The Weltanschauung of Miss Marie Corelli
“By my faith I would as soon listen to the gabbling of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddling, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid garrulity, such ranting verbosity.”
“Clearness of thought, brilliancy of style, beauty of diction, all these were hers united to consummate ease of expression and artistic skill.”
The above quotations, extracted from Ardath and from the autobiographical if unofficial description of Mavis Clair in The Sorrows of Satan, are well adapted to express the two extreme views concerning the merits and the demerits of the lady who, rightly or wrongly, certainly occupies the most conspicuous position among our English women-novelists. It is not surprising that such divergent views should be provoked by a character who, however simple she may be in her own personal psychology, is from the literary standpoint essentially complex.
In The Romance of Two Worlds, for instance, the first fruits of her literary genius, the novelist’s theory of the “Soul Germ” and her conception of the “Electric Principle of Christianity” running through the whole cosmology would seem unmistakably to foreshadow the Bergsonian theory of the élan de vie, while the subtly delineated character of the twentieth-century Chaldæan magician, Heliobas, “who never promises to effect a cure unless he sees that the person who comes to be cured has a certain connection with himself,” bears a distinct analogy to the cabalistic mysticism of Mr. Aleister Crowley. On the other hand, that grim tragedy entitled Vendetta is in almost equal degrees reminiscent of the stark inexorableness of Æschylus, and of the human, all-too-human, humanity of Mr. Walter Melville. In Ardathy that “tale of beauty, of horror, and of extraordinary amours” (if we may quote from the authorised biography of our novelist), a subject-matter that might well have emanated from the pen of a Pierre Louys, is handled with the unimpeachable correctness of a Samuel Smiles. So, too, the great Tendenzroman “Wormwood” is a dexterous combination of the macabre phantasy of Mr. Ranger Gull and the ethical “uplift” of Mr. Guy Thorne. She is, moreover, an authoress who is keenly alive to the social problems of the day, treating in Boy and The Mighty Atom of the Wedekindian problem of the influence of free-thought on the mind of puberty (though it must be confessed that her solution of that exceedingly thorny problem is by no means identical with that of the slightly cynical author of Spring’s Awakening), and handling in The Murder of Delicia the almost equally delicate subject of the modern maquereau.
While, too, Miss Corelli has enriched the literature of Anti-Semitism with such novel and crushing phrases as “Jew-speculator,” “Jew-proprietor of a stock-jobbing newspaper,” “the fat Jew-spider of several newspaper webs,” her denunciation of certain phases of Continental Christianity as “the sickening and barbarous superstition everywhere offered as the representation of sublime Deity” indicates some cleavage between her own Protestant theology and that rigid Ultramontanism which would appear nowadays to be one of the essential qualifications for the really full-fledged Anti-Semite. And if at times with the thyrsus of her ecstatic style she is frequently the Juvenalian flagellant of that “brilliant fashionable dress-loving crowd of women who spend most of their time in caring for their complexions and counting their lovers,” her features exhibit not so much the sadic grin of the mænad as the seraphic loving-kindness of some mediæval saint dumped down by a caprice of a fantastic Providence amid all the howling welter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While too such phrases as “retrospective and introspective repentance” show an almost Jamesian preciosity in the fine-drawn distinction between the repentance for the sins that have been already committed in the past and for those which are about to be committed in the future, and between the repentance which takes place within the four corners of the human soul, and that which occurs within some other sphere of psychological activity, our lady’s entire lack, generally speaking, of all the affectations of our ultra-modern subtlety are more reminiscent of the downright horse-sense of President Roosevelt or the transparent but by no means necessarily shallow simplicity of such writers as Mrs. L. T. Meade, Mrs. Annie Swan, Mr. Charles Garvice, and Mr. William Le Queux.
It is then in view of the fundamentally complex problem constituted by Miss Corelli that, disregarding alike the convention of her admirers that she is above criticism, and the convention of her detractors that she is beneath it, we propose to examine our authoress with the maximum of seriousness at our command, and to await with sanguine interest the result of what from the point of view at any rate of the critic is so revolutionary a procedure. The contents of at any rate the majority of the volumes of Miss Corelli being necessarily familiar to all readers of culture, we propose to confine our analysis to a survey of the cardinal points in our lady’s Weltanschauung. Strange though it may seem to “the fashionable atheism of the day” (if we may quote one of our authoress’s favourite and most persistent phrases), it is the religious instinct which supplies the key of the Corellian psychology. In this connection it is interesting to remember parenthetically the pretty anecdote of how when the future novelist, then quite a little girl, was rejoicing in the sobriquet of “The Rosebud,” she would always have the nocturnal consciousness that angels were present in her bedroom, and that Dr. Mackay, the mid-Victorian littérateur who had adopted the child at the early age of three months, is reported to have made the gentle but not inapposite remark, “Never mind, Dearie! It is there, you may be sure, and if you behave just as if you saw it, you will certainly see it some day.”
