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English Writers of To-day, No. 4

HALL CAINE

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Elliott & Fry, Photographers, London.

With kindest greetings

Hall Caine

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TO
E⸺ L⸺
S⸺ M⸺
AND
H⸺ H⸺

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CONTENTS

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PREFACE

In preparing this monograph on Mr Hall Caine, I have devoted much more attention to his earlier life than to those years during which he has been before the public as a novelist. The reasons for this are obvious, the chief one being that the early life of a famous man, with its struggles against circumstance, and its slow, oft-impeded progress towards success, is of much more interest to the general reader than that part of his life which is passed immediately under the gaze of all interested in him.

I have to express my thanks to Miss Esther Luffman for considerable assistance in Chapters VII., VIII. and IX.; to Miss Brown, daughter of the Rev. T. E. Brown, for permission to use the letters printed on pages 115-17, 145-6, 182-3; to Miss Pinto Leite, the literary executrix of R. D. Blackmore, for permission to use the letters printed on pages 90-2, 94-7, 118-19; to Miss Harriett Jay, the literary executrix of Robert Buchanan, for permission to use the letter printed[x] on pages 79-80; and to Mr A. P. Watt, the literary executor of Wilkie Collins, for permission to use the letters printed on pages 108-10.

These letters, all of them addressed to Mr Hall Caine, are used with his consent.

I owe my thanks to two early friends of Mr Hall Caine, the Rev. Wm. Pierce and Mr George Rose, for the recollections of the boyhood of my subject which give so much freshness and vitality to my narrative.

In preparing this volume I have sometimes spoken out of my personal knowledge of my subject, and it may be that without intending it I have appeared to commit him to my own opinions. If this be so, let me hasten to say that whatever the value of what I have said, it is everywhere and entirely my own, and the last thing I desire is to charge my own views to my subject, especially where in any degree they concern himself.

After I had finished my work I wished to submit the manuscript to Mr Hall Caine for the verification of facts, and I hoped that perhaps he would give me the benefit of a short prefatory note saying that these were correctly stated. But Mr Hall Caine could not be induced to meet the latter part of my request, and to the former part he would only respond so far as the facts concerned[xi] others than himself. I now feel that this decision was the only proper and possible one, but as paragraphs in literary papers have said that Mr Hall Caine has “revised” my biography of himself, I find myself reluctantly compelled to publish the following letter:—

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Therefore, in publishing this monograph on a living man who is much in the light of public opinion and still a subject for controversy, I wish to take every responsibility for whatever errors of judgment or taste may appear in my work. My sources of information, with the important exceptions indicated above, have been public ones, and the subject of my sketch has had nothing to do either with the origin of my book or the way in which it has been carried out.

C. FRED KENYON.

Ellesmere Park, Eccles, September 24, 1901.

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HALL CAINE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

The keynote of Hall Caine’s character, both as a man and as a novelist, is sincerity, and the deepest thing in him is love of humanity. He is dominated by the ambition to get out of the realm of thought all that is best and wisest, and from his heart a stream of love for suffering, tortured humanity is constantly flowing. Heart and brain alike are ever at work for the good of mankind. “I have a real sense of joy in the thought that I am at least in the midst of the full stream of life, not in an eddy or backwater,” he said to me one summer day, as we lay among the ferns of Greeba. He loves to feel that he is striving with the[2] complex forces of these impetuous days of a new century; loves to feel that he is being carried along by the River of Life, for ever battling with the torrent, and always stretching out eager hands to help those who are weaker than himself. This, I repeat, is the deepest thing in Hall Caine, both as a man and as a writer, and the critics who find other interpretations of either know both imperfectly.

Thus it comes about that the great body of his written work is full of a wonderful sympathy for his fellow-creatures. Every man’s sorrow is his sorrow, and every man’s joy his joy. At no time of his life has he been immersed in the study of dead-and-gone languages; he has always been occupied with the study of humanity—humanity in its multifarious activities, hopes, struggles and fears. He has gone to the root of all things—the souls and hearts of men and women. He is no psychological analyst of man’s wickedness; rather does he overlook the weakness of man’s nature in his admiration for all the[3] good he finds there. “No man is as black as he is painted,” he has told me, not once, but often; and he does not say this because of any inability to perceive sin where it exists, but rather because his clear-sighted intellect detects all the hereditary influences, the hideous power of circumstance, and the temptation to which men are exposed. I can think of no English writer, past or present, who evinces so broad and generous a sympathy with all mankind, as does Hall Caine. His power of sympathy has enabled him to understand the characters of men with whom he has come in contact, no matter of what nationality they have been. Englishman, Icelander, Moor, Italian, German—all are read by him with sympathy and with ease, because he accepts the fact that the passions of love, hate, sorrow and joy are the same all the world over. In his works I do not find any subtle analyses of character; he treats all his men and women on broad human principles, concerning himself with the structural basis of their natures, and leaving[4] the details to take care of themselves. He has neither the analytical sense of George Moore, nor the extraordinary subtlety of George Meredith; neither the passionate pessimism of Thomas Hardy, nor the epigrammatic cynicism of John Oliver Hobbes. He is simple, earnest, human. He takes no heed of the tricks by means of which an unwholesome interest is aroused; but his strong dramatic sense takes the place of these, and enchains the reader’s attention.

I am very far from saying that Hall Caine is without fault as an imaginative writer: he himself would be the first to deprecate such a statement. He has the defect of his qualities. He sees everything on a large scale, no matter how intrinsically insignificant it may be. So great is his absorption in and love for humanity that he has dulled his sense of perspective, and what seems to the average man an ordinary, everyday affair, is to him charged with tragic significance. The consequence is that he is always writing at white heat: it is a[5] real mental and emotional strain for anyone to read a novel of his. He expects almost as much from the reader as he gives him. Again, his view of life is often very one-sided; he sees all its tragedy, and little or nothing of its comedy. This is particularly noticeable in his earlier books. He takes himself seriously, as every artist should, but he sometimes forgets that in order to take oneself seriously it is not necessary to shut one’s eyes to the light and laughter that are in the world. That Hall Caine has humour no one who has read The Deemster, The Christian, or Cap’n Davy’s Honeymoon can doubt; but his humorous instincts are constantly kept in check, and subordinated to the tragic interest of the plot. There is nothing approaching “comic relief” in any of his works, and for this reason we may be grateful, for, structurally, his novels are almost perfect, and to have gone out of his way in order to introduce eccentric and humorous characters would have been to destroy the symmetry of his plots. No! it is his general outlook on life which[6] seems at fault: all is tragedy, as black and awe-inspiring as a thundercloud. The white brilliant day is to him never free from distant thunders; the sun is always shadowed by a cloud. To quarrel with this view of humanity would be useless, for it is the man himself, and his work is but an honest, sincere interpretation of his personality.

One of the chief qualities of his work is his dramatic sense. He uses it powerfully and, at times, with astounding effect. In his earlier novels (The Shadow of a Crime and A Son of Hagar) he does not employ it so skilfully as in, say, The Deemster and The Bondman; he is so mastered by it, and so much the slave of his own personality, that the written result is often melodrama pure and simple. Indeed, it is the opinion of many critics that Mr Caine was born a dramatist, and not a novelist, and the late Mr Blackmore used to insist that the success of the author of The Manxman would be as nothing compared with what awaited him as a dramatist. This opinion[7] has been endorsed by the American public, who were as enthusiastic over the dramatised version of The Christian as they were over the novel. But probably the dramatist in Hall Caine has never yet expressed itself. A dramatised version of a novel begins with obvious limitations.

Let me say something of Mr Caine’s method of working. In many respects it resembles that of M. Zola. They are, above everything, conscientious. Mr Caine works slowly: three years elapsed between the publication of The Manxman and the publication of The Christian; and four between The Christian and The Eternal City. “For the writing of The Eternal City, I have read or looked into as many books as there are over there,” said the novelist to me in his library, pointing to a bookcase containing several hundred volumes. He takes notes freely. His writing is a process of condensation. He verifies each statement of importance by personal reference to the original authorities. Nothing escapes his attention. He tries[8] to weld his various facts into one consistent whole, and the result is a closely-written logical piece of work. He seeks documentary evidence, not from one source only, but from all sources. It will be readily seen that such a method of work as this involves enormous care and patience: a single slip, and the critics are on him, shouting that a mere schoolboy could teach him better than that! For Hall Caine is a born fighter—a fighter against all the injustice and sham of modern society; and whatever he may attack, the critic is sure to imagine that it is his duty to take up the cudgels on behalf of him who is assailed. In such closely-written, fully-packed books as Hall Caine’s, it would be an utter impossibility that there should be no technical mistake of any kind; and because a few of these crept into The Christian, some of the critics thought they were justified in declaring the whole book a mistake. On what they knew they based their judgment of what they did not know. It is the way of the world.

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If one estimated the amount of work done by a writer by the number of words he wrote each day, then Mr Hall Caine could not be called a hard worker; for his daily output is small. Sometimes it is represented by a blank page. But ten hours spent in concentrated thought can be a far harder day’s work than four or five foolscap sheets of writing. At the time of my last visit to Mr Caine, he was rising at 5 a.m., and working steadily till 10.30 a.m. That is to say, that when most men are beginning their day’s labour, Mr Caine has finished his. He gives up the best of his life to his art. He finds that when the digestive organs are at work he does not work so well; so the early morning hours, both in summer and winter, find him with pen or book in hand. He prepares for each work just as a student prepares for a difficult examination. In The Bondman he was writing about Iceland; so he went to Iceland and studied at first hand what he was to describe. In The Scapegoat, Morocco; so he went to Morocco. In The Eternal City, Rome; so[10] he went to Rome. And so on, throughout all his books, and not in their broad features merely but in their every detail. I have seen the MS. copy of The Bondman: it is written in small, exquisitely neat handwriting, with many alterations and erasures. On my expressing amazement at the patience and care with which he worked, the novelist replied: “Oh! that is only the final copy. For each page you see there, perhaps three or four were written—the second better than the first, the third better than the second, and so on.” No one but a writer can appreciate the amount of toil required for such a method of working as this; but Hall Caine sacrifices everything for the sake of his art. He feels the power of the written word, and the responsibility of giving to the world that which is not of one’s best.

Apparently, before beginning work on a new novel, Mr Caine does not deliberately seek a plot. First of all, he becomes absorbed in some abstract idea—an idea that is the outcome of the times in which we live, and the conditions under which[11] we work. The idea lives in his brain for hours, days, weeks, months, and it may be years. From this idea his characters grow without any effort on his part. They spring into being out of the nebulous atmosphere in which they exist, and from his characters comes his plot. It is generally a matter of slow germination: the abstract idea—the seed of the novel—lies in his brain, gathering unto itself all the experience and thought of the novelist’s life, and gradually it grows and expands until it has reached a state of cohesion and unity. This method of working is the method of nearly all creative minds; there are few who deliberately seize a plot, and create their characters to fit in with the exigencies of time, place and circumstance. A man’s character it is that makes the plot, not vice versa. It must not be supposed from this that Hall Caine regards the plot as quite a secondary matter; but he works from within outwards, making the plot develop according to the manner in which the creatures of his brain act, feel and think. A cut-and-dried plot is very[12] often the mere mechanism of an agile mind; but there is a kind of plot which is inspired, which has for its centre of radiation a spiritual idea of truth and beauty. And this is the kind of plot with which Hall Caine has sympathy. Take The Deemster, for instance. What is it but a modern version of the Prodigal Son? The abstract idea of repentance and self-purification after a life of dissolute conduct. Again, The Bondman is the story of Esau and Jacob, with the sympathy of the reader being drawn to Esau. The Scapegoat is the story of Eli and his sons, a girl taking the place of Samuel; and The Manxman is a modern version of David and Uriah.

The root idea of each of these stories is not one that depends for its interest on any particular time or place; it is for all times and all places. The mise-en-scène, the atmosphere, the characters are but accidents—the necessary accidents for the presentment of the moral and spiritual drama. The Christian and The Eternal City, it is true, depend on their presentment for a great deal[13] of their interest: they are the outcome of the strenuous and conflicting times in which we live. But still, in these books also, the eternal spiritual questions are clearly indicated and clearly discernible. It seems to me Mr Caine believes that if a novelist or poet does not seek to elevate his fellow-creatures by his work, there can be no reason for his continuing to write. It cheers and strengthens the reader to have a noble character put before him, for he thinks to himself, “I could be like that if I tried;” and in many cases he does try, and the result achieved is the greatest reward a writer can receive. The hero must not be too good; he must be human, faulty maybe; but still pure and noble. Otherwise, the reader says, “Such a character never existed. He is utterly beyond me. Try how I might I could never be like that” No! a noble nature is rarely without sin, and it is the small faults of disposition, temperament and character which make him real and human. In this connection I think of the noble-hearted Dan of The Deemster, that tortured[14] soul who, though a forger and a murderer, yet remains one of the purest and most lovable characters in modern fiction.

Before closing this introductory chapter, I should like to say something of Mr Caine as he impresses one in conversation. It has been my privilege to have met him several times, and I have spent many unforgettable hours in his company alone. First of all, he is one of the very few men I have met who impressed me, almost at the first glance, with the conviction that he had genius. As soon as he speaks his face lights up, his eyes shine, and his soul is laid bare. That is no manner of speaking: it is the simple truth. One knows that whatever he may say it is exactly what he feels. There is no “smartness” in his conversation, no epigrammatic fireworks, no talking for mere cleverness’ sake. He speaks convincingly because what he says he believes to be the truth. His delivery is dramatic and realistic. He rarely gesticulates, but when he does it is with the discrimination of the born actor; one feels, indeed, that the stage[15] has lost a man who would surely have become one of its most notable figures. His knowledge of men and things is both deep and wide. Nothing escapes his observation. He has travelled in many countries—America, Russia, Poland, Iceland, Italy and Morocco, and wherever he has been he has studied, first of all, humanity, and secondly, humanity, and yet again humanity. And so, throughout the busy years of his life, when he was engaged in journalism, study, novel-writing, travelling, lecturing, he was all the time adding to his knowledge of his fellow-creatures, quietly observing not only the great men of the earth with whom he came in contact, but also the boy who brought the newspaper in the morning, the fishermen at their nets, and the hundred-and-one seemingly commonplace people whom one meets in the street day by day. Still, with all this knowledge of humanity he is never eager to express opinions on notable men and women. He is silent concerning those he dislikes for fear lest he has misjudged them; he will not speak of his friends[16] because he sets so high a value on their friendship. But on all the problems that have come under his immediate notice, he is willing—nay, anxious—to hear the opinion of other people, no matter if their knowledge be merely superficial.

Mr Caine is of average height, well-made and erect. His brow is fine and broad, his eyes large and luminous. His head is the head of a poet, a thinker, a prophet. It is suggestive of most of the portraits—ideal and otherwise—of Shakespeare; there is the same noble forehead, and the same large, passionate eyes. In manner he is quiet and, except among friends, somewhat reserved; but when his interest is aroused he asserts himself at once, speaking passionately and with consummate fluency. He is, perhaps, one of the best raconteurs living, and has a vast store of personal anecdote with which to illustrate any point which may crop up in conversation. He has a particularly keen sense of the humorous, and his manner of relating a funny story is equal to that of his fellow-countryman, the late Thomas Edward Brown.

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His home life is simple and unaffected; it is a life of plain living and high thinking. He is the friend of every cottager round about Greeba, and the fishermen of Peel are his comrades. I remember an old woman from Crosby talking of him to me three or four years ago. “Terrible kind he is,” she said, “and simple. Aw, but you should have seen him makin’ hay on the curragh—laughin’ and jokin’ and all that.” And whatever sentence she began, it always ended with the same words, “terrible kind he is.”

