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 shine 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 assembled 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 Titanic" 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