sary 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 ha