[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."