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CHAPTER II
HALL CAINE’S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Thomas Henry Hall Caine was born in Runcorn, Lancashire, on May 14, 1853. Runcorn is by no means a romantic town, and, fortunately for the future novelist, he only spent ten days of his life within its precincts. His father was a Manxman, and his mother a native of Cumberland. They were both of the people—hard-working, poor and thrifty; but they must have possessed some remarkable qualities of mind and heart if we are to give any credence to the theory of heredity, for not only has Hall Caine made his mark upon his generation, but his sister, Miss Lily Hall Caine, has won a by no means unimportant place in the theatrical world, and his brother, Mr Ralph Hall Caine, is, within limits, a charming[19] writer of talent and ability. Caine is a Celtic name; Hall, his mother’s maiden name, is Norse, and is very commonly met with still in Iceland. The novelist himself has inherited the physical characteristics of his maternal ancestors, for, like the Norsemen, his beard and hair are red, and although he is the reverse of a strong man, his clearly-defined and well-developed features indicate to some extent the physical robustness of the Norsemen. His forefathers were farmers and fishermen, an old hardy family of great strength and physical endurance.

Though born in Runcorn, and resident whilst a very young child in Liverpool, Hall Caine’s earliest recollections are of the Isle of Man, of his grandmother’s cottage “Ballavolley,” Ballaugh, in the north of Manxland. It speaks much for his early development that even as a little child he loved the island which, in future years, was to be dearer to him than any spot on earth. “There is no place in America, Italy, Russia, Iceland, Morocco,[20] or any other country I have visited, that is quite so beautiful as my own little island in its own little way,” he said to me only a month or two ago. And what he thinks to-day he has always thought.

There is a subtle, elusive charm about the Isle of Man which is obvious to the least observant of men, but there are few who are able to define its particular character, or who are able to define from what source it is derived. Once become a lover of that narrow stretch of land, and you are eternally lost; its beauty, its freshness and its fragrance will haunt you for ever, and each year when June comes round you will be impelled, by an irresistible desire, to tread once more the heights of Snaefell and Barrule, and wander again through the glens of Sulby and the Dhoon. It were worse than useless for me to attempt to paint any of the beautiful scenes which Manxland possesses, but the explanation of its distinctive charm lies in this, that it is an island. For not only is it an island, but a nation—a nation with manners and[21] customs peculiar to itself—a nation that is, for the most part, occupied with itself and its own affairs. Its very aloofness attracts. It is in the world, but not of it; it lies apart surrounded by the ever-changing seas, and covered by a firmament which seems to be a part of its very self. The dim outline of the hills of other lands—England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales—only emphasises this sense of remoteness. It is only the vessels out at sea creeping steadily along the horizon, that act as a reminder of the existence of other lands, and not the far-off lands themselves. These vessels are the only disturbing influence of the island’s peace: they breathe forth the breath of the city, and remind one of that which one has been tempted almost to forget—that the world is not all beautiful, and that sooner or later the city will again claim us as its own.

But this island-charm was not the only influence that was at work upon the young child’s imagination. His grandmother, superstitious like all good Manx people,[22] would tell him tales in the dusk of evening, that banished all sleep from his eyes, and set his fancy weaving stories of elves, fairies, gnomes and witches. The old woman had the folk-lore of her native country at her finger-ends, and so attentive a listener curled up at the fire of peat made a good story-teller of her. The first book he remembers reading was a huge volume on the German Reformation, about Luther and Melancthon, and other men who soon became his well-loved heroes. These days Mr Caine remembers well and the memory is sweet and pleasant. But the time came when it was necessary for him to go to school, and he returned to his parents who had settled in Liverpool. At the age of ten he entered as a “new boy” the public school in Hope Street, Liverpool. Among his fellow-pupils was a William Pierce who was afterwards to become one of the most prominent figures in the Congregational Ministry. I am indebted to this gentleman for the following schoolboy reminiscences of his companion.

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“Many things served to make the entry of Hall Caine among us noteworthy. In the first place, he was easily distinguished among a crowd of schoolboys by his then bright hair—gold, turning to red—his clear, almost girlish complexion, and his large, luminous brown eyes. I think the almost instantaneous conviction in the minds of the rest of the class that morning was that our new friend would be all the better for a little wholesome persecution when their duties were over, if only to take some of the painful freshness out of him and tone him down to our own colour. This feeling on our part was heightened when he was called upon to read a passage aloud, which he did, as I clearly recall, in a very musical voice, and with much greater modulation than we had dared to employ—lest we should be thought to be giving ourselves airs! When our master was injudicious enough to praise Hall Caine warmly at the expense of the rest of us, the duty of taking him in hand became one of high moral obligation.[24] And though I have no recollection of what happened, I have no doubt that, being so different from other boys in many respects, he did suffer some little persecution, without being, I hope, any the worse for the discipline.

“I think that probably, to the end of his school experience, Caine was somewhat scoffed at by the rougher boys; partly, also, because he was not addicted to settling his differences with other boys by giving or accepting challenges to fight. But he was not in the least a milksop. Among the trivial remembrances of those days, the only outstanding recollection I have of Caine is quite characteristic of him. At one of the terminal examinations we were set to write a short English composition. The report of the examiner stated that one paper was unusual, coming from a class of boys of our years. This youthful production was graced by apt poetical quotations, illustrations of the theme set us—a unique feature in the examiner’s experience of boys of our standard.[25] I remember one of our class-mates remarking that it required some cheek to quote poetry in old ⸺’s composition; but my own estimate of Caine increased by this and similar circumstances, and when I left for one of the larger grammar schools in the city, we were already great friends.”

It will be seen from the above that early in life Hall Caine was schooled to bear the unfriendly criticism and persecution of those who were unable to understand him. The schoolmaster mentioned by the Reverend William Pierce was Mr George Gill, the head of the well-known firm of publishers of schoolbooks. From the very first Mr Gill recognised that his young, sensitive pupil had remarkable powers, and that if all went well he would one day make a name for himself. In proof of this I should like to relate a story in connection with the first night of The Christian in London. Mr George Gill, now an old man, was in the stalls, his heart full of pride at the distinguished position his quondam pupil had gained.[26] The theatre was packed with a fashionable and intellectual audience. A play was about to be produced which had taken America by storm, and it was confidently expected that in England also the drama would achieve a tremendous success. Carried away by generous pride and enthusiasm, Mr Gill turned to those seated near him, exclaiming: “I always knew it! I always knew it! I said from the very first that the lad had genius, and to-night I am witnessing the proof of it.” The conduct of the old gentleman reflected the greatest credit on his heart and head alike, and it is a noteworthy instance of Hall Caine’s power of making and keeping friends.

But let me return to Mr Pierce’s reminiscences. “During the few years that followed,” he says, “my friendship with Caine met with little advance. I saw him occasionally only, and heard of his doings but at rare intervals. His people were attached to the large and important Baptist Church in Myrtle Street, presided over by Hugh Stowell Brown, himself a Manxman.[27] It was natural that young Caine should find here an opening for his budding faculties, though he never became one of the inner circle of the workers of the church. I used to hear of his occasional participation in the proceedings of a literary and debating society established at Myrtle Street. Without aiming at it, he easily drew attention to himself—in voice, in manner and in mental cast he was an exceptional youth. Meanwhile he was ‘something in the city.’”

Mr George Rose, another of his most intimate friends at this time, writes me that at the age of fifteen young Caine was apprenticed to an architect. “It was in a quiet spot,” continues Mr Rose, “somewhat remote from the part of the town where the activities of commerce were carried on. The daily routine of duties was not burdensome, and many of his hours were devoted to the self-imposed tasks of a literary nature, in which he delighted. Probably he dreamed, through many a quiet hour, of success to be gained in after years; if it were possible to[28] recall some of those dreams and, by putting them together, to form the chart of a projected journey through life, it would be found to differ widely in many ways from the course he was ordained to follow. Perhaps the only points of coincidence which could be noticed would be the constant turning towards the Isle of Man that was never absent from any scheme of life upon which his fancy dwelt in youthful days.

“For those who hope to ‘make their way,’ London necessarily fills a large space in the map of life, and thither Hall Caine’s thoughts often turned. Then there were quiet joys in Lakeland to tempt the wanderer; but the little Man Island was the home to which return was to be made at last, and which was to have its scenes brightened by any glory that could be won in the outer world.

“Hall Caine was endowed by Nature with some graceful qualities which would have made him popular in whatever walk of life he chose to follow. Before it was known outside the circle of his friends that he[29] possessed such remarkable qualities of mind he had already shown his power to hold the attention of audiences, and was well known and greatly esteemed in the wide district occupied by the southern portion of Liverpool. It was customary at that time to arrange ‘Readings’ for the amusement of the people. These entertainments were given by societies connected with places of worship, and were intended to have an educating and refining effect on the people who attended them. Hall Caine when very young was in great request at gatherings of that kind, and his presence on any platform was enthusiastically welcomed. He was of pleasing appearance, confident in his manner, and his countenance gave the impression that his disposition was genial. People were always happy to make his acquaintance, and when he began to speak, whether expressing his own thoughts or reciting some piece of poetry, the clear tone of his voice, the perfect enunciation of his words, his intense earnestness and effective dramatic style enabled him to hold the[30] attention of an audience from his first word so long as he chose to address them. His taste lay in the selection of serious pieces; sometimes they were even a little beyond the comprehension of his hearers. He had given much attention to the study of the works of the Lake school of poets, and to those of the best writers of the eighteenth century. With these as models, he had formed for himself an ideal of perfection in language that, even in the excitement of speaking in public, he never lost sight of; and this, combined with his natural fluency of speech, raised his efforts to the level of oratory. The extent and variety of his reading tended to give a peculiar quaintness to some of his forms of expression. He sometimes introduced words and phrases borrowed from old authors, forgetting that they were no longer in common use. At other times the sense in which he used a word was different from that in which his hearers understood it. In connection with his work in the society of Myrtle Street Chapel he undertook to read a poem upon which he was then engaged; it[31] was a romantic composition in blank verse. The subject was the return of a hero to his desolated native land, in defence of which he had been long absent on a distant journey. Although the poem was of considerable length it contained few characters and incidents, but its lines embodied Hall Caine’s ideal of a golden age. When he first turned his thoughts to literature as a profession his inclination would have led him to express his ideas in the form of poetry; in this particular his mind gradually changed. Next to poetry his desire was to become a journalist. During his holiday visits to the Isle of Man he found opportunities of contributing to the island newspapers, and soon his articles were so highly valued that his editor accepted everything that came from his pen. One little peculiarity in those articles was the source of much amusement to his friends in Liverpool. It was the frequent repetition of a pet phrase, ‘these three small islands,’ by which he meant Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man. If he had then been called upon to name them in the order of their importance[32] he would undoubtedly have given the first place to Manxland.”

In connection with these articles mentioned by Mr Rose, I may say that they were written when their author was sixteen years of age. It has been my privilege to read many of them. They are noticeable for close reasoning and exceptionally wide reading for one so young. They were written in favour of the maintenance of Manx political institutions which, at that time, were threatened with annihilation. They are vehement but reasonable, and in no place does their author overstep the bounds of common-sense.

Again I quote Mr Rose. “One of Hall Caine’s favourite plans was an intention to write a drama. He had read that in some part of Germany there was a law by virtue of which an inquiry was made immediately after a man’s death into the extent of his possessions; and when it was found that he had evaded payment of any portion of the taxes to which a man of his means was liable, the whole of his property[33] was forfeited to the State. The plot of Hall Caine’s intended drama was to be founded upon a tragic result of this custom. The principal idea of the story was that a wealthy merchant having entrusted to his confidential agent the duty of making the statements required by the law, the agent systematically falsified them, in order that on the death of the principal the agent might become an informer and bring about the forfeiture of the estate. The motive was that the daughter of the merchant, being rendered penniless, might be driven to accept the informer’s proposal of marriage.

“Such was the crude outline of the plot; but it was altered almost every day. He often talked about this project, but never spoke about the words of the play. It was the machinery of the play that he was concerned about, the number of the scenes and their order of succession, with other points of stage management. He wrote so easily that he felt no anxiety about his ability to accomplish the literary part of the design; but he believed that in a dramatic composition,[34] however original and lofty the thoughts it contained, however perfect the expression of them, all would be wasted unless they were woven around a framework of method exactly adapted to meet the conditions of stage representation.

“Although the idea of writing such a play was never carried into effect, it served to show what direction Hall Caine’s thoughts were taking. Many of his contributions to Liverpool newspapers took the form of dramatic criticism. His mind was greatly influenced by the successes achieved by Henry Irving. It will be remembered that for some considerable time before Mr Irving appeared in the character of Hamlet, his intention to do so was known, and the degree in which his representation of the part would differ from that of other actors was the subject of lively discussion. Hall Caine interested himself deeply in the matter, and contributed many brilliant articles on the subject to various papers. He gave a great deal of attention to the study of Shakespeare’s writings, and his[35] conversation on the subject was very interesting because of the light he was able to throw on the meaning of passages the importance of which would be overlooked by an ordinary reader. I heard him speak at a meeting of a literary society over which he presided for some time and which had enrolled many able men amongst its members. The subject was a reading of scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar. Some remarks had been made about the conversation of the conspirators which takes place as they stand in the garden of Brutus’s house. In talking together they allude to the dawn which they saw or pretended to see. Hall Caine insisted that the words were full of hidden meaning if properly emphasised by appropriate gesture. He quoted the speech of Casca in Act II., Scene I. ‘Here as I point my sword, the sun arises; … some two months hence, up higher towards the north, he first presents his fire,’ and said it was necessary for the actor to bring out the true significance of the lines by pointing with his sword,[36] first to the house of Cæsar, and then to that of Brutus, indicating the transfer of power to the latter which the conspirator desired to effect.”

This study of Shakespeare—a study close, intimate and unremitting—cannot be insisted on too strongly. Shakespeare and the Bible have from his earliest years been his chief mental food: his thoughts are coloured by the imagery of the Prophets, and his language has gained in terseness, vigour and force from the greatest poet who has ever lived.

I now resume Mr Pierce’s reminiscences. “He was becoming” (in about the year 1870, when Hall Caine was seventeen years of age) “more and more absorbed in literary studies, and quite early began to make acquaintance with the dramatists—not content, as most of us were, with reading the plays of Shakespeare only among the Elizabethans, but reading extensively and thoughtfully the writings of all the most notable playwrights of that great age. I was early struck by his references to the[37] Jew of Malta. He would quote Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or from a play by Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Webster, in a way which showed considerable familiarity with the literature of the time. These facts have more significance for me now than then, as I see in them the growth of his mind, and the evidence of an original impulse towards literary studies. It is difficult to explain how this solitary youth, amidst surroundings by no means suggestive of such studies, should have chosen this way of spending his hours of leisure; and by what instinct, in those early days when university extension lectures were yet unknown, before English literature as an educational subject was popularised, and before the publication of our modern guides and manuals for the help of the blundering tyro, Caine seized at once the salient points of the great subject, divining the place and importance of names not known to the merely well-informed multitude, least of all to youths who had not long left school.

[38]

“It was during this period that I began to renew my intimacy with Caine. It was probably due to some kindness on his part. He has a genius for friendship, and is capable of taking immeasurable pains in the service of those to whom he is attached; and he is, or perhaps I should say he was, one of the best and most faithful letter-writers I have ever known. I had left business and was studying Art and Literature in an easy, unmethodical, Bohemian fashion, drawing from the antique during the day, and exploring the poets and essayists in the evening, with desultory violin studies and excursions into Geology and Genesis by way of diversion and variety. Caine was interested in all these things; but he never aspired to sing or play, and made fun of his own drawings, though I believe he was really a skilful architectural draughtsman. He did one thing, one thing only, and he did it better than anyone else.

