MR HALL CAINE'S HOME LIFE.

Otago Witness, Issue 1897, 12 June 1890, Page 35

MR HALL CAINE'S HOME LIFE.

A pleasant two-mile walk from Bexley station under the leafy elms of one of the prettiest country lanes in Kent brings you to the ivy-covered jhouse where the author of " The Deemster " is thinking out the plot of a new story. On passing the gate you speedily discover the novelist with a book or magazine, smoking a post-prandial cigarette in a bell-shaped military tent, erected under the shade of an apple tree. After being cordially welcomed by the most genial of hosts, you pass on to the house, over a delightful circular lawn with a picturesque clump of fir trees in the centre, and find yourself in an old-fa3hioneddiningroom with deeply-alcoved bay windows, through which you see an apparently limitless extent of orchard. It is at once evident that the host is a connoisseur in old oak. Apparently, if he can help it, he never allows his eye to rest on any article of furniture which does not carry the memory back for several generations, On the walls are photographs of Rossetti's unfinished sketches, with descriptive annotations in his own hand. Here are the chairs made for him by William Morris, there his choice old cabinet with its quaint panels carved in archaic English style. But perhaps the most valued of all these treasures is the ancient and richly-carved casket in which Rossetti used to preserve his manuscripts. It may, perhaps, have originally belonged to a monastery, where it might have been used as an offering-box. In later times it held "The Blessed Damozel," "Rose Mary," and all the other poems we know so well.

You rise somewhat reluctantly from Rossetti's easy chair on your host's invitation to smoke a cigar in bis literary workshop. A glance round makes you fall quite in love with the study. Your host draws attention to the view. To the south, away for 15 miles or so, over the laburnums and apple trees in blossom, are seen the Knockholt Beeches. On the west side there is first a line of splendid chestnut trees in full bloom, then a row of oaks, and in the distance Shooter's Hill, behind which the sun has just gone down. A nightingale in the shrubbery whistles a prelude to the music it will discourse when the shadows have deepened. With characteristic modesty, Mr Hall Came laughingly tells you that he owes his first lifick to his face. When only a smooth-faced stripling of 20 he had the good fortune to meet the late Lord Houghton at the house of Hawthorne's great friend Henry Bright, and his lordship was very much struck with the remarkable resemblance to Severn's wellknown portrait of Keats. Later on, the PreRaphaelites thought him a youthful reproduction of Burne Jones. As your eyes rest on the long auburn hair, the full eloquent eyes, and the animated features, you can easily understand how the impression was produced. But Mr Caine's vigorous conversation and deep interest in life show that he has now well nigh surmounted the influence of the somewhat languid school to which he was primarily attached. In answer to a remark from you that he has been fortunate in getting local colour for his novels, he tells you that his mother was a Cumberland woman, and his father a Manx farmer, and that m<my of his boyish days were spent in the Isle of Man. He was able to take the characters in " The Deemster " almost from life.

Mr Came is essentially a romanticist. Though his heroes are Cumbrian dalesmen, and his vihe en scene is chiefly on the farmstead and the fell, he is able to invest his characters with a dignity of action, a strength of feeling, and a nobility of moral purpose which have the effect of sealing them firmly alike in the reader's imagination and affections. He makes straight for the heart. Putting aside the fripperies and conventionalities of the drawing room and the boudoir, he invades Nature. He is not afraid to " handle " delicate matters of life and action, and to speak plain English in relation thereto ; yet his books have the effect of a moral tonic — no line of them unfit for the purest eye, no sentiment that would not grace the most fleckless manhood.

Mr Caine's romance is the romance of reali ty. He has recognised that fiction is the essence of fact, the improbable the reflex of the probable. He combines moral sanity with imaginative fervour, truth of emotion with strength of passion, and thus succeeds in that combination of the familiar with the unfamiliar, that blending of the common-place with the unusual, which must ever remain the essence of the highest romantic achievement. Mr Came may justly claim a place in the

noble list of authors who have Indubitably proved that it is possible to be artistic without being immoral, and to paint the heart's emotions without wallowing in the heart's riot. Every page of "The Shadow of a Crime " betokens sustained force and fervid imagination ; a book which no one can read without feeling himself in the presence of a writer who is intensely in earnest. " A Son of Hagar " marks an appreciable advance. Its action is more rapid, its effect more intensely absorbing ; the reader's attention is gripped at the outset, and never for a moment does the interest flag. "The Deemster" is perhaps even more distinctly a "romance" than either of the two works just noticed. The scene is the Isle of Man ; the period 1775. The extraordinary internal life of the "little nation" at that time is carefully pictured, and out of certain strange powerspossessed byjtlie bishop, as head of the last spiritual baronies of Man, the story derives its striking motif.

Mr Came may safely be urged to go with confidence on his way. In an age of that popular science and cheap philosophy which has wrought no small harm to literature proper, he has elected to base his stand on the humanities. Amid the conflict and clamour of an unsettled epoch, the desire for a reversion to the simple first principles of human nature is already apparent. In literature this reaction is manifest by the eager reception accorded to any book which, leaving aside lengthy disquisition and elaborate analysis, is content to tell a "story"; and in his present temper the reader cares little what form the story takes, if only it deai with human incident and emotion.