Читать книгу Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman - R. S. Warren Bell - Страница 6

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“Keep a brave heart. You are steadily rising. People recognize that you are an artist working with love, not a machine producing novels against bank-notes, with no interest in its work. But keep a good heart, little lady. It is the way with people of imagination and keen sensibility to have their moments of depression.... I believe you will emerge out of all this with your brave little spirit, and I shall rejoice to see you successful, because I believe you will not be spoilt by success.”

Thus wrote George Bentley, the publisher, to Marie Corelli on November 15th, 1888. At that time only three of her books had appeared—“A Romance of Two Worlds,” “Vendetta,” and “Thelma”—and she was engaged upon the latter portion of “Ardath.” She was in the spring of her career, probing the Unknown and the Unseen, the Long Ago and the Future, with daring flights of fancy that had already set the world wondering.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bentley watched over his protégée with a care that was almost parental. A number of extracts from his wise and helpful letters will be given in the course of this work; and the reader will not fail to observe that there was very much more in Mr. Bentley’s attitude than a mere desire to coin pretty expressions for the benefit of a charming young woman possessed of undeniable genius. He could be very candid in his criticisms, when occasion demanded, but his tact was unfailing, and his sympathy boundless. He was one of an old school of which but few examples now remain. He was a personal friend as well as a publisher, one who could regard an author as something more than a creature with a money-producing imagination. He was of the school that produced Blackwood, Murray, Smith—the famous scions of those houses—and others whose names have ever been uttered with affection by those men and women of the pen who had dealings with them. One has only to peruse the correspondence which passed between John Blackwood, on the one side, and G. H. Lewes and George Eliot, on the other, to appreciate in full the power of encouragement and the influence a publisher possesses in his negotiations with a writer of promise.

Of a truth, Marie Corelli had need of such a friend, for her early career, as everybody knows, was thorny and troublous. A publisher greedy for a golden harvest might have prevailed upon her to write quickly, and, as a natural consequence, not at her best, for the certain gains which such work would produce in abundance. Mr. Bentley deprecated undue hurry. “You are now a person,” he says in one of his characteristic letters, “of sufficient importance not to have to depend on appearance or non-appearance. You have shown not only talent, but versatility, and that you are not a mere mannerist with one idea repeating itself in each book; consequently, when you next come, there will be expectation.”

In advising one possessed of so seemingly inexhaustible a fund of mental riches, Mr. Bentley was undertaking no light task. Moreover, he was offering counsel to a writer, who, to many people, was an absolute enigma.

For when Marie Corelli appeared as a novelist she was altogether new. She was something entirely fresh, and, to a certain extent, incomprehensible; as a result, she was reviled, she was told that she was impossible, she was treated as a pretending upstart: the critics would have none of her.

But her success with her first book, “A Romance of Two Worlds,” was due to itself, and not to either the praise or the censure of the press. Only four reviews of this romance appeared, each about ten lines long, and none of the four would have helped to sell a single copy. But the public got hold of it. People began to talk about it and discuss it. Then it was judged worth attacking, and the more continuous its sale the more it was jeered at by the critical fault-finders.

Marie Corelli did not invite adverse criticism. She was quite a girl, untried and inexperienced, and had, apparently, from her letters to her friends, a most touching faith in the chivalry of the press. “I hope,” she wrote to Mr. Bentley, “the clever men on the Press will be kind to me, as it is a first book [the ‘Romance’]; because if they are I shall be able to do so much better another time.”

But, much to her surprise, the clever men of the press bullied her as though she had been a practiced hand at literature, and abused her with quite unnecessary violence. She did not retort upon them, however. “Vendetta,” “Thelma,” “Ardath,” and other works were produced patiently in rotation, and still the abuse continued—and so did her success. It was only with the publication of “Barabbas” and the distinctly unfair comments that book received, that she at last threw down the gauntlet, and forbade her publishers to send out any more of her books for review.

This action practically put an end to the discussion of her works in the literary journals by critics with warped ideas of fair play. For they failed to remember that, though his draftsmanship may here and there display a flaw, an artist should be judged by the conception of his design—by his coloring—by the intention of his work as a whole.

Five years have elapsed since the one-sided truce was called; those critics, wandering by the bookshops, see people issuing therefrom bearing in their hands the hated volumes—the brain-children of the woman who had met them in unequal combat. They read in the papers of the gigantic sales of these works; they lift their hands in horror, and sigh for the gone days of authors who appealed but to the cultured few. So waggeth the world of letters; so arriveth that person to be trampled on—offend he or she the critics by ever so little—the New Writer.

It is manifestly unfair that a novelist should criticise novels; yet this is frequently done. It goes without saying that the novelist who devotes valuable time to reading and criticising the works of his brethren in art cannot be in very great demand, as fiction is paid for at a much higher rate than reviewing. That Miss Corelli’s earlier works were submitted for valuation to those engaged—if we may use a commercial phrase—in the same line of business, may account for the bitterness that characterized many of the notices. Let the critic criticise, and the novelist write novels; then, each attending to his trade, the new writer will receive fairer play.

The rough-and-tumble journey through the now defunct house of Bentley which “A Romance of Two Worlds” experienced, prompts us to question the advisability of appointing novelists to act as publishers’ “readers.” Quantities of manuscript pass through the hands of a publisher’s literary adviser, and in six weeks he may imbibe—he cannot help imbibing—enough ideas to set him up for six years. A novelist who spends a considerable portion of his lifetime weighing and sorting the raw material of other novelists, must find it a matter of great difficulty to reconcile his conscience with the performance of such duties.

It must often have occurred to the men who have so harshly criticised Miss Corelli’s works to demand of themselves a logical reason for her boundless popularity—a popularity that extends to every corner of the earth. “The Mighty Atom” has been published under the auspices of the Holy Synod in Russia, and “Barabbas” has been translated into Persian, Greek, and Hindustani. And these are but two instances of her universality. Why is Marie Corelli read the world over, while the authors upon whom many responsible judges of literature shower encomiums can claim but an Anglo-Saxon public, and not a tremendous one then?

It is because, primarily, her chief mission is to exploit, with knowledge, with conviction, and with limitless zeal, the most vital question of this or any age—man’s religion. Since the world was created this has been the chief motive of humanity’s actions. The Israelites, for taking to themselves false gods, were sold into bondage; thousands of years later, because the tomb of Christ was threatened, Christian Europe, putting aside international differences, arose in pious wrath and sent forth its men of the Red Cross to do battle with the infidels. In misguided zeal, and prompted by a morbid fanaticism, “bloody” Mary destroyed the peace of our own fair land, and earned for her memory undying execration by burning at the stake the unfortunates who differed from her in their religious views. The impiety of its rulers was the root of the evil which plunged France into the throes of a ghastly Revolution. Even on every coin of the realm at the present day,—on every sovereign that changes hands at race meetings, on every penny that the street arabs play pitch and toss with, we are reminded that the reigning monarch is the Defender of our “Faith.”

A simple belief in God pervades everything that Marie Corelli has written, and from this devout standpoint she views all those other things which constitute mundane existence—Love, Marriage, buying and selling, social intercourse, art, science, and education.

Her books abound in passages which bewail the fact that—to extract a phrase from the “Master-Christian”—“the world is not with Christ to-day.” Her sole weapons pen and paper, the author of that remarkable book is making a strenuous effort to dispel the torpor to which Christianity is gradually succumbing. The keynote of her work is sounded by Cardinal Bonpré, when he deplores the decay of holy living. “For myself, I think there is not much time left us! I feel a premonition of Divine wrath threatening the world, and when I study the aspect of the times and see the pride, licentiousness, and wealth-worship of man, I cannot but think the days are drawing near when our Master will demand of us account of our service. It is just the same as in the case of the individual wrong-doer; when it seems as if punishment were again and again retarded, and mercy shown,—yet if all benefits, blessings, and warnings are unheeded, then at last the bolt falls suddenly and with terrific effect. So with nations—so with churches—so with the world!”

