Marie Corelli does not overstate the case when she declares that absinthe has taken a grim and cancerous hold of Paris. It is called for in the cafés as naturally as we, in London, order a “small” or “large” Bass. But what a difference in the two beverages! A French writer of authority says that fifteen per cent. of the French army are rendered incapable by the use of absinthe.
The bulk of the French populace drinks either bock or light wine, and it takes a fairly large amount of either to produce intoxication. In England the populace drinks draught ale or whiskey. Comparing the two peoples and their behavior—for example—on public holidays, we must allow that the French are by far the more sober nation. But in London we have not—except in one or two West-End cafés—this dreadful absinthe, and we may well be thankful that the drinking of it has not grown upon us as it has grown upon the Parisians.
Could not Marie Corelli turn the heavy guns of her genius on the drink question this side of the Channel! The field is a very wide one. Children under fourteen are now prevented by law from being served at public-houses. It would be a good plan, too, if women could not order intoxicants from grocers. Many a man, in discharging his grocer’s account, does not trouble to inspect the items, or is not afforded the chance of inspecting them; many a man, however, if he were to submit his grocer’s book to a close scrutiny, would find that bottles of inferior wines and spirits were being supplied along with the raisins and baking-powder not for his own, the cook’s, or his family’s use, but for the secret consumption of his wife.
In suggesting new legislative measures with regard to the sale of intoxicants in this country, Marie Corelli would be performing a public service worthy of the Nation’s profoundest gratitude.
“The Soul of Lilith,” which was published about a year after “Wormwood,” is a work of a very different character. This book treats of a subject in which Marie Corelli revels. As a brief introductory note explains, “The Soul of Lilith” does not assume to be what is generally understood by a “novel,” being simply the account “of a strange and daring experiment once actually attempted,” and offered to those who are interested in the unseen possibilities of the Hereafter. It is the story of a man “who voluntarily sacrificed his whole worldly career in a supreme effort to prove the apparently Unprovable.”
This persistent probing on Marie Corelli’s part of what most writers shun and very few have ever attempted to solve, is one of the secrets of her great sales. Turn to page 319 of “The Soul of Lilith,” and you will find the matter put neatly in a nutshell:
“And so it happens that when wielders of the pen essay to tell us of wars; of shipwrecks, of hairbreadth escapes from danger, of love and politics and society, we read their pages with merely transitory pleasure and frequent indifference, but when they touch upon subjects beyond earthly experience—when they attempt, however feebly, to lift our inspirations to the possibilities of the Unseen, then we give them our eager attention and almost passionate interest.”
This passage may afford a little light to those people who are forever declaring that they cannot understand what other people can see in Marie Corelli. The fact is, Marie Corelli appeals to a tremendous section of the public—a section in which, we are assured, the fair sex does not predominate. Indeed, the majority of the novelist’s correspondents are men. Marie Corelli is intensely in earnest, imaginative, and passionate. She lets her reader know, before she has covered many pages, precisely what her book is to be about, and in this way she spares one the irritation excited by those old-fashioned writers who used to drone on for chapter after chapter, making headway in an exasperatingly slow and cumbrous fashion.
Then it must be taken into consideration that there is a very big public which has practically nothing to do except eat meals, sleep, take exercise, and read novels. Such people are necessarily more introspective than busy folk, and many of them are exceedingly anxious as to what will become of them when it shall please Providence to put an end to their aimless existence in this vale of smiles and tears. Marie Corelli supplies them with ample food for thought and argument.
Perhaps all these attempts to solve the Unsolvable have a morbid tendency; a little simple faith is certainly more salutary. However that may be, a very great public regards such attempts as more engrossing reading-matter than tales “of love and politics and society”; and a still stronger reason for Marie Corelli’s immense popularity is to be found in the fact that she is the only female Richmond in the field. She sits on a splendidly isolated throne, a writer whose genius has enabled her to soar to certain peculiar heights which no other literary man or woman has succeeded in scaling.