Читать книгу Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman - R. S. Warren Bell - Страница 9

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In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an author’s first long manuscript is a poor and immature thing, which, owing to its inflammatory nature, were best devoted to fire-lighting purposes. But the aspiring scribbler, not being—from this point of view, at any rate—a utilitarian in his views, would as lief lose his right hand as behold his precious pages being put to the base wooing of wood and coals. Instead, he spends several pounds on having it typewritten, and then sends it forth upon its travels round the publishing houses. It comes back to him with exasperating regularity, until the author, at last realizing that his book does not appeal to publishers’ readers quite as vividly as it does to its creator, either (if he be wise) consigns it to the dust-bin, or (if he be unwise) pays one of the shark publishing firms to bring it out. Did he know that the wily fellows to whom he entrusts his work simply print enough copies for review purposes and a few more to put on their shelves, charging him the while for a whole edition, he would not part with his good money so readily! As it is, he has the satisfaction of seeing his story between covers, of sending it to his friends, of beholding his name in the “Books Received” corner of the daily papers, of knowing for certain that a copy, wherever else it may not be found, will always be supplied to students of fiction at the British Museum; and that is all.

It is needless to say this was not the course of procedure adopted by Miss Marie Corelli. She wrote voluminously in her school-days, and was as successful as most young girls are when they are serving their literary apprenticeship. She scribbled poetry, and was no doubt happy—as every youthful scribe should be—when she was rewarded for her labors by the mere honor of print.

But the time came—as come it always does to those who have the real gift of literary creativeness—when the young artist set a large canvas upon her easel and sturdily went about the task of filling it.

Of ideas, at such an age, there is an abundant flow. Meals are irksome and many hours are stolen from slumber; it is late to bed and early to rise; it is a hatred of social duties, and a period when everything else but the dream of fame is forgotten. Although we may take the foregoing to be fairly applicable to the average girl-author, Miss Corelli denies that the writing of “A Romance of Two Worlds” ever caused her to become “æsthetically cadaverous.” Her methodical habits may account for the fact that, in spite of much desk toil and hard thinking, she has always managed to keep a well-balanced mind in corpore sano.

“I write every day from ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, alone and undisturbed.... I generally scribble off the first rough draft of a story very rapidly in pencil; then I copy it out in pen and ink, chapter by chapter, with fastidious care, not only because I like a neat manuscript, but because I think everything that is worth doing at all is worth doing well.... I find, too, that in the gradual process of copying by hand, the original draft, like a painter’s first sketch, gets improved and enlarged.”

The “Romance,” then, according to this salubrious programme, entered quietly into a state of being. Miss Corelli was doubtful whether it would ever find a publisher: her first notion was to offer it to Arrowsmith, as a railway-stall novelette. Possibly the success of “Called Back” suggested the Bristol publisher, the title she first fixed upon, “Lifted Up,” being eminently suggestive of a shilling series. However, the manuscript never went westwards—a matter which good Mr. Arrowsmith has excellent cause to regret—for, in the interim, as a kind of test of its merit or demerit, Miss Corelli sent it to Bentley’s. The “readers” attached to that house advised its summary rejection. Moved by curiosity to inspect a work which his several advisers took the trouble to condemn in such singularly adverse terms, Mr. George Bentley decided to read the manuscript himself, and the consequence of his unprejudiced and impartial inspection was approval and acceptance.

Letters were exchanged, terms proposed and agreed upon. “I am glad that all is arranged,” wrote Mr. Bentley; “nothing now remains but to try to make a success of your first venture. The work has the merit of originality, and its style writing will, I think, commend it.”

A later letter from him says: “I expect our rather ‘thick’ public will be slow in appreciating the ‘Romance,’ but if it once takes, it may go off well.”

These extracts are interesting as showing the view taken by a veteran publisher—one who had been dealing with books and authors since early manhood—of a work by an absolutely unknown writer. His opinion of Miss Corelli’s powers is represented by a further letter dispatched to her in February, 1886: “I shall be perfectly ready to give full consideration to anything which proceeds from your pen, all the more readily, too, because I see you love wholesome thought, and will not lend yourself to corrupt and debase the English mind.... I have no greater pleasure than to bring to light a bright writer like yourself. After all, the Brightness must be in the author, and so the sole praise is to her.”

