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."