Meanwhile the Mahdi has taken Naomi to her dying father; and over the deathbed of Israel they are betrothed. So ends _The Scapegoat_.
It will be seen that to carry out such a plot as this, with its almost miraculous crises, needs a high standard of literary skill. That the writer has succeeded there can be no doubt, for Naomi stands out, a creature of living flesh and blood, in whom nature and circumstance work to perfection through suffering. Israel’s character is followed in its development, with convincing truth: the sudden rush of joy that elates the man, the reaction that depresses him, the acts of mercy that soften him—all lead irrevocably to the final scene of a soul reconciled to its God. In this novel, as in all the best work of Mr Caine, the keynote is suffering, but suffering that of itself ennobles and purifies.
Whilst writing _The Scapegoat_, Mr Caine suffered severely from neurasthenia; his illness, of course, had effect upon his work, making it more sombre and gloomy than it might otherwise have been. When the work was published he received an urgent request from the Chief Rabbi asking him to visit Russia and write about the persecutions of the Jews in that country. He went in 1892, armed with signed documents from Lord Salisbury and the Chief Rabbi which were calculated to gain his admittance wherever he sought to go. The novelist was most warmly received wherever he went; but he was never able to make use of his experiences in the form of a novel. The subject, he felt, was altogether too vast for his experience: it would require years of study which he could not give. On his return to London, he lectured before the Jewish Workmen’s Club in the East End, “in a hall crammed to suffocation. I shall never forget that audience, the tears, the laughter, the applause, the wild embraces to which I was subjected by some of those poor exiles of humanity.”
In _The Manxman_, Hall Caine sounds the depths of humanity, and brings up the cry of living men and women to our ears. The sacred powerfulness of Love is his theme, the depths of spiritual degradation in which Love, twisted, distorted, makes its own punishment—the ennobling beauty of carrying out its great Unselfishness in simple fearlessness. And this is shown in the three characters, Kate, Pete and Philip, which, as they develop, touch every chord of sympathy in the reader’s gamut of sensibility.