We went to his room and he handed me a few pages of printed copy. I read them.
“Well?” inquired he, when I had finished.
“It is passionate, it is sexual,” said I, “but to call it immoral is to call black white.”
“You really believe that?” he asked, a little anxiously.
[123]
]“I do. I assure you I do.”
But the black cloud of self-distrust and misery would not be dissipated, and that night, after dinner, we sat over a slow fire, though it was early in August, and talked long and rather sadly of Rossetti, of T. E. Brown and of things that had been said by Peel fishermen.
. . . . . . . .
Another occasion, when I was with the novelist on a day of some anxiety, is equally clear in my memory. I may say at this point that Hall Caine was invariably in a condition of some mental strain a few days before and after the publication of one of his stories. He was a little apprehensive of the reviewers, and he was always afraid lest the public should not remain faithful to him. In this connection I remember him saying to me once: “I can imagine no fate more tragic than for a novelist at middle age, when he believes his powers to be at their highest, to lose his hold upon his public.”
He would, I think, deny that he cares what the reviewers may say; nevertheless, my experience of him tells me that he does care. In his early life as a novelist he was, perhaps, overpraised; certainly he but very rarely felt the lash of the critic’s whip. So that when the critics began to condemn the work of the man they had once praised, he was not disciplined to bear their condemnation philosophically. Every taunt wounded him, every thrust went home, every sneer was a stab.
But on the occasion about which I am now writing he was not depressed so much in anticipation of what the reviewers might say as on account of the competition of another novel which had been issued a few days previous to the date fixed for the publication of a new book of his own. That novel was Lucas Malet’s The History of Sir Richard Calmady, published, if my memory does not betray me, by Messrs Methuen.