“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 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 de Charmilles was not a shy girl, but by this I do not
mean it to be in the least imagined that she was bold. On the
contrary, she had merely that quick brightness and _esprit_ which
is the happy heritage of so many Frenchwomen, none of whom think it
necessary to practice or assume the chilly touch-me-not diffidence
and unbecoming constraint which make the young English “mees” such
a tame and tiresome companion to men of sense and humor. She was
soon perfectly at her ease with me, and became prettily garrulous
and confidential, telling me stories of her life at Lausanne,
describing the loveliness of the scenery on Lake Leman, and drawing
word-portraits of her teachers and schoolmates with a facile
directness and point that brought them at once before the mind’s
eye as though they were actually present.”
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:
“Men never fall in love at first with a woman’s mind; only with her
body. They may learn to admire the mind afterwards, if it prove
worth admiration, but it is always a secondary thing. This may be
called a rough truth, but it is true, for all that. Who marries a
woman of intellect by choice? No one; and if some unhappy man does
it by accident, he generally regrets it. A stupid beauty is the
most comfortable sort of housekeeper going, believe me. She will be
strict with the children, scold the servants, and make herself look
as ornamental as she can, till age and fat render ornament
superfluous. But a woman of genius, with that strange subtle
attraction about her which is yet not actual beauty,--she is the
person to be avoided if you would have peace; if you would escape
reproach; if you would elude the fixed and melancholy watchfulness
of a pair of eyes haunting you in the night.”
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 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:
“A remarkably handsome fellow, that Guidèl!” he said. “Dangerously
so, for a priest! It is fortunate that his lady penitents will not
be able to see him very distinctly through the confessional
gratings, else who knows what might happen! He has a wonderful gift
of eloquence too. Dost thou like him, Gaston?”
“No!” I replied frankly, and at once, “I cannot say I do!”
My father looked surprised.
“But why?”
“Impossible to tell, _mon père_. He is fascinating, he is
agreeable, he is brilliant; but there is something in him that I
mistrust!”
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, writing the history of those days long
afterwards, Beauvais acknowledges that he was mistaken in changing his
attitude towards Guidèl:
“Though first impressions are sometimes erroneous, I believe there
is a balance in favor of their correctness. If a singular antipathy
seizes you for a particular person at first sight, no matter how
foolish it may seem, you may be almost sure that there is something
in your two natures that is destined to remain in constant
opposition. You may conquer it for a time; it may even change, as
it did in my case, to profound affection; but, sooner or later, it
will spring up again, with tenfold strength and deadliness; the
reason of your first aversion will be made painfully manifest, and
the end of it all will be doubly bitter because of the love that
for a brief while sweetened it. I say I loved Silvion Guidèl!--and
in proportion to the sincerity of that love, I afterwards measured
the intensity of my hate!”
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
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 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:
“Gaston, you have behaved like a villain! I would not have believed
that my son could have been capable of such a coward’s vengeance!”
I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders.
“You are excited, _mon père_! What have I done save speak the
truth, and, as the brave English say, shame the devil?”
“The truth--the truth!” said my father passionately. “Is it the
truth? and if it is, could it not have been told in a less brutal
fashion? You have acted like a fiend!--not like a man! If Silvion
Guidèl be a vile seducer, and that poor child Pauline his
credulous, ruined victim, could you not have dealt with _him_ and
have spared _her_? God! I would as soon wring the neck of a bird
that trusted me, as add any extra weight to the sorrows of an
already broken-hearted woman!”
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 pavement 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 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”:
“_Viens sur ton aile, Ange fidèle_
_Prendre mon cœur!_
_C’est le plus ardent de mes vœux;--_
_Près de Marie_
_Place-moi bientôt dans les cieux!_
_O guide aimable, sois favorable_
_A mon désir_
_Et viens finir_
_Ma triste vie_
_Avec Marie!"_
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:
“An afternoon came when I saw the stretcher carried in from the
river’s bank with more than usual pity and reverence,--and I,
pressing in with the rest of the morbid spectators, saw the fair,
soft, white body of the woman I had loved and hated and maddened
and driven to her death, laid out on the dull hard slab of stone
like a beautiful figure of frozen snow. The river had used her
tenderly--poor little Pauline!--it had caressed her gently and had
not disfigured her delicate limbs or spoilt her pretty face;--she
looked so wise, so sweet and calm, that I fancied the cold and
muddy Seine must have warmed and brightened to the touch of her
drowned beauty!
“Yes!--the river had fondled her!--had stroked her cheeks and left
them pale and pure,--had kissed her lips and closed them in a
childlike, happy smile,--had swept all her soft hair back from the
smooth white brow just to show how prettily the blue veins were
penciled under the soft transparent skin,--had closed the gentle
eyes and deftly pointed the long dark lashes in a downward sleepy
fringe,--and had made of one little dead girl so wondrous and
piteous a picture, that otherwise hard-hearted women sobbed at
sight of it, and strong men turned away with hushed footsteps and
moistened eyes.”
