“‘If thou hadst known, even in this thy day’” — he quoted dreamily—” Alas, alas! What of those who wilfully prefer ignorance to knowledge!”
“Speakest thou of the misguided who have scorned and rejected the Divine?” asked Simon— “Surely ere long they all will be convinced, — yea, even Caiaphas” —
“Thou simple soul! — thinkest thou that a liar can ever be convinced of truth? Nay— ’tis a miracle past all working! Through Caiaphas the stain of treachery will rest on the dead Judas; through Caiaphas will be denied the Resurrection, — through Caiaphas the very name of Christ will be banished from the Jewish annals. Bear thou this in mind, — that a so-called Priest of God did crucify God’s Messenger. ‘Twill help thee to more clearly read the future.”
“Knowest thou,” said Simon suddenly—” that Peter hath returned from Bethany and boldly preacheth Christ crucified and risen?”
“Ay, doth he preach?” queried Melchior, with satiric melancholy— “And hath he grown so sudden bold?
Even so doth he make late atonement! He hath a wondrous destiny — for half the world will grasp the creed devised by him who did deny his Master.”
Sighing, he turned away from the city view.
“’Tis God’s symbolic teaching,” he said, “which few of us may understand. A language unlettered and vast as eternity itself! Upon that hill of Calvary to which thou, Simon, turnest thy parting looks of tenderness, hath been mystically enacted the world’s one tragedy — ;the tragedy of Love and Genius, slain to satisfy the malice of mankind. But Love and Genius are immortal, and immortality must evermore arise; wherefore in the dark days that are coming let us not lose our courage or our hope. There will be many forms of faith, — and many human creeds in which there is no touch of the Divine, — keep we to the faithful following of Christ, and in the midst of many bewilderments we shall not wander far astray. The hour grows late, — come, thou first hermit of the Christian world! — let us go on together!”
They descended the hill. Across the plains they passed slowly; taking the way that led towards the mystic land of Egypt, where the Pyramids lift their summits to the stars, and the Nile murmurs of the false gods forgotten. They walked in a path of roseate radiance left by a reflection of the vanished sun, and went onward steadily, never once looking back, till their figures gradually diminished and disappeared. Swiftly the night gathered, and spread itself darkly over Jerusalem like a threatening shadow of storm and swift destruction; thunder was in the air, and only one pale star peered dimly forth in the dusk, shining placidly over the Place of Tombs, where, in his quiet burial-cave, Barabbas slept beside the withering palm.
The Sorrows of Satan
This novel was popular from the outset, selling more copies than any other previously published English novel – 50,000 copies in the first seven weeks after publication in 1895. George Bentley published the novel in Britain and there were various illicit editions in America, including one by Wessels of New York in 1897. The Sorrows of Satan was published in the “new” format of a one volume novel. By the time Methuen had taken over Corelli’s back catalogue, publishing in the years prior to the First World War, the novel was in its fifty-fifth edition or impression.
Never one to shy away from issues that interested her, Corelli explores sexual transgression in this novel with a commendable frankness and one that would have shocked readers at the time. There was a stage version of the novel, which drew an unfavourable review from George Bernard Shaw and a film version was made in 1917, starring twenty-nine-year-old Gladys Cooper, who was by then already an established stage and film performer, but went on to greater acclaim in a long film and stage career. The film was advertised as attracting “large crowds” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 1 September 1917). D.W. Griffith’s silent cinematic version starring Adolphe Menjou, appeared only after Corelli’s death in 1926.
Geoffrey Tempest is the archetypal impoverished novelist – “downright, cruelly, hideously poor” - striving in vain for success. Tempest has been made bitter and cynical by his dealings with affluent people, whom he finds ill-mannered and completely unaware of what real poverty means. He feels it more keenly because he was raised as a gentleman, only to find that his inheritance will have to go to the family’s many creditors. His novel, which is of the literary genre, rather dull and worthy in tone, is rejected by a kindly editor who advises Tempest to write some popular fiction if he wishes to have a writing career and the more risqué, the better. How the mighty have fallen! At this low point in his life, Tempest is stunned to receive a letter from a firm of lawyers informing him that he has inherited five million pounds from a distant relative. In the same postal delivery, Tempest also receives a letter from one Prince Lucio Rimanez, introducing himself via a mutual friend.
Tempest finds himself willingly propelled into making the acquaintance of Rimanez, whom he finds to be masterful in character and with the perfect combination of “beauty and intellectuality”; yet there is also “bitterness, disdain and cruelty” in his good looks and expression. Still reeling from his good news, Tempest readily accepts the assistance of Rimanez in moving back into the polite society that had abandoned him.
The two men are well matched; they both have contempt for women, especially those that endeavour to be more than an appendage and brood mare to their menfolk and wish to use their intellect to better themselves. Especially where Rimanez is concerned, women are cattle in a market, selling their sexuality to the highest bidder for the sake of security. This adulation of the alpha-male is a recurring theme in the story; for example, male poets are described as “effeminate, puling, unmanly humbugs”. Tempest pays a publisher to print and publicise his novel and he is confident that his efforts will have made his debut novel into a best seller; the early months passes in a whirl of spending, socialising and planning.
