an 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 ha