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:
“You must give it up,” he said decisively, “at once,--and forever.
It is a detestable habit,--a horrible craze of the Parisians, who
are positively deteriorating in blood and brain by reason of their
passion for this poison. What the next generation will be, I dread
to think! I know it is a difficult business to break off anything
to which the system has grown accustomed,--but you are still a
young man, and you cannot be too strongly warned against the danger
of continuing in your present course of life. Moral force is
necessary,--and you must exert it. I have a large medical practice,
and cases like yours are alarmingly common, and as much on the
increase as morphinomania amongst women; but I tell you frankly, no
medicine can do good where the patient refuses to employ his own
power of resistance. I must ask you, therefore, for your own sake,
to bring all your will to bear on the effort to overcome this fatal
habit of yours, as a matter of duty and conscience.”
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
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:
“Paris, steeped in vice and drowned in luxury, feeds her brain on
such loathsome literature as might make even coarse-mouthed
Rabelais and Swift recoil. Day after day, night after night, the
absinthe-drinkers crowd the _cafés_, and swill the pernicious drug
that of all accursed spirits ever brewed to make of man a beast,
does most swiftly fly to the seat of reason to there attack and
dethrone it;--and yet, the rulers do nothing to check the spreading
evil,--the world looks on, purblind as ever and selfishly
indifferent,--and the hateful cancer eats on into the breast of
France, bringing death closer every day!”
“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.
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 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:
“And so it happens that when wielders of the pen essay to tell us
of wars; of shipwrecks, of hairbreadth escapes from danger, of love
and politics and society, we read their pages with merely
transitory pleasure and frequent indifference, but when they touch
upon subjects beyond earthly experience--when they attempt, however
feebly, to lift our inspirations to the possibilities of the
Unseen, then we give them our eager attention and almost passionate
interest.”
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
predominate. 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 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.
“_I have kept one human creature alive and in perfect health for
six years on that vital fluid alone._”
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 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:
“How it is that you have not foreseen this thing I cannot
imagine,”--continued the monk. “The body of Lilith has grown under
your very eyes from the child to the woman by the merest material
means,--the chemicals which Nature gives us, and the forces which
Nature allows us to employ. How then should you deem it possible
for the Soul to remain stationary? With every fresh experience its
form expands,--its desires increase,--its knowledge widens,--and
the everlasting necessity of Love compels its life to Love’s
primeval source. The Soul of Lilith is awakening to its fullest
immortal consciousness,--she realizes her connection with the great
angelic worlds--her kindredship with those worlds’ inhabitants,
and, as she gains this glorious knowledge more certainly, so she
gains strength. And this is the result I warn you of--her force
will soon baffle yours, and you will have no more influence over
her than you have over the highest Archangel in the realms of the
Supreme Creator.”
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.
“There are two governing forces of the Universe,” replied the monk
deliberately; “one, the masculine, is Love,--the other, feminine,
is Beauty. These Two, reigning together, are GOD;--just as man and
wife are One. From Love and Beauty proceed Law and Order. You
cannot away with it--it is so. Love and Beauty produce and
reproduce a million forms with more than a million variations, and
when God made Man in His Own Image it was as Male and Female. From
the very first growths of life in all worlds,--from the small,
almost imperceptible beginning of that marvelous evolution which
resulted in Humanity,--evolution which to us is calculated to have
taken thousands of years, whereas in the eternal countings it has
occupied but a few moments,--Sex was proclaimed in the lowliest
sea-plants, of which the only remains we have are in the Silurian
formations,--and was equally maintained in the humblest _lingula_
inhabiting its simple bivalve shell. Sex is proclaimed throughout
the Universe with an absolute and unswerving regularity through all
grades of nature. Nay, there are even male and female Atmospheres
which when combined produce forms of life.”
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:
“Perhaps I am! Yet poets are often the best scientists, because
they never _know_ they are scientists. They arrive by a sudden
intuition at the facts which it takes several Professors
Dry-as-Dust years to discover. When once you feel you are a
scientist, it is all over with you. You are a clever biped who has
got hold of a crumb out of the universal loaf, and for all your
days afterwards you are turning that crumb over and over under your
analytical lens. But a poet takes up the whole loaf unconsciously,
and hands portions of it about at haphazard and with the abstracted
behavior of one in a dream.”
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:
“He always went into things with such terrible closeness, did
El-Râmi,”--said Sir Frederick after a pause; “no wonder his brain
gave way at last. You know you can’t keep on asking the why, why,
why of everything without getting shut up in the long run.”
“I think we were not meant to ask ‘why’ at all,” said Irene slowly;
“we are made to accept and believe that everything is for the
best.”
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.”