d.), bears his name, only removed by a few inches from that of one of the publishing fraternity of whom we were led to believe he had washed his hands altogether. The stories in the Autonym Library are as a rule slight and readable. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan is only going to publish his serious and epoch-making books without the intervention of a professional publisher, and will relax his principles when he is in lighter vein. “A Marriage by Capture” is an Irish romance. It has excitement and interest at first, but ends weakly, and the cleverness of the incidents is counterbalanced by the want of drawing in the characters. Mr. Buchanan describes the startling adventures of Catherine Power, a young girl who has been left a fine property, accompanied by a millionaire’s income, in a wild part of Connaught. She elects to live at Castle Craig quite alone, and is subjected to treatment which even in a romantic story is generally situated in the fifteenth century, not in the nineteenth. If the property had been entailed it would have come to Catherine Power’s cousin, a rough young Irishman with a pedigree warranting the motto “Not we from kings, but kings from us” and tastes as low as a loafer whose antecedents do not date back so far as his father. This person, whom Mr. Buchanan fails to make much of, having made an unsuccessful attempt to win Catherine’s consent to a marriage by fair means, determines to force it by foul. Several attacks on her are made by kidnappers in crape masks and she is obliged to ask for police protection. When at last she is carried off the reader naturally believes that her cousin Patrick Blake is the offender. But he is mistaken, and in that mistake lies the chief triumph of “A Marriage by Capture,” so it would be unfair to unlock the mystery here. If the characters were not smudged in with apparent haste and thoughtlessness the story would be a really excellent one. As it is, it is pleasant to read, and the Irish brogue is not unbearably unintelligible. ___ [The New York Tribune review below deals with both A Marriage by Capture and Effie Hetherington.] Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The New York Times (17 May, 1896) EFFIE HETHERINGTON. By Robert Buchanan. Boston: Roberts Brothers. $1.50. _____ Mr. Robert Buchanan, who is endowed with a strong and vigorous style, has peculiar penchant for the writing of unpleasant romances. In “Effie Hetherington” all is stress and storm, illumined by the fitful flare of lightning. ___
The Guardian (23 June, 1896 - p.4) With all its faults—and it abounds in them—Effie Hetherington (Fisher Unwin, 8vo, pp. 264, 6s.) is a better piece of work than anything Mr. Robert Buchanan has given us for a long time. The outline of the story inevitably suggests Stevenson’s unfinished story “Weir of Hermiston”—a fact which is not to Mr. Buchanan’s advantage. But there is some force in the portrait of Richard Douglas, the gloomy, unpolished Scotch laird, and some intensity in the love-scenes between him and the falsely fair Effie. The country, too, is described with knowledge and appreciation. But though Richard Douglas himself is alive and well planted on his feet, the general impression left by the book is one of unreality, and one feels all the time that Mr. Buchanan cared no more about writing it than we do about reading it. Mr. Buchanan, in fact, needs a burning question to rouse his faculties into life, and an ordinary tale of love and passion, however lurid, is not sufficient to provide him with the stimulus which he requires. ___
The Times (31 July, 1896 - p.3) RECENT NOVELS. The Quarterly Reviewer of “Endymion” frankly proclaimed that he had not read through the whole of that celebrated poem. This candour is unusual, but a critic who has read the first 50 pages of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s EFFIE HETHERINGTON might be tempted to imitate the old example; the task seems not worth while. In some 50 or 60 pages a critic can collect feebleness and inconsistencies and commonplaces enough to justify him almost in positively declining to go further. The book begins in the weirdest conventionalities, the most sombre and antiquated banalité. On Hallow E’en, 1870, Richard Douglas, of Douglas, a ruined laird of ancient, very ancient, family, is glooming and glowering over the waters of the Solway Firth. We know all about him already, by long practice in novel-reading. Mix up “The Master of Ravenswood” and Mr. Black’s “Macleod of Dare”; the desolate manor, the single servant, a doited old foster-mother and housekeeper (“Elspeth,” of course; the name “is indicated”), with one of the appalling moonlit thunderstorms so common in Scotland at the end of October, and the hero and mise en scène are before the student. Let the hero exclaim, “Damn the women! Damn their soft, smooth faces, and their scented hair, and all their winsome ways! Ay, damn them all—save one!” Then the least experienced amateur knows what to expect. The “one” who is “barred” in the brief but comprehensive private ejaculation comes to the hero’s