CHAPTER XV

SPEECHES AND LECTURES

Miss Marie Corelli’s career as a public speaker has been a short one, but, so far as it has gone, full of promise. She has a good enunciation and a sweet, penetrating voice; she takes the platform with the whole of her address clearly mapped out in her mind, her only aids to memory being a few notes scribbled on slips of paper, which at first glance look like a number of broad spills. Consulting these occasionally by way of mental refreshment, she says what she has to say with easy self-possession, never hesitating for lack of a suitable word or phrase.

The novelist’s first speech in public was made in connection with a bazaar at Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, in July, 1899. The announcement that Miss Corelli was to open the proceedings attracted a large number of people to this picturesque little town, which is situated some eight miles from Stratford-on-Avon, on the high road to Birmingham.

When Miss Corelli had mounted the improvised platform, she first thanked the organizers of the bazaar for the compliment that had been paid her in their invitation, and then proceeded as follows:

“I think we all know very well what a bazaar is. It is peculiar and distinctive; it is a way of charming the money out of our pockets. We wish it to be charmed to-day, because we always know when such money is obtained it is for a good purpose. Sometimes it is for a hospital, frequently it is for the restoration of a parish church. That is our object this afternoon. Now, there are some people who say that a parish church does not always require repair, but in this special case you cannot possibly offer that as an excuse for not spending your money. The parish church of Henley-in-Arden is in a very sad state; indeed, there are holes in the wooden floor through which rats and mice, quite uninvited, may come to prayers. Also the pavement of the central aisle is so broken up that it has literally risen in wrath, and become divided against itself. I hope this day you will come forward with your money and make the parish church a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is a very old building. It is, I believe, five or six hundred years old, and all that time it has been a place of prayer and praise. I am sure you will not allow it to suffer, or fall into neglect and ruin at your hands. Now, I want you to set your hearts to the tune of generosity this afternoon, and I want you to spend regardless of expense; I want you to be absolutely extravagant and reckless. The bazaar is full of very pretty things, some useful, some not useful, but all ornamental; and I can only recommend you to buy everything in the place. In the words of the Immortal Bard, whose very spirit permeates the whole of your beautiful county,

Leave not a wrack behind!

Set your hearts to the task, your wills to the deed, spend your money, and make the whole thing a great and triumphant success. Ladies and gentlemen, may your purses to-day be like this bazaar, which I have now the honor to declare open!”

An excellent example of what an address to workingmen should be, was delivered by Miss Corelli, at Stratford-on-Avon on January 6th, 1901. The lecture was entitled, “The Secret of Happiness.” After some preliminary observations on the birth of the New Century, Miss Corelli said:

