H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/May 25, 1916

§1.

In the preceding articles of this series I put Hall Caine and Marie Corelli among American purveyors of the banal in prose fiction, along with E. Phillips Oppenheim, Harold Bindloss, and La Glyn. Both they and the country deserve the classification, cruel though it may seem, for they write with a glittering eye upon the American market; and the American market, in return of courtesy, offers them far richer usufructs than the market at home. In England, Caine is scarcely more than a public zany, and as for Mlle. Corelli, her last unshaken reader died with Queen Victoria; but on this side of the water they are still enormously popular, and the newspapers review their books with much gravity.

Caine, in particular, is a hero to the general. His trips across the Atlantic, always cunningly planned, bring him thousands of columns of free advertising. He is almost as well known to the newspaper reader as Inez Milholland or Henry Ford, and no less an expert upon the democratic fine arts than Abraham Erlanger, the theatrical manager, has pronounced him one of the greatest living authors.

§2.

In a London autograph catalogue I once came upon this item:

Gissing (Geo.) A. L. s. 2½ pp. £1 15s. I have been reading Hall Caine’s new book, which has had such prodigious success. Either I am bemused with envy, or the clamorous praise of the reviewers is utterly preposterous. I am unable to find a single point in the book which merits high laudation: it seems to me always commonplace and often vapid.

Half sound criticism—but the other half the sneaking envy which Gissing himself suspected. The fact is that the English discussions of Hall’s triennial volumes of passion, poison and petrifaction seldom do him justice. The piping of every Fleet street wit is against him. It is the fashion over there to make game of him, to scoff at his carefully manufactured thrills, to wax satirical over his prodigies of press-agenting, to appraise his art in terms of his whiskers, to dismiss him as a mountebank, a Barnum, a literary Roosevelt or Lloyd-George. Even the new Everyman’s Encyclopedia, otherwise a judicious work, speaks of him contemptuously as “the sparring partner” of La Corelli. Does he deserve all these superior sneers? A few of them, no doubt, but not all! Say that he is tawdry, that he wallows in the obvious, that he is apparently incapable of clear thinking, and you tell only the simple truth about him. But say that he is a bad writer; that he doesn’t know his trade; that he gets the public’s money by tricks requiring no honest skill, and you are unfair to him. In truth, he is a highly alert and long-headed artisan, a virtuoso of the tried and true, a master of the stock situation, the orthodox sentiment, the popular style. He knows exactly what the public wants, and what is more important, he knows exactly what it doesn’t want.

§3.

A typical Caine shocker is “The Woman Thou Gavest Me.” It is a sort of compendium or boiling down of all the sloppy novels of the last hundred years, plus the suave, oleaginous personality of Caine himself. It is a circus in which in the lions are caged and toothless, and all the acrobats are helped out with wires, and all the spangles are full of verdigris, and all the clowns tell jokes out of Joe Miller—but with a brisk and elegantly barbered ringmaster cracking the whip.

I cannot recall a single standard character or situation that is missing. See them troop into the ring: Bluebeard, Cinderella, Don Juan, Prince Charming, Hedda Gabler, Abelard and Héliose, Tom Jones, Col. Newcombe, King Lear, Jacob and Rachel, the Tombs Angel, the wicked earl, the cruel father, the honest jack tar, the wife in name only, the fussy family solicitor, the faithful old priest, the innocent divorcée, the worldly bishop, the love child, the adventuress, the huzzahing villagers.

Caine takes no chances: he wrings the vulgar with the problems and the pathos that have made them sweat and weep before; he takes them over all the old ground. Here are dear and ancient friends: the intercepted letter, the loveless marriage, the midnight flight, the innocent adultery. Here is the tested staff, the immemorial stuff, the sure stuff. And here it is with new frills, new magnetos, new sauces. A dash of mental telepathy, a pinch of white slavery, a drop or two of trust-busting, a garnish of polar exploration—and beheld The Duchess and Augusta Evans have become Hall Caine! Is the Montessori method missing? Does one seek in vain for German spies, the direct primary, the initiative and referendum? Have patience, beloved! Hall is still in the prime of life. He will write other books. Besides, he has a certain conservatism, a fastidious disinclination for the too new. A novelty must prove its worth before he embalms it in his amber.

§4.

“The Woman Thou Gavest Me” tells of the virtues and sufferings of Mary O’Neil, daughter of Daniel O’Neil, the harsh and beetle-browed old millionaire. Daniel makes his millions in America, but comes back to the Isle of Ellen to spend them. First he buys a castle, then he buys a titled son-in-law—to wit, the libidinous Lord Raa. Mary protests against marrying this singularly immoral man, but her Gothic father forces her into it. Her objections, however, continue unabated after the ceremony and she succeeds in resisting her husband’s disgusting advances. He consoles himself with Alma Lier, an American divorcée, and presently Mary herself falls in love with Martin Conrad, an Antarctic explorer.

The day before Martin sails for the Far South she visits his apartment. . . . A year later we find her in London, hiding from her husband and father. Her money has run out and she is trying to support herself and her child by slaving in a sweatshop. A cruel employer discharges her. What to do? . . . It is 9.30 in Piccadilly. A pale, sad woman joins the parade of Marguerite Gautiers. Discerning a tall, well-dressed man in the offing, she approaches him. As he halts, a street lamp suddenly illuminates his face. He is Martin Conrad, home from the South Pole! “Mary, Mary! . . . Don’t be afraid! It’s I!” Decent English, you will observe, even in a moment of supreme passion. Not “It’s me,” but “It’s I.”

