Adventures in Criticism Part 24

MR. HALL CAINE

August 11, 1894. "The Manxman."

Mr. Hall Caine's new novel _The Manxman_ (London: William Heinemann) is a big piece of work altogether. But, on finis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 Caesar 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 guardians.h.i.+p 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 Caesar and the others were kneeling by the barley-stack, Kate s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sage quoted above has. .h.i.therto 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.sembled 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 "aeschylean" applied to his work. The epithet would not be unwarranted: but it is precisely when most consciously aeschylean 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 t.i.tanic" about the book. aeschylus 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.

MR. ANTHONY HOPE

Oct. 27, 1894. "The G.o.d in the Car" and "The Indiscretion of the d.u.c.h.ess."

As I set down the t.i.tles of these two new stories by Mr. Anthony Hope, it occurs to me that combined they would make an excellent t.i.tle for a third story yet to be written. For Mr. Hope's d.u.c.h.ess, if by any chance she found herself travelling with a G.o.d in a car, would infallibly seize the occasion for a _tour de force_ in charming indiscretion. That the car would travel for some part of the distance in that position of unstable equilibrium known to skaters as the "outside edge" may, I think, be taken for granted. But far be it from me to imagine bungling developments of the situation I here suggest to Mr. Hope's singular and agreeable talents. Like Mr. Stevenson's smatterer, who was asked, "What would be the result of putting a pound of pota.s.sium in a pot of porter?" I content myself with antic.i.p.ating "that there would probably be a number of interesting bye-products."

Be it understood that I suggest only a combination of the t.i.tles--not of the two stories as Mr. Hope has written them: for these move on levels altogether different. The constant reader of _The Speaker's_ "Causeries" will be familiar with the two propositions--not in the least contradictory--that a novel should be true to life, and that it is quite impossible for a novel to be true to life. He will also know how they are reconciled. A story, of whatever kind, must follow life at a certain remove. It is a good and consistent story if it keep at that remove from first till last. Let us have the old tag once more:

"Servetur ad inum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet."

A good story and real life are such that, being produced in either direction and to any extent, they never meet. The distance between the parallels does not count: or rather, it is just a matter for the author to choose. It is here that Mr. Howells makes his mistake, who speaks contemptuously of Romance as _Puss in Boots_. _Puss in Boots_ is a masterpiece in its way, and in its way just as true to life--_i.e._, to its distance from life--as that very different masterpiece _Silas Lapham_. When Mr. Howells objects to the figure of Vautrin in _Le Pere Goriot_, he criticizes well: Vautrin in that tale is out of drawing and therefore monstrous. But to bring a similar objection against Porthos in _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_ would be very bad criticism; for it would ignore all the postulates of the story. In real life Vautrin and Porthos would be equally monstrous: in the stories Vautrin is monstrous and Porthos is not.

But though the distance from real life at which an author conducts his tale is just a matter for his own choice, it usually happens to him after a while, either from taste or habit, to choose a particular distance and stick to it, or near it, henceforth in all his writings.

Thus Scott has his own distance, and Jane Austen hers. Balzac, Hugo, Charlotte Bronte, d.i.c.kens, Tolstoi, Mr. Howells himself--all these have their favorite distances, and all are different and cannot be confused. But a young writer usually starts in some uncertainty on this point. He has to find his range, and will quite likely lead off with a miss or a ricochet, as Mr. Hardy led off with _Desperate Remedies_ before finding the target with _Under the Greenwood Tree_.

Now Mr. Hope--the application of these profound remarks is coming at last--being a young writer, hovers in choice between two ranges. He has found the target with both, and cannot make up his mind between them: and I for one hope he will keep up his practice at both: for his experiments are most interesting, and in the course of them he is giving us capital books. Of the two before me, _The G.o.d in the Car_ belongs to the same cla.s.s as his earliest work--his _Father Stafford_, for instance, a novel that did not win one-tenth of the notice it deserved. It is practice at short range. It moves very close to real life. Real people, of course, do not converse as briskly and wittily as do Mr. Hope's characters: but these have nothing of the impossible in them, and even in the whole business of Omof.a.ga there is nothing more fantastic than its delightful name. The book is genuinely tragic; but the tragedy lies rather in what the reader is left to imagine than in what actually occurs upon the stage. That it never comes to a more explicit and vulgar issue stands not so much to the credit of the heroine (as I suppose we must call Mrs. Dennison) as to the force of circ.u.mstances as manipulated in the tactful grasp of Mr. Hope. Nor is it to be imputed to him for a fault that the critical chapter xvii.

reminds us in half a dozen oddly indirect ways of a certain chapter in _Richard Feverel_. The place, the situation, the reader's suspense, are similar; but the actors, their emotions, their purposes are vastly different. It is a fine chapter, and the page with which it opens is the worst in the book--a solitary purple patch of "fine writing." I observe without surprise that the reviewers--whose admiring attention is seldom caught but by something out of proportion--have been fastening upon it and quoting it ecstatically.

