Complete works of hall c.., p.701
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 701
It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country’s battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shifts day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against the young manhood of my country.
THE PART PLAYED BY WOMAN
The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed continents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there has been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman’s part in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and undivided glory.
Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the State. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel, and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Every class of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of British womanhood, and it seemed to say, “We hate war as no man can ever hate it, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take our share in it.”
THE WORD OF WOMAN
But long before July 17, 1915, woman’s part in this war began. It began on August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary army sprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to account for it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we should have had no Kitchener’s Army, for “on the decision of the women, above everything else, lay the issues of the men’s choice.” {*}
* The Times.
It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundred homes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early days of the war, after the clear call went out over England, “Your King and Country need you.”
In the little house of a City clerk, married only a year before, the young wife is saying, “Yes, I think you ought to go, dear. It’s rather a pity, so soon after the boy was born... just as you were expecting a rise, too, and we were going to move into that nice cottage in the garden suburb. But, then, it will be all for the best, and you mustn’t think of me.”
Or perhaps it is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the day he has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and his wife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime but heartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. “Nearly time for you to go, Robert, if you are to get to the barracks by six.... Betty? Oh, no, pity to waken her. I’ll kiss her for you when she awakes and say daddy promised to bring her a dolly from France.... Crying? Of course not I Why should I be crying?... Good-bye then I Good-bye!...”
Or perhaps it is evening in a great house in Belgravia, and Lady Somebody is saying adieu to her son. How well she remembers the day he was born! It was in May. The blossom was out on the lilacs in the square, and all the windows were open. How happy she had been! He had a long fever, too, when he was a child, and for three days Death had hovered over their house. How she had prayed that the dread shadow would pass away! It did, and now that her boy has grown to be a man he comes to her in his officer’s uniform to say,... Ah, these partings! They are really the death-hours of their dear ones, and the women know it, although, like Andromache, they go on “smiling through their tears.”
With what brave and silent hearts they face the sequel too! The mother of Sub-Lieutenant So-and-So receives letters from him nearly every other week. Such cheerful little pencil scribblings! “Dearest Mother, I have a jolly comfortable dug-out now — three planks and a truss of straw, and I sleep on it like a top.” Or, perhaps, “You see they have sent me back to the Base after six weeks under fire, and now I have a real, real room, and a real, real bed!” The dear old darling! She puts her precious letters on the mantelpiece for everybody to see, and laughs over them all day long. But when night comes, and she is winding the clock before going upstairs, thinking of the boy who not so long ago used to sleep on her knees.... “Ah, me!”
And then the final trial, the last tragic test — the women are equal to that also. First, the letter in the large envelope from the War Office: “Dear Madam, the Secretary of State regrets to inform you that Lieutenant So-and-So is reported killed in action on... Lord Kitchener begs to offer you...” And then, a little later, from the royal palace: “The King and Queen send you their most sincere....” Oh, if she could only go out to the place where they have laid... But then the Lord will know where to find His Own!
Somebody in Paris said the other day, “No one will ever make our women cry any, more — after the war.” All the springs of their tears will be dry.
THE NEW SCARLET LETTER
It is brave in a man to face death on the battlefield, instantaneous death, or, what is worse, death after long suffering, after lying between trenches, perhaps, on the “no-man’s ground” which neither friend nor foe can reach, grasping the earth in agony, seeing the dark night coming on, and then dying in the cold shiver of the dawn. Yes, it is brave in a man to face death like that. But perhaps it is even braver in a woman to face life, with three or four fatherless children to provide for, on nothing but the charity of the State. Then battle is in the blood of man, and the heroic part falls to him by right, but it is not in the blood of woman, who shrinks from it and loathes it, and yet such is her nature, the fine and subtle mystery of it, that she flies to the scene of suffering with a bravery which far out-strips that of the man-at-arms.
On the breasts that have borne tens of thousands of the sons who have fallen in this war the Red Cross is now enshrined. It is the new scarlet letter — the badge not of shame, but glory. And “through the rolling of the drums” and the thundering of the guns a voice comes to us in this year of service and sacrifice whose message no one can mistake. Woman, who faces death every time she brings a man-child into the world, must henceforth know what is to be done with him. It is her right, her natural right, and the part she has taken in this war has proved it.
AND... AFTER?
Such is the drama of the war as I have seen it. How far it has gone, when it will close and the curtain fall on it none of us can say. With five millions already dead, twice as many wounded, one kingdom in ruins, another desolate from disease, the larger part of Europe under arms, civil life paralysed, social existence overshadowed by a mourning that enters into nearly every household; with a war still in progress compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; with a public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke (who thought £240,000,000 frightful) would have considered certain to sink the ship of State; with taxation such as our fathers never conceived possible — what will be our condition when this hideous war comes to an end?
It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least of the results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortunes will have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remains of our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thought we had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrial classes will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of human tragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor will more than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds and eating the bread of the children.
Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that after the longest and most exhausting wars the accumulation of the largest national debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nations have rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distress in these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although 1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herself quickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil War in America left poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have since amassed boundless wealth.
So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strength even after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic loss there will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps, of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanently disabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyond the physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthless destruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with the past; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss in the uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed to unite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part of Europe will be closed to some of us for the rest of our natural lives, and the world will contain more than a hundred millions fewer of our fellow-creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy.
WAR’S SPIRITUAL COMPENSATIONS
But, thank God, there is another side to the picture, both for young and old. If we are to be poorer we shall be more free. If we are to be weak and faint from loss of blood we shall rest at night without dread of that shadow of the sword which has darkened the sleep of humanity for forty years. If the countries of our enemies are to be closed to some of us in the future, the countries of our Allies will be more than ever open; nay, they will be almost the same to us as our own. France will be our France, Italy our Italy, Belgium our Belgium, and the next time I, for one, sit by the stove in the log cabin of a Russian moujik on the Steppes, I shall feel as if I were in the thatched cottage of one of my own people in our little island in the Irish Sea. So does blood shed in a common cause break down the barriers of race and language and bind together the children of one Father. The dead of our Allies become our dead, and our dead theirs. That Frenchman died to save my son; therefore he is my brother, and France is my country. “One’s country is the place where they lie whom we loved.”
Thus war, brutal, barbarous war, has its spiritual compensations, and pray heaven the present one may prove to have more than any other. If it does not, something will break in us after all we have gone through. Our faith in the invisible powers to bring a good end out of all this welter of blood and destruction has become a religion. It must not fail us if our souls are to live.
LET US PRAY FOR VICTORY
“It is good to pray for peace, but it is better to pray for justice. It is better to pray for liberty. It is better to pray for the triumph of the right, for the victory of human freedom.” {*}
* New York Times.
Then let us pray for victory over our enemies, having no qualms, no shame, and no remorse. We know that Christ pronounced a death sentence on war, and that as soon as Christianity shall have established an ascendancy war will cease. But if anybody tells us in the meantime that by Christ’s law we are to stand aside while a strong Power, which is in the wrong, inflicts frightful cruelties upon a weak Power which is in the right, let us answer that we simply don’t believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ’s law we are to permit ourselves to be trodden upon and trampled out of being by an empire resting on violence, let us answer that we simply don’t believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ’s law we are not to oppose the gigantic ambition of a “War Lord” who claims Divine right to stalk over Europe in scenes of blood, rapacity, and impurity, let us answer that we simply don’t believe it. If anybody tells us that Christ’s words, “Resist not evil,” were intended to say that spiritual forces will of themselves overcome all forms of war (including, as they needs must, crime, disease, and death) let us answer that we simply don’t believe it.
Such a clumsy and dangerous interpretation of Christ’s doctrine would put an end to government, to science, and to literature, and allow the worst elements of human nature to rule the world. It would also put Christianity on the scrap-heap — Christianity “with its benevolent morality, its exquisite adaptation to the needs of human life, the consolation it brings to the house of mourning and the light with which it brightens the mystery of the grave.” {*}
*Macaulay.
God forbid that the very least of us should say one word that would prolong the horrors of this terrible war. But it is just because we hate war that at the end of these 365 days we still think we must carry it on. It is just because our hearts are bleeding from the sacrifices we have made, and have still to make, that we feel they must be compelled to bleed.
Let us, then, pray with all the fervour of our souls for Belgium, for Poland, for Italy, for Russia, for France, but above all, for our own beloved country, mother of nations, mother, too, of some of the bravest and best yet born on to the earth, that as long as there remains one man or woman of British blood above British soil this England and her Empire may be ours — ours and our children’s.
The Biography
Caine, 1911
HALL CAINE, THE MAN AND THE NOVELIST by C. F. Kenyon
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER II. HALL CAINE’S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
CHAPTER III. 1879-1884
CHAPTER IV. THE SHADOW OF A CRIME AND A SON OF HAGAR
CHAPTER V. THE DEEMSTER
CHAPTER VI. HALL CAINE AS A DRAMATIST, SHORT-STORY WRITER, POET AND CRITIC
CHAPTER VII. THE BONDMAN
CHAPTER VIII. THE SCAPEGOAT
CHAPTER IX. THE MANXMAN
CHAPTER X. THE CHRISTIAN
CHAPTER XI. THE ETERNAL CITY
The original frontispiece
PREFACE
IN preparing this monograph on Mr Hall Caine, I have devoted much more attention to his earlier life than to those years during which he has been before the public as a novelist. The reasons for this are obvious, the chief one being that the early life of a famous man, with its struggles against circumstance, and its slow, oft-impeded progress towards success, is of much more interest to the general reader than that part of his life which is passed immediately under the gaze of all interested in him.
I have to express my thanks to Miss Esther Luffman for considerable assistance in Chapters VIL, VIII. and IX.; to Miss Brown, daughter of the Rev. T. E. Brown, for permission to use the letters printed on pages 115-17, 145-6, 182-3; to Miss Pinto Leite, the literary executrix of R. D. Blackmore, for permission to use the letters printed on pages 90-2, 94-7, 118-19; to Miss Harriett Jay, the literary executrix of Robert Buchanan, for permission to use the letter printed on pages 79-80; and to Mr A. P. Watt, the literary executor of Wilkie Collins, for permission to use the letters printed on pages 108-10.
These letters, all of them addressed to Mr Hall Caine, are used with his consent.
I owe my thanks to two early friends of Mr Hall Caine, the Rev. Wm. Pierce and Mr George Rose, for the recollections of the boyhood of my subject which give so much freshness and vitality to my narrative.
In preparing this volume I have sometimes spoken out of my personal knowledge of my subject, and it may be that without intending it I have appeared to commit him to my own opinions. If this be so, let me hasten to say that whatever the value of what I have said, it is everywhere and entirely my own, and the last thing I desire is to charge my own views to my subject, especially where in any degree they concern himself.
After I had finished my work I wished to submit the manuscript to Mr Hall Caine for the verification of facts, and I hoped that perhaps he would give me the benefit of a short prefatory note saying that these were correctly stated. But Mr Hall Caine could not be induced to meet the latter part of my request, and to the former part he would only respond so far as the facts concerned others than himself. I now feel that this decision was the only proper and possible one, but as paragraphs in literary papers have said that Mr Hall Caine has “revised” my biography of himself, I find myself reluctantly compelled to publish the following letter: —
“DEAR MR KENYON, — I have looked over the portion of your manuscript which you sent me, and have made a few comparatively unimportant changes. They concern what you say about my friends, living and dead, and therefore I have felt it to be my duty to set you right where I thought you were wrong. With what you say of myself, whether in the way of criticism or biography, I do not feel that I have any right to interfere, and I fear I must deny myself the pleasure of writing the Preface which you are good enough to request. If your view of my life and my books is to have any value for the public, it must stand as your own, without any criticism or endorsement from me.
