"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.