“Perhaps my knowledge of his mind during these early years is due to the fact that I left Liverpool about the close of 1871[39] for Carnarvon to take up a press appointment. Caine had no difficulty in communicating his thoughts in writing. I must have written him some account of my whereabouts, or have sent him copies of the newspaper on which I was engaged, or probably have done both things. And so a correspondence, to me most notable, began. Caine was principally responsible for its maintenance; he was the more regular and conscientious writer. His letters were often extraordinary with regard to their length, and more often extraordinary with regard to their contents. But in the most rapid and familiar of them there is a sense of style. He is full of qualifying clauses, inversions, interpolated interrogations, and exclamations, but the grammatical and logical close of each sentence is successfully reached. Still, though often somewhat formidable in length, and graced by literary ingenuities at times, they are letters, nevertheless, and not essays. There is no consciousness that a word in any one of them is ever to be seen by a third person. That they are less casual and[40] simple in style than most letters addressed to familiar friends must be set down to the character of the writer. I remember a somewhat matter-of-fact schoolfellow, himself innocent enough of any refinement of speech or culture of mind, expressing his detestation of Caine because when you met him on the most ordinary occasions and conversed on the most trifling subjects, ‘he always spoke like a book.’ However, it was natural to Caine to dress his casual thoughts in refined and graceful language. His thoughts are grave and gay in his letters, and sometimes, indeed, he writes for the sake of writing; he likes playing with words and sentences. He is naturally communicative—tells his thoughts, and gossips about himself pleasantly. He has been gracing a friend’s essay on ‘War’ with a couple of stanzas. Not that he is a peace-at-any-price man; the stanzas, though not at all sanguinary, are highly patriotic. He has even delivered a Temperance lecture, and not without much appreciation on the part of the ancients who heard him; but he[41] positively declines to pursue Fame on the Temperance platform. Then after a little pleasantry he hopes I am laughing, as he himself does at his own jokes; in the first place, for reasons of prudence—since none other might laugh save himself, and in the second place, because it is unchristianlike to ask another to do what you refuse to do yourself. One item startles us. He has just finished a play in blank verse, and inquires if I should like to peruse it.

“In another letter he hopes the correspondence will continue, since he knows it would tend ‘towards the establishment in our minds of fixed principles, upon matters the most important to man’s welfare here, as well as in that existence of his which (we believe) is to come.’ It would also strengthen our friendship, though upon the subject generally he has some sad things to say—as that at the time he is writing there lived not the man with whom he had ‘true unity of feeling.’ As the letter proceeds we see that he is entering the melancholy period of life when sad and[42] depressed spirits are a very frequent distemper with young men who are thoughtful and live much alone. In such a mood Caine had the day before written verses some of which he quotes, and a few lines of which I further quote.

“It is a not uncommon mood with young men, and its not unnatural cure is for the young man to fall deeply in love. But there seemed no likelihood of any such happiness befalling young Caine, so far as any of his friends knew. He seemed to avoid the possibility of such a contingency. His friendships, so far as I knew, were exclusively with young men, though there[43] was nothing of the misogynist in him. In the letter from which the above quotations are taken, he again refers to grave spiritual questions—what is life? he asks, and naturally gives vague answers and speculations. He quotes, in connection with the hypothesis that evil is a quality of our more material part, the lines:—

He excuses himself for not sending the play in blank verse as he has only one draft copy, and its condition is such that he is convinced I could not read it. In some letters now lost he had referred to a Christmas poem he is to write, but although now it is the first day of December, it is not begun. ‘It is to be framed from an old plot of one of the Greek Tragedians,’ and is to be ‘written in the same vein as Christabel.’ At the close of this letter he mentions that if I cared to see newspaper articles of general interest written by him, I could have them in volumes.

[44]

“A later letter is written in rhymed couplets. After some four hundred lines in verse, it finishes with a few lines in prose. The poem referred to in previous letters is to be called Geraldine, but cannot be sent as ‘a bookseller fellow needs to see it.’ He had hoped to raise the character of this rhymed effusion by adding some verses on the Days of Minstrelsy, but after keeping it six days he must dispatch it without. He is to deliver a lecture on Hamlet the following month, and the subject is absorbing all his thoughts.

“Soon after this—about the close of 1873 or the beginning of the following year—I was interested to find Caine was proposing to publish a small monthly magazine, and he was good enough to ask me for a contribution. There were, evidently, difficulties in the way of the venture, small as it was. But he put all his usual energy into the enterprise and communicated his enthusiasm to his friends, and in due course the first number of Stray Leaves appeared, with a lithographic portrait of Henry Irving[45] as a frontispiece. It had some modest literary pretensions, though of no very distinctive character, and therefore after prolonged expectation it was not quite surprising to read: ‘Stray Leaves has made no second appearance. It never will.’ But, meanwhile, he has another and larger magazine in hand, and this time, with a view of avoiding some of the difficulties which had beset him on his earlier venture, in announcing The Rambler Magazine he prints on the official paper ‘T. H. H. Caine, Proprietor.’ I was obliged to take an interest in the new magazine—Caine was so buoyantly sanguine of its success. I therefore sent him a poem, and next, and more to the purpose, arranged with a local bookseller to exhibit the poster and sell copies. I also got a favourable review of the first number inserted in the newspaper with which I was connected; and this ought to sell ‘at least three dozen copies,’ he writes. The parcel for our town got unaccountably delayed, but every copy was eventually distributed. Caine had[46] been staying at or near Keswick, and writes his astonishment that the poet Close (a well-known character in those parts) had sold two hundred copies, and was asking for a further hundred. But the letter containing this information has a much more exciting piece of news. He had to-day replied to an inquiry from ‘a man of means (heaps of money)’ concerning ‘the establishment of a critical newspaper in Liverpool.’ He is willing to conduct such a journal for three months if a sufficient guarantee fund is provided, and already seeing the possible success of this fresh candidate for Fame, says, if the project advances, I must return to Liverpool to take a place on his staff.

“There was being published in Liverpool at this time a small weekly journal called The Town Crier, satirising and criticising with more or less good humour the affairs of the town. It is not necessary to enter upon any details as to the establishment of this paper, but I was interested in its existence because Caine had some sort of connection[47] with it. The editor and general factotum was our old schoolfellow William Tirebuck, while Caine wrote for it, especially dramatic notices and reviews, and acted as adviser generally, if I remember rightly. We were all surely young enough to be engaged in such work, but Tirebuck was our junior by a couple of years. I remember visiting Liverpool about this time and calling at the small editorial sanctum out of South Castle Street. I had already written a little for The Town Crier, and was much interested in its career. It was a great time. Everybody was busy preparing for the next day’s issue. The printer’s boy had brought a bundle of galley proofs and was told he must not return without the rest of the copy. There were confidential conferences over correspondence, some of it purporting to divulge certain pieces of municipal jobbery; final consideration of the article which sailed very near the wind in denouncing a town scandal, in which a man of much wealth and no principle was concerned. Everyone was in the highest spirits. Caine had come[48] down in his dinner hour, or had special leave, and when we had settled the affairs of The Town Crier and of the town generally, we went off to a meal, not at all of an elaborate character, I admit, but graced by overflowing good-fellowship and light-hearted wit.

“Meanwhile, the fortunes of The Rambler, notwithstanding that all the copies of the first number were distributed and in some cases further copies called for, were not in a flourishing way. The printer’s bill was a very matter-of-fact document. No amount of generous self-denying enthusiasm could alter its figures. Even reviews favourable and unfavourable, and there was a liberal number of both kinds, did not solve the problem. Caine rightly claimed that the widespread notice taken of The Rambler was some proof of its worth. One journal gave prominent place to the opinion that ‘the contents of The Rambler are bosh—pure, unmitigated bosh,’ the style of the criticism at least indicating the character of the journal. But the ‘bosh’ was not so[49] unmitigated that it could be disregarded. Nevertheless, the financial results were not encouraging. He tried, in answer to a sympathetic inquiry on my part, to let me know how matters stood. He says, ‘The last issue paid (cannot pay more than) (or, rather, didn’t pay at all, or paid on the wrong side) fifty per cent.’ Then feeling that this was not exactly an enlightening statement, he proceeds—‘I am really such a fool at business affairs and so very little acquainted with the technicalities of trade as surely to have made a mess of the last explanation.’ The substance of the explanation was that they had reckoned on a loss, and had received half of what they had calculated their proceeds might be, making the real loss proportionately greater. He does not contemplate giving up; is ‘only disposed to delay the issue of No. 2 in the hope of balancing affairs.’ However, he never troubled any of his friends about the financial difficulties; whatever the losses may have been, he squared them without the aid of his fellow-contributors. The second[50] number did appear, somewhat belated, but that was the end of Caine’s amateur efforts at floating a magazine.

“When I returned to Liverpool in the beginning of 1875, to prepare myself for college, I had an opportunity of renewing my personal intercourse with Caine. It was a very pleasant time to me. We had one or two congenial friends and with them or ourselves alone had a long succession of talks upon the subjects that interested us. I think he generally determined the course of our conversation. Earlier in life he had been greatly under the sway of Coleridge. By this time his tastes had widened and were more varied. He had much to say about Wordsworth. I recall an evening when he was full of the Ode to Immortality, which he quoted at great length—as he could most things he admired—and discussed with great insight and power. But the range of subjects we ventured upon was wide and varied enough to suit all tastes and dispositions. I can by no means recall them all, but I remember such subjects as the[51] writings of Jean Paul, the Aristotelian unities and the modern drama, the nature of Hamlet’s madness, and Shakespearian subjects generally. Curiously enough, we had little to say concerning Tennyson—In Memoriam was the only poem I remember discussing—and even less in regard to Browning, though I had myself a vague conviction that Browning was the greater poet of the two. But we frequently conversed about Rossetti, Swinburne and William Morris. On many evenings when we felt little inclined for literary talks we enjoyed lighter chat and gossip; while, occasionally, we turned to graver subjects and speculated on eternal things with the calmness and confidence which are part of youth’s prerogative. And though we were a kind of peripatetic academy, we were happy enough, and seasoned our more serious mental fare with a liberal share of laughter and fun.

“Apart from the little circle of friends with whom he thus associated—and I recall him most easily during the midsummer[52] months when I spent most of my long vacation at home—I think he spent a solitary life. He was little understood. The majority of the people he met being very dull persons, they could note only his outward peculiarities, and I have no doubt most of them set him down as an eccentric young man. They were struck with his musical voice, his copious diction, his literary style of speech, which I think they generally set down as an affectation. Yet he could, when he chose, make himself interesting to very commonplace people. He knew so many things. He found them interesting in ways they themselves little suspected. Then beside being a remarkable talker he was never disposed to turn the conversation into a monologue. He was a most sympathetic listener.

“For the sake of his health he often spent his week-ends at New Brighton, at the mouth of the Mersey, and for some time had permanent lodgings there. We were all compelled to visit him, for he was ever the most hospitable of friends, and thought[53] no trouble too great to bestow on the comfort of those who were his guests. I was his guest overnight, and specially recall his appearance at that time. He had grown as tall as he is now, and was of spare habit. He wore his hair, which had lost its early golden tinge, slightly longer than is usual. He had a striking face—pale and clean-shaven, a refined expression, ample forehead, and large, bright, intelligent eyes. For a student he walked very erect, wore a close-fitting and fairly long frock-coat, many-buttoned and double-breasted, and was very square-shouldered. He was a man easily distinguished in a crowd.

“In my early days at college I had one special letter from Caine, and with some reference to it my own particular reminiscences of my eminent friend may come to a close. His younger brother John, a very fine young fellow, was at the time dangerously ill. Very soon after he died of consumptive disease. Hall Caine was subject to fits of depression, and this event did not tend to relieve his thoughts. Yet I think[54] the sad event left him with more hope and fortitude. Trial and difficulty always aroused the best in him. His letter, however, is very pathetic and interesting. I gather that I must have written, in reply to an earlier letter, that the stronger the natural affection, the greater the tendency to magnify the danger. He replies that it would not be easy to exaggerate the gravity of his brother’s case, though they are not without hope that rest and nourishing food may do something to alleviate the lung disease. The letter is full of frank disclosures of his thought and feeling. He is preparing himself ‘for the utmost length and disaster.’ But his sad philosophy can only say: ‘The best that can leave us is Life; the worst that can come is Death; of which we may remember that if it be now, it is not to come; if it be not to come, then it is now—the readiness is all.’ My interpretation of his gloomy outlook as being not reality but the creation of his own thought, he examines and analyses, yet without comfort to himself. He feels how small is our power to choose[55] our own thoughts, ‘how entirely men are born to convictions.’ He moralises over a photograph of myself which I had sent him, and sees all my future in my face. And so with himself. It is not because he has chosen to think it so, that to him—

At the same time he declines Jean Paul’s advice to treat it all like a dream. When we awake the dream-sorrow vanishes. ‘I tremble when I reflect upon the horrible sceptic I should become, say rather the demon I should be, if believing in a Godhead I should believe also the world to be but a dream.’ The sight of the young life leaving behind all the happy activities of existence here, and entering upon a succession of weary days ‘doomed to peer through the darkness for the light of the fairer morning’ touches him acutely; but it leads him to say that for his own part he means to face life bravely. Once, indeed, in a time of spiritual prostration ‘Actual Death’ seemed[56] ‘less terrible than its shadow,’ but ‘I have grown out of the weakness of that period, and now intend, not proudly, but resolutely, to meet life and go through with it.’ And he has doubtless kept to the resolution, and through it achieved his present position.”

It will be seen from the foregoing that whilst in Liverpool Hall Caine’s life was an exceedingly busy one. With characteristic energy he threw himself heart and soul into any work he undertook, and already a burning ambition was urging him on to strain every nerve to gain his goal. His mind developed quickly: long nights of study and deep thought, some struggles of a material kind, and at least one tragic event made a man of him long before his time. Not that he was ever anything of a recluse: he was merely absorbed in his work, and the thoughts of the great minds which he studied matured his judgment, and he crammed a lifetime of experience into a few years. His connection with Rossetti was to ripen many qualities of his mind, and strengthen his character.

[57]

The following letters of Ruskin were addressed to Caine a year or two before the future novelist left Liverpool, and when he was in the midst of the office, journalistic and lecturing work described by Mr Pierce and Mr Rose. The first is dated November 8, 1878, and was written in reply to an invitation of Mr Caine to deliver an address in Liverpool.

The second letter, dated 27th December 1879, reads:—

[58]

Ruskin, however, was not the only famous writer who had his eye on the young man working away in Liverpool. Already Matthew Arnold and Lord Houghton had made friendly and encouraging advances—the former writing him a long letter of praise concerning an essay of Caine’s which had come into his hands, and the latter asking Henry Bright (the H. A. B. of Hawthorne) to arrange an interview between himself and the rising young littérateur. These marks of distinct encouragement from eminent and well-loved men were a source of keen pleasure to Hall Caine; they not only gave him confidence in his own powers, amid many discouraging circumstances, but made him feel that his strenuous labour was not being done in vain.

[59]

CHAPTER III
1879-1884

In the year 1878 an event of the greatest importance to Hall Caine’s future life happened; he became acquainted with the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Little did the eager young student of literature imagine, when he first heard the name of one of the most subtle and alluring poets of the last century, that his life would one day be joined with his. Rossetti was to exercise an influence on his future the full extent of which cannot even now be estimated. In his fascinating Recollections of Rossetti Mr Caine tells, with a certain amount of detail, the story of his friendship with the poet. The story is a deeply interesting one, and in some respects without precedent in Literature. Their friendship[60] was an honourable affair to both of them—more especially to the younger man, who not only gave up many months of his early youth when, maybe, he would have preferred to have been battling with a still unconquered world, but also sacrificed much of his peace of mind in his endeavour to make happy the last hours of Rossetti’s troubled life. On the other hand, what he lost in health of body and mind, he gained in intellectual stimulus; for Rossetti had a mind richly stored with poetic and artistic lore, and the strangely beautiful dreams and phantasmagoria that flitted through his brain undoubtedly did a great deal towards stirring up the imagination of the future novelist, and inciting him to further achievement. As I think of the poet and his enthusiast talking for many hours together in Chelsea; as I think of them afterwards in their loneliness in the Vale of St John; and as I ponder over those last tragic days together at Birchington, I see many examples of sacrifice on the part of Hall Caine, and many, many bitter hours when[61] the poet, forced by what seemed almost a power outside himself, gave way to the accursed drug which killed him. A weak, febrile mind would have given way under the strain of constant companionship with Rossetti during the last months of his life; but Hall Caine had more than this to weigh down his vigorous young intellect. For several weeks he had the sole responsibility of the poet’s life on his shoulders, and it even became necessary for him to regulate the doses of chloral which was Life and Death to the diseased man with whom he lived; and many were the extremities to which he was put in order to hide the fatal drug from his friend. The story of their friendship, quite apart from its own intrinsic interest, is essential to any honest attempt to understand the development of the novelist’s mind.

It was in the early spring of 1879 that Rossetti wrote his first letter to Hall Caine. It reads as follows:—

This was sent in reply to a note of Hall Caine’s covering a copy of a lecture he had twice or thrice delivered in Liverpool, on Rossetti’s poetry. The lecture was subsequently printed in a magazine, and some little time after its publication he conceived the idea of sending a copy to the poet. This letter was the first of nearly two hundred which followed in quick succession. Rossetti’s generous nature immediately recognised the enthusiasm of his admirer, and Hall Caine writes in his Recollections of[63] Rossetti: “It is hardly necessary to say that I was … delighted with the warmth of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation the letters appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature.” Mr Caine was naturally somewhat chary of seeming to seek favour from the distinguished poet, and his purpose of bringing to Rossetti’s knowledge the contents of his essay being served, he withdrew from the correspondence and “there ensued an interval in which I did not write to him.” Rossetti then wrote:—

This at once put at rest all doubts that troubled Mr Caine, and a long, ardent correspondence ensued.

During the time that Hall Caine was engaged in writing to Rossetti, his life was an exceedingly busy one, and full of many[64] and varied interests. As we have seen, he was engaged all day in office work—uncongenial, one can imagine, and perhaps even irksome. At night—sometimes all night—he worked at his books, reading and writing, for he had a good deal to do in order to catch up with others who had enjoyed better opportunities. His life was far from unhappy, in spite of the checked ambition which was beginning to dominate him. He had friends of like mind and tastes with his own, and his work in connection with the Liverpool Notes and Queries Shakespearian Society brought him in contact with many interesting people. Still, he was longing to be away—longing to test his strength with the strength of the world, and desiring nothing better than to work out his destiny. The story of how he threw off the shackles of conventional life in Liverpool and escaped to the mountains of Cumberland is by no means uncharacteristic, and I may perhaps be pardoned if I tell it here pretty much as Mr Caine himself related it to me.

[65]

In 1881 his health seemed on the point of breaking down. He mentioned the fact to his employer, with whom, by now, he was on terms of friendship. Perhaps business was pressing, perhaps there were good and sufficient reasons of some other kind, but at all events little attention was taken, and for a week or two Mr Caine worked on uncomplainingly. But a time came when he felt that if he wished to preserve his health he must have an immediate holiday, so, giving up his keys to his fellow clerk, he walked out of the office and never returned, in spite of the affectionate and solicitous letters which followed him. But he had had more than enough of office life, and had made up his mind to devote his energies to Literature. At this time he possessed a sum of about thirty pounds, and was delivering a course of twenty-four lectures for the Liverpool Corporation. For each lecture he received two or three guineas, but that was all that stood between him and the bottom of the purse. But in his heart of hearts he knew that Literature[66] was the only profession in the world for him, and that the sooner he began to devote his life to it the better. At this date, Hall Caine had twice stayed with Rossetti at his house in Chelsea. He had found the poet cheerful and in good health, but the mental atmosphere in which he lived was almost morbid. “The gloom, the mediæval furniture, the brass censers, sacramental cups, lamps and crucifixes conspired, I thought, to make the atmosphere of a dwelling-house heavy and unwholesome.” But he felt that by personal contact with the man he had been brought much nearer to him in spirit, and there existed between them an affectionate regard such as father and son might have for each other. The younger man was soon to be called upon to make a sacrifice on behalf of his friend, and with that “genius for friendship” of which we have already heard, the sacrifice was made eagerly enough. Hall Caine had not been settled long at the Vale of St John before Rossetti wrote saying that he too was ill—bodily and mentally, and that he must soon leave London. If only he[67] could get away to the country, he was sure he would be better. “Supposing,” he wrote, “I were to ask you to come to town in a fortnight’s time from now—I returning with you for a while into the country—would that be feasible to you?” For a few days he remained undecided, but at length wrote to the Vale of St John asking Mr Caine to come to him. Mr Caine went, but on arriving at Rossetti’s house found the poet unwilling to move. A great change had now taken place. Rossetti had lost his cheerfulness, his fund of good spirits. He was ill, and more than ever a slave to chloral. His mind was unsettled and gloomy, and he suffered from the hallucination that nearly all his friends had proved faithless. He longed to escape from London, but yet he had not the strength of mind to take the necessary steps. His doctor gave his permission for a visit to Cumberland, but still Rossetti would not go. At last, yielding to the persuasion of Mr Caine, strongly supported by the advice of Rossetti’s older and more immediate friends,[68] Theodore Watts, Frederick Shields and William Rossetti, his brother, who thought the bracing mountain air of Cumberland would work wonders, Rossetti consented to go. And now ensued a time of anxiety for Hall Caine. They were entirely alone in the little house they had rented in the mountains, save for a nurse to attend to the wants of the sick man; and Caine had the real responsibility of Rossetti’s life on his shoulders. Rossetti could not sleep, so night was turned into day and day into night. They would sit up through the dark hours together, with the sound of the flooded ghyll outside, and within the tones of Caine’s voice as he read aloud to Rossetti to while the hours away. And as he read, the poet would walk up and down the oblong room, restless, nervous, and longing to get at the chloral which was safely locked away in a place he knew not of. The hot, quick, anguishing thirst for chloral was on him during these days, and when Rossetti used to come to Hall Caine’s bedside and beg for an extra dose, the younger man[69] found him simply irresistible, and often had to give way to his friend’s earnest pleading. There were other grave responsibilities thrust upon him of which I cannot speak; suffice it to say that he bore them bravely and uncomplainingly, and came out from his trial a more experienced and a stronger man.

It was during these long sleepless nights that Hall Caine first told Rossetti the outline of the story which was afterwards to be the framework of his first novel, The Shadow of a Crime. This story, which is dealt with in an ensuing chapter, although it appealed to Rossetti’s imagination, did not convince him that it would make a good novel. It was too terrible—too unsympathetic. He urged Caine to try his hand at a Manx novel, and told him that it would be no mean ambition to strive to become the bard of Manxland. The plot was discussed from every point of view, but as yet the writing of it had not been commenced. Perhaps the young student of Literature did not yet feel quite strong enough in experience[70] and imagination to attempt so large a scheme; perhaps he was too engrossed reading Smollett, Fielding and Richardson for his Liverpool lectures; or perhaps he had seen that Rossetti’s criticism was a just one, and that the story would prove cold and inhuman. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that he did not begin to work on his first novel until some time afterwards when Rossetti lay in his grave, but month by month, week by week, it was getting a stronger and yet stronger hold on his imagination, until it dominated him entirely. The familiar legend of his youth became a part of his everyday life, a part of his very being. It obsessed him almost entirely to the exclusion of all other interests; but he restrained himself day by day, until restraint was no longer possible, and then in a fever of impatience and enthusiasm he began to write.

Meanwhile Rossetti was gradually becoming worse and worse, and Caine more and more anxious. What was to be done? They were hundreds of miles away from[71] home and older and more experienced friends, and Rossetti seemed too ill to travel. It was a critical time for both of them. Rossetti was by turns irritable and genial, bad-tempered and high-spirited, full of life and languidly indolent; but these various moods were not reflected in his companion—he was always anxious, always wondering what was going to happen. The solitude, the anxiety and the poor state of his own health made him suffer keenly; yet even now he confesses that he looks back with great tenderness and gratitude to those four weeks with Rossetti among the Cumberland hills. At length it was decided that they should return home, and the instant the decision was made Rossetti’s spirits rose. Perhaps he had already a premonition of his nearly-approaching death, and felt more at ease that he was to die near friends and kindred instead of in the almost tragic silence and loneliness of Cumberland. He returned worse in health and spirits than he had come, and as soon as his doctor saw him he realised that the time had arrived when[72] drastic measures should be taken. Rossetti had an attack of paralysis, and from that time his drug was absolutely forbidden him. The pain that ensued was intense, and he became delirious with desire for chloral. A few days after, however, he rallied and became more cheerful, and it was decided that he should stay for a time at a bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea which had very opportunely been placed at his service. Thither he went with Hall Caine, his constant friend and comforter, and there he died shortly afterwards—literally in his young friend’s arms, for at the last moments Caine had put his arm about Rossetti to raise him up, in order to relieve his apparent pain.

In attempting to gauge the kind of influence which Rossetti exercised over Hall Caine, it must not be overlooked that the poet was old enough to be the younger man’s father; indeed, both in letters and conversation, he more than once expressed the wish that he was his father. When Caine first knew Rossetti, the latter’s health and nerves were already on the point of[73] breaking down, and he was even then a victim to the chloral-taking habit. He was morbid and fanciful; his body diseased, and his mind unhealthy. Caine, on the other hand, had fair health and a vigorous, lusty mind. What came to pass is only what a spectator might have guessed; the older man attracted and fascinated the younger, and there can be little doubt that this fascination had by no means an entirely healthy influence over Hall Caine. Indeed, he tells us in his Recollections of Rossetti that one day he found himself becoming the victim of the very delusions which so tortured his friend, and this is but one instance out of many by means of which it might be shown that the poet’s influence over the budding novelist was one of at least questionable value. As I have already remarked, it would have required a peculiarly strong and vigorous mind and body to have lived with Rossetti towards the end of his life without being detrimentally influenced by his personality; but fortunately for Hall Caine, this doubtful part of the influence was only temporary,[74] while the good and noble part of it was permanent, and was felt long after the personal intercourse came to its end. It must not be forgotten, too, that Hall Caine’s imagination was with him a masterful power which he had not yet learned to control properly, and his sensitive, responsive disposition made him particularly impressionable. But it cannot be doubted that the friendship of these two men, both strongly, indeed peculiarly individual, had a great deal to do in developing the character of the younger man. It was inevitable that a man of Rossetti’s genius and character should inflame his imagination and light up many beacons of his intellect.

When a year or two later Hall Caine began to strike out for himself it was bruited abroad that he was making capital out of the names of his friends—in other words, that he was making a bid for Fame by the help of those who constituted the Rossetti circle.

This, of course, was as absurd as it was untrue. People said that Caine had been[75] Rossetti’s secretary, and some foolish gossips went so far as to declare that he had been his valet. The only relationship that existed between them was one of friendship. Hall Caine looked on Rossetti with enthusiastic admiration and something almost approaching reverence, and Rossetti regarded him with the keen interest one naturally takes in the career of a young man of genius. For Rossetti often encouraged his young friend by bidding him have no anxiety as to what the future held for him, declaring that Fame was bound to come to him sooner or later. It speaks much for Rossetti’s perspicacity that he was able to discern the genius of his friend, for at this time Hall Caine had produced little or nothing that he cares to recognise now. He had written a quantity of mediocre verse, and a few sonnets of real and lasting beauty; but that was all. Rossetti insisted that Caine’s vocation lay in the writing of fervid and impassioned prose, and the truth of this remark has been demonstrated over and over again since it was first uttered.

[76]

I have not read the essay which Hall Caine wrote on the poetry of Rossetti, and which was the means of bringing the two men together, but I can very well imagine what it was in the poet that attracted him. Different as the two men seem to be in almost every particular save their mutual love of Beauty, there is one common trait which bound them together: they were both strangely and strongly attracted towards the supernatural and spiritual. There is an air of mystery, of unknown and unseen terrors and forces in Rossetti’s poetry that is also breathed in the earlier novels of Hall Caine. To this very day, Hall Caine is a firm believer in many of the phenomena which, by ignorant people, are placed in the category of spiritualism. For instance, he believes in second sight. On several occasions he has himself had distinct and indisputable warnings of accidents some minutes before they actually happened. A case in point occurred the day previous to my last visit to Greeba Castle. A young lady was bicycling through Greeba on the[77] way to Peel. She was “scorching,” but, so far as one could judge, had complete command over her machine. Mr Caine happened to be in the road at the time with a friend, and as the lady passed he turned to his companion and said: “That girl will meet with an accident before she has turned the corner!” They watched her for a minute or so with interest, and then everything happened as the novelist had predicted. She collided with an unsuspecting cow, which appeared from some unseen place, and fell to the ground almost insensible. I could, if it were necessary, produce other instances of the exercise of the somewhat mysterious faculty for foreseeing which have come within my own observation.

Rossetti was always powerfully attracted by the supernatural, as, indeed, men of imagination usually are, and this mutual attraction undoubtedly served to bind the two writers together. Caine’s attraction to and study of Coleridge had undoubtedly prepared him for the advent of Rossetti,[78] for the mystic imagery, the finished technique and the mandragora-like spell of the earlier poet were reproduced in detail by the later. Again, the supernatural in Shakespeare had received Caine’s particular study, and throughout his life it has been a powerful factor in stirring up his imagination.

In 1882—the year of Rossetti’s death—appeared Hall Caine’s Recollections of Rossetti, which has already been referred to several times in this chapter. For this he received forty pounds. The book made something of a sensation in the literary world, owing chiefly, or perhaps entirely, to its subject, and the intimate nature of its revelations, but it did not in the least enhance its author’s reputation among the large body of general readers. Mr Caine does not to-day regard this product of his earlier years with any feeling of respect. It was edited with the kindest and best possible intentions by Rossetti’s friends and relatives, and many important changes were insisted on. I myself have read the original[79] version side by side with that which was eventually published, and I have not the least hesitation in saying that the unedited account which Mr Caine wrote of his relations with his revered friend is vastly superior to that with which the public is familiar.

Before I leave Rossetti and turn to the novels of the subject of this monograph, I should like to give a letter of the late Mr Robert Buchanan, addressed by him to Mr Caine after reading the latter’s obituary notice of his friend in the Academy. To all who know anything of the life of Rossetti, it will prove of exceptional interest, for it bears directly upon one of the causes of his premature death, and throws fresh light on one of the most widely-discussed episodes of nineteenth-century literature.

In the meantime, Caine had also published an anthology of sonnets, entitled Sonnets of Three Centuries (a particularly handsome volume, prefaced by a very capable and original essay on the history of the sonnet), and a volume of essays entitled Cobwebs of[81] Criticism. Neither of these books did much to widen his reputation, but the volume of sonnets was a labour of love, and the essays contained in the latter consisted chiefly of lectures delivered in Liverpool.

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CHAPTER IV
THE SHADOW OF A CRIME AND A SON OF HAGAR

After the death of Rossetti, Hall Caine spent eighteen months in daily journalism in London writing his Rossetti recollections, and reviewing books, etc., for the Academy and Athenæum. He was also employed as a leader-writer on the Liverpool Mercury at a salary beginning at a hundred pounds per annum. This life, honourable and fascinating as it was, did not satisfy him, however. He was beginning to look further afield. Besides, he was being dominated by the legend which was to be the germ of his first novel.

So, in order to obtain complete immunity from all interruption, social and professional, he “settled in a little bungalow of three rooms in a garden near the beach at Sandown in the Isle of Wight.” In the[83] meantime he had married, and at the time of settling at Sandown he had enough money to keep him going for about four months. But his story was deeply rooted in his mind and heart, and he feared nothing—not even failure. The legend that so dominated him was as follows. (I quote from The Idler, to which magazine Mr Caine contributed an article entitled My First Book):—

“One of the oldest legends of the Lake mountains tells of the time of the plague. The people were afraid to go to market, afraid to meet at church and afraid to pass on the highway. When any lonely body was ill, the nearest neighbour left meat and drink at the door of the afflicted house, and knocked and ran away. In these days a widow and two sons lived in one of the darkest of the valleys. The younger son died, and the body had to be carried over the mountains to be buried. Its course lay across Sty Head Pass, a bleak and ‘brant’ place, where the winds are often high. The eldest son, a strong-hearted lad,[84] undertook the duty. He strapped the coffin on to the back of a young horse, and they started away. The day was wild, and on the top of the pass, where the path dips into Wastdale, between the breast of Great Gable and the heights of Scawfell, the wind rose to a gale. The horse was terrified. It broke away and galloped over the fells, carrying its burden with it. The lad followed and searched for it, but in vain, and he had to go home at last, unsatisfied.

