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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.
We did not of course forget the relatives of the men who had fallen in our defense. The boatswain Caine left a widow and two children. We put her upon a pension until she married a grocer two years later. We were never able to hear that she thought the loss of husband number one anything but a good riddance. Jimmie's share went into a fund, which is being managed by Yeager and me as trustees.
Well, the girl begins with the Caine colossus: he vanishes into thin air. She proceeds to the moving picture actors: they are almost as far beyond her. And then to the man of God, the junior partner, the department manager, the clerk; one and all they are carried off by girls of greater attractions and greater skill girls who can cast gaudier flies.
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty this boy wrote learned leading articles on building, land-surveying, and architecture for "The Builder." George Godwin, the editor of this leading periodical, could not believe his eyes when he first met his contributor. Hall Caine was then nineteen. "I felt terribly ashamed of being so young," he says, in speaking of this interview.
Adolphus "I can assure you that the money paid by some firms of publishers to a few well-known authors I will mention no names as advances against royalties, is something stupendous!" "Ah!" Mr. Barnes murmured, solemnly shaking his head. "Marie Corelli, I expect, and that Hall Caine," remarked young Adolphus. "Seems easy enough to write a book, too," Mrs. Barnes said.
"Not a thing." I had been readjusting the handkerchief, but I happened to look up unexpectedly. My glance caught a flash of meaning that passed between the two. It seemed to hint at a triumphant mockery of my plight. "Caine is a deep-sea brute, mean-hearted enough to be pleased at what has happened," I thought peevishly. Later I learned how wide of the mark my interpretation of that look had been.
To-day, as then, when Hall Caine has a book to write, he reads every book bearing on his theme which he can obtain "a whole library for each chapter" and will work at his subject day and night, all-absorbed, wrapped up, concentrated.
Caine says: "The people of India, unlike other people, only drink for the purpose of getting drunk, and if we make them drunken we destroy them more rapidly than by war, pestilence and famine."
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty.
There is about them much of that air of 'rightness' which Hall Caine has noted to be one of the most enduring qualities of good fiction, whatever its literary style may be. They are cheerful, virile, soundly moral, and take far more account of the good than of the bad in human nature. There is no fondness of the sensational for its own sake.
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