After his first visit to Miss Corelli, in July of that year, Mr. Bentley wrote as follows: “The afternoon remains with me as a pleasant memory. I am so glad to have seen you. I little expected to see so young a person as the authoress of works involving in their creation faculties which at your age are mostly not sufficiently developed for such works.”

Miss Corelli was allowed to retain her copyright, a fact which, though regarded by her as of slight import at the time, has since proved of some pecuniary advantage, seeing that the “Romance” is now in its twentieth edition.

The wise old publisher saw nothing attractive, explanatory, or salable in such a name as “Lifted Up,” so a new title was asked for. Scott once said there was nothing in a name, and certainly it did not matter what such a magician as he was, called a book, any more than it matters what name any firmly established author fixes upon; but a new writer can seldom afford to despise the gentle art of alliteration or the appellation which appeals to the eye, ear, and imagination.

Both Dr. Charles Mackay and his son George Eric were appealed to by the young beginner in that literary career to which they were both accustomed. Both demanded a reading of the manuscript that they might be guided by its contents as to the title. But Marie refused to show her manuscript to any one. She told her stepfather that he would only “laugh at her silly fancies.” She would not let George Eric read it, because she wanted to surprise him by quoting some of his poetry in the book from the “Love-Letters of a Violinist,” which title she, by-the-bye, had suggested. She said her story was “about this world and the next,” whereupon Dr. Mackay, who happened to be reading Lewis Morris’s “Songs of Two Worlds” at the time, suggested “A Romance of Two Worlds.”

So, as “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the book appeared. Up to this time Miss Corelli had naturally had no experience with reviewers. She had heard of them, of course, being a member of a literary household, and she had every reason to suppose that they would, in the ordinary course of events, write criticisms upon the “Romance.” In this expectation, however, she was doomed to disappointment. It received only four reviews, all brief and distinctly unfavorable. It may not be uninteresting, at this distance of time, to quote the criticism which appeared in a leading journal, as it is a very fair sample of the rest:

“Miss Corelli would have been better advised had she embodied her ridiculous ideas in a sixpenny pamphlet. The names of Heliobas and Zara are alone sufficient indications of the dulness of this book.”

Less could hardly have been said. Had the paper been a provincial weekly, and the writer a junior reporter to whom the book had been flung with a curt editorial order to “write a par about that,” the review could not have been more innocent of any attempt at criticism. It is highly apparent that the critic in question was not employed on the elbow-jogging terms known as “on space.”

As for the names, it would have been equally absurd to call a Chaldæan—descended directly from one of the “wise men of the East”—and his sister, by the Anglo-Saxon Jack and Jill; or, indeed, to apply to them European nomenclature of any description. The “Romance,” to quote its writer’s own description, was meant to be “the simply-worded narration of a singular psychical experience, and included certain theories on religion which I, personally speaking, accept and believe.”

What name, then, would this reviewer have chosen for the electric healer who is the principal male character in the work? Although he lived in Paris, it would hardly have been fair to christen him Alphonse, a name, by the way, strongly suggestive of a French valet. Clearly the critic here was unreasonable as well as idle.

With regard to the allegation as to dulness, we imagine that Miss Corelli’s most bitter detractors have never accused her of this most unpardonable crime in a maker of books. Her imagination may take flights exasperating in their audacity to the stay-at-home mind of Wellington Street; she may occasionally state her opinions a thought too didactically for people who are themselves opinionated; when she cries shame on vice and humbug, her pen may coin denunciations somewhat too hot-and-strong for the easy-going and the worldly; but, whatever she is, or whatever she does, she is never dull.

