“On the contrary, madame,” he said gallantly, “I can never get enough of it. I am the vainest man alive.”
On the same occasion Holmes told me that he had been unable to do any writing (except his short Hundred Days in Europe) for years, because his entire time was taken up with answering complimentary letters.
Hardy did come to 32 Addison Mansions, Hardy who has received the Order of Merit, and is proposed for next year’s Nobel prize for literature, as the head of the literary craft, one of the great masters of English fiction. I am very proud to have known Thomas Hardy; he is not only so great, but so silent and reserved, that it is not easy to know him. I have met him often, but seldom seen him talking, except very quietly to an intimate friend. He has generally been on the edge of a crowd, observing—we have the fruits of that profound observation in his novels. That slight figure, that melancholy face, with the watchful eyes, was always a cynosure, for Hardy has been the object of unbounded admiration for many years. I remember his being the bright particular star about whom the late Lady Portsmouth was always talking at her house-parties at Eggesford, where I stayed, as far back as 1885.
I have a letter from him which is one of my most treasured literary possessions. He wrote it to me to explain his point in introducing the passage about the slaughtered pig after I had reviewed Jude, the Obscure, at considerable length and with minute criticism in the Queen. I have alluded to his almost equal eminence as a poet in another chapter.
It is natural to couple Hall Caine with Thomas Hardy, for both of them were brought up as architects, though they turned to literature, and reached the topmost rung.
Hall Caine has been an intimate friend of mine for many years. Our friendship began before he was a novelist, in the days when he was a critic of the Athenæum and the Academy, and an editor of poetry. His sending me The Sonnets of Three Centuries in the year in which he lost his housemate, the poet and artist, Dante Rossetti, was the beginning of our friendship. He began publishing novels in 1885, and two years later leapt into the front rank of novelists with his magnificent Deemster.
After my return from America I began to see more and more of him. He became a director of the Authors’ Club, of which I was Honorary Secretary, and one of the chief speakers at the New Vagabonds Club.
In 1894 he reached, with The Manxman, the height of fame, at which he has since continued. I prophesied its enormous success in a long review of it, which I wrote for the Queen, which came out simultaneously with the publication of the book. We were in Rome together at the time that he was writing the Eternal City, and in Egypt together while he was writing The White Prophet.
No one could be in the presence of Hall Caine for five minutes without knowing that he was in the presence of a remarkable man. His resemblance to Shakespeare is extraordinary, not only in the dome-like expanse of his forehead and the Elizabethan slope of his beard, but in the burning eyes and the shape of the eyecups. He looks the genius that he is.
Hall Caine has always had the merit of being highly approachable and affectionate, and if his conversation is apt to centre round the work he is doing, it is always most interesting and pregnant.