“Miss Corelli would have been better advised had she embodied her ridiculous ideas in a sixpenny pamphlet. The names of Heliobas and Zara are alone sufficient indications of the dulness of this book.”
Less could hardly have been said. Had the paper been a provincial weekly, and the writer a junior reporter to whom the book had been flung with a curt editorial order to “write a par about that,” the review could not have been more innocent of any attempt at criticism. It is highly apparent that the critic in question was not employed on the elbow-jogging terms known as “on space.”
As for the names, it would have been equally absurd to call a Chaldæan—descended directly from one of the “wise men of the East”—and his sister, by the Anglo-Saxon Jack and Jill; or, indeed, to apply to them European nomenclature of any description. The “Romance,” to quote its writer’s own description, was meant to be “the simply-worded narration of a singular psychical experience, and included certain theories on religion which I, personally speaking, accept and believe.”
What name, then, would this reviewer have chosen for the electric healer who is the principal male character in the work? Although he lived in Paris, it would hardly have been fair to christen him Alphonse, a name, by the way, strongly suggestive of a French valet. Clearly the critic here was unreasonable as well as idle.
With regard to the allegation as to dulness, we imagine that Miss Corelli’s most bitter detractors have never accused her of this most unpardonable crime in a maker of books. Her imagination may take flights exasperating in their audacity to the stay-at-home mind of Wellington Street; she may occasionally state her opinions a thought too didactically for people who are themselves opinionated; when she cries shame on vice and humbug, her pen may coin denunciations somewhat too hot-and-strong for the easy-going and the worldly; but, whatever she is, or whatever she does, she is never dull.
In spite of the meagre allowances in the review way dealt out by the press to “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the book prospered exceedingly. It is absurd to deny the power of the press—either for well or for ill—and Miss Corelli’s career is a striking proof of the soundness of this statement. The public recognized the power of the new writer, and the “Romance” sold by thousands; the press went out of its way to condemn the works that followed it, and thereby advertised them. “If you can’t praise me, slate me,” said an author once to an editor; and he spoke sagely. Luke-warm reviews are the worst enemies a writer can have; favorable reviews impress a certain number of book-buyers, book-sellers, and librarians; but bitingly hostile criticisms—tinged, if possible, with personal spite—are frequently quite as helpful as columns of eulogy.
In the case of “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the press did not help one way or the other, however. The public discovered the book for themselves, and letters concerning its theories began to pour in from strangers in all parts of the United Kingdom. At the end of its first twelve months’ run, Mr. Bentley brought it out in one volume in his “Favorite” series. Then it started off round the world at full gallop.
It was, as Miss Corelli has already related in a very frank magazine article, a most undoubted success from the moment Bentleys laid it on their counter. It was “pirated” in America; chosen out and liberally paid for by Baron Tauchnitz for the popular and convenient little Tauchnitz series; and translated into various Continental languages. A gigantic amount of correspondence flowed in upon the authoress from India, Africa, Australia, and America; and it may be added that the more recent editions of the “Romance” have contained very representative excerpts from this epistolary bombardment. One man wrote saying that the book had saved him from committing suicide; another that it had called a halt on his previous driftings towards Agnosticism; others that the book had exercised a comforting and generally beneficent influence over them. To quote only one correspondent: “I felt a better woman for the reading of it twice; and I know others, too, who are higher and better women for such noble thoughts and teaching.”
Now, if a book—however one may object to the writer’s convictions or disagree with them—has an undoubted influence for good; if it drives from some minds the black spectre of Doubt, makes good men better, bad men less bad, and all men think, then has not that book won a brave excuse for its existence? may it not be considered, as a work of art, infinitely the superior of a picture or a play or another book that leaves beholders or readers exactly where it found them?
Many people condemn Marie Corelli without reading her, on the old Woolly West principle of “First hang, then try!”