It was perhaps a few years later that the little girl dreamt of founding a new religious order, and that an education at a French convent left on her virgin soul that white cachet which even the corruptness of Edwardian society, “when the infidelity of wives is most unhappily becoming common—far too common for the peace and good repute of society,” has signally failed to in any way pollute (if as a mere matter of grammatical conviviality we may venture to split an infinitive with our distinguished consœur). When, however, Miss Corelli attained the ripeness of complete womanhood, the voice of the angels would appear to have whispered in her ear the great injunction “to leave the world a little better than she found it,” and the sacred odour of her exceedingly important mission is to be detected practically in every work that has issued from her pen. Holding, like Torquemada, Mr. Torrie, Attila, Loyola, and the late Dr. Elijah Dowie and many other great religious enthusiasts of all epochs, that conversion is the most efficient method of spiritual improvement, she concentrates her fire with especial vehemence on the “women-atheists, who had voluntarily crushed out the sweetness of the sex within them, the unnatural product of an unnatural age,” who have “as haughty a scorn of Christ and His teaching as any unbelieving Jew,” and on “the common boor who, reading his penny Radical paper, thinks he can dispense with God and talks of the carpenter’s son of Judæa with the same easy flippancy and scant reverence as his companion in sin.”
Thus it comes that Miss Corelli, with her full share of that intolerance which is the classical concomitant of all true religion, would close the harbour of England to the exiled Jesuits of France, and exclude the Jews from their prominent position in contemporary society and finance. So far from shedding a single tear over the tragic death of Zola, she gloats with righteous gusto over his asphyxiation, which she ascribes to a specific piece of theological revengefulness on the part of an orthodox and insulted Providence. At times her strictures come nearer home, and more frequently perhaps than any other woman-novelist of the day does she castigate those Episcopalian clergymen who indulge in the mental and physical enjoyment of illicit sex in wilful disregard of the most fundamental elements of their professional etiquette, “the vicious and worldly clerical bon-vivants... talking society scandal with as much easy glibness as any dissolute lay decadent that ever cozened another man’s wife away from honour in the tricky disguise of a soul.” In Thelma, for instance, the lascivious minister of Christ intent on compassing the almost compulsory seduction of the prettiest of his own parishioners, while his “conscience was enveloped in a moral leather casing of hypocrisy and arrogance,” is a piece of characterisation which in its own particular line of vice forms a fitting analogue to the monstrous clergyman in Mrs. Voynich’s Jack Raymond.
So far, moreover, as the nuances of dogma are concerned our teacher takes the delicate and middle course, being as deeply shocked by the ritualistic excesses of the High Church as by what Mr. G. K. Chesterton has epigrammatically described as the “tea-leaves of Nonconformity.” In fact her theology may perhaps be crystallised in the following formula, which however difficult in actual practice is from the stylistic standpoint of perfect simplicity:
“Why should we be followers of Luther, Wesley, or any other human teacher or preacher when all that is necessary is that we should be followers of Christ?”
But Miss Corelli is no credulous bigot. She is as sceptical of the historical trustworthiness of part of the initial chapters of Genesis as Colonel Ingersoll, Mr. G. W. Foote, or Mr. Horatio Bottomley. Let us quote from Free Opinions the following eloquent parenthesis: “A legend, which, like that of the Tree of Good and Evil itself requires stronger confirmation than history as yet witnesseth, which, by the way, was evidently invented by man himself for his own convenience.”
Let us, however, now turn from Miss Corelli’s solitary excursion into the sphere of the Higher Criticism to some brief survey of her more positive and constructive philosophy.