door with Lady Bell Lindsay and the young man they both want to marry. They are staying at the Castle (Lady Bell being, indeed, the Earl’s daughter), and what more natural than that they should start, at night, for “a gallop to Dumfries, and be riding back to the Castle for Halloween” in the dark. As there is to be “a ball, a supper, and all the stupid old customs of Halloween,” the stupid old custom of going home to dinner seems to have been overlooked, unless they galloped through the night after dinner. Lady Bell and her lover ride away. Effie Hetherington (who rides in a petticoat of lace) is left with the hero. “He’s harnessing,” says Elspeth, “the only beast he keeps—a beast that tholes only saddle and bridle, and not them, unless the rider is a Laird o’ Douglas.” This exclusive animal none the less presently jogs demurely over to Castle Lindsay, conveying safely, in a ramshackle old gig, the darkling Laird of Douglas and the coquettish Miss Effie, who has partaken of some toddy. “Are you a spirit or are you a woman?” asks Mr. Douglas—much the kind of question Odysseus put to Nausicaa in an age less scientific than ours. Miss Effie is dressed for the dance by Lady Bell’s maid, who “had been in the service of the earl for many years.” We expect, therefore, to find her a second edition of Elspeth, but no, “she was a short, sturdy looking woman of about five and twenty,” who spoke broad Scots. Such are the maids of the daughters of a hundred earls, as everybody knows. Mr. Douglas had, apparently, gone home across the moor, but he returned, not dressed indeed, still, “it was clear that he had had recourse to soap and water and a clothes brush; his hair, too, was brushed carefully.” “Please, papa,” cried Lady Bell, “we all owe Mr. Douglas a debt of gratitude.” Now, the daughters of a hundred earls, or even of one earl, do not say “Please, papa!” The general public of tenants and guest, contemplating Mr. Douglas, remarked, “Lord save us all! See till the mud of his boots!” Now, what with the conventionality of Mr. Douglas, his foster-mother, and his thunderstorm; what with the unconventionality of the darkling “gallop to and from Dumfries,” and “Please, papa,” and a lace petticoat under a habit, we maintain that, whether as a melodrama, or a study of manners and character, Mr. Buchanan’s work does not seem to deserve to be read to its bitter end—in the Morgue. To be fair, let us offer one specimen of Mr. Buchanan’s gnomic wisdom—”It is the man of power and insight who, penetrating to the sources of female caprice, and reading the female heart like a book, stands aghast at his discoveries, and lets slip each golden opportunity.” The discoveries to be made in Effie’s character and conduct do, indeed, astonish the reader. Once well embarked in the melodrama of a man’s constancy, a woman’s caprice, a murder, an addition to the illegal population of romance, and a suicide, Mr. Buchanan is more at home with his materials, and the reader who survives the early chapters may derive some gloomy entertainment from the novel. ___
The New York Tribune (9 August, 1896 - p.22) EFFIE HETHERINGTON. By Robert Buchanan. 12 mo, pp. 264., Roberts Brothers. It was Mr. Robert Buchanan who once caused Rossetti so much distress of mind by accusing him in an anonymous article of exalting the flesh above the spirit in his poetry. With that effort in mind, we are somewhat surprised to find Mr. Buchanan himself falling into the same error in his last novel, “Effie Hetherington.” Effie is certainly a young lady about whose person the author permits the reader to know entirely too much. She is, to be sure, not destined to be happy; she is, in fact, destined to die miserably, isolated from her family and friends. This is bad enough, but, in our opinion, does not justify the author in dwelling so persistently on her physical charms in the early chapters. It is sufficient to know that she had a small, saucy, pug nose; that her mouth was “a veritable rosebud”; that her underlip was “full,” and would probably be fuller yet; that in disposition she was, as her historian has it, “chameleonic.” But Mr. Buchanan might have spared us the size of her waist, the measure of her shoulders, and the texture of her skin. We will not say that these data may not be presented unobjectionably. All we claim is that Mr. Buchanan either cannot, or did not wish to, present them in this manner. He lacks frankness, and his cant is only another means of focusing attention on details which he seems to wish to conceal. Effie Hetherington is the sort of girl that men often like, but do not always respect; she is a natural flirt, and it is her misfortune to exercise her powers on a certain Laird Douglas (the scene is laid in Scotland). Douglas is a gloomy, morose man who lives by himself, and, like Hamlet, has foresworn family life. He has a curious laugh, which sounds like the “croak of a corby crow,” whatever that may be, and thus expresses himself on the subject of women early in the story, “Damn the women! Damn their soft, smooth faces and their scented hair, and all their