"Mason Croft" Miss Corelli’s Present Residence

(A Corner Glimpse in Winter)

{1}

{2} 

Copyright, 1903, by
George W. Jacobs & Company,
Published June, 1903
{3}

Preface

Miss Marie Corelli’s unique personality has aroused interest and curiosity among all classes of society, and we are aware that the present work will be diligently searched for intimate information regarding the subject of these pages. It behooves us, therefore, to remind those who peruse this volume that the writing of contemporary biography is a most delicate literary performance; so, while it has been our aim to set before the public as many particulars as possible concerning Marie Corelli the Woman—as distinct from Marie Corelli the Writer—it will be apparent to the least intelligent of our patrons that, in common courtesy to Miss Corelli, it is possible for us to publish only a limited number of personal minutiæ concerning the novelist during her lifetime.

In making a general survey of Miss Corelli’s various books, we have endeavored, in each case, to quote such passages as may be read with interest independently of the context, or such as tend to{4} explain the spirit animating the novelist whilst engaged upon the volume under treatment.

It has been our endeavor to keep this biographical study free from offense to any living person, or to the memory of any who have passed away. In cases where we have found it necessary to refer in vigorous terms to the words or conduct of certain individuals, we have been actuated solely by a desire to have justice done to Miss Corelli. And in this respect we prefer not to be regarded as her champions so much as “counsel” briefed for the defense of a woman who has had, and still has, to contend with a very great number of adversaries, not all of whom are in the habit of conducting their warfare in the open.

In conclusion, we beg to offer Miss Corelli our grateful thanks for permitting us to have access to letters, papers, and other documents necessary to authenticate our facts, as without such permission we could not have undertaken our task.

Thomas F. G. Coates,
R. S. Warren Bell.

March, 1903.{5}

Contents

Of the above Chapters, II, V, VIII, IX, XII, XIII, XVI, and XVII are by Thomas F. G. Coates; and Chapters I, III, IV, VI, VII, X, XI, XIV, XV and XVIII by R. S. Warren Bell.

Illustrations

{13}

MARIE CORELLI

The Writer and the Woman

CHAPTER I

THE HEROINE OF THE STORY

“Keep a brave heart. You are steadily rising. People recognize that you are an artist working with love, not a machine producing novels against bank-notes, with no interest in its work. But keep a good heart, little lady. It is the way with people of imagination and keen sensibility to have their moments of depression.... I believe you will emerge out of all this with your brave little spirit, and I shall rejoice to see you successful, because I believe you will not be spoilt by success.”

Thus wrote George Bentley, the publisher, to Marie Corelli on November 15th, 1888. At that time only three of her books had appeared—“A Romance of Two Worlds,” “Vendetta,” and “Thelma”—and she was engaged upon the latter{14} portion of “Ardath.” She was in the spring of her career, probing the Unknown and the Unseen, the Long Ago and the Future, with daring flights of fancy that had already set the world wondering.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bentley watched over his protégée with a care that was almost parental. A number of extracts from his wise and helpful letters will be given in the course of this work; and the reader will not fail to observe that there was very much more in Mr. Bentley’s attitude than a mere desire to coin pretty expressions for the benefit of a charming young woman possessed of undeniable genius. He could be very candid in his criticisms, when occasion demanded, but his tact was unfailing, and his sympathy boundless. He was one of an old school of which but few examples now remain. He was a personal friend as well as a publisher, one who could regard an author as something more than a creature with a money-producing imagination. He was of the school that produced Blackwood, Murray, Smith—the famous scions of those houses—and others whose names have ever been uttered with affection by those men and women of the pen who had dealings with them. One has only to peruse the correspondence which passed between John Blackwood, on the one side, and G. H. Lewes and George Eliot, on the other, to appre{15}ciate in full the power of encouragement and the influence a publisher possesses in his negotiations with a writer of promise.

Of a truth, Marie Corelli had need of such a friend, for her early career, as everybody knows, was thorny and troublous. A publisher greedy for a golden harvest might have prevailed upon her to write quickly, and, as a natural consequence, not at her best, for the certain gains which such work would produce in abundance. Mr. Bentley deprecated undue hurry. “You are now a person,” he says in one of his characteristic letters, “of sufficient importance not to have to depend on appearance or non-appearance. You have shown not only talent, but versatility, and that you are not a mere mannerist with one idea repeating itself in each book; consequently, when you next come, there will be expectation.”

In advising one possessed of so seemingly inexhaustible a fund of mental riches, Mr. Bentley was undertaking no light task. Moreover, he was offering counsel to a writer, who, to many people, was an absolute enigma.

For when Marie Corelli appeared as a novelist she was altogether new. She was something entirely fresh, and, to a certain extent, incomprehensible; as a result, she was reviled, she was told that she{16} was impossible, she was treated as a pretending upstart: the critics would have none of her.

But her success with her first book, “A Romance of Two Worlds,” was due to itself, and not to either the praise or the censure of the press. Only four reviews of this romance appeared, each about ten lines long, and none of the four would have helped to sell a single copy. But the public got hold of it. People began to talk about it and discuss it. Then it was judged worth attacking, and the more continuous its sale the more it was jeered at by the critical fault-finders.

Marie Corelli did not invite adverse criticism. She was quite a girl, untried and inexperienced, and had, apparently, from her letters to her friends, a most touching faith in the chivalry of the press. “I hope,” she wrote to Mr. Bentley, “the clever men on the Press will be kind to me, as it is a first book [the ‘Romance’]; because if they are I shall be able to do so much better another time.”

But, much to her surprise, the clever men of the press bullied her as though she had been a practiced hand at literature, and abused her with quite unnecessary violence. She did not retort upon them, however. “Vendetta,” “Thelma,” “Ardath,” and other works were produced patiently in rotation, and still the abuse continued—and so did her suc{17}cess. It was only with the publication of “Barabbas” and the distinctly unfair comments that book received, that she at last threw down the gauntlet, and forbade her publishers to send out any more of her books for review.

This action practically put an end to the discussion of her works in the literary journals by critics with warped ideas of fair play. For they failed to remember that, though his draftsmanship may here and there display a flaw, an artist should be judged by the conception of his design—by his coloring—by the intention of his work as a whole.

Five years have elapsed since the one-sided truce was called; those critics, wandering by the bookshops, see people issuing therefrom bearing in their hands the hated volumes—the brain-children of the woman who had met them in unequal combat. They read in the papers of the gigantic sales of these works; they lift their hands in horror, and sigh for the gone days of authors who appealed but to the cultured few. So waggeth the world of letters; so arriveth that person to be trampled on—offend he or she the critics by ever so little—the New Writer.

It is manifestly unfair that a novelist should criticise novels; yet this is frequently done. It goes without saying that the novelist who devotes{18} valuable time to reading and criticising the works of his brethren in art cannot be in very great demand, as fiction is paid for at a much higher rate than reviewing. That Miss Corelli’s earlier works were submitted for valuation to those engaged—if we may use a commercial phrase—in the same line of business, may account for the bitterness that characterized many of the notices. Let the critic criticise, and the novelist write novels; then, each attending to his trade, the new writer will receive fairer play.

The rough-and-tumble journey through the now defunct house of Bentley which “A Romance of Two Worlds” experienced, prompts us to question the advisability of appointing novelists to act as publishers’ “readers.” Quantities of manuscript pass through the hands of a publisher’s literary adviser, and in six weeks he may imbibe—he cannot help imbibing—enough ideas to set him up for six years. A novelist who spends a considerable portion of his lifetime weighing and sorting the raw material of other novelists, must find it a matter of great difficulty to reconcile his conscience with the performance of such duties.

It must often have occurred to the men who have so harshly criticised Miss Corelli’s works to demand of themselves a logical reason for her boundless{19} popularity—a popularity that extends to every corner of the earth. “The Mighty Atom” has been published under the auspices of the Holy Synod in Russia, and “Barabbas” has been translated into Persian, Greek, and Hindustani. And these are but two instances of her universality. Why is Marie Corelli read the world over, while the authors upon whom many responsible judges of literature shower encomiums can claim but an Anglo-Saxon public, and not a tremendous one then?

It is because, primarily, her chief mission is to exploit, with knowledge, with conviction, and with limitless zeal, the most vital question of this or any age—man’s religion. Since the world was created this has been the chief motive of humanity’s actions. The Israelites, for taking to themselves false gods, were sold into bondage; thousands of years later, because the tomb of Christ was threatened, Christian Europe, putting aside international differences, arose in pious wrath and sent forth its men of the Red Cross to do battle with the infidels. In misguided zeal, and prompted by a morbid fanaticism, “bloody” Mary destroyed the peace of our own fair land, and earned for her memory undying execration by burning at the stake the unfortunates who{20} differed from her in their religious views. The impiety of its rulers was the root of the evil which plunged France into the throes of a ghastly Revolution. Even on every coin of the realm at the present day,—on every sovereign that changes hands at race meetings, on every penny that the street arabs play pitch and toss with, we are reminded that the reigning monarch is the Defender of our “Faith.”

A simple belief in God pervades everything that Marie Corelli has written, and from this devout standpoint she views all those other things which constitute mundane existence—Love, Marriage, buying and selling, social intercourse, art, science, and education.

Her books abound in passages which bewail the fact that—to extract a phrase from the “Master-Christian”—“the world is not with Christ to-day.” Her sole weapons pen and paper, the author of that remarkable book is making a strenuous effort to dispel the torpor to which Christianity is gradually succumbing. The keynote of her work is sounded by Cardinal Bonpré, when he deplores the decay of holy living. “For myself, I think there is not much time left us! I feel a premonition of Divine wrath threatening the world, and when I study the aspect of the times and see the{21} pride, licentiousness, and wealth-worship of man, I cannot but think the days are drawing near when our Master will demand of us account of our service. It is just the same as in the case of the individual wrong-doer; when it seems as if punishment were again and again retarded, and mercy shown,—yet if all benefits, blessings, and warnings are unheeded, then at last the bolt falls suddenly and with terrific effect. So with nations—so with churches—so with the world!”

Marie Corelli is bold; perhaps she is the boldest writer that has ever lived. What she believes she says, with a brilliant fearlessness that sweeps aside petty argument in its giant’s stride towards the goal for which she aims. She will have no half-measures. Her works, gathered together under one vast cover, might fitly be printed and published as an amplified edition of the Decalogue.

It is small wonder, then, that she has not earned the approbation of those critics who are unable to grasp the stupendous nature of her programme; they, having always held by certain canons, and finding those canons brusquely disregarded, retort with wholesale condemnation of matters that they deem literary heterodoxy, but whose sterling simplicity is in reality altogether beyond their ken. Fortunately, their words have failed to frighten off{22} the public, which, ever loyal to one fighting for the right, has supported and befriended Marie Corelli in her dauntless crusade against vice and unbelief.

Other writers have doubtless written in a somewhat similar strain, and it has not been their fault that the woman who forms the subject of this biography has eclipsed all the worthy makers of such books who have preceded her. Power has been given her, and she has not proved false to her trust. Genius is Heaven-sent, to be used or abused according to the will of its possessor; let those so gifted beware lest they cast the pearls of their brain before swine, for of a surety there will come a day of reckoning when every genius, as well as every other man, shall be called upon to give an account of his stewardship.

Unlike the majority of her contemporaries, Marie Corelli does not subsist on a single “big hit.” She is a twelve-book rather than a one-book woman. It is a fortunate circumstance for a writer when people disagree in regard to his or her chef-d’œuvre. There are those—and their name is legion—who regard “Thelma” as Miss Corelli’s best book, while others—and their name, too, is legion—account “The Sorrows of Satan” the worthiest of her productions. The overwhelming success of the “Mas{23}ter-Christian” served somewhat to bedim the lustre of her former writings, but in many hearts the moving history of the sweet and unsophisticated Norwegian maid will always cause “Thelma” to hold chief sway.

“Barabbas,” at once the most scriptural and devotional of its author’s long list of publications, has won almost as great a popularity as “The Sorrows of Satan,” being now in its thirty-seventh edition. “The Mighty Atom,” of which nearly a hundred thousand copies have been sold, is regarded by the public with singular affection, many children, as Mr. Arthur Lawrence has told us in The Strand Magazine, sending Miss Corelli “all sorts of loving and kindly greetings” as a token of their sympathy with little Lionel and Jessamine. The turbulent and stormy progress of “A Romance of Two Worlds” through the sea of criticism has made this book more familiar to the ear than some of its successors, though its sale has not equaled that of half a dozen of its fellow-works.

Miss Corelli’s average book is about as long as two novels of the ordinary six-shilling size put together; but she has published some comparatively short stories—notably “Boy,” “Ziska,” and “The Mighty Atom,” as well as some brochures; to wit, “Jane,” a society sketch; “Cameos;” and her{24} tribute to the virtues of “Victoria the Good.” “Boy,” though published about the time that the “Master-Christian” appeared, was accorded the heartiest of welcomes, being now in its forty-sixth thousand.

In days to come the “Master-Christian” and “The Sorrows of Satan” will, we venture to predict, be sufficient alone to preserve their author’s fame; and, for those who delight in a love-story, “Thelma” will constitute a perpetual monument to its creator’s memory.

Owing to the unique and unclassifiable nature of her productions, it is impossible to award Miss Corelli a definite place in the world of letters. It is under any circumstances a thankless task to arrange writers as one would arrange boys in a class—according to merit. There are the poets, the historians, the novelists, the humorists, and—the critics. Marie Corelli occupies a peculiarly isolated position. A novelist she is, in the main, and yet hardly a novelist according to cut-and-dried formulas; she is, unquestionably, a poet, for there is many a song in her books not a whit less sweet because it is not set in measured verse and line. So we may safely leave her place in the Temple of Fame to be chosen by the votes of posterity, for there is one critic who is ever just, who goeth on his “ever{25}lasting journey” with gentle but continuous step; who condemns most books, with their writers, to oblivion, but who saves a certain few.

And his name is Time.{26}

CHAPTER II

MARIE CORELLI’S CHILDHOOD—EARLY INFLUENCES—LITERARY BEGINNINGS—THE MACKAYS—FATHER AND SON

In explanation of an unannounced and unexpected afternoon visit in 1890, Mr. W. E. Gladstone said: “I came because I was curious to see for myself the personality of a young woman who could write so courageously and well, and in whose work I recognize a power working for good, and eminently calculated to sway the thoughts of the people.”

Such were the veteran statesman’s words—well remembered by a friend of the novelist’s who was present at that eventful meeting.

This young woman was Marie Corelli, the novelist, whom so many lesser men have abused, because, unlike Gladstone, they have not studied her work, or have done so only with the determination to find fault.

The baby girl for whom so distinguished a career was destined, was adopted, when but three months old, by Dr. Charles Mackay, that excellent journalist, poet, song writer, and author. The love be{27}tween Dr. Mackay and his adopted daughter was one of the closest and most sweet of domestic experiences. When reverses and suffering came to the man of letters, his joy and consolation was in the careful training of the much-loved little girl; and in his closing years he had the satisfaction of knowing that she had fulfilled his hopes and achieved success.

To the high character of Dr. Charles Mackay must be attributed the chief influence in the formation of the child’s ideas; a glance, therefore, at the career of that gentleman cannot fail to be of interest. A native of Perth, Charles Mackay was born March 27th, 1814. His father, George Mackay, was the second son of Captain Hugh Mackay, of the Strathnavar branch of the Mackay clan of which Lord Reay is the chief. Charles Mackay received his earlier education in London, and, subsequently proceeding to a school at Brussels, made a special study of European languages. He early commenced writing for Belgian newspapers, and, also whilst a youngster, sent poems to English newspapers, which readily published them. A volume of “Songs and Poems” followed; and then, returning to England, Mr. Mackay became a contributor to The Sun, assistant sub-editor of The Morning Chronicle, and editor of The Glasgow{28} Argus. He was married in 1831, and by his first wife had three sons—Charles, Robert, and George Eric, and also a daughter, who died when she was twenty-two years of age. Of the sons, Charles is still living, being resident in America with his wife and family. Robert is dead, but is survived by a son and a daughter. Of George Eric Mackay, the second of the three sons, more will be told anon.

During Charles Dickens’s brief editorship of the London Daily News, a number of verses by Mackay were published in that newspaper, and attracted much notice and praise. They were subsequently republished in a volume as “Voices from the Crowd.” A selection of these verses was set to music, and quickly caught the ear of the people, “The Good Time Coming” reaching a circulation of well-nigh half a million.

In 1848 Mr. Mackay became a member of the staff of The Illustrated London News, and in 1852 was appointed editor of that journal. Here, through the enterprise of Mr. Ingram, the song-writing capacities of Mr. Mackay were put to good use, and a number of musical supplements of The Illustrated London News were produced. “Songs for Music” afterwards appeared as a volume in 1856. The pieces included such prime favorites as “Cheer, Boys, Cheer!” “To the West! To the West!{29}” “Tubal Cain,” “There’s a Land, a dear Land,” and “England over All.” Set to the taking melodies of Henry Russell and others, these songs, it may truly be said, have been sung the world over, wherever the English language is spoken.

Mackay severed his connection with The Illustrated London News in 1859, and in the following year started The London Review, which did not succeed. Failure was the fate, too, of another periodical, Robin Goodfellow, founded by him in 1861. During the American Civil War, Mackay was the special correspondent of the New York Times. Dr. Mackay’s efforts in prose were as numerous and as interesting as his verses. His “Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs from 1830 to 1870,” is a classic and a literary treat to every one who reads it; for herein is set forth a graphic picture of the life and times of that most interesting period, not only in England, but in the United States. His relations with Greeley and with President Lincoln were of altogether exceptional interest. Few men had experiences so varied and interesting as those of Charles Mackay—his degree, by the way, was that of LL. D. of Glasgow University—and few men were so capable as was he of vividly describing what he did, and saw, and heard.{30}

In addition to writing many volumes of songs and ballads himself, it should be mentioned that Mackay compiled the well-known “A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry.”

From the year 1870 he engaged in little regular work, though he undertook interesting and valuable researches into Celtic philology. His closing years were—through ill-health and age—a period of financial reverses, but the gloom was brightened by the presence of the pet child of his adoption. He worked on till the last, being engaged during the very week of his death in writing two articles, one for Blackwood’s Magazine, the other for The Nineteenth Century.

When his adopted daughter’s somewhat brief school-days were over, she returned home well fitted to assist Dr. Mackay in his literary work. She was already on familiar terms with his study and his books. A good many of the baby days were spent in the Doctor’s study, and as an infant there were evidences that the mind of the little one was of a thoughtful and inquiring bent. She was considered almost too inquiring by those governesses who guided her earliest lessons, religious subjects always having a peculiar attraction for her. “Little girls must be good and try to please God,” one governess impressed upon her; and the chil{31}d’s wondering reply was: “Why of course; everybody and everything must try to please God, else where would be the use of living at all?”

Babies—when they are good—always seem somewhat akin to angels, and the “Rosebud”—as Mackay called his adopted girl—always had a perfect belief not only in their existence, but in their near presence. The poet especially encouraged her faith in them. The “Rosebud” always believed angels were in her bedroom at night, and on her once saying that she could not see the angel (whom she fully expected) in her room, the Doctor answered: “Never mind, dearie! It is there, you may be sure; and if you will behave just as if you saw it, you will certainly see it some day.”

Passed chiefly in the country and abroad, the first ten years of Marie Corelli’s life went by pleasantly enough. Some hours daily were devoted to lessons; others to play, and most of these amongst the flowers that she has always loved. And as much time was spent, not over lesson books, but over those works of a nature to be understood by a child which she found in the Doctor’s library, and listening to stories, witty and wise, of Dr. Mackay’s former friends and literary associates. Many, indeed, had been these friends—Dickens and Thackeray, Sir Edwin Landseer and Douglas Jerrold, to{32} name but a few. He had known many men of light and leading in his day, and to the little girl who played in his study he delighted to recount reminiscences of them. Through him she learned to love some of his old friends as if she had known them personally.

Those were days that had much to do with the moulding of the character of the future novelist. There were no child playmates for little Marie, and the naturally studious bent of her mind was greatly affected by her environment. It gave her thought and wisdom beyond her years. This absence of child companions may or may not be advantageous; it all depends upon the circumstances. Victoria, who became Queen of England, had no child companions, and often in later years dwelt upon the fact with regret. Yet who would say they would have had any alteration in the character and doings of our late sovereign? The loss to a child of that child-companionship which most enjoy may be very great; but there are compensations.

Those who have studied the productions of Marie Corelli with understanding of the spirit which has animated her work would not, we think, wish that anything should have been different. As to the reading of her early years, it was quite exceptional, as reading with children goes. She not only{33} heard of the sayings and doings of Dickens, Thackeray, Jerrold, and such, but had read many of their works before she was ten; had not only read, but understood a great deal of them, having a loving tutor to make matters easy for her. She took great interest in histories of times and peoples, and learned to sympathize with the workers. Dr. Mackay’s poems were all familiar to her. So were the works of Shakespeare and Scott and Keats. Poetry was one of her chief delights, while instrumental music appealed to her as did the rhythm of song. The Bible, and especially the New Testament, was always her greatest friend in the world of books. And so, when it was deemed well to send her away for more systematic educational training than that of the sweet home-life, it was a little maiden of unusual knowledge who went to a convent in France to receive further tuition.

Peculiarly did the convent school-life commend itself to the studious mind of the child. The quietude and peacefulness of this holy retreat appealed very greatly to her contemplative and imaginative mind. The Doctor had instilled into her a strict regard for truth and sincerity, a reverence for sacred things, and a desire to follow in spirit and in truth the teachings of Christ. Meditating on New Testament matters, she at one time had a curious{34} idea of founding some new kind of religious order of Christian workers, but this never subsequently took definite shape.

A great happiness which the convent provided was a grand organ in the chapel. At this, when schoolfellows were indulging in croquet, tennis, and other games, the young girl would sit, sometimes for hours at a time, playing religious songs and improvising harmonies. In several of the novels that were written in after years there are references to the organ and its soothing influences. Miss Corelli possesses remarkable musical talents, this power of improvisation amongst them, and her intimate friends to-day often have the pleasure of listening to her performances. Dr. Mackay had recognized that her musical ability was of exceptional order, and, as his financial losses had been such that he was aware he would not be able to provide for his adopted daughter, he determined that she should endeavor to win her way in the musical profession.

With this object in view the convent training was specially devoted to the development of her music, and with such thorough care were her studies conducted, that she still retains the skill then acquired upon organ, piano, and mandolin, and her voice is both sweet and powerful.{35}

Both as instrumentalist and vocalist Miss Corelli could have been sure of a large measure of success. Principally she loves the old English and Scotch ballads; listening to her as she sings such songs to her own accompaniment in her dainty drawing-room at Mason Croft, it is pleasant to observe how very feminine she is, how paramount is the Woman in her nature.

That the young girl was ambitious goes without saying. During her holidays from school, she wrote the score of an opera, which was called Ginevra Da Siena. About the same time she produced numerous verses and short poems which brought high praise from that competent judge, Dr. Mackay. Moreover, she wrote in her very young days three sonnets on Shakespearean plays, these being approved, praised, and published by Mr. Clement Scott in The Theatre.

It soon appeared, however, that the little convent maid had done too much for her strength. Athletic exercises would have been better in those early days than the excess of brain-work to which she set herself, absolutely from inclination and of her own free will. Under the great strain her health broke down, and she was compelled to return from school for a spell of rest, carrying with her, however, impressions{36} of the convent life which had a great effect upon her subsequent thoughts and aims.

Her health being restored, and Dr. Mackay growing more feeble, he was glad to keep her at home with him. Musical studies were persistently pursued. Half the day she would spend with the Doctor, reading, playing, or singing to him, conversing with him, and cheering him in the illness that was upon him. The other half of the day was passed at her desk, and literature finally claimed all her working hours. The first story she wrote was returned to her. It seemed she was to traverse no path of roses to fame and fortune. Though occupied with minor literary matters she was turning over in her mind the outlines of a singular story suggested by the thoughts or fancies or dreams of that period when her health broke down, and during which, whilst health was being restored, there was little to do save keep quiet and meditate. The result was the formation of the plot of “A Romance of Two Worlds.” These early years, by the way, up to 1885, were spent in a country cottage; then Dr. Mackay removed to London, and took a house in Kensington. “A Romance of Two Worlds” was published in 1886.

Miss Corelli’s sole companion after her convent school-life, with the exception of Dr. Charles{37} Mackay, was her devoted friend, Miss Bertha Vyver, daughter of the Countess Vyver, a not unimportant personage at the court of Napoleon III. The friendship between Miss Vyver and Miss Corelli has always been of the closest description. Since Dr. Charles Mackay welcomed Miss Vyver as his “second daughter,” they have never been separated. In all her daily life, not least the nursing of Dr. Mackay through his long illness, Miss Vyver has been by her side, helping her in home difficulties and trials as help can only be given by one with whom there is perfect sympathy. Miss Vyver has seen every detail of all the work the novelist has done, and to-day the friendship between the two is closer and dearer than ever for the years that have passed, and the sorrows and joys that have been borne in company.

George Eric Mackay, Dr. Mackay’s second son, had been a wanderer on the Continent for many years. Born in London in 1835, and educated chiefly at the Academy of Inverness, he had first been put into a business house. Trade was, however, entirely opposed to his tastes and temperament, and consequently he left the commercial establishment and began to think of another career. With such a father there was naturally a desire that the son should enter the field of literature. George{38} Eric, however, did not seem, at first, disposed to do this. He preferred the stage, and made efforts to secure a footing on it. He was tried by Charles Kean, and there were evidences of talent. Eric did, indeed, possess very considerable powers of portraying character. The stage, however, was in those days, as it probably will be for all time, a thankless profession for the embryo actor, and Eric found the work too severe. The plodding labors of the beginner by no means suited one who was not fitted by nature for drudgery or slow progress.

He had a good voice, and the next profession to which he turned his attention was operatic singing. For this again he had a not unpromising equipment, and his father determined to send him to Italy for the purpose of studying music there under good masters. No progress, however, was made with the musical studies, though the people and the conditions of existence in Italy appealed strongly to him, and he made Italy his home for many years.

During the first portion of his sojourn abroad he received a liberal allowance from his father, and was at other times indebted to him for considerable financial help. He was, like the Doctor, a master of European languages, and this knowledge enabled him to earn a precarious livelihood as a teacher of{39} French and English. The income thus derived was added to by correspondence for newspapers.

Dr. Mackay gave his son many valuable introductions, and he thus became acquainted with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (to whom he subsequently dedicated a book of poems); Sir Richard Burton; and Sir William Perry, the British Consul at Venice. All three became interested in him, and were frequently of assistance to him.

He found it impossible, however, to settle down. He stayed nowhere very long. Rome and Venice saw more of him than other cities. He wrote verses, and some were, under the title of “Songs of Love and Death,” collected in a volume and published by Messrs. Chapman & Hall in 1864. This was the volume which was dedicated to Sir E. Bulwer Lytton. He was not encouraged by the financial results of his work. Poetry, in fact, does not pay, and the public at the time gave his verses but a chilly greeting. His poetic ardor somewhat damped by this treatment, he left the lyrical muse alone for a time and commenced the publication in Rome of The Roman Times. This journal, unfortunately, like most newspaper enterprises that do not “go,” was a costly failure. Il Poliglotta, another journalistic venture, was published in Venice. It was a disastrous undertaking, absorbing all the{40} money which its editor had been able to raise, and leaving a heavy deficit.

The failure was the more serious because of other debts—personal, and in connection with two volumes which he had published. One, a collection of his newspaper articles, was called “Days and Nights in Italy”; the other, “Lord Byron at the Armenian Convent,” this being practically a handy guide-book to Venice. Nothing paid. The result was that he left Italy, after living there for twenty years, poorer than he went, which literally meant that he came back penniless. Broken financially, and in spirit, he returned to his father.

To the young girl Marie, whose life had hitherto been so exceptionally quiet, there was almost a romantic interest in this sudden arrival of the middle-aged man who, she was informed, was her stepbrother, and she made much of him. Moreover, Dr. Mackay was seriously disappointed at the failure of his son to make a career, and at his position—without income or apparent hope of earning one; and it was evident to Marie that it would afford her stepfather the keenest pleasure if George Eric should, after all, achieve success.

The circumstances of her untiring efforts to bring him into notice are known only to a few, though misunderstood by many.{41}

In the first place, her principal aim was to relieve her stepfather from the burden of his son’s maintenance. In the second, she sought to rouse and inspire that son to obtain for himself a high position in literature. She spared no pains to attain these two objects, and all her first small earnings went in assisting him. She was at this time still continuing her musical studies, and very often went to hear Sarasate. The large sums of money earned by this eminent artist first suggested an idea to George Eric of learning the violin, and, though late in life to begin, he resolved to study the instrument. His musical training in Italy must have been very ineffectual, as he had to learn his notes. He wished, however, for a good instrument, and his stepsister secured a “Guarnerius” model from Chappell, which she paid for by instalments and presented to him. It may be added that he never made anything of it, but it was useful in providing the title of his best-known work.

He had produced a volume, “Pygmalion in Cyprus,” published at the expense of friends, but the result was again disheartening. Some plays that he wrote were rejected by the managers to whom they were sent. About the same time Miss Corelli had returned to her the first story she had written. The editor of the magazine to whom it had been sub{42}mitted was of opinion that the writing of novels was not her forte. She took the opinion seriously, and decided to write no more, but to complete her musical training and look to the concert platform as the means of livelihood. She had already composed quite a large number of poems, some of which were subsequently torn up, some remain unpublished, and some have found a place in her books. A strong poetical tendency is evident throughout all her books, and is particularly prominent in “Ardath,” a great portion of which is almost as much poetry as prose. Two letters, written by Eric Mackay at this time, and now preserved in Miss Corelli’s autograph album, are particularly interesting. One ran:

“I am happier than I have been since boyhood, for I have a little sister again, and that little sister—the best and brightest in the world—does everything for me. But how far short of your ambition for me must I fall!—for you have already done so much in your short life—you, a child, and I, alas! a man growing old.”

And in another he said:

“I must thank you for sending me the little Keats volume. Curiously enough, I never read his poems at all before. Browning I can’t stand, but if you like him I must read him. You seem to live in an{43} atmosphere of poetry, but pray be careful and do not study too hard.”

“Love-Letters of a Violinist” at last made Eric Mackay famous. The book was published in 1885, and it was Marie Corelli who arranged for its production. She had fully convinced herself of the beauty of the poems, and she determined that they should be published as became what she regarded as their great value. She corrected the proofs of the poems, selected the binding, and saw to every detail of the book. The poems were published anonymously, and at once became the talk not only of England, but of America. There was much speculation as to the authorship. Eric Mackay entered fully into the humor of the thing, and made numerous suggestions to his acquaintances as to the probable writer, even putting forth the hint that the late Duke of Edinburgh, an able violinist, might have written them. He must have chuckled hugely at the discussions about this anonymous author; and the whole story was often talked about among his friends. Miss Corelli wrote an introductory notice to a subsequent edition of the “Love-Letters,” the introductory note and the initials “G. D.”—which she had adopted—causing almost as much discussion as the publication of the “Love-Letters” themselves. “G. D.” was meant by her to signify{44} Gratia Dei. Probably few books have ever emerged from the press in more attractive form. It was a quaint, vellum-bound, antique-looking volume tied up on all sides with strings of golden silk ribbon, and illustrated throughout with fanciful wood-cuts.