The Corellian cosmology is most fully expounded in The Romance of Two Worlds. This novel is the story of a young girl who, sick in body and mind, visits the Continent. She makes the acquaintance of a Chaldsean mage of magnetic personality called Heliobas. Heliobas, realising at the first sight of the young girl “that her state of health precludes her from the enjoyment of life natural to her sex and age,” gives her to drink of some rare and special potion with the result that her soul, dissociated for the time being from her body, takes a flying trip through space and purgatory, and the lady awakens to a more complete spiritual harmony. In this book the authoress’s individual theories of the Soul Germ and the Electric Circle are expressed in voluminous digressions and dialogues whose inexhaustible opulence might well be called a Platonic Dialectic brought up to the date of nineteenth-century science.
This fusion of science and mysticism, which at first sight seem as far apart as the poles or the sexes, into a harmonious if heterogeneous unity, can also be traced in the Corellian physiology. Thus in Thelma we meet the unfortunate creature Sigurd, “an infant abortion, the evil fruit of an evil deed,” destined to so tragic and well-described a death, while in Temporal Power we are confronted with the strange character of Paul Zouche, “the human eccentricity, the result of an amour between a fiend and an angel.”
In the sphere of ethics, Miss Corelli is careful to avoid that misplaced originality which is so often the gaudy masquerade for a pallid and degenerate licentiousness. Our authoress finds sufficient both for her own personal requirements and the spiritual health of her reader in those good old maxims enshrined in the Bible, the Family Herald, and the copy-books of all self-respecting seminaries. Good is Good, she says, and Right is Right. We may note also the Corellian principle of the inevitable triumph of the hero or heroine and the inevitable damnation of the villain or villainess, a principle which bears a distinct affinity to the Jewish and Christian doctrines of Recompense, the Æschylean doctrine of νέηεσις, and the dramaturgy of the Transpontine Theatre. It may perhaps be urged by the ultra-modern critic that novels of the stamp of Anne Veronica, The New Machiavelli, or Esther Waters, where sin emerges from its slough, sometimes in triumph, yet always in dignity and comfort, have a closer correspondence with the actual facts of our modern civilisation. But our authoress would no doubt confidently retort that it is the pious duty of the moral missionary to censor ruthlessly such pernicious intelligence, and that she is proud to prefer the higher if not always accepted truths of ethics to the lower and degrading truths of a sordid reality.
This sublime principle of Divine Justice is perhaps best exemplified in Holy Orders. In this extraordinary book, Jacqueline, the local prostitute of a picturesque English village, marries a man named Nordheim, “one of the smartest Jew-millionaires that ever played with the money-markets of the world.” But the wages of sin, though for a few years a motor car and a Rockefellerian income, turn out in the long run to be death in a balloon in the illicit company of an aristocratic drunkard. For sheer psychology and for sheer English the following portrayal of the villain which represents the cream of two or three separate passages merits quotation.
“Claude Ferrers? Why, he is a famous aeronaut; a man who spends fabulous sums of money in the construction of balloons and aeroplanes and airships. He is the owner of a gorgeous steerable balloon in which all the pretty ‘smart’ women take trips with him for change of air. He is an atheist, a degenerate, and—one of the most popular ‘Souls’ in decadent English society—just to have a look at the fat smooth-faced sensualist and voluptuary whose reputation for shameless vice makes him the pride and joy of Upper-Ten Jezebels will help you along like a gale of wind. Claude Ferrers is a modern Heliogabalus in his very modern way, and by dint of learning a few salacious witticisms out of Molière and Baudelaire he almost persuades people to think him a wit and a poet.”
In view, no doubt, of the high moral tendency of most of the comedies of Molière, who in Tartuffe, for instance, satirises hypocrisy almost as effectively, if with a less palpable directness than does Miss Corelli herself, and in view of the essentially religious or at any rate mystical spirit that animates so many of the poems of the author of Les Fleurs de Mai, it must be reluctantly confessed that Miss Corelli is more impressive as a moralist and as a psychologist than as a woman of letters and an expert in French literature. It is possible, however, that this slight error may be explained by the fact that her acquaintance with these authors may only be second-hand, that she was involuntarily misled by the rhyme in the two names, and that her unimpeachable principles have debarred her from even hearing the names of such refined exponents of the Gallic spirit as M. Abel Hermant and M. Octave Mirbeau.