winsome ways! Aye, damn them all save one!” When Douglas delivers himself of this tirade he is reading Boccaccio (in the original) in his lonely cabin; a thunder storm is raging outside, and it is Hallowe’en. Suddenly there is a clatter of horse’s hoofs, and a party of revellers bound for the castle—Lady Bell, Arthur Lamont (the villain of the tale), and Effie—enter, seeking shelter from the violence of the storm. Here Mr. Buchanan seizes the occasion to tell his readers that Effie wears silk stockings, and that at each successive clap of thunder she snuggles up against Douglas’s brawny arm, although she has never met the man before. When the storm abates, Douglas accompanies her on her way to the castle, and pops the question. Space forbids a detailed analysis of the rest of the story. Mr. Buchanan’s admirers may be assured, however, that it is a glittering example of rhetorical fiction, and is written from title to colophon, as has been said of Hall Caine’s books, “at the top of the voice.” “A Marriage by Capture” is also by Mr. Robert Buchanan. It differs from “Effie Hetherington” in that it is considerably shorter, and that the action passes in Ireland. The subordinate characters are drawn with spirit, and with a just appreciation of picturesque detail. The drinking party at Casey’s Inn is an excellent bit of genre painting, and sets one asking why Mr. Buchanan does not more often prefer to do this sort of work to depicting, or trying to depict, the elemental emotions. A passing word of commendation is also due to his rendering of Father John O’Donnell; of Kennedy, the captain of police, and particularly of Mary, of the ready tongue. For the rest the tale is a specimen of sheer melodrama. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
The Rev. Annabel Lee: a tale of to-morrow (1898)
The Scotsman (24 March, 1898 - p. 9) Mr Robert Buchanan has in his new story, The Rev. Annabel Lee, taken a flight into the twenty-first century. The opening, as he himself in a preface suggests, may fairly be regarded as somewhat puzzle-headed, and however clear his theme may become to one who would study the book as a speculative treatise in sociology, to the novel reader who likes his thinking done for him, the problem of life, as the author would read it, is not so clear as could be wished. Less importance is given to the conditions of life in the twenty-first century than to the views held regarding death, a life beyond, heredity, and the belief or denial of the supernatural. People who had eliminated the unfit by the aid of a chamber of euthanasia, who forbade the marriage of persons who did not satisfy a board of sanitation as to their mental and physical soundness, who had no poverty or drunkenness, having discovered a secret principle of nutrition and could do with one meal a week, who had flying machines to convey them from one European capital to another in a few hours, and so on, had time on their hands apparently to reason themselves into the belief that their barbarian ancestors of the nineteenth century were meat-eating, beer-drinking sordid sots, and cherished some old world superstitions. One is in doubt sometimes as to the direction in which Mr Buchanan’s sympathies lie, though there is no mistaking his occasional very pointed ironies. The “Rev.” Annabel Lee is a true child of nature—childhood, the reader will thankfully learn, will be unaltered in the twenty-first century—and she is much puzzled about the death of her little brother. She becomes acquainted with a little boy named Uriel, an invalid who has escaped the euthanasia chamber, and in whom lurks no small share of the old beliefs in the supernatural and the deity, and his talk seems to tone the mind of the gentle girl. Uriel and his Annabel Lee, indeed, form a pretty story, and when in after years, in the liberty of the twenty-first century, Annabel begins to teach and to preach a form of Christian ethics and beliefs it comes to be discovered that the sum of wisdom found in the very modern halls of the religion of humanity is simply that of the “Inquisition” writ very large. The story merits careful reading. ___
The Pall Mall Gazette (31 March, 1898 - Issue 10300) According to Mr. Robert Buchanan, the world will grow lop-sided in the next century and a half. Certain doctrines, such as the elimination of the weak for the sake of the strong, and the improvement of physical conditions at all costs, will override human nature and abolish Christianity. On this extraordinary theory is founded the story of “The Rev. Annabel Lee” (C. Arthur Pearson), the woman preacher who revived the old faith. The plot is romantic, but not particularly well carried out or very novel; we have met a good many of the ideas before in “The Revolt of Man,” “Looking Backward,” and other kindred works. ___