Tempest of course is besotted with his new life, but the odd seed of doubt sows itself in his mind about his captivating friend. Rimanez is deeply cynical, cold and overpowering and sometimes Tempest is glad when he can go out and socialise alone. He is delighted when Lady Sybil Elton accepts his marriage proposal and he saves her family from financial embarrassment by purchasing their family seat in Warwickshire – little realising he will have a rather unusual neighbour. Tempest seems all set for the life of ease and happiness he craved when he was poor, but will money be the only price he pays for fulfilling his every desire? Also, what of the all-pervasive, even insidious presence of Rimanez, the man that both draws people in and yet terrifies them at the same time? Has he been entirely honest about his background?
There are several themes in this book that tell us much about Corelli’s preoccupations. For some reason, despite being a fiercely independent woman herself, she had a vitriolic dislike of the first wave feminists, known then as New Women; she felt that the literature of the day, both fiction and poetry, had corrupted females and rendered them soulless, sexless and unmarriageable. Rimanez represents what Corelli saw as a prevailing cynicism and a moral malaise and self centredness. Ironically, the novel is now being cited by feminist scholars as a critique of contemporary opposition to early feminism. This was not at all what Corelli intended!
Keep careful watch in the narrative for one of the most narcissistic self portraits of an author ever included in a novel, which proves the point that many commentators have made about Corelli, that she had a huge sense of her own worth in every possible way.
The first edition
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
/> XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
The first edition’s title page
I
Do you know what it is to be poor? Not poor with the arrogant poverty complained of by certain people who have five or six thousand a year to live upon, and who yet swear they can hardly manage to make both ends meet, but really poor, — downright, cruelly, hideously poor, with a poverty that is graceless, sordid and miserable? Poverty that compels you to dress in your one suit of clothes till it is worn threadbare, — that denies you clean linen on account of the ruinous charges of washerwomen, — that robs you of your own self-respect, and causes you to slink along the streets vaguely abashed, instead of walking erect among your fellow-men in independent ease, — this is the sort of poverty I mean. This is the grinding curse that keeps down noble aspiration under a load of ignoble care; this is the moral cancer that eats into the heart of an otherwise well-intentioned human creature and makes him envious and malignant, and inclined to the use of dynamite. When he sees the fat idle woman of society passing by in her luxurious carriage, lolling back lazily, her face mottled with the purple and red signs of superfluous eating, — when he observes the brainless and sensual man of fashion smoking and dawdling away the hours in the Park, as if all the world and its millions of honest hard workers were created solely for the casual diversion of the so-called ‘upper’ classes, — then the good blood in him turns to gall, and his suffering spirit rises in fierce rebellion, crying out— “Why in God’s name, should this injustice be? Why should a worthless lounger have his pockets full of gold by mere chance and heritage, while I, toiling wearily from morn till midnight, can scarce afford myself a satisfying meal?”
Why indeed! Why should the wicked flourish like a green bay-tree? I have often thought about it. Now however I believe I could help to solve the problem out of my own personal experience. But ... such an experience! Who will credit it? Who will believe that anything so strange and terrific ever chanced to the lot of a mortal man? No one. Yet it is true; — truer than much so-called truth. Moreover I know that many men are living through many such incidents as have occurred to me, under precisely the same influence, conscious perhaps at times, that they are in the tangles of sin, but too weak of will to break the net in which they have become voluntarily imprisoned. Will they be taught, I wonder, the lesson I have learned? In the same bitter school, under the same formidable taskmaster? Will they realize as I have been forced to do, — aye, to the very fibres of my intellectual perception, — the vast, individual, active Mind, which behind all matter, works unceasingly, though silently, a very eternal and positive God? If so, then dark problems will become clear to them, and what seems injustice in the world will prove pure equity! But I do not write with any hope of either persuading or enlightening my fellow-men. I know their obstinacy too well; — I can gauge it by my own. My proud belief in myself was, at one time, not to be outdone by any human unit on the face of the globe. And I am aware that others are in similar case. I merely intend to relate the various incidents of my career in due order exactly as they happened, — leaving to more confident heads the business of propounding and answering the riddles of human existence as best they may.