It is, of course, highly characteristic of our authoress’s simplicity of vision that all her characters are either very, very, very good or very, very, very bad. Realising that complexity of temperament is but too frequently the mere euphemism for dissoluteness of life, she is content that her young heroes should be immaculate with all the immaculacy of the jeune premier, that her middle-aged heroes should be those strong silent men who have contributed so largely to make England what she is, and that her heroines should be all equally typical and equally sweet flowers of our English womanhood. Her villains invariably smile with all the depraved and diabolical cynicism of Drury Lane, and her villainesses are branded as degenerate super-women of intrigue and lust. And if the authoress by thus delineating her characters in the two primary colours of black and white thus denies herself the intellectual pleasure of minutely analysing some ultra-modern soul torn a myriad ways by unnumbered and unmentionable emotions, she has the consolation that she certainly points her moral with a more obvious precision.
The only character who in any way suffers from a complex temperament is Maryllia, the sweet-named heroine of God’s Good Man. By nature as white and pure a specimen of Anglo-Saxon girlhood as ever spent to some good moral purpose her fragrance in the pages of the prettiest novelette, Maryllia is so corrupted by the fashionable whirl of smart society, “where without mincing matters it can be fairly stated that the aristocratic Jezebel is the fashionable woman of the hour, while the men vie with one another as to who shall best screen her from their amours with themselves,” that she becomes addicted to the vice of smoking. God’s Good Man, however, in the person of that high-minded clergyman the Rev. John Walden, has the courage to rebuke her at a dinner-party with an incivility which is, fortunately, more than counterbalanced by the fundamental kindness of his intention:
“I have always been under the impression that English ladies never smoke.”
Maryllia, it is true, at first bridles at this essentially well-meant reprimand, only, however, to return finally repentant and converted to her prospective husband.
It is, consequently, not surprising to find that Miss Corelli’s attitude to modern problems is one of a rugged and uncompromising conservatism. Thus she disapproves not merely of smoking but also of the bridge-party and the motor-car and of the décolleté dress which she so severely satirises in the phrase, “the brief shoulder-strap called by courtesy a sleeve which keeps her ladyship’s bodice in place.”
Consistently enough, also, in the sphere of philosophy she chaffs the agnostic dilettantism of Mr. Balfour with the most delicate of badinage: “His study of these volumes is almost as profound as that of Mr. Balfour must have been when writing The Foundations of Belief,” and flicks with a deadly though gentle irony the “sort of cliquey reputation and public failure attending a certain novel entitled Marius the Epicurean.”
True Englishwoman that she is, Miss Corelli yields to none in her reverence for established institutions, and does not shrink from attacking boldly the complex questions of contemporary royal and political life. Thus, in the 600-page romance, Temporal Power, apparently disapproving of that democratic shuffling of the classes which is so marked a feature of our ultra-modern age, she treats with exquisite taste of the problems of the sinister Semitic capitalist, the intriguing politician who was once a manufacturer, and of the morganatic marriage of a sailor-prince.
For our authoress has at bottom a true respect for the social order of England. What though the monarch masquerade as an anarchist in Temporal Power and sign his name in the red letters of a woman’s blood? Does not the repeated insistence on the title “Sir Philip,” in referring to the virile and delectable hero of Thelma, show that it is less society per se than the abuses and perversions of society which constitute the target of the Corellian invective? Does not again the following passage show the bias of a soul which inclines with the sincerest sympathy to that innate munificence which forms the chief petal in the “fine flower” of the English gentry: “They got their overcoats from the officious Briggs, tipped him handsomely, and departed arm in arm?” Does not similarly such a phrase as “a dignified grande dame clad in richest black silk” show that most generous of loyalties which will not allow the true majesty of the aristocracy to be imperilled through the stinting of an extra adjective or the lack of a superlatively appropriate dress.
Unfortunately many passages in Miss Corelli’s novels may occasion her admirers some heart-searchings as to the reliability of her social psychology. In such a sentence, for instance, as “Why does an English earl marry a music-hall singer? Because he has seen her in tights,” it would appear that the real heart of the matter is tactfully adumbrated rather than specifically described. When again that lecherous Jew, David Jost, the chief villain in Temporal Power, is sitting at home in his study a few minutes before midnight, after he had already “supped in private with two or three painted heroines of the foot-lights,” does not our authoress attribute to the horrible Hebrew a capacity for concentrating an amount of pleasure into a brief period, more consistent with the powers of some hustling and record-breaking American than with the more protracted languors of the Oriental? Similarly, when she writes that “the public are getting sick of having the discarded mistresses of wealthy Semites put forward for their delectation in ‘leading’ histrionic parts,” Miss Corelli is either inverting the more natural and logical order of events, or is attributing to such isolated members of the Jewish race as happen to be licentious a retrospective generosity in respect of past kindness which however gratifying to their co-religionists seems somewhat inconsistent with the general trend of her attitude.