But the poems are beautiful and deserving of the fame they attained. It is curious how very different in quality they are to the author’s earlier published works, issued in 1864, 1871, and 1880. Each “Love-Letter” (and there are twelve of them) is in twenty stanzas—each stanza contains six lines. Antonio Gallenga of The Times declared the poems to be as regular and symmetrical as Dante’s “Comedy,” with as stately and solemn, ay, and as arduous a measure!... “There are marvelous powers in this poet-violinist. Petrarch himself has not so many changes for his conjugation of the verb ‘to love.’” The latter is what may be called, to quote a phrase recently used in a well-known newspaper, a “quotation from an hitherto unpublished review,” because the late Antonio Gallenga wrote a review of the “Love-Letters” at the request of Miss Corelli (whom he had known since her childhood); but The Times refused it, and he sent Miss Corelli the original manuscript, from which she quoted excerpts in her “Introduction” to the “Love-Letters.”

A lengthy review entitled “A New Love-Poet{45}” appeared in London Society under the name of “W. Stanislas Leslie,” no other than Marie Corelli herself. For the rest, all the critics fell foul of the book and “slated” the author unmercifully.

Some of the reviewers, notwithstanding the mystery they made of it, knew all about the authorship. Miss Corelli gave the news to the world in an anonymous letter to the New York Independent, which was the first journal to reveal the identity of the writer of the poems. It published a brief statement to the effect that the author was simply a gentleman of good position, the descendant of a distinguished and very ancient family, George Eric Mackay.... “He will undoubtedly,” it was added, “be numbered with the choice few whose names are destined to live by the side of poets such as Keats, whom, as far as careful work, delicate feeling, and fiery tenderness go, Eric Mackay may be said to resemble.”

Swinburne, about whom Marie Corelli was to write so strongly in “The Sorrows of Satan,” the poet-violinist thus addressed:

Again, there are such pretty fancies as:{46}

and

There are scores of passages like these. The great gifts displayed in the volume certainly afforded some justification a few years afterwards for the strenuous efforts which Marie Corelli made to get her stepbrother made Poet Laureate.

The “Love-Letters of a Violinist,” great as was their success as poems, did not prove lucrative. Miss Corelli had provided for the first issue; afterwards Mr. Eric Mackay made a free gift of the book to the publishers of the Canterbury Poets series. The sales have since been considerable, but the arrangement made by Mr. Mackay was one which, of course, did not benefit him financially.

Shortly after the publication of “The Love-Letters of a Violinist,” there were serious developments in Dr. Charles Mackay’s illness. He was stricken down with paralysis, and the pinch of poverty was being felt, for there was very little{47} coming into the home. Marie Corelli had now a great responsibility upon her young shoulders. The completion of her musical training it was impossible to afford. What should she do? She determined to try to write a novel. More articles and essays were contributed anonymously to newspapers and magazines; and, meanwhile, the plan of “A Romance of Two Worlds” had been prepared and the book was being written. Finally it was submitted to and accepted by a great publisher, who came to see Miss Corelli, and stared with amazement to find that the young lady to whom he was introduced as the author was a personal friend of his. Yet so it was, and the story of the publication and reception of the book is instructive.{48}

CHAPTER III

“A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS”

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an author’s first long manuscript is a poor and immature thing, which, owing to its inflammatory nature, were best devoted to fire-lighting purposes. But the aspiring scribbler, not being—from this point of view, at any rate—a utilitarian in his views, would as lief lose his right hand as behold his precious pages being put to the base wooing of wood and coals. Instead, he spends several pounds on having it typewritten, and then sends it forth upon its travels round the publishing houses. It comes back to him with exasperating regularity, until the author, at last realizing that his book does not appeal to publishers’ readers quite as vividly as it does to its creator, either (if he be wise) consigns it to the dust-bin, or (if he be unwise) pays one of the shark publishing firms to bring it out. Did he know that the wily fellows to whom he entrusts his work simply print enough copies for review purposes and a few more to put on their shelves, charging him the while for a whole edition, he{49} would not part with his good money so readily! As it is, he has the satisfaction of seeing his story between covers, of sending it to his friends, of beholding his name in the “Books Received” corner of the daily papers, of knowing for certain that a copy, wherever else it may not be found, will always be supplied to students of fiction at the British Museum; and that is all.

It is needless to say this was not the course of procedure adopted by Miss Marie Corelli. She wrote voluminously in her school-days, and was as successful as most young girls are when they are serving their literary apprenticeship. She scribbled poetry, and was no doubt happy—as every youthful scribe should be—when she was rewarded for her labors by the mere honor of print.

But the time came—as come it always does to those who have the real gift of literary creativeness—when the young artist set a large canvas upon her easel and sturdily went about the task of filling it.

Of ideas, at such an age, there is an abundant flow. Meals are irksome and many hours are stolen from slumber; it is late to bed and early to rise; it is a hatred of social duties, and a period when everything else but the dream of fame is forgotten. Although we may take the foregoing{50} to be fairly applicable to the average girl-author, Miss Corelli denies that the writing of “A Romance of Two Worlds” ever caused her to become “æsthetically cadaverous.” Her methodical habits may account for the fact that, in spite of much desk toil and hard thinking, she has always managed to keep a well-balanced mind in corpore sano.

“I write every day from ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, alone and undisturbed.... I generally scribble off the first rough draft of a story very rapidly in pencil; then I copy it out in pen and ink, chapter by chapter, with fastidious care, not only because I like a neat manuscript, but because I think everything that is worth doing at all is worth doing well.... I find, too, that in the gradual process of copying by hand, the original draft, like a painter’s first sketch, gets improved and enlarged.”

The “Romance,” then, according to this salubrious programme, entered quietly into a state of being. Miss Corelli was doubtful whether it would ever find a publisher: her first notion was to offer it to Arrowsmith, as a railway-stall novelette. Possibly the success of “Called Back” suggested the Bristol publisher, the title she first fixed upon, “Lifted Up,” being eminently suggestive of a{51} shilling series. However, the manuscript never went westwards—a matter which good Mr. Arrowsmith has excellent cause to regret—for, in the interim, as a kind of test of its merit or demerit, Miss Corelli sent it to Bentley’s. The “readers” attached to that house advised its summary rejection. Moved by curiosity to inspect a work which his several advisers took the trouble to condemn in such singularly adverse terms, Mr. George Bentley decided to read the manuscript himself, and the consequence of his unprejudiced and impartial inspection was approval and acceptance.

Letters were exchanged, terms proposed and agreed upon. “I am glad that all is arranged,” wrote Mr. Bentley; “nothing now remains but to try to make a success of your first venture. The work has the merit of originality, and its style writing will, I think, commend it.”

A later letter from him says: “I expect our rather ‘thick’ public will be slow in appreciating the ‘Romance,’ but if it once takes, it may go off well.”

These extracts are interesting as showing the view taken by a veteran publisher—one who had been dealing with books and authors since early manhood—of a work by an absolutely unknown writer. His opinion of Miss Corelli’s powers is{52} represented by a further letter dispatched to her in February, 1886: “I shall be perfectly ready to give full consideration to anything which proceeds from your pen, all the more readily, too, because I see you love wholesome thought, and will not lend yourself to corrupt and debase the English mind.... I have no greater pleasure than to bring to light a bright writer like yourself. After all, the Brightness must be in the author, and so the sole praise is to her.”

After his first visit to Miss Corelli, in July of that year, Mr. Bentley wrote as follows: “The afternoon remains with me as a pleasant memory. I am so glad to have seen you. I little expected to see so young a person as the authoress of works involving in their creation faculties which at your age are mostly not sufficiently developed for such works.”

Miss Corelli was allowed to retain her copyright, a fact which, though regarded by her as of slight import at the time, has since proved of some pecuniary advantage, seeing that the “Romance” is now in its twentieth edition.

The wise old publisher saw nothing attractive, explanatory, or salable in such a name as “Lifted Up,” so a new title was asked for. Scott once said there was nothing in a name, and certainly it did not matter what such a magician as he was, called a{53} book, any more than it matters what name any firmly established author fixes upon; but a new writer can seldom afford to despise the gentle art of alliteration or the appellation which appeals to the eye, ear, and imagination.

Both Dr. Charles Mackay and his son George Eric were appealed to by the young beginner in that literary career to which they were both accustomed. Both demanded a reading of the manuscript that they might be guided by its contents as to the title. But Marie refused to show her manuscript to any one. She told her stepfather that he would only “laugh at her silly fancies.” She would not let George Eric read it, because she wanted to surprise him by quoting some of his poetry in the book from the “Love-Letters of a Violinist,” which title she, by-the-bye, had suggested. She said her story was “about this world and the next,” whereupon Dr. Mackay, who happened to be reading Lewis Morris’s “Songs of Two Worlds” at the time, suggested “A Romance of Two Worlds.”

So, as “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the book appeared. Up to this time Miss Corelli had naturally had no experience with reviewers. She had heard of them, of course, being a member of a literary household, and she had every reason to{54} suppose that they would, in the ordinary course of events, write criticisms upon the “Romance.” In this expectation, however, she was doomed to disappointment. It received only four reviews, all brief and distinctly unfavorable. It may not be uninteresting, at this distance of time, to quote the criticism which appeared in a leading journal, as it is a very fair sample of the rest:

“Miss Corelli would have been better advised had she embodied her ridiculous ideas in a sixpenny pamphlet. The names of Heliobas and Zara are alone sufficient indications of the dulness of this book.”

Less could hardly have been said. Had the paper been a provincial weekly, and the writer a junior reporter to whom the book had been flung with a curt editorial order to “write a par about that,” the review could not have been more innocent of any attempt at criticism. It is highly apparent that the critic in question was not employed on the elbow-jogging terms known as “on space.”

As for the names, it would have been equally absurd to call a Chaldæan—descended directly from one of the “wise men of the East”—and his sister, by the Anglo-Saxon Jack and Jill; or, indeed, to apply to them European nomenclature of any description. The “Romance,” to quote its write{55}r’s own description, was meant to be “the simply-worded narration of a singular psychical experience, and included certain theories on religion which I, personally speaking, accept and believe.”

What name, then, would this reviewer have chosen for the electric healer who is the principal male character in the work? Although he lived in Paris, it would hardly have been fair to christen him Alphonse, a name, by the way, strongly suggestive of a French valet. Clearly the critic here was unreasonable as well as idle.

With regard to the allegation as to dulness, we imagine that Miss Corelli’s most bitter detractors have never accused her of this most unpardonable crime in a maker of books. Her imagination may take flights exasperating in their audacity to the stay-at-home mind of Wellington Street; she may occasionally state her opinions a thought too didactically for people who are themselves opinionated; when she cries shame on vice and humbug, her pen may coin denunciations somewhat too hot-and-strong for the easy-going and the worldly; but, whatever she is, or whatever she does, she is never dull.

In spite of the meagre allowances in the review way dealt out by the press to “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the book prospered exceedingly. It is absurd to deny the power of the press—either for{56} well or for ill—and Miss Corelli’s career is a striking proof of the soundness of this statement. The public recognized the power of the new writer, and the “Romance” sold by thousands; the press went out of its way to condemn the works that followed it, and thereby advertised them. “If you can’t praise me, slate me,” said an author once to an editor; and he spoke sagely. Luke-warm reviews are the worst enemies a writer can have; favorable reviews impress a certain number of book-buyers, book-sellers, and librarians; but bitingly hostile criticisms—tinged, if possible, with personal spite—are frequently quite as helpful as columns of eulogy.

In the case of “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the press did not help one way or the other, however. The public discovered the book for themselves, and letters concerning its theories began to pour in from strangers in all parts of the United Kingdom. At the end of its first twelve months’ run, Mr. Bentley brought it out in one volume in his “Favorite” series. Then it started off round the world at full gallop.

It was, as Miss Corelli has already related in a very frank magazine article, a most undoubted success from the moment Bentleys laid it on their counter. It was “pirated” in America; chosen out and liberally paid for by Baron Tauchnitz for the{57} popular and convenient little Tauchnitz series; and translated into various Continental languages. A gigantic amount of correspondence flowed in upon the authoress from India, Africa, Australia, and America; and it may be added that the more recent editions of the “Romance” have contained very representative excerpts from this epistolary bombardment. One man wrote saying that the book had saved him from committing suicide; another that it had called a halt on his previous driftings towards Agnosticism; others that the book had exercised a comforting and generally beneficent influence over them. To quote only one correspondent: “I felt a better woman for the reading of it twice; and I know others, too, who are higher and better women for such noble thoughts and teaching.”

Now, if a book—however one may object to the writer’s convictions or disagree with them—has an undoubted influence for good; if it drives from some minds the black spectre of Doubt, makes good men better, bad men less bad, and all men think, then has not that book won a brave excuse for its existence? may it not be considered, as a work of art, infinitely the superior of a picture or a play or another book that leaves beholders or readers exactly where it found them?

Many people condemn Marie Corelli without{58} reading her, on the old Woolly West principle of “First hang, then try!”

She has a big public, but it would be a thousand times bigger if only scoffers and doubters would really read these books by the authoress whom they hang without trial. Let them take a course of Marie Corelli during the long winter evenings, passing on from book to book—from the “Romance” to “Vendetta,” thence to “Thelma,” “Ardath,” “Wormwood,” “The Soul of Lilith,” and so on—in the order in which they were written. For the idle and listless, for the frivolous, for the irreligious, for the purse-proud, for the down-hearted and distressed, she will prove a veritable “cure,” for she is at once a moralist and a tonic. And whereas she is a literary sermon in herself to those who listen to other preachers without profit, so will she prove a profitable and restorative change of air to the busy, the honestly prosperous, the “godly, righteous, and sober” of her students. She is for all, and, where funds are scarce and shillings consequently precious, Free Libraries bring her within reach of everybody.

At a time when our leading dramatists and novelists drag their art in the mud for the sake of the lucre that may be found down there in plenty, it is refreshing and hope-inspiring to find that the writer{59} with the largest public in the world, whose work has penetrated to every country and is thus not restricted to Anglo-Saxondom any more than a new type of rifle is, has ranged herself on the side of Right! Thus, owing to the wide-spread interest in her work, she is enabled to preach the gospel of her beliefs in all corners of the globe;—this, too, in spite of the fact that she is comparatively a newcomer in literature.

“My appeal for a hearing,” wrote Miss Corelli, when describing, in the pages of the Idler, the appearance of her first book, “was first made to the great public, and the public responded; moreover, they do still respond with so much heartiness and good-will, that I should be the most ungrateful scribbler that ever scribbled if I did not” (despite press “drubbings” and the amusing total ignoring of my very existence by certain cliquey literary magazines) “take up my courage in both hands, as the French say, and march steadily onward to such generous cheering and encouragement. I am told by an eminent literary authority that critics are ‘down upon me’ because I write about the supernatural. Neither ‘Vendetta,’ nor ‘Thelma,’ nor ‘Wormwood’ is supernatural. But, says the eminent literary authority, why write at all, at any time, about the supernatural? Why? Because I{60} feel the existence of the supernatural, and, feeling it, I must speak of it. I understand that the religion we profess to follow emanates from the supernatural. And I presume that churches exist for the solemn worship of the supernatural. Wherefore, if the supernatural be thus universally acknowledged as a guide for thought and morals, I fail to see why I, and as many others as choose to do so, should not write on the subject.... But I distinctly wish it to be understood that I am neither a ‘Spiritualist’ nor a ‘Theosophist’.... I have no other supernatural belief than that which is taught by the Founder of our Faith....”

The plot of the story with which Miss Corelli won her spurs is simple in the extreme. The plot indeed, is a secondary matter, the main strength of the book being the Physical Electricity utilized by Heliobas—the medicine man of Chaldæan descent who has neither diploma nor license—in his cure of the young improvisatrice whose nerves have been shattered by over-devotion to musical study and whose vitality has been reduced to an alarmingly low ebb by her inability to recuperate, even in the soothing climate of the Riviera. An artist who has been saved from self-destruction and restored to absolute health by Heliobas, advises her to seek out this “Dr. Casimir” (as Heliobas is called in Paris){61} and put herself in his hands. This she does, with astounding results; for, from a miserable, woe-begone creature, all “palpitations and headaches and stupors,” Casimir’s potions and electrical remedies change her into an absolutely healthy woman, “plump and pink as a peach.” In Casimir’s house lives the physician’s sister, Zara, who, by means of the same medical and electrical properties, retains, at thirty-eight, the complexion and supple health of a girl of seventeen, being ever “as fresh and lovely as a summer morning.” During her stay with him, Heliobas expounds his “Electric Creed” to the young musician, and by her own wish, and by means of his extraordinary hypnotic powers—combined with a fluid preparation which he causes her to take—throws her into a trance, in the course of which “strange departure,” her soul is temporarily separated from her body and floats from the earth to other spheres. Guided by the spirit Azùl, it wanders to the “Centre of the Universe,” and, after being permitted to gaze upon the wonders and glories of the supernatural, returns to earth and once more takes its place in the work-a-day body from which it had been temporarily released. After Casimir has afforded the girl further explanations of his theories, she is admitted to the small circle of adherents to the Electric Creed. As a result of Casi{62}mir’s treatment she eventually finds herself not only in possession of complete health, but also equally perfected in her work; so much so, indeed, that while her improved looks are a delight to her friends, her playing fills them with wonder and delight.

The story ends pathetically. Just as the heroine is about to go forth into the world again, armed with new bodily vigor and tenfold her previous talent, her friend, the ever-youthful Zara, is killed by a flash of lightning. After attending the burial of his sister in Père-la-Chaise, Heliobas takes leave of his patient, and proceeds to Egypt to accustom himself to the solitude to which his sister’s death has condemned him. The reader is given to understand, however, that Heliobas and the young musician meet again later on under more cheerful conditions.

Such is a mere outline of this popular story, which is told throughout with admirable restraint and dignity, the language being moderate, and the arguments pithily expressed. The half-dozen minor characters are touched in with all the skill of an experienced novelist; and yet, when Miss Corelli set to work on this “Romance,” she was younger than her heroine is represented to be.

The actual penmanship occasioned by the writing{63} of the book must have been as nothing compared with the very arduous thought and study connected with the mental generation of the views held by Heliobas and his fellow-believers. That the theories here exploited are well worth the consideration of all thoughtful persons, is proved by the intense interest the book has aroused in so many widely different and widely separated areas of civilization.

It ought to be remembered, too, that, at the time the “Romance” was published, the wonders of the X-rays had not been demonstrated, nor had wireless telegraphy become a fait accompli. Yet these were distinctly foretold in Marie Corelli’s first book, as also the possible wonders yet to be proved in certain new scientific theories of Sound and Color. It may instruct many to know that the theory of God’s “Central World” with which all the universe moves, is a part of the authoress’s own implicit belief in a future state of being.{64}

CHAPTER IV

“VENDETTA” AND “THELMA”

To Miss Corelli’s host of admirers the story of “Vendetta” must be so familiar as to render a lengthy repetition of it unnecessary. “Vendetta” is, briefly, an exposition—in the form of a novel—on marital infidelity.

In August, 1886, before the book was published, Mr. Bentley wrote: “May I tell you that I have been again looking into ‘Vendetta,’ and I venture to prophesy a success? It is a powerful story, and a great stride forward on the first book ... it marches on to its awful finale with the grimness of a Greek play.”

That Mr. Bentley’s prophecy was fulfilled is clearly indicated in a letter addressed by him to the authoress on October 22d of the same year: “I have very great pleasure in sending the enclosed, because I should have been mortified beyond expression if the public had not responded to the marked power of your story. I believe you will come now steadily to the front, and I am very {65}curious to read your new story".... “I shall yield to no reader of your works,” he again wrote, some time afterwards, “in a very high opinion of such scenes as the supper scene in ‘Vendetta’—as good as if Bulwer had written it....”

As the preface to “Vendetta” tells us, the book’s chief incidents are founded on an actual and fatal blunder which was committed in Naples during the cholera visitation of 1884. “Nothing,” says the authoress, “is more strange than truth;—nothing, at times, more terrible!” “Vendetta” is, then, practically, a true story, and certainly a very terrible one, of a Neapolitan nobleman who, being suddenly attacked by the scourge that was decimating this fair southern city, fell into a coma-like state so closely resembling death that he was hurried into a flimsy coffin, and deposited in his family vault as one deceased. Awaking from his deep swoon, the frenzied strength which would naturally come to a man finding himself in such an appalling situation, enabled him to break the frail boards of his narrow prison and escape from the vault. In the course of his wanderings, ere he found an outlet, he became acquainted with the fact that a band of brigands had utilized the mausoleum as a store-house for their ill-gotten valuables. Having helped himself liberally to a portion of the plunder, the count—with hair turned white by his{66} harrowing experiences—retraced his steps to his house, only to find his most familiar friend consoling his supposed widow for the loss of her husband in a manner which plainly gave evidence that the amours of the guilty couple were by no means of recent origin. Fired by a desire for revenge, and materially assisted by the bandits’ secret hoard, the wronged nobleman, instead of making known his resurrection to his wife or anybody else, quitted Naples for a while. On his reappearance, six months later—well disguised by his white hair and a pair of smoked spectacles—he represented himself to be an elderly and wealthy Italian noble, lately returned from a long but voluntary exile from his native land. Playing his rôle to perfection, he soon succeeded in striking up a friendship with his wife and her lover, his ire increasing as he found that they were both supremely indifferent to the memory of the man whom they imagined to be lying in the tomb of his ancestors.

From this point the reader is compelled to pass rapidly from chapter to chapter in following out the injured husband’s scheme of retaliation. With remarkable ingenuity the novelist depicts the manner in which the elderly nobleman, making free use of his abundant means, wormed himself into the confidence of his supposed widow as well as his{67} traitorous friend, and how he finally manœuvred the latter into a duel which proved fatal to the doer of evil, and the former into a second marriage with himself. The curtain falls on a midnight adventure which proved fatal to the twice-wed wife.

Miss Corelli appears to be thoroughly at home at Naples and among the Neapolitans. Her descriptions of the place and its people are admirable. She is well-versed in the art of painting a pretty picture, only, for the purposes of her plot, to destroy it with a great ugly dab across the smiling canvas. For the story opens as daintily as you please. Left, while still a youth, an ample fortune, Count Fabio Romani dwelt “in a miniature palace of white marble, situated on a wooded height overlooking the Bay of Naples.” His pleasure grounds “were fringed with fragrant groves of orange and myrtle, where hundreds of full-voiced nightingales warbled their love-melodies to the golden moon.”

One can imagine that a young nobleman, who, though athletic and fond of the open air, was at the same time of a bookish and dreamy disposition, might, in such a pleasant retreat, have lingered on, a bachelor, until the discretion of the thirties would have befriended him in selecting a suitable mate. As it was, he saw but few women, and did not seek their society; but, when only a few years had{68} passed since his accession to the title, Fate cast in his way a face “of rose-tinted, childlike loveliness,” it dazzled him. And “of course I married her.”

The fair canvas is not blurred over too soon, for following the marriage come several years of bliss undimmed by any cloud. The false friend’s infidelity remains unexposed and all is peace at the Villa Romani, the husband doting and believing himself to be doted upon, and a girl-babe, “fair as one of the white anemones” which abounded in the woods surrounding the home, arriving to add pride to his love. Then the bolt falls. The cholera descends upon Naples, and with inexorable clutch claims victim after victim.

Count Fabio, strolling down to the harbor one hot early morn, comes upon a lad stricken by the dread malady, and tends him. Within an hour he is himself convulsed with excruciating agony, and, whilst stretched on a bench in a humble restaurant, loses consciousness—to awake in his coffin.

The horrors of such a restoration to life are depicted with extraordinary force, and with equal power is described the revulsion of feeling—the intoxicating delight—experienced by the unfortunate man as, having regained his liberty, he stands rejoicing in the morning light and listens to the{69} song of a boatman who is plying his oars on the smooth surface of the Bay. It was a happy fancy to set down the words of the sailor’s carol—a gentle touch of human gladness ere the demon of vengeance whispers “Vendetta!”

With astonishing cleverness the outraged husband maps out his plan of requital; his patience, his self-control, his constant alertness are described by himself—the story is told in the first person—with a deliberation that is almost diabolical in its cold-blooded intensity.

Count Fabio scorns the idea of divorce or even an ordinary duel; his revenge must partake of nothing so prosaic as an action at law or ten minutes’ rapier play. The matter does, indeed, come to a fight at last, but even here the injured nobleman gives his rival no chance; for, by removing his smoked spectacles, and disclosing his eyes for the first time to his one-time friend, he so unnerves his opponent that the latter fires wildly and merely grazes the count’s shoulder, while Fabio’s bullet finds a vital spot in the breast of the man who in a mere prosaic action for divorce would be referred to as the co-respondent.

The count intended to kill his man, and, if his action were unsportsmanlike, he would doubtless have excused it on the ground that a vendetta wots{70} not of fair play, the idea being that one person has to bring about the death of another, by means fair or foul. The count found it necessary to his programme to make the duel appear a perfectly fair one; but as a matter of fact he never for a moment, owing to the precautions he took, had any misgivings as to which combatant would prove successful.

In the event of this book being dramatized, the most thrilling situation will undoubtedly be pronounced the scene in the vault when Fabio, having remarried his wife, takes her to what he describes as the house where he keeps his treasure. When retreat is impossible the guilty woman discovers that he has lured her into the Romani mausoleum. In this noisome place of sepulture, amidst the bones of bygone Counts Romani, he discloses his identity, and points to his own coffin, broken asunder—a ghastly proof of the fact that his story is true. This is his night of triumph: here ends his revenge. “Trick for trick, comedy for comedy.” His once familiar friend lies dead in a grave distant but a few yards from the vault in which, held fast in a ruthless snare, stands the wife whose love had strayed from her husband to the silent one yonder.

Her first fright over, she shows resource even in these dire straits: she flees, but a locked gate{71} bars her exit, and then she almost succeeds in stabbing her jailer. But nothing avails against his vigilance and iron strength, and her terrible surroundings turn her brain. Mad, she breaks into song—an old melody that at last, when too late, touches the heart of her husband, and he resolves to remove her from the charnel-house. But ere his new-found compassion can take action, while she is crooning over the bandits’ hoard of jewels and decking her fair arms and neck with blazing gems, a sudden upheaval of Nature, not uncommon in those parts, shakes a ponderous stone out of the vault’s roof and silences her song forever.

The conclusion is fittingly brief. The once proud noble flees from Naples to the wild woodlands of South America, where, with other settlers, he ekes out a bare existence by the rough and unremitting toil inseparable from such surroundings.

It is a relief to turn from these scenes of black and tempestuous passion to the gracious and winning personality of the Norwegian girl Thelma, whose name adorns the title-page of Miss Corelli’s third novel. Here is no pestilence, for the opening chapters seem to breathe health and strength and{72} well-being, so redolent is the setting of all that is good and sweet.

Miss Corelli’s publisher was delighted with the manuscript. “I have read all,” wrote Mr. Bentley, on March 22d, 1887; “what a nuisance space is! Here are three hundred miles separating us, and I feel I could say what I have to say fifty times better by word of mouth than with this pen.... ‘Thelma,’ as long as it is Norwegian, is a lovely dream—a romance full of poetry and color. ‘Thelma’ in London (I speak of the book) I cannot like. Of course the contrast, if not too deep, is effective.... How glad I was to get back to Norway! The death of Olaf is very picturesquely painted, and little Britta is a charming little brick.” In a previous letter, written when he had perused up to “page 1017,” he said: “The character of Sigurd I consider a most beautiful creation. I hardly like to write what I really think of it, since either it is of the very highest order, or I have no claim to critical ability of any sort. His whole career, his half-thought-out, half-uttered exclamations, the poetry of his thoughts, his passion so noble and so pitiful, the grand and highly dramatic close of his life, must give you a position which might be denied for ‘Vendetta’ as melodrama. Here there is nothing of that sort of life—here one{73} is in the world which held Ariel. The Bonde I like much, and Lorimer. How necessary are some defects to a perfect liking! How we are in touch with poor Humanity through its weak side! This is, I suppose, why we do not sympathize as we ought with Christ. We feel sad for ourselves, and I can only truly pity those who need it,—the sort of cry in our hearts for the lost perfection.... I could write several sheets about the novel, but I forbear. Don’t write too fast. One who can write as well as you can, can write better, and in the long run will stand better on financial grounds.”

Here is advice from one possessing great experience and much worldly wisdom. How helpful such sound and friendly counsel proved to the young novelist can readily be imagined.

“The death of Sigurd, and that also of Olaf,” wrote Mr. Bentley, on March 28th, 1887, “are far ahead in literary excellence and truth of anything in ‘She’".... “I confess I hate perfect people,” he remarks in a subsequent letter, “and that is why, on the contrary, I love Thelma’s father, have a strong sympathy with poor Sigurd as well as with many of the other characters in the story, and with that pretty little side picture of the plucky little waiting maid. I congratulate you on your next idea. It is in the Spirit of the age to pierce into the{74} mysteries of the unseen world, and I look forward to some interesting speculations from your enquiring mind.”

Various passages in other letters testify to Mr. Bentley’s genuine appreciation of the book. “A clever lady, a great friend of mine whose opinion I value, is charmed with ‘Thelma.’ This lady was a friend of Guizot, is a keen critic, and hates our modern novels.” And again: “There is a rich imagery in ‘Thelma,’ which makes me believe you capable of becoming our first novelist, and there is a versatility which bodes well.... But God sends what is best for His children—may His best be for you!”

“Thelma” is, in truth, for some considerable way through its numerous pages, a very pretty story: by many readers, as has been said, it is counted Miss Corelli’s best achievement, albeit the authoress, in her heart of hearts, sets “Ardath” above everything that has come from her pen.

“Thelma” is quaintly unorthodox from its very start, for the two principal characters meet each other in the unconventional manner so dear to the heart of the romance-lover. A wave-lapped beach, at midnight, in the Land of the Midnight Sun—a handsome English aristocrat—a wonderful maid, who can claim direct descent from the old Vikings{75}—some slight assistance required in the launching of a boat—are not these particulars sufficient to whet the appetite for what is bound to follow? Favored by circumstances, this chance meeting ripens into a full-fledged friendship, whence to a wooing and a wedding is no far cry in the hands of a skilful novelist.

The main theme of the story, of course, is English society as viewed by a girl who, though naturally refined and carefully educated, is, as regards the world and its ways, a child. Thelma, having become Lady Bruce-Errington, is gradually introduced to her husband’s social equals, the result being as diverting as it is pathetic; for she has to go through a process of disillusionment whereby she learns with no little pain that an invitation to dinner is not necessarily a genuine expression of regard any more than a woman’s kiss betokens the slightest affection or even liking for the woman upon whom it is bestowed.