The Graphic (9 April, 1898 - Issue 1480) “THE REV. ANNABEL LEE” About the beginning of the twenty-first century, according to Mr. Robert Buchanan’s “The Rev. Annabel Lee” (C. Arthur Pearson), Londoners will be drinking Thames water without the need either of a filter or of an undertaker. No more need be said to show what science will have accomplished in the way of making everybody comfortable; the virtual abolition of crime, disease, and poverty may be regarded as almost minor achievements—and all this to happen in little more than another hundred years! But we must not be too sanguine. The age of universal comfort will imply universal lethargy and stagnation; and faith in the unseen will perish when it is no longer required by sorrow and pain. Then will arise a protesting prophetess against the barren reign of Science; and it is her story that Mr. Buchanan eloquently tells. Unquestionably her view, and his, is worth presenting, even though Miss Lee’s experiences are far from encouraging, and though there are no present symptoms of the need of a revolt against a universal content so excessive as to amount to an evil. ___
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin) (9 April, 1898) THE REV ANNABEL LEE. By Robert Buchanan. The book is guilty of the one sin unpardoned and unpardonable of the novel reader—dullness. The scene is laid in the twenty-first century, when Christianity is abandoned, almost forgotten, but the people have attained the very acme of physical perfection. Annabel Lee who takes her name frankly from Poe’s vague poem of the maiden “In the Kingdom of the Sea,” successively strives to revive this lost and forgotten Christianity and belief in a life after death. But the whole business is unconvincing. There is too much preaching and moralising, and too little story in the book. In a book like this which, so to speak, takes the incredible as its axiom, it is necessary that the details should have some verisimilitude. This the work has not accomplished. The heroine is, if one may so say, an impersonal personage, a myth with attributes: not a woman with qualities, and her lack of actuality lends an unsatisfying vagueness to the book. ___
The Belfast News-Letter (19 April, 1898 - Issue 25803) THE REV. ANNABEL LEE. By Robert Buchanan. In this clever “tale of to-morrow” Mr. Buchanan has endeavoured to picture the future, its visions and wonders. With what purpose it is not difficult to understand, though with what degree of success opinions will doubtless differ. In “Locksley Hall” Tennyson conjures up a very idealistic state of affairs, resulting in the “federation of the world,” but he is satisfied to leave its realisation to the chances of time. With greater confidence in the certainty of the achievements of slowly creeping science, Mr. Buchanan plunges into the middle of the twenty-first century, and shows us an existing environment practically on a level with that of the dead Laureate’s imaginings. The Great City, which is the scene of the chief incidents of the story, possesses few characteristics whereby it might be compared with any of the cities of to-day. It hums with humanity truly, but the noise is harmonious; no foul smoke blackens the atmosphere, no foetid odours pollute the air; the river, which winds in its serpentine course, is clear as crystal; on its transparent breast float argosies, and various other modes of transport are provided by artificial wings. Cemeteries are things of the past. Each district has its crematorium, situated in a beautiful “garden of rest,” where lie in urns the ashes of the dead. The secrets of human sustenance have been revealed, with the result that public abbatoirs are unknown, and man may subsist for the better portion of a year on a repast provided by the vegetable kingdom. Sickness, poverty, disease, and crime are almost unknown. “Humanity has come to his throne” and Christianity is extinct. In short, we find man “master of the world and of his own destiny,” and that “science, by abolishing nearly all the evils which had devastated the earth for so many centuries, had produced an almost perfect race.” Our heroine is the daughter of one of the learned doctors of the period; and it becomes hers in time to lead a crusade in search of abandoned Christianity. Early in years she had lost a little brother, her sole companion. Incapacity to realise the meaning of his departure and antipathy towards the idea of eternal separation influence her mind. Nor does the inward craving for hope wane as years accumulate. When eighteen she joins a semi-religious Order called the Sacred Sisterhood, and by means of free libraries, which are about the only relics of this poor era of ours, she acquires some knowledge of the religion of Christianity. By it she is greatly impressed, and as its mysteries unfold themselves she determines to devote her life to mission work, ladies, be it understood, being permitted to assume clerical functions. As a helpmeet she gains one Uriel, a deformed musician. Between the two there rapidly develops a spiritual sympathy. In time another affection awakens, but the law is stringent as to the physical condition of those meditating matrimony, and defiance thereof means death. The Rev. Annabel and Uriel, however, betake themselves to the hills and valleys on a crusade against Humanity as it pertains. They rouse the land and bring upon themselves the wrath of the Holy Office. Finally we see them in the Judgment Hall arraigned for their espousal of the obsolete doctrines of the Man Christ. Here Mr. Buchanan rises to a high level of dramatic power, and rings his curtain down upon an intensely moving tragedy. The picture, indeed, is almost a repetition from the historical point of view in the human aspect. We do not wish to suggest with what harvest Annabel and her disciple laboured. Those who wish to know will much more agreeably discover in the book. Only one thing remains to be said. It is this — the author has succeeded in furnishing a wide field for the speculator in the consequences of the march of science ungoverned by the influence and restraint of the Christian religion. Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
Father Anthony: A Romance of To-day (1899)
The Irish Monthy (Vol. 26, 1898 - p.671) 15. Father Anthony. A Romance of To-day. By Robert Buchanan, Author of “God and the Man,” etc. London; John Long, 6 Chandos Street, Strand. (Price 6s.) ___
The Pall Mall Gazette (19 January, 1899 - Issue 10551) THE SECRECY OF THE CONFESSIONAL.† MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN has not written a book for the Kensitite, so let none be misled by the above caption. His story turns on the pathetic and dramatic motif of the inviolability of the confessional to which St. John Nepomucene was proto-martyr, and which, so far as we know, has not been broken to our day, even by a recanting priest. To our mind Mr. Buchanan is less excellent as a dramatist than as a story-writer and ballad-maker. Therefore we prefer still “The Shadow of the Sword,” or “God and the Man,” to this effective dramatic story. Yet it has the qualities of its kind; direct narration, striking situations, speed, terseness and vigour. The play is the thing in this story, and Mr. Buchanan has made little or no attempt at characterization. We only see his actors from the outside. The one bit of excellent portraiture in the book is the one which will probably offend the class which otherwise will be well pleased with “Father Anthony.” This is “Father John;” and any Irish reader who is not hide-bound will recognize the type. It is the type of that great class of the Irish priests who are not born but made priests, and withal are devoted, self-sacrificing, affectionate, and watchful shepherds of their flocks, whose genial ways need only scandalize the Pharisee and the dullard, and who form by far the most delightful and typical part of Irish life. The book shows some signs of haste; and Mr. Robert Buchanan, even in his months at Erris, can hardly have seen a pair-horsed jaunting-car. Or if he did it only exists there. Those who like a straight tale and a well-managed mystery will be well pleased with “Father Anthony.” † “Father Anthony.” By Robert Buchanan. (London: John Long.) ___
The New York Times (11 March, 1899) LONDON LITERARY LETTER. Written for THE NEW YORK TIMES’S SATURDAY REVIEW by LONDON, Feb. 28.— ___
Aberdeen Weekly Journal (20 March, 1899 - Issue 13775) The Rev. William Barry, D.D. (author of “The Two Standards”), writing to Mr John Long, the publisher of “Father Anthony,” by Robert Buchanan, says:—“It is, if I may say so, among the best things he has done; very kind in his dealings with our people and our priests, generous, and, on that account, fair minded; while, as a story, I suppose many will agree that it aims high and succeeds in winning our attention, nay in touching our hearts. It deserves to be the great success your advertisement shows it to be, and I would congratulate the author, who has been an impetuous champion of ideals not always mine or those of the Catholic Chruch, but still conceived by him in a spirit of ardent chivalry.” ___
Brooklyn Eagle (25 August, 1900 - p.7) By Robert Buchanan. “Father Anthony,” a story of Irish life and character of the present day, by Robert Buchanan, is a novel that has met with an unusual degree of success on the other side, having run through ten editions in London and is now published in this country. Father Anthony is a young priest, a curate in a remote country parish. His only brother, to whom he is devotedly attached, is charged with the murder of the leading man of the district, and the evidence against him appears conclusive, but Father Anthony has learned under the seal of the confessional who the real criminal is. His strong sense of duty forbids him to make use of the knowledge, even to save his brother’s life, and the only hope lies in wringing a public confession from the criminal. This knowledge is shared only by the sister of the guilty man. The tragic character of the situation is enhanced by the fact that the accused, and the daughter of the murdered squire are deeply in love with each other, and that the quarrel which is supposed to have provoked the murder was over this attachment, the two families having been enemies for many years. Moreover, the sister of the real murderer knows of this attachment and herself entertains a hopeless passion for the accused man. The story is supposed to be told by a London physician, who goes into this wild part of the country for rest from a too arduous devotion to the duties of his profession. A mysterious dream, thrice repeated, comes to him, and on his journey into Ireland he encounters on the train a lovely young Irishwoman, evidently in deep distress, whose face he recalls as having appeared prominently in his dream. How he was drawn into the chain of circumstances connected with the murder, and how the mystery was finally unraveled it is the province of the book to convey to the reader. It is a strong tale, with a good deal of pathos and a number of strong situations, which help to make it a story worth reading. ___