So from end to end of the book. Here is the secret of Caine. He knows precisely what the snuffling fat ladies and talcumed backfisch want; he knows what they have always wanted. He doesn’t waste his time devising new situations. He doesn’t try to invent new characters. Instead, he devotes all his energies to describing the old situations and the old characters in a new and super-gaudy way. In other words, he depends upon techniques rather than upon the divine afflatus. And be gets away with it, to borrow a phrase from vaudeville, because he actually has that technique, because he is a first-rate journeyman fictioneer, because he really knows how to write. I defy any other popular novelist to tell the story of “The Woman Thou Gavest Me” without making it a screaming farce. Hall manages it without faltering; he lifts it over the bad places with admirable skill. . . .

Let us laugh at the dear fellow less and praise him more. Say what you will against him, he at least accomplishes the thing that be sets out to do—he at least reaches the public diaphragm with unerring stroke. A worker in paste and celluloid. The novelist foreordained for a people clad in near-silks and “mixed” woolens, and fed upon potted chicken made of bleached veal, and led by statesmen who steal one another’s platforms. The Munyon of prose fiction!

§5.

Love and hope! Hope and love! The Corelli is the only member of the Sacred College who dares to break the combination. She does it by substituting for hope a candid melancholy, straight from the boarding school. If you would see the process, don’t turn to her volumes of diabolism, but to the more gentle compositions of her later years—for example, to “Innocent.”

It is Briar Farm that here sees the beginning of the sad business—Briar Farm, that ancient and fruitful demesne. The current owner, it appears, is one Hugo Jocelyn, a bachelor of sixty-odd years and the last of the Jocelyns, or, more accurately, de Jocelins. When the story opens Hugo is floored by albuminnuria and arterio-sclerosis, and so he thinks it high time to tell his adopted daughter, Innocent by name, the story of her life. Innocent, it appears, has hitherto regarded Hugo as a widower, not as a bachelor, and herself as his issue. But not so. She was left on his hands, it appears, by a Mysterious Stranger. The tale this Stranger told was a specious one: he had a honeyed tongue and was as handsome as William G. McAdoo. The upshot was that Hugo, the poor rustic, agreed to hold the baby while the Stranger rode on to keep an appointment. Six months later came a couple of bank notes, marked “For Innocent.” . . . And that is her story.

§6.

Naturally enough, poor Innocent is greatly perturbed by it. Net only does it leave her vastly in old Hugo’s debt, with no means of repaying him, but in addition it makes impossible her marriage with young Robin Clifford, his nephew.

“What?” she exclaims. “Marry Robin now? How could I marry Robin? I’m nothing! I’m nobody! I have not even a name!”

Old Hugo, seeking to comfort her, only makes things worse. That is to say, he tells her fatuously not to take it so badly—that all the folks of the neighborhood look upon her as his illegitimate daughter. But this, of course, only makes her weep the more.

“It’s far worse!” she screams. “You’ve branded me with shame! . . . I will not be considered your illegitimate daughter any longer! It’s cruel of you to have made me live a lie!—yes, cruel!—though you’ve been so kind in other things. You don’t know who my parents were—you’ve no right to think they were not honest!”

Within the next few weeks come three incidents that double, triple and quadruple her sorrow. The first floors her that very night. She has gone to her room to weep her eyes out. Robin Clifford, hearing her sobs, decides to climb up the wisteria vine which grows beneath her window, hoping to divert her with a romantic love scene. But before he can got much beyond “Soft, what light through yonder,” etc., a noise is heard below, and he springs down to face the figure of a man. The man is Ned Landon, a neighboring villain who has long plotted to get Innocent into his clutches, and the first words Landon utters embody a plain accusation that Robin was aloft for no good purpose—in brief, that Innocent in not a lady.

The second blow falls a week or so later. It is the death of old Hugo. Then the third. It arrives in the person of Lady Blythe, a worldly, wicked woman with a “low, sweet, yet cold voice.” This Lady Blythe at once proceeds to business. She is none other, it appears, than Innocent’s own mother, and she confesses her shame with sneering, scoffing sang froid. Poor Innocent blanches, gasps and reels. (“You remind me,” says Lady Blythe maliciously, “of Sarah Bernhardt in ‘La Tosca!”) It is too, too much! It was bad enough to be illegitimate, but to be the offspring of this creature! . . .

§7.

I have brought you to page 193, and that, in truth, is as far as I could get myself. Let us jump to page 431. . . . Alas, more sorrow! Innocent is now dying. Robin, still faithful, reaches her room just in time to catch her as she expires. The fragile form he clasps to his bosom is “helpless, lifeless, breathless.” With a “great shuddering sob of agony,” he realizes “the full measure of his life’s despair.” Pierce Armitage (it turns out that he is Innocent’s father) has turned over a new leaf, and is

now paying his devotions to a Miss Leigh. But Miss Leigh, of course, refuses to marry him, and so he and she and old Lord Blythe make “a compact of affection such an is seldom known in this work-a-day world.”

Lord Blythe? Do I not mean Lady Blythe? Not at all. Lady Blythe, that vile one, has vanished from the scene. Perhaps the was killed on Gallipoli, fighting for her country. Perhaps—who knows?—she has run over to Biarritz with Viscount Jones, the wicked heir of the Earl of Maudlin. Again, perhaps she is in gaol. . . . I could go on perhapsing for column after column, but all to no purpose. The simple truth is that I do not know. . . .