Having imbibed all the accomplishments of the schoolroom, Thelma finds that the vanity of the world is a study which brings much bitterness of soul in the mastering. At first the young bride’s astonishing frankness is taken for a supreme effort of art; then, when the truth dawns upon her associates, her success in society advances by leaps and{76} bounds, and she becomes what is called “the rage.” Naturally her large nature soon sickens of such adulation, and induces a strange weariness which gives place to blank despair and unutterable misery when the machinations of certain evily-disposed persons lead her to believe that her husband has bestowed his affections upon a burlesque actress. So great is her selflessness that the poor girl makes excuses for her husband’s (alleged) infidelity, and actually blames herself for not having proved sufficiently fascinating to keep him by her side. In bitter weather she quietly leaves London—bound for home. She crosses the rough seas in a cargo-boat, and arrives in Norway to find that her father is just dead. Her husband follows her by a perilous route, and, surviving the many dangers of the journey, gains her bedside in time to save her life and reason. And thereafter all is well.

In a book containing six hundred and fifteen closely-printed pages, there must of necessity be a long roll of characters. It is often the case that characters, increasing in number as a book progresses in the writing, demand more and more space for their exploitation. Hence such voluminous works as “Thelma.” In the first part of the novel the persons introduced are mainly of the bachelor kind, and, though useful in filling chairs at the literary re{77}past, are not absolutely necessary to the plot’s working. In Book II.—“The Land of Mockery”—a new set of people is introduced, society people mostly, and their servants. In Book III.—“The Land of the Long Shadow”—the reader is taken to Norway in the winter, the novelist appropriately and strikingly making Nature’s moods harmonize with those of her pen-and-ink creations.

Miss Corelli lays on her colors with an unsparing brush—there is nothing half-and-half in her characterization. There are four “principals” in this play. Lady Winsleigh, as opposed to Thelma, fills a rôle full of wrongful possibilities in that she portrays “a woman scorned,” than whom, as we are asked to believe, Hell hath no fury whose malevolence is of a worse description. Sir Francis Lennox is, in wrong-doing, her masculine counterpart; and to balance him we have Thelma’s husband, an excellent fellow who makes a fool of himself in a truly bewildering manner. His behavior in endeavoring to bring about a reconciliation between his secretary and his secretary’s wife—the actress already referred to—is the weak spot in the book.

Much, however, that displeases the critical sense—which is fortunately not the predominating mental attribute of the novel-reading public—is obliterated by Thelma’s womanliness and attractively gentle{78} nature. She is born to love and to suffer, and still to love, without murmur or reproach, “for better for worse, for richer for poorer,” the husband of her heart’s choice. She is a human flower, well pictured by the lines from Rossetti quoted by the authoress:

CHAPTER V

“ARDATH”—THE STORY OF A DEAD SELF—THE WONDERFUL CITY OF AL-KYRIS—THE MISSION OF THE BOOK

In no work produced by her busy pen has Miss Corelli given such range to her imagination, to her love of the beautiful and fantastic, as in “Ardath.” This, her fourth book, abounds in wonderful accounts of a strange people in a strange place. When she sets a scene of barbaric splendor in the city of Al-Kyris, she reaches great descriptive heights; she tells, indeed, a tale of beauty, of horror, and of extraordinary amours, whose like can nowhere be found, look where you will. “Ardath” stands alone—a prose poem and a startlingly vivid narrative in one. “I have read it,” wrote Mr. Bentley (referring to the work in manuscript form), “with wonder that one small head could hold it all.”

That the authoress has a quick and appreciative eye for the picturesque, her most bitter detractor will not care to deny; she loves to write of birds and flowers, field and forest, golden sunshine and blue waters. She exhibits a passion for the bygone{80}—in architecture and in man. In her interesting miscellany, “A Christmas Greeting,” she reproves those who would take from the charming old-worldliness of Shakespeare’s birthplace by erecting in Stratford-on-Avon ugly villas and shops suggestive of Clapham or Peckham Rye. She would—as we all would—have Stratford kept as much as possible like Stratford was when Shakespeare wandered by Avon’s banks or brooded over the fire in his home near to the old Guild Church.

“Ardath” was written in a hot glow of inspiration. Its theme is drawn from the Book of Esdras, one of the apocryphal Jewish writings which, while not used for “establishment of doctrine,” are held to be of value for historical purposes and for “instruction of manners.” Like a constantly recurring refrain in a musical composition, the passage in Esdras chosen by the authoress for her text greets the reader ever and anon as he turns the pages: “So I went my way into the Field which is called ‘Ardath,’ and sat among the flowers.”

On this passage Miss Corelli built her romance, and so successfully did she work out her ideas that “Ardath” drew letters from all sorts and conditions of men—letters discussing the theories propounded in her writings, and asking for information and advice of encyclopædic character. Amongst the

A Boating Place on the Avon

A Favorite Reach on the Avon

{81}

correspondence were many flattering letters from men and women of light and leading, not only in England, but abroad. The novel under notice, which was issued in 1889, brought Miss Corelli a letter of praise from Lord Tennyson. The work was indeed so remarkable a piece of imaginative conception and picturesque writing that it appealed peculiarly to the Laureate’s sense of the poetic and artistic.

Of the mission of the book, which was of serious character, we shall speak anon. “Ardath” is one of the author’s finest efforts to further the cause of true religion. A strange outcome of the book was the proposed building, by some enthusiastic Americans, of a Corelli city in Fremont County, Colorado, U. S. A., on the Arkansas River, and a prospectus was actually issued explaining the project.

“Ardath” is divided into three parts. In the first is introduced a sceptic poet, Theos Alwyn. In the Second Book, Theos is transplanted into the city of Al-Kyris, in a bygone world, where he is supposed to have led a previous existence five thousand years before Christ’s advent. In the Third Book, Alwyn is back in London, amongst old associates, with the knowledge of all these strange experiences within him. The book has a sub-title, “The Story of a Dead Self,” and it is in the city of Al-Kyris that the peculiar “Dead Self” experience comes to{82} Theos Alwyn, through whom Miss Corelli expounds lessons to all men—and women.

The story opens in the heart of the Caucasus Mountains, where a wild storm is gathering, and there is an early example of the descriptive delights with which the book is adorned. Miss Corelli is unique, not alone in her imaginings and in her treatment of them, but, too, in her powerful pictures of scenery. Here,

It was such fine writing as this, doubtless, which caught Tennyson’s fancy on casually opening the book to inspect and arrive at conclusions concerning its contents for himself, regardless of anything reviewers might have said previously in its disfavor. It was a sympathetic perusal of its many pages that drew from him a letter of commendation which he duly dispatched to its writer. It was the poetic conception of the city of Al-Kyris which appealed to the lonely Man of Wight, pondering, in his long island walks, on the strange romance of{84} pre-Babylonian times set down by a woman who had won the whole-hearted approval of his great contemporary, William Gladstone.

Not unlike this majestic opening of “Ardath” are many of the poet’s own sublime pen-pictures. A master of verse, standing high above all others of his time as well as above most who had preceded him, the warm encomiums that he deliberately awarded to Marie Corelli should surely silence the snarls of envious Grub Street.

But to our story. Within the Monastery of Lars, “far up among the crags crowning the ravine,” are seen a group of monks whose intonations strangely stir a listener,—an Englishman,—Alwyn, whose musings on the reverential exercises of the monks indicate the religious purpose that underlies the story which follows. For Alwyn at the time is not only a poet, but an egoist and an agnostic. What sort of fellows are these monks, he muses,—fools or knaves? They must be one or the other, thinks he, else they would not thus chant praises “to a Deity of whose existence there is, and can be, no proof.” He is none the less conscious that the ending of faith and the prevalence of what he regards as Truth, would be a dreary result, destroying the beauty of the Universe. With cold and almost contemptuous feelings he watches the proceedings of{85} these monks, and listens to the recital of their seven Glorias:

“Glory to God, the Most High, the Supreme and Eternal!” And with one harmonious murmur of accord the brethren respond:

Vespers over, the monks leave their chapel, and immediately the agnostic poet is face to face with one who is presumably chief of the Order—the monk who had recited the Glorias. And who, indeed, is he? None other than the mystic scientist, the Heliobas of “A Romance of Two Worlds,” who has now adopted this secluded monastic life. To him Theos Alwyn explains that he is miserable, and that, though an agnostic and searcher after absolute and positive proof, he desires for a time to be deluded into a state of happiness. So, the Parisian fame of Heliobas having reached him, this modern poet does not hesitate to seek from him a peace and happiness which neither his world of success nor his agnostic opinions can give him. From Heliobas he learns that this strange monk possesses a certain spiritual force which can overpower and subdue material force—that he can release the poet’s soul—“that is, the Inner Intelligent Spirit which is the actual You”—from its house of{86} clay and allow it an interval of freedom. Alwyn pleads—even demands—that Heliobas will exercise this power at once; but the monk, amazed and reproachful, declines.

Stranger than many of the marvels of the book is the scene that follows. It is a contest of Will between Alwyn and Heliobas. The former, concentrating all the powers of his mind upon the effort, declares that Heliobas shall release his soul:

{87}

The soul of the poet had by a superhuman access of will managed to break its bonds and escape elsewhere. “But whither? Into what vast realms of translucent light or drear shadow?” Unable to answer the question, the monk betakes himself to the monastery chapel, and prays in silence till the heavy night had passed and the storm “had slain itself with the sword of its own fury on the dark slopes of the Pass of Dariel.”

Theos for a time lies as one dead. Anon he awakes, seats himself at a table, and writes. Sometimes he murmurs “Ardath,” but he goes on writing for hours. Then Heliobas rejoins him. “I have been dreaming,” Theos says. The monk points to the written manuscript as proof that the dream has been productive, at any rate. Alwyn reads from the manuscript and recites:

But that, he remembers, is a stanza he had heard somewhere when he was a boy. Why does he now think of it? “She has waited,—so she said,—these many thousand days!” And there was the key to the dream. There was a woman in it; and an angel.{88}

Theos explains his dream to Heliobas, tells how he had seemed to fly into darkness, how in wild despair he cried “Oh, God, where art Thou?” and heard a great rushing sound as of a strong wind beaten through with wings, while a voice, grand and sweet as a golden trumpet blown suddenly in the silence of night, answered, “Here!—and Everywhere!” And then all was brightness, a slanting stream of opaline radiance cleft the gloom, and Alwyn was uplifted by an invisible strength. And then he hears some one call him by name, “Theos, my Beloved!” and a woman of entrancing beauty appears, crowned with white flowers, and robed in a garb that seems spun from midsummer moonbeams; ... a smiling maiden-sweetness in a paradise of glad sights and sounds.

And this being, bidding Alwyn return to his own star, further directs him to seek out the Field of Ardath, where she will meet him. And so they part.

Theos Alwyn awakens from his dream madly in love with this vision of loveliness, and determines, if a Field of Ardath there is, to go there and keep the appointment. Heliobas shows him where the Field of Ardath lies. It is mentioned in the Book of Esdras, in the Apocrypha, and is described as{89} situated four miles west of the Babylonian ruins. Alwyn decides on journeying thither, first sending the poem he had written to his London friend, Francis Villiers, with the request that as “Nourhàlma; a Love Legend of the Past,” it shall be published in the usual way.

By the waters of Babylon we next find Theos Alwyn, who is soon housed in the Hermitage, near Hillah, with one Elzear of Malyana, to whom Heliobas has supplied the traveler with a letter of introduction. So impatient is this lover to prove the truth or falsity of his mystic vision at Dariel, that, on the first night of his arrival at the Hermitage, he proceeds shortly before midnight to search for the Field of Ardath which was known to the Prophet Esdras. He sets forth, and the wondrous story of his experiences immediately commences. “Kyrie eleison! Christe eleison! Kyrie eleison!” sung by full, fresh, youthful voices in clear and harmonious unison, greets his ears; though whence comes the sound, and from whom, there is nothing to show. “Was ever madman more mad than I,” he murmurs. It is a sweet and fascinating madness none the less, for the angel-lover is true to her promise. “Behold the field thou thoughtest barren, how great a glory hath the moon unveiled!” quoth the Prophet Esdras,{90} and as Theos treads the Field of Ardath, which had appeared, when first his eyes rested upon it, a dreary and desolate place, he finds the turf covered with white blossoms, star-shaped and glossy-leaved, with deep golden centres, wherein bright drops of dew sparkled like brilliants, and whence puffs of perfume rose like incense swung at unseen altars. And here he finds, moving sedately along through the snow-white blossoms, a graceful girl. He no longer has eyes for the flower-transfiguration of the lately barren land. “My name is Edris; I came from a far, far country, Theos,—a land where no love is wasted and no promise forgotten!” she tells him. More than that, she adds that she has waited and prayed for him through long bright æons of endless glory, and he recognizes in Edris at last the angel of his vision. She upbraids him for his doubts and unhappiness, speaks slightingly of fame as a perishable diadem; and crying “O fair King Christ, Thou shalt prevail!” she leaves him, and as she goes Theos is told “prayers are heard, and God’s great patience never tires;—learn therefore from the perils of the past, the perils of the future.” Alwyn, falling senseless, drifts into the dream wherein he is to learn the story of his new self.

The description of Theos’s dream fills over fifteen{91} score of pages. The reader is impelled on and on, finding in every step new subject for wonder. The city of Al-Kyris is a feast of scenic splendors, the skill of the writer providing fascinating word-pictures of incidents more strange than were ever imagined in an Arabian Nights’ entertainment. And through all runs a steady and strong undercurrent made up of the solid lesson of the book, “learn from the perils of the past, the perils of the future.”

Theos Alwyn could not tell how long he slept on the Field of Ardath, for his awakening was confusing. He had a consciousness of his previous life, its conditions, his position, and opinions. All now was changed. He was before a gate leading into a walled city, the entrance to which consisted of huge massive portals apparently made of finely moulded brass, and embellished on either side by thick round stone towers from the summits of which red pennons drooped idly in the air. Through the portals was seen a wide avenue paved entirely with mosaics, and along this passed an endless stream of wayfarers. A strange city and a strange people. Fruit-sellers, carrying their lovely luscious merchandise in huge gilded baskets, stood at almost every corner; flower-girls, fair as their own flowers, bore aloft in their gracefully upraised{92} arms wide wicker trays overflowing with odorous blossoms tied into clusters and wreaths. Theos understood the language spoken. It was perfectly familiar to him—more so than his own native tongue. What was his native tongue? Who was he? “Theos Alwyn” was all he could remember. Whence did he come? The answer was direct and decisive. From Ardath. But what was Ardath? Neither a country nor a city. And his dress!—he glanced at it, dismayed and appalled—he had not noticed it till now. It bore some resemblance to the costume of ancient Greece, and consisted of a white linen tunic and loose upper vest, both garments being kept in place by a belt of silver. From this belt depended a sheathed dagger. His feet were shod with sandals, his arms were bare to the shoulder and clasped at the upper part by two broad silver armlets richly chased. The men were for the most part arrayed like himself, though here and there he met some few whose garments were of soft silk, instead of linen, who wore gold belts in place of silver, and who carried their daggers in sheaths that were literally encrusted all over with flashing jewels.

Dazed and bewildered, Theos Alwyn gazed about him. Then, following the crowd, he was borne along to a large square which bordered on the banks of a river that ran through the city. A strange gilded vessel was seen approaching. Huge oars, like golden fins, projected from the sides of the vessel and dipped lazily now and then into the water, wielded by the hands of invisible rowers. The ship sparkled all over as though it were carved out of one great burning jewel. Golden hangings, falling in rich, loose folds, draped it gorgeously from stem to stern; gold cordage looped the sails. On the deck a band of young girls, clad in white and crowned with flowers, knelt, playing softly on quaintly shaped instruments; and a cluster of tiny, semi-nude boys, fair as young cupids, were grouped{94} in pretty, reposeful attitudes along the edge of the gilded prow, holding garlands of red and yellow blossoms which trailed down to the surface of the water.

Theos, gazing dreamily and wonderingly upon the scene, was suddenly roused to feverish excitement, and with a smothered cry of ecstasy fixed his straining eager gaze on one supreme, fair figure—the central glory of the marvelous picture.

Beauty-stricken, Theos was roughly brought back to a sense of his position as a stranger in the city. Al-Kyris was given up to the worship of a serpent, Nagâya. This woman who had passed was Nagâya’s High Priestess, the chief power in the place. All the people worshiped her, and Theos had not, with them, fallen down before her. Immediately he was seized and roughly handled by the mob, who proclaimed him an infidel and a spy. At this opportune moment the Poet Laureate of the Realm,{95} one Sah-Lûma, made his appearance. In Al-Kyris the Laureate was a great man, next only indeed to Zephorânim, the King.

Sah-Lûma rebuked the crowd for their ill-treatment of the stranger; and then, hearing that Theos was a poet from a far country, took him to his own palace.

Probably no vainer person than Sah-Lûma ever existed, whether in a real or imaginary world. They were very artistic in Al-Kyris. Nobody ever seemed to work except the black slaves. Apparently there was no necessity for that. The people, including the King, positively doted on poets. No wonder Sah-Lûma was the Prince of Egoists, seeing that he was the chief poet in Al-Kyris.

The Laureate explained the religion of Al-Kyris to his guest:

These views were strikingly similar to those held by Theos when he was in the world, and he could thus endorse the further assertions of Sah-Lûma, who deemed even a false religion better for the masses than none at all, urging that men were closely allied to brutes. If the moral sense ceased{97} to restrain them they at once leaped the boundary line and gave as much rein to their desires and appetites as hyenas and tigers. And in some natures the moral sense was only kept alive by fear—fear of offending some despotic invisible force that pervaded the Universe, and whose chief and most terrible attribute was not so much creative as destructive power. Thus Sah-Lûma again on the theology of Al-Kyris:

Lysia, High Priestess of Nagâya, was the charmer of the God of Al-Kyris, charmer of the serpent and of the hearts of men. “The hot passion of love is to her a toy, clasped and unclasped so!—in the pink hollow of her hand; and so long as she retains the{98} magic of her beauty, so long will Nagâya-worship hold Al-Kyris in check.” Otherwise,—who was to know? Not Sah-Lûma and not Theos, though both were to learn later. Already in Al-Kyris, it was explained to Theos by his new friend, there were philosophers who were tired of the perpetual sacrifices and the shedding of innocent blood that marked the worship of the city. There was a Prophet Khosrûl who even denounced Lysia and Nagâya in the open streets, and gave out the faith that was in him—that far away in a circle of pure Light the true God existed,—a vast, all-glorious Being, who, with exceeding marvelous love, controlled and guided Creation towards some majestic end. Furthermore, Khosrûl held that thousands of years thence (the times described in Al-Kyris are assumed to be 5000 B.C.) this God would embody a portion of His own existence in human form, “and will send hither a wondrous creature, half God, half man, to live our life, die our death, and teach us by precept and example the surest way to eternal happiness.”

It is the prophet who gave out this faith against whom the King and the people of Al-Kyris are mostly incensed. They prefer their worship of Lysia, “The Virgin Priestess of the Sun and the Serpent,” who “receives love as statues may receive{99} it—moving all others to frenzy she is herself unmoved.” So ’tis said. There is, however, the threatening legend:

And the fall of Al-Kyris is imminent.

To the splendors of the court of Zephorânim, King of Al-Kyris, Theos is duly introduced by the Poet Laureate. He finds there that the poetic muse is adored, and Sah-Lûma is scarcely less esteemed than the King, who, indeed, his friend and devotee, would almost make the Poet supreme. The government and religion of Al-Kyris is mainly humbug. They sin freely and get absolution at an annual feast where a maiden is always slaughtered and offered as a sacrifice to Nagâya.

Theos has some quaint experiences. His great friend Sah-Lûma enchants the court with a poem—one that Theos faintly remembers he himself had written in days of old. The poet and his friend, after a court function, proceed to a reception at the Palace of Lysia. There they witness and take part in marvelous scenes; and the garden of the Palace gives the novelist an opportunity for those beautiful word-pictures that her pen evolves so brilliantly.{100} The poets attend a midnight reception and there witness an extraordinary ballet which follows a banquet even more astounding in its incidents and in its revelations of the real character of this so-called Virgin Priestess. One, Nir-jalis, who had received favors from Lysia, and who, filled and flooded with wine, was indiscreet in his utterances, is given by her a cup of poison—the Chalice of Oblivion—which he drinks, and before a laughing, bacchanalian crowd dies a horrible death with the jeering words of Lysia in his ears, her contemptuous smile upon him. Nobody cares. In Al-Kyris, and certainly in Lysia’s Palace, they enjoy such scenes.

Theos, amazed, watches all. He, too, has another strange revelation before the night is through. In the midst of the revelry he hears a chime of bells, which reminds him of the village church of his earlier years, and of odd suggestions of fair women who were wont to pray for those they loved, and who believed their prayers would be answered. As he meditates thereon he is suddenly seized and borne swiftly along till in the moonlight he recognizes Lysia. Dramatic indeed is the scene that follows. Theos makes a passionate declaration of love to her, and has the promise from Lysia: “Thou shalt be honored above the noblest in the {101}land ... riches, power, fame, all shall be thine—if thou wilt do my bidding.” The bidding is “Kill Sah-Lûma,” and it is Lysia who shows Theos his sleeping friend and places in his hand the dagger with which to strike. Horrified at the suggestion, Theos flings the weapon from him, escapes from the Palace, and reaches the home of Sah-Lûma, where, later, the Poet Laureate rejoins him.

The sands of Al-Kyris were fast running out, and events crowded one upon the other in rapid succession. Theos was terrorized when Sah-Lûma recited “the latest offspring of my fertile genius—my lyrical romance ‘Nourhàlma.’” Then the full title was proclaimed—“Nourhàlma: A Love-Legend of the Past”; and we are given the first line of this mysterious poem:

It was the poem written by Theos after the vision of Edris! He had to hear Sah-Lûma proclaim it as his own; to praise it, too, as the work of the other. Assuredly the cup of self-abnegation for Theos Alwyn was very full. As they talked about the poem a great commotion was heard in the streets. Theos and Sah-Lûma found themselves in the midst of a turbulent crowd, who, for once, even disregarded the Poet Laureate. The Prophet Khosrûl was predicting in the midst of excited multitudes the early{102} destruction of the city, and the coming of the Redeemer. Upon Theos was again forced the knowledge which was his in the world whence he had been transported to this pre-Christian age; and, suddenly roused to excitement, he declared to these talented barbarians—“He HAS come! He died for us, and rose again from the dead more than eighteen hundred years ago!”

From the astonishment caused by this declaration the people had scarcely been roused by words from Sah-Lûma, when King Zephorânim appeared. Khosrûl, having delivered his last dread warning, fell dead; and his decease was immediately followed by the collapse of the great obelisk of the city. The people’s final terrors had begun. The last words of the Prophet Khosrûl had been a reiteration of the old forgotten warning regarding the relations of the High Priestess and the King, and the fall of the city was foretold for that night.

Escaping the destruction caused by the fall of the obelisk, Sah-Lûma and Theos returned to the Palace of the former, and there the Poet Laureate for the first time showed real emotion on learning that his favorite slave, Niphrâta, had left him forever. Soon Sah-Lûma and Theos were summoned by Zèl, High Priest of the Sacrificial Altar, to take part in the Great Sacrifice; for the people were terrified by the{103} many strange happenings and were about to join in solemn unison to implore the favor of Nagâya and the gods. The Temple of Nagâya was magnificently decorated for this New Year’s Festival. There Sah-Lûma found that the maiden to be sacrificed was Niphrâta, and he made an impassioned demand, then an appeal, for her life. Niphrâta was permitted her choice, but she repudiated Sah-Lûma, appearing to be in love with some ghostly representation of the Poet and to be unconscious of his material existence. She had, she plaintively cried, waited for happiness so long; and, the Sacrificial Priest calling for the victim, she rushed upon the knife the Priest held ready for her. One second and she was seen speeding towards the knife; the next—and the whole place was enveloped in darkness. Fire broke out in every part of the Temple. A terrible scene of destruction was enacted, and the terrified people rushed hither and thither in the effort to save their lives;—efforts vain, because the last day of the city had come,—Al-Kyris was doomed,—there was rescue neither for people nor priests.

Sah-Lûma, death being certain, desired to die with Lysia, but his claim was contested by the King. Sovereign and Poet then learned that they had been rivals in love. The prophecy of Khosrûl was being fulfilled. The barbarous Lysia, even in these last{104} moments, was fierce in her hate, and demanded of the King that he should kill Sah-Lûma. Her last order was obeyed. She could secure the death of the Poet, but she could not save herself. Her own death was one of the most terrible and appalling scenes ever conceived or described. Nagâya, the huge snake that the people of Al-Kyris had worshiped, claimed its own. Frightened by the flames, in its fear it turned upon its mistress Lysia, and, with the King vainly striving to drag her from the coils of the python, the High Priestess, chief of the city of lies, atheism, and humbug, died a death which she had many times remorselessly and gleefully decreed for others.

Theos, gazing at the funeral pyre, as it vaguely seemed to him, of a wasted love and a dead passion, passed from the scene, taking with him the dead body of his friend the Poet. And as he kept his steadfast gaze on Sah-Lûma’s corpse, “the dead Poet’s eyes grew into semblance of his own eyes, the dead Sah-Lûma’s face smiled spectrally back at him in the image of his own face!—it was as though he beheld the Picture of Himself, slain and ‘reflected in a magician’s mirror!’” Humbly he prayed to God to pardon his sins and to teach him what he should know; and again he heard soft, small voices singing Kyrie Eleison, and AWOKE to find himself{105} on the Field of Ardath, the dawn just breaking, and the angel Edris near him. Then Edris told him that in the past he had been Sah-Lûma, that in those days he would neither hear Christ nor believe in Him, and that his talents had been misused; she also told Theos how his future years should be spent. She promised that afterwards he should meet her in the highest Heaven, but “not till then, unless the longing of thy love compels.”

It is in that portion of the work called “Poet and Angel” that the serious aim of Marie Corelli in writing this romance is clearly and emphatically brought out. Theos Alwyn is himself once again; but he is a very different self. Returning to London he is received warmly by his friend Villiers, and hears that “Nourhâlma” has brought him much of fame and profit. He had ceased to care for one or the other. He tells Villiers he has become a Christian, anxious, so far as he is able, to follow a faith so grand, and pure, and true. In his declarations on the subject we hear what our author again and again urges in many books—that Christianity and Religion are not determined by one sect or the other. In the words of Theos:

This is the text on which many of Alwyn’s powerful arguments are based, in dealing, both in and out of society, with those opinions of sceptics and agnostics which had formerly commended themselves to him but which he now combats with convincing clearness and strength. To emphasize his position he quotes that terse rebuke of Carlyle’s, in “Sartor Resartus,” as to the uselessness of Voltaire’s work:

The theologian and the lay thinker alike must follow with keen interest the arguments of Theos Alwyn against atheism, materialism, and, what Miss Corelli calls, Paulism. Uncompromisingly should those writers be denounced who take immorality for their theme, and achieve considerable sales thereby. The declarations of Alwyn are of particular interest because in them expression is given to many of Marie Corelli’s own views on sacred things. The man or woman who is bewildered by the quarrels of the religious sects of these days, and whose bewilderment is increased by the teachings of the cynics, may well exclaim with Alwyn what a howling wilderness this world would be if given over entirely to materialism, and conclude with him that, if it were, scarce a line of{108} division could be drawn between man and the brute beasts of the field! “I consider,” says the poet, “that if you take the hope of an after-joy and blessedness away from the weary, perpetually toiling Million, you destroy, at one wanton blow, their best, purest, and noblest aspirations. As for the Christian Religion, I cannot believe that so grand and holy a Symbol is perishing among us. We have a monarch whose title is ‘Defender of the Faith,’—we live in the age of civilization which is primarily the result of that faith,—and if, as it is said, Christianity is exploded,—then certainly the greatness of this hitherto great nation is exploding with it! But I do not think, that because a few sceptics uplift their wailing ‘All is vanity’ from their self-created desert of agnosticism, therefore the majority of men and women are turning renegades from the simplest, most humane, most unselfish Creed that ever the world has known. It may be so, but, at present, I prefer to trust in the higher spiritual instinct of man at his best, rather than accept the testimony of the lesser Unbelieving against the greater Many, whose strength, comfort, patience and endurance, if these virtues come not from God, come not at all.”

To those who, through the atheistic views of some in the churches and of the hosts outside, be{109}gin to feel doubt as to the truth of the Christian faith, this book “Ardath” will be of enormous value. It will strengthen their faith and aid greatly to carry conviction to those who pause, unable to decide amid the chaotic teachings of conflicting theorists. We praise this book more especially for its virtue as an antidote to the pitiful writings of some female novelists whose vicious themes must do much harm amongst the women of the day. “If women give up their faith,” declares Alwyn to the Duchess de la Santoisie, “let the world prepare for strange disaster! Good, God-loving women,—women who pray,—women who hope,—women who inspire men to do the best that is in them,—these are the safety and glory of nations! When women forget to kneel,—when women cease to teach their children the ‘Our Father,’ by whose grandly simple plea Humanity claims Divinity as its origin,—then shall we learn what is meant by ‘men’s hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.’ A woman who denies Christ repudiates Him, Who, above all others, made her sex as free and honored as everywhere in Christendom it is. He never refused woman’s prayers,—He had patience for her weakness,—pardon for her sins,—and any book written by woman’s hand that does Him the small{110}est shadow of wrong is to me as gross an act as that of one who, loaded with benefits, scruples not to murder his benefactor!”

The reading of “Ardath” will help many to the conviction of Theos Alwyn—“God Exists. I, of my own choice, prayer, and hope, voluntarily believe in God, in Christ, in angels, and in all things beautiful, and pure, and grand! Let the world and its ephemeral opinions wither; I will not be shaken down from the first step of the ladder whereon one climbs to Heaven!”

Such is the teaching of this remarkable book “Ardath,” which inculcates these lessons interwoven with a romantic story of fascinating interest.

Towards its close there occurs, again in the person and in the words of Heliobas, a scathing comment upon “spiritualists,” for whom six tests are suggested:

There is a charming finale. Theos marries the angel Edris. An angel? Yes; but an angel because a woman, most purely womanly. That is all, and all women can be angels—“A Dream of Heaven made human!{112}”

CHAPTER VI

“WORMWOOD” AND “THE SOUL OF LILITH”

Some day a selection of extracts from “The Works of Marie Corelli” will be published, and excellent reading it will prove. For, scattered about the novelist’s goodly list of books, one may light on many interesting little observations concerning human nature which will well bear reproduction without the context. In the course of this biography a modest choice of Miss Corelli’s thoughts on religion, men, women, education, and such-like topics will be found; but it is impossible in the narrow scope of the present publication to quote everything that one would like to.