“The twentieth century finds us all on the same old search, asking the same old question: How to be happy? Some of the distinguished persons who have written in the newspapers on this subject declare we have lost the art of being happy in the old simple ways, and that all the brightness and mirth which used to make our England ‘Merry England’ have gone forever. I think there is some little truth in these statements, and the reason is not very far distant. We think too much of ourselves and too little of our neighbors. There is nothing so depressing as a constant contemplation of one’s self, and the greatest moral cowardice in the world’s opinion comes from consulting one’s own personal convenience. It is just as if a man were asked to look at a beautiful garden full of flowers, and, instead of accepting the invitation, sat down with the Röntgen rays to look at his own bones. His bones concern no one but himself, and are a dull entertainment at best. To be truly happy we must set ourselves on one side, and think of all the good we can do, all the love we can show to our neighbors. This is our work and our business, and, by performing that work thoroughly well, we shall not lose the secret of happiness; we shall find it. The harming, the slandering, the over-reaching, the plucking down of our neighbors is not our business, and if we indulge in that kind of thing we shall never be happy. It is to a great extent true, as some of the newspapers tell us, that the twentieth century still finds us very far from the best ideals and hopes. War still hangs like a cloud across the country. Drink is still a curse, and large sections of trade are being taken from us by American and foreign rivals. This, if it goes on, will mean much ruin and misery and want to many of our English artisans and workmen, and this brings me to another point in the secret of happiness, which is Work. Not what we call scamp work; not work which drops its tools at the first sound of the dinner bell and runs across to the public-house, but good, conscientious, thorough work, of which the workman himself may be justly proud. Why should Americans take work which Englishmen, if they like, can do infinitely better? Simply because they are smart, cute, up to time, and take less early closing and fewer bank holidays. I am a very hard worker myself, and I am not speaking without knowing what I am talking about, and I say from my own experience--and I have worked ever since I reached my sixteenth year--that work is happiness. No one can take my work from me and therefore no one can take my happiness from me. I defy any one to upset, worry, or put me out in the least so long as I have my work to do. Take away my work, and I am lost. Show me a lazy, loafing person, man or woman, and I will show you a discontented grumbler, who is a misery in his or her home, and a misery to him or her self. Nothing is idle in God’s universe; the smallest observation will prove that. If there were early closing up there (_pointing upwards_) there would soon be an end to us all. The flower works, as it pushes its way through the soil to bud and blossom; the tree works as it breaks into beautiful foliage; the whole earth works incessantly to produce its fruits. The sun works; it never rests; it rises and sets with perfect regularity. In fact, everything we see about us in nature is in constant, steady, splendid, perfect work. The idle person is, therefore, out of tune with the plan of God’s creation and action. A great millionaire whom I know said to his son: ‘If you can’t find anything to do I will disinherit you, so that you may work as hard as I did. That will make a man of you.’ In this beautiful world, with a thousand opportunities of doing good every day and all day, and with the light of the Christian faith spread about us like perpetual sunshine, no one should be really unhappy. To your society, which has done so much good already, which is doing so much good, and will continue to do so much good, I would say, if I may be permitted to offer any advice: Cultivate among yourselves a spirit of cheerfulness, light-heartedness, and content, which shall spread the influence of moral and mental sunshine all through this dear little town in which you dwell. Let those who don’t belong to your society see that you can be merry and wise without needing any other stimulant than your own cheery natures, and that the Christian faith is to you a healthy and active working daily principle, the heart, life, and soul. Show all your friends--and enemies too--that you have the secret of happiness by holding up a firm faith in the goodness of God; by keeping the welfare of others always in sight, and loving your neighbor not only as yourself, but even more than yourself; and by carrying out whatever you have to do, no matter how trivial it be, so thoroughly and so perfectly that you can feel proud of it. Such pride is true pride, and thoroughly justifiable, and the independence that comes from work thoroughly well done is a noble independence. I would not change such independence as that to be a king and be waited on by courtiers all day long. To me the honest workman is a thousand times better than the king. The king can do no work. It is all done for him,--poor king! He can hardly call his soul his own. He is not allowed to put his own coat on, and do you call him an independent man! I call him a slave! I would rather have a man here in Stratford, who could do something of his own accord, turn out a piece of work, perfect--carving, finishing, or anything of that sort--and say, ‘That is mine! The king can’t do that, but I can!’ Money is nothing; pride, independence, and self-respect are everything; and money gained by bad work is bad money. You can’t make it anything else. Good work always commands good money, and good money brings a blessing with it. We are told that the danger of the twentieth century is greed of gold. Our upper classes are all craving for yet still more money, and as much money is spent in a single night on a dinner in London as would keep nearly all Stratford. We are told that England will lose her prestige through the money-craving mania of her people. More than one great empire has fallen from an excessive love of luxury and self-indulgence, but we will hope that no such mischief will come to our beloved England. At any rate, in this little corner of it--Shakespeare’s greenwood--where the greatest of thinkers, philosophers, and poets was born, and to which he was content to return, when he had made sufficient means, and die among his own people--here, I say, let us try and keep up high ideals of mutual help, love, and labor. Let us keep them up to their highest spirit. The secret of happiness is to hold fast to such simple, old-fashioned virtues as love of home, a life of simplicity, and appreciation of all the beautiful things of Nature, which are so richly strewn about us in Warwickshire, and never to lose sight of the best of all things--the great lesson of the pure Christian faith, the lesson which teaches us how the Divine sacrifice of self for the sake of others was sufficient to redeem the world! A happy New Year and a century of hope and good to all of you.”

