My Contemporaries In Fiction

by David Christie Murray

In ‘The Murder of Delicia’ we are made acquainted with another lady-writer who enjoys all the popularity of Miss Corelli and of ‘Mavis Clare,’ who has the genius and the eyes and the stature and the hair of both. ‘As a writer she stood quite apart from the rank and file of modern fictionists.’ ‘The public responded to her voice, and clamoured for her work, and as a natural result of this, all ambitious and aspiring publishers were her very humble suppliants. Whatsoever munificent and glittering terms are dreamed of by authors in their wildest conceptions of a literary El Dorado were hers to command; and yet she was neither vain nor greedy.’ One thanks God piously that yet she was neither vain nor greedy; but one can’t keep the mouth from watering. Ah! those wildest conceptions of a literary El Dorado! ‘Delicia’ gets 8,000L. for a book. May it be delicately hinted that this sum is only approached in the receipts of one living lady-writer, and that the lady-writer’s name is ———? Wild horses shall not drag this pen further.

Miss Corelli complains, in a preface to this recent work, that ‘every little halfpenny ragamuffin of the press that can get a newspaper corner in which to hide himself for the convenience of throwing stones,’ pelts every ‘brilliant woman’ with the word ‘unsexed.’ Honestly, I don’t remember the reproach being hurled at Mrs. Browning, or George Eliot, or Mrs. Cowden Clarke, or Charlotte Brontë, or Maria Edgeworth, or Mrs. Hemans. Miss Corelli tells us that the woman who is ‘well-nigh stripped to man’s gaze every night,’ and who ‘drinks too much wine and brandy,’ is not subjected to this reproach, whilst if another woman ‘prefers to keep her woman’s modesty, and execute some great work of art which shall be as good or even better than anything man can accomplish, she will be dubbed “unsexed” instantly,’ Where has Miss Corelli found the society of which these amazing things are true? Does anybody else know it? And where are the better works of art from woman’s hand than man can accomplish? ‘Aurora Leigh’ and the Portuguese Sonnets are at the top of feminine achievement, and Shakespeare is not dethroned. And here is a pearl of common sense: ‘To put it bluntly and plainly, a great majority of the men of the present day want women to keep them,’ This is Miss Corelli in her own person in her preface, and, ‘to put it bluntly and plainly,’ the statement is not true, or approximately true, or within shouting distance of the truth. And what of the ‘persons of high distinction who always find something curiously degrading in paying their tradesmen’? Are they commoner than persons of high distinction who meet their bills? Are they as common? Miss Corelli sweeps the board. She is angry because some people will not take her seriously, but whilst her pages are charged with this kind of matter, she cannot fairly blame anybody but herself. She burns to be a social reformer. It would be unjust to deny her ardour. But when she tells the tale of a penniless nobleman who lives on his wife’s money and breaks her heart, and assures us that ‘there are thousands of such cases every day,’ she undoes her own sermon by one rampant phrase of nonsense There are such men, more’s the pity, and they are the social satirist’s honest game There have been foolish people who thought that women unsexed themselves by doing artistic work, but they died many years ago, for the most part. There are men who want to marry rich women, and live lazy lives, but they are not ‘a great majority.’ Miss Corelli knows these things, of course, for they are patent to the world; but she allows zeal to run away with judgment. The rules for satire are the rules for Irish stew. You mustn’t empty the pepper-castor, and the pot should be kept at a gentle bubble only. There is reason in the profitable denunciation of a wicked world, as well as in the roasting of eggs.

But Miss Corelli has hit the public hard, and it is the self-imposed task of the present writer to find out, as far as in him lies, why and how she has done this. Miss Corelli’s force is hysteric, but it is sometimes very real. A self-approving hysteria can do fine things under given conditions. It has been the motive power in some work which the world has rightly accepted as great. In the execution of certain forms of emotional art it is a positive essential. Much genuine poetry has been produced under its influence. It is a sort of spiritual wind, which, rushing through the harp-strings of the soul, may make an extraordinary music. But the sounds produced depend not upon the impulse conveyed to the instrument, but on the quality and condition of the instrument itself. Without the impulse a large and various mind may lie quiescent. With the impulse a small and disordered spirit may make a very considerable sound. In the very loftiest flights of genius we discern a sort of glorious dementia. All readers have found it in the last splendid verse of ‘Adonaïs.’ It proclaims itself in Keats in the wild naïveté of the inquiry, ‘Muse of my native land, am I inspired?’ The faculty of the very greatest among the great lies in the existence of this inrush of emotion, in strict subordination to the intellectual powers. To be without it precludes greatness; to be wholly subject to its influence is to be insane. Miss Corelli experiences the inrush of emotion in great force, but, unfortunately for her work, and for herself, the sense of power which it inspires is not co-ordinate with the strength of intellect which is essential to its control.

Miss Corelli has ventured freely into the domain of spiritual things, and has dealt, with more daring than knowledge, with esoteric mysteries. The great reading public knows little of these matters, because, as a rule, they have been expressed by writers whose works are too abstruse to catch the popular ear. It is only when they are handled by writers of imaginative fiction that they become popularly known at all. In ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ Miss Corelli has earned a reputation for originality by advancing a theory which is older than many of the hills. It has been for ages a rooted religious belief, but it is wholly in conflict with the theological ideas which are taught in our churches and chapels, and has, therefore, a startling air of strangeness to the average church and chapel-goer.