Early in “Wormwood” there occurs a passage of the kind to which we refer. It is a pretty description of the ill-fated heroine of the story, and of her “soft and trifling chatter.” Pauline de Charmilles is eighteen, newly home from school—“a child as innocent and fresh as a flower just bursting into bloom, with no knowledge of the world into which she was entering, and with certainly no idea of the power of her own beauty to rouse the passions of{113} men.” Pauline, by mutual parental head-nodding, is thrown much into the society of young Beauvais (who tells the story), a wealthy banker’s son. His description of the girl forms the passage alluded to above:

Pauline’s ingenuousness and alluring looks quickly enslave young Beauvais. He cannot understand the reason of this fascination. He quite realizes that she is a bread-and-butter schoolgirl, and “a mere baby in thought,” but—she is beautiful. So, having granted that the net in which he finds himself immeshed is purely a physical one, he thus descants on the reasonableness of his fall:{114}

The love of Beauvais is apparently returned by Pauline, and all goes merrily in the direction of marriage-bells, whose ringing seems a matter of no great distance off when the two young people become betrothed; although it is apparent to a great friend of Pauline’s, Heloïse St. Cyr, that the schoolgirl is not so sure of herself in the matter of being in love as she should be.

Among the many charmingly French touches in this book is Pauline’s reassuring speech to her lover. “Be satisfied, Gaston; I am thy very good little fiancée, who is very, very fond of thee, and happy in thy company, voilà tout!” And then, taking a{115} rose from her bouquet-de-corsage, she fastens it in his button-hole, enchanting him completely.

Then comes Silvion Guidèl, nephew of M. Vaudron, Curé of the parish in which live the De Charmilles. Guidèl is destined for the priesthood and possesses considerable personal charms. Beauvais père comments on them:

As events prove, Beauvais fils has only too good reason to distrust the embryo priest. Soon after, Beauvais père is called away to London for several weeks, and, as a consequence of the superintending of the Paris banking house falling entirely to the son, Gaston sees but little of his fiancée. But he is often in the company of Silvion Guidèl, to whom he becomes much attached in spite of his previous feelings towards M. Vaudron’s nephew. So, writ{116}ing the history of those days long afterwards, Beauvais acknowledges that he was mistaken in changing his attitude towards Guidèl:

The wedding day draws closer, and Beauvais remains blind to everything save his own joy and the bliss which he fondly imagines will result from the union. True, he sometimes notices a certain lack of enthusiasm in Pauline’s view of the approaching ceremony, but he attributes this and her wistfulness of expression to “the nervous excitement a young girl would naturally feel at the swift approach of her wedding day.” Strangely enough, Guidèl, too, shows signs of physical and mental{117} distress, but when Beauvais rallies him on his manner and appearance, he puts the young banker off with light speeches in which, however, there is a certain bitterness which puzzles the latter considerably. However, Beauvais still suspects nothing. At length Pauline shatters all his dreams of the future, and makes him a miserable wretch for life, by confessing that she loves Silvion Guidèl, that her love is returned, and that, in consequence of this mutual passion, the worst of possible fates has befallen her.

Then Beauvais flies to absinthe drinking, which is the keynote of the story. From that time on it is all absinthe. A broken-down painter, André Gessonex, lures him on to this disastrous form of begetting forgetfulness; and this is the first step down the short steep hill which leads to the young banker’s utter ruin. Having once tasted the potent and fascinating mixture, he returns to it again and again, and gradually it warps him, physically and mentally, finally transforming him into one of the meanest scoundrels in Paris.

But this is after many days. On the morning after his first bout of absinthe drinking, Beauvais decides to challenge Silvion, but discovers that the betrayer of Pauline has disappeared from Paris. Thereupon, though sore at heart, he determines{118} to save Pauline’s family an infinity of shame by marrying the girl; and so the preparations continue.

But in the interval that elapses between this decision and the date fixed for the nuptials, the absinthe works a terrible change in Beauvais’ attitude towards Pauline, with the result that, when the day of the ceremony arrives, he denounces her before her parents and the large assembly of guests as the cast-off mistress of Guidèl, and harshly refuses to make her his wife.

The awful effect of this speech may be imagined; poor Pauline’s looks confirm the truth of his statement; the guests quietly leave the broken-hearted parents with their daughter; there is no marriage. Take the decorations down; fling the wedding feast to the mendicants who whine round the house; there is no marriage!

Even Beauvais père turns on his miscreant of a son as they quit the desolate girl’s abode:

More than this, the indignant old man gives his son a substantial sum of money, and turns him out of his house.

Pauline, too, leaves her home in a mysterious and sudden fashion, without telling any one where she is going. The death of her father, M. de Charmilles, quickly follows. Beauvais drinks himself stupid every night, and spends his days doggedly hunting for Pauline, who, he feels sure, has hidden herself in the loathsome slums in which Paris abounds. And in time he does meet her, but long before this he encounters her seducer, Silvion Guidèl, and, after a mad struggle, throttles him, and casts the corpse into the Seine.

The murder is not traced home to Beauvais, who drinks more deeply than ever of the deadly absinthe, and becomes more surely its slave with every draught. Gessonex, the disreputable artist who introduced him to this form of vice, ends his failure of a career by shooting himself on the pave{120}ment outside of a café after one of these carousals, and it is while Beauvais is visiting the artist’s grave that he at last sets eyes on Pauline, kneeling by the tomb of the De Charmilles. For he cannot mistake the figure crouching by that closed door: “She was slight, and clad in poorest garments—the evening wind blew her thin shawl about her like a gossamer sail,—but the glimmer of the late sunlight glistened on a tress of nut-brown hair that had escaped from its coils and fell loosely over her shoulders,—and my heart beat thickly as I looked,—I knew—I felt that woman was Pauline!”

When he endeavors to track her to her lodgings, however, she unconsciously eludes him, and he obtains no clue as to where she may be found.

Weeks go by, and Beauvais swallows more and more absinthe by way of deadening thought and feeling. The insidious poison is beginning to tell on his brain. At times he is seized by the notion that everything about him is of absurdly abnormal proportions, or the reverse. “Men and women would, as I looked at them, suddenly assume the appearance of monsters both in height and breadth, and again, would reduce themselves in the twinkling of an eye to the merest pigmies.” So, while the absintheur’s brain and body decline, the summer fades into autumn, and he is still looking{121} for Pauline. At length, one dismal November evening, whilst wandering home in his usual heavily drugged condition, he hears a woman singing in one of the by-streets. She is singing a well-known convent chant, the “Guardian Angel”:

It is Pauline at last! Then the absinthe tells its tale, and Beauvais completes his scheme of vengeance. With cold-blooded ferocity he confesses that he has slain her lover, whereupon the desolate girl, the hopes she had fostered of meeting Silvion again being forever shattered, buries her woes in the dark bosom of the river of sighs.

Beauvais haunts the Morgue for two days, and his patience is rewarded. Here is a piece of description which, in its way, is perfect:

And that, practically, is the end of the story, for Gaston Beauvais, having revenged himself on his sweetheart and her betrayer, has nought to do now save drink absinthe. Delirium tremens ensues, Beauvais is laid up for a month, and at the end of that period the doctor speaks plain words of wisdom and warning to him:

{123}

But the physician’s admonition falls on heedless ears. Beauvais returns to the alluring glass, and the book ends with the confession that he is a confirmed absintheur—“a thing more abject than the lowest beggar that crawls through Paris whining for a sou!—a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous, that if you met me by chance in the daytime, you would probably shriek for sheer alarm!”

Such is the graphic and terrible picture drawn by Marie Corelli of the effects of this iniquitous draught. If Beauvais had not been tempted by{124} Gessonex to taste it, it is not probable that Pauline’s piteous confession would have resulted in such wholesale tragedy; for Heloïse St. Cyr, the sweet woman-friend of the bride-elect’s, dies, too, and so an entire happy household is destroyed by reason of one man’s uncontrollable savagery.

Had Beauvais never put his lips to the fatal glass, he would in all probability, on hearing what had befallen his sweetheart, have quietly broken off the match. For, it must be remembered, he was a respectable young banker, of sober mien and quiet ways, not a Bohemian and frequenter of all-night cafés. But he tasted absinthe, and so brought about his undoing, as many another young Parisian is bringing it about at the present day. Here is the novelist’s fierce denunciation of the vice:

{125}

“Wormwood” is undoubtedly a work of genius—a strange, horrible book, yet fraught with a tremendous moral. The story of inhuman vengeance goes swiftly on, without a stop or stay; one feels that the little bride-girl is doomed, that the priest must die, that unutterable misery must be the final lot of all the actors in the story.

Marie Corelli does not overstate the case when she declares that absinthe has taken a grim and cancerous hold of Paris. It is called for in the cafés as naturally as we, in London, order a “small” or “large” Bass. But what a difference in the two beverages! A French writer of authority says that fifteen per cent. of the French army are rendered incapable by the use of absinthe.

The bulk of the French populace drinks either bock or light wine, and it takes a fairly large amount of either to produce intoxication. In England the populace drinks draught ale or whiskey. Comparing the two peoples and their behavior—for example—on public holidays, we must allow that the French are by far the more sober nation. But in London we have not—except in one or two West-End cafés—this dreadful absinthe, and we may well be thankful that the drinking of it has not grown upon us as it has grown upon the Parisians.{126}

Could not Marie Corelli turn the heavy guns of her genius on the drink question this side of the Channel! The field is a very wide one. Children under fourteen are now prevented by law from being served at public-houses. It would be a good plan, too, if women could not order intoxicants from grocers. Many a man, in discharging his grocer’s account, does not trouble to inspect the items, or is not afforded the chance of inspecting them; many a man, however, if he were to submit his grocer’s book to a close scrutiny, would find that bottles of inferior wines and spirits were being supplied along with the raisins and baking-powder not for his own, the cook’s, or his family’s use, but for the secret consumption of his wife.

In suggesting new legislative measures with regard to the sale of intoxicants in this country, Marie Corelli would be performing a public service worthy of the Nation’s profoundest gratitude.

“The Soul of Lilith,” which was published about a year after “Wormwood,” is a work of a very different character. This book treats of a subject in which Marie Corelli revels. As a brief introductory note explains, “The Soul of Lilith” does not assume to be what is generally understood by a “novel,” being simply the account “of a strange{127} and daring experiment once actually attempted,” and offered to those who are interested in the unseen possibilities of the Hereafter. It is the story of a man “who voluntarily sacrificed his whole worldly career in a supreme effort to prove the apparently Unprovable.”

This persistent probing on Marie Corelli’s part of what most writers shun and very few have ever attempted to solve, is one of the secrets of her great sales. Turn to page 319 of “The Soul of Lilith,” and you will find the matter put neatly in a nutshell:

This passage may afford a little light to those people who are forever declaring that they cannot understand what other people can see in Marie Corelli. The fact is, Marie Corelli appeals to a tremendous section of the public—a section in which, we are assured, the fair sex does not pre{128}dominate. Indeed, the majority of the novelist’s correspondents are men. Marie Corelli is intensely in earnest, imaginative, and passionate. She lets her reader know, before she has covered many pages, precisely what her book is to be about, and in this way she spares one the irritation excited by those old-fashioned writers who used to drone on for chapter after chapter, making headway in an exasperatingly slow and cumbrous fashion.

Then it must be taken into consideration that there is a very big public which has practically nothing to do except eat meals, sleep, take exercise, and read novels. Such people are necessarily more introspective than busy folk, and many of them are exceedingly anxious as to what will become of them when it shall please Providence to put an end to their aimless existence in this vale of smiles and tears. Marie Corelli supplies them with ample food for thought and argument.

Perhaps all these attempts to solve the Unsolvable have a morbid tendency; a little simple faith is certainly more salutary. However that may be, a very great public regards such attempts as more engrossing reading-matter than tales “of love and politics and society”; and a still stronger reason for Marie Corelli’s immense popularity is to be found in the fact that she is the only female Richmond in{129} the field. She sits on a splendidly isolated throne, a writer whose genius has enabled her to soar to certain peculiar heights which no other literary man or woman has succeeded in scaling.

“The Soul of Lilith,” as we have inferred, displays its author in her element. It is a work which, from its nature, may be classed with “A Romance of Two Worlds” and “Ardath.” It possesses the same mystic properties, the same speculative endeavors to obtain knowledge that is denied to mortals.

This is the kernel of the story, which narrates how El-Râmi, a man of Arabian origin, possessing many of the mysteriously occult powers peculiar to the Indian fakir, injects a certain fluid into the still warm veins of a dead Egyptian girl-child called Lilith. In this way he preserves her body in a living condition, and the success of his experiment is proved by the fact that Lilith passes from childhood to womanhood whilst in this state, and answers questions put to her by El-Râmi.

It is the desire of El-Râmi, however, to make himself master of Lilith’s soul as well as of her{130} body, and this impious object leads to the destruction of the fair form he has preserved and of his own reason. For he falls in love with Lilith, and the declaration of his passion is followed by her crumbling away to dust. The shock to his highly strung organization results in his mental collapse, and from this he never recovers.

There are many passages of wild beauty and extraordinary power in this story, which occupies many pages in the telling before the superbly dramatic dénouement is reached. Heliobas, the wise physician of “A Romance of Two Worlds,” but now turned monk, is introduced into the story, and warns El-Râmi that his atheistic experiment will prove fruitless:

El-Râmi reminds Heliobas that it is only a woman’s soul that he is striving for—“how should it baffle mine? Of slighter character—of more sensitive balance—and always prone to yield,—how should it prove so strong? Though, of course, you will tell me that Souls, like Angels, are sexless.”

The monk repudiates such a suggestion. “All created things have sex,” he declares, “even the angels. ‘Male and Female created He them’—recollect that,—when it is said God made Man in ‘His Own Image.’”

“What! Is it possible you would endow God Himself with the Feminine attributes as well as the Masculine?” cries El-Râmi, in astonishment.

The verbal duel between Heliobas, the man of God, and El-Râmi, the man of Science, is exceedingly well-written. In the course of their conversation El-Râmi opines that Heliobas is more of a poet than either a devotee or a scientist. The monk’s rejoinder is worth quoting:

{133}

In spite, however, of Heliobas’ warning words, El-Râmi proceeds with his experiment, which ends as recorded. The scientist is taken by his brother Féraz—a poetically conceived character—to a monastery in Cyprus, where he lives in placid contentment. Here he is visited by some English friends, who sum up his condition and suggest a simple remedy for others inclined to pursue similar researches in a way that strikes one as singularly practical:

And surely the gentle rejoinder of Irene is one that should silence controversy, dissipate vain speculation, and bring peace and rest to many thousands of minds which are wearied with attempts “to prove the apparently Unprovable.{134}”

CHAPTER VII

MR. BENTLEY’S ENCOURAGEMENT—SOME LETTERS OF AN OLD PUBLISHER

When Solomon was at the zenith of his glory the number of people who could read must have been extremely limited, and yet that monarch—whose methods of administering justice may compare, in point of brevity and common sense, with those of the late Mr. Commissioner Kerr—is known to have commented on the never-ceasing literary output of his generation.

We may take it, then, that from the earliest times the supply of books has always exceeded the demand—when Israel had kings there must have been publishers, and from that era to the days of Byron (and, possibly, in subsequent times) there must have been robbers among them.

The young and aspiring writer has probably trodden a thorny path in his pursuit of fame at all stages of literary history; for, dealing only with the facts of yesterday and to-day, the scribe of tender years, after successfully arranging for the publica{135}tion of his work has still had the vitriolic condemnation of the jealous critic to contend with.

There have been occasional straightforward articles in the literary journals on the ethics of criticism, and now and then a writer of note and influence has come forward with a word in behalf of the literary pilgrim, who, however, still goes on his way having no real weapon of defense save his native ability—and in Marie Corelli’s case this has proved to be a very sharp weapon indeed!

How Mr. Bentley first became acquainted with Miss Corelli has already been described in the chapter on “A Romance of Two Worlds.” When Mr. Bentley paid his first call on her, he found her, to his astonishment, a mere schoolgirl. It was altogether a novel experience to him to have dealings with a writer who was at once so youthful and so gifted, and the attitude he adopted towards her from that time onwards was benignly paternal.

Marie Corelli has never employed a literary agent, and fails to see why a writer should not manage his or her own business affairs without any such extraneous assistance. In some respects we ourselves are of the opinion that the agent is an undesirable “middleman,” he being far too apt to hold out glittering awards which lure authors on to work above their normal pace; but it must be borne in mind{136} that there are many authors who are poor hands at haggling over terms with publishers and editors, and, in such cases, the literary agent proves of great service.

No gentleman of this order, then, came between Miss Corelli and Mr. Bentley after the successful appearance of the “Romance;” terms for future work were arranged to the mutual satisfaction of author and publisher; and book after book, under these genial auspices, was steadily written, each new volume serving still more fully to substantiate the high opinion Mr. Bentley formed of Miss Corelli’s abilities after reading her first manuscript.

Shortly after the publication of “The Soul of Lilith” Mr. George Bentley retired from active participation in the business of his firm (which was subsequently incorporated with the house of Macmillan), and Miss Corelli transferred her books to Messrs. Methuen. Hereunder is a list of the novelist’s works published by Messrs. Bentley:

Portions of some of the many letters written to{137} the author of these works by her publisher we have already quoted. We will now proceed to give a selection of extracts from others. The reader will not fail to observe how happily cordial—affectionate, almost—were the relations of these two—the gray-headed publisher and the young lady novelist.

The first of our selection has to do with “Ardath,” which Mr. Bentley had been reading in manuscript form:

It would appear from the next letter that the novelist had been throwing out a hint that the doughty knights of Grub Street might be approached with a preface of a nature to make them pause ere they ground her latest work under heel.{139} Mr. Bentley’s letter in reply, like that which follows it, is redolent of his sturdy independence and sound common sense.

The following was written after Mr. Gladstone’s first visit to the novelist. It should be explained that Mr. Gladstone, when he first called, found Miss Corelli “out,” and was afterwards invited by her to come to tea on a particular date:

And again, on the same topic:

The following are characteristic of Mr. Bentley’s opinions and frame of mind. The conclusion of the letter written in October is pleasantly Johnsonian:

Now occurs an interval of ten months, and then the manuscript of “Wormwood” evokes the following sentiments:

{142}

{143}

The first part of the next letter has reference to “The Soul of Lilith.” Following it are further remarks about “Ardath,” which, of all Marie Corelli’s books, seems to have taken the greatest hold on Mr. Bentley.

The following alludes to the publication of a new edition of the work mentioned:{145}

What Becomes of the Press Cuttings

Marie Corelli’s Pet Yorkshire Terrier “Czar"

{147}

The next (undated) was written just after Queen Victoria desired that all Marie Corelli’s works should be sent to her:—

{148}

This of October 28th, 1892, forms the last of the batch of extracts placed in our hands. Throughout his business associations with Miss Corelli, it is apparent that Mr. Bentley was everything that was kindly, tactful, and encouraging. The imaginative temperament is always a difficult one to deal with, and Mr. Bentley excelled himself in this respect. Even when he wished to bestow a mild rebuke he did so with an old-fashioned courtesy that is truly delightful and only too rare in these days of dictated, typewritten epistles.

There are other letters, but from these it will be only necessary to cull a sentence here and there. All the above-quoted communications, we should add, were in Mr. Bentley’s own handwriting.

Marie Corelli has always been a neat workwoman, and here, in a letter from her publisher, dated Au{149}gust 28th, 1886, we find a tribute to the perfection of her “copy:”—

Vice versâ, one calls to mind a tale of Miss Martineau’s about Carlyle, who literally smothered his proof-sheets with corrections. One day he went to the office to urge on the printer. “Why, sir,” said the latter, “you really are so very hard upon us with your corrections. They take so much time, you see!” Carlyle replied that he had been accustomed to this sort of thing—he had got works printed in Scotland, and —— “Yes, indeed, sir,” rejoined the printer, “we are aware of that. We have a man here from Edinburgh, and when he took up a bit of your copy, he dropped it as if it had burnt his fingers, and cried out, ‘Lord, have mercy! have you got that man to print for? Lord knows when we shall get done with his corrections.’”

It is evident that Mr. Bentley deemed his protégée—if we may so term her—capable of turning her pen in many directions. “I am not sure that you could not give us a fine historical novel,” he wrote in 1887, “if you got hold of a character which fascinated your imagination.{150}”

In a letter dated May 7th, 1888, he refers playfully to “the little blue silk dress” which seems to have taken his fancy on a previous occasion; nor did he forget the young novelist’s birthday, for in a previous letter of the same year he declares that, if he were in London, he would “be tempted to cast prudence to the wind, even to the perilous East wind, to offer you my greeting on the first of May.”

Besides being a keen judge of manuscript—as, indeed, he had need to be—Mr. Bentley wrote very pleasant prose himself. His reading was extensive and his comments thereon lucid and thoughtful. In 1883 he printed for private circulation among his friends a little green covered volume called “After Business.” A copy of this work, presented to Miss Corelli a fortnight after Mr. Bentley first met her, lies before us. There are seven chapters, whose nature can be divined from their titles: I. An Evening with Erasmus. IV. How the World Wags. V. An Afternoon with Odd Volumes—and so forth. A peaceful, soothing little book is this. Here is the final passage of the “Odd Volumes” chapter. It affords a happy example of the book’s literary flavor, of its truly “After Business” characteristics:

The influence of the kindly advice George Bentley dealt out to the young novelist cannot be overestimated. Was she upset by a criticism, he came to her aid with good humored badinage and sympathy; was she despondent, he laughed away the mood and bade “Thelma” be herself again! Always, indeed, he urged her to be herself—to embody in her books the message so nobly delivered by a poet:

CHAPTER VIII

“BARABBAS”—A “PASSION PLAY” IN PROSE

“Why should women’s writings be in any respect inferior to that of men if they are only willing to follow out the same method of self-education?” asked Charles Kingsley. This was of the nature of a prophecy, for had Kingsley lived until to-day he would have seen the verification of his words. Women, as a rule, do not self-educate themselves. They will not try to walk alone. They understand only just the easy verse and rhyme of existence. Some few understand to-day a higher phase by self-conviction. Marie Corelli is certainly one.

To write prose, perfect prose; to stir the heart and move the soul, is the highest phase of mental reasoning. It is the air and melody of spiritual conception, the so-called “supernatural.” All our lives we can talk prose, but to grasp tersely your brain’s creation, to fix upon your different dream characters and embody them with life, with passion, and with naturalness—the naturalness which has existed from creation—is the highest{153} prose, for it is poetry and prose hand-in-hand, an achievement, a oneness of the two.

This was Marie Corelli’s idea in penning “Barabbas.” Setting her mind hard and fast to face creeds and defy criticism; true to the instincts which permeated her mind throughout her pristine works, she went on following her soul impression, her inspiration to see “good” in most things, nobility in men and women who might be scourged by the world. And thus “Barabbas,” though a robber, might have had some strong points, and though of an evil nature must certainly, from scriptural evidence, have had the sympathy of the populace. That sympathy gave the author the keynote to produce the human drama, which is lived over and over again to-day and forever,—and which is aptly called A Dream of the World’s Tragedy.

Marie Corelli, true to her colors in this later work, still adheres to poetic spirituality, the “ideal,” the sublime, the free, the sympathetic, mingled with the rendering of a forcible and traitorous character in that of “Judith” (the heroine of the book) in its full strength of weakness and evil, and in its final magnificent revulsion from a past to the glory of a holy repentance and in finding the King, in the symbol of the cross. Take this scene,{154} where after madness and despair, she meets her death:

The conception of the character of “Judith” in “Barabbas” is fret with strong and sympathetic points. She is the mainspring of the work. The idea of the “Betrayal” emanates from her, yet the æsthetic treatment at the finale with the symbol of the cross, while closing her eyes in death, is poetry in itself.

Listen to Peter’s definition of a lie:{155}

The critics were as usual up in arms over “Barabbas,” but in spite of them its sale has been immense. The book has made such headway since its publication that it has been translated into more foreign tongues than any other novel of either the past or present—the translations comprising thirty to forty languages. As a matter of original conception, tragical effect and clearness of diction, “Barabbas” is considered by many the best of Marie Corelli’s works.{156}

In “Barabbas” there is no loitering by the way, as it were, to argue, although the moral throughout is strong enough. The author’s sensibility grasps the situation of that potent day in the World’s era with a subtle reasoning of how to-day things are precisely the same, and would be precisely the same at the advent of a new Christus, save possibly as regards the execution. For our lunatic asylums afford an infinitely better kind of torture than the cross.

The character of Jesus of Nazareth, “the dreamy Young Philosopher” of his short day, is the poem of the tragedy. Barabbas himself is a character of much force, despite his weakness in the hands of Judith. The soliloquies of Melchior throughout the first part of the book are somewhat drastic, though the character bears out well its own mission.

There is extreme spirituality in the sayings of this somewhat important creation. He might be the Cicero of the work. One of his replies to Barabbas, showing the vesture of his thoughts, occurs again thus:

A terse reasoning out of the living essence of the supreme, and an almost matchless soliloquy.

Here is another of Melchior’s speeches:

It was Marie Corelli’s idea in this particular{158} work evidently to clothe her characters in the real human, that which is changeless and unchangeable as cycles in the world’s eye; and to show that the mind of man in its essentials does not change, and that its perfection is gained only by the spiritual side of things, overcapping the material and the so-called animal. That God intends men and women to attain this superiority over matter is one of the æsthetic treasures of Marie Corelli’s literature, generally not particularly well received, still less understood, but haply none the less welcome, as it is a conception of its own peculiar originality by no means local. The fictional character of Caiaphas in all his sycophancy and sacerdotal arrogancy occupies a measure of the romance, furnishing a tone of treachery throughout.

Naturally the description of the Magdalen is full of extraordinary beauty. It is the beauty of a{159} regenerated soul, a soul of love and greatness, emancipated from the material, yet bearing the same. The death of the one Magdalen, and the rising therefrom of the new Mary, is pathetically described in her own words to Barabbas:

If Miss Corelli was bold in attacking so vast and so controversial a subject as the tragedy of the Christ, she was none the less inspired in her conception of the situation. The description of Jesus of Nazareth, upon whom the story centres and concludes, is simplicity itself. It teaches charity, love, brotherhood, and yet preaches humility; not humility of a universal ignorance, but that “humility” which puts even dignity in the shade,{160} since it is dignity in another name. The pathetic touches are the cream of her story. It is not a long study, but what there is, is strange and touching with the wholesomeness of real pathos, not of one particular class, not mythical, but a tender theme as it were from a woman’s tender heart, possessing the faculty of a noble sympathy for the world’s greatest tale of inimitable love and sorrow therefrom. The chapter on the resurrection is one of the highest aims of the work, and has been read frequently as a “lesson” in the Churches on Easter day. The peculiar and idealistic spirituality of the angels at the tomb is told in a fashion distinctive of the writer. The scene of the resurrection, indeed, is worth giving in its entirety:

This appeals fully to the poetic imagination, and it seems to quicken a kind of personal interest as to the marvelous mystery of that stupendous occasion.

Marie Corelli’s Christ embodies much of the human—the human that is divinely magnetic, almost, if not quite, undefinable, yet not exclusive, not idolatrous, but simply and gently human. The creation of the character of Jesus of Nazareth possesses no atom of bigotry. It teaches love and does not seek to embitter hate. The aura of the master{162} character permeates each living character throughout the work. It preaches Love, Charity, and Brotherhood; it ignores the Church (i.e., sectarian misnomer), so it should have, as it has through so many tongues, its mission.

There is no new creed, no new passion, no new deed under the sun to-day. There is only the same recapitulation in a fresh garb. Our Saints still live to-day. It sounds drastic enough, but Miss Corelli feels this and knows that midst the fair field of fairness there is also the thorn and the poisonous flower any one may cull, or the simple field lily that lifts its face to Heaven, and sees only Heaven in its purity.

Kingsley said, “The history of England is the literature of England.” Possibly so. The strong advance of women writers ever since that excellent man’s passing has proved much of this. It is to the honor of women to-day. It is proved in the fine grasp of subjects, the faculty of dealing poetically with a theme, so widely known yet always fresh, under new lens, and without which this world to many would be a finite and a joyless place. There is just another quotation from “Barabbas,” quite at the conclusion of this remarkable book, which weighs in with this and also with the author’s idea,—just an exoneration of the Great{163} Tragedy, a simplification of the whole story. It is the finale and in itself not only teaches powerfully, but is an invitation, as it were, from a potent mind to those to whom it sends its own message:

{164}

CHAPTER IX

“THE SORROWS OF SATAN,”—AS A BOOK AND AS A PLAY,—THE STORY OF THE DRAMATIZATION

The publication of “The Sorrows of Satan,” in 1895, caused a greater sensation than had followed the appearance of any other work by Miss Corelli. Many presumably competent judges of literature indulged in an absolute orgie of denunciation. In the Review of Reviews, Mr. W. T. Stead printed a column or so of sneers, though admitting that the conception was magnificent, and that the author had an immense command of language. Anxious, apparently, not to miss what would greatly interest the public, a good twelve pages of his periodical were devoted to extracts from the book. He knew, as all the critics knew, that all the world would soon be reading it, and forming its own judgment. The public must, in very truth, form an unflattering opinion of the fairness of some of those who attempt to force their own opinions of a book upon men and women who are not only fully capable of thinking for themselves, but who, sometimes,—as in the{165} case of Marie Corelli’s publications,—insist upon doing so.

Most of the critics entirely missed the point of “The Sorrows of Satan.” There is a notable character in the book—Lady Sibyl Elton. Now the idea of Lady Sibyl was an allegorical one. She represented, to Marie Corelli’s mind, the brilliant, indifferent, selfish, vicious impersonation of Society offering itself body and soul to the devil. This was completely lost sight of by most of those who criticised the book, and who had not the imagination to see beyond the mere forms of woman and fiend. All the other characters are arranged to play round this one central idea, so far as the “woman of the piece” was concerned.

It utterly surprised the author to find that people imagined that she had taken some real woman to portray, and had contrasted her badness with Mavis Clare to advertise her own excellent character against the other’s blackness. Facts, however, are facts. Marie Corelli considers that the evils of society are wrought by women; hence the impersonation of Lady Sibyl as a woman, courting the devil. Secondly, she considers that the reformation of society must be wrought by women; hence the impersonation of Mavis Clare, as a woman repelling the devil.

“The Sorrows of Satan” is now in its forty-third{166} edition. The book has not only been read by representatives of all classes in all countries, but is valued and loved by many thousands who, by the wonderful power of this single pen, have been forced to think; and, by meditating upon the problems which make the book, have found themselves better men and women for the exercise.

“Thousands and tens of thousands throughout English-speaking Christendom,” declared Father Ignatius, “will bless the author who has dared to pen the pages of ‘The Sorrows of Satan’; they will bless Marie Corelli’s pen, respecting its denunciation of the blasphemous verses of a certain ‘popular British poet.’ Where did the courage come from that made her pen so bold that the personality of God, the divinity of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, the necessity of religious education should thus crash upon you from the pen of a woman?”

Courageous, indeed, is any author or speaker who attacks the selfishness, the materialism, the insincerity of much of our social life and of many of our social customs. And what made the attack so successful, what caused such bitter resentment on the part of those who hate Marie Corelli for her exposures of shams and impostures, and her valiant upholding of virtue and of truth, is the fact that the author has not only the courage which her convic{167}tions give her, but that she has the power that justifies her bravery! The book is a grand and successful attempt to show how women who are good and true hold the affection, the esteem, the devotion, the homage of men; it is an incentive to women to be in men’s regard the Good Angels that men best love to believe them; it is a lesson to women how to attain the noblest heights of womanhood.