In spite of the meagre allowances in the review way dealt out by the press to “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the book prospered exceedingly. It is absurd to deny the power of the press—either for well or for ill—and Miss Corelli’s career is a striking proof of the soundness of this statement. The public recognized the power of the new writer, and the “Romance” sold by thousands; the press went out of its way to condemn the works that followed it, and thereby advertised them. “If you can’t praise me, slate me,” said an author once to an editor; and he spoke sagely. Luke-warm reviews are the worst enemies a writer can have; favorable reviews impress a certain number of book-buyers, book-sellers, and librarians; but bitingly hostile criticisms—tinged, if possible, with personal spite—are frequently quite as helpful as columns of eulogy.

In the case of “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the press did not help one way or the other, however. The public discovered the book for themselves, and letters concerning its theories began to pour in from strangers in all parts of the United Kingdom. At the end of its first twelve months’ run, Mr. Bentley brought it out in one volume in his “Favorite” series. Then it started off round the world at full gallop.

It was, as Miss Corelli has already related in a very frank magazine article, a most undoubted success from the moment Bentleys laid it on their counter. It was “pirated” in America; chosen out and liberally paid for by Baron Tauchnitz for the popular and convenient little Tauchnitz series; and translated into various Continental languages. A gigantic amount of correspondence flowed in upon the authoress from India, Africa, Australia, and America; and it may be added that the more recent editions of the “Romance” have contained very representative excerpts from this epistolary bombardment. One man wrote saying that the book had saved him from committing suicide; another that it had called a halt on his previous driftings towards Agnosticism; others that the book had exercised a comforting and generally beneficent influence over them. To quote only one correspondent: “I felt a better woman for the reading of it twice; and I know others, too, who are higher and better women for such noble thoughts and teaching.”

Now, if a book—however one may object to the writer’s convictions or disagree with them—has an undoubted influence for good; if it drives from some minds the black spectre of Doubt, makes good men better, bad men less bad, and all men think, then has not that book won a brave excuse for its existence? may it not be considered, as a work of art, infinitely the superior of a picture or a play or another book that leaves beholders or readers exactly where it found them?

Many people condemn Marie Corelli without reading her, on the old Woolly West principle of “First hang, then try!”

She has a big public, but it would be a thousand times bigger if only scoffers and doubters would really read these books by the authoress whom they hang without trial. Let them take a course of Marie Corelli during the long winter evenings, passing on from book to book—from the “Romance” to “Vendetta,” thence to “Thelma,” “Ardath,” “Wormwood,” “The Soul of Lilith,” and so on—in the order in which they were written. For the idle and listless, for the frivolous, for the irreligious, for the purse-proud, for the down-hearted and distressed, she will prove a veritable “cure,” for she is at once a moralist and a tonic. And whereas she is a literary sermon in herself to those who listen to other preachers without profit, so will she prove a profitable and restorative change of air to the busy, the honestly prosperous, the “godly, righteous, and sober” of her students. She is for all, and, where funds are scarce and shillings consequently precious, Free Libraries bring her within reach of everybody.

At a time when our leading dramatists and novelists drag their art in the mud for the sake of the lucre that may be found down there in plenty, it is refreshing and hope-inspiring to find that the writer with the largest public in the world, whose work has penetrated to every country and is thus not restricted to Anglo-Saxondom any more than a new type of rifle is, has ranged herself on the side of Right! Thus, owing to the wide-spread interest in her work, she is enabled to preach the gospel of her beliefs in all corners of the globe;—this, too, in spite of the fact that she is comparatively a newcomer in literature.

“My appeal for a hearing,” wrote Miss Corelli, when describing, in the pages of the Idler, the appearance of her first book, “was first made to the great public, and the public responded; moreover, they do still respond with so much heartiness and good-will, that I should be the most ungrateful scribbler that ever scribbled if I did not” (despite press “drubbings” and the amusing total ignoring of my very existence by certain cliquey literary magazines) “take up my courage in both hands, as the French say, and march steadily onward to such generous cheering and encouragement. I am told by an eminent literary authority that critics are ‘down upon me’ because I write about the supernatural. Neither ‘Vendetta,’ nor ‘Thelma,’ nor ‘Wormwood’ is supernatural. But, says the eminent literary authority, why write at all, at any time, about the supernatural? Why? Because I feel the existence of the supernatural, and, feeling it, I must speak of it. I understand that the religion we profess to follow emanates from the supernatural. And I presume that churches exist for the solemn worship of the supernatural. Wherefore, if the supernatural be thus universally acknowledged as a guide for thought and morals, I fail to see why I, and as many others as choose to do so, should not write on the subject.... But I distinctly wish it to be understood that I am neither a ‘Spiritualist’ nor a ‘Theosophist’.... I have no other supernatural belief than that which is taught by the Founder of our Faith....”

