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."