In November, 1901, Miss Corelli delivered her first lecture in Scotland. It was called “The Vanishing Gift: an address on the Decay of the Imagination,” and was listened to with the greatest appreciation by a crowded audience of the members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, and their friends, numbering some four thousand persons.

Scotland has ever been a more literary country than England. A novel that fails in England often sells well in Scotland. Scotch people are very loyal to the magazines they like, and they always display a keen interest in literary ventures. Thackeray was a great favorite up there. “I have had three per cent. of the whole population here,” he wrote from Edinburgh in November, 1856, “If I could but get three per cent. of London!” Both Dickens and Thackeray received tangible tokens of regard from Edinburgh people, Thackeray’s taking the form of a silver statuette of “Mr. Punch,” designed as an inkstand.

It would seem that to-day, as then, Edinburgh is anxious to give substantial proof of its appreciation, for, a few days after Miss Corelli delivered her lecture, whilst ill-health detained her at the Royal Hotel, a deputation from the Philosophical Institution called and presented her with a massive silver rose-bowl.

The Chairman of the deputation, in asking her to accept the gift, made a very eloquent little speech, in which he laid emphasis on the fact that the last time a similar token of appreciation had been presented by the Philosophical Institution to any novelist had been in the case of Charles Dickens. Since then, no one, save Miss Corelli, had received the unanimous vote of the Committee as meriting such a tribute. The rose-bowl bears the following inscription:--

“_Presented to Miss Marie Corelli by the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, in grateful recognition of the Brilliant Address delivered by her on 19th November, 1901._”

It is worthy of note that the leading journal of Edinburgh, _The Scotsman_, made no allusion whatever to this presentation. The omission caused considerable annoyance to the Committee of the Philosophical Institution, and the Secretary made inquiry as to why their special compliment to Miss Marie Corelli had been passed over. The reply was that they “did not think it was necessary to mention it”; a particularly lame and inadequate answer, seeing that if such a handsome presentation on the part of a great Institution had been made to any well-known male author, the probabilities are that considerable importance would have been attached to the incident. As it was, _The Scotsman_ was judged to have committed itself to a singular error of prejudice in the omission, as also by stating that Miss Corelli’s crowded audience at the Queen’s Hall were “mostly women,” a perfectly erroneous statement, as by far the larger half of the assembly was composed of the sterner sex.

Miss Corelli, in the course of the lecture referred to, attributed the gradual dwindling of Imagination to the feverish unrest and agitation of the age in which we live. The hurry-skurry of modern life, the morbid craving for incessant excitement, breed a disinclination to think. Where there is no time to think, there is less time to imagine; and when there is neither thought nor imagination, creative work of a high and lasting quality is not possible. In the world’s earlier days, conceptions of art were of the loftiest and purest order.

“The thoughts of the ‘old world’ period are written in well-nigh indelible characters. The colossal architecture of the temples of ancient Egypt, and that marvelous imaginative creation, the Sphinx, with its immutable face of mingled scorn and pity; the beautiful classic forms of old Greece and Rome,--these are all visible evidences of spiritual aspiration and endeavor; moreover, they are the expression of a broad, reposeful strength--a dignified consciousness of power. The glorious poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures, the swing and rush of Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ the stately simplicity and profundity of Plato--these also belong to what we know of the youth of the world. And they are still a part of the world’s most precious possessions. We, in our day, can do nothing so great. We have neither the imagination to conceive such work, nor the calm force necessary to execute it. The artists of a former time labored with sustained and passionate, yet tranquil, energy; we can only produce imitations of the greater models with a vast amount of spasmodic hurry and clamor. So, perchance, we shall leave to future generations little more than an echo of ‘much ado about nothing.’ For truly we live at present under a veritable scourge of mere noise. No king, no statesman, no general, no thinker, no writer is allowed to follow the course of his duty or work without the shrieking comment of all sorts and conditions of uninstructed and misguided persons....”