As Marie Corelli, in discussing the “Modern Marriage Market,” has said, “Follies, temptations, and hypocrisies surround, in a greater or less degree, all women, whether in society or out of it; and we are none of us angels, though, to their credit be it said, some men still think us so. Some men still make ‘angels’ out of us, in spite of our cycling mania, our foolish ‘clubs,’—where we do nothing at all,—our rough games at football and cricket, our general throwing to the winds of all dainty feminine reserve, delicacy, and modesty,—and we alone are to blame if we shatter their ideals and sit down by choice in the mud when they would have placed us on thrones.”

The woman who reads and studies “The Sorrows of Satan” will desire to attain the angel ideal; and the lesson will be the better learned by the reading of this book because of the appalling picture of Lady Sibyl Elton, whose callousness and whose fin-de-{168}siècle masquerading, lying, trickery, atheism, and vice, make up an abomination in the form of Venus that is a painting of many society beauties of the day,—soulless beauties whose bodies are as deliberately sold in the marriage mart as the clothes and jewels with which their damning forms are adorned.

And then in “The Sorrows of Satan” there is the unattractive personality of Geoffrey Tempest, a man with five millions of money, one of whose first declarations on the attainment of wealth is that he will give to none and lend to none, and who pursues a life of vanity, selfishness, and self-aggrandizement, until at last he repels the evil genius of the story, Prince Lucio Rimânez—the devil.

In the opening chapter of “The Sorrows of Satan” we are introduced to Mr. Geoffrey Tempest, at the moment a writer and a man of brains, but starving and sick at heart through a hopeless struggle against poverty, and railing against fate and the good luck of a “worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold by mere chance and heritage.” He is in the lowest depths of despair, having just had a book of somewhat lofty thoughts rejected with the advice that, to make a book “go,” it is desirable, from the publisher’s point of view,{169} that it should be somewhat risqué; in fact, the more indecent the better. It was pitiful advice and wholly false, for the reason that the great majority of publishers most carefully avoid works of the kind. Tempest’s case is bad indeed. He must starve, because his ideas are “old-fashioned.” Moreover, he cannot pay his landlady her bill. And just at this critical moment two things happen. He receives £50 from an old chum and £5,000,000 from Satan. But he is not aware of the real source from which proceeds the latter sum. Presumably it comes from an unknown uncle whose solicitors confide to the legatee that the old man had a strange idea “that he had sold himself to the devil, and that his large fortune was one result of the bargain.” But who, with five millions to his name, would worry about an old man’s fancies? Certainly not Geoffrey Tempest. Probably no man.

On the very night that the intimation of his good fortune reaches him, the newly made millionaire receives a call from Prince Lucio Rimânez, whose person is beautiful, whose conversation is witty to brilliance, whose wealth is unlimited, and whose age is mysterious. The meeting takes place very suitably in the dark, and the hands of the pair meet in the gloom “quite blandly and without{170} guidance”; and we soon hear from the lips of the Prince that it is a most beautiful dispensation of nature that “honest folk should be sacrified in order to provide for the sustenance of knaves!” and that the devil not only drives the world whip in hand, but that he manages his team very easily.

Tempest and Rimânez forthwith become friends—even more, chums inseparable; and soon we find Mr. Geoffrey Tempest very aptly playing the part he had formerly rallied against—that of a worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold, and gluttonously swallowing the evil and corrupting maxims of his fascinating friend. He eats the best of food, drinks the most expensive of wines, and rides in the most luxurious of carriages; his book is published and advertised and boomed at his own expense, and he has not a particle of sympathy for the poor or the suffering. “It often happens that when bags of money fall to the lot of aspiring genius, God departs and the devil walks in.” So asserts Rimânez—who ought to know; and so it proves in the case of his rich and ready disciple, Mr. Geoffrey Tempest. Nothing seems to disturb the serenity of the multi-millionaire in the early days of his new-found wealth and power—for the world bows before him—except a mysterious{171} servant of the Prince’s, a man named Amiel, who cooks mysterious meals for his master and, imp of mischief, plays strange pranks upon his fellow-servants.

Soon Tempest, through the instrumentality of his princely friend, makes the acquaintance of the beautiful Lady Sibyl Elton. “No man, I think, ever forgets the first time he is brought face to face with perfect beauty in woman. He may have caught fleeting glimpses of many fair faces often,—bright eyes may have flashed on him like starbeams,—the hues of a dazzling complexion may now and then have charmed him, or the seductive outlines of a graceful figure;—all these are as mere peeps into the infinite. But when such vague and passing impressions are suddenly drawn together in one focus, when all his dreamy fancies of form and color take visible and complete manifestation in one living creature who looks down upon him, as it were, from an empyrean of untouched maiden pride and purity, it is more to his honor than his shame if his senses swoon at the ravishing vision, and he, despite his rough masculinity and brutal strength, becomes nothing but the merest slave to passion.” Thus Geoffrey Tempest when the violet eyes of Sibyl Elton first rest upon him.

The scene is a box at a theatre, the play of{172} questionable character about a “woman with a past.” The picture is complete with the lady’s father—the Earl of Elton—bending forward in the box and eagerly gloating over every detail of the performance. There is assuredly no exaggeration in this portraiture. Such scenes can be witnessed every night during the season. Nor does Marie Corelli go beyond the unpleasing truth in asserting that novels on similar themes are popular amongst women and are a sure preparation for the toleration and applause by women of such plays.

The Earl of Elton is hard up, as his daughter knows, and she has been trained to manœuvre for a rich husband. The idea of a marriage for love is out of the question; she is too wary to brave “the hundred gloomy consequences of the res angusta domi,” as old Thackeray puts it. She is not the sort of girl who marries where her heart is, “with no other trust but in heaven, health, and labor,”—to quote the same mighty moralist.

As Prince Rimânez has explained to Tempest, Lady Sibyl is “for sale” in the matrimonial market, and Tempest determines to buy her; or, in other words, decides that he wants to marry her and that his millions will enable him to achieve that object. Poor Lady Sibyl! A victim of circumstances, it is impossible not to pity her! Cold, callous, heartless,{173} calculating, corrupt, she is what her mother has made her—the mother herself being a victim of paralysis and sensuality, a titled, worn-out rouée.

“Madame, we want mothers!” Napoleon once said truly to one who sorrowed over the decadence of French manhood; and to the Countess of Elton might have been applied, with more justice than to the less sinful sisters from whom society sweeps its skirts, the name of wanton.

Tempest loses no time in pursuing what now becomes the main object of his life—marriage with Lady Sibyl Elton, who is quite ready to be wooed. Incidentally, the book contains stirring pictures of the times. There is a visit of Tempest and Rimânez to an aristocratic gambling-house, and Miss Corelli’s account of the scene there enacted is but a true description of what is going on constantly “in the West.” How often, when the Somerset House records of the wills of deceased men of note are revealed, do people marvel that So-and-so, with his vast income, was able to put by so little!

Very often it is the gaming-table that supplies the reason. For the gambling fever is raging in the world of to-day from peers, statesmen, lawyers, aye, and ministers, to the street-boys who stake their trifles on a race or a game of shove ha’penny. There are book-makers who, as the police records{174} show, do not hesitate to accept penny bets on horse races from boys. There are “swell” boardinghouses, we know, in secluded country retreats, where roulette, rouge et noir, and baccarat are played nightly all the year round, not for pounds, but for hundreds of pounds, and the police of the districts concerned never disturb the accursed play. There are luxurious flats in London where similar play goes on, equally undisturbed by the police. And there are the gaming hells, such as Miss Corelli describes, where often may be seen men of distinction, whose names are familiar to every ear, destroying their peace, their prosperity, the happiness of themselves and their families, for the luck of the cards.

To such a place as this—where wealth and position were the only “open sesames”—went Tempest and Prince Rimânez. Both, so rich that it mattered not to them what resulted, play and win heavily, mainly from a Viscount Lynton. Rimânez here stays one of the only good impulses that came to Geoffrey Tempest after his accession to wealth. He would have forgiven the Viscount his ruinous losses. And so the play goes on, and then—a merry bet—Lynton plays with Rimânez at baccarat for a queer stake—his soul. Of course he loses, and Rimânez has but a short time to wait to collect{175} the wager, for the mad young Viscount blows out his brains that night. Such is the history—less only the last specific bet—of many a young aristocrat’s suicide.

In the furtherance of his marriage scheme, Tempest purchases Willowsmere Court, in Warwickshire, a place which, in his palmy days, the Earl of Elton had owned, but which had subsequently got into the hands of the Jews. Near to Willowsmere lives Mavis Clare, the good angel of the story. It has been said “in print,” and it is popularly believed even now, notwithstanding positive denial, that Mavis Clare was intended to portray Miss Marie Corelli. It was an unwarrantable and unfair suggestion, because it implied to Miss Corelli that gross libel, often falsely attributed to her, of vanity and self-advertisement. In very truth, if she were vain it would be a sin easy to condone in one who has achieved so much. Yet, happily, she is so true a woman that vanity has no part in her character, and she is incapable of deliberately applying to herself the Mavis Clare description.

In the Review of Reviews it was stated: “A leading figure in ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ is none other than the authoress herself, Marie Corelli, who, like Lucifer, the Son of Morning, also appears under a disguise. But it is a disguise so transparent{176} that the wayfaring man, though a fool, could not fail in identifying it. Mavis Clare, whose initials it may be remarked[B] are the same as those of the authoress, represents Marie Corelli’s ideal of what she would like to be, but isn’t; what in her more exalted moments she imagines herself to be. It is somewhat touching to see this attempt at self-portraiture.” The suggestion thus put forward, that Mavis Clare was a deliberate portrait of Miss Marie Corelli, was at once accepted by the public—be it said to the credit of the public, who, having read her books, must have been instilled with the accurate idea that the talented author must be good and true, like Mavis Clare. Color was naturally lent to the suggestion of her deliberate self-portraiture by the similarity of the initials, and also of the circumstances of Miss Corelli and the lady of the story.

Nothing, however, was further from Miss Corelli’s thoughts or intentions than this, and the similarity of the initials was purely accidental. The name was written in the manuscript and appeared in the proofs as “Mavis Dare” and not Mavis Clare. Not only just before the book went to press, but actually whilst it was in the press, the second name was suddenly altered, because it was pointed out to{177} Miss Corelli that the name was so very like the “Avice Dare” of another writer. When these facts were brought to Mr. Stead’s notice he did Miss Corelli the justice to apologize for the statement which had been made in the Review of Reviews.

It is Lady Sibyl who suddenly and violently breaks the thin wall between Tempest’s desire to marry her and the formal request that she shall become his wife. She, with just enough glimmering of honor to detest the “marriage by arrangement,” informs him of her knowledge that her charms are for sale and that he, Tempest, is to be the accepted purchaser. Her language is plain enough in very truth to demonstrate the hideousness of the bargain, for this is the picture of the bride-to-be that she herself draws for the edification of her future husband:

The unholy wedding of the selfish millionaire and Lady Sibyl Elton takes place. Prince Rimânez acts as master of the ceremonies, and calls to his aid a devil’s own army of imps who work marvelous musical and picturesque effects—their identification as creatures of hell being, of course, hidden. Even thunder and lightning are called down to add to the remarkable scene. And so the marriage bargain is completed. Disillusionment quickly follows, and we find the husband and wife mutually disgusted with one another, and on the verge of hate. Lady Sibyl, however, finds passion at last, passion for the husband’s friend, Lucio Rimânez, Prince of Darkness.

To such an extent does this fever of love possess{179} her that she seeks out Rimânez one night and declares her love, only to be scorned by him:

She falls upon her knees. And the scene thus continues:

After further passages of this description, concluding with some passes with a dagger, the scene ends, the hidden but listening husband coming forth and blessing the friend for his upright conduct. The inevitable follows. Lady Sibyl commits suicide; and the husband, finding the corpse seated in a chair before a mirror, carries out a plan for an awful midnight interview with the dead, turning on a blaze of lamps, and sitting down there in the death-chamber to read a document left by his wife, in which she gives a pitiful picture of the training that has made her character so repellent. She describes, in a remarkable and appalling letter, of which an extract follows, how the death-giving poison is taken and the agonizing thoughts of the last moments.{181}

Here the manuscript ends,—incomplete and broken off abruptly,—and there is a blot on the last sentence as though the pen had been violently{182} wrenched from the dying fingers and flung hastily down.

From this terrible incident the story hastens to its close, remarkable alike for the discourses of the Prince of Darkness, for the experiences of Tempest, for his final severance from the evil genius and his return to honest work. And here it is necessary to consider the conception of his Satanic Majesty with which the author presents us. She states that the idea came to her in the first place from the New Testament: “There I found that Christ was tempted by Satan with the offer of thrones, principalities and powers, all of which the Saviour rejected. When the temptation was over I read that Satan left Him, and that angels came and ministered to Him. I thought this out in my own mind and I concluded that if man, through Christ, would only reject Satan, Satan would leave him, and that angels would minister to him in the same way that they ministered to Christ. Out of this germ rose the wider idea that Satan himself might be glad for men to so reject him, as he then might have the chance of recovering his lost angelic position.” In fact, the writer would have it that Satan becomes on terms of intimacy with man, and man then becomes consequently evil, only if man shows that he wishes to travel an evil course; that{183} man may never redeem the devil, but that when man has become as perfect as, through Christ, he may, then the devil may again become an angel—a Doctrine of universal salvation for sinners and for Satan too. No other writer has given such a conception of the devil’s character and position.

The central conception of “The Sorrows of Satan,” Marie Corelli further says, is that as the possession of an immortal spirit must needs breed immortal longings, Satan, being an angel once, must of necessity long for that state of perfection; and that God, being the perfection of love, could not in His love deny all hope of final redemption even to Satan. Truly she here gives a conception of the God of Love more attractive than the pitiless readings of the Divine character which some theologians would have us accept.

There are the two conflicting influences in the novelist’s conception of the devil—Satan endeavoring to corrupt and destroy man, yet knowing that if man rejects him he is nearer to his own redemption. And so in this book we find Prince Lucio Rimânez often giving utterance to thoughts and principles which the man enslaved by him refuses to adopt and practice, as if he longed for Tempest to repel him, though helping forward all his selfish schemes. And we are given, too, the picture of{184} this Prince of Darkness, finding that Mavis Clare could not be tempted, begging for her prayers—“you believe God hears you.... Only a pure woman can make faith possible to man. Pray for me, then, as one who has fallen from his higher and better self; who strives, but who may not attain; who labors under heavy punishment; who would fain reach Heaven, but who by the cursed will of man, and man alone, is kept in hell! Pray for me, Mavis Clare; promise it; and so shall you lift me a step nearer the glory I have lost.”

Rimânez and Tempest go on a long yachting cruise together,—to Egypt,—and during this journey the discourses of the Prince are numerous and of intense interest. In one he states that if men were true to their immortal instincts and to the God that made them,—if they were generous, honest, fearless, faithful, reverent, unselfish, ... if women were pure, brave, tender, and loving,—then “Lucifer, Son of the Morning,” lifted towards his Creator on the prayers of pure lives, would wear again his Angel’s crown. There is for a brief period after this a vision of the devil,—“one who, proud and rebellious, like you, errs less, in that he owns God as his Master”—as an Angel. And then the yacht, steered by the demon Amiel, crashes on through ice with a noise like thunder, to the worl{185}d’s end. Tempest catches a passing glimpse of his dead wife, and feels remorse and pity at last. A few moments pass and Tempest’s hour has come, an hour for a great decision:

The choice is made. Tempest realizes with shame his miserable vices, his puny scorn of God, his effronteries and blasphemies; and in the sudden strong repulsion and repudiation of his own worthless existence, being, and character, he finds both voice and speech. “God only! Annihilation at{186} His hands, rather than life without Him! God only! I have chosen!” From the brightening heaven there rings a silver voice, clear as a clarion-call,—“Arise, Lucifer, Son of the Morning! One soul rejects thee,—one hour of joy is granted thee! Hence, and arise!” And with a vision of the man fiend rushing for a brief hour to celestial regions, because of one soul that rejected Satan, Geoffrey Tempest finds himself tied to a raft on the open sea, and remembers the promise, “Him who cometh unto me will I in no wise cast out.”

The late Rev. H. R. Haweis, preaching on this book, said: “‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you,’ is the grand moral carried out,” and that is an opinion, notwithstanding the ban of the Romish Church, which is entertained of the book by many Christian men, by a large number of Christian clergy. It is a declaration of the Nemesis of everything that opposes itself to the will of God. The book teaches the softening influences upon mankind of good deeds done, of good words spoken. It teaches, in brief, that there are two contending powers at work upon mankind—the evil and the good; and the book is an eloquent, beautiful, effective contribution to the victory of the Good. The sensuality, the evil imagination, the{187} prostitution of the marriage sacrament to commercial bargains, the infidelity, in thought and intention, though not in deed, of Lady Sibyl Elton, are stripped of their pretty dressings and shown in their detestable reality. “The acts of selfishness in man,” Mr. Haweis added, “are exhibited in the person of Geoffrey Tempest in a garb that repels and with results that horrify; and the pure influence of Mavis Clare is shown on the other side of the picture, bright and attractive, the spirit of peace, contentment, and love in a glorious and glorified conquest of the spirit of evil.”

Miss Corelli has suffered in a peculiar way from the deficiencies of the law of copyright which allows perfect protection to a mechanical patent, but which gives an author no adequate protection over rights such as the dramatization of a book. “The Sorrows of Satan,” as everybody knows, was dramatized, and this is how it came about: In the year of the publication of “The Sorrows of Satan,” 1895, Mr. George Eric Mackay introduced to his stepsister a lady of his acquaintance, a sculptress, who, so he said, was anxious to make a study of his head. This lady, in her turn, introduced Captain Woodgate, who expressed his enthusiastic admiration for “The Sorrows of Satan” to Miss Corelli, and said it would make a very fine{188} play, and followed up his praise by asking whether he might try his hand at dramatizing it, as he had already had some experience in the writing of plays. Miss Corelli replied that she had not thought of it at all as a play, but that she had no objection to his trying, on condition that nothing was produced without her authorization and permission. Captain Woodgate readily consented to this, but the whole subject was talked of so casually that (so Miss Corelli declares) she did not think he really meant to undertake it.

Miss Corelli was very ill at the time, and went to Scotland for her health. During her absence, Captain Woodgate went to work, and called in the assistance of Mr. Paul Berton. Between them they wrote a play, and “The Grosvenor Syndicate” was formed for the purposes of its production.

Miss Corelli was then invited to hear the play read in the Shaftesbury Theatre green-room. Miss Evelyn Millard, selected to play the part of “Lady Sibyl,” was present. After the first act had been read by Mr. Paul Berton, Miss Corelli informs us that she very decidedly expressed her objection to it, and said that it would never do. Mr. Eric Mackay, who was also present, said that, on the contrary, he thought it “admirable.” Miss Corelli, hearing this, remained silent while the second act{189} was proceeded with by Mr. Berton, to her increasing distaste. Her feelings in the matter (so Miss Corelli declares) met with complete sympathy from Miss Evelyn Millard, who, rising from her place, begged Miss Corelli to give her a few words in private. Miss Corelli followed her out of the room, and Miss Millard then said: “My dear Miss Corelli, I was ready and glad to think of playing your character of ‘Lady Sibyl Elton’ in ‘The Sorrows of Satan,’ but I cannot possibly consent to act in this.”

Miss Corelli thanked Miss Millard very heartily for her plain speaking and her decision, and then, informing the joint authors that she would have nothing whatever to do with the play, the meeting at the Shaftesbury broke up. Mr. Lewis Waller, who had been selected for the part of “Lucio Rimânez,” wrote a letter to Miss Corelli in which he cordially sympathized with her on the treatment her work had received.

“The Grosvenor Syndicate” paid her five hundred pounds for the use of her name, but this sum she offered to promptly return if they would as promptly withdraw the play. Upon this the shareholders met together at the office of Miss Corelli’s lawyer to discuss the matter, and Miss Corelli again proposed to give them back at once the five hundred pounds, and to write a play on her book herself. It{190} may be added that, if she had been allowed to do this, Mr. Beerbohm Tree would have been ready and glad to consider the part of Prince Lucio. She said to those who had invested their money in the syndicate: “Gentlemen, if you will withdraw this work, I will guarantee to write you a play which shall be a success.” They, however, after consideration, refused, saying that shares were issued and they could not go back. Miss Corelli, therefore, withdrew her “authorization” altogether, and only allowed the simple use of her name on the programmes to this effect: “Dramatized from the novel of that name by Marie Corelli.” The play was therefore produced for the first time at the Shaftesbury Theatre on the evening of January 9th, 1897, in the presence of H. R. H. the Duke of Cambridge and suite, the Duke, audibly expressing agreement with Miss Corelli’s views of the work. She herself was not present. She was lying ill in bed, suffering acute pain, having that very day gone through a trying ordeal of surgical examination by Sir John Williams, who had bluntly informed her that she had not, perhaps, six months to live unless she went through a grave operation. It will be owned that this was a singular situation for any author, as she herself says, “to have the work of her brain dealt with in a way to which she took{191} obvious exception, and herself threatened with death both on the same day.”

The play of The Sorrows of Satan was produced, Mr. Lewis Waller playing the part of Lucio. Miss Millard remained staunch to her opinion, and wrote to Miss Corelli, saying how sincerely sorry she was that the play had been brought out, notwithstanding the protest. Since that time several dramatic versions of the book have been played, including Mr. C. W. Somerset’s version, which Miss Corelli has described as a combination of her novel and the late George Augustus Sala’s “Margaret Foster.” Mr. Somerset is himself the author of this production, and we are told that he informed Miss Corelli that he put the two books together in this work “to strengthen both!”

Miss Corelli would much like to put a stop to the various stage renderings of “The Sorrows of Satan” if the law would give her the power to do so; and she would greatly like to see the law altered so as to give her and other authors such power. As it is, she now, to secure her titles, whenever she writes a book, has a play, bearing the title of her book, produced before a paying audience.

In order to secure such dramatic copyright, authors have to pay to have their “sham” play performed before a “sham” audience with “sham” actors! And the law compels it!{192}

CHAPTER X

“THE MIGHTY ATOM” AND “BOY”

Marie Corelli never writes without a purpose—never solely to excite or entertain the reader who regards books as pleasant things provided for his regalement just as ices, pantomimes, and balloon ascents are.

The greatest of novelists have generally told their stories with an object other than mere story-telling. Charles Reade brought about asylum reform by publishing “Hard Cash,” while in “Foul Play” he made clear the injustice of preventing a prisoner from giving evidence in his own behalf—a state of things which has been only recently remedied; Dickens showed up villainous schoolmasters, receivers of stolen goods, the delays of the Law, Bumbledom, emigration frauds, and a hundred other abuses; Thackeray preached against cant; Wilkie Collins broke a lance with the vivisectionists; and Clark Russell, in “The Wreck of the Grosvenor,” told a harrowing story of the rotten food provided for the helpless merchant sailor.{193}

Miss Corelli has grappled with human wrongs just as great, even though they may not be amenable to jurisdiction.

In the two books before us she deals, in hard-hitting, thought-compelling terms, with the criminally mistaken up-bringing of children. Her object in writing “The Mighty Atom” she tersely explains in her dedicatory note to “those self-styled ‘progressivists’” who support the cause of education without religion. The short and pathetic history of Lionel Valliscourt is placed before us as typical of the fate which so often befalls the overwrought child-brain: the horrible end to the young life is depicted with the idea of manifesting in what the absence of religion even from a boy’s mind may result. Had Lionel learned to say his prayers at his mother’s knee; had he trotted off to Church every Sunday morning, his hand within his father’s, and at eventide listened to the sweet old Bible-stories which so appeal to a child’s imagination, the Christian precepts thus implanted in his heart would surely have stayed his hand when he conceived the idea of taking his own life.

This most sad story fully brings home to the reader the evils attendant on the entirely godless teaching bestowed on a young and exceptionally bright boy, who has an instinctive yearning for that{194} “knowledge and love of God” of which our authoress is the strenuous champion.

Lionel, the small centre of the picture, is introduced as a boy who “might have been a bank clerk or an experienced accountant in a London merchant’s office, from his serious old-fashioned manner, instead of a child barely eleven years of age; indeed, as a matter of fact, there was an almost appalling expression of premature wisdom on his pale wistful features;—the ‘thinking furrow’ already marked his forehead,—and what should still have been the babyish upper curve of his sensitive little mouth was almost, though not quite, obliterated by a severe line of constantly practiced self-restraint.”

Mr. Valliscourt has hired tutor after tutor to assist him in forcing Lionel’s intellect: by turns each tutor has thrown up his task in disgust. At last comes William Montrose, B. A., a breezy Oxonian, who refuses point-blank to go through the “schedule of tuition” which Mr. Valliscourt “formulates” for his son’s holiday tasks. Montrose is angrily dismissed, and Professor Cadman-Gore, “the dark-lantern of learning and obscure glory of university poseurs,” is engaged in his place to squeeze the juice out of poor little Lionel’s already wearied brains.{195}

Very early in his holiday term of coaching the Professor has to submit to some cross-examination from Lionel on the subject of the Atom. “Where is it?—that wonderful little First Atom, which, without knowing in the least what it was about, and with nobody to guide it, and having no reason, judgment, sight, or sense of its own, produced such beautiful creations? And then, if you are able to tell me where it is, will you also tell me where it came from?”

It appears that Lionel has imbibed atheistic principles not only from his father, but from a former tutor, and he is determined to thrash the matter out with the Professor, whom he takes to be the cleverest man in the world. The Professor’s replies, however, are unsatisfactory, and Lionel goes on wondering.

The work continues, and he grows yet wearier. Manfully he struggles to accomplish his allotted tasks, each effort sapping his strength still further and adding to the pains which fill his head and drive sleep from his tired eyes. The Professor, acting according to orders, continues to grind the young brains to powder.

At last the crisis arrives. Under dishonorable circumstances Lionel’s mother leaves her husband: over-work, sorrow, too little exercise—all these{196} combined bring about Lionel’s collapse. The plain-spoken village doctor orders him away for rest, and so the Professor and his young charge go to Clovelly, where they spend some bewilderingly delightful weeks of absolute idleness. The Professor’s eyes have been somewhat opened by Lionel’s break-down to the real state of the child, whom thereafter he treats with a certain rough kindness which wins him the boy’s whole heart. Lionel cannot quite make it out—but he is grateful.

“He used to show his gratitude,” we are told, “in odd little ways of his own, which had a curious and softening effect on the mind of the learned Cadman-Gore. He would carefully brush the ugly hat of the great man and bring it to him,—he would pull out and smooth the large sticky fingers of his loose leather gloves and lay them side by side on a table ready for him to wear,—he would energetically polish the top of his big silver-knobbed stick,—and he would invariably make a ‘buttonhole’ of the prettiest flowers he could find for him to put in his coat at dinner.”

One can imagine the grim old gentleman being by turns astonished and touched by such attentions: the Professor indeed warms to the lad, and, when they return to Combmartin, bids him go and play instead of returning to his investigation of{197} “The Advance of Positivism and Pure Reason,” which formed part of that schedule of study which his father had previously insisted upon.

Before his illness Lionel had become close friends with the village sexton, Reuben Dale, and that worthy’s little daughter, Jessamine. It had been the boy’s keenest joy to romp and talk with Jessamine, and so, on being afforded a holiday by the Professor’s thoughtfulness, he proceeds with a light heart in search of his former playmate. He finds Reuben at work in the churchyard, and “the significant hollow in the ground was shaped slowly in a small dark square, to the length of a little child.”

The old man’s sobs betray the truth—during Lionel’s absence his baby sweetheart has fallen a prey to diphtheria. The boy’s anguish is terrible: the sexton’s simple faith in God’s way being the best way has no comfort for the helpless little pagan who has been taught that such faith as this is sheer nonsense. “No, no!” he cries; “there is no God; you have not read,—you have not studied things, and you do not know,—but you are all wrong. There is no God,—there is only the Atom which does not care.”

Distracted with grief, Lionel tears away into the woods, his bewildered and weary head full of{198} strange thoughts. At last a firm resolve takes possession of him. “I know!—I know the best way to discover the real secret,—I must find it out!—and I will!”

And he does. With the cool deliberation that is often a distinguishing attribute of one bent on self-destruction, he goes to bed in the usual way. When the house is quite still, and all its other inmates are slumbering, he steals down to his schoolroom, where he carefully pens some letters—one to his father, another to the Professor, and a third to Mr. Montrose. This done, he falls upon his knees by the open window and prays to that Being whom he feels “must be a God, really and truly,” in spite of the many learned theories to the contrary by which his child-mind has been distracted.

A little later “there came a heavy stillness, ... and a sudden sense of cold in the air, as of the swift passing of the Shadow of Death.”

One may reasonably contend that such passages as these are unnecessarily distressing, and certainly there are several of Miss Corelli’s works which should not be left in the way of weak-minded persons. The authoress, it is clear, wishes to drive home her arguments in a manner that will be remembered. Chapter XIV. of “The Mighty{199} Atom” is not one that is ever likely to be forgotten by those who have read this book.

People who object to such methods as Miss Corelli employs in “The Mighty Atom” must bear in mind that the motive underlying each of her stories is to show up a certain evil and suggest remedial measures, themselves as powerful as the disease requiring their application.

The lesson taught so startlingly in “The Mighty Atom” must have brought home the truths of its straightforward doctrines to a multitude of readers. Thus can a book drop seed which is destined to flourish abundantly for a great length of time and in widely separated places. If a book be good, it will have a long life: living, its effects will be felt by more than one generation of readers. Such is the power of literature—such the strength of a mere pen when wielded by one whose principal stock-in-trade is knowledge combined with sincerity and a determination to speak out for the general weal at all hazards, critics notwithstanding.

“Boy,” a book about equal in length to “The Mighty Atom,” is less picturesque in its setting than the latter, but, on the other hand, is lightened by considerable humor and happy characterization. It is a sermon to parents. The boy, as we know,{200} is father of the man; consequently, if you bring a boy up badly, the complete growth of him when he reaches man’s estate is hardly likely to be satisfactory.

“It is a dangerous fallacy,” says the author of “Boy,” “to aver that every man has the making of his destiny in his own hands: to a certain extent he has, no doubt, and with education and firm resolve, he can do much to keep down the Beast and develop the Angel; but a terrific responsibility rests upon those often voluntarily reckless beings, his parents, who, without taking thought, use God’s privilege of giving life, while utterly failing to perceive the means offered to them for developing and preserving that life under the wisest and most harmonious conditions.”