“This was in the spring, and nearly all the summer through the surviving son of the widow was out on the mountains, trying to recover the runaway horse, but never once did he catch sight of it, though sometimes, as he turned homeward at night, he thought he heard, in the gathering darkness, above the sough of the wind, the horse’s neigh. Then winter came, and the mother died. Once more the dead body had to be carried over the fells for burial, and once again the coffin was strapped on the back of a horse. It was an old mare that was chosen this time, the mother of the young[85] one that had been lost. The snow lay deep on the pass, and from the cliffs of the Scawfell pikes it hung in great toppling masses. All went well with the little funeral party until they came to the top of the pass, and though the day was dead calm the son held the rein with a hand that was like a vice. But just as the mare reached the spot where the wind had frightened the young horse, there was a terrific noise. An immense body of the snow had parted at that instant from the beetling heights overhead, and rushed down into the valley with the movement as of a mighty earthquake, and the deafening sound as of a peal of thunder. The dale echoed and re-echoed from side to side, and from height to height. The old mare was affrighted; she reared, leapt, flung her master away, and galloped off. When they had recovered from their consternation, the funeral party gave chase, and at length, down in a hollow place, they thought they saw what they were in search of. It was a horse with something strapped on its[86] back. When they came up with it they found it was the young horse, with the coffin of the younger son. They led it away, and buried the body that it had carried so long, but the old mare they never recovered, and the body of the mother never found sepulchre.”

It will be seen at a glance that this legend contains great dramatic and imaginative possibilities, but for Hall Caine its fascination lay in its “shadow and suggestion of the supernatural.” When Rossetti was still alive, Mr Caine had discussed with him its merits as the foundation for a novel; but the poet, as we have seen, was against the idea. He did not see the possibility of getting any sympathy into it. This judgment, coming from so expert and experienced a quarter, disheartened the younger man, and he “let the idea go back to the dark chambers of memory.” But it was of no use, the ghost would not be laid. The idea recurred to him at intervals, and each time it impressed him more and more. At last, when settled[87] in the Isle of Wight, he thought he had found a way of evading Rossetti’s criticism. “The sympathy was to be got out of the elder son. He was to think God’s hand was upon him. But whom God’s hand rested on had God at his right hand; so the elder son was to be a splendid fellow—brave, strong, calm, patient, long-suffering, a victim of unrequited love, a man standing square on his legs against all weathers.” Then he began to write; but he was faced by a thousand difficulties. It was his desire to grip the reader’s interest from the very outset, and it took him a fortnight’s hard work to make what he judged to be a satisfactory beginning. Within three months it was practically finished. He showed it first to Mr J. S. Cotton, an old and valued friend and at that time editor of the Academy. “His rapid mind saw a new opportunity. ‘You want peine forte et dure,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘An old punishment—a beautiful thing,’ he answered. ‘Where’s my dear old Blackstone?’ and the statute concerning the[88] punishment for standing mute was read to me. It was just the thing I wanted for my hero, and I was in rapture, but I was also in despair. To work this fresh interest into my theme half of what I had written would need to be destroyed!”

But destroyed it was, and after two months’ arduous labour, he took it to the late John Lovell, editor of the Liverpool Mercury. “It’s crude,” he said. “But it only wants sub-editing.” Imagine the young author’s feelings! Sub-editing, indeed! But again he re-wrote it, and this time to some purpose, for Mr Lovell offered him a hundred pounds for the serial right in the Liverpool Weekly Mercury. This offer was, of course, accepted.

Mr Caine was now living in rooms on the fourth floor of New Court, in Lincoln’s Inn. He called upon several publishers with the object of getting his novel issued in volume form; eventually Chatto & Windus made him an offer which he accepted, and at this date the book has gone through more editions than I care to[89] count. It was an immediate and undoubted success, and the only thing that Mr Caine regrets with regard to it is the fact that he was forced to sell it outright instead of on the royalty system. Hard cash was what he wanted, though the amount he received in ready money would have been trebled many times over if he had been paid according to the number of copies sold.

As the first novel of a young man (and, at this time, Mr Caine was quite painfully young) The Shadow of a Crime shows little evidence of crudity. It is coherent, cohesive and mature. It is true, the melodramatic interest is often too insistent, and that the novelist expects too much from the credulity of the reader; but these faults apart, the book is the book of a grown man and a practised writer. It evinces an intimate knowledge of Cumberland life and dialect, and has the dignity and strength of a work of genius.

After the publication of The Shadow of a Crime a time of need ensued. He canvassed many publishers and offered himself[90] as reader, but he was invariably turned away. Whatever indignity and humiliation was thrust upon him only made him more determined to succeed. He never knew when he was beaten. He never was beaten, for he never withdrew from his hand-to-hand fight with the world, but struggled on with the passionate conviction that he would one day come off the winner. So, undaunted, he set about the writing of a new work, A Son of Hagar.

When this book was nearing completion, he expressed a wish to Mr Richard Gowing to dedicate it to Mr R. D. Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone. Mr Gowing, who was a friend of Mr Blackmore’s, immediately communicated with him and received the following reply:—

Three months later he wrote the following letter to Mr Caine himself:—

A Son of Hagar was completed in 1886, as was also a life of Coleridge which was written in three weeks. The former brought him three hundred pounds; the latter thirty pounds. Coleridge had always been a favourite study of Hall Caine’s; we have seen that as a young man in Liverpool he was particularly attracted towards his work, and the incidents of the great poet’s life had received his careful and unremitting attention. But the series for which it was written was one devoted to brief biographies only, and Mr Caine was unable to make use of the vast store of knowledge which he had so patiently acquired. Still, the biography was one of the best of the series, and though it[93] brought neither fame nor fortune to its author, it undoubtedly did something towards establishing his reputation as an original and thoughtful critic.

A Son of Hagar was written on somewhat the same lines as The Shadow of a Crime; that is to say, there is the same knowledge of the life of the Cumberland people of the “statesman” class, the same intimate acquaintance with Cumberland dialect, and the same partiality for melodrama and, one must acknowledge, improbable incident. Judged by present-day standards, this book achieved what would be called remarkable popular success; but the success was not sufficient to satisfy the consuming ambition of the young novelist. He said to himself, “I will write one more book. I will put into it all the work that is in me, and if the public still remains indifferent, I will never write another.” These words, uttered in the heat of the moment, must be taken cum grano salis; for I feel convinced that if Mr Caine had written ten or a dozen unsuccessful works, he would still have continued[94] faithful to the novel as a means of expressing his own personality and his views of the complex individual and social life as he has found it, not only in history, but in these hot, passionate days of a new century. Yet, the fact remains, that what he chose to consider his limited success did not satisfy him.

I am privileged to give the following letters written by Mr Blackmore to Mr Caine during the year 1887.

Mr Blackmore then proceeds to give vent to the irritation which he felt towards humanity in general, and his publisher’s corrector of proofs in particular. This latter gentleman seems to have had his own ideas as to correct grammar and punctuation; these[95] ideas, however, did not coincide with those of Mr Blackmore. He adds:—

The second letter was written concerning Caine’s Life of Coleridge—interesting for its reference to the first reviews of Lorna Doone.

Mr Caine has inscribed this note at the head of the following. “This letter was written about A Son of Hagar, which was dedicated to Blackmore. The censorious part of it is very just.—H. C.”

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CHAPTER V
THE DEEMSTER

It was The Deemster that brought Hall Caine fame. It was written in a mood of dissatisfaction, of disappointment. He felt that he had it in him to write a novel that should be worthy of the world’s respect, and though The Shadow of a Crime and A Son of Hagar were, in no sense, failures, yet they had not met with the success for which the young novelist was so ardently longing. This was to be his first book dealing with Manx life, customs and character, and he wrote it in the island with all the beautiful landscape and the glorious sea for an inspiration.

The plot of the book is founded on the story of the Prodigal Son. It teaches the doctrine of purification by suffering, though[99] by no stretch of the imagination can it be called a “book with a purpose.” Rather is it an imaginative picture of wonderful pathos, and the moral which it enforces is never hinted at; it is revealed in the very atmosphere of the book, in its childlike purity, in its passionate simplicity.

The Prodigal Son is Daniel, son of Gilchrist Mylrea, Bishop of Man. His mother died at his birth, and so during the early years of his young life his father acted as mother, nurse, teacher, playmate and friend. Here is a picture of father and son, with Mona and Ewan, Dan’s cousins and housemates.

Can you not see them?—the four innocent children playing their games as though they were the whole world. But their happiness was soon cut short. Thorkell Mylrea, the[102] Deemster and the father of Ewan and Mona, and the evil genius of the book, calls at Bishop’s Court, and takes his children away. “Let a father treat his children as the world will treat them when they have nothing but the world for their father,” he says, and henceforth the children’s joy is taken away. But Dan lives on with his father, the Bishop, laughing, playing his pranks, and making of the Court one huge nursery. The years pass, and a friendship like that of David and Jonathan springs up between Dan and Ewan. But Dan is headstrong, wilful and impetuous. He runs almost wild, and his great strength and love of sport lead him into the companionship of good-for-noughts. He quarrels with Ewan, and, in a scene of great beauty and tenderness, a reconciliation is effected. But again they quarrel, and Dan strikes Ewan a terrible blow which has far-reaching consequences. Dan is covered with shame, and feels abased in his very soul. And then, assailed by the most subtle temptation, Dan commits forgery, and Ewan, by now a priest, tells a lie to save[103] him. And so Dan, the noble-hearted, pure-minded soul, sinks deeper and deeper into petty sins. He wastes his substance, idles, drinks—does all that a tortured weak soul will do when it has begun to step on the downward path. The end of it all is that in fair fight Dan kills his cousin, and goes to Mona to tell her of his sin.

The restrained power of this passage is typical of Hall Caine—not one word too much, and yet the man and woman live and breathe before our very eyes.

Mona confesses her love, and Dan leaves her to give himself up to justice. But temptation and hindrances are put in his way. It seems to be fated that his crime shall go unpunished, unatoned for. At[105] length, overcoming all his weakness, and with a mighty resolve to suffer the penalty of his guilt, Dan gives himself up at the Ramsey courthouse. Then follow weary months of waiting until his trial. Finally he receives his punishment on Tynwald Hill—the ancient mound where, once in each year, the laws of the island are proclaimed to the assembled people. He is sentenced by his own father to lifelong solitude. “Men and women of Man,” cries the Bishop, “the sentence of the court of the barony of the island is, that this man shall be cut off from his people. Henceforth let him have no name among us, nor family, nor kin. From now for ever let no flesh touch his flesh. Let no tongue speak to him. Let no eye look on him. If he should be an-hungered, let none give him meat. When he shall be sick, let none minister to him. When his death shall come, let no man bury him. Alone let him live, alone let him die, and among the beasts of the field let him hide his unburied bones.” And then follows a tear-compelling document written by Dan in his[106] exile, wherein it is shown how he works out his own redemption, and regains his manhood. Eventually he becomes the saviour of his people and dies in Mona’s arms.

Many critics have levelled at Mr Caine a charge of unnecessary sadness in thus allowing his hero to die just at the moment when his regeneration is complete, but to my mind that is the only possible ending. Read in the right spirit the book is not sad; pervading its pages is seen a glorious optimism which not only gives one new faith in humanity, but makes one feel that life itself is a grander and nobler thing than one had ever before imagined. If Dan had had his punishment cancelled, and had married Mona—what a painful piece of bathos it would have been! And yet that is precisely what many critics desired. They seem to imagine that the temporal life is of far more importance than the spiritual. Dan’s life was crowned and his death glorified by his spiritual triumph. During those years of awful loneliness he not only purified his own nature, but exalted his very soul. The[107] Deemster is no melodramatic piece of stagework; it is a direct human document, a spiritual drama. It is the first work of Hall Caine’s which has indubitably written on every page the word “genius.”

It was published in 1838, and immediately created a sensation. Critics welcomed it on all hands. It was recognised as a powerful and original piece of work, and the new setting for the story added not a little to its attractiveness; for, fully in sympathy with Manxland, its laws, customs and society, Mr Caine had painted a picture of great charm and attraction. Old Kerry, Quilleash, and Hommy-beg were accepted as true portraits of Manx character, with their ingrained superstition, their vanity and their generosity. But the book did not impress the critics only; it was read far and wide by the public, and within a few months the circulation had become enormous. The Deemster was one of the successes of the year, and from the date of its publication the popularity of Hall Caine began.

I am permitted to give here, by the[108] courtesy of Mr A. P. Watt, Mr Wilkie Collins’s literary executor, a letter addressed to Mr Caine by the late novelist. It is only one out of many hundreds received by Hall Caine from all parts of the world, congratulating him on his success, and offering him tributes of thanks.

The criticism contained in this letter is both sound and just, and though Mr Collins declares that in penning it he was not sitting in the chair of the critic, but in that of the novelist, yet the advice afforded is such as only the most competent critic who united the qualities of the imaginative writer could possibly have given.

Where Mr Caine particularly shows his strength in this novel, to my mind, is in the last part of all—the document written by Dan just before his death. The situation offers so many temptations to write in a falsely pathetic style that one cannot offer too much praise for the admirably firm and manly way in which Mr Caine has written this part of his novel.

I have before me as I write two letters written in October 1886. One is from Mr Hall Caine to the late Thomas Edward Brown (of Fo’c’stle Yarns fame), re the plot and mise-en-scène of what afterwards became[111] The Deemster; and the other is Mr Brown’s reply. The letters are too long to reproduce exactly as they stand, but I give here sufficiently important extracts to show the reader what enormous and seemingly insuperable difficulties Mr Caine had to overcome before even beginning the actual writing of the book that brought him fame. Mr Caine’s letter is dated 3rd October 1886, from Aberleigh Lodge, Bexley Heath, London.

The foregoing is noteworthy not only because it is the first skeleton of The Deemster, but because (as will be seen from Mr Brown’s reply), there were many difficulties opposing the idea of making the Isle[115] of Man the mise-en-scène for the plot, and because these difficulties were most skilfully overcome. These two letters are one of the most convincing proofs with what extraordinary care and patience Mr Caine works.

The following is Mr Brown’s reply.

He hopes he “has made his meaning clear.” Only too terribly clear! Almost every point necessary to the proper development of the plot was promptly knocked on the head; the vital links in the chain were broken, the structural backbone of the romance was destroyed. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given up the idea in despair; but not Hall Caine. He seized on the hint of Bishop Wilson—the “epoch-making” personage; he altered[118] this part of the plot, and developed that; he substituted one character for another, and introduced new dramatis personæ;—in a word, he not only recast the plot, but made it historically convincing, and this in the very face of the warnings and obstacles raised by one of the most erudite scholars the Isle of Man has yet produced. This, of course, involved immense labour, but it was done, and done successfully. Even Mr Brown himself had to acknowledge this. As Mr Caine has written me: “When the book was written there was no such sympathetic reader as T. E. B.”

Another eminent writer who generously acknowledged the power and beauty of The Deemster was the late R. D. Blackmore, who wrote the following letter immediately after reading Mr Caine’s book.

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CHAPTER VI
HALL CAINE AS A DRAMATIST, SHORT-STORY WRITER, POET AND CRITIC

Hall Caine has written five plays, three of which have been produced. The drama founded on The Eternal City has been played for copyright purposes only. The first of these plays was called Ben-my-Chree and was the dramatised version of The Deemster. I venture to quote from an excellent biographical article by Mr Robert Harborough Sherard in the Windsor Magazine (November 1895): “Irving read the book (The Deemster) in America, and seeing that there was here material for a splendid play, with himself in the part of the Bishop, hesitated about cabling to the author. In the meanwhile Wilson Barrett had also read the book, and had telegraphed to Kent to[121] ask Hall Caine to come up to London to discuss its dramatisation. Hall Caine started, but was forced to leave the train at Derby because a terrible fog rendered travelling impossible. He spent the next ten days in the Isaac Walton Inn at Dovedale, near Derby, waiting for the fog to lift, and whilst so waiting wrote the first draft of the play. Barrett was enthusiastic about it, and Ben-my-Chree was duly produced for the first time at the Princess’s Theatre on May 14 (the dramatist’s birthday), 1888, before a packed house in which every literary celebrity in London was present. It was, however, by no means a great success: for some unaccountable reason, it failed to ‘draw,’ and after running for a hundred nights, it was withdrawn.” Strange to say, it was exceedingly popular in America, and at this moment a company is touring it in the English provinces.

His next drama, The Manxman, was also produced by Mr Wilson Barrett in Leeds on August 20, 1894. It was successful everywhere “except in Manchester and[122] New York.” I do not quite understand Mr Caine’s statement that The Manxman was not a success in Manchester, for I myself remember climbing up on to the top row of the gallery at the Theatre Royal (or was it the Prince’s?) because there was no room anywhere else. On that occasion the theatre was crowded, and the reception enthusiastic in every way. Perhaps it was a “return visit” that I witnessed, and the Manchester public had had time to gather its wits and become appreciative.

His third play, The Christian, was produced first in Albany, New York, and afterwards in Liverpool. In this play the dramatist’s sister, Miss Lily Hall Caine, took the part of Polly Love, and afterwards, when the play was taken on tour, the part of Glory Quayle. This play is still running, and meets with enthusiastic applause wherever it goes. It has been performed in England and the United States more than two thousand times.

In passing any criticism on Mr Caine’s plays, it must at the very outset be confessed[123] that he has not yet done himself justice. For my own part, I have not much faith in the dramatised versions of novels. A plot that lends itself to treatment in the form of a novel is very rarely suitable for production as a drama; and until Hall Caine is inspired with the plot of a drama that is at once cohesive and compact, it seems to me he will never produce anything worthy of the powers which he undoubtedly possesses. Some regard to the unities of Time and Place is necessary before a drama can be considered seriously as a work of art, and it must be acknowledged that Mr Caine pays very little attention to the technique of dramaturgy. I do not for one moment deny that his plays are full of strong and dramatic situations, that the dialogue is natural, easy and telling, and that they are exceedingly well-constructed from a “popular” standard; but as contributions to dramatic literature they cannot be seriously considered. Mr Caine himself would, I feel sure, be the first to agree with me in all this. I know that he does not consider his[124] dramatic work to be on anything like the same plane as his novel-writing. It is rather a matter of surprise that a writer gifted with so well-developed a dramatic sense should have been comparatively unsuccessful in his plays; but, so far as one can judge, it seems probable that this is due to the fact that he has only attempted plays based on novels. When he shall have developed a plot which obviously lends itself to stage treatment and no other kind of treatment, he may be expected to write a drama which shall take the same position in dramatic literature that his novels have attained in the world of fiction.

In the way of short story writing Mr Caine has done little. A volume entitled Capt’n Davy’s Honeymoon, containing three tales, is his only output in this direction. Their excellence, and the delicacy of their treatment, make one regret that he has not seen fit to devote more time to this particular branch of his art. Capt’n Davy’s Honeymoon refutes conclusively all allegations that Mr Caine possesses little or no humour. It is[125] a Manx tale, full of delicate, beautiful touches that create the right atmosphere at the very outset. The second story in the volume, The Last Confession, is situated in Morocco, and in form is based on Rossetti’s blank-verse poem of the same name. It is a closely-written piece of work, quietly and soberly worked out, yet powerful and convincing. The Blind Mother is the title of the third tale, and consists of a slightly altered episode in his second book, A Son of Hagar. I quote the following extracts of the dedication to Mr Bram Stoker:—

A charming dedication, is it not? and interesting as a revelation of the motives which inspired the only three short stories we have from his pen. The Last Confession and The Blind Mother were issued in America under the title of the former. It is extremely unlikely that Mr Caine will ever return to the short story as a means of expressing himself; the form is of too limited a scope, and of too ephemeral a nature. A story entitled Jan, the Icelander, recently appeared in one of the weekly papers; but it was originally prepared by Mr Caine as a dramatic dialogue which, on one or two occasions, he recited in public.

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As a poet, Mr Hall Caine has a great claim to our admiration. It is true, he has published no poetry in volume form, and little enough in the magazines, but what has appeared is of undoubted beauty. I am able to give here two sonnets which originally appeared in the Academy in the early eighties. Then, as now, the Academy and the Athenæum were the two foremost literary papers in the kingdom, and at this time Mr Caine was a critic on the permanent staff of both papers. It will be seen that both sonnets reveal a deep and unusual love of Nature; and it seems to me that that entitled Before Sunrise on Helvellyn ranks with the very best sonnets of Wordsworth. Besides its intrinsic beauty, it contains that “fundamental brain-work” which many critics hold to be an essential of a fine sonnet, although Mr Caine’s own criticism is that “it is wanting in the first quality of poetic style—flexibility.”

This was published in the Academy of January 28, 1882; the following was published in the same paper on May 12, 1881, whilst Mr Caine was still in his twenty-eighth year.

Other sonnets appeared at about the same time, particularly noticeable among which are three to Byron, Keats and Rossetti respectively.

But though poetry was Hall Caine’s natural means of expression, and to be a poet his earliest ambition, yet in his youth he recognised the fact that in order to reach a large public some other medium than verse was necessary. So poetry was more or less reluctantly abandoned, and fiction soon took its place.

As a critic, Mr Caine would undoubtedly have won a foremost place among the littérateurs of our time if he had devoted his whole life to that particular branch of his art; but soon after his thirtieth year professional criticism was abandoned in his absorption in novel-writing. From his earliest years the young student was a critic.[130] He eagerly discussed every book he read with his friends and acquaintances, and his first contributions to the Press were in the form of literary criticism. When Lord Houghton first saw Caine as a very young man, he prophesied for him a great future as a critic, and there can be no doubt that his powers in this direction are altogether exceptional. I have read a large amount of criticism which he contributed to the Academy and Athenæum in the early eighties, and I was struck not only by the mature judgment and catholic taste displayed therein, but also by the ease and fluency with which he expressed his views. Those were the days of signed articles, and the curious reader may turn up for himself the back numbers of these two great literary papers and read those articles signed “T. Hall Caine.” He will find in them much to surprise him, for most of them are truly remarkable as the product of so youthful a writer.

Mr Caine was particularly fortunate in obtaining a place on the Academy staff. A[131] complete stranger to Mr J. S. Cotton (at that time the editor of this paper), he called on him and asked for employment. “Certainly!” replied Mr Cotton, much to the young man’s confusion, for he had by no means expected so enthusiastic a reception. The acquaintance made in this way soon deepened to a warm friendship which is to-day valued by both men as much as it was twenty years ago.

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CHAPTER VII
THE BONDMAN

The Bondman is a lurid picture of conflicting passions. Love, of an intense sadness, is set against hate and mischance. The strength of the story and the powerfulness of its narration lay hold of the reader’s imagination with a shudder, like a grim masterpiece of Rembrandt. Here is an extract from the opening book—Rachel, the Governor’s daughter, has left her home under the curse of her father, to marry a peasant Icelander, a good-for-nothing. Supported by his mother, they live on the brink of starvation. At last the husband, in shame, complains that if he had sixty crowns he would buy a fishing-boat; and Rachel sells her beautiful hair to procure the money, handing it over to him to make the purchase.

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Stephen never comes back, and the son born to Rachel is christened Jason and is the “Bondman” of the tale. He is brought up by his mother in one of the meanest huts in the fishing quarter of the Icelandic capital, and supported by her drudgery. After nineteen years of flickering belief in her husband’s return, she comes by the knowledge that he is indeed living, but with another wife and another son, in the Island of Man. Broken-hearted and worn-out with hard living, Rachel sinks to her death, and, with her cold hand in his, Jason swears the oath that forms the motive of the book.

Stephen Orry, on leaving his wife, has left Iceland as seaman in an English ship, and deserted from it on touching the Isle of Man. There he finds a companion in “the slattern and drab of the island,” and though vaguely ashamed of her, marries her. Michael, “little Sunlocks,” is the offspring of this unhappy union, a union becoming more degrading and more horrible to Stephen with every year of the child’s life. The father’s tortured brain, after trying every other means within his knowledge, resolves to kill his son rather than leave him to grow up under the influence of such a mother, and[136] with that purpose he takes the child out to sea in his little boat. This passage is one of most beautiful that Hall Caine has yet written.

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He finds it impossible to murder the innocent little one, and returns home to find his wife dead.

Then he decides to give the child away, never doubting but that the sunshine of his broken life would be an acceptable present to anyone. The Deputy-Governor, a man of great benevolence and generosity, is his choice; and the Governor accepts the trust, thereby estranging his wife and his own six sons. Adam Fairbrother, the Deputy-Governor, has a daughter of Michael’s age, and until little Greeba goes away to be brought up in the household of the Duke of Athol, the two children live and play together. Michael grows up to be his foster-father’s right hand, and the jealousy of the six sons and their mother cause a rupture in the family, the mother and sons taking the gift of all Adam’s private property and going away to live on it. At the age of eighteen, Greeba returns from London, and at the same time Stephen Orry reappears. He has gathered together two hundred pounds, and with it he asks that Michael shall go to[139] Iceland, there to search out Rachel and her child and succour them from the poverty-stricken life in which Stephen had left them, so long before. Michael refuses the money, but accepts the charge, and takes ship for Iceland on the very day that Jason, in pursuance of his vow, reaches the Isle of Man.

Jason lands on the island, only to rescue his father from drowning and watch over him as he dies. He takes up life with Adam Fairbrother’s sons, and for four years grows in love for Greeba and her father. Then the office of Deputy-Governor is taken from Adam; and turning for home to his wife, in the house that he had given her, is refused admission. He remembers Michael Sunlocks, and determines to go to him in Iceland, leaving Greeba to live with her mother, and the love of none but Jason. The mother dies and the sons treat Greeba very hardly, so that she accepts the love of Jason. Then comes a letter from Michael which fans into flame the embers of her love. He writes to her, tells her of his position,[140] and asks her to come out to him to be his wife. In a scene which shows the height of Jason’s nobility, Greeba takes back her love.

Greeba goes to Michael and Iceland, and Jason, remembering his vow, follows her. A succession of events have made Sunlocks the Governor of Iceland, for its short-lived Republic. Knowing that the man he is in search of is the Governor, Jason now finds that the Governor is Michael Sunlocks. Beside himself with the knowledge of all the man has unconsciously stolen from him, Jason dogs him with intent to kill, but, being discovered by Greeba, is denounced by her and sentenced to penal servitude in the sulphur-mines.

The six sons of Adam Fairbrother, discovering the purpose of Greeba’s flight from their home, decide that in brotherliness they will go to her and share her prosperity. Failing in their purpose, they successfully attempt to poison Michael’s mind against her, telling him that Greeba[142] had loved Jason at the time that she had left the Isle of Man. Michael, in his revulsion of feeling, determines to take from Greeba the position for the sake of which he believes her to have married, and summons the Althing in order to resign his office of Governor. While the meeting is in progress, the doors of the Senate House are locked, and the building surrounded by Danish soldiers. The Republic is overthrown, and Michael Sunlocks, as a political prisoner, is sent to the mines.

Thus the most touching and at the same time the most terrible part of the story is reached. Touching because of the great love that grows up in Jason’s heart for Sunlocks, his bondfellow; terrible, because of the fiendish inhumanities of Michael’s lot. This is the description of the place of torment.

Spurred by the cruel treatment of Sunlocks, Jason breaks away, carrying on his shoulders the half-insensible body of his now blind and maimed companion. They manage to reach the valley of Thingvellir, where the biennial of Althing is taking place, and there, as the custom allows, Jason demands justice and freedom. It is granted to him as a criminal of Iceland, but denied to Sunlocks as a Danish prisoner; and Sunlocks is therefore sent in his helpless, blind condition to the[144] custody of a priest on an outstanding island. There Greeba, who has followed him in his wanderings, takes domestic service with the priest, that she may tend Michael and win back his love, and there Jason comes, to lay down his life for his friend after effecting his escape.

Thus ends one of the most powerful novels ever written, great by reason of its strength of thought and directness of utterance. And yet, here and there in its pages, are passages of wonderful softness, tender pictures of the consolation of childhood—little Sunlocks, little Greeba, and the little child Michael. This is what we grow to look for in Hall Caine, the tenderness and the tragedy of humanity. They form the strength of his novels, and it is they that will make them live through the ages, based as they are on truths and passions that are old as the world is old.

The publication of The Bondman established, once and for all, Hall Caine’s claims to genius; it confirmed the impression created by The Deemster, and there was[145] hardly one dissentient voice in the verdict of the critics who proclaimed it as one of the masterpieces of the century. The late T. E. Brown wrote the following letter to Mr Caine immediately after reading The Bondman.

This letter is but one out of many hundreds received by Mr Caine from all parts of the world, congratulating him on his success. The dramatic tension, so admirably sustained throughout every page of the book, took the literary world by storm, and the sale of the book to-day, eleven years after publication, is extremely large.

The Bondman was written with Mr Caine’s usual care. With his wife and child he paid a two months’ visit to Iceland, there to gather material and local colour for his book. It was begun in March 1889, at Aberleigh Lodge, Bexley Heath, Kent, and was finished in October of the same year at Castlerigg Cottage, Keswick. Always greatly attracted by Cumberland, Mr Caine had now settled down there permanently; it was not until a few years afterwards that he made his home in the Isle of Man.

[147]

Later in this year Sir Henry Irving commissioned him to write a drama with Mahomet as the central character. The subject fascinated him, and in a short time he was immersed in the study of Mahomet, his life and his times. Three acts were written in a fever of enthusiasm; and then came a great disappointment. The almighty British Public, hearing of Mr Caine’s work, took upon itself to be shocked, and, growing tired of silent indignation, raised its voice in alarm, and protested vehemently. The Press took up the cry and pointed out that British Mohammedans would certainly be offended. Sir Henry took alarm, and telegraphed to Mr Caine that the idea could not be carried out. But the dramatist was heart and soul in his work, and only spared the time to write a vehement article in The Speaker, pointing out that his critics were too hasty, before he went on with the writing of his play and finished it. Irving, of course, was as much annoyed as Mr Caine, and offered the latter a substantial[148] sum to recompense him for the trouble he had taken; Mr Caine, however, refused to accept a penny, and offered his play to Willard for production in America. It was at once accepted, but has not yet been put on the boards.

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CHAPTER VIII
THE SCAPEGOAT

Although in comparison with The Bondman, The Deemster or The Manxman, The Scapegoat is not a masterpiece, yet it is in no sense a failure, or derogatory to the gifted hand that wrote it. Written next in order after The Bondman, The Scapegoat seems to be an aftermath of that, one of the three greatest works, in our opinion, of Hall Caine. It is bitter without much sweetness, and it draws out its long note of human woe without one cheering ray. Tenderness and hope are indeed present, and they are the avenues through which the writer approaches his story, and the means whereby he enchains the hearts of his readers, gladdening and strengthening their souls by his own fervency of belief. Hall Caine has a[150] wonderful power of creating atmosphere. In this novel of The Scapegoat, we tread the tortuous streets of a Morocco town, we think in the inflated metaphors of its inhabitants, we brush against the varied costumes that denote their myriad nationalities. We feel religious antagonism to be a race-element, Oriental cunning and cruelty matters of course; and we read of the Spaniards as though they were to us a strange people from a far-off continent, so thoroughly has the writer imbibed the spirit of his tale.

Israel ben Oliel is a man hardened by circumstance. He is a Jew whose father married for gain and knew no paternal tenderness. Brought up in England, Israel returns to his native country, Morocco, on the death of his father, and takes the post of assessor of tributes for the Kaid of Tetuan. His calling, though pursued at the first with justice, makes him to be hated by the over-taxed people, and on his marriage with the daughter of the grand Rabbi, they gather before the house to curse[151] and prophesy evil. Ben Oliel and his wife, Ruth, take up their worse than lonely life in Israel’s house in the Jewish quarter. For long they have no child and are held in derision by the Jews their neighbours; but after the space of three years their prayers are answered, and on the birth-night of the child, Israel prepares a feast and invites his enemies that he may triumph over them.

Israel sinks yet deeper in the contempt of his countrymen because of what seems to them a manifest judgment of God. And he, knowing his condemnation to be unjust, is soured by the knowledge, and, in rebellion[153] against God and man, changes his hitherto upright dealings, becoming in very deed a persecutor of the people. Meanwhile he has taken into his household a little negro waif as a companion for his stricken child Naomi. He grows up to be the devoted follower of Israel in his adversities. When Naomi has reached her seventh year, her mother dies, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery by six State prisoners from the jail, for none other in his isolation can Israel find to help him. He returns to his orphaned child and wraps around her all his thought, all his tenderness. Nightly he reads to her from the Koran, doing his best to dispel the terrible fear that she, knowing nothing of God, may stand condemned in the next life; for in a vision of the night, he has seen Naomi going out into the wilderness as the scapegoat for his sins. So seven more years pass and Israel’s heart softens towards the people under him, and he begins to hate the tyrannies that are exercised over them. And in the disturbance of his heart he takes a journey out to where the prophet[154] Mohammed of Mequinez, a man who has given up all to the cause of the poor and afflicted, holds his camp of refugees. The prophet tells him: “Exact no more than is just; do violence to no man; accuse none falsely; part with your riches and give to the poor:” and with the hope in his heart that such sacrifice will turn God’s face towards Naomi, Israel returns home on foot, giving away all that he carries with him except that which his necessities require. He reaches home in tattered Moorish clothing which at first prevents his recognition.

Naomi has gained her hearing in an illness, and it is with suffering that she learns to bear sound. It is long before she can speak. Israel has sorrowed at her suffering and almost reproached God with her dumbness. A plague of locusts is eating up everything off the face of the land. The Jews in vain beseech the Almighty to send His floods, and then turn their thoughts to the sinner among them whom they believe to be drawing down God’s wrath on their nation. They select Israel and assemble with the purpose of putting him to death. Walking in the town he stumbles across the people who are crowded together expecting him.

Naomi can now speak, and Israel’s world is a happier one. Issuing from his house in the night time, he goes into the poorest quarters of the town on errands of mercy, and soon in his liberality becomes a poor man. The people, seeing his poverty, account for it by the supposition that he must be falling from the Kaid’s favour, and curse and jeer at him all the more openly. From secret charity, Israel determines to renounce his position as servant of the[158] wicked Kaid, and waits upon him to deliver up the seal of office. The Kaid receives him at first with suspicion, then with contempt, finally with insult. The wife of the Kaid strikes Israel with her fan.

Katrina, the Kaid’s wife, pretends to see in this nothing but imposture. Telling her husband that Naomi’s defects have been assumed, she imparts her own rage to him, and he sentences both Israel and his daughter to be put out of the town.

In the now driving rain Naomi and Israel are thus paraded in the streets, and all the townsfolk mass themselves to follow in a huge, howling, jeering procession. Naomi walks with closed eyes, not being able to bear the light, and for several days she seeks shade and darkness, almost in terror.[160] Once out of the town, they find people who are kind to them, giving them food and garments; and they settle in a hut among their new-found friends. Israel’s little remaining money is expended on a few sheep and oxen, and a living is found from the sale of wool, butter and milk, which they send into the town with the neighbours’ market produce. They live in happiness for some months until a crushing blow falls. One of Israel’s last acts of mercy while in office was to liberate a number of prisoners. The knowledge of this has now come to the Kaid’s ears, and he orders the arrest of Ben Oliel. Israel is hurried away to a distant prison, and Naomi is left alone, a child in knowledge both of the world and of the dangerous people around her. The thought of the evil that may come to her preys upon Israel’s mind in his helplessness, and gradually reduces him to insanity. His comrades, in their sympathy, do all they can to arouse him, and fresh prisoners as they arrive tell of the Kaid’s tyrannies, and of how the people of Tetuan regret their treatment of[161] Israel, wishing him back among them. The kindly efforts are useless, until the wit of the prison tells a harrowing tale in the hope of bringing Israel to tears.

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Tarby is successful, and with his tears the old man’s madness leaves him. Hardly has he regained his sanity when the order comes for his release, and Israel in joy and thankfulness hurries away to rejoin his child.

In the meanwhile, much has befallen Naomi. At first she clings to her lonely hut, refusing the neighbours’ hospitality; but little by little she gathers from their talk some idea of what her father’s life in prison must be, and finally determines to follow the custom expected from prisoners’ friends and relatives, in carrying food to him. She sets out with a pannier of loaves and another of eggs on either side of her borrowed mule, paying no heed to the expostulations of the good people around her. But as her journey progresses her heart begins to sink. Knowing nothing of evil, and expecting friendliness from all men, she is disheartened by the knowledge that now forces itself upon her, and as, by theft, and in payment for her lodging, her stock of food diminishes, she almost resolves to turn back. By this time she has reached Tetuan, and close to the town gates she is[163] met and recognised by a former servant of Israel.

[164]

The two go together to the Kaid, who, seeing Naomi’s beauty, resolves to ward off the threatened displeasure of the Sultan by making a gift of her at the coming royal feast But in the interim, Naomi’s former nurse has found her and told her, that to embrace Mahometanism would mean separation from her father. The girl halts long in her distress. She is sent to the harem, and from the harem to the prison. She is given her choice of Mahometanism or death, and is finally overborne by the Jews of Tetuan, who, coming to her prison bars, entreat her to renounce her religion.

Thus it comes to pass that Israel is released from prison, and hastens in his[165] ignorance to the place where he had left Naomi, only to find it empty. He is told that she is in the women’s apartments at the Kaid’s palace, and the news breaks down his reason; he stays, in the childishness of insanity, in the home of his former happiness.

The Sultan enters Tetuan amid much outward pomp, but there is an undercurrent of treachery. A rumour of the coming of the Mahdi, Mohammed of Mequinez, is in the air, and beneath that, a feeling of something more—of the revolt which shall abet the Spaniards in their expected siege of the town. The Mahdi comes, and demands the freedom of Naomi, but without success. Leaving the palace, he decides to follow the plan at which he had before hesitated, the plan of co-operation with the Spaniards. This plot has been contrived by Ali, the boy whom Israel had trained from childhood; and he has gained the promise of support from all the principal townspeople.

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Evening falls, and Ali proceeds to carry out his plans. He passes into the palace, finds Naomi, and leads her to the Mahdi. Then he joins the Spaniards, but forgets to lock the doors of the banqueting hall; and when the town gates open to the enemy,[167] news is carried to the palace and the guests scatter, most of them escaping. Ali, in his hatred, hunts the deserted palace for the Kaid, and in so doing meets with his death. The Kaid, having stayed behind to secure his money-bags, finds himself entrapped, and is stoned to death by the enraged townspeople.

Meanwhile the Mahdi has taken Naomi to her dying father; and over the deathbed of Israel they are betrothed. So ends The Scapegoat.

It will be seen that to carry out such a plot as this, with its almost miraculous crises, needs a high standard of literary skill. That the writer has succeeded there can be no doubt, for Naomi stands out, a creature of living flesh and blood, in whom nature and circumstance work to perfection through suffering. Israel’s character is followed in its development, with convincing truth: the sudden rush of joy that elates the man, the reaction that depresses him, the acts of mercy that soften him—all lead irrevocably to the final scene of a soul reconciled to its[168] God. In this novel, as in all the best work of Mr Caine, the keynote is suffering, but suffering that of itself ennobles and purifies.

Whilst writing The Scapegoat, Mr Caine suffered severely from neurasthenia; his illness, of course, had effect upon his work, making it more sombre and gloomy than it might otherwise have been. When the work was published he received an urgent request from the Chief Rabbi asking him to visit Russia and write about the persecutions of the Jews in that country. He went in 1892, armed with signed documents from Lord Salisbury and the Chief Rabbi which were calculated to gain his admittance wherever he sought to go. The novelist was most warmly received wherever he went; but he was never able to make use of his experiences in the form of a novel. The subject, he felt, was altogether too vast for his experience: it would require years of study which he could not give. On his return to London, he lectured before the Jewish Workmen’s Club in the[169] East End, “in a hall crammed to suffocation. I shall never forget that audience, the tears, the laughter, the applause, the wild embraces to which I was subjected by some of those poor exiles of humanity.”

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CHAPTER IX
THE MANXMAN

In The Manxman, Hall Caine sounds the depths of humanity, and brings up the cry of living men and women to our ears. The sacred powerfulness of Love is his theme, the depths of spiritual degradation in which Love, twisted, distorted, makes its own punishment—the ennobling beauty of carrying out its great Unselfishness in simple fearlessness. And this is shown in the three characters, Kate, Pete and Philip, which, as they develop, touch every chord of sympathy in the reader’s gamut of sensibility.

Kate and Pete are children of one generation. Life is theirs and the light of the sun; yesterday has no hold over them, neither has to-morrow. Philip is the[171] aristocrat, knowing his father’s, and his father’s father, heavy with the knowledge of their follies and sins; the world calls to him, for him there is a great To-morrow. Into the complexity of his nature comes love—love for a girl who is “of the people”—Kate; and the alternate yielding to and resisting his love makes the tragedy of the three lives.

The scene is laid entirely in the Isle of Man. Manx characteristics, humours, eccentricities and pathos making up the atmosphere so exclusively that when we are introduced for the moment to an assemblage chiefly English, we feel ourselves to be in a foreign element.

Philip Christian is brought up by his aunt, who in dread lest the principal weakness of their house should appear in him, makes it her task to keep in his remembrance the misery of his father’s life, who, in marrying beneath him, ruined his career and lost his self-respect. We are carried through Philip’s childhood with its love for little peasant Pete, until, with[172] Pete’s child-sweetheart, Kate, the miller’s daughter, the three stand together on the borderland of the mystery of manhood and womanhood. Then Pete, leaving Manxland to seek a fortune which shall make him acceptable in the eyes of Kate’s parents, commits his sweetheart to Philip’s care and toils his youth away in South Africa. Philip in his rôle of protector and letter-carrier, visits the inn of Sulby, Kate’s home, now frequently, now infrequently, as his hidden love for Kate or the thought of treason to his friend surges uppermost. And Kate’s child-love for Pete fades, passes into woman’s passion for Philip. Understanding nothing of Philip’s feelings, but knowing his love for her, and caring for nothing else, she rebels at his silence and sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, uses all her power to tempt him to break it.

News comes of Pete’s death, and Kate, knowing nothing of the world’s share in Philip’s heart, thinks the only barrier removed. And, for a few hot, passionate hours Philip does give way, only to be dragged back at the heels of his ambition, under the shield of Pete’s home-coming and the falsity of the rumour of his death. He tells Kate that marriage with her would be treasonable to Pete, more than that, that neither he nor she can in honour marry either each other or anyone else. In her despair, Kate falls back upon stratagem. She sees Pete, allows herself to be considered his betrothed, and encourages rather than prevents the wedding preparations. Still Philip gives no sign, and Kate is married without fully realising what she is doing; but, on awakening to her new life, she sets herself the easy though bitter task of keeping Pete happy and[176] ignorant. Philip absents himself for some months, and then, returning to his native island and the career he had laid out for himself, becomes, on Pete’s happy insistence, an occasional inmate of the latter’s cottage. A child is born, and Kate finds it impossible to keep from Philip the knowledge that it is his. She tells him, and thence ensues the tragedy of Pete’s life.

Kate goes, and Pete crushes his grief to defend her honour. The lies he invents, that she has gone to visit his uncle in Liverpool, the letters he writes to himself, purporting to have come from her, the wiles he practises to deceive the neighbours—all intensify his terrible sorrow.

Pete must write back, and orthography not being his strong point, Philip must be his secretary.

The letter is finished, and Philip in his misery returns to Kate, who persuades him to lead Pete to believe her dead. After doing this, Philip’s moral degradation seems to be complete, and Kate, feeling herself to have been the cause of his ruin, leaves him. To outward appearance he climbs higher and higher in his professional career, while Pete sinks into poverty. Still the two men are friends. The child is ill; between them they nurse it, and Pete begins to see its resemblance to Philip. Little by little the truth comes to him—from the lips of a drunkard, he hears that Kate has been seen in London. Returning to his now poverty-stricken[180] cottage, he finds the wanderer bending over the cradle of her child. In his stupefaction he watches her as she leaves the house to end her misery, only to be rescued and brought face to face with Philip in his office of Deemster. Burning for vengeance, Pete seeks Philip—to meet him as he is borne home unconscious from the courthouse, and the sight wipes out all feelings but those of love and friendship in the great-hearted man. All his thought is for the happiness of Philip and Kate—to restore Philip to health, to resign Kate, to leave the island, after giving up the child that he has tended with so much love. And all that is best in Philip’s nature rises, strengthened by its suffering. As the crown of his brilliant youth, he is offered the Governorship of the island; before the assembled court he refuses it, and quitting the post of honour to which he has already climbed, acknowledges Kate, setting out with her, there among the people that have known them from childhood, to build up a new life on the ruins of the old.

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Although the story of The Manxman throbs with sadness, yet the unconscious humour of the minor characters, depicted as they are with tender appreciation, gives to the book a completeness which is perhaps lacking in Hall Caine’s earlier novels. The quaintnesses of Grannie, of Cæsar, of Pete himself, do much to sustain the spirit of optimism, that, rising triumphant in the end, gives to the story its undying beauty. To the hearts of all who read, the Manx people must come closer, the hope of all humanity shine brighter, because of the evident faithfulness of this picture of human life.

The first part of The Manxman was written in Greeba Castle, Isle of Man, where Mr Caine temporarily resided. He afterwards removed to Peel, and did not return to Greeba Castle until it was his own property.

In 1895 he visited America, where he was enthusiastically received. He was fêted, interviewed, bombarded at his hotel, and entertained almost to the point of extinction. It was said in one American journal that the American public had not been so deeply[182] interested by the visit of an English author since the visit of Dickens many years before. He always speaks of his visits to America with the deepest gratitude, for the distinguished attention and overflowing kindness always shown to him. There is no warmer admirer of America and American institutions.

His visit to America was undertaken on behalf of the Authors’ Society, in connection with difficulties that had arisen with regard to Canadian copyright. His mission was highly successful, and on his return to the Isle of Man his greeting was as hearty as that which he had enjoyed in America. He received the following characteristic letter from “T. E. B.”

This seems to me the fitting place in which to insert a hitherto unpublished article written by Mr Hall Caine on hearing of Mr Brown’s death. Mr Caine was on his way to Rome when the news reached him that his friend had died suddenly at Clifton.

Mr Caine received the following letter from the late W. E. Gladstone shortly after the publication of The Manxman.

He followed this letter up by another, written on December 4, 1894, from[187] Hawarden Castle, Chester, in which he says: “Though I am no believer in divorce, I have read your Manxman with great admiration of the power which gives such true life to Manx character and tradition.”

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CHAPTER X
THE CHRISTIAN

With the publication of The Christian began a new episode in Hall Caine’s career. Hitherto he had been welcomed on all sides; praise was literally heaped upon him. The critics had repeated these eulogies each time a new book of Hall Caine’s was put into their hands. First, The Deemster; next The Bondman; then The Scapegoat. But The Christian changed all this. The critics had grown tired of praise. Besides, Mr Caine had dared to criticise the hypocrisies of modern society. So the critics turned about, and flatly contradicted nearly everything they had said before. One pointed out that Mr Caine had described a certain garment as red, instead of, say, green; another was highly indignant because he chose to think the novelist had said a deacon could be made[189] bishop without passing through the intermediate state of priesthood; and another cried out because the character of a purely fictitious nurse was described as being not particularly moral. I have far more respect for the reviewer of books than the average literary person has, but I must confess his methods are sometimes inexplicable. This change of attitude, amusing as it was in many ways, must have been a matter of some surprise to Mr Caine. But there were explanations—the novelist had deserted the Isle of Man and come to London; he had brought Glory Quayle, fearless, healthy, beautiful, ambitious, from Manxland and put her down in a London hospital. By contact with the metropolis she is, in many ways, spoiled—vulgarised. And not only that: London was shown as a terrible place, the rich trampling on the poor, the immoral living on the moral, and the strong placing their feet on the necks of the weak. This fearless attack of Mr Caine’s was the chief cause of the change of attitude of the critics. He had stated his case, and in the opinion[190] of his admirers proved it up to the hilt; and certain of the reviewers, imagining that the cap was made for them, wore it, at the same time declaring that it was ten sizes too large.

