is a force at work but it is strength at stress, and not
at ease. Meredith is not very greatly moved. He sympathises, but he
sympathises from the brain. His heart is right towards the world, but it
is cool. The man we are now dealing with has a passionate sympathy. He
is hot at heart, and he does not look on at the movement of mankind as
merely understanding it, and analysing it, and liking it,--and making
allowances for it. He is tumultuous and urgent, daring and impetuous,
eager to say a great word. His conceptions shake him. They are all
grandiose and huge. The great passions are awake in them--avarice, lust,
hate, love, god-like pity, supreme courage, base fear. The whole trend
of his mind is towards the heroic. He struggles to be in touch with the
actual, and he makes many incursions upon it, but Romance snatches him
away again, and claims him for her own. His native and ineradicable
concept of a work of art in fiction is a story that shall shake the
soul. This inborn passion for the vast and splendid in spiritual things
is always in strict subordination to a moral purpose. Here is the reason
for his hold upon the English-speaking people, which is probably, at
this moment, deeper and wider than that of any other living writer.

I do not deal in what I am now about to say with the critical adjustment
of relative powers, but simply with a question of temperament You may
draw a triangle, and at one of its extremes you may place Meredith, at
another Stevenson, and at another Hall Caine. At one extremity you have
an artist whose methods are almost purely intellectual, at the next you
have an embodiment of sympathetic receptivity, and at the third a man
whose forces are almost wholly emotional and dynamic. Stevenson's main
literary prompting was to say a thing as well as it could possibly be
said. Hall Caine's chief spur is a fiery impulse to a moral warning.

From the earliest stages of Hall Caine's literary career until now
his impulse has not changed, but he has made such a steady advance in
craftsmanship as could not be made by any man who did not take his work
in serious earnest. The faults of his first style still linger, but they
are chastened. He has the defect of his quality. In each of his books
he strives for an increasing stress of passion, a sustained crescendo; a
full and steady breeze for the beginning, and then a gale, a tempest,
a tornado. The story is always constructed with this view towards
emotional