The career of the particular “boy” under notice is traced from the time when, a crawling babe, he gravely surveys his father’s drunken antics and ascribes them to attacks of illness. Hence his frequent references to the “poo’ sing” whose too close attentions to the bottle have earned him this mistaken infantile sympathy. “Boy’s” especial admirer is a maiden lady of ample means, who has an ardent desire to adopt him, but whose wishes are invariably thwarted by “Boy’s” mother, a “large, lazy, and unintelligent” woman with lim{201}ited and peculiar ideas on the rearing and educating of children. The maiden lady herself has a devoted cavalier, in the shape of an elderly Major, who proposes to her regularly, only to be met with a gentle but steady negative. The lady’s heart is buried with a former lover, who, years before, went to India and died there; and although the Major knows that the object of his attachment is burning perpetual candles before a worthless shrine—for the dead man was a sad rascal in his day, and was, moreover, false to her—he prefers to let her live with her illusion rather than profit by acquainting her with the true facts of the case.

As the Major is generally in attendance on Miss Letitia Leslie we see a good deal of the bluff old soldier, for “Boy” is occasionally allowed to go and stay with “Miss Letty.” These are the golden periods of the good maiden lady’s life—and, too, of “Boy’s,” for while Miss Leslie cares for him properly, his mother exploits her ideas of motherhood by feeding the little fellow “on sloppy food which frequently did not agree with him, in dosing him with medicine when he was out of sorts, in dressing him anyhow, and in allowing him to amuse himself as he liked wherever he could, however he could, at all times, and in all places, dirty or clean.{202}”

Meantime, Captain the Honorable D’Arcy Muir rolls in and out of the house—more often than not in that state of drunken combativeness which finds a vent in assaulting mantelpiece ornaments and the lighter articles of furniture—and Mrs. D’Arcy Muir reads novels, or, studying personal ease before appearance, slouches about the house in soft felt slippers and loosely fitting garments which frequently lack a sufficiency of buttons and hooks.

In spite of such surroundings “Boy” remains a very lovable little fellow until he goes to school. Then Miss Letty and the Major lose sight of him for a long period, for he is sent to a school in Brittany. The Major deplores the fact: “You must say good-bye to ‘Boy’ forever!... Don’t you see? The child has gone—and he’ll never come back. A boy will come back, but not the boy you knew. The boy you knew is practically dead.... The poor little chap had enough against him in his home surroundings, God knows!—but a cheap foreign school is the last straw on the camel’s back. Whatever is good in his nature will go to waste; whatever is bad will grow and flourish!”

As it happens, “Boy” stays in France only a year, but during that period Miss Letty, the Major, and the Major’s niece go to America and settle{203} down there for a time. “Boy” reappears at the age of sixteen, when he is being educated at an English military school. One of the best-written scenes in the book describes the meeting of “Boy” with Miss Letty, who returns from America about this time. “Boy” has grown into a slim, awkward youth, getting on to six feet in height, callous, listless, and cynical. He has lost his old frankness; he is not, as the Major predicted, the “boy” that Miss Letty knew in the days gone by.

The description of the luncheon party when the four sides of the table are occupied respectively by Miss Letty, the Major, the latter’s niece, and “Boy,” is exceedingly well done, “Boy’s” stolid, blasé replies to the many questions he is asked being exceedingly diverting, although one feels sorry to see into what an automaton he has grown.

“Are you glad you are going to be a soldier?” the Major asks him. “Oh, I don’t mind it!” says “Boy.” “Are you fond of flowers?” the girl demands of him a little later. “I don’t mind them much!” replies “Boy” indifferently. “Well, what do you mind? Anything?” puts in the Major. “Boy” laughed. “I don’t know.”

This scene—from which we have merely extracted a few remarks—is in its way an excellent bit of comedy, but on behalf of public schoolboys{204} generally we must say that we don’t think “Boy” would have put his hat on—as he is reported to have done—while still in the room with the ladies.

“Boy” passes into Sandhurst, but is expelled therefrom for drunkenness; he gets a clerkship, incurs card debts, alters the amount on a check which Miss Letty has sent him, repents of the fraud, returns the whole amount, with a manly apology, to Miss Letty, enlists, and is killed by the Boers. That, then, is the sad end of “Boy.”

In addition to the characters mentioned there are others of subsidiary importance, and there is, threading in and out of the “Boy” episodes, a love-story which ends tragically, at the time, for the Major’s niece, though she eventually meets the man Fate has decreed she shall marry, on a South African battle-field.

In no other book has Miss Corelli favored us with so many smile-provoking passages. There is, for instance, a good deal of grim humor about “Rattling Jack”—the salt-dried veteran of whom “Boy” makes a friend when the D’Arcy Muirs move from their London home in Hereford Square to cheaper quarters on the coast.

Rattling Jack doesn’t sympathize with the elementary methods of the young student of natural history. He doesn’t see why beetles and butterflies{205} should be trapped and carried home for the “museum.” One day “Boy” brings for the old sailor’s inspection a beautiful rose-colored sea-anemone which he had managed to detach from the rocks and carry off in his tin pail.

This weary-wise old fellow must be credited to Miss Corelli as one of her best portraits in miniature. His observations are full of sage and seasoning, and we could do with more of him.

Did Miss Corelli’s themes allow of it, we might have been treated to a good deal more humor in her works, but she is too good an artist to intrude comic relief when such relief would merely be an{206} annoying interruption. But various passages in her books show her to be the possessor of a considerable sense of the laughable, and it is to be hoped that she will some day find time to write a story dealing with the lighter side of existence.{207}

CHAPTER XI

“THE MURDER OF DELICIA” AND “ZISKA”[C]

In the former of these works Marie Corelli has much to say about men that is very disagreeable and, as it appears to us, only partially true. It would seem that the novelist is too prone to seize upon a particular instance of “man’s ingratitude,” laziness, cruelty, and general worthlessness, and set it up as a frequently occurring type.

In “The Murder of Delicia,” for example, a handsome guardsman, nicknamed by his fellow-officers “Beauty Carlyon,” marries a lady novelist who is equally gifted in brain and person, and, after spending her money for a considerable period, finally breaks her heart—in short, “murders” her—by his neglect and infidelity.

The keynote of the story—which is, we are assured by its writer, a true one—may be found in an introductory note, which contains the following: “To put it plainly and bluntly, a great majority of the men of the present day want women to keep them.{208}”

Now surely this is an over-statement which will not strengthen Marie Corelli’s case. We grant that a certain number of men marry for money, and that the women they so marry are only too glad to be married on those or any terms; but the social conditions of this era have not become so cankered as to lead the “great majority of men” to seek a livelihood at the altar steps! Would it not be altogether more reasonable to substitute “a certain minority” for “a great majority”? In fairness to the novelist, we must add that her remarks on this subject apply principally to the aristocracy. The worthy lover or husband of the middle classes may therefore breathe again.

Nevertheless, we will venture to present the other aspect of this matter of marrying for money. It is well-known that many a wealthy woman languishes in virgin solitude on account of those very shekels of gold and shekels of silver which she possesseth, while her penniless girl-friends are donning their marital veils and going through the sweet old business of marrying and being given in marriage. This applies to the upper as well as to the lower ranks of society.

Many a man—aye, many a guardsman—would now be a happy Benedict had a certain girl of “once upon a time” been possessed of no riches save the{209} inestimable wealth of a loving heart, no diamonds except those shining in her eyes, no pearls but what one might see when her lips parted in shy smile or merry laughter.

For the average man—be his rank high or low—loves a woman, as the saying is, for herself. While recognizing the value and usefulness of money, while raising no objection should his father-in-law allow the young wife pin-money, the average man who marries in the ordinary way sets little store on what his bride brings him in the shape of earthly dross.

It is, however, incumbent on a writer of contemporary biography to be in the main courteous and commendatory, else we might apply a harsher criticism to “The Murder of Delicia” than a mere statement to the effect that this book is the least worthy of all the books Marie Corelli has written. It is far too full of railing against men; it is far too one-sided and far too bitter. Granted that a novelist must put his or her case strongly, in order to drive conviction home to the reader’s mind—granted this, it must be at the same time pointed out that there are generally two sides to every question. Given that a certain number of men marry for money—for money and nothing else—it must be recollected that there are at the present moment{210} thousands of Englishwomen devoting whatever powers of mental arithmetic they may be endowed with to reckoning up exactly what pecuniary advantages shall accrue to them if they marry Jack Jones, or, failing Jack Jones, John Smith! And a cross-Channel père de famille would tell you that they are quite right to do this, that, indeed, if they were his daughters, he would do it for them, and have the whole thing put down in black and white at a notary’s office.

But—thank heaven!—we are a little more sentimental on this side of the narrow strip of silver sea. We still believe in the love marriage, and so an approving Dame Nature gives us healthy sons and daughters for the regular renewal of the nation’s strength. Whereas in la belle France, with her businesslike matrimonial alliances, they have to offer prizes for babies! Truly a pathetic endeavor to stem a national decay!

“The Murder of Delicia” is a short story, soon told. Lord Carlyon takes a strong fancy to Delicia Vaughan, the popular and beautiful lady-novelist, and his liking is returned tenfold. They marry, and Delicia supplies him with money for his clothes, club expenses, cabs, and card games. Were it not that we are aware that even the wisest of women may, in spite of their wisdom, love un{211}wisely, we should marvel at a woman of Delicia Vaughan’s intellectual gifts (which were coupled, we may presume, with the keen insight into human nature that a novelist should possess) marrying a man of the Lord Carlyon type—a big, handsome animal, whose conversation must have afforded her very little entertainment. She loved him because to her (to quote the book) he was a “strong, splendid, bold, athletic, masterful creature who was hers—hers only!” Is it possible that a woman of Delicia Vaughan’s alleged intelligence would have fallen so completely in love with a man who “was absolutely devoid of all ambition, save a desire to have his surname pronounced correctly”? Truly, a dull dog—yet Delicia worshiped him. She disregarded the apostolic command to little children not to take unto themselves idols. She doted on this man of inches. She housed and fed him, pampered him, showered money on him, and he repaid her by indulging in a low intrigue with a music-hall dancer.

Marie Corelli almost laughs at her heroine. But, even while the smile hovers on her lips, she explains poor Delicia’s phantasy. It was “the rare and beautiful blindness of perfect love”—squandered on an entirely worthless object. And this is quite a true touch, for even lady-novelists are only human.{212}

Delicia had to pay the penalty of her passion. Her eyes were opened all in good time, and from showering the wealth of her hand and all the treasures of her heart upon Carlyon, she came, in the end, to threatening him with a revolver when he would have healed their differences with a kiss.

The book, as its title implies, ends sadly. How sadly, those who have read it will know, and those who may read it hereafter will soon discover, for it is quite a little book, and its price but a florin.

“These are the people,” writes Marie Corelli in “Ziska,” alluding to the tourists assembled in Cairo, “who usually leave England on the plea of being unable to stand the cheery, frosty, and in every respect healthy winter of their native country—

"Killiecrankie Cottage” Where “Ziska” was Finished

"Avon Croft” Where “The Master Christian” was Finished

{213}

Be that as it may, the tourists assembled at the Gezireh Palace Hotel one winter were treated to a vision of loveliness which for a time made them momentarily forget their nameless languors in spells of admiration and envy, according to the sex which claimed them, the vision in question taking an apparently human shape in the person of the Princess Ziska.

Reputedly a Russian lady, Ziska was in reality the flesh-clad ghost of Ziska-Charmazel, the favorite of the harem of a great Egyptian warrior, described in forgotten histories as “The Mighty Araxes.” Visiting Egypt at the same time as the Princess was Armand Gervase, a French painter of great renown, and the interest of the story may be imagined when it is explained that Armand was the nineteenth-century incarnation of Araxes, who, it must be understood, had, in the dim long-ago, slain Ziska-Charmazel because she stood in the way of his ambition.

The modern Araxes is quickly enslaved by Ziska’s loveliness, but the passion that consumes him is a{214} decidedly uncanny one, as the following passage will show. Armand is speaking to Helen Murray, the sister of his great friend, Denzil Murray. In Scotland during the previous summer Armand had paid Helen some attentions, and Helen does not fail to note that the charms of Ziska have dissipated any tender feeling which Armand might have once entertained for the Scottish girl. “How was I to know,” cries Armand, “that this horrible thing would happen?” “What horrible thing?” enquires Helen.

{215}

Unfortunately, the painter’s very good friend, Denzil Murray, also becomes inspired with a passion for Ziska, and the lad’s temper is roused when Armand openly admits that his intentions with regard to the Princess are strictly dishonorable. Murray suggests that it were well Ziska should know this, but Armand laughs at the other’s idea that the bringing of such tidings to Ziska’s ears would lower him one jot in that lovely lady’s estimation:

The hot-headed young Highlander, however, will not be put off with any such reasoning, and the rivalry might have resulted awkwardly at an early date of its upspringing had not Armand steadfastly refused to quarrel.

There is one person at the hotel who makes a shrewd guess at the spiritual identity of both Ziska{216} and Armand—an old savant named Dr. Dean, who is visiting Egypt for the purpose of studying its hieroglyphs and other matters possessing interest for an antiquarian. A knowing fellow is this Doctor, and a fine little character, whose good-humored personality and quiet, shrewd observations present a soothing contrast to the passionate utterances of Murray and Armand, and the dramatic outbursts of Ziska when she scornfully taunts the painter with his vileness.

In conversation with the Doctor, Gervase Armand admits that there is something about Ziska which has struck him as being familiar. “The tone of her voice and the peculiar cadence of her laughter” affect him peculiarly. When he wonders whether he has ever come across her before as a model either in Paris or Rome, the Doctor shakes his head. “Think again,” he says. “You are now a man in the prime of life, Monsieur Gervase, but look back to your early youth,—the period when young men do wild, reckless, and often wicked things,—did you ever in that thoughtless time break a woman’s heart?”

Armand admits that he may have done so, and the Doctor propounds his theory:

{217}

For it should be explained that, when Ziska gave the celebrated painter a sitting, he could produce nothing on his canvas, in spite of his genius, but a strange and awful face distorted with passion and pain, agony in every line of the features—“agony in which the traces of a divine beauty lingered only to render the whole countenance more repellent and terrific.”

Dr. Dean quickly comes to the conclusion, and very reasonably, that this is the most interesting problem he has ever had a chance of studying.{218} It could be only one case out of thousands, he decides.

Other of the Doctor’s thoughtful utterances are well worth quoting. “To the wise student of things there is no time and no distance. All history from the very beginning is like a wonderful chain in which no link is ever really broken, and in which every part fits closely to the other part,—though why the chain should exist at all is a mystery we cannot solve. Yet, I am quite certain that even our late friend Araxes has his connection with the present, if only for the reason that he lived in the past.”

Armand asks him how he argues out that theory, and the Doctor replies:{219}

When the Princess Ziska betakes herself to the Mena House Hotel, near the Pyramids, Dr. Dean, Gervase Armand, and Denzil Murray follow her. She entertains them at dinner, and after dinner, while the Doctor and Armand are strolling without, Murray puts his fate to the touch, with results as might have been expected, for the Princess has displayed little emotion in respect to anybody save Armand, and in his case it is clear that her interest has a malignant foundation.

Armand comes after him, and, in a passionate scene, audaciously proposes to “play the part of Araxes over again.” Ziska promises to give him her answer on the morrow, and on the morrow Armand receives it.

The last scene of this “Problem of a Wicked Soul” takes place beneath the Great Pyramid. Why and how the modern Araxes and the modern Ziska-Charmazel come together in the end in this strangest of meeting-places, we will leave the reader to discover for him or herself.

But we may at least record our admiration for the feat of imagination of which “Ziska” is the result, and indicate the lesson that is to be learned from its{221} pages. “Ziska” teaches that sin shall not escape punishment, that a man shall not play fast and loose with women’s hearts and yet go scotfree. “Ziska” shows how the mutilated soul of the beautiful dancer arises after many centuries and exacts vengeance from its enemy; and again “Ziska” shows how, when Araxes, in his modern painter guise, cries for pardon, the eyes of his one-time victim soften and flash with love and tenderness.

Truly a fragrant passage is this, wherein the old story is once again told of man’s repentance and woman’s sweet forgiveness.{222}

CHAPTER XII

“THE MASTER CHRISTIAN”—IF CHRIST CAME TO ROME!

There had been a considerable pause in the writings of Miss Corelli, for reasons which have already been discussed, when, in August, 1900, “The Master Christian” appeared.

Miss Corelli commenced “The Master Christian” at Brighton on All Saints’ Day, 1897, in the hope that she would get through it before the terrible illness she had been suffering from for seven years reached an acute stage. The novelist, however, was almost dying on Christmas Eve of the same year, and on December 29th the surgeons took her in hand. She was dangerously ill during January, February, and March, 1898. In April and May Miss Corelli was just beginning to recover when the shock occasioned by her stepbrother’s death on June 2d produced a relapse, and she very nearly died from grief and weakness combined. She was ill all the rest of the year, and, a long period of convalescence following, she did not resume “The Master Christian” till the spring of 1899.{223}

“The Master Christian” is Marie Corelli’s longest work, containing, as it does, over six hundred and thirty-four closely printed pages. While occupied upon it, the novelist had also to fulfil a long-standing engagement with Messrs. Hutchinson & Co. “Boy” and “The Master Christian” were, therefore, claiming her attention practically at the same time.

The writing of the two books under the circumstances was a stupendous undertaking. The effort required was so great that she often had to lay down her pen and lean back in her chair almost fainting from nervous exhaustion caused by the severity of the work and its effect upon her in her still weak condition.

It is a painfully interesting proceeding to read “The Master Christian” and then a large number of the reviews of the book which appeared. The conclusion is forced upon one that many of the critics had not taken the trouble to perform the obvious duty of reading a book that was to be “slated,” but had merely glanced at a page here, and quoted a passage, without the context, there. Either this was what happened or there was misconception of the book through ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation. It is really astounding to realize the manner in which Miss Corelli has been “criticised,” and one notable incident of many{224} within our experience will serve to indicate what is a too frequent sin.

It was at the dinner of a well-known literary club, and ladies had been invited. One lady sat beside a gentleman who, years ago, was editor of a great daily newspaper, whose name is familiar to all as a notable and experienced journalist and critic, and who has arrived at an age when discretion, if not fairness, should be practiced. The lady was a friend of Marie Corelli’s, and upon the works of the novelist, who was also at the dinner, the conversation turned. The critic expressed the utmost contempt for her books, and used language so bitterly sarcastic and so grossly unfair that the lady gently asked: “Have you really ever read any of her works?” The question was natural. The answer was astonishing: it was the bald admission, “No.” Surely comment is unnecessary.

A somewhat similar incident may be quoted in connection with “Boy.” Sir Francis (then Mr.) Burnand, as the “Baron de Bookworms,” in Punch, said that he considered “Boy” “a work of genius.” Several critics took his article up, and declared that he had never done anything better in the way of satire. Miss Corelli thereupon wrote to Burnand and asked him if he had really meant his apparently generous praise.{225}

He wrote back:

One writer in the Sunday Sun observed that as Burnand had fallen so low as to praise a work of Marie Corelli’s, he had “no other remedy but to take a bag of stones and break Mr. Punch’s windows!” He added that “he had not read ‘Boy’ and didn’t intend to.” Again, comment would be superfluous. The facts speak for themselves and show our contention to be correct, i.e., that condemnatory criticisms of Marie Corelli’s books are written at times by those who do not even read them.

One of the critics who does read what he comments upon in the way of books, but who, though a deep thinker, is sometimes trivial, superficial, and even frivolous in his treatment of a subject, is Mr. W. T. Stead. He is as amazing to others as others very often are to him. He must, we think, have been smiling pretty broadly when he wrote: “If any one wants to know what ‘The Master Christian’ is like, without reading its six hundred and thirty pages, he will not have much difficulty if he takes Sheldon’s ‘In His Steps,’ Zola’s ‘Rome,’ and{226} any of Marie Corelli’s previous novels in equal proportion.” A strange suggestion, that! “In His Steps,” Zola’s “Rome,” and an equal proportion of, say, either “Vendetta” or “The Sorrows of Satan!” Reading the book itself seems to be so much more simple—and just.

Again, Mr. Stead referred to “The Master Christian” and to Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s “Robert Elsmere,” and speaking of their great success, he wrote: “The phenomenal sale of such works is perhaps much more worthy of consideration than anything that is to be found within the covers of the books themselves.” Now the matter for consideration raised in “The Master Christian” is whether Christians, and more especially the Pope of Rome and the priests of the Romish Church, obey the commands and attempt to fulfil the behests of Jesus Christ. We should have thought Mr. Stead would have regarded that question, at any rate, as more important than the mere numerical sale of a book. Mr. Stead also said that as a book the chief fault of “The Master Christian” was its lack of sympathy. Yet the whole teaching of the work is a Divine charity. “If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” The chief figure in the book is Manuel,{227} Christ once more in the world in the form of a child, and if his utterances show a “lack of sympathy,”—with lies and superstitious idolatry,—yet he speaks largely from the words of Christ and the Apostles. Well may it be doubted, with the author, whether, if Christ came once more to earth, He would be welcome.

It is said again that “The Master Christian” is a bitter attack upon the Roman Catholic Faith. It is nothing of the kind. After Manuel, the child-Christ, the chief character is that of Cardinal Bonpré, who is devoted to the Church of Rome but who also believes in Christ, and the two things, unhappily, are not always akin. If the man-made portion of the Roman Catholic dogma has hidden the teachings of Christ on which that Church was founded, that is the fault and the misfortune of the Church of Rome, and not of Marie Corelli, who is bold enough to speak the truth about the matter. That faith in God which is her standby is what she would wish to see in the ministry of the Roman Catholic Church, instead of, as she fears, a mere degenerate, priest-built, superstitious reliance upon symbolic shams.

Marie Corelli’s personal views may be taken to be those to which one of her characters, Aubrey Leigh, gives expression: “I never denied the beauty,{228} romance, or mysticism of the Roman Catholic Faith. If it were purified from the accumulated superstition of ages, and freed from intolerance and bigotry, it would perhaps be the grandest form of Christianity in the world. But the rats are in the house, and the rooms want cleaning.” She attacks neither the Roman Catholic Faith nor even the Church. She makes a terrible onslaught upon the rats.

“The Master Christian” is both a novel and a sermon. The story of the book is intensely interesting, in “plot” clever and original. It is one of the refreshing features of Miss Corelli’s books that the plots always are original. She does not go to the British Museum or to the productions of Continental novelists to find her themes. Wherever, in “The Master Christian,” the mission of the book can best be emphasized, even though what critics call the “art of the story”—as to which we should like something in the nature of a clear definition—gives way to it, she pursues the mission. After all, we have an idea that if literature possesses merit, it is rather because it is followed as a means of influencing men’s minds than as an attempt to write a story, the lines of which fall together as harmoniously as do the notes of a perfect string band. Such a book if produced

"Hall’s Croft” Where Marie Corelli Wrote Half of “The Master Christian"

{229}

would, we fancy, be so harmonious that it would have no influence to raise men and women to think.

With “The Master Christian” the reader has to think all the time. It is a sermon of great power, and the text of it is supplied, as it should be, by the fair preacher. It will be remembered that in the year 1900 the late Dr. St. George Mivart, a priest of the Church of Rome, was inhibited by His Eminence Cardinal Vaughan, on account of certain scientific works which were displeasing to the Church. Shortly afterwards Dr. Mivart died and the Romish Church even denied him religious rites of burial. In an “In Memoriam” note appended to her “Open letter to Cardinal Vaughan” on this subject, Marie Corelli wrote: “In the name of the all-loving and merciful Christ, whose teachings we, as Christians, profess to follow, it is necessary to enter a strong protest against this barbarous act in a civilized age, and to set it down beside the blind stupidity which arraigned glorious Galileo, and the fiendish cruelty which supported Torquemada. For the words of the Divine Master are a command to Churches as well as to individuals: ‘If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses!{230}’”

We wonder if that saying of Christ’s was remembered when the ban of excommunication was pronounced by the Greek Church against Count Leo Tolstoy! We wonder if that saying of Christ’s is remembered at Rome when any ban of excommunication is passed, when religious rites of burial are denied to any man! And if the reply be that the words do not apply because the Pope and his priests commit no trespasses, we can only wonder what Christ would say if He came to Rome; and, further, we believe that He would say much that the child-Christ Manuel utters in “The Master Christian.”

The text of the book is that charity and forgiveness—the carrying out of Christ’s commands in the spirit of the Saviour—should guide mankind to-day, that they apply to-day as they did in the days of Christ’s sojourn on earth, and that the conditions of the world to-day are such as render it possible for Christians to walk in His steps. In the “open letter” to Cardinal Vaughan, already referred to, we find in some of the passages a true insight into the spirit of and the aims with which “The Master Christian” was written.

And again,

Marie Corelli, by the words of Manuel, as we think it is recognized, gives a truer interpretation of the Divine Will. Even the title page contains a quotation from St. Luke that is a protest against many of the practices of the Romish and other Churches: “Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”

The story of “The Master Christian” opens in Rouen, where a Roman Catholic prelate, Cardinal Felix Bonpré, is seen in the Cathedral of Notre{233} Dame. This Cardinal is a pious and true man who has for many years contented himself with the administration of his diocese and the performance of good work. His Rouen visit is a portion of a tour of several months taken for purposes of health, and with the object of judging for himself how the great world, of which he has seen little, is faring, “whether on the downward road to destruction and death, or up to the high ascents of progress and life.” The farther he travels the more depressed he becomes by the results of his observations. Within Rouen Cathedral Cardinal Bonpré hears singularly soothing music, though whence it comes he is unable to perceive. He is impressed with a peculiar sense of some divine declaration of God’s absolute omniscience, and a question seems to be whispered in his ears:

“When the Son of Man cometh, think ye He shall find faith on earth?”

With his growing experience of the confusion and trouble of the world, the Cardinal is forced to the conclusion that there is an increasing lack of faith in God and a Hereafter; and of the reason for it he thinks: “We have failed to follow the Master’s teaching in its true perfection. We have planted in ourselves a seed of corruption, and we have permitted—nay, some of us have encouraged{234}—its poisonous growth till it now threatens to contaminate the whole field of labor.”

Cast down by these reflections, the good Cardinal proceeds to the Hotel Poitiers, a modest hostelry preferred by him to the Palace of the Archbishop of Rouen, another “Prince of the Church,” a term which Cardinal Bonpré—like Miss Corelli—finds particularly detestable, especially when used in connection with a Christian Church wherein she thinks distinctive ranks are a mistake and even Anti-Christian.

At the inn a striking picture is drawn by the novelist of the evil effect upon the children of France brought about by the removal of religious instruction from the schools. The two charmingly precocious children of Jean and Madame Patoux are quite old in agnostic views and doubts. There also Bonpré has his first serious religious argument with the Archbishop of Rouen, whom he astonishes by declaring that the Church herself is responsible for the increase of ungodliness.

We are informed here, also, through Cardinal Bonpré, of what Marie Corelli means by Paulism. Ministers of religion, he declares, should literally obey all Christ’s commands:

Cardinal Bonpré that night has a vision of the end of the world, and in his agony at the spectacle he cries: “Have patience yet, Thou outraged and blasphemed Creator! Break once again Thy silence as of old, and speak to us! Pity us once again, ere Thou slay us utterly! Come to us even as Thou camest in Judea, and surely we will receive{236} Thee and obey Thee, and reject Thy love no more.” And a divine voice replies: “Thy prayer is heard, and once again the silence shall be broken. Nevertheless, remember that the light shineth in Darkness, and the Darkness comprehendeth it not.” At this juncture a plaintive cry falls on his ears, and he goes out into the night to discover the cause. He proceeds to the Cathedral, and there, in the deeply hollowed portal, discovers the slight shrinking figure of a child—

Thus the second coming of Christ, according to Marie Corelli.

Manuel is then taken entirely under the protection of Cardinal Bonpré, and the two become inseparable. At all times the lad talks with wonderful eloquence and power—as Marie Corelli thinks Christ would talk if He were a child amongst us, and as He did talk when astonishing the learned doctors of law in Jerusalem. Before he and the Cardinal leave the Hotel Poitiers a miracle is performed. In Rouen there is a lad, Fabien Doucet, who has a bent spine and a useless leg. The unbelieving Patoux youngsters bring little Fabien to the Cardinal, and ask him to cure the lad. Beside the Cardinal stands Manuel. The incident is introduced by Marie Corelli in order to emphasize her own belief in the power of prayer—prayer that is sincere, the{238} expression of faith that is true. The story of the miracle is very beautiful, especially for the spirit in which the good Cardinal performs the duty that the children ask of him. He addresses Fabien:

As Fabien Doucet hobbles away at the conclusion of this prayer, the Cardinal, speaking from his heart, declares that if the giving of his own life could make the lad strong he would willingly sacrifice it. Then Manuel moves from his place near the Cardinal’s chair, approaches the little cripple, and, putting his arms round him, kisses him on the forehead.

Sweet assurance, truly, for the afflicted one. Shortly afterwards the Cardinal and Manuel depart from Rouen. They have not been long gone when there comes the startling announcement from{241} Fabien Doucet’s mother that the boy is cured, and, to prove it, little Fabien, the former cripple, speeds gaily to the home of the Patoux family, strong and well.

Unconscious of the remarkable cure that has awed and amazed the townsfolk of Rouen, the Cardinal, accompanied by Manuel, proceeds to Paris and to the residence of his niece, Angela Sovrani, an artist famous throughout Europe. In Paris many interesting persons are brought together, mainly in Angela Sovrani’s studio. One remarkable character is the Abbé Vergniaud, a brilliant preacher, witty, eloquent, and sarcastic, but an atheist for all that. In his conversations with Angela he endeavors to justify his position, but the girl insists upon the depressing and wretched nature of his soulless creed. Vergniaud frankly admits his unbelief to Cardinal Bonpré. He also makes a confession and a declaration. In his early days, twenty-five years before, he had betrayed and deserted a woman, long since dead. Her son, however, has grown to manhood with the determination to avenge the mother’s wrong, and the Abbé goes in daily fear of assassination at his hands. Yet the Abbé Vergniaud shows that he is far from being a wholly evil man. He declares his determination to retrieve the past so far as he can and{242} to clear his son’s soul from the thirst for vengeance that is consuming it.

On one occasion Vergniaud declares that Paris is hopelessly pagan, that Christ is there made the subject of public caricature, that His reign is over—in Paris at least.

The Abbé is inclined to resent the rebuke, but only for a moment. The next, abashed, he admits its justice, and craves pardon. The incident is the turning point in Vergniaud’s life. He shortly afterwards writes to the Cardinal that he is moved to say things that he has never said before, and that it is possible he may astonish and perchance scandalize Paris.

He concludes by requesting the Cardinal to come two days later to hear him preach at Notre Dame de Lorette.{243}

In his letter to the Cardinal, the Abbé Vergniaud mentions that Manuel has given him a rose, and the mention of this to the child-Christ gives us a charming fancy as to the floral beauties of Heaven.

Here is another sweet thought which Marie Corelli gives us in the words of Manuel:

{244}

It is worthy of note that, on account of “The Master Christian,” in spite of the teachings in it such as we have quoted, the author has been labeled an “atheist.{246}”

CHAPTER. XIII

“THE MASTER CHRISTIAN”—(Continued)

Of many interesting incidents which mark the Cardinal’s stay in Paris, the most sensational is the sermon of the Abbé Vergniaud and the extraordinary scene at its close.