The theory is thus expressed in Mr. C. G. Harrison’s lectures on ‘The Transcendental Universe’: ‘It is generally supposed that Satan is the enemy of spirituality in man; that he delights in his degradation, and views with diabolical satisfaction the development of his lower nature and all its evil consequences. The wide, and almost universal, prevalence of this mediaeval superstition only makes it all the more necessary to protest against it as a grotesque error.... It would probably be much nearer the truth to say that the degradation and suffering of mankind, for which the adversary of God is responsible, so far from affording him any satisfaction, afflict him with a sense of failure and deepen his despair of ultimate victory.’

This is, of course, the root idea of ‘The Sorrows of Satan,’ and if the theme had been handled with reserve and dignity a very noble book indeed might without doubt have been built upon it. But Miss Corelli has not had the power to confine herself within the limits of the severe and lofty conception of the old Theosophists. Her sorrowful Satan grows first melodramatic and then absurd. The notion that the great sad adversary of Almighty Goodness is settled in a modern London hotel, with a private cook of his own, and a privately engaged bath of his own, carries the reader away from the original conception to the burlesque—vulgar and flagrant—of the mystery-plays of the Middle Ages; and the devotion of supernatural power to the preparations for a suburban garden-party is purely ludicrous. Miss Corelli has seized the Theosophic thought, which in itself is far nobler and more poetic than the Miltonic, but she has not been strong enough to use it. She has fallen under the weight of her chosen theme, and the result is that her demoniac hero is at one time presented as a majestic and suffering spirit, and at another as a mere Merry Andrew.

The curious and instructive part of all this is that, if Miss Corelli had been gifted with any power of self-criticism, her ardour would have been damped, and any work she might have done would have suffered proportionately. Her work has hit the public hard, and it has done so because, of its kind, her inspiration has been genuine. The wind does not blow through the strings of a well-ordered instrument, but it blows, and however grotesque the sound produced may sometimes be, it is of a sort which is not to be produced by any mere mechanism of the mind. To the critical ear the tunes played in ‘Wormwood’ and ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ are not, and cannot be, agreeable. The writer, to speak in plain English, and without the obscurity of symbols, is the owner of genius on the emotional side, and is not the owner of genius, or anything approaching to it, even from afar, on the intellectual side. The result of this disproportion between impulse and power is, to the critical mind, disastrous; but it does not so make itself felt with the ordinary reader. It is rather an unusual thing with him to come into contact with a real force in books. He has not read or thought enough to know that the ideas offered to him with such transcendental pomp are old and commonplace. It is enough for him to feel that the writer understands herself to be a personage.

She succeeds in imposing herself upon the public because she has first been convinced of her own authority. Her inward conviction of the authority of her own message and her own power to deliver it is the one qualification which makes her different from the mob of writing ladies. Even when she deals with purely social themes the same air of overwhelming earnestness sits upon her brow. In a little trifle published in the November of 1896, and entitled ‘Jane,’ she goes to work with a quite prophetic ardour to tell a story almost identical with that related in a scrap of Thackeray’s ‘Cox’s Diary.’ The reader may find the tale in the second chapter of that brief work, where it is headed ‘First Rout.’ Thackeray tells his version of it with a sense of fun and humour. Miss Corelli tells hers with the voice and manner of a Boanerges.. Nothing is to be done without the divine afflatus, and plenty of it. The temperamental difference between the satirist and the scold is well illustrated by a large handling and a little handling of the same theme.

The point upon which it seems worth while to insist is this: That the mass of the reading public is always ready to submit itself to the influence of sincerity. It does not seem much to matter what inner characteristics the sincerity may have. In the case now under analysis the quality seems to resolve itself into pure self-confidence. Miss Corelli’s method of capturing the public mind is not a trick which anybody else might copy. It is the result of a real, though perilous, gift of nature—a gift which she possesses in something of a superlative degree. Nobody could pretend to such a gift and succeed by virtue of the pretence. Miss Corelli is, at least, quite serious in the belief that she is a woman of genius. She is only very faintly touched with doubt when she thinks that the people who are laughing at her are writhing with envy. She speaks, therefore, with precisely that air of authority to which she would have a right if her ideas with regard to her own mental power were based on solid fact.

So far we arrive at little more than the long-established truth that the unthinking portion of the public is not only longing for a moral guide, but is ready to accept anybody who is conscious of authority. It would be well if we could leave Miss Corelli here, but something remains to be said which is not altogether pleasant to say. In ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ many pages are devoted to the bitter (and merited) abuse of certain female writers who deal coarsely with the sexual problem. But Miss Corelli appears to think that she may be as frankly disagreeable as she pleases so long as she is conscious of a moral purpose. Whatever she may feel, and whatever estimable purposes may guide her, she has published many things which run side by side with her denunciation of her sister writers, and are as offensive as anything to be found in the work of any living woman. Take as a solitary example the following passage: