MB. BUCHANAN'S LATEST NOVEL.*
WE are compelled to say—and we say it with real regret—that as a writer of prose fiction, Mr. Buchanan is not fulfilling the great expectations raised by those singularly powerful and beautiful works, The Shadow of the Sword and God and tlw Man, or even by such less strong but very charming writing as was to be found in A Child of Nature. In the matter of true romance, we have of late years been somewhat poverty-stricken ; and as Mr. Buchanan had showed himself to be a romance-writer of a really high order, it was natural that his career should be watched with a good deal of interest. In the creation of ideal figures standing out against an imaginatively conceived background, his genius seemed at home ; but of late it has wandered into a far country in which it is an alien. As a romancer, Mr. Buchanan stood alone; in forsaking romance for a very cheap kind of melodrama, he entered into competition with rivals who, though immeasurably inferior to himself, have special aptitudes which he does not possess. No other living English author could, we think, have written either the first or the second of the books we have jest mentioned; but there are at least a score of novelists quite equal to the production of a book like Stormy Waters, and in the hands of not a few of them it would have turned out a much more satisfactory performance than it now is. In some respects we are glad to say that this latest novel from Mr. Buchanan's pen is an improvement on one or two of its predecessors. It does not, like The Martyrdom of Madeline, derive any of its interest from attacks upon living notabilities, nor does it contain any of the offences against morality and decency which made Foxglove Manor such an unwholesome and unpleasant book ; but, on the other hand, it is, we think, inferior to both these stories in constructive skill and literary finish. We do not know whether Stormy Waters appeared first in a serial farm, but it certainly gives us the impression of having been written from hand to mouth— that is, the story reads as if the author had manufactured it chapter by chapter, instead of working along the lines of a preconceived plan. For example, we are in an early chapter introduced to an organisation composed principally of English agricultural labourers, the apparent object of which is the overthrow of landlordism ; but as the story progresses this organisation completely changes its character, ceasing to be merely agrarian, and becoming politically anarchic ; and as we advance still further its members are spoken of in quite a matter-of-course way as " Fenians," and to one of them is committed the task of blowing np with dynamite the offices of the Local Government Board. Then, too, the hero of the book is a sailor named Hastings, who, when we make his acquaintance, cannot utter a sentence which is not incredibly rich in nautical metaphor of the " shiver-my-timbers " kind; but who, as he becomes involved in the active business of the plot, suddenly drops his seatropes, and talks,—well, not like an ordinary human being, but, at any rate, like an ordinary melodramatic land-lubber. To say that gross and obvious carelessness of this kind is unworthy of Idr. Buchanan is to speak too mildly; it is unworthy of the merest literary hack who works in a conscientious manner, and would not, we should think, be tolerated even in a well-edited "penny dreadful." It is bad enough when a man of Mr. Buchanan's capabilities and attainments condescends, under any pressure less severe than that of actual necessity, to give himself up to the production of pot-boilers ; but it is much worse when he shows himself so cynically indifferent to his reputation as not to care whether he reaches even the low average of pot-boiling work.
The identification by a novelist of a criminal whom the police have as yet been unable to discover is, so far as we can remember, a new thing in fiction, where new things of a kind are certainly desirable ; but we should hardly say that this is the kind of novelty which is wanted, nor do we think that the other items of newspaper material which Mr. Buchanan freely utilises conduce to the artistic impression of the work. It is, however, almost absurd to speak of such a thing as artistic impression when dealing with a novel in which all accepted canons of art are deliberately sacrificed to the lowest and vulgarest kind of effectiveness. To complain of mere improbabilities and extravagances in a work of this class would be as foolish and unfair as to object to a fairy-tale for flying in the face of the laws of nature, for without these things melodramatic fiction could not exist; but we may reasonably demand that the necessary improbability or
extravagance shall be so handled as not to be obtrusive, whereas in Stormy Waters they are so very obtrusive that we cannot get rid of them. Michael Morton is a tenant-farmer who murders the squire, Walter Carruthers, because he has been informed that the squire has seduced one of his daughters and is endeavouring to seduce another. As a matter of fact, Colonel Kingston, his informant, is the guilty man ; but Morton makes no attempt at investigation, and on the strength of a single unverified statement becomes a murderer. His criminality is known to Kingston, who agrees with Morton to offer evidence which shall exculpate him, and throw suspicion upon the sailor Hastings, the condition being that Morton shall give himself body and soul to the agrarian or Fenian society of which Kingston is the head, and hold himself ready to obey its behests, the first of which is the management of the now historical explosion in Charles Street. While engaged in preparation for this task his path is several times crossed by Hastings, who for some unexplained reason, is hotly pursued not only by the police but by the Fenians, and whose adventures in eluding his pursuers are of a most Miiuchausen-like character. At last, in a quite incredibly fatuous manner, he allows himself to be taken by the former set of foes, is tried for the murder of Carruthers, and condemned to be executed ; but, of course, the hero's extremity is the novelist's opportunity, and Kingston being betrayed by an accomplice, the innocent Hastings escapes as it were by the skin of his teeth, and is, with his sweetheart, happy ever afterwards. At least, this is the natural inference, for the story ends abruptly and somewhat prematurely ; but the hurried-up conclusion is of a piece with what has gone before it, and seems the fitting climax to a novel which has probably been produced in the minimum of time, and has certainly been written with the minimum of care.
It has been anything but pleasant to speak as we have been compelled to speak of the manifold faults of Stormy Waters. Mr. Buchanan, like other men who have engaged in literary controversy, has made enemies in certain literary circles ; and criticism of his books has, we cannot doubt, often been embittered by personal dislike and antagonism ; but he knows that in these columns his work has never been treated otherwise than respectfully, and has often received a deserved tribute of ungrudged admiration. We would therefore express the hope that he will accept counsel from those who wish him well, and who feel that they cannot possibly wish him anything better than that he should return to his early and healthy manner, and resist to the death the temptations, whatsoever they may have been, to which he succumbed when he turned his attention to second-rate, and sometimes very unwholesome, melodrama.
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