Marie Corelli gives a wonderfully realistic word-picture of the scene in the famous church on a notable occasion. The Abbé’s sermon, which appears in its entirety, is scathingly sarcastic. In it he bitterly denounces the hypocrisy alike of people and of churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church, which he attacks for the ban it places upon many things, even discussion; he declares that all the intellectual force of the country is arrayed against priestcraft, and that the spirit of an insolent, witty, domineering atheism and materialism rules us all. “But what I specially wish to advise you—taking myself as an example—is, that none of you, whether inclined to virtue or to vice, should remain such arrant fools as to imagine that your sins will not find you out.{247}”

And then the Abbé makes open confession, before the congregation, of his past life.

The report of a pistol shot sounds through the church as the last words are uttered. A young man has fired at the preacher. It is the son seeking his vengeance at last. Manuel prevents the bullet from reaching Vergniaud, who immediately announces to the astonished congregation that he will not make a charge: “I decline to prosecute my own flesh and blood. I will be answerable for his future conduct,—I am entirely answerable for his past! He is my son!”

It is upon the persecution of Cardinal Bonpré in consequence of the attitude he adopts towards the Abbé Vergniaud after this sensational incident that Marie Corelli builds her chief indictment of the Vatican executive. An agent of the Vatican, then in Paris, is Monsignor Moretti. He calls at the Sovrani Palace. There he has an interview with the Cardinal, the Abbé, and the latter’s son Cyrillon. Moretti upbraids Vergniaud for his conduct, cor{248}rectly describing him as a faithless son of the church, and meets with the retort, “The attack on the Church I admit. I am not the only preacher in the world who has so attacked it. Christ Himself would attack it if He were to visit this earth again!” The remark is characterized as blasphemy, but, on the Cardinal being appealed to, the good Bonpré states his failure to perceive the alleged blasphemy of “our unhappy and repentant brother.”

This forgiveness of sin which Christ preached and which Marie Corelli claims that the Romish Church does not practice, is the basis of the differences of Cardinal Bonpré with Moretti, and afterwards with the Pope. Vergniaud, still unrebuked by Cardinal Bonpré, declares to Moretti that there is a movement in the world which all the powers of Rome{249} are unable to cope with, the movement of an ever-advancing and resistless force called Truth, and that God will shake down Rome rather than that the voice of Truth should be silenced.

The Abbé’s declarations, as the Vatican emissary points out, mean his expulsion from the Church. Before the interview closes there comes the declaration by Cyrillon Vergniaud, the son of the Abbé, that he is “Gys Grandit,” a powerful writer of essays that are the creed of a “Christian Democratic” party—that advocate of Truth to which the Abbé had referred. The announcement is startling to all three clerics, the more so as the young man proceeds to utter his views, a stern denunciation of the Church’s practices, with such rebukes as: “Does not the glittering of the world’s wealth piled into the Vatican,—useless wealth lying idle in the midst of hideous beggary and starvation,—proclaim with no uncertain voice, ‘I know not the Man’?” with the added declaration that there is no true representative of Christ in this world—either within or without the Romish Church—though even sceptics, while denying Christ’s Divinity, are forced to own that His life and His actions were more Divine than those of any other creature in human shape that has ever walked the earth!

In the further argumentative passes between{250} Moretti and Gys Grandit, the former holds that the Church of Rome is a system of moral government, and that it is proper to thrust out of salvation heretics who are excommunicate, and that if our Lord’s commands were to be obeyed to the letter it would be necessary to find another world to live in. These propositions the Christian Democrat absolutely denies, and urges, on the other hand, that it may be possible that we may be forced to obey Christ’s commands to the letter or perish for refusing to do so. For permitting such remarks to go unreproved, Moretti, as the interview closes, intimates that, in reporting the matter to the Pope, the attitude of Cardinal Bonpré will be explained. Further offense is given by the appearance of Manuel upon the scene, and by some remarks the lad makes upon the subject under discussion.

Clouds are gathering heavily over the horizon of the saintly Bonpré, who, accompanied by Manuel, proceeds to Rome after this most unpropitious preliminary to an audience at the Vatican. He is further troubled, immediately after his arrival at the palace of his brother-in-law, Prince Sovrani, by being informed of the “miracle” of Rouen—the recovery of Fabien Doucet, of which he now hears for the first time, though all Rome has been talking loudly of it. Bonpré is decidedly in bad repute at{251} the Vatican, and it is determined that he shall be made to suffer for his defense of Vergniaud. He adds to his offenses by denying all knowledge of the Rouen lad’s cure.

Manuel and Bonpré visit St. Peter’s, which does not please them, and at last they are received by the Pope. Here all Marie Corelli’s criticism of the Romish Church is concentrated in the appeal which is made by the child-Christ to His Holiness. He asks him why he stops at the Vatican all alone.

This address has such an effect on the Pope that at its conclusion he falls senseless. Bonpré and Manuel, the former now without a friend left at the Vatican, take their departure, and shortly afterwards it is deemed expedient for them to leave Rome for shelter in England, the idea being intimated that the authorities of the Church were{256} determined to make a prisoner of the Cardinal, and inflict upon him some undefined evil.

So far as the book is concerned apart from its central theme, the interest is held by the light touches of the loves of some charming people, and also of a very frivolous roué, the Marquis Fontenelle. This very “up-to-date” French nobleman is ultimately, to the relief of every one and the regret of few, killed in a duel with his own brother, the great actor Miraudin. To make this melodramatic incident as striking as possible the author kills both the brothers. The Marquis is a character who says and does what would seem to be impossible things. Notwithstanding his immoral propensities he has a certain pleasing fascination that almost inclines one to regard his faults with tolerance. His faults are many, but let it be said to his credit at least that he recognizes them. His views of men and women and love are extraordinarily callous and cynical, yet it is an absolute fact that the prototype of the Marquis Fontenelle exists, and holds and openly expresses the views to which in this book he is made to give utterance. And, evil as he is, he also is conquered at the last by the true character of a sweet, pure, womanly woman. It is such who conquer all evil.{257}

The Comtesse Sylvie Hermenstein, an altogether delightful lady, marries Aubrey Leigh and leaves the Church of Rome. The story of her doing so, of the struggles of the Romish priesthood to retain her and her wealth, and of the methods by which they endeavored to attain that end, is in itself a stirring narrative.

Marie Corelli is altogether pleasing, not only to those who approve the mission of her book, but to many of her most severe critics, in her account of the life which Leigh in younger days had led in a Cornish fishing village, working as one of themselves amongst the rugged, true-hearted, brave men who with all their roughness of character are perhaps stauncher in a simple faith in God than many of those who ostentatiously worship in fine churches. She pens, too, many delightful, humorous, and pathetic pictures of the French peasantry.

Quite another story is the love, or, rather, two loves, of Angela Sovrani. When we first make her acquaintance—a woman, yet one of the finest artists in the world—she is betrothed to Florian Varillo, a man with a character of almost impossible evil. We wish we could regard the character as absolutely impossible. Varillo is also an artist, handsome, unprincipled, egotistical to the worst degree, believing himself great and holding{258} the view—once generally held, but now to a large extent exploded—that woman’s work cannot be equal to masculine effort. Angela has for years been engaged upon a picture which she hopes will be a masterpiece. No person—not even father or lover—has been permitted to gaze upon the canvas. A date for the uncovering and inspection of the picture is fixed. Alone in her studio the evening before, Florian begs admittance in order that he may inspect the picture that night, owing to a journey which he must take early on the morrow. Angela consents. “Come and see.” The concealing curtain is removed and Florian recoils with an involuntary cry, and then remains motionless and silent, stricken dumb and stupid by the magnificent creation which confronts him.

“The central glory of the whole picture was a figure of Christ.... Kingly and commanding.” Near by are seen the faces of many pre-eminent in the history of the time. The Pope is shown fastening fetters of iron round a beautiful youth called Science. The leader of the Jesuits is counting gold. The forms of men representing every description of Church-doctrine are beheld trampling underneath them other human creatures.

{259}

And what of Angela and Florian? Painter and sweetheart regard the work. Varillo’s first remark is, “Did you do it all yourself?” That is the first verbal stab. Others follow, killing the joy of Angela. And the verbal stabs are but the prelude to one with steel; for Varillo, maddened by jealousy, determines to kill Angela and then to per{260}suade the world that he has painted the picture. Angela, happily, is not killed. Varillo, who escapes, enters into a conspiracy to declare and maintain that the great picture is his. He is got out of the world and out of the book by perishing in a fire at a monastery to which he had been taken. Such treachery it is almost impossible to conceive. Yet those who condemn the incident should remember some of Marie Corelli’s own personal experiences, with which the world has now to some extent become acquainted. Angela subsequently marries Gys Grandit.

Throughout the book there are a good many discourses by Aubrey Leigh and Gys Grandit on the subject of Christian Democracy. What seems to be the main desire of this party is “a purified Church—a House of Praise to God, without any superstition or Dogma.” We must confess, however, that we recognize the truth of the remark made by Gherardi—one of the Roman prelates—“You must have Dogma. You must formulate something out of a chaos of opinion”; and neither through Manuel, Aubrey Leigh, nor Gys Grandit does Marie Corelli tell us how she would build up this simple universal church of which she speaks so much. We may, however, expect in a further book to have Miss Corelli’s constructive conceptions{261} on the subject. The basis of it all is, at any rate, that the main feature of all worship should be praise of the Almighty and His Divine Son; and, as a true believer and an artist, she would have the churches not only essentially houses of Praise, but buildings worthy of the high purpose for which they are erected. In “The Master Christian” she gives us her stepfather’s poem as indicating Aubrey Leigh’s ideal on the subject:

In the closing of the story we find Cardinal Bonpré threatened by the Pope with severe punish{263}ment unless he parts with Manuel, and the Cardinal’s dignified and argumentative reply. The two part, but it is not at the bidding of the Pope. There is a beautiful description of the last night on earth of the Cardinal and of a vision beheld by him—a Dream of Angels, “Of thousands of dazzling faces, that shone like stars or were fair as flowers!”

So the Cardinal passes away to his eternal rest:

That is the question that Marie Corelli asks the world through “The Master Christian.{265}”

CHAPTER XIV

“TEMPORAL POWER”

This, Marie Corelli’s latest work, appeared on August 28th, 1902, the first edition totalling up to the unprecedented number of 120,000 copies. We understand that, since the primary issue, a further 30,000 copies have been printed. Thus it comes about that in spite of all the newspaper invective of which she has been the victim and the verbal floodgates that have been opened upon her, Marie Corelli has with her latest production broken the bookselling record for a six-shilling volume on its first appearance.

“Temporal Power” is not an inviting name. As a schoolmiss would say, “It sounds dry.” It has not the mystery-suggesting flavor of “The House on the Marsh” or the thrilling and adventuresome qualities of a title like “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea”; yet “Temporal Power,” despite its appellation, is, at the time of writing, the most-talked-about book in the world.

“For,” to quote Marie Corelli, “it must be borne in mind that ‘Temporal Power’ are the two daz{266}zling words which forever fascinate the Pope, and are the key-notes of every attempt at supremacy. ‘Temporal Power’ is the desire of kings, as of commoners. There is nothing really prosaic about such a title, unless the thing itself be deemed prosaic, which, if this were proved, would make out that all the work of the world was useless and that nothing whatever need be done except fold one’s hands and sit down in unambitious contentment.”

“Temporal Power” was not issued to the Press for review, but no less than three hundred and fifty journals—big and little—paid Miss Corelli the compliment of purchasing the book in order to comment on its plot and characteristics. Conning the mass of critical matter which is the outcome of this action on the part of the newspapers, it would seem that the attitude of the Press towards the authoress is growing less hostile than of yore, for quite a number of the reviews are couched in distinctly favorable language.

From Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, September 21st, 1902, we cull the following notice, which will serve as a brief resumé of the plot—no doubt already familiar to the majority of our readers—and at the same time as an example of how an entire stranger to the novelist—as the author of this article was—can disregard the prejudice which has arisen with{267} respect to our subject, and write as he thinks, combining, as it appears to us, a happy knack of lucid expression with a calm and temperate judgment.

From this exceedingly able summing-up of the work we will now turn to the article on “Temporal Power” which was published in The Review of Reviews.

To begin with, it needs to be explained that Mr. Stead first of all wrote a private letter to Miss Co{269}relli telling her that it was “by far the strongest book she had yet written.” He then went on to suggest that she meant her characters for certain living Royalties and celebrities. Miss Corelli wrote back to him at once, stating that he was entirely in error. He having made the suggestion that she had described Queen Alexandra as the cold and irresponsive Queen of “Temporal Power,” Miss Corelli referred him to her “Christmas Greeting,” published at the end of the previous year, for the description of the Queen as seen in “The Soul of Queen Alexandra.” The general tone of Mr. Stead’s review was to accuse Miss Corelli of “disloyalty” (though he himself, Miss Corelli complains, had long expressed views that were distinctly Pro-Boer), and to inquire sarcastically how it happened that she was invited to the Coronation? It may be stated that she was invited to the Coronation because the King knows her personally, and, knowing her, is perfectly aware that he has no more loyal subject—a conviction that is not likely to be disturbed by the casual statement even of an experienced reviewer like Mr. Stead. From certain letters and messages Miss Marie Corelli has received from both the King and Queen (if she cared to make them public), it is very evident that she is thoroughly appreciated by the Royal Family, and that they are the last people{270} in the world to believe the numerous adverse statements circulated about her merely on account of her brilliant success.

It was in the September (1902) Review of Reviews that Mr. Stead devoted four pages to his criticism of “Temporal Power,” which was described as “a tract for the guidance of the King.”

“The fact” (continued Mr. Stead) “that her pages reflect as in a glass darkly, in an exaggerated and somewhat distorted shape, the leading personages in the English Court, and in contemporary politics, may be one of those extraordinary coincidences which occur without any intention on the part of the authoress of the book.”

The King and the Queen are then described, and attention is drawn to the position of the Heir Apparent after he has contracted what is known as a morganatic marriage.

We have Miss Corelli’s authority for stating, with all possible emphasis, that “Temporal Power” was written without the least intention on the part of the author to introduce living personalities under a romantic disguise. As touching the character of the defaulting Secretary of State, Carl Perousse, with which a large number of writers (including Mr. Stead) have sought to identify Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, it may be pointed out that if the author had any prominent European statesman at all in view, it was a well-known Italian minister, now deceased, as any one with judgment and knowledge of Italian affairs could testify—though{272} Perousse is made tall and thin in the book, with the express object that he shall escape association with the said Italian minister, who was short and fat. Nothing has astonished the novelist more than the numerous letters she has received from members of Mr. Chamberlain’s party in which it is stated that the villainous Perousse is “exactly like” their leader. We have only to refer such correspondents to Miss Corelli’s public speeches in Edinburgh and Glasgow to prove that she has always spoken in high praise of the Colonial Secretary.

The King of the book is no more intended to be a suggested picture of Edward the Seventh than of Haroun Alraschid. The performances of the latter potentate are certainly “impossible” and “outrageous”—to quote press diatribes on “Temporal Power”—but they live, and their forgotten writer is not branded with lèse-majestè. This romance of Marie Corelli’s was written to show how a King, in spite of modern surroundings, can still be a hero. Marie Corelli’s king is the best man in the whole story, and is represented as winning the love of all his people.

The authoress readily admits that an attack on Jesuitism is contained in the book, nor is she the only one who has waylaid that persuasion. She is{273} strenuously opposed to the political and educational system of Jesuitry, and believes that the whole civilized world is with her.

The much-discussed question of “royal bigamy” as condemned by the action of Miss Corelli’s young Prince Humphry and his love for “Gloria,” is a matter that has nothing to do with one Royal Family more than another. Our author’s ideas are, that if any crime is a crime in commoners, it should not be excused in persons of Royal birth; moreover, she thinks that many a Royal Prince has been made hopelessly miserable, and the springs of his life poisoned at their very fount, by his being forced to wed where he does not love, merely for “Reasons of State.” The Pope has quite recently condemned Royal alliances between cousins; and as all Royal Families are at the present day very closely allied, Miss Corelli thinks it will soon be necessary for heirs to thrones to enjoy the same honest freedom of purpose in their loves and marriages as the simplest gentlemen in the land.

The novelist has been told that she has made enemies among the “extra-loyal” and “Imperialistic” party. She presumes the “extra-loyal” means the “extra-toadies.” If the “Imperialistic” party is a party which seeks to curtail and restrict{274} the rights of the People, then she goes with the People against all political parties whatsoever. But she takes no side in party politics: she is a stickler for Justice and Right for the great majority.

Two apparent attempts in journals catering specially for the book trade, were made to quash the success of the novel. One of these journals plainly stated that “Temporal Power” had not obtained the triumph claimed for it. The publishers, Messrs. Methuen and Co., instantly taxed the paper in question with having misstated the case, with the result that the following retractation was published: “With reference to our statement last month, regarding the sales of ‘Temporal Power,’ we learn that, so far from the repeat orders not comparing favorably with those of ‘The Master Christian,’ they have established a record even in the gigantic sales of Marie Corelli’s novels. Up to the present, during the same period, the sales of ‘Temporal Power’ have exceeded those of ‘The Master Christian,’ by over twenty thousand, and some idea of the demand for the book, even after the first rush, may be obtained from the fact that all the retail book-sellers, with one exception, in Brighton, sent large repeat orders within a few weeks of publication, while a single repeat order from one retail book{275}seller alone in another part of the country was for seven hundred and twenty-eight copies.”

The other periodical, after making one or two attempts to stem the great wave of “Temporal Power,” printed the following somewhat halfhearted comment: “Although few reviewers have spoken kindly of this novel, its sale has reached a figure which it is unnecessary to repeat here; whether its merits deserve such popularity we must refrain from discussing.”

In some quarters it has been boldly alleged that “Temporal Power” is like “The Eternal City.” There are absolutely no points of resemblance. Miss Corelli has never read “The Eternal City” or any of Mr. Hall Caine’s books except “The Christian.” She declares, however, that she searched in vain for a real follower of Christ in that work. It is interesting to note, by the way, that although the two novelists met years ago at a social function, they are practically strangers to one another, and are probably content to remain so.

From a book containing scores of powerful passages which would well bear reproduction independently of the context, we only propose to make a single quotation. The following extract concerns one of the most touching events of the story, i. e.,{276} the rejection of the King’s offered love by “Lotys,” woman of the people:

{280}

This beautiful passage alone is a literary tour-de-force. “Temporal Power,” in short, shows no abatement of Marie Corelli’s energetic and varied genius, and the public will await her next work with all possible interest.{281}

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{282} bazaar for the compliment that had been paid her in their invitation, and then proceeded as follows:

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:

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{288} 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:—

It is worthy of note that the leading journal of Edinburgh, The Scotsman, made no allusion{289} 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{290} possible. In the world’s earlier days, conceptions of art were of the loftiest and purest order.

Imagination is an artist’s first necessary. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, or the musician{291} 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.

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.

{292}

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{294} 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:

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:—

{296}

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{297} 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.{298}

CHAPTER XVI

MARIE CORELLI’S VIEWS ON MARRIAGE

Marie Corelli seems to think that the present generation is one in which hypocrisy cumbers the face of the globe. “Never,” she says, “was the earth so oppressed with the weight of polite lying, never were there such crowds of evil masqueraders, cultured tricksters, and social humbugs, who, though admirable as tricksters and humbugs, are wholly contemptible as men and women. Truth is at a discount, and if one should utter it the reproachful faces of one’s so-called ‘friends’ show how shocked they are at meeting with anything honest.” That is a very sweeping assertion for which Marie Corelli has been abused. If the world had in it more sincerity than sham, the truth of her condemnation of present systems and practices would have been frankly admitted. Because what she says is true to an unhappy degree. The authoress is severe in her criticisms of the marriage “bargains” which are, we think, mainly the possession of what she would call “smart{299}” society. The Divorce Court record is certainly a proof that a good many of the weddings that are “arranged” are certainly not made in Heaven. Marie Corelli thinks, indeed, that many women have forgotten what marriage is, and she declares it to be an absolute grim fact that in England many women of the upper classes are not to-day married, but merely bought for a price.

Amongst all classes a very large number of marriages mean all that. Amongst the poorer classes—not the lowest classes—the proportion is probably the largest, and amongst the middle{300} and higher classes it is so to a large though diminishing degree. Nevertheless, Marie Corelli states, and we agree, that it is the cash-box that governs the actions of far too many in entering upon the most serious duty of life; and if the man and wife do not realize the importance and sacredness of the tie, the result must be, as the novelist says, that the man and wife will drag down rather than uplift each other.

In a magazine article which Marie Corelli wrote some time ago, she drew a delightful picture of an artist and his wife in Capri who live on £100 a year in perfect bliss. When one views the picture she draws of their life it is easy to think one has found something like the lost paradise. Still, if we all tried love on £100 a year in Capri the housing problem would soon become as serious a matter there as it is to-day in our great cities. Love on £100 a year, or less or more, must be tried by most of us under less favorable geographical circumstances; but under whatever circumstances true it is, as Miss Corelli insists, that God’s law of love will make of marriage a successful and happy undertaking.

Marriage on very moderate means is not attractive. And why? According to Marie Corelli, because Love is not sufficient for the average girl;{301} because in the rush of our time we are trampling sweet emotions and true passion under foot, marriages being too seldom the result of affection nowadays. They are too often merely the carrying out of a settled scheme of business. Mothers teach their daughters to marry for a “suitable establishment”; fathers, rendered desperate as to what they are to do with their sons in the increasing struggle for life and the incessant demand for luxuries which are not by any means actually necessary to that life, say: “Look out for a woman with money.” The heir to a great name and title sells his birthright for a mess of American dollar-pottage;—and it is a very common, every-day business to see some Christian virgin sacrificed on the altar of matrimony to a money-lending, money-grubbing son of Israel. Bargain and sale,—sale and bargain,—it is the whole raison d’être of the “season,”—the balls, the dinners, the suppers, the parties to Hurlingham and Ascot,—even on the dear old Thames, with its delicious nooks fitted for pure romance and heart betrothal, the clatter of Gunter’s luncheon-dishes and the popping of Benoist’s champagne-corks remind the hungry gypsies who linger near such scenes of river revelry that there is not much sentiment about,—only plenty of money being wasted. Marie Corelli well says that there{302} can be nothing more hideous—more like a foretaste of hell itself—than the life position of a man and woman who have been hustled into matrimony, and who, when the wedding fuss is over and the feminine pictorial papers have done gushing about the millinery of the occasion, find themselves alone together, without a single sympathy in common, with nothing but the chink of gold and the rustle of the bank-notes for their heart music, and with a barrier of steadily increasing repulsion and disgust rising between them every day.

We have seen something of such a picture in Marie Corelli’s character of “Sybil Elton”; that it is no more nor less than a crime to enter upon marriage without that mutual supreme attraction and deep love which makes the union sacred, may be, in fact, allowed. The question is, how to avoid such evils? Marie Corelli gives the answer in this advice: “In a woman’s life one love should suffice. She cannot, constituted as she is, honestly give herself to more than one man. And she should be certain—absolutely, sacredly, solemnly certain, that one man is indeed her preelected lover, her chosen mate; that never could she care for any other hand than his to caress her beauty, never for any other kiss than his to rest upon her lips, and that without him life is but a half-circle waiting completion....{303} Love is the last of all the mythical gods to be tempted or cajolled by lawyers and settlements, wedding-cake, and perishable millinery. His domain is nature and the heart of humanity,—and the gifts he can bestow on those who meet him in the true spirit are marvelous and priceless indeed. The exquisite joys he can teach,—the fine sympathies,—the delicate emotions,—the singular method in which he will play upon two lives like separate harps, and bring them into resounding tune and harmony, so that all the world shall seem full of luscious song,—this is one way of Love’s system of education. But this is not all—he can so mould the character, temper the will, and strengthen the heart, as to make his elected disciples endure the bitterest sorrows bravely,—perform acts of heroic self-sacrifice and attain the most glorious heights of ambition,—for, as the venerable Thomas à Kempis tells us,—‘Love is a great thing, yes, a great and thorough good; by itself it makes everything that is heavy, light—and it bears evenly all that is uneven. For it carries a burden which is no burden, and makes everything that is bitter sweet and tasteful. Though weary it is not tired,—though pressed it is not straightened,—though alarmed it is not confounded, but as a lively flame and burning torch it forces its way upward and securely passes through{304} all. Is not such divine happiness well worth attaining?’”

The answer to that rests with the women mainly, and to them Marie Corelli says:

{305}

Marie Corelli is a great friend of children, loving them and beloved of them. It may be regarded as probable that the children of those who form the ideal unions which the novelist so eloquently describes will be sure to train their own offspring on good and intelligent lines. But there are others—so many of them. There is much in the writings of Marie Corelli that bears upon the question, and her text is the dedication of the “Mighty Atom”—“To those self-styled ‘Progressivists’ who by precept and example assist the infamous cause of education without religion, and who, by promoting the idea, borrowed from French atheism, of denying to the children in Board schools and elsewhere, the knowledge and love of God, as the true foundation of noble living, are guilty of a worse crime than murder.” That is her view. She regards the teaching of simple Christian truths—the love of God, and the instruction which is the basis of all Christian creeds, i. e., to do unto others as you would be done by—as an essential element in the education of children. She would regard it as the most heinous of crimes to take from our English elementary schools that religious instruction which was agreed to in the 1870 Compromise, the Compromise which happily has survived a violent attack made upon it not long since in the elemen{306}tary educational Parliament of London, the Metropolitan School Board.

Whatever be the general scheme of elementary, secondary, higher, and technical education and training, Marie Corelli would have the people insist, as for life itself, upon the children being taught “the knowledge and love of God.”

She would have that knowledge imparted in the spirit of which Queen Victoria wrote: “I am quite clear,” said the Queen, speaking of her eldest daughter, then a child, “that she should be taught to have great reverence for God and for religion, and that she should have the feeling of devotion and love which our Heavenly Father encourages His earthly children to have for Him, and not one of fear and trembling.” In “The Master Christian” we see incidentally brought out the evil results of the unhappy law of France which excludes religious education from the schools, the consequence of which is the enormous increase of agnostic thought in that country, and, built upon it, the views and practices which are eating into the heart of that great nation like a foul disease, weakening its numerical strength and its moral and intellectual force. For the guidance of parents in this matter we would commend them to those two most interesting books, “The Mighty Atom” and{307} “Boy.” They are volumes which all parents should read and study. They have already given pause to many callous men and women who were neglecting to bestow that thought on the children’s training which the subject demands. There are many Christian parents who for want of thought neglect this matter and sometimes have only themselves to thank for dissolute sons and impure daughters. On the other hand, to their credit it is the fact that many who are not Christians, who are careless and neglectful of religion, or are even agnostics, insist upon their children receiving that religious education which they themselves once received, with the just and broad-minded idea that, though they have become careless, cynical, or entirely agnostic, the children shall start as they did with the same training and have the same opportunity of forming their own judgment on these matters.

Parents will think deeply over “The Mighty Atom” and “Boy.” Different as the two stories are, they deal essentially with this great question. They both teach serious lessons to the fathers and the mothers of English boyhood. The stories, as such, have been already dealt with. Here we will just give a few of those lessons which it is the object of the works in question to teach.{308}

The author would have children’s bodies educated as well as their minds. She regards the former as the more important for the reason that a healthy body is the most suitable habitation for a healthy mind, and that a keen intellect developed by ruining the physical strength is not calculated to benefit either the individual, or the community to which the individual belongs. Lionel Valliscourt, the little hero of “The Mighty Atom,” has a father and also a tutor, one Montrose. The father is an atheist and anxious to educate the son on a system, part of which is the exclusion of religion from the curriculum. Montrose, a level-headed, clear-brained Scotchman,—no “preacher,” but possessing a simple belief in God—is dismissed from his position because he does not approve the father’s system. This he describes as child-murder; and in the remarks he addresses to the father at their last interview Marie Corelli’s opinions about child-training are indicated:

Marie Corelli is absolutely opposed to “cram.” That was what was killing little Lionel. At ten he was well advanced in mathematics, Latin and Greek, history, and even science. No wonder he was often “tired,” or that he felt as if, to use his own words, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to belong to the hybernating species and go to sleep all the winter. Miss Corelli detests cram—the regarding of the young human brain as a sort of expanding bag or hold-all, to be filled with various bulky articles of knowledge, useful or otherwise, till it shows signs of bursting. That was the plan of little Lionel’s new coach, who, after the operation of cramming a youngster’s brain, would then lock up the brain-bag and trust to its carrying the owner through life. If the lock broke and the whole bag gave way, so much the worse for the bag, that was all. That was what happened with poor little Lionel, who hanged himself, tired of the “cram,” and worried into insanity by the loss of his mother, the death of his playmate, and the trouble of considering whether, if there be no God, and death is mere negation, it was really worth while living at all.{310}

Healthy physical exercise, reasonable study, and religion as the basis of that study: so Miss Corelli would train the children.

“Boy” teaches equally healthy lessons, though the story and the circumstances are totally different. “Boy” might have been a fine fellow. He had good qualities. That he became a thief and a forger was the fault of the home circumstances and example. The father of “Boy” was a drunkard and a blackguard, though a man of good family. The lad’s mother was a silly-minded slattern. There was too much discipline brought to bear upon Lionel Valliscourt; far too little was ever tried on “Boy.” The latter, in his early childhood left to himself, or to mix only with street lads, and with parents who, for a foolish “pride,” refused him better training at the hands of others, developed by neglect into a young ruffian, though he turned out well in the end.

Again, in conclusion, we commend these books to parents, and, indeed, to all interested in or engaged in the education and upbringing of children.{311}

CHAPTER XVII

SOME PERSONAL ITEMS

It is pretty generally known that when Sir Theodore Martin desired, in honor of Lady Martin’s memory, to place a Helen Faucit memorial in the chancel of Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, it was Miss Marie Corelli who undertook a successful campaign against the project. Sir Theodore Martin most ardently wished to execute his intention, and he had progressed so far with the negotiations that his desires were on the point of being carried out; and they would have been but for the active intervention of Miss Corelli, who roused the whole town of Stratford into energetic protest against the proposed invasion of Shakespeare’s own particular shrine. It was Sir Theodore’s idea to place a bas-relief of Helen Faucit immediately opposite the historical bust of the Poet, on the other side of the chancel, but in an equally if not more prominent position.