_The Indiscretion of the d.u.c.h.ess_ is the tale in Mr. Hope's second manner--the manner of _The Prisoner of Zenda_. Story for story, it falls a trifle sort of _The Prisoner of Zenda_. As a set-off, the telling is firmer, surer, more accomplished. In each an aimless, superficially cynical, but naturally amiable English gentleman finds himself casually involved in circ.u.mstances which appeal first to his sportsmanlike love of adventure, and so by degrees to his chivalry, his sense of honor, and his pa.s.sions. At first amused, then perplexed, then nettled, then involved heart and soul, he is left to fight his way through with the native weapons of his order--courage, tact, honesty, wit, strength of self-sacrifice, apt.i.tude for affairs. The _donnee_ of these tales, their spirit, their postulates, are nakedly romantic. In them the author deliberately lends enchantment to his view by withdrawing to a convenient distance from real life. But, once more, the enchantment is everything and the distance nothing. If I must find fault with the later of the stories, it will not be with its general extravagance--for extravagance is part of the secret of Romance--but with the sordid and very nasty Madame Delha.s.se. She would be repulsive enough in any case: but as Marie's mother she is peculiarly repulsive and, let me add, improbable. n.o.body looks for heredity in a tale of this sort: but even in the fairy tales it is always the heroine's _step_-mother who ends very fitly with a roll downhill in a barrel full of spikes.

But great as are the differences between _The G.o.d in the Car_ and _The Indiscretion of the d.u.c.h.ess_--and I ought to say that the former carries (as it ought) more weight of metal--they have their points of similarity. Both ill.u.s.trate conspicuously Mr. Hope's gift of advancing the action of his story by the sprightly conversation of his characters. There is a touch of Dumas in their talk, and more than a touch of Sterne--the Sterne of the _Sentimental Journey_.

"I beg your pardon, madame," said I, with a whirl of my hat.

"I beg your pardon, sir," said the lady, with an inclination of her head.

"One is so careless in entering rooms hurriedly," I observed.

"Oh, but it is stupid to stand just by the door!" insisted the lady.

To sum up, these are two most entertaining books by one of the writers for whose next book one searches eagerly in the publishers' lists. If, however, he will not resent one small word of caution, it is that he should not let us find his name there too often. As far as we can see, he cannot write too much for us. But he may very easily write too much for his own health.

"TRILBY"

Sept. 14, 1895. Hypnotic Fiction.

A number of people--and I am one--cannot "abide" hypnotism in fiction.

In my own case the dislike has been merely instinctive, and I have never yet found time to examine the instinct and discover whether or not it is just and reasonable. The appearance of a one-volume edition of _Trilby_--undoubtedly the most successful tale that has ever dealt with hypnotism--and the success of the dramatic version of _Trilby_ presented a few days ago by Mr. Tree, invite one to apply the test.

Clearly there are large numbers of people who enjoy hypnotic fiction, or whose prejudices have been effectively subdued by Mr. du Maurier's tact and talent. Must we then confess that our instinct has been unjust and unreasonable, and give it up? Or--since we _must_ like _Trilby_, and there is no help for it--shall we enjoy the tale under protest and in spite of its hypnotism?

a.n.a.lysis of an Aversion.

I think my first objection to these hypnotic tales is the terror they inspire. I am not talking of ordinary human terror, which, of course, is the basis of much of the best tragedy. We are terrified by the story of Macbeth; but it is with a rational and a salutary terror. We are aware all the while that the moral laws are at work. We see a hideous calamity looming, approaching, imminent: but we can see that it is the effect of causes which have been duly exhibited to us. We can reason it out: we know where we stand: our conscience approves the punishment even while our pity calls out against it. And when the blow falls, it shakes away none of our belief in the advantages of virtuous conduct. It leaves the good old impregnable position, "Be virtuous and you will be happy," stronger than ever. But the terror of these hypnotic stories resembles that of a child in a dark room. For artistic reasons too obvious to need pointing out, the hypnotizer in these stories is always the villain of the piece. For the same or similar reasons, the "subject" is always a person worthy of our sympathy, and is usually a woman. Let us suppose it to be a good and beautiful woman--for that is the commonest case. The gives us to understand that by hypnotism this good and beautiful woman is for a while completely in the power of a man who is _ex hypothesi_ a beast, and who _ex hypothesi_ can make her commit any excesses that his beastliness may suggest. Obviously we are removed outside the moral order altogether; and in its place we are presented with a state of things in which innocence, honesty, love, and the rest are entirely at the disposal and under the rule of malevolent brutality; the result, as presented to us, being qualified only by such tact as the author may choose to display. That Mr. du Maurier has displayed great tact is extremely creditable to Mr. du Maurier, and might have been predicted of him. But it does not alter the fact that a form of fiction which leaves us at the mercy of an author's tact is a very dangerous form in a world which contains so few Du Mauriers. It is lamentable enough to have to exclaim--as we must over so much of human history--

"Ah! what avails the sceptred race And what the form divine?..."

But it must be quite intolerable when a story leaves us demanding, "What avail native innocence, truthfulness, chast.i.ty, when all these can be changed into guile and uncleanliness at the mere suggestion of a dirty mesmerist?"

The answer to this, I suppose, will be, "But hypnotism is a scientific fact. People can be hypnotized, and are hypnotized. Are you one of those who would exclude the novelist from this and that field of human experience?" And then I am quite prepared to hear the old tag, "_h.o.m.o sum_," etc., once more misapplied.

Limitation of Hypnotic Fiction.

Let us distinguish. Hypnotism is a proved fact: people are hypnotized.