A terse reasoning out of the living essence of the supreme, and an almost matchless soliloquy.
Here is another of Melchior’s speeches:
“Men are pigmies,—they scuttle away in droves before a storm or the tremor of an earthquake,—they are afraid of their lives. And what are their lives? The lives of motes in a sunbeam, of gnats in a mist of miasma,—nothing more. And they will never be anything more, till they learn how to make them valuable. And that lesson will never be mastered save by the few.”
It was Marie Corelli’s idea in this particular work evidently to clothe her characters in the real human, that which is changeless and unchangeable as cycles in the world’s eye; and to show that the mind of man in its essentials does not change, and that its perfection is gained only by the spiritual side of things, overcapping the material and the so-called animal. That God intends men and women to attain this superiority over matter is one of the æsthetic treasures of Marie Corelli’s literature, generally not particularly well received, still less understood, but haply none the less welcome, as it is a conception of its own peculiar originality by no means local. The fictional character of Caiaphas in all his sycophancy and sacerdotal arrogancy occupies a measure of the romance, furnishing a tone of treachery throughout.
“Once dead,” whispered Caiaphas, with a contemptuous side-glance at the fair-faced enemy of his craft, the silent “Witness unto the Truth,”—“and, moreover, slain with dishonor in the public sight, he will soon sink out of remembrance. His few disciples will be despised,—his fanatical foolish doctrine will be sneered down, and we,—we will take heed that no chronicle of his birth or death or teaching remains to be included in our annals. A stray street preacher to the common folk!—how should his name endure?”
Naturally the description of the Magdalen is full of extraordinary beauty. It is the beauty of a regenerated soul, a soul of love and greatness, emancipated from the material, yet bearing the same. The death of the one Magdalen, and the rising therefrom of the new Mary, is pathetically described in her own words to Barabbas:
“Friend, I have died!”—she said.—“At my Lord’s feet I laid down all my life. Men made me what I was; God makes me what I am!”
* * * * * *
“Thou’rt man”—she answered.—“Therefore as man thou speakest! Lay all the burden upon woman,—the burden of sin, of misery, of shame, of tears; teach her to dream of perfect love, and then devour her by selfish lust,—slay her by slow tortures innumerable,—cast her away and trample on her even as a worm in the dust, and then when she has perished, stand on her grave and curse her, saying—‘Thou wert to blame!—thou fond, foolish, credulous trusting soul!—thou wert to blame!—not I!’”
If Miss Corelli was bold in attacking so vast and so controversial a subject as the tragedy of the Christ, she was none the less inspired in her conception of the situation. The description of Jesus of Nazareth, upon whom the story centres and concludes, is simplicity itself. It teaches charity, love, brotherhood, and yet preaches humility; not humility of a universal ignorance, but that “humility” which puts even dignity in the shade, since it is dignity in another name. The pathetic touches are the cream of her story. It is not a long study, but what there is, is strange and touching with the wholesomeness of real pathos, not of one particular class, not mythical, but a tender theme as it were from a woman’s tender heart, possessing the faculty of a noble sympathy for the world’s greatest tale of inimitable love and sorrow therefrom. The chapter on the resurrection is one of the highest aims of the work, and has been read frequently as a “lesson” in the Churches on Easter day. The peculiar and idealistic spirituality of the angels at the tomb is told in a fashion distinctive of the writer. The scene of the resurrection, indeed, is worth giving in its entirety: