When I first knew him Hall Caine was already in the full blaze of his remarkable popularity; that is to say, he was the most popular novelist-of the day. For a little while Miss Marie Corelli was a hot rival; but her rivalry, if exciting and spectacular, was brief. With readers in general Meredith was not in the running; nor was Hardy, at any rate until Tess unexpectedly boomed; and that was but a single success out of a series of comparative failures as judged by sales. Stevenson's great vogue was mostly posthumous. For more than thirty years Caine went from triumph to triumph in popular favour. His real popularity began with The Deemster when he was thirty-four, and culminated with The Master of Man when he was sixty-eight. Of the English edition of that book, the late Sidney Pawling told me, 100,000 copies were sold before publication.

To that glittering success many qualities contributed. For one thing Hall Caine was a first rate man of business. In the City he would indubitably have been among the financial magnates. As it was, he carried his activities into regions that had no connection with literature. As Voltaire made a fortune by army contracting, so Hall Caine made substantial profits as a dealer in Manx real estate.

Into authorship he carried the same alert mind, the same business acumen. His dealings with publishers (once he found his public) were those of one who knew his own value to the last farthing and could hold his own in a bargain. Then he understood (and cultivated) the power of the press. The material result is an estate of £250,000, which must be reckoned handsome for a man of letters.

Inevitably, perhaps, his methods exposed him to some sharp criticism and not a little ridicule. “The Boomster” he was nicknamed, and satirists did not stint their satire. What they forgot, or ignored, was the important fact that he “delivered the goods,” the goods which multitudes of people were eager to buy.

It was a familiar jibe that Hall Caine took himself and his writings with portentous seriousness. If the charge means that he put his whole heart and strength into his work, then it is true. Assuredly he was no light and facile writer. Those who have seen his manuscripts know that his first rough draft was a narrow strip of matter down the middle of large sheets, “a rivulet of text in a meadow of margin,” the meadow being meant for alterations and additions. Then the whole was rewritten and generally again rewritten. Even into his letters, of which I have scores, he carried the same system, and often his afterthoughts introduced marginally were the most interesting parts. He was a slow, laborious worker, his output at times being no more than two or three hundred words a day.

To one important matter in the novelist's craft he paid particular attention—construction. There he may have been influenced to some extent by his old friend, Wilkie Collins. Then he never shrank from exhibiting elemental passions in full, at times in unbridled play. Passion and drama, drama and passion, those were the foundations on which he built. The Manx people, who were mostly his dramatis personæ, resented his representations, asking indignantly why they should be held up to the world as sinners indulging recklessly in the sins of the flesh? Their anger troubled Caine: but did not in the least deflect him from his purpose.

After each of his later books he suffered a period of utter exhaustion. When The Master of Man was finished he said to me rather pathetically, “It is my last big book. I could not face the labour of another like it, Steuart.”

For many years, as his friends knew, he was intermittently engaged on an enormous Life of Christ. It was to be his magnum opus. Whether health conditions made it possible to realise that ambition remains to be seen. Certainly he was a student of the Bible. As critics have not failed to note, his plots are often taken from the Old Testament and given a modern setting; and to his sinners he dealt out punishments with quite Biblical severity.

In some respects the least sensitive of men, in others he was morbidly sensitive. I have seen him almost in tears over an attack, when the attacker, as he felt, hit below the belt. One or two illustrative instances may be given. Once a press interviewer visited him at Greeba Castle, and after hospitable entertainment left with several “interviews” in his pocket. Somehow it got about that Caine himself wrote them, and instantly there was a buzz of condemnation and ridicule. He came to me in a state of painful agitation. “See what they are doing,” he cried, “what am I to do?” After some talk to and fro I advised him to ignore the pother and take a holiday—out of England. He did, and quickly recovered his spirits. Now and then too he had differences with editors, with prelates and other people of importance who fancied they held the public conscience in fee; but he throve on controversy; indeed the hotter the debate the better it served his purpose.

Of his early experiences in Liverpool as architect's apprentice and amateur journalist he seldom spoke, and I got the impression he did not care to remember them. But he talked freely of his early London experiences, and particularly of his association with Rossetti. He would break into peals of laughter in telling how, as an after-dinner amusement Rossetti reeled off limericks of the most fantastic wit and originality. When, as sometimes happened, I suggested that his demi-god was not quite sane, he immediately got warm in defence. To him Rossetti was a great man, a great painter and a great poet.

Like most people of imagination, he enjoyed an occasional dip into Bohemianism. Once when I spent some hours with him in rooms he occupied high up in the Savoy Hotel he ordered tea, just a pot and cups; then from a cupboard he produced a box of biscuits, some buns, a shapeless clunk of butter and half a cake of noble proportions. On that mixed collation we fared deliciously, looking out on the wonderful sunlit panorama of London's huddled roofs and crowded river. He was then deep in a quarrel with a publisher over the film rights of an early novel. His early novels he sold outright for trifling sums. To their publisher they must have proved gold mines.

What of his place in literature? Will he live, will future generations recapture anything of the old enthusiasm for The Deemster, The Manxman, The Christian and their fellows? Here one does well to remember the American humorist's warning, “Don’t never prophesy onless ye know.” We don’t know. It may be that the baggage is too heavy for the light wings of fame. From the first, it must be admitted, many good bookmen could not read Hall Caine, or read him with sharp protests and reservations. On the other hand, equally competent judges have acclaimed him as a writer of spacious imagination and great emotional power, a creator of sagas on the grand scale. The future, supposing it to be interested, will dispose of these contradictions in its own way. Meanwhile it can be said with certainty that in the fiction of his own day he thoroughly understood the taste of the multitude, and ministered to it with a success which put all rivals out of court.