The Corellian dialogue also frequently gives the psychologist food for thought. “O God” (cried impetuously the heroine of Thelma after she had listened virtuously to the illicit overtures of the villain, a “lascivious dandy and disciple of no creed and self-worship”), a magnificent glory of disdain flashing in her jewel-like eyes, “what thing is this that calls itself a man—this thief of honour—this pretended friend of me, the wife of the noblest gentleman in the land!”
Or take again so characteristic a specimen as the following:
“You will be made the subject for the coarse jests of witticisms at your expense—your dearest friends will tear your name to shreds—the newspapers will reek of your doings, and honest housemaids reading of your fall from your high estate will thank God that their souls and bodies are more clean than yours.”
If, however, Miss Corelli disdains the more gramophonic accuracy of Mrs. Humphry Ward, she is none the less perfectly entitled to answer that her characters like those of Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, being something more than mere mechanical and objective copies of humanity, subserve the far higher function of being the mouthpieces of the subjective philosophy of their creator.
Our last quotation, however, brings us to the burning question of Miss Corelli’s attitude towards the sexual problem. In this connection it will not be without its interest to draw some slight analogy between Miss Corelli and her equally distinguished if not equally popular sister-in-letters, Mrs. Elinor Glyn.
We would remark in the first place that the sexual problem clutches Miss Corelli hotly in its drastic grip. Her religious temperament may no doubt occasion a profound and genuine abhorrence for physical sin, but as was the case with the even more religious Tolstoi, or that strangely interesting character Elfrida (the ethical sexual reformer in Herr Frank Wedekind’s Totentanz), her abhorrence merely supplies an added vehemence to the unflinching nature of her treatment and the drastic audacities of her missionary work, while the proud consciousness of her own personal virtue may conceivably entitle her to find at once a duty and a recompense in the sanguinary flagellation of her less immaculate sisters. Though, moreover, a moral teacher, Miss Corelli is also a psychologist, and her aphorism “Men never fall in love with a woman’s mind, only with her body,” can be well compared for its bold but delicate cynicism with Mrs. Glyn’s maxim, “Love is a purely physical emotion.”
But Miss Corelli with all her unimpeachable correctness is by no means blind to the temperamental significance of a grande passion, though of course she does not specialise on this subject to the same extent as her distinguished colleague. It is none the less instructive to compare Miss Corelli’s saving grace of a grande passion, “the one of those faithful passions which sometimes make the greatness of both man and woman concerned and adorn the pages of history with the brilliancy of deathless romance,” with the following fine passage from Mrs. Glyn in which she admonishes those philistine readers “who have no eye to see God’s world with the stars in it and to whom Three Weeks will be but the sensual record of a passion” with a dignified apologia for the life of her heroine—“Now some of you who read will think her death was just, in that she was not a moral woman, but others will hold with Paul that she was the noblest lady who ever wore a crown.”
The latter quotation, however, brings us to an important distinction in the sexual ethics of our two novelists. For while Miss Corelli on the one hand is no respecter of persons and would be prepared to treat an “Upper-Ten Jezebel” or a “soiled dove of the town” (if we may borrow two typically Corellian phrases) with scrupulous impartiality according to their respective deserts, the novels of Mrs. Elinor Glyn constitute a valuable sexual hierarchy by which the degree of license to be enjoyed and condoned is in direct proportion to the social rank of the lady or her paramour. Thus the continued adultery on the part of the Princess throughout a period of three weeks in the novel of that name is freed from any taint of offensiveness or indignity by the exalted rank of that royal personage who is decorated in this one book with several sets of stars. The ordinary untitled gentlewoman, however (if we except Agnes the lady in Elizabeth’s Visits to America, who “had an affair with her chauffeur,” and the Mildred in Beyond the Rocks, whose lovers, however, were “so well chosen and so thoroughly of the right sort”), though she may frequently infringe the spirit of the seventh commandment, is usually far too prudent to break the letter. Thus the romantic young wife in Beyond the Rocks, in spite of the assiduous attentions of an extremely fascinating peer, “an ordinary Englishman of the world who had lived and loved and seen many lands,” succeeds by the most heroic self-control in preserving the technical chastity of a Prévostian demi-vierge. Note, however, by way of contrast the extremely wide margin which is allowed to the hale and energetic duchess: “Her path was strewn with lovers and protected by a proud and complacent husband who had realised early he never would be master of the situation and had preferred peace to open scandal. She was a woman of sixty and, report said, still had her lapses.”
