Mr. Hall Caine's new novel _The Manxman_ (London: William Heinemann)
is a big piece of work altogether. But, on finishing the tale, I
turned back to the beginning and read the first 125 pages over again,
and then came to a stop. I wish that portion of the book could be
dealt with separately. It cannot: for it but sets the problem in human
passion and conduct which the remaining 300 pages have to solve.
Nevertheless the temptation is too much for me.
As one who thought he knew how good Mr. Hall Caine can be at his best,
I must confess to a shock of delight, or rather a growing sense of
delighted amazement, while reading those 125 pages. Yet the story is a
very simple one--a story of two friends and a woman. The two friends
are Philip Christian and Pete Quilliam: Philip talented, accomplished,
ambitious, of good family, and eager to win back the social position
which his father had lost by an imprudent marriage; Pete a nameless
boy--the bastard son of Philip's uncle and a gawky country-girl--ignorant,
brave, simple-minded, and incurably generous. The boys have grown up
together, and in love are almost more than brothers when the time comes
for them to part for a while--Philip leaving home for school, while
Pete goes as mill-boy to one Cæsar Cregeen, who combined the occupations
of miller and landlord of "The Manx Fairy" public-house. And now enters
the woman--a happy child when first we make her acquaintance--in the
shape of Katherine Cregeen, the daughter of Pete's employer. With her
poor simple Pete falls over head and ears in love. Philip, too, when
home for his holidays, is drawn by the same dark eyes; but stands aside
for his friend. Naturally, the miller will not hear of Pete, a landless,
moneyless, nameless, lad, as a suitor for his daughter; and so Pete sails
for Kimberley to make his fortune, confiding Kitty to Philip's care.
It seems that the task undertaken by Philip--that of watching over his
friend's sweetheart--is a familiar one in the Isle of Man, and he who
discharges it is known by a familiar name.
"They call him the _Dooiney Molla_--literally, the 'man-praiser';
and his primary function is that of an informal, unmercenary,
purely friendly and philanthropic match-maker, introduced by the
young man to persuade the parents of the young woman that he is a
splendid fellow, with substantial possessions or magnificent
prospects, and entirely fit to marry her. But he has a secondary
function, less frequent, though scarcely less familiar; and it is
that of a lover by proxy, or intended husband by deputy, with
duties of moral guardianship over the girl while the man himself
is off 'at the herrings,' or away 'at the mackerel,' or abroad on
wider voyages."
And now, of course, begins Philip Christian's ordeal: for Kitty
discovers that she loves him and not Pete, and he that he loves Kitty
madly. On the other hand there is the imperative duty to keep faith
with his absent friend; and more than this. His future is full of high
hope; the eyes of his countrymen and of the Governor himself are
beginning to fasten on him as the most promising youth in the island;
it is even likely that he will be made Deemster, and so win back all
the position that his father threw away. But to marry Kitty--even if
he can bring himself to break faith with Pete--will be to marry
beneath him, to repeat his father's disaster, and estrange the favor
of all the high "society" of the island. Therefore, even when the
first line of resistance is broken down by a report that Pete is dead,
Philip determines to cut himself free from the temptation. But the
girl, who feels that he is slipping away from her, now takes fate into
her own hands. It is the day of harvest-home--the "Melliah"--on her
father's farm. Philip has come to put an end to her hopes, and she
knows it. The "Melliah" is cut and the usual frolic begins:
"Then the young fellows went racing over the field, vaulting the
stooks, stretching a straw rope for the girls to jump over,
heightening and tightening it to trip them up, and slackening it
and twirling it to make them skip. And the girls were falling
with a laugh, and, leaping up again and flying off like the dust,
tearing their frocks and dropping their sun-bonnets as if the
barley-grains they had been reaping had got into their blood.
"In the midst of this maddening frolic, while Cæsar and the
others were kneeling by the barley-stack, Kate snatched Philip's
hat from his head and shot like a gleam into the depths of the
glen.
"Philip dragged up his coat by one of its arms and fled after
her."
Here, then, in Sulby Glen, the girl stakes her last throw--the last
throw of every woman--and wins. It is the woman--a truly Celtic
touch--who wooes the man, and secures her love and, in the end, her
shame.
"When a good woman falls from honour, is it merely that she is
the victim of a momentary intoxication, of stress of passion, of
the fever of instinct? No. It is mainly that she is the slave of
the sweetest, tenderest, most spiritual, and pathetic of all
human fallacies--the fallacy that by giving herself to the man
she loves she attaches him to herself for ever. This is the real
betrayer of nearly all good women that are betrayed. It lies at
the root of tens of thousands of the cases that make up the
merciless story of man's sin and woman's weakness. Alas! it is
only the woman who clings the closer. The impulse of the man is
to draw apart. He must conquer it, or she is lost. Such is the
old cruel difference and inequality of man and woman as Nature
made them--the old trick, the old tragedy."