Imagination is an artist’s first necessary. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, or the musician must be able to make a world of his own, and live in it, before he can make one for others. When he has evolved such a world out of his individual consciousness, and has peopled it with the creations of his fancy, he can turn its “airy substance” into reality for all time.

“Shakespeare’s world is real; so real that there are not wanting certain literary impostors who grudge him its reality, and strive to dispossess him of his own. Walter Scott’s world is real; so real that you have built him a shrine here in Edinburgh, crowded with sculptured figures of men and women, most of whom never existed save in his teeming fancy. What a tribute to the power of Imagination is that beautiful monument in the centre of Princes Street, with all the forms evoked from one great mind, lifted high above us, who consider ourselves ‘real’ people!”

The lecturer proceeded to deplore acts of vandalism such as that which caused “the pitiful ruin of Loch Katrine” in supplying Glasgow with water. Further on she lamented the gradual disappearance of “that idealistic and romantic spirit” which has helped to make Scotland’s history such a brilliant chronicle of heroism and honor.

In her powerful peroration the novelist graphically told of modern wonders which were imagined when the world was young.

“What, after all, is Imagination? It is a great many things. It is a sense of beauty and harmony; it is an instinct of poetry and prophecy. A Persian poet describes it as an immortal sense of memory which is always striving to recall the beautiful things the soul has lost. Another fancy, also from the East, is that it is ‘an instructive premonition of beautiful things to come.’ Another, which is perhaps the most accurate description of all, is that it is ‘the sundial of the soul, on which God flashes the true time of day.’ This is true, if we bear in mind that Imagination is always ahead of science, pointing out in advance the great discovery to come. Shakespeare foretold the whole science of geology in three words--‘sermons in stones’; and the whole business of the electric telegram in one line--‘I’ll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.’ One of the Hebrew prophets ‘imagined’ the phonograph when he wrote, ‘Declare unto me the image of a voice.’ As we all know, the marks on the wax cylinder in a phonograph are ‘the image of a voice.’ The airship may prove a very marvelous invention, but the imagination which saw Aladdin’s palace flying from one country to another was long before it. All the genii in the ‘Arabian Nights’ stories were only the symbols of the elements which man might control if he but rubbed the lamp of his intelligence smartly enough. Every fairy-tale has a meaning; every legend a lesson. The submarine boat in perfection has been ‘imagined’ by Jules Verne. Wireless telegraphy appears to have been known in the very remote days of Egypt, for in a very old book called ‘The History of the Pyramids,’ translated from the Arabic, and published in France in 1672, we find an account of a certain high priest of Memphis, named Saurid, who, so says the ancient Arabian chronicler, ‘prepared for himself a casket, wherein he put magic fire, and, shutting himself up with the casket, he sent messages with the fire day and night, over land and sea to all those priests over whom he had command, so that all the people should be made subject to his will. And he received answers to his messages without stop or stay, and none could hold or see the running fire, so that all the land was in fear by reason of the knowledge of Saurid.’ In the same volume we find that a priestess, named Borsa, evidently used the telephone; for, according to her history, ‘she applied her mouth and ears unto pipes in the wall of her dwelling, and so heard and answered the requests of the people in the distant city.’

“Thus it would seem that there is nothing new under the sun to that ‘dainty Ariel’ of the mind--Imagination.”

