“Bother the papers; don’t let them bother you. If I lived next door to you, I should intercept them all.
* * * * * *
“It seems a growing fashion to use strong language, and certainly such language has been leveled at you. The fair sex in former days were held to command a chivalrous respect, which seems to be almost as much a thing of the past as the Crusades.”
This of October 28th, 1892, forms the last of the batch of extracts placed in our hands. Throughout his business associations with Miss Corelli, it is apparent that Mr. Bentley was everything that was kindly, tactful, and encouraging. The imaginative temperament is always a difficult one to deal with, and Mr. Bentley excelled himself in this respect. Even when he wished to bestow a mild rebuke he did so with an old-fashioned courtesy that is truly delightful and only too rare in these days of dictated, typewritten epistles.
There are other letters, but from these it will be only necessary to cull a sentence here and there. All the above-quoted communications, we should add, were in Mr. Bentley’s own handwriting.
Marie Corelli has always been a neat workwoman, and here, in a letter from her publisher, dated August 28th, 1886, we find a tribute to the perfection of her “copy:”—
“The printers report that, owing to the fewness of the corrections and the clearness with which they are made, revises will be unnecessary, which will be a great gain in time, as well as a saving of expense.”
Vice versâ, one calls to mind a tale of Miss Martineau’s about Carlyle, who literally smothered his proof-sheets with corrections. One day he went to the office to urge on the printer. “Why, sir,” said the latter, “you really are so very hard upon us with your corrections. They take so much time, you see!” Carlyle replied that he had been accustomed to this sort of thing—he had got works printed in Scotland, and —— “Yes, indeed, sir,” rejoined the printer, “we are aware of that. We have a man here from Edinburgh, and when he took up a bit of your copy, he dropped it as if it had burnt his fingers, and cried out, ‘Lord, have mercy! have you got that man to print for? Lord knows when we shall get done with his corrections.’”
It is evident that Mr. Bentley deemed his protégée—if we may so term her—capable of turning her pen in many directions. “I am not sure that you could not give us a fine historical novel,” he wrote in 1887, “if you got hold of a character which fascinated your imagination.”
In a letter dated May 7th, 1888, he refers playfully to “the little blue silk dress” which seems to have taken his fancy on a previous occasion; nor did he forget the young novelist’s birthday, for in a previous letter of the same year he declares that, if he were in London, he would “be tempted to cast prudence to the wind, even to the perilous East wind, to offer you my greeting on the first of May.”