Glory Quayle has not been long in London when she is taken to the theatre by her friends Drake and Lord Robert Ure. The play was Much Ado About Nothing, and the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. It is Glory’s first visit to the theatre, and her imagination runs riot in utter bewilderment.

But Drake and Lord Robert are merely friends; it is the Reverend John Storm whom she loves. He has “a well-formed nose, a powerful chin, and full lips. … His complexion is dark, almost swarthy, and there is a certain look of the gipsy in his big golden-brown[192] eyes with their long black lashes.” Her love is returned, but he has forsworn the world, and she is longing to become an actress, to have the world at her feet, applauding her, and showering on her all the praise and glory at their command. Which is it to be?—Love without the World?—or the World without Love? She cannot decide. Meanwhile she has left the hospital, and John Storm has entered a Brotherhood in the heart of London, and taken the necessary vows. Meanwhile, Glory is passing through strange vicissitudes, keeping body and soul together by different occupations, serving in a tobacconist’s shop, and selling programmes at a theatre. But she writes cheery letters to the old people at home in the Isle of Man, making them believe that she is happy and well, and that the world is a very beautiful place to live in. Here is one of her letters:—

This is but one out of many delicious letters that Glory writes to her grandfather and aunts. Meanwhile she makes a beginning, singing at a music-hall, and then in society drawing-rooms. But she is rarely happy; she is hampered by being only a woman. Difficulties are placed in her way, and vice lurks at every unsuspected corner waiting to pounce out upon her. But eventually[194] she succeeds. She becomes a famous music-hall star, and John Storm has left the monastery. He is consumed with love for Glory—and she, she cannot give up the world she is just beginning to conquer. He visits the music-hall at which she is performing, and a day or two after he visits Glory.

But it is of no use. Glory cannot give up her nights of applause; her increasing fame is the very breath of her nostrils, and though love calls in a clear, compelling voice, yet she pays it no heed, but devotes all her energy to her profession, and so the tale progresses. In the course of time, John Storm goes to live in the heart of the slums, to work among the poorest of the poor. His mind and soul are in his work, but his heart is ever with Glory. She becomes more and more successful, and once, on a visit to the races, she meets John Storm. She is driving with friends, he walking by the roadside. She is flushed with[196] joy—radiant with happiness, but he is torn and bleeding with love. His Glory is in danger; success and love of the world are destroying her soul. What can he do to save her? Nothing, nothing! Yes, but there is one thing he can do. He imagines himself called by God to kill her, for only by that means can her soul be saved from everlasting damnation.

But these two unhappy lovers are only[199] married when John is on his deathbed. He is fatally injured in a riot, and though “they could not come together in this world,” yet they are “united for all eternity on the threshold of the next.” So ends one of the most enthralling of Hall Caine’s books—a book that will be read as long as men and women care to hear about the love of a noble-hearted, fearless woman for a pure and high-minded man.

[200]

CHAPTER XI
THE ETERNAL CITY

This last great novel of Hall Caine’s is not a picture of Life; it is Life. His characters are more real than those with whom we meet and talk to every day of our lives; for not only do we hear them speak, but we see into the thoughts of their hearts, and sometimes catch a glimpse of their very souls. It may be urged that real men and women are not so passionately pure and self-sacrificing as David Rossi and Roma, but they who speak thus forget that the world has produced as many saints, martyrs and heroes, as blackguards and criminals. David Rossi is a hero for the sake of his country, for the sake of the poor and oppressed; Roma, purified, ennobled, and uplifted by[201] Love, is a martyr for the sake of her betrothed. They are as passionate as Romeo and Juliet, Paolo and Francesca; and as pure as Dante and Beatrice.

The mise-en-scène of the story is, of course, Rome—Rome with its grandeur side by side with its misery; its ambitious men and fallen women; its Vatican, its theatres, its ruins and its shame. The time is the first months of the present century. The City is made to live; we breathe its air and walk its streets. David Rossi is a member of the Chamber of Deputies, a friend of the people, a conspirator, a hero; all his actions are for the material and spiritual elevation of the down-trodden and oppressed, and this book is the story of the martyrdom he has to undergo, and of his eventual success. This is his charter, a framed manuscript copy of which he keeps hanging by his bedside:—

Roma is the ward of Count Bonelli, the young King’s Prime Minister; she is a beautiful, high-spirited, noble-hearted woman, who has little or no memory of either father or mother. She lives a life of extravagant luxury—happy, thoughtless and[203] frivolous, but always kind and generous. Still, her soul is asleep; she has never realised that Life is a serious matter, not to be trifled with or neglected. But when she meets David Rossi all is changed. She has called at his rooms with the idea of laying him in the dust. Ignorantly, and in the heat of the moment, he has publicly defamed her character, and she is intent on revenge.

Soon, however, she has to acknowledge that no matter how childlike he may be, he is never for one moment childish; he gives her proof of his strength, his devotion, his manly purity.

Her idea of revenge is entirely gone; she is at his feet, loving him, and aching to be loved in return. But he remembers his work: he must not allow worldly matters to interfere with its progress. So he will not see Roma again. Love is not for him; would that it were! And then follows a series of delightful letters: on his part serious, kind, and imbued with a high sense of duty; on her part, humorous, light, wistful, and sometimes sad. He tells her that he is in love, the object of his affections being a lady of beauty, wealth and virtue. The lady is herself, but the language is veiled, and at first she hardly guesses his meaning.

[207]

Eventually their love is confessed, and Baron Bonelli learns the truth. He sets to work immediately to compass the ruin or[208] death of Rossi, and jealousy lives in his heart every minute of the day, and all the night through. It is true he is married, but his wife is a maniac, and he expects to hear of her death at any time. It becomes necessary for Rossi to leave Rome: he is surrounded by a host of enemies ready at any moment to clap him into prison. So he says “Good-bye” to Roma, but before he leaves they are “religiously” married—that is to say, they take part in a ceremony recognised by the Church as a substitute for the marriage service proper, but which the State refuses to acknowledge. But they are man and wife for all that, and the thought sustains them through all the trouble they have to undergo. The moment the ceremony is over he leaves her, and she is alone to face the cunning and duplicity of Baron Bonelli.

And, indeed, Roma is not so secure as she imagines. She is relying on the fact that, according to the law of nearly every civilised nation, a wife is not permitted to[210] give evidence against her husband. The Baron is ignorant that Rossi and she are man and wife. But alas! she is not Rossi’s wife, not even according to the rules of the Church. She has not been baptised, and an unbaptised woman cannot be a daughter of the Church, and a woman who is not a daughter of the Church cannot claim the Church’s privileges.

Meanwhile Rossi is in London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva, addressing meetings, and organising a tremendous demonstration which is to take place in Rome. But his letters are necessarily vague—mere hints of what is about to come to pass; and gradually the thought grows in Roma’s mind that the secret work upon which he is engaged in is nothing more or less than a conspiracy to take the King’s life. Terror seizes hold on her and she knows not what to do. And all the time she is pursued by a terrible remorse: she has never told Rossi of the one dark stain on her life. She has never told him that, against her will, Baron Bonelli seduced her, and that she still remained his[211] friend. That brief, terrible hour has tormented her soul with the torments of hell. Ought she to tell the man she thinks is her husband? She cannot answer this question, so she confesses, and the priest refers her to the Pope himself. And then in an extraordinarily vivid and beautiful scene the Pope urges her to confess everything to Rossi; but this she has already done. However, her husband has not replied. The letters she has written have miscarried, but she imagines that her confession has killed his love, or roused his anger. The plot is too intricate and delicately handled at this point to be related in detail without great risk of damaging its interest and spoiling its effect; suffice it to say that, acting on the purest and most generous motives, but deceived by circumstance, Roma betrays her husband, and he is captured by the police when he is on his way home to peace and happiness. He escapes, seeks out Roma, and confronts her with her perfidy. She admits it, but says she can explain all. In the midst of her wild, vehement talking, Baron Bonelli[212] enters from an inner room. A fight ensues between Rossi and the Baron. The latter is mortally wounded, and Roma is left alone to wait on him—her bitterest enemy—in his dying hour. This is, perhaps, the most powerful scene in the book; it is certain it is the most dramatic. But it would be an invidious task to select one particular scene as being more skilful and effective than any other, when there are so many supremely skilful and effective scenes.

The rest of the story is of breathless interest. Roma is found with the body of the dead Baron, is accused of murder, and pleads guilty. She receives her sentence of imprisonment quite calmly, happy in the thought that in sacrificing herself she is helping on the cause of her husband, and suffering in his stead. Meanwhile David Rossi, on the point of suicide, and suffering a thousand torments through what seems to him to be Roma’s treachery, seeks sanctuary at the Vatican. The Pope receives him and grants him what he asks. Too bewildered by the stress of recent[213] events to think, he does not realise Roma’s danger; it never occurs to him that she may be seized upon as Bonelli’s murderer. But soon it reaches the ears of the Pope that Rossi is the guilty one, and not Roma, and on David asking for an interview the following scene takes place:—

The close of the story is deeply pathetic. David rushes off to save her, and gives himself up in her place. But Parliament acquits him of all guilt, and he is once more a free man. Roma is seized by some terrible internal disease, and it is only a matter of a few weeks before she is overtaken by death. Her last hours are spent with David by her side in peace, quietness and gladness.

I have given but the barest outline of the plot, for it hinges more on the conflict of one character against another, than on the intricacies of coincidence and unlooked-for event, and many of the phases of modern thought and feeling indicated in the different characters are of too subtle and delicate a nature to be dealt with in a short notice. This much may be said: it is a book that should be read. No one can afford to pass it over. It contains some of the[216] most descriptive and dramatic writing of our time, and, quite apart from its literary value, will go down to posterity as one of the most popular achievements of the twentieth century. All careful readers must admit that this is the strongest, the most mature, and yet the most daring novel that Hall Caine has yet written. The strongest, because not only does it deal with individuals, but also with masses of men representing the most conflicting thoughts, feelings and passions of the present day; the most mature, because it contains the expression of his thought on subjects which have compelled his study for more than thirty years; and the most daring, because it introduces the Pope and the Prime Minister of Italy as central characters with complete and indisputable success.

I venture to quote two paragraphs from the Bookman (August 1901) which give, so it seems to me, an extremely lucid account of how Mr Caine fixed on Rome as the scene for his latest story.

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“When Mr Hall Caine first decided upon the central idea, he had thought of setting his story in London, or Paris, or New York. He tried all cities and found them impossible. The civil and social conception which is behind the story has its rightful home in the Third Italy. To Mr Hall Caine Rome is typical of the new democracy. According to his observation, the force which in the past century has most vigorously asserted itself is the power of the peoples, wide, liberal, and democratic in contrast with the absolute power of the kings. But over the new power which has destroyed the reality of absolutism, continues the pomp and ostentation of the old rule of things, and not only continues, but daily attempts to gain a new vigour, a resurrection by three systems, in which Mr Hall Caine recognises the re-incarnation of the Philistine against the modern Samson, who stands for the rights of the peoples—imperialism, militarism, and the question of temporal power.

[218]

“Rome is the metropolis of the Christian world, not only by reason of its religious connections, but also by reason of its geographical position, its history, its glorious traditions, the fascination of its art, and the mystery of its eternal life which pervades and surrounds it. Rome alone seems to Mr Hall Caine the city worthy, in the dawn of an immense social revolution, to be the heart and soul of humanity, renewing itself in hopes and aspirations now, and promising in the future pacific civil and moral glory.”

Whether or not Mr Caine is right in his supposition that a tremendous social upheaval in Europe is imminent, it is not for me to say; but it is certain that his picture of the working of the antagonistic social forces of the present day in Rome is a truthful one, and that the feverish unrest and disorder of the people has not been brought about by the Italian Government only, but by the Church itself.

The Eternal City is not only a history: it is a prophecy also. It contains a solemn[219] warning, and states the case of the people with unparalleled insight and sympathy. If the next few years do not witness a mighty change in the mode of Government of the peoples of Europe, it will be because some tremendous outside force, which has not yet been reckoned with, has intervened, and changed the current of social and international politics.

In looking at Mr Hall Caine’s future it is impossible to see with any certainty what he is likely to achieve. A novelist he is, and a novelist he will always remain, for he is a born writer, and could not separate himself from his work even if he desired to do so. Besides, he has a worldwide public to address—a public that increases in large numbers year by year—and to sacrifice an audience of millions of human beings would be the very height of folly. And there can be no manner of doubt that he realises that the written word has immeasurably greater power than that which is merely spoken. The responsibility of[220] his position often weighs heavily upon him, for he feels that his power over the destinies of those who love his works is almost illimitable, and a single false step might mean ruin to the lives of hundreds of his fellow-creatures. Yet, in his later works, I see a desire on his part to enter more closely into the lives of the masses: he seems to be obsessed by the ambition to make easier the lives of the ignorant and uneducated, and to be anxious to reach those into whose hands a book of his can never fall. I have very good reason to suppose that he contemplates entering public life as a politician or as a lecturer on social reform—but a career of that kind would mean sacrificing an audience of millions that he reaches by his novels, for an audience that could certainly be estimated in thousands. But still there are many whom he wishes to aid who are, in the present condition of things, beyond his reach; how to bring himself in touch with this section of humanity, he cannot yet perceive, but I have no doubt that in the[221] course of time he will find a way out of the difficulty.

This gradual dawning of sympathy on the part of Hall Caine with the suffering and oppressed is one of the most interesting features in the study of his life and work. That he has always sympathised with the poor and ignorant we have ample evidence in the account of the Reverend William Pierce of his early life in Liverpool; but this sympathy did not begin to evince itself in his work until The Deemster was published, where in parts it was clearly seen that the lower classes were gaining a strong hold upon his heart and imagination. The Christian eventually showed the depth of this sympathy, and in what way he thought it advisable to put it into practical form.

From time to time it has been rumoured that Mr Caine has the intention of dealing with the drink question in a novel; but I am able to state that, though he has been and is profoundly moved by the misery and shame which are caused by the too free use of[222] alcohol, yet he has been unable to see his way to treat it in a work of fiction. It is true, the subject has engaged his attention for some considerable time, and on my last visit to him he spoke long and earnestly on this question. Whatever he may decide to do in the future, it is certain that for the next two or three years he will be occupied with another Manx novel. He has thought of making the recent Bank failure the subject of his work, but before he decides definitely he is to take a long rest. Each fresh novel he writes drains away his strength, for to him writing means a constant struggle, a bitter emotional experience which almost prostrates him. Of late he has also been turning his attention to the Life of Christ, which he wrote some years ago, but which has never yet been published in spite of the many tempting offers which he has received for the copyright. It has not been my privilege to read this book, but I may say that Mr Caine believes it to contain some of his best work. Speaking[223] of the year 1890, he says: “I had read Rénan’s Life of Christ, and had been deeply impressed by it, and I had said that there was a splendid chance for a life of Christ as vivid and as personal (if that were possible) from the point of belief as Rénan’s was from the point of unbelief.” It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that such a work from the pen of Mr Caine would be of absorbing interest to all his readers, and it is to be hoped that he will be prevailed upon to give it to the world.

And now I come to the end of my work. I have attempted no comparison between him and his contemporaries, for his place in the literature of England must be left for future generations to decide. Suffice it to say, that it seems to me he must be placed in the very front rank of all novelists, living or dead; for in few writers do I see such sympathy, such depth of knowledge of human nature, such insight, such power, and such discrimination as I see in the work of Hall[224] Caine. However this may be, it is certain that no novelist—of this or past generations—has so profoundly stirred the masses of England and America as Hall Caine has done. He has influenced his own generation to a greater extent than can possibly be estimated; that his influence has been of an ennobling, purifying nature few will deny, and those who find evil in his books must look into their own hearts and cast out the wickedness that they find there. “To the pure all things are pure”; well, not quite all, but one cannot help suspecting that those who have such keen noses for scenting evil odours are not themselves so free from corruption as they would have us believe.

THE END

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