SIR HALL CAINE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20967, 2 September 1931, Page 10

SIR HALL CAINE.

If the death of Sir Hall Caine, which has occurred at the age of 78, had happened 25 years ago, it would have been an event of much more, moment than in the present year. He then had a vogue which ran high, and his activities and picturesque personality kept his identity more before the public than it has been in recent years. That does not mean that he has no following now, or that ho has gone far on the road toward being forgotten. But the giants of one generation do not necessarily retain their stature in the next. Sometimes they grow greater, sometimes they diminish. The factor that stamps Hall Caine as a popular novelist rather than one of the few great ones who will survive with probably growing reputations, is that with a lessening of his activities he disappeared much from notice. Yet in his time he was no inconsiderable figure, both as a novelist and a writer for the theatre. He caught the ear of the public and could count his enthusiastic admirers by many thousands. He can be classed as a mid-Victorian by the nature of his work as well as by reference to the years during which the greater part of it appeared. He came to the front when the results of popular education had become manifest, when writers discovered a great, eager and not especially critical public demanding to be entertained in their leisure hours rather than to have their intellects stimulated or their imaginations stirred. The defects which are now discovered in much of the literary output with which Hall Caine's novels can be classed are over-sentimentality and melodrama. A great deal that he wrote cannot escape the charge, nor is it free from a tendency to point to the moral to the detriment of its artistic qualities. It is asking much of a popular novelist to demand that he rise superior to the age in which he lives ; and the worst that can be alleged against Hall Caine is that he did not do this. Apart from what was purely ephemeral in his literary output, Sir Hall Caine has one solid achievement to his credit. He pioneered and made good use of the picturesque possibilities of the Isle of Man, this giving his writings what will probably prove their most lasting feature.