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:
‘I soon found that Lucio did not intend to marry, and I concluded that
he preferred to be the lover of many women, instead of the husband of
one. I did not love him any the less for this; I only resolved that
I would at least be one of those who were happy enough to share his
passion. I married the man Tempest, feeling that, like many women I
knew, I should, when safely wedded, have greater liberty of action. I
was aware that most modern men prefer an amour with a married woman
to any other kind of _liaison_, and I thought Lucio would have readily
yielded to the plan I had preconceived.’
I do not know of any passage in any of the works so savagely assaulted
by Miss Corelli which goes beyond this; and I think it the more, and not
the less, objectionable, because the lady who wrote it can see so very
plainly how sinful her offence is when it is committed by other people.
XII.--THE AMERICANS
I suppose it will not be disputed that the glory of a nation’s
literature lies in the fact that it is national--that it reflects truly
the spirit and the life of the people with whom it is concerned, by whom
it is written, and to whom it belongs. It will not be denied either that
this final splendour has not yet descended on the literature of America.
The happy and tonic optimism of Emerson is a gift which could hardly
have been bestowed upon any man in an old country. It belongs to a land
and a time of boundless aspiration and of untired youth, and in virtue
of this possession Emerson is amongst the most characteristically
American of Americans. In the walks of fiction, with which alone we have
to deal in these pages, the Americans have been distinctively English
in spirit and in method (until within recent years), even when they have
dealt with themes chosen from their own surroundings. There is nowhere
in the world, and never was until now, and possibly never again will be,
such another field for the born student of human nature as is afforded
by the United States at this time. The world has never seen such an
intimate mixture of racial elements as may be found there. A glance
at the Newspaper Directory shows the variety and extent of the foreign
elements which, though in rapid process of absorption, are as yet
undigested. Hundreds on hundreds on hundreds of journals minister to
the daily and weekly needs of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Norwegians,
Swedes, Russians, Hungarians. There are Polish newspapers, and Armenian,
and Hebrew, and Erse and Gaelic. Sleepy old Spain is rubbing
shoulders with the eager and energetic races of Maine and New York and
Massachusetts. The negro element is everywhere, and the Chinese add a
flavour of their own to the _olla podrida_. So far no American writers
of fiction have seen America in the large. Bits of it have been
presented with an admirable art; but as yet the continent awaits its
Dickens, its Balzac, its Shakespeare, or its Zola.
Mr. Bret Harte has made California his own, but it is not the California
of to-day. ‘Gone is that camp, and wasted all its fire,’ but the old
life lives in some of its pages still, and will find students for a long
time to come. He has given us three, perhaps, of the best short stories
in the world, and a man who has done so much has a right to gratitude
and goodwill. Possibly there never was a writer who gave the world all
the essentials personal to his art so early, and yet so long survived
in the race for popularity. Bret Harte’s first book was something like
a revelation. In workmanship he reminds the reader of Dickens, but his
surroundings were wholly novel, and as delightful as they were strange.
He bewitched the whole reading world with ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’
and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat,’ and ever since those days he has gone
on with a tireless vivacity, telling the same stories over and over
again, showing us the same scenes and the same people with an apparent
unconsciousness of the fact of repetition which is truly astonishing.
The roads of dusty red and the scented pine groves come back in story
after story, and Colonel Starbottle and Jack Folinsbee look like
immortals. The vagabond with the melodious voice who did something
virtuous and went away warbling into the night is alive in new as in old
pages, in defiance of fatigue. Preternaturally murderous gamblers with a
Quixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhuman
splendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph of
their history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. The
oddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Since
he first delighted us he has scarcely troubled himself once to find
a new story, or a new type of character, or a new field for his
descriptive powers. He took the Spanish mission into his stock-in-trade,
and he has since made that as hackneyed as the rest. And yet there
remains this peculiarity about him--his latest stories, are pretty
nearly as good as his first. It would seem as if his interest had not
flagged, as if the early impressions which impelled him to write were
still clear and urgent in his mind. He is amongst the most singular of
modern literary phenomena. The zest with which he has told the same tale
for so many years sets him apart. It is as if until the age, say, of
thirty he had been gifted with a brilliant faculty of observation, and
had then suddenly ceased to observe at all. There seems to have come a
time when his musical box would hold no more tunes, and ever since then
he has gone on repeating the old ones. The oddness is not so much in
the repetition as in the air of enjoyment and spontaneity worn by the
grinder. He at least is not fatigued, and to readers who live from hand
to mouth, and have no memories, there is no reason why he should ever
grow fatiguing.
Mr. Henry James is a gentleman who has taken a little more culture than
is good for the fibre of his character. He is certainly a man of many
attainments and of very considerable native faculty, but he staggers
under the weight of his own excellences. The weakness is common enough
in itself, but it is not common in combination with such powers as Mr.
James possesses. He is vastly the superior of the common run of men,
but he makes his own knowledge of that fact too clear. It is a little
difficult to see why so worshipful a person should take the trouble to
write at all, but it is open to the reader to conjecture that he would
not be at so much pains unless he were pushed by a compulsory sense of
his own high merits. He feels that it would be a shame if such a man
should be wasted. I cannot say that I have ever received; from him any
supreme enlightenment as to the workings of that complex organ, the
human heart, but I understand quite definitely that Mr. James knows all
about it, and could show many things if he were only interested enough
to make an effort He is the apostle of a well-bred boredom. He knows all
about society, and _bric-à-brac_, and pictures, and music, and natural
landscape, and foreign cities, and if he could feel a spice of interest
in any earthly thing he could be charming. But his listless, easy
air--of gentlemanly-giftedness fatigued--provokes and bores. He is like
a man who suppresses a yawn to tell a story. He is a blend of genuine
power and native priggery, and his faults are the more annoying because
of the virtues they obscure and spoil. He is big enough to know better.
