TO THE QUARTERLY
WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
Greeting, old friend! A merry Christmas time
To you, who nothing merry ever see;—
Great Murderer of poets in their prime,—
Why have you struck at me?
With vengeful hooks of sharpened critic-steel
You tortured giants in the days gone by,—
And now upon your creaking, rusty wheel,
You’d break a Butterfly!
Alas! you’re far too cumbrous for such things!
Your heavy, clanking axle drags i’ the chase;—
The happy Insect has the use of wings,
And keeps its Sunshine-place!
CHAPTER XVIII
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
A review of Marie Corelli’s life from the time she left her convent-school to the present day, shapes as a record of intellectual activity rather than one of movement or incident of an anecdotal nature. But although the novelist has never actually gone out of her way to study local color, she has traveled all over Europe; as, during her stepfather’s long illness and the constant strain of anxiety entailed upon her by his condition, it was necessary for her to take at least one month’s rest and change of air in the course of each year. These annual holidays were spent in various parts of Europe—in France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany—and during her travels she was never idle, but always at work recording notes of scenes, seasons, and events. The locale of Combmartin was carefully studied by her before she ever wrote “The Mighty Atom”; and, as the many tourists who have visited the neighborhood since on account of the story can testify, both that village and Clovelly have been faithfully represented. But some of the scenery in her other books, though correct in detail, has never been visited by the novelist at all. “Thelma,” which is a frequent companion-volume to travelers in Norway, has certain scenes depicted which are now shown by local guides as associated with the novel, but the writer herself has never visited Norway.
It may be remembered that in “Anne of Geirstein” Walter Scott gives an exact description of Switzerland; but at the time he wrote the novel he had never seen that country. We have already told how Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a great authority on Persia, called on Miss Corelli shortly after the publication of “Ardath” to inquire personally where she had resided in the East, to be so familiar with Eastern color and surroundings; and he was very much surprised to learn that she had never visited the East at all, nor had any idea of going there. In the same way, though “Vendetta!” is an essentially Neapolitan story, she has never seen Naples. Nor does she “read up” for her local color. When asked to explain how she manages to convey herself in spirit to countries with which she is entirely unacquainted, she replies: “I imagine it must be so, and I find it generally is so.” As she stated in her lecture at Edinburgh on “The Vanishing Gift,” she thinks Imagination is a decaying faculty in the present day. “People seem unable to project themselves into either the past or the future,” she says, “and yet that is the only way to gauge the events of the present.”
Marie Corelli is a fair linguist, having a thorough knowledge of French and Italian. She can read Balzac and Dante as readily as she can read Walter Scott—these three, by the way, being particular favorites of hers.
Marlowe describes a library as containing “infinite riches in a little room.” Though no millionaire in her possession of this kind of wealth, Marie Corelli has gathered about her a set of volumes which is representative without being cumbersome. Her books are not stored in a stately room that is held sacred to them and them alone, but they are here, there, and everywhere, in drawing-room, working-den, and bedroom. She is not a bookish woman—in the reading sense—but she reads discreetly, and has many widely different friends between covers. Nor is she a miser in this respect, for she gives and lends as readily as she buys or borrows.
Many of those interested in the novelist’s movements have wondered what attraction drew Miss Marie Corelli to Stratford-on-Avon so greatly as to persuade her to settle there. The cause is a very simple one. From her earliest childhood she had been encouraged by her adopted father, Dr. Charles Mackay, to entertain a great adoration for the name and the works of Shakespeare, and before she was nine years old she used to recite, at his request, whole passages from the plays of the great Master. When she returned from school, he promised to take her for a “pilgrimage,” as he termed it, to all the places made notable by Shakespeare’s association with them, and to this pilgrimage she had looked forward with the greatest expectation. But it was never to be, for Dr. Mackay’s illness came on and prevented all such plans of pleasure from being fulfilled.