"BLACK TOM" BEFORE "THE COTTAGE BY THE WATER-TROUGH."
"I went through the pale of settlement," he relates, "and saw as much of frontier life amongst the Jews as possible and found them like hunted dogs. I, however, got no further than the frontier towns, for cholera had broken out, numerous deaths took place every day, my own health was getting queer, and, to speak plainly, I was frightened. So we turned our faces back and returned home. On my return to London I delivered a lecture before the Jewish Workmen's Club in the East End, in a hall crammed to suffocation. I shall never forget the enthusiasm of the audience, the tears, the laughter, the applause, the wild embraces to which I was subjected."
This was the only use that Hall Caine ever made of all his experiences of his tour in Russia in 1892, which had lasted many months, for when he returned to Cumberland to write the story which was to be called "The Jew," he found the task impossible. "I worked very hard at it, I turned it over in every direction in my mind, but I felt I could not do it. I wanted the experience of a life; I could not enter into competition in their own field with the great Russian novelists. I found it could not be done."
THE WRITING OF "THE MANXMAN."
In the meanwhile, circumstances had obliged him to give up Castlerigg Cottage in disgust, and he accordingly removed to the Isle of Man, with the determination of fixing his residence there definitely. For the first six months he lived at Greeba Castle, a very pretty but very lonely house, about half-way between Peel and Douglas, on the Douglas road—and it was there that most of "The Manxman" was written.
"I turned my Jewish story into a Manx story, and 'The Jew' became 'The Manxman.' In my original scheme, Philip was to be a Christian, governor of his province in Russia; Pete, Cregeen, and Kate were to be Jews. I thought that the racial difference between the two rivals would afford greater dramatic contrast than the class difference, and it was only reluctantly that I altered the scheme of my story."
Hall Caine, in speaking of the genesis of "The Manxman," may be induced to show his little pocket-diary for 1893. Against each day during the whole of January and part of February are written the words: "The Jew."
"That means," he will explain, "that all those days I was working at my story in my head."
"The Manxman" was finished at the house in Marine Parade in Peel where Hall Caine is now temporarily residing—a large brick house, which was built for a boarding-house and is certainly not the house for an artist. As he has determined to make his home in the island, he is at present hesitating whether to purchase Greeba Castle, or to build himself a house on the Creg Malin headland at Peel, than which no more wondrous site for a poet's home could be found in the Queen's dominions, overlooking the bay, with the rugged pile of Peel Castle, memory haunted, beyond.
He loves the Manx and they love him. At first "society" in the island objected to his disregard of the conventions. Now he is as popular at Government House, or at the Deemster's, as he is in Black Tom's cottage. But his warmest friends are amongst the peasants and fishermen, from one end of the island to the other. "They are such good fellows," he says, "and such excellent subjects for study for my books. They are current coin for me." So he asks them to supper, and visits them in their houses, and has taught himself their language and their strange intonations as they speak.