"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.