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 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.
“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 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 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 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 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.
“‘What wonder, if in height of grief
The fading flower, the falling leaf
Make truer solace to the mind,
Than Nature’s richest, gladdest bloom
In harvest waving to the wind.