The New York Times (15 September, 1900) Robert Buchanan.* Dr. Charles Sutherland of Wigmore Street, London, had a remarkable dream. It was a regular nightmare. But, what was worse, the doctor kept on dreaming the same horrors. A woman was drowning and crying for help. That dream affected the health of the doctor, and so he made up his mind to take a holiday. He went to Ireland. In the car he meets a beautiful young lady. It strikes him at once that the lady resembles the drowning spectre of his dreams. Miss Eileen Craig of Craig is in great trouble. The doctor, taking advantage of his dream acquaintance, has her secret confided to him. It is sad enough. She is in love with Michael Creenan. Michael is in Castlebar Prison accused of having murdered Eileen’s father. Dr. Sutherland determines to solve the mystery. The story of “Father Anthony” is of the detective kind. Michael has a brother Anthony who is a priest. It looks as if one of the brothers had shot Eileen’s father. Both brothers are under suspicion. Neither of them did the cruel deed. The crime is laid to Rory Bournes. He was drunk when he shot his man. There is a great deal of whisky absorbed by the personages in the story. You learn that a dram is called “shnifter.” The virtues of potheen are vaunted, but is it really better than Jamieson’s? Mr. Robert Buchanan is unquestionably a sound authority. * FATHER ANTHONY. A Romance of To-day. By Robert Buchanan. New York: G. W. Dillingham & Co. _____
Father Anthony was serialised in The Golden Penny, a supplement of The Graphic, commencing Saturday, February 19th, 1898. Two pages from this edition of The Golden Penny, are available below: Father Anthony in The Golden Penny
Back to the Bibliography or the Novels _____
Andromeda: an idyll of the Great River (1900)
The Guardian (21 March, 1900 - p.3) NEW NOVELS. To many of those who know Mr. Robert Buchanan in very different moods and in other characters it will be refreshing to meet him as the author of ANDROMEDA (Chatto and Windus, 8vo, pp. 413, 6s.), an old-fashioned romance of love, art, and mystery which carries us back to the early sixties by its plot, and still more by its manner and execution. The heroine is a child of the sea, the nursling, ward, and wife of a truculent, open-handed, hard-favoured mariner who has not been heard of for many a long day when a weak-minded young artist falls in love with her on Canvey Island, near Gravesend. Charlie Somerset is engaged to a cousin, and an elderly comrade of the palette gives him excellent advice. He follows it for a little; but fate will have it that Andromeda receives, with news that her ferocious husband is dead or dying, a considerable fortune from Californian mines. Somerset jilts his cousin, and the lovers are to be married; but just then, of course, Matt Watson comes ashore safe and sound. What happens then we shall not say, but it is very exciting, and though there is a little uncertainty about the end, Mr. Buchanan manages his plot with the hand of a master of suspense. There is no subtlety about the characters; in every feature and every phrase they are in the tradition of mid-century sentimentalism. But the story has more life and rapidity than half the psychological “studies” can show; there is some admirable landscape from the mouth of the Thames, and the pictures of Bohemian Bloomsbury in the sixties have all the air of being done from life. ___
The Literary World (1 July, 1900 - Vol. XXXI, p.140) Mr. Robert Buchanan’s Andromeda has at least power, but it is the power of physical endowment and expression. Andromeda’s history is a mystery. She is the child of an unknown woman and an unknown father, cast up, so to speak, out of the sea, adopted by a rough sailor who treats her as a guardian might but marries her in form and leaves her, who finds a lover, and is put in a strait betwixt him and her husband, and who finally falls to the possession of the right man, but only after dramatic experiences which come very near to running into tragedy. It is a novel of the fleshly school, strong to the verge of coarseness—not always pleasant reading for a refined taste. [J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.25.] _____
[“Andromeda: a Tale of the Great River” was serialised in The Derby Mercury from September 6th to December 27th, 1899.] Back to the Bibliography or the Novels
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