During a certain bitter winter, long remembered for its arctic severity, when a great wave of intense cold spread freezing influences not alone over the happy isles of Britain, but throughout all Europe, I, Geoffrey Tempest, was alone in London and well-nigh starving. Now a starving man seldom gets the sympathy he merits, — so few can be persuaded to believe in him. Worthy folks who have just fed to repletion are the most incredulous, some of them being even moved to smile when told of existing hungry people, much as if these were occasional jests invented for after-dinner amusement. Or, with that irritating vagueness of attention which characterizes fashionable folk to such an extent that when asking a question they neither wait for the answer nor understand it when given, the well-dined groups, hearing of some one starved to death, will idly murmur ‘How dreadful!’ and at once turn to the discussion of the latest ‘fad’ for killing time, ere it takes to killing them with sheer ennui. The pronounced fact of being hungry sounds coarse and common, and is not a topic for polite society, which always eats more than sufficient for its needs. At the period I am speaking of however, I, who have since been one of the most envied of men, knew the cruel meaning of the word hunger, too well, — the gnawing pain, the sick faintness, the deadly stupor, the insatiable animal craving for mere food, all of which sensations are frightful enough to those who are, unhappily, daily inured to them, but which when they afflict one who has been tenderly reared and brought up to consider himself a ‘gentleman,’ — God save the mark! are perhaps still more painful to bear. And I felt that I had not deserved to suffer the wretchedness in which I found myself. I had worked hard. From the time my father died, leaving me to discover that every penny of the fortune I imagined he possessed was due to swarming creditors, and that nothing of all our house and estate was left to me except a jewelled miniature of my mother who had lost her own life in giving me birth, — from that time I say, I had put my shoulder to the wheel and toiled late and early. I had turned my University education to the only use for which it or I seemed fitted, — literature. I had sought for employment on almost every journal in London, — refused by many, taken on trial by some, but getting steady pay from none. Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah. Nobody wants him, — everybody despises him. His efforts are derided, his manuscripts are flung back to him unread, and he is less cared for than the condemned murderer in gaol. The murderer is at least fed and clothed, — a worthy clergyman visits him, and his gaoler will occasionally condescend to play cards with him. But a man gifted with original thoughts and the power of expressing them, appears to be regarded by everyone in authority as much worse than the worst criminal, and all the ‘jacks-in-office’ unite to kick him to death if they can. I took both kicks and blows in sullen silence and lived on, — not for the love of life, but simply because I scorned the cowardice of self-destruction. I was young enough not to part with hope too easily; — the vague idea I had that my turn would come, — that the ever-circling wheel of Fortune would perchance lift me up some day as it now crushed me down, kept me just wearily capable of continuing existence, — though it was merely a continuance and no more. For about six months I got some reviewing work on a well-known literary journal. Thirty novels a week were sent to me to ‘criticise,’ — I made a habit of glancing hastily at about eight or ten of them, and writing one column of rattling abuse concerning these thus casually selected, — the remainder were never noticed at all. I found that this mode of action was considered ‘smart,’ and I managed for a time to please my editor who paid me the munificent sum of fifteen shillings for my weekly labour. But on one fatal occasion I happened to change my tactics and warmly praised a work which my own conscience told me was both original and excellent. The author of it happened to be an old enemy of the proprietor of the journal on which I was employed; — my eulogistic review of the hated individual, unfortunately for me, appeared, with the result that private spite outweighed public justice, and I was immediately dismissed.
After this I dragged on in a sufficiently miserable way, doing ‘hack work’ for the dailies, and living on promises that never became realities, till, as I have said, in the early January of the bitter winter alluded to, I found myself literally penniless and face to face with starvation, owing a month’s rent besides for the poor lodging I occupied in a back street not far from the British Museum. I had been out all day trudging from one newspaper office to another, se
eking for work and finding none. Every available post was filled. I had also tried, unsuccessfully, to dispose of a manuscript of my own, — a work of fiction which I knew had some merit, but which all the ‘readers’ in the publishing offices appeared to find exceptionally worthless. These ‘readers’ I learned, were most of them novelists themselves, who read other people’s productions in their spare moments and passed judgment on them. I have always failed to see the justice of this arrangement; to me it seems merely the way to foster mediocrities and suppress originality. Common sense points out the fact that the novelist ‘reader’ who has a place to maintain for himself in literature would naturally rather encourage work that is likely to prove ephemeral, than that which might possibly take a higher footing than his own. Be this as it may, and however good or bad the system, it was entirely prejudicial to me and my literary offspring. The last publisher I tried was a kindly man who looked at my shabby clothes and gaunt face with some commiseration.
“I’m sorry,” said he, “very sorry, but my readers are quite unanimous. From what I can learn, it seems to me you have been too earnest. And also, rather sarcastic in certain strictures against society. My dear fellow, that won’t do. Never blame society, — it buys books! Now if you could write a smart love-story, slightly risqué, — even a little more than risqué for that matter; that is the sort of thing that suits the present age.”
“Pardon me,” I interposed somewhat wearily— “but are you sure you judge the public taste correctly?”
He smiled a bland smile of indulgent amusement at what he no doubt considered my ignorance in putting such a query. “Of course I am sure,” — he replied— “It is my business to know the public taste as thoroughly as I know my own pocket. Understand me, — I don’t suggest that you should write a book on any positively indecent subject, — that can be safely left to the ‘New’ woman,” — and he laughed,— “but I assure you high-class fiction doesn’t sell. The critics don’t like it, to begin with. What goes down with them and with the public is a bit of sensational realism told in terse newspaper English. Literary English, — Addisonian English, — is a mistake.”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 324