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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.