But the paramount importance of social etiquette in sexual relationship is most effectively illustrated in His Hour. This novel deals with the mutual physical passion between a barbaric and dissolute Russian prince and a typical and refined modern Englishwoman. Matters reach a crisis when the prince lures the lady by night to the sinister solitude of a deserted hut. “His splendid eyes blazed with the passion of a wild beast”; the lady faints, and when she wakes up in the morning of course assumes that she has been ravished. Not unnaturally she is quite upset that she should have been the victim of such insulting behaviour, “she, a lady, a proud English lady.” The commands of society, however, are inexorable in such matters and she consequently writes proposing marriage with dignified irony to that bestial nobleman, who had, according to her own theory, put her own status as a gentlewoman into such delicate jeopardy: “I consent—I have no choice—I consent. Yours truly, Tamara Lorane.”
So far as mere erotic description and dialogue is concerned, there is very little to choose between our authoresses. The following passages are fair examples of Mrs. Glyn’s conception of romantic love-making:
“Then, sweet Paul, I shall teach you many things, and
among them I shall teach you how to LIVE.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Beloved, beloved,” he cried, “let us waste no more
precious moments. I want you, I want you, my sweet.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“My darling one,” the lady whispered in his ear, as she
lay in his arms on the couch of roses, crushed deep and
half-buried in their velvet leaves, “this is our soul’s
wedding, in life and in death they can never part us more.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
If, however, we would make any distinction between the respective techniques of the two ladies, we would say that while Mrs. Glyn tends to exhibit the practical modernity of Mayfair or Continental society, Miss Corelli is at times more exotic and luxuriant, at times more explicit and direct, for blunt, plain woman that she is, she never even once dabbles in those mystic messages of the stars which Mrs. Glyn interprets with so facile and consummate a felicity. We search in vain, for instance, in the works of Mrs. Elinor Glyn for a passage like the following, which but for the pendent nominative might quite well have come out of the Aphrodite of M. Pierre Louys or the Mafarka le Futuriste of M. Marinetti:
“This done, they rose and began to undo the fastenings of her golden domino-like garment; but either they were too slow, or the fair priestess was impatient, for she suddenly shook herself free of their hands, and loosening the gorgeous mantle herself from its jewelled clasps it fell slowly from her symmetrical form on the perfumed floor with a rustle as of fallen leaves.”
Again, the delicious sachets of Mrs. Elinor Glyn’s diction never somehow exhale such whiffs of unadulterated English as the following:
“With the seduction of your nude limbs and lying eyes you make fools, cowards, and beasts of men.”
We may, perhaps, conclude this portion of our comparative analysis by suggesting for the erotic crest of Mrs. Elinor Glyn a Debrett and an Almanach de Gotha enveloped in a silk and scented “nightie”; for that of Miss Marie Corelli, a volume of the Self-and-Sex series lying open between a doffed domino and a crinoline.
It is also noticeable that while Miss Corelli, with whatever detail she may feel it her duty to portray their erotic sins, is always primarily concerned with her characters’ ethical significance for good or for evil, Mrs. Glyn devotes herself more specifically to their physical qualifications. Miss Corelli’s typical hero, for instance, is the Rev. John Walden, that middle-aged God’s Good Man whose ripe dignity of manhood is subordinated to the description of his more spiritual qualities. Mrs. Glyn’s typical hero is the Paul of Three Weeks, “a splendid young English animal of the best class.”
We thus find that the space which Mrs. Elinor Glyn will devote to telling us that her heroine’s skin “seemed good to eat,” or that her hero had “fine lines” and “velvet eyelids,” will be devoted by Miss Corelli to the description of the corresponding attributes of her hero or heroine’s soul. Miss Corelli, however, is by no means obtuse to the baleful effect on the spiritual life exercised by physical blandishments. She will thus explain the precocious corruption by senile perversity of a young girl in a remarkable passage whose stark realism certainly succeeds in portraying fully an important ethical and physiological truth:
“Old roués smelling of wine and tobacco were eager to take me on their knees and pinch my soft flesh;—they would press my innocent lips with their withered ones—withered and contaminated by the kisses of cocottes and soiled doves of the town.”