It is likely enough that to Mr. James the fact of having been bred in
the United States has proved a disadvantage. To the robuster type of
man of letters, to the Dickens or Kipling kind of man, it would be
impossible to wish better luck than to be born into that bubbling
pot-full of things. But Mr. James’s over-accentuated refinement of mind
has received the very impetus of which it stood least in need. He has
grown into a humorous disdain of vulgar emotions, partly because he
found them so rich about him. The figures which Bret Harte sees through
a haze of romance are to him essentially coarse. The thought of Mr.
James in association with Tennessee and Partner over a board supplied
with hog, flapjack and forty-rod awakes a bewildering pity in the mind.
An hour of Colonel Starbottle would soil him for a week. He is not made
for such contact. It is both curious and instructive to notice how the
too-cultured sensitiveness of a man of genius has blinded him to the
greatest truth in the human life about him. Born into the one country
where romance is still a constant factor in the lives of men, he
conceives romance to be dead. With stories worthy of a great writer’s
handling transacting themselves on every hand, he is the first
elucidator of the principle that a story-teller’s business is to have no
story. The vision of the sheet which was let down from Heaven to Peter
was seen in vain so far as he is concerned, but the story of that dream
holds an eternal truth for the real artist. Mr. James is not the only
man whose best-nursed and most valued part has proved to be destructive
With a little more strength he might have kept all his delicacies,
and have been a man to thank God for. As it is, he is the victim of an
intellectual foppery.
Mr. W. D. Howells has something in common with Mr. James, but he is of
stronger stuff--not less essentially a gentleman, as his books reveal
him, but more essentially a man. He has a sterling courage, and has
never been afraid of his own opinions. His declaration that ‘all the
stories have been told’ is one of the keys to his method as a novelist
A work of fiction is something which enables him to show the impingement
of character on character, with modifying effects of environment and
circumstance. His style is clean and sober, and his method is invariably
dignified. He has deliberately allowed his critical prepossessions to
exclude him from all chance of greatness, but within his self-set
limits he moves with a certain serene mastery, and his detail is finely
accurate.
Miss Mary Wilkins, who is a very much younger writer than any of the
three here dealt with, reminds an English reader both of George Eliot
and Miss Mitford. ‘Pembroke’ is the best and completest of her books. So
far as pure literary charm goes it would be difficult to amend her work,
but the suggestion of character conveyed is surely too acidulated. Such
a set of stubborn, self-willed, and uncomfortable people as are gathered
together in these pages could hardly have lived in any single village in
any quarter of the world. They are drawn with an air of truth which is
not easy to resist, but if they are really as accurately studied as they
seem to be Pembroke must be a place to fly from. It is conceivable that
the members of such a congregation might be less intolerable to each
other than they seem to the foreign outsider, but the ameliorating
effects of usage must needs be strong indeed to make them fit to live
with. For the most part they are represented as well-meaning folk; but
they are exasperatingly individual, all over sore corners, eager to
be injured at their tenderest points, and implacable to the person who
hurts them. In Pembroke a soreness of egotism afflicts everybody. Every
creature in the book is over-sensitive to slight and misunderstanding,
and every creature is clumsy and careless in the infliction of pain. It
is a study in self-centred egotism. People who have an opportunity
of knowing village life in the Eastern States proclaim the book a
masterpiece of observation.
Bret Harte, studying a form of life now extinct, which once (with
certain allowances made for the romantic tendency) flourished in the
West; Mr. Howells, taking micro-graphic studies of present-day life in
the great centre of American culture; Mr. James, with a clever, weary
_persiflage_ skimming the face of society in refined cosmopolitan
circles; and Miss Wilkins, observing the bitter humours of the Eastern
yokel, are none of them distinctively American either in feeling or
expression. Mr. Samuel L. Clemens--otherwise Mark Twain--stands in
striking contrast to them all. He is not an artist in the sense in which
the others are artists, but he is beyond compare the most distinct
and individual of contemporary American writers. He started as a mere
professional fun-maker, and he has not done with fun-making even yet,
but he has developed in the course of years into a rough and ready
philosopher, and he has written two books which are in their own way
unique. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the two best boys in the whole wide
range of fiction, the most natural, genuine, and convincing. They belong
to their own soil, and could have been born and bred nowhere else, but
they are no truer locally than universally. Mark Twain can be eloquent
when the fancy takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest and
plainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like an
American, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not the
exponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, excepting
Walt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a great
democracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, as
he displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves are
not reverend, and since its point of view is not one from which all
things are visible it seems occasionally overbold and crude; but the
creed it expresses is manly, and clean, and wholesome, and the man who
lives by it is a man to be admired. The point of view may be higher in
course of time, and the observer’s horizon widened. The limitations of
the mind which adopts the present standpoint may be found in ‘A Yankee
at the Court of King Arthur.’ Apart from its ethics, the book is a
mistake, for a jest which could have been elaborated to tedium in a
score of pages is stretched to spread through a bulky volume, and snaps
into pieces under that tension.