Early in 1902 Miss Corelli again gave an address in Scotland--this time at Glasgow, where one of the largest audiences ever known in that city assembled to hear her lecture on “Signs of the Times.” Every seat was occupied, and up to the last moment numbers were clamoring for only standing room. All reserved seats had been booked for nearly three weeks beforehand, and the extraordinary number of applications received proved that double the accommodation available could have been taken up.

The Address was undeniably daring and spirited, touching on various social aspects of the hour. The apathy of Parliament on certain pressing matters of home interest, the new rules of Procedure in the House, the inrush of undesirable aliens, the traitorous attitude of the pro-Boers, the crowding out of British industries by an excess of foreign competition, the German slanders upon our army, the change in the British uniform to the German model, and the flattering attentions of Germany towards America, were all touched upon by the novelist with a force and satire that were entirely new and unexpected. One of her best points was made in alluding to the words uttered by the Prince of Wales, on his return from his Colonial tour, in the course of his famous speech at the Mansion House, _i. e._, “The old country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her Colonial trade against foreign competition.”

She continued:

“I believe it is the first time in all the annals of English History that any Prince of Wales has deemed it necessary to tell the old country, which gave him his birth and heir-apparency, to ‘wake up’! It has been called a ‘statesmanlike utterance’ in many quarters of our own always courteous Press, but by our Continental neighbors it has been simply taken as a royal and official statement of British incompetency. It has even been said that no Prince of Wales should ever have admitted any possible likelihood of weakness in his own country. We must remember, however, that the warning of his Royal Highness was directed against foreign competition, and may have been intended to prepare British trade for the impending commercial designs of Germany upon South Africa.... If the British Lion is indeed sleeping, it is time to wake, but to some of us the Great Creature seems never to have slept, but to have been caught unsuspectingly in a trap of restrictive legislation and vested interests, and so bound hand and foot unawares. The Lion is a generous animal, but in certain old fables he is represented as being no match for the Fox. If, as the Prince of Wales says, the old country is to maintain her position of pre-eminence against foreign competition, she has some right to demand that she be not swamped and throttled by it under the very shelter of her own sea wall.”

Referring to what she satirically termed the evidence of our “love” for Germany, she pointed out that though Germans were guilty of one of the grossest insults ever recorded in history against our brave army, we, nevertheless, had clothed that army in the German uniform, and had made free and independent Tommy Atkins turn himself into a copy of his Teuton conscript brother. Not only that, we have accepted a German design for the new postage stamps. She also alluded to the rumor that the Coronation medal was to be struck from a German design.

Miss Corelli concluded with the following words:--

“The greatest, strongest, most splendid and hopeful ‘sign of the times’ is the advancing and resistless tide of Truth, which is approaching steadily--which cannot be kept back, and which in the first breaking of its great wave shall engulf a whole shore of weedy shams. A desire for Truth is in the hearts of the people: Truth in religion, Truth in Life, Truth in work. We are all aiming for it, pushing towards it, and breaking down obstacles on the way. And, because God is on the side of Truth, we shall obtain it; more speedily, perhaps, than we think--especially if we are not too weakly ready to be led away by the first Anti-Christ of religious, political, or social example.

“‘Truth, like the sun in the morning skies, Shall clear the clouds from the days to be; “Each for himself” is a Gospel of Lies, That never was issued by God’s decree.’”

Such are a few examples of Miss Corelli’s utterances in public. It is hardly necessary to add that these speeches were liberally punctuated with applause by those who had the privilege of listening to them.

If those who condemn the novelist so readily will only take the trouble to study what she has said, they cannot, if they wish to be regarded as honest men, deny her possession of many of the qualities that make for greatness. There are people who fear and dislike this lady because the attitude she takes up, on many questions, is significant of Battle. She hits very hard; her enemies wince beneath her blows, and revile her in wholesale terms because they cannot overcome her in fair combat. But newspaper sneers will do little to affect the judgment of the Public, which is, after all, the critic whose opinion is abiding and final.