And meanwhile Pete is not dead; but recovered, and coming home.
Here, on p. 125, ends the second act of the drama: and the telling has
been quite masterly. The passage quoted above has hitherto been the
author's solitary comment. Everything has been presented in that fine
objective manner which is the triumph of story-telling. As I read, I
began to say to myself, "This is good"; and in a little while, "Ah,
but this is very good"; and at length, "But this is amazing. If he can
only keep this up, he will have written one of the finest novels of
his time." The whole story was laid out so easily; with such humor,
such apparent carelessness, such an instinct for the right stroke in
the right place, and no more than the right stroke; the big
scenes--Pete's love-making in the dawn and Kate's victory in Sulby
Glen--were so poetically conceived (I use the adverb in its strictest
sense) and so beautifully written; above all, the story remained so
true to the soil on which it was constructed. A sworn admirer of Mr.
Brown's _Betsy Lee_ and _The Doctor_ has no doubt great advantage over
other people in approaching _The Manxman_. Who, that has read his
_Fo'c's'le Yarns_ worthily, can fail to feel kindly towards the little
island and its shy, home-loving folk? And--by what means I do not
know--Mr. Hall Caine has managed from time to time to catch Mr.
Brown's very humor and set it to shine on his page. The secret, I
suppose, is their common possession as Manxmen: and, like all the best
art, theirs is true to its country and its material.
Pete comes home, suspecting no harm; still childish of heart and loud
of voice--a trifle too loud, by the way; his shouts begin to irritate
the reader, and the reader begins to feel how sorely they must have
irritated his wife: for the unhappy Kate is forced, after all, into
marrying Pete. And so the tragedy begins.
I wish, with my heart, I could congratulate Mr. Hall Caine as warmly
upon the remainder of the book as upon its first two parts. He is too
sure an artist to miss the solution--the only adequate solution--of
the problem. The purification of Philip Christian and Kitty must come,
if at all, "as by fire"; and Mr. Hall Caine is not afraid to take us
through the deepest fire. No suffering daunts him--neither the anguish
of Kitty, writhing against her marriage with Pete, nor the desperate
pathos of Pete after his wife has run away, pretending to the
neighbors that she has only gone to Liverpool for her health, and
actually writing letters and addressing parcels to himself and posting
them from out-of-the-way towns to deceive the local postman; nor the
moral ruination of Philip, with whom Kitty is living in hiding; nor
his final redemption by the ordeal of a public confession before the
great company assembled to see him reach the height of worldly
ambition and be appointed governor of his native island.
And yet--I have a suspicion that Mr. Hall Caine, who deals by
preference with the elemental emotions, would rejoice in the epithet
"Æschylean" applied to his work. The epithet would not be unwarranted:
but it is precisely when most consciously Æschylean that Mr. Hall
Caine, in my poor judgment, comes to grief. This is but to say that he
possesses the defects of his qualities. There is altogether too much
of the "Go to: let me be Titanic" about the book. Æschylus has grown a
trifle too well aware of his reputation, has taken to underscoring his
points, and tends to prolixity in consequence. Mr. Hall Caine has not
a little of Hugo's audacity, but, with it, not a little of Hugo's
diffuseness. Standing, like Destiny, with scourge lifted over the
naked backs of his two poor sinners, he spares them no single
stroke--not so much as a little one. Every detail that can possibly
heighten their suffering is brought out in its place, until we feel
that Life, after all, is more careless, and tell ourselves that Fate
does not measure out her revenge with an inch rule. We see the
machinery of pathos at work: and we are rather made incredulous than
moved when the machinery works so accurately that Philip is made to
betray Pete on the very night when Pete goes out to beat a big drum in
Philip's honor. Nor is this by any means the only harrowing
coincidence of the kind. Worse than this--for its effect upon us as a
work of art--our emotions are so flogged and out-tired by detail after
detail that they cannot rise at the last big fence, and so the scene
of Philip's confession in the Courthouse misses half its effect. It is
a fine scene. I am no bigoted admirer of Hawthorne--a very cold one,
indeed--and should be the last to say that the famous scene in _The
Scarlet Letter_ cannot be improved upon. Nor do I make any doubt that,
as originally conceived by Mr. Hall Caine, the story had its duly
effective climax here. But still less do I doubt that the climax, and
therefore the whole story, would have been twice as impressive had the
book, from p. 125 onwards, contained just half its present number of
words. But whether this opinion be right or wrong, the book remains a
big book, and its story a beautiful story.