As showing the comprehensive ultra-modernity of Miss Corelli’s outlook on the sexual question, we would refer finally to her frequent allusions to “the unnatural and strutting embryos of a new sex which will be neither male nor female.” Though, however, she is in one of her maxims apparently of opinion that “true beauty is sexless,” we would infer from the following passages that she does not go so far as Péladan in ascribing an important ethical and sociological significance to this new type:
“Men’s hearts are not enthralled or captured by a something appearing to be neither man nor woman. And there are a great many of these Somethings about just now.... Beauty remains intrinsically where it was first born and first admitted into the annals of Art and Literature. Its home is still in the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sang.”
Returning, however, from Lesbos to Stratford-on-Avon, let us make some brief survey of Miss Corelli’s style. To condense into a few phrases so delicate and baffling a phenomenon is difficult. At one moment her weighty nouns, guarded not infrequently by a triple escort of epithets, possess the pomp and luxuriance of the true Asiatic style, at another the brisk horsiness of her diction has all the spontaneous force of English as it is actually spoken. At times such passages as “A moisture as of tears glistened on the silky fringe of his eyelids—his lips quivered—he had the look of a Narcissus regretfully bewailing his own perishable loveliness. On a swift impulse of affection Theos threw one arm round his neck in the fashion of a confiding schoolboy walking with his favourite companion.... Sah-lûma looked up with a pleased yet wondering glance. ‘Thou hast a silvery and persuasive tongue,’ he said gently,” are reminiscent of the mellifluous cadences of Dorian Gray. Anon she will indulge in a vein of frank but militant simplicity that bears a greater resemblance to the style of Mr. Robert Blatchford, the celebrated atheist:
“A small private dinner-party at which the company are some six or eight persons at most is sometimes (though not by any means always) quite a pleasant affair; but a ‘big’ dinner in the ‘big’ sense of the word is generally the most painful and dismal of functions except to those for whom silent gorging and after-repletion are the essence of all mental and physical joys. I remember —and of a truth it would be impossible to forget—one of those dinners which took place one season at a very ‘swagger’ house—the house of a member of the old British nobility, whose ancestors and titles always excite a gentle flow of saliva in the mouths of snobs.”
We would incidentally mention that Miss Corelli is above all a purist in her diction, and that she has registered her emphatic protest against the use of the expression “Little Mary,” “a phrase which, although invented by Mr. J. M. Barrie, is not without considerable vulgarity and offence.” Though, moreover, her language is on the whole essentially English, Miss Corelli by no means disdains the use of classical figures. For instance in the phrase “after-repletion” from our last quotation we meet an interesting survival of the Greek use of a preposition to qualify a noun. The occasional anacoluthon also (or lack of orthodox syntax) which is found in her works points to a by no means unprofitable study of Thucydides, unless indeed it is simply in order to emphasize her lack of any literary snobbery that our authoress so frequently declines to curtsey to the affected rigidities of pedantic grammar. Her frequent use, again, of compound words such as “socially-popular,” “brilliantly-appointed,” “Jew-spider” betrays the distinct influence of the Teutonic idiom, while such a phrase as “braced with the golden shield of Courage” shows what unique results can be obtained by a metaphor simultaneously fashioned out of the defensive article of war of the ancient Spartan and the preservative article of attire of the modern European.
Finally, what is the real secret of Miss Corelli’s success? It is that she is sincere and that she means well. Whether her invective rises to the lofty scorn of an Isaiah, a Mrs. Ormiston Chant, or a Juvenal, or whether the smooth current of her hate meanders along with all the tepid benevolence of a grandmotherly facetiousness, it is impossible to doubt her portentous sincerity. It is this quality which distinguishes her most effectively from the merely journalistic authors of the “big” serials. These ladies and gentlemen, it is true, effect their object and succeed in presenting the outlook on life of the typical man or woman in the typical street or alley. But their most brilliant productions but produce the effect of an intellectual tour de force, as though achieved in despite of the natural bias of their temperaments, by dint of a diligent study of the well-known Manual of Serialese. Miss Marie Corelli needs no such manual. Her Weltanschauung, broad, plain, simple, touched at once with a high consciousness of her ethical mission and a ruthless observation for all the sins and follies of the age, is the authentic and spontaneous outcome of her own unique psychology.