The plot of the story with which Miss Corelli won her spurs is simple in the extreme. The plot indeed, is a secondary matter, the main strength of the book being the Physical Electricity utilized by Heliobas—the medicine man of Chaldæan descent who has neither diploma nor license—in his cure of the young improvisatrice whose nerves have been shattered by over-devotion to musical study and whose vitality has been reduced to an alarmingly low ebb by her inability to recuperate, even in the soothing climate of the Riviera. An artist who has been saved from self-destruction and restored to absolute health by Heliobas, advises her to seek out this “Dr. Casimir” (as Heliobas is called in Paris) and put herself in his hands. This she does, with astounding results; for, from a miserable, woe-begone creature, all “palpitations and headaches and stupors,” Casimir’s potions and electrical remedies change her into an absolutely healthy woman, “plump and pink as a peach.” In Casimir’s house lives the physician’s sister, Zara, who, by means of the same medical and electrical properties, retains, at thirty-eight, the complexion and supple health of a girl of seventeen, being ever “as fresh and lovely as a summer morning.” During her stay with him, Heliobas expounds his “Electric Creed” to the young musician, and by her own wish, and by means of his extraordinary hypnotic powers—combined with a fluid preparation which he causes her to take—throws her into a trance, in the course of which “strange departure,” her soul is temporarily separated from her body and floats from the earth to other spheres. Guided by the spirit Azùl, it wanders to the “Centre of the Universe,” and, after being permitted to gaze upon the wonders and glories of the supernatural, returns to earth and once more takes its place in the work-a-day body from which it had been temporarily released. After Casimir has afforded the girl further explanations of his theories, she is admitted to the small circle of adherents to the Electric Creed. As a result of Casimir’s treatment she eventually finds herself not only in possession of complete health, but also equally perfected in her work; so much so, indeed, that while her improved looks are a delight to her friends, her playing fills them with wonder and delight.

The story ends pathetically. Just as the heroine is about to go forth into the world again, armed with new bodily vigor and tenfold her previous talent, her friend, the ever-youthful Zara, is killed by a flash of lightning. After attending the burial of his sister in Père-la-Chaise, Heliobas takes leave of his patient, and proceeds to Egypt to accustom himself to the solitude to which his sister’s death has condemned him. The reader is given to understand, however, that Heliobas and the young musician meet again later on under more cheerful conditions.

Such is a mere outline of this popular story, which is told throughout with admirable restraint and dignity, the language being moderate, and the arguments pithily expressed. The half-dozen minor characters are touched in with all the skill of an experienced novelist; and yet, when Miss Corelli set to work on this “Romance,” she was younger than her heroine is represented to be.

The actual penmanship occasioned by the writing of the book must have been as nothing compared with the very arduous thought and study connected with the mental generation of the views held by Heliobas and his fellow-believers. That the theories here exploited are well worth the consideration of all thoughtful persons, is proved by the intense interest the book has aroused in so many widely different and widely separated areas of civilization.

It ought to be remembered, too, that, at the time the “Romance” was published, the wonders of the X-rays had not been demonstrated, nor had wireless telegraphy become a fait accompli. Yet these were distinctly foretold in Marie Corelli’s first book, as also the possible wonders yet to be proved in certain new scientific theories of Sound and Color. It may instruct many to know that the theory of God’s “Central World” with which all the universe moves, is a part of the authoress’s own implicit belief in a future state of being.