Miss Corelli began her campaign with a letter to the Morning Post calling public attention to Sir Theodore’s plan, and the whole Press backed up{312} her efforts with hearty unanimity. The late Sir Arthur Hodgson had taken the chief responsibility of supporting Sir Theodore Martin, but in his haste and zeal had forgotten to ascertain whether he could legally remove from the wall of the chancel two mural tablets which occupied the intended site of the proposed Helen Faucit effigy. The then Bishop of Worcester, Dr. Perowne, a great personal friend of Sir Arthur’s, was persuaded to grant a “faculty” for their removal, without due inquiry. Miss Corelli, however, discovered the descendants of the very family those mural tablets belonged to, and found that their permission had not been sought, or their existence considered. Whereupon the law promptly stepped in, and Sir Theodore Martin was compelled to withdraw. Otherwise the modern stone-mason would have gone to work in the hallowed precincts of Shakespeare’s grave, and a piece of wholly unecclesiastical sculpture would have overlooked the Poet’s place of family sepulture, a place which Shakespeare himself purchased for his own interment, and which all the world of literature rightly considers should be left to his remains, uninvaded.

The bas-relief of Lady Martin, had it been put up, would have shown her figure turned with its back to the altar, the medallion of Shakespeare{313} lying at her feet! The whole thing was out of place, and out of tune with the national sentiment, as though Helen Faucit was an eminent actress in her day, she had no connection with Stratford-on-Avon; moreover, she was not British-born. Miss Corelli’s fight was a hard one, for though Mr. Sidney Lee, who was entirely on her side, wrote to Sir Theodore Martin himself to expostulate with him on the mistaken idea he had taken up, nothing would have had any effect had not Miss Corelli fortunately discovered the descendants of the family whose mural tablets were about to be displaced without their permission. When she at last won the day, the whole Press broke out unanimously in a chorus of praise and congratulation, which must have been a singular experience for her, so long inured to disparagement. She was bombarded by telegrams from almost every quarter of the globe, particularly from America, expressing the thanks of all lovers of Shakespeare.

It is a pity some one like Marie Corelli was not in Stratford-on-Avon at the time Shakespeare’s own house, “New Place,” was demolished. Had there been such an one, the chances are that the house would be still standing as one of the world’s priceless treasures. Many precious shrines are defaced, and many valuable mementoes lost for lack of some{314} one to speak out who is not afraid to give an opinion. Shakespeare’s townspeople are grateful to the novelist who fought their Poet’s cause single-handed, and won it in the face of powerful opposition.

* * * * * *

Concerning the portraits of Miss Corelli, her experiences have not been particularly pleasing. It will be remembered that a large oil painting of the novelist was exhibited at Messrs. Graves’ Art Gallery, Pall Mall. This portrait was painted for two reasons: first, because Miss Corelli knew at the time of its execution that she was the victim of a serious malady which might, it was then feared, shortly end her life; and secondly, because she wished to leave some resemblance of herself to her dearest friend, Miss Vyver.

Miss Donald-Smith painted the picture and also executed two “pastel” portraits. Miss Corelli gave several sittings to the artist at a time when her illness was causing her the acutest agony, and when the hours thus spent in the studio were to her a perfect martyrdom. At Miss Donald-Smith’s request she permitted her to send the large picture to the Academy, where it was rejected. It was then exhibited by Messrs. Graves, and was at once made the subject of personal and abusive attacks,{315} not on the artist, but on Marie Corelli herself for being painted at all! Some journalists went so far as to accuse her of “taking the gate-money” and “speculating in her own portrait.” As a matter of fact, Miss Corelli received none of the percentage allowed on the photogravures of the picture, and it may be added that she withdrew the picture altogether from public view before it had been long on exhibition.

Another portrait was painted by Mr. Ellis Roberts for himself. He asked Marie Corelli to sit for him, having always been one of her greatest admirers. He did not, of course, know that she consented to sit for the same primary reason as for the other—namely, that she did not then expect to live more than a few months—and that she wished to bequeathe some “presentment” of herself to those who might care for it. Mr. Roberts is probably not aware to this day that she was often almost fainting when she left his studio after a prolonged “sitting.” He has never seen her since she recovered her health and good spirits: if he had, it is probable he would wish to make another sketch of her.

We may add that Miss Corelli still declines to allow a portrait of herself to be published—a decision which we regret. For many are the “surprises” that have been given to those expectant of{316} meeting in the novelist a severe literary woman with spectacles and a bilious complexion. It may be truly said that Marie Corelli is very light-hearted, always high-spirited, and full of fun; people who represent her as morbid, brooding on her own “sorrows,” or grumbling at the world in general, have never seen her, and can form no idea of her disposition.

She is really a most charming lady, a most hospitable hostess, a delightful raconteur, a brilliant musician, a woman of broad views and large sympathies, a true and staunch friend, always glad to do a kindly action.

* * * * * *

After the record-breaking success of “The Master Christian” and the world-wide discussions following the publication of that famous book, the editor of a magazine addressed the following communication to Miss Marie Corelli:

Vastly entertained by this proposition, and seeing very clearly through the evident “hole in a millstone,” the novelist replied promptly:

* * * * * *

When Sir Henry Drummond Wolff made Miss{318} Corelli’s acquaintance he was rather struck by the somewhat lonely and incessantly hard-working life of the young novelist at the time of “Ardath"‘s publication. Her beloved stepfather was dying by inches—failing gradually every day, and her hours were consumed by anxiety, work, and watching. He asked her if he could introduce her to any one in London she would like to know. After a few moments’ reflection, of all people in the world she chose Henry Labouchere! “I don’t want anything from him,” she said; “I’m not after a notice in Truth. I want to know him, because I’m sure he is unlike anybody else.”

The introduction was given, and the result of it was that she became very intimate with the editor of Truth, with Mrs. Labouchere, and with Miss Dora Labouchere. They were among those good friends who, with Miss Vyver, helped to rouse her from the shock and nervous prostration following on the sudden death of her stepbrother, George Eric Mackay. Mr. Labouchere has never been known to try the satiric edge of his tongue against his “little friend,” as he calls her; and she is always a most welcome visitor to his house in Old Palace Yard.

* * * * * *

Quite lately there has been a singular journalistic incident which must be considered as particularly{319} unfortunate, having regard to some of Miss Marie Corelli’s previous experiences of newspapers. A “private and confidential” letter, written by her to the editor of a ladies’ paper, was published by that editor in his journal with the appendage of a very discourteous reply. The incident arose out of the Highland gathering at Braemar, at which place Miss Corelli had been staying for some weeks. This gathering, which was honored by the presence of his Majesty, was attended by Miss Corelli and a party of friends. Miss Corelli, as her thousands of readers have no need to be told, did not require, or seek for, a “mention in the papers” in consequence of her attendance at the function. Had she done so she could easily have paid for it in the “fashionable announcements.” She attends many gatherings in connection with which her name is never mentioned, but she does not write complaints—confidential or otherwise—on that score. Some people like to suggest that Marie Corelli, whose circle of distinguished personal friends is remarkably large, is more or less friendless and without social surroundings, a suggestion that, pitiful as it is, is somewhat amusing to those who are favored with her close acquaintance.

On the occasion in question Miss Corelli wrote a note marked “private and confidential,” asking the{320} editor of the ladies’ paper not “why her name was not mentioned,” but “why it was omitted”—a distinction with a difference in this case—for she happened to be the hostess of a party whose names were included in the newspaper notice, and who were surprised and indignant at the fact that, whilst their names were mentioned, that of their notable hostess was left out. It was at the suggestion of one of these that Miss Corelli wrote the “private and confidential” letter which the editor, without consulting her, rushed into print. The result of her harmless inquiry is well-known. The publication of the communication brought a shoal of letters to the famous author from men and women of “light and leading,” assuring her of their sympathy in this outrage. Amongst the writers of these letters were several very distinguished journalists, a fact which lends emphasis to Miss Corelli’s knowledge that, notwithstanding her tilts with the Press, the bulk of the journalists of the country do honor to their profession and totally disapprove of such an act as the publication of a “private and confidential” communication. We hear that printed slips containing her letter to the editor in question, and the latter’s reply, were sent by some one for circulation through the town of Stratford-on-Avon. Such a proceeding, whoever

Winter at “Mason Croft"

{321}

was responsible, could have been followed with only the one object of endeavoring to make Miss Corelli appear in an unfavorable light before the neighbors and friends among whom she resides.

It is pleasant to learn that this precious campaign entirely failed. The editor of the local journal, the Stratford-on-Avon Herald, duly received his slips of this correspondence, the hope probably being that he would reproduce them in his journal. He however took no notice of these “hand-bills”; and the good citizens of Shakespeare’s town generally are far too conscious of Miss Corelli’s affection for them and unfailing sympathy in all their interests, to feel anything but unmeasured contempt for any effort to injure her in their esteem. People hastened to call at Mason Croft and express their indignation at the treatment she had received, and they found her, as usual, busily working, happy and unconcerned. To one friend, an M.P., who expressed his views on the subject with considerable expletive, she said quietly, “Oh, well, it really doesn’t matter! The editor has condemned himself by his own action. My letter, asking merely why my name was omitted, was quite a harmless epistle, surely? It scarcely merits an imprisonment in the Tower!”

The Daily Express acted somewhat curiously on{322} this occasion. Having copied the whole of the “private correspondence,” it was suggested that this paper might possibly be laying itself open to penalties of the law for “breach of copyright.” Whereupon haste was made to send the following telegram to Miss Corelli: “Have asked our correspondent to call upon you. We will print with pleasure any statement. Sorry our article did not please you. Would like to make amends.—Daily Express.

The desire, however, to “make amends” does not appear to have been very hearty, because soon afterwards a second article on the subject appeared in The Daily Express, stating that there was “no law to prevent the publication of a private and confidential letter,” unless it bore a legal “confidential stamp.” And at the same time Mr. Pearson wrote to Miss Corelli to say that he thought the editor who had published her “private and confidential” note was “perfectly justified” in his action! But there can be no possible justification for publishing a letter of confidence. Business would be impossible under such circumstances. The mistake Miss Corelli has made in the past has been to condemn the Press and pressmen for the shortcomings of individuals who represent only themselves and not a profession. She has been{323} misunderstood on the matter, but her hearty good-will to journalists is well-known to many of the craft who are proud to be within the pleasant circle of her intimate friends.

* * * * * *

A section of the Press finds pleasure in accusing Miss Corelli of “self-advertisement.” If it were at all true that she has any proclivities that way, she would surely accept the frequent and urgent offers made to her to lecture in the United States, on almost fabulous terms.

Again, a chance for “self-advertisement” offered itself to Miss Corelli in the invitation of Edinburgh, last year, to open the Home Industries Exhibition, in Waverley Market. People hoped for her coming, and urgent letters were sent to her assuring her that she would receive a splendid welcome. Miss Corelli, however, declined the tempting proposal, which, if the “advertising” accusations were in any way well-founded, seems a short-sighted waste of opportunity on her part. As a matter of fact, she seldom takes the chances of notoriety that are so frequently offered to her; but it would be easy to name a dozen or more periodicals which are glad to make advertisements for themselves out of some specially contrived attack upon her. The public, however, sees through this, and, understand{324}ing the motives of action, are all the more loyal to Marie Corelli and her work. Britishers are famed for their love of “fair play,” and the spectacle of several able-bodied men engaged in steadily “hounding” a woman who has made her way without their assistance by the fuel of her own brain and energy, does not appeal to the majority. They see no fun in it, but only an exhibition of cowardice.

While on this subject, it may be mentioned that as soon as certain sections of the Press discovered that Marie Corelli was among the favored few who had received an invitation from the King to be present in the Abbey at the Coronation on August 9th, she was bombarded with letters and telegrams from several newspapers entreating her to write for them her “impressions” of the great ceremony. To all these applications she gave no answer. Her silence on such an occasion rather discounts her supposed “love of notoriety”! Truth to tell, her presence at the Abbey, as a guest of the King, created in some quarters quite a riot of fury.

“We hear,” said one paper, “that Miss Marie Corelli was among the King’s guests in the Abbey! Marvelous! No doubt she wore a gown as gorgeous as her love of self-advertisement could make it!” Poor Miss Corelli! In the very simplest attire{325} of white chiffon and lace, she was one of the most unobtrusively dressed ladies present, as she wore no jewels, and had nothing indeed about her costume that could attract the slightest attention, though she was the “observed of all observers” at the luncheon held in the House of Peers after the Abbey ceremonial, not for her dress, but for her fame.

Another incident may be aptly quoted here. When the King was attacked by his serious illness, the enterprising manager of a newspaper press agency made haste to write to Miss Corelli saying that it was necessary to “prepare for the worst,” and would she therefore write her “impressions” of the King,—which meant, of course, an obituary notice! To which the novelist replied with considerable warmth that she had too much immediate concern for the dangerous condition of her Sovereign, as well as too much honor for him, to “make trade” for the newspapers by writing “obituary notices” of his life before he was dead! By the grace of God, she said, he would be spared to the Throne for many good and happy years to come. Such is the real spirit of the woman whom her more than malicious enemies accuse of “disloyalty” and “desire for advertisement.” It is a satisfaction to give a few truths of her real disposition as opposed to the unfounded falsehoods that are circu{326}lated about her. As a single example of her womanliness and womanly sympathies, it may be mentioned that no one has yet written a tenderer tribute to the virtues of the Queen than Marie Corelli in “The Soul of Queen Alexandra,” published last year in her “Christmas Greeting.”

* * * * * *

Two letters which were addressed to Miss Corelli by eminent preachers who have since passed away are of interest. In explanation of their inclusion it should be mentioned that Dr. Campbell, the successor of Dr. Parker at the City Temple, was exceedingly anxious to persuade Miss Corelli to open a great Nonconformist bazaar in the Dome during the early part of last November. She would have been perfectly willing to do so had there not been a great agitation just then in the press concerning the Education Bill, for she judged that had she performed any special ceremony in any prominent way for the Nonconformist cause, she would again have been singled out for unfair attack.

For several days she hesitated, her whole inclination being to help the charity so urgently and eloquently pleaded for by the Rev. Dr. Campbell. During this time of indecision, however, she was made the subject of a violent discourse from the pulpit of a Nonconformist minister in another part{327} of the country. This appears to have formulated her final resolve, for she wrote to Dr. Campbell, regretting her inability to comply with his request, and enclosing the “sermon” on herself from one of his own persuasion, concerning which she said that under such circumstances her opening of the Bazaar might do the cause more harm than good.

Dr. Campbell, disappointed, but not dismayed, renewed his persuasions and prevailed upon several of his distinguished personal friends to write to the novelist and urge her to alter her decision. Among those who did so were Dr. Joseph Parker and the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, to both of whom the sermon against the novelist had been sent for perusal. Dr. Parker wrote to Miss Corelli as follows:—

The note from the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes ran thus:—

Miss Corelli, however, who was just at that time being made the subject of some particularly venomous attacks concerning her romance, “Temporal Power,” felt compelled to maintain her refusal, though much to her own great disinclination and regret—a regret that we share, for we should like to be able to record that she opened the bazaar after all.

{329}

* * * * * *

The following letter, which deals with a critique on “Temporal Power,” is most interesting from the point of view that it was written by one lady-novelist in defense of another; it possesses all the more weight seeing that Mrs. Rentoul Esler is an entire stranger to Miss Corelli.

{331}

Mrs. Rentoul Esler is herself a writer of distinction and power, and is thus able to express herself with the vigor and lucidity which carry conviction. Her letter is a clear call for that “Fair Play” which Marie Corelli has been demanding for so long.

* * * * * *

That the novelist is well able to retort upon unfriendly critics is shown by a few verses addressed by her to The Quarterly in her “Christmas Greeting” (1901). A lacerating article concerning Miss Corelli and her work had appeared in The Quarterly, and it drew from her the following little epigram:—

TO THE QUARTERLY

WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON

CHAPTER XVIII

AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON

A review of Marie Corelli’s life from the time she left her convent-school to the present day, shapes as a record of intellectual activity rather than one of movement or incident of an anecdotal nature. But although the novelist has never actually gone out of her way to study local color, she has traveled all over Europe; as, during her stepfather’s long illness and the constant strain of anxiety entailed upon her by his condition, it was necessary for her to take at least one month’s rest and change of air in the course of each year. These annual holidays were spent in various parts of Europe—in France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany—and during her travels she was never idle, but always at work recording notes of scenes, seasons, and events. The locale of Combmartin was carefully studied by her before she ever wrote “The Mighty Atom”; and, as the many tourists who have visited the neighborhood since on account of the story can testify, both that village{333} and Clovelly have been faithfully represented. But some of the scenery in her other books, though correct in detail, has never been visited by the novelist at all. “Thelma,” which is a frequent companion-volume to travelers in Norway, has certain scenes depicted which are now shown by local guides as associated with the novel, but the writer herself has never visited Norway.

It may be remembered that in “Anne of Geirstein” Walter Scott gives an exact description of Switzerland; but at the time he wrote the novel he had never seen that country. We have already told how Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a great authority on Persia, called on Miss Corelli shortly after the publication of “Ardath” to inquire personally where she had resided in the East, to be so familiar with Eastern color and surroundings; and he was very much surprised to learn that she had never visited the East at all, nor had any idea of going there. In the same way, though “Vendetta!” is an essentially Neapolitan story, she has never seen Naples. Nor does she “read up” for her local color. When asked to explain how she manages to convey herself in spirit to countries with which she is entirely unacquainted, she replies: “I imagine it must be so, and I find it generally is so.” As she stated{334} in her lecture at Edinburgh on “The Vanishing Gift,” she thinks Imagination is a decaying faculty in the present day. “People seem unable to project themselves into either the past or the future,” she says, “and yet that is the only way to gauge the events of the present.”

Marie Corelli is a fair linguist, having a thorough knowledge of French and Italian. She can read Balzac and Dante as readily as she can read Walter Scott—these three, by the way, being particular favorites of hers.

Marlowe describes a library as containing “infinite riches in a little room.” Though no millionaire in her possession of this kind of wealth, Marie Corelli has gathered about her a set of volumes which is representative without being cumbersome. Her books are not stored in a stately room that is held sacred to them and them alone, but they are here, there, and everywhere, in drawing-room, working-den, and bedroom. She is not a bookish woman—in the reading sense—but she reads discreetly, and has many widely different friends between covers. Nor is she a miser in this respect, for she gives and lends as readily as she buys or borrows.

Many of those interested in the novelist’s movements have wondered what attraction drew Miss{335} Marie Corelli to Stratford-on-Avon so greatly as to persuade her to settle there. The cause is a very simple one. From her earliest childhood she had been encouraged by her adopted father, Dr. Charles Mackay, to entertain a great adoration for the name and the works of Shakespeare, and before she was nine years old she used to recite, at his request, whole passages from the plays of the great Master. When she returned from school, he promised to take her for a “pilgrimage,” as he termed it, to all the places made notable by Shakespeare’s association with them, and to this pilgrimage she had looked forward with the greatest expectation. But it was never to be, for Dr. Mackay’s illness came on and prevented all such plans of pleasure from being fulfilled.

When the aged poet died, and his adopted child, broken-hearted at his loss, and feeling herself utterly alone in the world, knew not how to endure the weary days following immediately on his death, she suddenly bethought herself of the “pilgrimage” she and the dear one she had loved so well had arranged to make together. She determined to carry out the plan, and her friend Miss Vyver (who lost her mother in the same year as that of Dr. Mackay’s death) accompanied her, as did her stepbrother, Mr. Eric Mackay. With sorrow as well as interest,{336} she went over every scene her early teaching had made her familiar with, and was so charmed with Warwickshire, and Stratford in particular, that she was anxious to leave London then at once, and take up her residence in Shakespeare’s town. This was in 1890, when only four of her books had been published.

Her wishes in this respect, however, she subordinated to those of her stepbrother, who preferred London; but from that time she always cherished the memory of Stratford-on-Avon, and hoped she would be able to return thither. Finally, in 1898, when Eric Mackay’s death deprived her of her last remaining link with her childhood, save her ever-faithful friend Miss Vyver, and when she was extremely ill from the effects of long sickness, followed by the nervous shock of Eric’s sudden end, she turned her thoughts to the old town again, and decided to take a furnished house there, to see if the place agreed with her health. She rented “Hall’s Croft” for a few months, then “Avon Croft” (where the “Master-Christian” and “Boy” were finished), and, finding that the soft, mild air did wonders for her, and gradually reestablished her strength, she decided to remain.

The only house available in the town for a permanency was “Mason Croft,” a very old place

The Elizabethan Watch Tower, Mason Croft

{337}

in a sad state of disrepair, its last “restoration” bearing the date of 1745, but, as it was all there was to be had, she risked taking it on trial. Gradually improving and restoring it, she has now brought it back to look something like it must have been in the fifteenth century, when it was quite an important house, requiring a “watch-tower,” wherein a watchman was set to guard the property, and which still stands in the garden, having been transformed into a cozy summer “study” for the novelist. Every month sees some new addition to the charming oak-panelled rooms, which are essentially home-like, and Miss Corelli’s love of flowers, which amounts to a passion, shows itself in the mass of blossom which in winter, equally as in the summer, adorns her “winter-garden,” leading out from the drawing-room.

She is very fond of the home she has made, and fond of the town in which it stands, and her reason for living in Stratford arises simply out of the old cherished sentiment of her childhood’s days when she was taught to consider the little town as the real “Heart of England,” where the greatest of poets had birth, and where her idolized stepfather had promised to “pass many happy days with her.” She takes the keenest interest in all the joys and sorrows of Stratford’s townspeople, and grudges{338} neither trouble nor expense in anything that may bring them pleasure or good.

It is well-known that she thinks it regrettable that the Memorial Theatre should be so little used, owing to the high fees asked for it, and that good actors should find it impossible to risk going down to perform there, unless their expenses are guaranteed, particularly as it is the only “self-endowed” theatre in England! She possesses an interesting letter from the late Charles Flower, who gave the largest share of the money required to build the place, in which it is plainly set forth that his idea of the theatre was to let it at a merely “nominal fee,” in order that the best actors might go to Stratford and play Shakespeare’s works, in the best manner, to the Stratford townspeople, who were only to be asked “popular” prices for admission. But, since that estimable benefactor’s death, things have not been exactly on the footing he thus suggested, and for more than half the year the theatre is empty and useless, which seems a pity. “How much better,” says Miss Corelli, “it would be to see the theatre full, and the public-houses empty!” In which most people will agree with her. But though her opinions are very strong on these and other points concerning some matters at Stratford, she never interferes or puts forward any suggestions{339} that she considers might be resented. The only time she did put her foot down was when Sir Theodore Martin wanted to break into the antique sanctity of Shakespeare’s resting-place in the Church of the Holy Trinity, and in that campaign all the world was with her, as well as Stratford itself. She does all the good she can in the neighborhood; she has quite revivified the Choral Society; she gives short, simple addresses to workmen and schoolchildren; she opens bazaars and sales of work, and by her presence at such functions brings much-needed pecuniary help to institutions which always feel, to a greater or less extent, the pinch of poverty.

The desire to do good to one’s fellow-creatures must animate every writer whose work is not solely the product of intellect. When there is “heart” in a book, there must be a heart that can throb for others in the author of it. Pass the lives of eminent authors before you in rapid mental review, and you will find that most of these authors were constantly performing kindly actions. The great souls of Dickens and Thackeray—of the latter especially—prompted them to do many generous things. It is said that when, as an editor, Thackeray found a letter with a manuscript telling a tale of pathetic circumstances, he would sometimes (when obliged to return the manuscript) scribble{340} out a check on his own account and send it back with the rejected story. Turning to women writers, has not Mrs. Gaskell, in her touching life of Charlotte Brontë, told us how she and the poor Yorkshire clergyman’s daughter paid sundry afternoon calls in the Haworth district, and how welcome was the novelist’s “quiet presence” in many humble homes? Ruskin’s kindness and open-handed charity, as one who visited him has told us, were proverbial in the Brantwood neighborhood. The history of Dr. Johnson’s home life proves amply the tenderness which lay behind his pompous and dictatorial manner. Poor Goldsmith’s generosity amounted almost to a vice, for he would borrow a guinea to give to a friend in need and empty his pockets for a whining mendicant. His philanthropy was wholesale, and quite lacked any sense of proportion. Scott worked himself to death to pay off the debts of the publishing firm in which he was concerned;—turn where you will, you find that the men and women whose work in life has been the making of songs and dramas and novels, have ever been keenly alive to the distress prevalent among their fellow-creatures, and have seldom been guilty of anything approaching selfishness.

It would not be meet in the present work to touch in any but the most passing way on Miss Corell{341}i’s practical philanthropy. But it is only due to her, in a biographical work published mainly to explain what she is—as opposed to what so many malicious paragraphists have declared her to be—to pay a tribute to her consideration for others, and her desire to make the best use of such worldly possessions as the extensive sale of her works has naturally brought her.

Those, however, who accuse her of “self-advertisement” will do well to remember that by such an absolutely false clamor they are depriving many in need from assistance which they might obtain were the novelist certain that her actions would not be misrepresented and misconstrued. For nothing makes her happier than to see others happy. She has helped many strugglers in the literary profession, too, and literary men and women who disparage her may be surprised to hear that she has herself never been known to say an injurious word with regard to any one of her fellow-authors.

It may be asked—what is Marie Corelli’s life-programme? Most writers have a definite object in view—this one to achieve immortality; that one to make money. What is Marie Corelli’s?

Briefly, she writes,—has always written,—to reach the hearts and minds of those thinking people of to-day who are striving to combat the sub{342}tleties of the Agnostic and Atheist; to strengthen their faith in the truth, the reality, the goodness of God and Christianity; the people who have hearts that throb with tenderness, hope, love and sincerity. She would purify society. She would exalt everything that is noble and good. She would destroy the rule of unbelief and insincerity, and raise in its place ideal characters and conditions strongly built upon a foundation of faith and truth. Such is Marie Corelli’s programme.

The interest taken by the novelist in social questions has led her to correspond with workingmen’s clubs in America and the colonies, and not a few papers have been written by her to serve as subjects for discussion in such institutions.

But what of that self of which so much has been heard? It is a personality striking in its simplicity and in its power. Marie Corelli is a woman of women, simple in her tastes, strong in her faiths and her aims, with a heart full of sympathy for others, living a busy life that from its productiveness in the world of literature is a constant influence for good in the hearts and homes of thousands the world over, and, in its private relationships, a source of help, inspiration, and benefit to those with whom she comes in contact.

That she is not merely a lover of Shakespeare,{343} but a Shakespeare enthusiast, is known to all her friends; she would see the day come, if possible, and help to speed its coming, when the whole town of Stratford-on-Avon shall be a Shakespeare memorial. She would exclude steam-launches and all similar misplaced modernities from the peaceful Avon; she would have every new building that is erected in the birthplace of Shakespeare constructed in accordance with the architecture of the Master’s day; she would sacredly and lovingly guard every old building and the form of all Stratford’s old streets; she would have the storehouse, that exists there, of never explored sixteenth-century records, thoroughly ransacked and reported upon, as it should be, by competent and national authorities, and given an adequate place and publicity. We should hear little more then, we venture to assert, of Baconian theories. Miss Corelli would have, moreover (and perhaps the statement may help to further the object), a great development of the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford. She would like it to be the Bayreuth of Literature. She would establish a central Shakespearean Society, with branches all over the world, which would circulate notes of interest among all Shakespeare lovers, and hold annual conferences in connection with the April Shakespearean celebrations.{344}

Now, as to Marie Corelli’s “public.” The great sale of her works proves it to be a vast one, and the fact that her publishers have not found it advisable to issue her in sixpenny form is clear proof that she commands the purses of those who are able to afford six shillings. And although the possession of money is no guarantee of literary taste, yet it stands to reason that the upper and middle classes, taken in the mass, are the chief supporters of literature, and afford the best criterion of worth in their selection of books owing to the fact that their education is superior to that of people who are commonly designated as “poor.” But for the latter there are the free libraries, and the Corelli novels are in as constant demand wherever books are to be obtained for nothing, as at railway bookstalls, where there is not a halfpenny abatement of the full published price. Miss Corelli, then, being read by people of all classes, may certainly be said to have won over a considerable majority of the bookreading portion of the British race.

And it must not be forgotten that she is perhaps the most extensively read of living novelists in Holland, Russia, Germany and Austria, where translations of her books are always to be obtained, or that her “Barabbas” and “A Romance of Two Worlds,” in their Hindustani renderings, com{345}mand a wide following among the native peoples of India. She is extremely popular in Norway and Sweden, and “Vendetta!” in its Italian translation is always the vogue in Italy, as is the French version of “Absinthe” (“Wormwood”) in France. There is no country where her name is unknown, and no European city, where, if she chances to pass through, she is not besieged with visitors and waylaid with offerings of flowers. Were she to visit Australia or New Zealand she would receive an almost “royal” welcome, so great is the enthusiasm in the “New World” for anything that comes from her pen.

Marie Corelli’s acquaintances are many in number, but her circle of friends is a small and carefully selected one. Shakespeare’s “He that is thy friend indeed” can be applied, even in the case of a popular novelist, to but few persons. Where Miss Corelli is, there always is her devoted friend Miss Vyver. Between these two there is perfect understanding and absolute sympathy. It goes without saying that, until the day of his death, Dr. Mackay held chief place in his adopted daughter’s heart, and, though dead, holds it still. The kind old publisher, George Bentley, was, perhaps, owing to his unceasing sympathy and delicate appreciation of her nature, the best friend Marie Corelli ever had outside her own family circle.{346}

But many of the social and artistic world’s great personages are among her most frequent guests and correspondents. The numerous letters she has from famous men and women would almost make a journal of contemporary history. Many eminent persons appear to set considerable value on her opinions, judging from the questions they ask of her, and the urgency with which they press for an answer.

During the South African War, representatives of all ranks at the front kept her informed of all that was going on, batches of letters reaching her from “fighting men” who were personally utter strangers to her, and whose names she had never heard. The gallant Lord Dundonald, who has long been a friend of hers, found time to write her one of the first letters that left his pen after he entered Ladysmith. And this kind of general confidence in her friendship runs all along the line. No one who has known her once seems inclined to forget her, while those who have really read her books become her friends without any personal knowledge of her.

At Stratford this celebrated novelist lives a very quiet life. Of course she cannot escape the attentions of the curious, for Fame has its penalties; the Stratford cabmen, taking visitors round the old town, often pull up opposite Mason Croft to allow

Miss Corelli’s Boatman and Punt

{347}

their fares to gaze upon the residence of the popular writer. Sometimes her admirers, although absolute strangers, venture to call upon her; but there is an astute and diplomatic butler at Mason Croft who takes very good care that his mistress is not unnecessarily disturbed when she is working.

It is this resolute working of hers that—coupled with her extraordinary gifts—has made the name of Marie Corelli one to conjure with. Week in, week out, she toils at her desk for several hours every morning, and it is by such methods of regularity and application that she has succeeded in writing such long, as well as such successful, novels.

The following sketch, contributed to the Manchester Chronicle last summer by the editor, Mr. J. Cuming Walters, affords a very complete picture of Marie Corelli as she is to-day:—

Here, then, let us leave her, with the parting benediction which fell from the lips of Mr. Gladstone: “It is a wonderful gift you have, and I do not think you will abuse it. There is a magnetism in your pen which will influence many. Take care always to do your best. As a woman, you are pretty and good; as a writer, be brave and true. God bless you, my dear child! Be brave! You’ve got a great future before you. Don’t lose heart on the way!”

THE END