“But I think you will improve upon this book vastly, as experience grows. The incidents appear to me to be huddled, without sense of proportion now and then, and there is much strain upon credulity. But I am loth to find fault, knowing that I am not a skilled workman myself.
“We are just leaving home, in the hope—probably a vain one—of doing some good to my helpless hand, whose failure is a great loss to me in every branch of garden work. I think of invading T. Hardy’s land—Swanage or the neighbourhood, almost the only part of the southern coast unknown to me. Further I would gladly go, but my wife cannot bear a long journey, or changes of conveyance. After our return I shall be very glad to see you, though I cannot advise much about Wales. North Wales is, of course, much the more picturesque, and the style of the natives more Cymric; whereas I am chiefly acquainted with the south. The love of truth seems to have been overlooked in the composition of Welsh character. The lower classes do not even resent the charge of lying, and consider it disgraceful mainly as a blot upon their intellect. But I must not be hard upon them, as my mother’s family, though English in the main, possessed many veins of Taffic fluid.
“I hope that you are now in strong health again, after the passing of the solid hot waves. As a fruit-grower, I have suffered bitter woes, some of my trees having shed all their fruit and none having fine crop as they promised. The rain came in earnest last week, but too late, and now we could take as much again.—With all good wishes, I am, truly yours,
“R. D. Blackmore.”
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 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.