“The Woman of Knockaloe” is first of all a love story. In our opinion
it is a charming and natural love story, beautiful in its purity,
and irresistible in its human appeal; so simple in its incidents
that it might be a nursery tale, so stark in its telling that it
might be a Saga, so inevitable in the march of its scenes, from its
almost breathless beginning to its tremendous end, that it might be a
Greek tragedy. In this character alone I think it calls for serious
consideration.
But it is more than a love story. It is a Parable, carrying an
unmistakable message, an ostensible argument. Readers all over
the world will so interpret it. They will see that it has special
application to the times, that it is directed against War as the
first author of the racial hatred, the material ruin, the sorrow and
suffering, the poverty and want, which are now threatening the world
with destruction; that it is a plea for universal peace, for speedy and
universal disarmament, as the only alternative to universal anarchy.
The story is laid in a little backwater of the war--a backwater
which has never before, perhaps, been explored in literature--but
nevertheless it is not in the ordinary sense a war story. The late
Great War does not enter it at all, except as an evil wind which blows
over a mile and a half by half a mile of land in a small island in the
Irish Sea, an Internment Camp, wherein twenty-five thousand men and
one woman, cut off from life, pass four and a half years within an
enclosure of barbed wire.
This narrow space of blackened earth is intended to stand for the world
in little, from 1914 to the present year, and the few incidents of the
simple yet poignant tale are meant to illustrate the effect of the late
war on the heart of humanity, to describe at very close quarters the
consequences of what we call The Peace on the condition of the world
and the soul of mankind, and to point to what the author believes to be
the only hope of saving both from the spiritual and material suicide to
which they are hurrying on. It is neither pro-British nor pro-German
in sympathy, but purely pro-human. War itself is the only enemy the
Parable is intended to attack.
The battlefield the author has chosen is dangerous ground, but the
public will not question his sincerity. Hall Caine is seventy years of
age, and down to 1914 he was a life-long and even an extreme pacifist.
More than one of his best known books was intended to show not only
the barbarity and immorality of warfare, but also its cowardice and
futility. Yet when the Great War broke out no man of letters became
more speedily or remained more consistently an advocate of the Allied
cause. The paradox is not difficult of explanation. In the face of
what he, in common with countless pre-war pacifists, believed to be a
deliberate plot whereby liberty was to be violated, civilization was to
be outraged, religion was to be degraded, the right was to be wronged,
the weak were to be oppressed, the helpless were to be injured, and
before the iron arm of a merciless military tyranny, justice and mercy
and charity were to be wiped out of the world, he became one of the
most passionate supporters of the war of resistance. The Great War
stood to him, as to others, as a war to end war.
It cannot be necessary to describe in detail his war activities even
at a moment when, by the publication of this challenging book, his
patriotism may possibly be questioned. They are matters of common
knowledge not only in Great Britain and America, but also in many
foreign countries in which his books have made his name known and his
opinions respected. For his war services he was honoured by his own
nation, and at least one of her Allies, being knighted in 1918, made an
Officer of the Order of Leopold in 1920, and a Companion of Honour in
1922.
But the war-propagandist never wholly submerged the pacifist. His last
war article was written on Armistice Day, 1918, and it was intended to
show that while the price paid for the victory of the Allied cause had
been a terribly bitter one it had been justified, inasmuch as it had
killed warfare, and so banished from the earth for ever the greatest
scourge of mankind.
Hall Caine has lived long enough since to see the falseness of that
judgment. No one can have suffered more from the disappointments and
disillusionment of the war, its political uselessness, its immeasurable
cruelty, its limitless waste, its widespread wretchedness, and above
all its inhuman demoralization. That the Great War has been in vain,
that so much sacrifice, so much heroism, so many brave young lives have
been thrown away, he would not for one moment say, being sure that in
the long review of a mysterious Providence all these must have their
place. But he is none the less sure that the late war has left the
world worse than it found it; that the after-war, which we call The
Peace, has been more productive of evil passions than the war itself
was; that violence has never been more rampant or faith in the sanctity
of life so low; that the poor have never been poorer, or the struggle
to live so severe; and that Christian Europe has never before been
such a chaos of separate and selfish interests or so full of threats
of renewed and still deadlier warfare in the future--in a word that
the Great War has not only failed to kill war but has frightfully
strengthened and inflamed the spirit of it.
And now he publishes his Parable, the little story called “The Woman of
Knockaloe,” in the hope of showing that there can be “no peace under
the soldier’s sword,” that the salvation of the world from the moral
and material destruction which threatens to overwhelm it is not to be
found in governments or parliaments or peace conferences, but only in
a purging of the heart of individual man of the hatreds and jealousies
and other corruptions which the war created--in a personal return of
all men, regardless of nation or race, or politics or creed, or (as in
the case of the American people) remoteness from the central scene of
strife, to the spiritual and natural laws which alone can bring the
human family back to true peace and real security--the laws of love and
mutual sacrifice, above all the law of human brotherhood, which was at
once the law and the first commandment of Christ.
That this is a great Evangel none can doubt, and that it will go far
in the beautiful human form in which it is presented, that of a deeply
moving story, few will question. But is the world prepared for it? Is
this the hour for such a plea? Is the Great War too recent to permit
any of the nations who engaged in it to forgive their enemies? In
this new book Hall Caine touches upon wounds that are not yet healed
and sometimes the touch hurts. If it is an all-healing touch the
pain may be endured. But is it? What will the British people think?
What will the Belgians, the French and the Americans, who are still
suffering from their bereavements, say to a writer who asks them, in
effect, to shake hands with the Germans who caused them? Will not the
nations which have suffered most from the war say that, having beaten
the Germans, it is their first duty to themselves and to humanity to
keep them beaten? Will not a residue of bitterness against an author
who calls upon the peoples of the world to make an effort that is
impossible to the human heart at such a time obscure the sublimity of
his message?
On the other hand will it not be agreed that the Christian ideal of
the forgiveness of injuries and the brotherhood of man is the only
remaining hope of the redemption of the world from the lamentable
condition into which the war, and the passions provoked by the war,
have plunged it; that without this ideal, politics are a meaningless
mockery, religion is an organized hypocrisy, and the churches are
a snare, and that, however hard it may be to learn the lesson, and
however cruel the pain of it, there never was a time when it was more
needed than now?
Here lies the theme for many a sermon, and judging of “The Woman of
Knockaloe” by its effect upon those who, besides myself, have read it,
it is hardly possible to question its missionary value, apart from its
human beauty and charm. At least it is certain that readers in many
lands will think and continue to think of some of the greatest of human
problems long after they have closed the book.