Marie Corelli is bold; perhaps she is the boldest writer that has ever lived. What she believes she says, with a brilliant fearlessness that sweeps aside petty argument in its giant’s stride towards the goal for which she aims. She will have no half-measures. Her works, gathered together under one vast cover, might fitly be printed and published as an amplified edition of the Decalogue.

It is small wonder, then, that she has not earned the approbation of those critics who are unable to grasp the stupendous nature of her programme; they, having always held by certain canons, and finding those canons brusquely disregarded, retort with wholesale condemnation of matters that they deem literary heterodoxy, but whose sterling simplicity is in reality altogether beyond their ken. Fortunately, their words have failed to frighten off the public, which, ever loyal to one fighting for the right, has supported and befriended Marie Corelli in her dauntless crusade against vice and unbelief.

Other writers have doubtless written in a somewhat similar strain, and it has not been their fault that the woman who forms the subject of this biography has eclipsed all the worthy makers of such books who have preceded her. Power has been given her, and she has not proved false to her trust. Genius is Heaven-sent, to be used or abused according to the will of its possessor; let those so gifted beware lest they cast the pearls of their brain before swine, for of a surety there will come a day of reckoning when every genius, as well as every other man, shall be called upon to give an account of his stewardship.

Unlike the majority of her contemporaries, Marie Corelli does not subsist on a single “big hit.” She is a twelve-book rather than a one-book woman. It is a fortunate circumstance for a writer when people disagree in regard to his or her chef-d’œuvre. There are those—and their name is legion—who regard “Thelma” as Miss Corelli’s best book, while others—and their name, too, is legion—account “The Sorrows of Satan” the worthiest of her productions. The overwhelming success of the “Master-Christian” served somewhat to bedim the lustre of her former writings, but in many hearts the moving history of the sweet and unsophisticated Norwegian maid will always cause “Thelma” to hold chief sway.

“Barabbas,” at once the most scriptural and devotional of its author’s long list of publications, has won almost as great a popularity as “The Sorrows of Satan,” being now in its thirty-seventh edition. “The Mighty Atom,” of which nearly a hundred thousand copies have been sold, is regarded by the public with singular affection, many children, as Mr. Arthur Lawrence has told us in The Strand Magazine, sending Miss Corelli “all sorts of loving and kindly greetings” as a token of their sympathy with little Lionel and Jessamine. The turbulent and stormy progress of “A Romance of Two Worlds” through the sea of criticism has made this book more familiar to the ear than some of its successors, though its sale has not equaled that of half a dozen of its fellow-works.

Miss Corelli’s average book is about as long as two novels of the ordinary six-shilling size put together; but she has published some comparatively short stories—notably “Boy,” “Ziska,” and “The Mighty Atom,” as well as some brochures; to wit, “Jane,” a society sketch; “Cameos;” and her tribute to the virtues of “Victoria the Good.” “Boy,” though published about the time that the “Master-Christian” appeared, was accorded the heartiest of welcomes, being now in its forty-sixth thousand.

In days to come the “Master-Christian” and “The Sorrows of Satan” will, we venture to predict, be sufficient alone to preserve their author’s fame; and, for those who delight in a love-story, “Thelma” will constitute a perpetual monument to its creator’s memory.

Owing to the unique and unclassifiable nature of her productions, it is impossible to award Miss Corelli a definite place in the world of letters. It is under any circumstances a thankless task to arrange writers as one would arrange boys in a class—according to merit. There are the poets, the historians, the novelists, the humorists, and—the critics. Marie Corelli occupies a peculiarly isolated position. A novelist she is, in the main, and yet hardly a novelist according to cut-and-dried formulas; she is, unquestionably, a poet, for there is many a song in her books not a whit less sweet because it is not set in measured verse and line. So we may safely leave her place in the Temple of Fame to be chosen by the votes of posterity, for there is one critic who is ever just, who goeth on his “everlasting journey” with gentle but continuous step; who condemns most books, with their writers, to oblivion, but who saves a certain few.

And his name is Time.