"Mason Croft" Miss Corelli’s Present Residence

(A Corner Glimpse in Winter)

MARIE CORELLI
The Writer and The Woman

By
T. F. G. COATES
Author of “The Life of Lord Rosebery”
and
R. S. WARREN BELL
Author of “Bachelorland,” etc.

WITH 16 FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1903, by
George W. Jacobs & Company,
Published June, 1903

Preface

Miss Marie Corelli’s unique personality has aroused interest and curiosity among all classes of society, and we are aware that the present work will be diligently searched for intimate information regarding the subject of these pages. It behooves us, therefore, to remind those who peruse this volume that the writing of contemporary biography is a most delicate literary performance; so, while it has been our aim to set before the public as many particulars as possible concerning Marie Corelli the Woman—as distinct from Marie Corelli the Writer—it will be apparent to the least intelligent of our patrons that, in common courtesy to Miss Corelli, it is possible for us to publish only a limited number of personal minutiæ concerning the novelist during her lifetime.

In making a general survey of Miss Corelli’s various books, we have endeavored, in each case, to quote such passages as may be read with interest independently of the context, or such as tend to explain the spirit animating the novelist whilst engaged upon the volume under treatment.

It has been our endeavor to keep this biographical study free from offense to any living person, or to the memory of any who have passed away. In cases where we have found it necessary to refer in vigorous terms to the words or conduct of certain individuals, we have been actuated solely by a desire to have justice done to Miss Corelli. And in this respect we prefer not to be regarded as her champions so much as “counsel” briefed for the defense of a woman who has had, and still has, to contend with a very great number of adversaries, not all of whom are in the habit of conducting their warfare in the open.

In conclusion, we beg to offer Miss Corelli our grateful thanks for permitting us to have access to letters, papers, and other documents necessary to authenticate our facts, as without such permission we could not have undertaken our task.

Thomas F. G. Coates,
R. S. Warren Bell.

March, 1903.

Contents

Of the above Chapters, II, V, VIII, IX, XII, XIII, XVI, and XVII are by Thomas F. G. Coates; and Chapters I, III, IV, VI, VII, X, XI, XIV, XV and XVIII by R. S. Warren Bell.

Illustrations

MARIE CORELLI
The Writer and the Woman

CHAPTER I
THE HEROINE OF THE STORY

“Keep a brave heart. You are steadily rising. People recognize that you are an artist working with love, not a machine producing novels against bank-notes, with no interest in its work. But keep a good heart, little lady. It is the way with people of imagination and keen sensibility to have their moments of depression.... I believe you will emerge out of all this with your brave little spirit, and I shall rejoice to see you successful, because I believe you will not be spoilt by success.”

Thus wrote George Bentley, the publisher, to Marie Corelli on November 15th, 1888. At that time only three of her books had appeared—“A Romance of Two Worlds,” “Vendetta,” and “Thelma”—and she was engaged upon the latter portion of “Ardath.” She was in the spring of her career, probing the Unknown and the Unseen, the Long Ago and the Future, with daring flights of fancy that had already set the world wondering.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bentley watched over his protégée with a care that was almost parental. A number of extracts from his wise and helpful letters will be given in the course of this work; and the reader will not fail to observe that there was very much more in Mr. Bentley’s attitude than a mere desire to coin pretty expressions for the benefit of a charming young woman possessed of undeniable genius. He could be very candid in his criticisms, when occasion demanded, but his tact was unfailing, and his sympathy boundless. He was one of an old school of which but few examples now remain. He was a personal friend as well as a publisher, one who could regard an author as something more than a creature with a money-producing imagination. He was of the school that produced Blackwood, Murray, Smith—the famous scions of those houses—and others whose names have ever been uttered with affection by those men and women of the pen who had dealings with them. One has only to peruse the correspondence which passed between John Blackwood, on the one side, and G. H. Lewes and George Eliot, on the other, to appreciate in full the power of encouragement and the influence a publisher possesses in his negotiations with a writer of promise.

Of a truth, Marie Corelli had need of such a friend, for her early career, as everybody knows, was thorny and troublous. A publisher greedy for a golden harvest might have prevailed upon her to write quickly, and, as a natural consequence, not at her best, for the certain gains which such work would produce in abundance. Mr. Bentley deprecated undue hurry. “You are now a person,” he says in one of his characteristic letters, “of sufficient importance not to have to depend on appearance or non-appearance. You have shown not only talent, but versatility, and that you are not a mere mannerist with one idea repeating itself in each book; consequently, when you next come, there will be expectation.”

In advising one possessed of so seemingly inexhaustible a fund of mental riches, Mr. Bentley was undertaking no light task. Moreover, he was offering counsel to a writer, who, to many people, was an absolute enigma.

For when Marie Corelli appeared as a novelist she was altogether new. She was something entirely fresh, and, to a certain extent, incomprehensible; as a result, she was reviled, she was told that she was impossible, she was treated as a pretending upstart: the critics would have none of her.

But her success with her first book, “A Romance of Two Worlds,” was due to itself, and not to either the praise or the censure of the press. Only four reviews of this romance appeared, each about ten lines long, and none of the four would have helped to sell a single copy. But the public got hold of it. People began to talk about it and discuss it. Then it was judged worth attacking, and the more continuous its sale the more it was jeered at by the critical fault-finders.

Marie Corelli did not invite adverse criticism. She was quite a girl, untried and inexperienced, and had, apparently, from her letters to her friends, a most touching faith in the chivalry of the press. “I hope,” she wrote to Mr. Bentley, “the clever men on the Press will be kind to me, as it is a first book [the ‘Romance’]; because if they are I shall be able to do so much better another time.”

But, much to her surprise, the clever men of the press bullied her as though she had been a practiced hand at literature, and abused her with quite unnecessary violence. She did not retort upon them, however. “Vendetta,” “Thelma,” “Ardath,” and other works were produced patiently in rotation, and still the abuse continued—and so did her success. It was only with the publication of “Barabbas” and the distinctly unfair comments that book received, that she at last threw down the gauntlet, and forbade her publishers to send out any more of her books for review.

This action practically put an end to the discussion of her works in the literary journals by critics with warped ideas of fair play. For they failed to remember that, though his draftsmanship may here and there display a flaw, an artist should be judged by the conception of his design—by his coloring—by the intention of his work as a whole.

Five years have elapsed since the one-sided truce was called; those critics, wandering by the bookshops, see people issuing therefrom bearing in their hands the hated volumes—the brain-children of the woman who had met them in unequal combat. They read in the papers of the gigantic sales of these works; they lift their hands in horror, and sigh for the gone days of authors who appealed but to the cultured few. So waggeth the world of letters; so arriveth that person to be trampled on—offend he or she the critics by ever so little—the New Writer.

It is manifestly unfair that a novelist should criticise novels; yet this is frequently done. It goes without saying that the novelist who devotes valuable time to reading and criticising the works of his brethren in art cannot be in very great demand, as fiction is paid for at a much higher rate than reviewing. That Miss Corelli’s earlier works were submitted for valuation to those engaged—if we may use a commercial phrase—in the same line of business, may account for the bitterness that characterized many of the notices. Let the critic criticise, and the novelist write novels; then, each attending to his trade, the new writer will receive fairer play.

The rough-and-tumble journey through the now defunct house of Bentley which “A Romance of Two Worlds” experienced, prompts us to question the advisability of appointing novelists to act as publishers’ “readers.” Quantities of manuscript pass through the hands of a publisher’s literary adviser, and in six weeks he may imbibe—he cannot help imbibing—enough ideas to set him up for six years. A novelist who spends a considerable portion of his lifetime weighing and sorting the raw material of other novelists, must find it a matter of great difficulty to reconcile his conscience with the performance of such duties.

It must often have occurred to the men who have so harshly criticised Miss Corelli’s works to demand of themselves a logical reason for her boundless popularity—a popularity that extends to every corner of the earth. “The Mighty Atom” has been published under the auspices of the Holy Synod in Russia, and “Barabbas” has been translated into Persian, Greek, and Hindustani. And these are but two instances of her universality. Why is Marie Corelli read the world over, while the authors upon whom many responsible judges of literature shower encomiums can claim but an Anglo-Saxon public, and not a tremendous one then?

It is because, primarily, her chief mission is to exploit, with knowledge, with conviction, and with limitless zeal, the most vital question of this or any age—man’s religion. Since the world was created this has been the chief motive of humanity’s actions. The Israelites, for taking to themselves false gods, were sold into bondage; thousands of years later, because the tomb of Christ was threatened, Christian Europe, putting aside international differences, arose in pious wrath and sent forth its men of the Red Cross to do battle with the infidels. In misguided zeal, and prompted by a morbid fanaticism, “bloody” Mary destroyed the peace of our own fair land, and earned for her memory undying execration by burning at the stake the unfortunates who differed from her in their religious views. The impiety of its rulers was the root of the evil which plunged France into the throes of a ghastly Revolution. Even on every coin of the realm at the present day,—on every sovereign that changes hands at race meetings, on every penny that the street arabs play pitch and toss with, we are reminded that the reigning monarch is the Defender of our “Faith.”

A simple belief in God pervades everything that Marie Corelli has written, and from this devout standpoint she views all those other things which constitute mundane existence—Love, Marriage, buying and selling, social intercourse, art, science, and education.

Her books abound in passages which bewail the fact that—to extract a phrase from the “Master-Christian”—“the world is not with Christ to-day.” Her sole weapons pen and paper, the author of that remarkable book is making a strenuous effort to dispel the torpor to which Christianity is gradually succumbing. The keynote of her work is sounded by Cardinal Bonpré, when he deplores the decay of holy living. “For myself, I think there is not much time left us! I feel a premonition of Divine wrath threatening the world, and when I study the aspect of the times and see the pride, licentiousness, and wealth-worship of man, I cannot but think the days are drawing near when our Master will demand of us account of our service. It is just the same as in the case of the individual wrong-doer; when it seems as if punishment were again and again retarded, and mercy shown,—yet if all benefits, blessings, and warnings are unheeded, then at last the bolt falls suddenly and with terrific effect. So with nations—so with churches—so with the world!”

Marie Corelli is bold; perhaps she is the boldest writer that has ever lived. What she believes she says, with a brilliant fearlessness that sweeps aside petty argument in its giant’s stride towards the goal for which she aims. She will have no half-measures. Her works, gathered together under one vast cover, might fitly be printed and published as an amplified edition of the Decalogue.

It is small wonder, then, that she has not earned the approbation of those critics who are unable to grasp the stupendous nature of her programme; they, having always held by certain canons, and finding those canons brusquely disregarded, retort with wholesale condemnation of matters that they deem literary heterodoxy, but whose sterling simplicity is in reality altogether beyond their ken. Fortunately, their words have failed to frighten off the public, which, ever loyal to one fighting for the right, has supported and befriended Marie Corelli in her dauntless crusade against vice and unbelief.

Other writers have doubtless written in a somewhat similar strain, and it has not been their fault that the woman who forms the subject of this biography has eclipsed all the worthy makers of such books who have preceded her. Power has been given her, and she has not proved false to her trust. Genius is Heaven-sent, to be used or abused according to the will of its possessor; let those so gifted beware lest they cast the pearls of their brain before swine, for of a surety there will come a day of reckoning when every genius, as well as every other man, shall be called upon to give an account of his stewardship.

Unlike the majority of her contemporaries, Marie Corelli does not subsist on a single “big hit.” She is a twelve-book rather than a one-book woman. It is a fortunate circumstance for a writer when people disagree in regard to his or her chef-d’œuvre. There are those—and their name is legion—who regard “Thelma” as Miss Corelli’s best book, while others—and their name, too, is legion—account “The Sorrows of Satan” the worthiest of her productions. The overwhelming success of the “Master-Christian” served somewhat to bedim the lustre of her former writings, but in many hearts the moving history of the sweet and unsophisticated Norwegian maid will always cause “Thelma” to hold chief sway.

“Barabbas,” at once the most scriptural and devotional of its author’s long list of publications, has won almost as great a popularity as “The Sorrows of Satan,” being now in its thirty-seventh edition. “The Mighty Atom,” of which nearly a hundred thousand copies have been sold, is regarded by the public with singular affection, many children, as Mr. Arthur Lawrence has told us in The Strand Magazine, sending Miss Corelli “all sorts of loving and kindly greetings” as a token of their sympathy with little Lionel and Jessamine. The turbulent and stormy progress of “A Romance of Two Worlds” through the sea of criticism has made this book more familiar to the ear than some of its successors, though its sale has not equaled that of half a dozen of its fellow-works.

Miss Corelli’s average book is about as long as two novels of the ordinary six-shilling size put together; but she has published some comparatively short stories—notably “Boy,” “Ziska,” and “The Mighty Atom,” as well as some brochures; to wit, “Jane,” a society sketch; “Cameos;” and her tribute to the virtues of “Victoria the Good.” “Boy,” though published about the time that the “Master-Christian” appeared, was accorded the heartiest of welcomes, being now in its forty-sixth thousand.

In days to come the “Master-Christian” and “The Sorrows of Satan” will, we venture to predict, be sufficient alone to preserve their author’s fame; and, for those who delight in a love-story, “Thelma” will constitute a perpetual monument to its creator’s memory.

Owing to the unique and unclassifiable nature of her productions, it is impossible to award Miss Corelli a definite place in the world of letters. It is under any circumstances a thankless task to arrange writers as one would arrange boys in a class—according to merit. There are the poets, the historians, the novelists, the humorists, and—the critics. Marie Corelli occupies a peculiarly isolated position. A novelist she is, in the main, and yet hardly a novelist according to cut-and-dried formulas; she is, unquestionably, a poet, for there is many a song in her books not a whit less sweet because it is not set in measured verse and line. So we may safely leave her place in the Temple of Fame to be chosen by the votes of posterity, for there is one critic who is ever just, who goeth on his “everlasting journey” with gentle but continuous step; who condemns most books, with their writers, to oblivion, but who saves a certain few.

And his name is Time.

CHAPTER II
MARIE CORELLI’S CHILDHOOD—EARLY INFLUENCES—LITERARY BEGINNINGS—THE MACKAYS—FATHER AND SON

In explanation of an unannounced and unexpected afternoon visit in 1890, Mr. W. E. Gladstone said: “I came because I was curious to see for myself the personality of a young woman who could write so courageously and well, and in whose work I recognize a power working for good, and eminently calculated to sway the thoughts of the people.”

Such were the veteran statesman’s words—well remembered by a friend of the novelist’s who was present at that eventful meeting.

This young woman was Marie Corelli, the novelist, whom so many lesser men have abused, because, unlike Gladstone, they have not studied her work, or have done so only with the determination to find fault.

The baby girl for whom so distinguished a career was destined, was adopted, when but three months old, by Dr. Charles Mackay, that excellent journalist, poet, song writer, and author. The love between Dr. Mackay and his adopted daughter was one of the closest and most sweet of domestic experiences. When reverses and suffering came to the man of letters, his joy and consolation was in the careful training of the much-loved little girl; and in his closing years he had the satisfaction of knowing that she had fulfilled his hopes and achieved success.

To the high character of Dr. Charles Mackay must be attributed the chief influence in the formation of the child’s ideas; a glance, therefore, at the career of that gentleman cannot fail to be of interest. A native of Perth, Charles Mackay was born March 27th, 1814. His father, George Mackay, was the second son of Captain Hugh Mackay, of the Strathnavar branch of the Mackay clan of which Lord Reay is the chief. Charles Mackay received his earlier education in London, and, subsequently proceeding to a school at Brussels, made a special study of European languages. He early commenced writing for Belgian newspapers, and, also whilst a youngster, sent poems to English newspapers, which readily published them. A volume of “Songs and Poems” followed; and then, returning to England, Mr. Mackay became a contributor to The Sun, assistant sub-editor of The Morning Chronicle, and editor of The Glasgow Argus. He was married in 1831, and by his first wife had three sons—Charles, Robert, and George Eric, and also a daughter, who died when she was twenty-two years of age. Of the sons, Charles is still living, being resident in America with his wife and family. Robert is dead, but is survived by a son and a daughter. Of George Eric Mackay, the second of the three sons, more will be told anon.

During Charles Dickens’s brief editorship of the London Daily News, a number of verses by Mackay were published in that newspaper, and attracted much notice and praise. They were subsequently republished in a volume as “Voices from the Crowd.” A selection of these verses was set to music, and quickly caught the ear of the people, “The Good Time Coming” reaching a circulation of well-nigh half a million.

In 1848 Mr. Mackay became a member of the staff of The Illustrated London News, and in 1852 was appointed editor of that journal. Here, through the enterprise of Mr. Ingram, the song-writing capacities of Mr. Mackay were put to good use, and a number of musical supplements of The Illustrated London News were produced. “Songs for Music” afterwards appeared as a volume in 1856. The pieces included such prime favorites as “Cheer, Boys, Cheer!” “To the West! To the West!” “Tubal Cain,” “There’s a Land, a dear Land,” and “England over All.” Set to the taking melodies of Henry Russell and others, these songs, it may truly be said, have been sung the world over, wherever the English language is spoken.

Mackay severed his connection with The Illustrated London News in 1859, and in the following year started The London Review, which did not succeed. Failure was the fate, too, of another periodical, Robin Goodfellow, founded by him in 1861. During the American Civil War, Mackay was the special correspondent of the New York Times. Dr. Mackay’s efforts in prose were as numerous and as interesting as his verses. His “Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs from 1830 to 1870,” is a classic and a literary treat to every one who reads it; for herein is set forth a graphic picture of the life and times of that most interesting period, not only in England, but in the United States. His relations with Greeley and with President Lincoln were of altogether exceptional interest. Few men had experiences so varied and interesting as those of Charles Mackay—his degree, by the way, was that of LL. D. of Glasgow University—and few men were so capable as was he of vividly describing what he did, and saw, and heard.

In addition to writing many volumes of songs and ballads himself, it should be mentioned that Mackay compiled the well-known “A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry.”

From the year 1870 he engaged in little regular work, though he undertook interesting and valuable researches into Celtic philology. His closing years were—through ill-health and age—a period of financial reverses, but the gloom was brightened by the presence of the pet child of his adoption. He worked on till the last, being engaged during the very week of his death in writing two articles, one for Blackwood’s Magazine, the other for The Nineteenth Century.

When his adopted daughter’s somewhat brief school-days were over, she returned home well fitted to assist Dr. Mackay in his literary work. She was already on familiar terms with his study and his books. A good many of the baby days were spent in the Doctor’s study, and as an infant there were evidences that the mind of the little one was of a thoughtful and inquiring bent. She was considered almost too inquiring by those governesses who guided her earliest lessons, religious subjects always having a peculiar attraction for her. “Little girls must be good and try to please God,” one governess impressed upon her; and the child’s wondering reply was: “Why of course; everybody and everything must try to please God, else where would be the use of living at all?”

Babies—when they are good—always seem somewhat akin to angels, and the “Rosebud”—as Mackay called his adopted girl—always had a perfect belief not only in their existence, but in their near presence. The poet especially encouraged her faith in them. The “Rosebud” always believed angels were in her bedroom at night, and on her once saying that she could not see the angel (whom she fully expected) in her room, the Doctor answered: “Never mind, dearie! It is there, you may be sure; and if you will behave just as if you saw it, you will certainly see it some day.”

Passed chiefly in the country and abroad, the first ten years of Marie Corelli’s life went by pleasantly enough. Some hours daily were devoted to lessons; others to play, and most of these amongst the flowers that she has always loved. And as much time was spent, not over lesson books, but over those works of a nature to be understood by a child which she found in the Doctor’s library, and listening to stories, witty and wise, of Dr. Mackay’s former friends and literary associates. Many, indeed, had been these friends—Dickens and Thackeray, Sir Edwin Landseer and Douglas Jerrold, to name but a few. He had known many men of light and leading in his day, and to the little girl who played in his study he delighted to recount reminiscences of them. Through him she learned to love some of his old friends as if she had known them personally.

Those were days that had much to do with the moulding of the character of the future novelist. There were no child playmates for little Marie, and the naturally studious bent of her mind was greatly affected by her environment. It gave her thought and wisdom beyond her years. This absence of child companions may or may not be advantageous; it all depends upon the circumstances. Victoria, who became Queen of England, had no child companions, and often in later years dwelt upon the fact with regret. Yet who would say they would have had any alteration in the character and doings of our late sovereign? The loss to a child of that child-companionship which most enjoy may be very great; but there are compensations.

Those who have studied the productions of Marie Corelli with understanding of the spirit which has animated her work would not, we think, wish that anything should have been different. As to the reading of her early years, it was quite exceptional, as reading with children goes. She not only heard of the sayings and doings of Dickens, Thackeray, Jerrold, and such, but had read many of their works before she was ten; had not only read, but understood a great deal of them, having a loving tutor to make matters easy for her. She took great interest in histories of times and peoples, and learned to sympathize with the workers. Dr. Mackay’s poems were all familiar to her. So were the works of Shakespeare and Scott and Keats. Poetry was one of her chief delights, while instrumental music appealed to her as did the rhythm of song. The Bible, and especially the New Testament, was always her greatest friend in the world of books. And so, when it was deemed well to send her away for more systematic educational training than that of the sweet home-life, it was a little maiden of unusual knowledge who went to a convent in France to receive further tuition.

Peculiarly did the convent school-life commend itself to the studious mind of the child. The quietude and peacefulness of this holy retreat appealed very greatly to her contemplative and imaginative mind. The Doctor had instilled into her a strict regard for truth and sincerity, a reverence for sacred things, and a desire to follow in spirit and in truth the teachings of Christ. Meditating on New Testament matters, she at one time had a curious idea of founding some new kind of religious order of Christian workers, but this never subsequently took definite shape.

A great happiness which the convent provided was a grand organ in the chapel. At this, when schoolfellows were indulging in croquet, tennis, and other games, the young girl would sit, sometimes for hours at a time, playing religious songs and improvising harmonies. In several of the novels that were written in after years there are references to the organ and its soothing influences. Miss Corelli possesses remarkable musical talents, this power of improvisation amongst them, and her intimate friends to-day often have the pleasure of listening to her performances. Dr. Mackay had recognized that her musical ability was of exceptional order, and, as his financial losses had been such that he was aware he would not be able to provide for his adopted daughter, he determined that she should endeavor to win her way in the musical profession.

With this object in view the convent training was specially devoted to the development of her music, and with such thorough care were her studies conducted, that she still retains the skill then acquired upon organ, piano, and mandolin, and her voice is both sweet and powerful.

Both as instrumentalist and vocalist Miss Corelli could have been sure of a large measure of success. Principally she loves the old English and Scotch ballads; listening to her as she sings such songs to her own accompaniment in her dainty drawing-room at Mason Croft, it is pleasant to observe how very feminine she is, how paramount is the Woman in her nature.

That the young girl was ambitious goes without saying. During her holidays from school, she wrote the score of an opera, which was called Ginevra Da Siena. About the same time she produced numerous verses and short poems which brought high praise from that competent judge, Dr. Mackay. Moreover, she wrote in her very young days three sonnets on Shakespearean plays, these being approved, praised, and published by Mr. Clement Scott in The Theatre.

It soon appeared, however, that the little convent maid had done too much for her strength. Athletic exercises would have been better in those early days than the excess of brain-work to which she set herself, absolutely from inclination and of her own free will. Under the great strain her health broke down, and she was compelled to return from school for a spell of rest, carrying with her, however, impressions of the convent life which had a great effect upon her subsequent thoughts and aims.

Her health being restored, and Dr. Mackay growing more feeble, he was glad to keep her at home with him. Musical studies were persistently pursued. Half the day she would spend with the Doctor, reading, playing, or singing to him, conversing with him, and cheering him in the illness that was upon him. The other half of the day was passed at her desk, and literature finally claimed all her working hours. The first story she wrote was returned to her. It seemed she was to traverse no path of roses to fame and fortune. Though occupied with minor literary matters she was turning over in her mind the outlines of a singular story suggested by the thoughts or fancies or dreams of that period when her health broke down, and during which, whilst health was being restored, there was little to do save keep quiet and meditate. The result was the formation of the plot of “A Romance of Two Worlds.” These early years, by the way, up to 1885, were spent in a country cottage; then Dr. Mackay removed to London, and took a house in Kensington. “A Romance of Two Worlds” was published in 1886.

Miss Corelli’s sole companion after her convent school-life, with the exception of Dr. Charles Mackay, was her devoted friend, Miss Bertha Vyver, daughter of the Countess Vyver, a not unimportant personage at the court of Napoleon III. The friendship between Miss Vyver and Miss Corelli has always been of the closest description. Since Dr. Charles Mackay welcomed Miss Vyver as his “second daughter,” they have never been separated. In all her daily life, not least the nursing of Dr. Mackay through his long illness, Miss Vyver has been by her side, helping her in home difficulties and trials as help can only be given by one with whom there is perfect sympathy. Miss Vyver has seen every detail of all the work the novelist has done, and to-day the friendship between the two is closer and dearer than ever for the years that have passed, and the sorrows and joys that have been borne in company.

George Eric Mackay, Dr. Mackay’s second son, had been a wanderer on the Continent for many years. Born in London in 1835, and educated chiefly at the Academy of Inverness, he had first been put into a business house. Trade was, however, entirely opposed to his tastes and temperament, and consequently he left the commercial establishment and began to think of another career. With such a father there was naturally a desire that the son should enter the field of literature. George Eric, however, did not seem, at first, disposed to do this. He preferred the stage, and made efforts to secure a footing on it. He was tried by Charles Kean, and there were evidences of talent. Eric did, indeed, possess very considerable powers of portraying character. The stage, however, was in those days, as it probably will be for all time, a thankless profession for the embryo actor, and Eric found the work too severe. The plodding labors of the beginner by no means suited one who was not fitted by nature for drudgery or slow progress.

He had a good voice, and the next profession to which he turned his attention was operatic singing. For this again he had a not unpromising equipment, and his father determined to send him to Italy for the purpose of studying music there under good masters. No progress, however, was made with the musical studies, though the people and the conditions of existence in Italy appealed strongly to him, and he made Italy his home for many years.

During the first portion of his sojourn abroad he received a liberal allowance from his father, and was at other times indebted to him for considerable financial help. He was, like the Doctor, a master of European languages, and this knowledge enabled him to earn a precarious livelihood as a teacher of French and English. The income thus derived was added to by correspondence for newspapers.

Dr. Mackay gave his son many valuable introductions, and he thus became acquainted with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (to whom he subsequently dedicated a book of poems); Sir Richard Burton; and Sir William Perry, the British Consul at Venice. All three became interested in him, and were frequently of assistance to him.

He found it impossible, however, to settle down. He stayed nowhere very long. Rome and Venice saw more of him than other cities. He wrote verses, and some were, under the title of “Songs of Love and Death,” collected in a volume and published by Messrs. Chapman & Hall in 1864. This was the volume which was dedicated to Sir E. Bulwer Lytton. He was not encouraged by the financial results of his work. Poetry, in fact, does not pay, and the public at the time gave his verses but a chilly greeting. His poetic ardor somewhat damped by this treatment, he left the lyrical muse alone for a time and commenced the publication in Rome of The Roman Times. This journal, unfortunately, like most newspaper enterprises that do not “go,” was a costly failure. Il Poliglotta, another journalistic venture, was published in Venice. It was a disastrous undertaking, absorbing all the money which its editor had been able to raise, and leaving a heavy deficit.

The failure was the more serious because of other debts—personal, and in connection with two volumes which he had published. One, a collection of his newspaper articles, was called “Days and Nights in Italy”; the other, “Lord Byron at the Armenian Convent,” this being practically a handy guide-book to Venice. Nothing paid. The result was that he left Italy, after living there for twenty years, poorer than he went, which literally meant that he came back penniless. Broken financially, and in spirit, he returned to his father.

To the young girl Marie, whose life had hitherto been so exceptionally quiet, there was almost a romantic interest in this sudden arrival of the middle-aged man who, she was informed, was her stepbrother, and she made much of him. Moreover, Dr. Mackay was seriously disappointed at the failure of his son to make a career, and at his position—without income or apparent hope of earning one; and it was evident to Marie that it would afford her stepfather the keenest pleasure if George Eric should, after all, achieve success.

The circumstances of her untiring efforts to bring him into notice are known only to a few, though misunderstood by many.

In the first place, her principal aim was to relieve her stepfather from the burden of his son’s maintenance. In the second, she sought to rouse and inspire that son to obtain for himself a high position in literature. She spared no pains to attain these two objects, and all her first small earnings went in assisting him. She was at this time still continuing her musical studies, and very often went to hear Sarasate. The large sums of money earned by this eminent artist first suggested an idea to George Eric of learning the violin, and, though late in life to begin, he resolved to study the instrument. His musical training in Italy must have been very ineffectual, as he had to learn his notes. He wished, however, for a good instrument, and his stepsister secured a “Guarnerius” model from Chappell, which she paid for by instalments and presented to him. It may be added that he never made anything of it, but it was useful in providing the title of his best-known work.

He had produced a volume, “Pygmalion in Cyprus,” published at the expense of friends, but the result was again disheartening. Some plays that he wrote were rejected by the managers to whom they were sent. About the same time Miss Corelli had returned to her the first story she had written. The editor of the magazine to whom it had been submitted was of opinion that the writing of novels was not her forte. She took the opinion seriously, and decided to write no more, but to complete her musical training and look to the concert platform as the means of livelihood. She had already composed quite a large number of poems, some of which were subsequently torn up, some remain unpublished, and some have found a place in her books. A strong poetical tendency is evident throughout all her books, and is particularly prominent in “Ardath,” a great portion of which is almost as much poetry as prose. Two letters, written by Eric Mackay at this time, and now preserved in Miss Corelli’s autograph album, are particularly interesting. One ran:

“I am happier than I have been since boyhood, for I have a little sister again, and that little sister—the best and brightest in the world—does everything for me. But how far short of your ambition for me must I fall!—for you have already done so much in your short life—you, a child, and I, alas! a man growing old.”

And in another he said:

“I must thank you for sending me the little Keats volume. Curiously enough, I never read his poems at all before. Browning I can’t stand, but if you like him I must read him. You seem to live in an atmosphere of poetry, but pray be careful and do not study too hard.”

“Love-Letters of a Violinist” at last made Eric Mackay famous. The book was published in 1885, and it was Marie Corelli who arranged for its production. She had fully convinced herself of the beauty of the poems, and she determined that they should be published as became what she regarded as their great value. She corrected the proofs of the poems, selected the binding, and saw to every detail of the book. The poems were published anonymously, and at once became the talk not only of England, but of America. There was much speculation as to the authorship. Eric Mackay entered fully into the humor of the thing, and made numerous suggestions to his acquaintances as to the probable writer, even putting forth the hint that the late Duke of Edinburgh, an able violinist, might have written them. He must have chuckled hugely at the discussions about this anonymous author; and the whole story was often talked about among his friends. Miss Corelli wrote an introductory notice to a subsequent edition of the “Love-Letters,” the introductory note and the initials “G. D.”—which she had adopted—causing almost as much discussion as the publication of the “Love-Letters” themselves. “G. D.” was meant by her to signify Gratia Dei. Probably few books have ever emerged from the press in more attractive form. It was a quaint, vellum-bound, antique-looking volume tied up on all sides with strings of golden silk ribbon, and illustrated throughout with fanciful wood-cuts.

But the poems are beautiful and deserving of the fame they attained. It is curious how very different in quality they are to the author’s earlier published works, issued in 1864, 1871, and 1880. Each “Love-Letter” (and there are twelve of them) is in twenty stanzas—each stanza contains six lines. Antonio Gallenga of The Times declared the poems to be as regular and symmetrical as Dante’s “Comedy,” with as stately and solemn, ay, and as arduous a measure!... “There are marvelous powers in this poet-violinist. Petrarch himself has not so many changes for his conjugation of the verb ‘to love.’” The latter is what may be called, to quote a phrase recently used in a well-known newspaper, a “quotation from an hitherto unpublished review,” because the late Antonio Gallenga wrote a review of the “Love-Letters” at the request of Miss Corelli (whom he had known since her childhood); but The Times refused it, and he sent Miss Corelli the original manuscript, from which she quoted excerpts in her “Introduction” to the “Love-Letters.”

A lengthy review entitled “A New Love-Poet” appeared in London Society under the name of “W. Stanislas Leslie,” no other than Marie Corelli herself. For the rest, all the critics fell foul of the book and “slated” the author unmercifully.

Some of the reviewers, notwithstanding the mystery they made of it, knew all about the authorship. Miss Corelli gave the news to the world in an anonymous letter to the New York Independent, which was the first journal to reveal the identity of the writer of the poems. It published a brief statement to the effect that the author was simply a gentleman of good position, the descendant of a distinguished and very ancient family, George Eric Mackay.... “He will undoubtedly,” it was added, “be numbered with the choice few whose names are destined to live by the side of poets such as Keats, whom, as far as careful work, delicate feeling, and fiery tenderness go, Eric Mackay may be said to resemble.”

Swinburne, about whom Marie Corelli was to write so strongly in “The Sorrows of Satan,” the poet-violinist thus addressed:

“Thou art a bee, a bright, a golden thing
With too much honey; and the taste thereof
Is sometimes rough, and somewhat of a sting
Dwells in the music that we hear thee sing.”

Again, there are such pretty fancies as:

“Phœbus loosens all his golden hair
Right down the sky—and daisies turn and stare
At things we see not with our human wit,”

and

“A tuneful noise
Broke from the copse where late a breeze was slain,
And nightingales in ecstasy of pain
Did break their hearts with singing the old joys.”

There are scores of passages like these. The great gifts displayed in the volume certainly afforded some justification a few years afterwards for the strenuous efforts which Marie Corelli made to get her stepbrother made Poet Laureate.

The “Love-Letters of a Violinist,” great as was their success as poems, did not prove lucrative. Miss Corelli had provided for the first issue; afterwards Mr. Eric Mackay made a free gift of the book to the publishers of the Canterbury Poets series. The sales have since been considerable, but the arrangement made by Mr. Mackay was one which, of course, did not benefit him financially.

Shortly after the publication of “The Love-Letters of a Violinist,” there were serious developments in Dr. Charles Mackay’s illness. He was stricken down with paralysis, and the pinch of poverty was being felt, for there was very little coming into the home. Marie Corelli had now a great responsibility upon her young shoulders. The completion of her musical training it was impossible to afford. What should she do? She determined to try to write a novel. More articles and essays were contributed anonymously to newspapers and magazines; and, meanwhile, the plan of “A Romance of Two Worlds” had been prepared and the book was being written. Finally it was submitted to and accepted by a great publisher, who came to see Miss Corelli, and stared with amazement to find that the young lady to whom he was introduced as the author was a personal friend of his. Yet so it was, and the story of the publication and reception of the book is instructive.

CHAPTER III
“A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS”

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an author’s first long manuscript is a poor and immature thing, which, owing to its inflammatory nature, were best devoted to fire-lighting purposes. But the aspiring scribbler, not being—from this point of view, at any rate—a utilitarian in his views, would as lief lose his right hand as behold his precious pages being put to the base wooing of wood and coals. Instead, he spends several pounds on having it typewritten, and then sends it forth upon its travels round the publishing houses. It comes back to him with exasperating regularity, until the author, at last realizing that his book does not appeal to publishers’ readers quite as vividly as it does to its creator, either (if he be wise) consigns it to the dust-bin, or (if he be unwise) pays one of the shark publishing firms to bring it out. Did he know that the wily fellows to whom he entrusts his work simply print enough copies for review purposes and a few more to put on their shelves, charging him the while for a whole edition, he would not part with his good money so readily! As it is, he has the satisfaction of seeing his story between covers, of sending it to his friends, of beholding his name in the “Books Received” corner of the daily papers, of knowing for certain that a copy, wherever else it may not be found, will always be supplied to students of fiction at the British Museum; and that is all.

It is needless to say this was not the course of procedure adopted by Miss Marie Corelli. She wrote voluminously in her school-days, and was as successful as most young girls are when they are serving their literary apprenticeship. She scribbled poetry, and was no doubt happy—as every youthful scribe should be—when she was rewarded for her labors by the mere honor of print.

But the time came—as come it always does to those who have the real gift of literary creativeness—when the young artist set a large canvas upon her easel and sturdily went about the task of filling it.

Of ideas, at such an age, there is an abundant flow. Meals are irksome and many hours are stolen from slumber; it is late to bed and early to rise; it is a hatred of social duties, and a period when everything else but the dream of fame is forgotten. Although we may take the foregoing to be fairly applicable to the average girl-author, Miss Corelli denies that the writing of “A Romance of Two Worlds” ever caused her to become “æsthetically cadaverous.” Her methodical habits may account for the fact that, in spite of much desk toil and hard thinking, she has always managed to keep a well-balanced mind in corpore sano.

“I write every day from ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, alone and undisturbed.... I generally scribble off the first rough draft of a story very rapidly in pencil; then I copy it out in pen and ink, chapter by chapter, with fastidious care, not only because I like a neat manuscript, but because I think everything that is worth doing at all is worth doing well.... I find, too, that in the gradual process of copying by hand, the original draft, like a painter’s first sketch, gets improved and enlarged.”

The “Romance,” then, according to this salubrious programme, entered quietly into a state of being. Miss Corelli was doubtful whether it would ever find a publisher: her first notion was to offer it to Arrowsmith, as a railway-stall novelette. Possibly the success of “Called Back” suggested the Bristol publisher, the title she first fixed upon, “Lifted Up,” being eminently suggestive of a shilling series. However, the manuscript never went westwards—a matter which good Mr. Arrowsmith has excellent cause to regret—for, in the interim, as a kind of test of its merit or demerit, Miss Corelli sent it to Bentley’s. The “readers” attached to that house advised its summary rejection. Moved by curiosity to inspect a work which his several advisers took the trouble to condemn in such singularly adverse terms, Mr. George Bentley decided to read the manuscript himself, and the consequence of his unprejudiced and impartial inspection was approval and acceptance.

Letters were exchanged, terms proposed and agreed upon. “I am glad that all is arranged,” wrote Mr. Bentley; “nothing now remains but to try to make a success of your first venture. The work has the merit of originality, and its style writing will, I think, commend it.”

A later letter from him says: “I expect our rather ‘thick’ public will be slow in appreciating the ‘Romance,’ but if it once takes, it may go off well.”

These extracts are interesting as showing the view taken by a veteran publisher—one who had been dealing with books and authors since early manhood—of a work by an absolutely unknown writer. His opinion of Miss Corelli’s powers is represented by a further letter dispatched to her in February, 1886: “I shall be perfectly ready to give full consideration to anything which proceeds from your pen, all the more readily, too, because I see you love wholesome thought, and will not lend yourself to corrupt and debase the English mind.... I have no greater pleasure than to bring to light a bright writer like yourself. After all, the Brightness must be in the author, and so the sole praise is to her.”

After his first visit to Miss Corelli, in July of that year, Mr. Bentley wrote as follows: “The afternoon remains with me as a pleasant memory. I am so glad to have seen you. I little expected to see so young a person as the authoress of works involving in their creation faculties which at your age are mostly not sufficiently developed for such works.”

Miss Corelli was allowed to retain her copyright, a fact which, though regarded by her as of slight import at the time, has since proved of some pecuniary advantage, seeing that the “Romance” is now in its twentieth edition.

The wise old publisher saw nothing attractive, explanatory, or salable in such a name as “Lifted Up,” so a new title was asked for. Scott once said there was nothing in a name, and certainly it did not matter what such a magician as he was, called a book, any more than it matters what name any firmly established author fixes upon; but a new writer can seldom afford to despise the gentle art of alliteration or the appellation which appeals to the eye, ear, and imagination.

Both Dr. Charles Mackay and his son George Eric were appealed to by the young beginner in that literary career to which they were both accustomed. Both demanded a reading of the manuscript that they might be guided by its contents as to the title. But Marie refused to show her manuscript to any one. She told her stepfather that he would only “laugh at her silly fancies.” She would not let George Eric read it, because she wanted to surprise him by quoting some of his poetry in the book from the “Love-Letters of a Violinist,” which title she, by-the-bye, had suggested. She said her story was “about this world and the next,” whereupon Dr. Mackay, who happened to be reading Lewis Morris’s “Songs of Two Worlds” at the time, suggested “A Romance of Two Worlds.”

So, as “A Romance of Two Worlds,” the book appeared. Up to this time Miss Corelli had naturally had no experience with reviewers. She had heard of them, of course, being a member of a literary household, and she had every reason to suppose that they would, in the ordinary course of events, write criticisms upon the “Romance.” In this expectation, however, she was doomed to disappointment. It received only four reviews, all brief and distinctly unfavorable. It may not be uninteresting, at this distance of time, to quote the criticism which appeared in a leading journal, as it is a very fair sample of the rest:

“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!”

She has a big public, but it would be a thousand times bigger if only scoffers and doubters would really read these books by the authoress whom they hang without trial. Let them take a course of Marie Corelli during the long winter evenings, passing on from book to book—from the “Romance” to “Vendetta,” thence to “Thelma,” “Ardath,” “Wormwood,” “The Soul of Lilith,” and so on—in the order in which they were written. For the idle and listless, for the frivolous, for the irreligious, for the purse-proud, for the down-hearted and distressed, she will prove a veritable “cure,” for she is at once a moralist and a tonic. And whereas she is a literary sermon in herself to those who listen to other preachers without profit, so will she prove a profitable and restorative change of air to the busy, the honestly prosperous, the “godly, righteous, and sober” of her students. She is for all, and, where funds are scarce and shillings consequently precious, Free Libraries bring her within reach of everybody.

At a time when our leading dramatists and novelists drag their art in the mud for the sake of the lucre that may be found down there in plenty, it is refreshing and hope-inspiring to find that the writer with the largest public in the world, whose work has penetrated to every country and is thus not restricted to Anglo-Saxondom any more than a new type of rifle is, has ranged herself on the side of Right! Thus, owing to the wide-spread interest in her work, she is enabled to preach the gospel of her beliefs in all corners of the globe;—this, too, in spite of the fact that she is comparatively a newcomer in literature.

“My appeal for a hearing,” wrote Miss Corelli, when describing, in the pages of the Idler, the appearance of her first book, “was first made to the great public, and the public responded; moreover, they do still respond with so much heartiness and good-will, that I should be the most ungrateful scribbler that ever scribbled if I did not” (despite press “drubbings” and the amusing total ignoring of my very existence by certain cliquey literary magazines) “take up my courage in both hands, as the French say, and march steadily onward to such generous cheering and encouragement. I am told by an eminent literary authority that critics are ‘down upon me’ because I write about the supernatural. Neither ‘Vendetta,’ nor ‘Thelma,’ nor ‘Wormwood’ is supernatural. But, says the eminent literary authority, why write at all, at any time, about the supernatural? Why? Because I feel the existence of the supernatural, and, feeling it, I must speak of it. I understand that the religion we profess to follow emanates from the supernatural. And I presume that churches exist for the solemn worship of the supernatural. Wherefore, if the supernatural be thus universally acknowledged as a guide for thought and morals, I fail to see why I, and as many others as choose to do so, should not write on the subject.... But I distinctly wish it to be understood that I am neither a ‘Spiritualist’ nor a ‘Theosophist’.... I have no other supernatural belief than that which is taught by the Founder of our Faith....”

The plot of the story with which Miss Corelli won her spurs is simple in the extreme. The plot indeed, is a secondary matter, the main strength of the book being the Physical Electricity utilized by Heliobas—the medicine man of Chaldæan descent who has neither diploma nor license—in his cure of the young improvisatrice whose nerves have been shattered by over-devotion to musical study and whose vitality has been reduced to an alarmingly low ebb by her inability to recuperate, even in the soothing climate of the Riviera. An artist who has been saved from self-destruction and restored to absolute health by Heliobas, advises her to seek out this “Dr. Casimir” (as Heliobas is called in Paris) and put herself in his hands. This she does, with astounding results; for, from a miserable, woe-begone creature, all “palpitations and headaches and stupors,” Casimir’s potions and electrical remedies change her into an absolutely healthy woman, “plump and pink as a peach.” In Casimir’s house lives the physician’s sister, Zara, who, by means of the same medical and electrical properties, retains, at thirty-eight, the complexion and supple health of a girl of seventeen, being ever “as fresh and lovely as a summer morning.” During her stay with him, Heliobas expounds his “Electric Creed” to the young musician, and by her own wish, and by means of his extraordinary hypnotic powers—combined with a fluid preparation which he causes her to take—throws her into a trance, in the course of which “strange departure,” her soul is temporarily separated from her body and floats from the earth to other spheres. Guided by the spirit Azùl, it wanders to the “Centre of the Universe,” and, after being permitted to gaze upon the wonders and glories of the supernatural, returns to earth and once more takes its place in the work-a-day body from which it had been temporarily released. After Casimir has afforded the girl further explanations of his theories, she is admitted to the small circle of adherents to the Electric Creed. As a result of Casimir’s treatment she eventually finds herself not only in possession of complete health, but also equally perfected in her work; so much so, indeed, that while her improved looks are a delight to her friends, her playing fills them with wonder and delight.

The story ends pathetically. Just as the heroine is about to go forth into the world again, armed with new bodily vigor and tenfold her previous talent, her friend, the ever-youthful Zara, is killed by a flash of lightning. After attending the burial of his sister in Père-la-Chaise, Heliobas takes leave of his patient, and proceeds to Egypt to accustom himself to the solitude to which his sister’s death has condemned him. The reader is given to understand, however, that Heliobas and the young musician meet again later on under more cheerful conditions.

Such is a mere outline of this popular story, which is told throughout with admirable restraint and dignity, the language being moderate, and the arguments pithily expressed. The half-dozen minor characters are touched in with all the skill of an experienced novelist; and yet, when Miss Corelli set to work on this “Romance,” she was younger than her heroine is represented to be.

The actual penmanship occasioned by the writing of the book must have been as nothing compared with the very arduous thought and study connected with the mental generation of the views held by Heliobas and his fellow-believers. That the theories here exploited are well worth the consideration of all thoughtful persons, is proved by the intense interest the book has aroused in so many widely different and widely separated areas of civilization.

It ought to be remembered, too, that, at the time the “Romance” was published, the wonders of the X-rays had not been demonstrated, nor had wireless telegraphy become a fait accompli. Yet these were distinctly foretold in Marie Corelli’s first book, as also the possible wonders yet to be proved in certain new scientific theories of Sound and Color. It may instruct many to know that the theory of God’s “Central World” with which all the universe moves, is a part of the authoress’s own implicit belief in a future state of being.

CHAPTER IV
“VENDETTA” AND “THELMA”

To Miss Corelli’s host of admirers the story of “Vendetta” must be so familiar as to render a lengthy repetition of it unnecessary. “Vendetta” is, briefly, an exposition—in the form of a novel—on marital infidelity.

In August, 1886, before the book was published, Mr. Bentley wrote: “May I tell you that I have been again looking into ‘Vendetta,’ and I venture to prophesy a success? It is a powerful story, and a great stride forward on the first book ... it marches on to its awful finale with the grimness of a Greek play.”

That Mr. Bentley’s prophecy was fulfilled is clearly indicated in a letter addressed by him to the authoress on October 22d of the same year: “I have very great pleasure in sending the enclosed, because I should have been mortified beyond expression if the public had not responded to the marked power of your story. I believe you will come now steadily to the front, and I am very curious to read your new story".... “I shall yield to no reader of your works,” he again wrote, some time afterwards, “in a very high opinion of such scenes as the supper scene in ‘Vendetta’—as good as if Bulwer had written it....”

As the preface to “Vendetta” tells us, the book’s chief incidents are founded on an actual and fatal blunder which was committed in Naples during the cholera visitation of 1884. “Nothing,” says the authoress, “is more strange than truth;—nothing, at times, more terrible!” “Vendetta” is, then, practically, a true story, and certainly a very terrible one, of a Neapolitan nobleman who, being suddenly attacked by the scourge that was decimating this fair southern city, fell into a coma-like state so closely resembling death that he was hurried into a flimsy coffin, and deposited in his family vault as one deceased. Awaking from his deep swoon, the frenzied strength which would naturally come to a man finding himself in such an appalling situation, enabled him to break the frail boards of his narrow prison and escape from the vault. In the course of his wanderings, ere he found an outlet, he became acquainted with the fact that a band of brigands had utilized the mausoleum as a store-house for their ill-gotten valuables. Having helped himself liberally to a portion of the plunder, the count—with hair turned white by his harrowing experiences—retraced his steps to his house, only to find his most familiar friend consoling his supposed widow for the loss of her husband in a manner which plainly gave evidence that the amours of the guilty couple were by no means of recent origin. Fired by a desire for revenge, and materially assisted by the bandits’ secret hoard, the wronged nobleman, instead of making known his resurrection to his wife or anybody else, quitted Naples for a while. On his reappearance, six months later—well disguised by his white hair and a pair of smoked spectacles—he represented himself to be an elderly and wealthy Italian noble, lately returned from a long but voluntary exile from his native land. Playing his rôle to perfection, he soon succeeded in striking up a friendship with his wife and her lover, his ire increasing as he found that they were both supremely indifferent to the memory of the man whom they imagined to be lying in the tomb of his ancestors.

From this point the reader is compelled to pass rapidly from chapter to chapter in following out the injured husband’s scheme of retaliation. With remarkable ingenuity the novelist depicts the manner in which the elderly nobleman, making free use of his abundant means, wormed himself into the confidence of his supposed widow as well as his traitorous friend, and how he finally manœuvred the latter into a duel which proved fatal to the doer of evil, and the former into a second marriage with himself. The curtain falls on a midnight adventure which proved fatal to the twice-wed wife.

Miss Corelli appears to be thoroughly at home at Naples and among the Neapolitans. Her descriptions of the place and its people are admirable. She is well-versed in the art of painting a pretty picture, only, for the purposes of her plot, to destroy it with a great ugly dab across the smiling canvas. For the story opens as daintily as you please. Left, while still a youth, an ample fortune, Count Fabio Romani dwelt “in a miniature palace of white marble, situated on a wooded height overlooking the Bay of Naples.” His pleasure grounds “were fringed with fragrant groves of orange and myrtle, where hundreds of full-voiced nightingales warbled their love-melodies to the golden moon.”

One can imagine that a young nobleman, who, though athletic and fond of the open air, was at the same time of a bookish and dreamy disposition, might, in such a pleasant retreat, have lingered on, a bachelor, until the discretion of the thirties would have befriended him in selecting a suitable mate. As it was, he saw but few women, and did not seek their society; but, when only a few years had passed since his accession to the title, Fate cast in his way a face “of rose-tinted, childlike loveliness,” it dazzled him. And “of course I married her.”

The fair canvas is not blurred over too soon, for following the marriage come several years of bliss undimmed by any cloud. The false friend’s infidelity remains unexposed and all is peace at the Villa Romani, the husband doting and believing himself to be doted upon, and a girl-babe, “fair as one of the white anemones” which abounded in the woods surrounding the home, arriving to add pride to his love. Then the bolt falls. The cholera descends upon Naples, and with inexorable clutch claims victim after victim.

Count Fabio, strolling down to the harbor one hot early morn, comes upon a lad stricken by the dread malady, and tends him. Within an hour he is himself convulsed with excruciating agony, and, whilst stretched on a bench in a humble restaurant, loses consciousness—to awake in his coffin.

The horrors of such a restoration to life are depicted with extraordinary force, and with equal power is described the revulsion of feeling—the intoxicating delight—experienced by the unfortunate man as, having regained his liberty, he stands rejoicing in the morning light and listens to the song of a boatman who is plying his oars on the smooth surface of the Bay. It was a happy fancy to set down the words of the sailor’s carol—a gentle touch of human gladness ere the demon of vengeance whispers “Vendetta!”

With astonishing cleverness the outraged husband maps out his plan of requital; his patience, his self-control, his constant alertness are described by himself—the story is told in the first person—with a deliberation that is almost diabolical in its cold-blooded intensity.

Count Fabio scorns the idea of divorce or even an ordinary duel; his revenge must partake of nothing so prosaic as an action at law or ten minutes’ rapier play. The matter does, indeed, come to a fight at last, but even here the injured nobleman gives his rival no chance; for, by removing his smoked spectacles, and disclosing his eyes for the first time to his one-time friend, he so unnerves his opponent that the latter fires wildly and merely grazes the count’s shoulder, while Fabio’s bullet finds a vital spot in the breast of the man who in a mere prosaic action for divorce would be referred to as the co-respondent.

The count intended to kill his man, and, if his action were unsportsmanlike, he would doubtless have excused it on the ground that a vendetta wots not of fair play, the idea being that one person has to bring about the death of another, by means fair or foul. The count found it necessary to his programme to make the duel appear a perfectly fair one; but as a matter of fact he never for a moment, owing to the precautions he took, had any misgivings as to which combatant would prove successful.

In the event of this book being dramatized, the most thrilling situation will undoubtedly be pronounced the scene in the vault when Fabio, having remarried his wife, takes her to what he describes as the house where he keeps his treasure. When retreat is impossible the guilty woman discovers that he has lured her into the Romani mausoleum. In this noisome place of sepulture, amidst the bones of bygone Counts Romani, he discloses his identity, and points to his own coffin, broken asunder—a ghastly proof of the fact that his story is true. This is his night of triumph: here ends his revenge. “Trick for trick, comedy for comedy.” His once familiar friend lies dead in a grave distant but a few yards from the vault in which, held fast in a ruthless snare, stands the wife whose love had strayed from her husband to the silent one yonder.

Her first fright over, she shows resource even in these dire straits: she flees, but a locked gate bars her exit, and then she almost succeeds in stabbing her jailer. But nothing avails against his vigilance and iron strength, and her terrible surroundings turn her brain. Mad, she breaks into song—an old melody that at last, when too late, touches the heart of her husband, and he resolves to remove her from the charnel-house. But ere his new-found compassion can take action, while she is crooning over the bandits’ hoard of jewels and decking her fair arms and neck with blazing gems, a sudden upheaval of Nature, not uncommon in those parts, shakes a ponderous stone out of the vault’s roof and silences her song forever.

The conclusion is fittingly brief. The once proud noble flees from Naples to the wild woodlands of South America, where, with other settlers, he ekes out a bare existence by the rough and unremitting toil inseparable from such surroundings.

It is a relief to turn from these scenes of black and tempestuous passion to the gracious and winning personality of the Norwegian girl Thelma, whose name adorns the title-page of Miss Corelli’s third novel. Here is no pestilence, for the opening chapters seem to breathe health and strength and well-being, so redolent is the setting of all that is good and sweet.

Miss Corelli’s publisher was delighted with the manuscript. “I have read all,” wrote Mr. Bentley, on March 22d, 1887; “what a nuisance space is! Here are three hundred miles separating us, and I feel I could say what I have to say fifty times better by word of mouth than with this pen.... ‘Thelma,’ as long as it is Norwegian, is a lovely dream—a romance full of poetry and color. ‘Thelma’ in London (I speak of the book) I cannot like. Of course the contrast, if not too deep, is effective.... How glad I was to get back to Norway! The death of Olaf is very picturesquely painted, and little Britta is a charming little brick.” In a previous letter, written when he had perused up to “page 1017,” he said: “The character of Sigurd I consider a most beautiful creation. I hardly like to write what I really think of it, since either it is of the very highest order, or I have no claim to critical ability of any sort. His whole career, his half-thought-out, half-uttered exclamations, the poetry of his thoughts, his passion so noble and so pitiful, the grand and highly dramatic close of his life, must give you a position which might be denied for ‘Vendetta’ as melodrama. Here there is nothing of that sort of life—here one is in the world which held Ariel. The Bonde I like much, and Lorimer. How necessary are some defects to a perfect liking! How we are in touch with poor Humanity through its weak side! This is, I suppose, why we do not sympathize as we ought with Christ. We feel sad for ourselves, and I can only truly pity those who need it,—the sort of cry in our hearts for the lost perfection.... I could write several sheets about the novel, but I forbear. Don’t write too fast. One who can write as well as you can, can write better, and in the long run will stand better on financial grounds.”

Here is advice from one possessing great experience and much worldly wisdom. How helpful such sound and friendly counsel proved to the young novelist can readily be imagined.

“The death of Sigurd, and that also of Olaf,” wrote Mr. Bentley, on March 28th, 1887, “are far ahead in literary excellence and truth of anything in ‘She’".... “I confess I hate perfect people,” he remarks in a subsequent letter, “and that is why, on the contrary, I love Thelma’s father, have a strong sympathy with poor Sigurd as well as with many of the other characters in the story, and with that pretty little side picture of the plucky little waiting maid. I congratulate you on your next idea. It is in the Spirit of the age to pierce into the mysteries of the unseen world, and I look forward to some interesting speculations from your enquiring mind.”

Various passages in other letters testify to Mr. Bentley’s genuine appreciation of the book. “A clever lady, a great friend of mine whose opinion I value, is charmed with ‘Thelma.’ This lady was a friend of Guizot, is a keen critic, and hates our modern novels.” And again: “There is a rich imagery in ‘Thelma,’ which makes me believe you capable of becoming our first novelist, and there is a versatility which bodes well.... But God sends what is best for His children—may His best be for you!”

“Thelma” is, in truth, for some considerable way through its numerous pages, a very pretty story: by many readers, as has been said, it is counted Miss Corelli’s best achievement, albeit the authoress, in her heart of hearts, sets “Ardath” above everything that has come from her pen.

“Thelma” is quaintly unorthodox from its very start, for the two principal characters meet each other in the unconventional manner so dear to the heart of the romance-lover. A wave-lapped beach, at midnight, in the Land of the Midnight Sun—a handsome English aristocrat—a wonderful maid, who can claim direct descent from the old Vikings—some slight assistance required in the launching of a boat—are not these particulars sufficient to whet the appetite for what is bound to follow? Favored by circumstances, this chance meeting ripens into a full-fledged friendship, whence to a wooing and a wedding is no far cry in the hands of a skilful novelist.

The main theme of the story, of course, is English society as viewed by a girl who, though naturally refined and carefully educated, is, as regards the world and its ways, a child. Thelma, having become Lady Bruce-Errington, is gradually introduced to her husband’s social equals, the result being as diverting as it is pathetic; for she has to go through a process of disillusionment whereby she learns with no little pain that an invitation to dinner is not necessarily a genuine expression of regard any more than a woman’s kiss betokens the slightest affection or even liking for the woman upon whom it is bestowed.

Having imbibed all the accomplishments of the schoolroom, Thelma finds that the vanity of the world is a study which brings much bitterness of soul in the mastering. At first the young bride’s astonishing frankness is taken for a supreme effort of art; then, when the truth dawns upon her associates, her success in society advances by leaps and bounds, and she becomes what is called “the rage.” Naturally her large nature soon sickens of such adulation, and induces a strange weariness which gives place to blank despair and unutterable misery when the machinations of certain evily-disposed persons lead her to believe that her husband has bestowed his affections upon a burlesque actress. So great is her selflessness that the poor girl makes excuses for her husband’s (alleged) infidelity, and actually blames herself for not having proved sufficiently fascinating to keep him by her side. In bitter weather she quietly leaves London—bound for home. She crosses the rough seas in a cargo-boat, and arrives in Norway to find that her father is just dead. Her husband follows her by a perilous route, and, surviving the many dangers of the journey, gains her bedside in time to save her life and reason. And thereafter all is well.

In a book containing six hundred and fifteen closely-printed pages, there must of necessity be a long roll of characters. It is often the case that characters, increasing in number as a book progresses in the writing, demand more and more space for their exploitation. Hence such voluminous works as “Thelma.” In the first part of the novel the persons introduced are mainly of the bachelor kind, and, though useful in filling chairs at the literary repast, are not absolutely necessary to the plot’s working. In Book II.—“The Land of Mockery”—a new set of people is introduced, society people mostly, and their servants. In Book III.—“The Land of the Long Shadow”—the reader is taken to Norway in the winter, the novelist appropriately and strikingly making Nature’s moods harmonize with those of her pen-and-ink creations.

Miss Corelli lays on her colors with an unsparing brush—there is nothing half-and-half in her characterization. There are four “principals” in this play. Lady Winsleigh, as opposed to Thelma, fills a rôle full of wrongful possibilities in that she portrays “a woman scorned,” than whom, as we are asked to believe, Hell hath no fury whose malevolence is of a worse description. Sir Francis Lennox is, in wrong-doing, her masculine counterpart; and to balance him we have Thelma’s husband, an excellent fellow who makes a fool of himself in a truly bewildering manner. His behavior in endeavoring to bring about a reconciliation between his secretary and his secretary’s wife—the actress already referred to—is the weak spot in the book.

Much, however, that displeases the critical sense—which is fortunately not the predominating mental attribute of the novel-reading public—is obliterated by Thelma’s womanliness and attractively gentle nature. She is born to love and to suffer, and still to love, without murmur or reproach, “for better for worse, for richer for poorer,” the husband of her heart’s choice. She is a human flower, well pictured by the lines from Rossetti quoted by the authoress:

“Sweet hands, sweet hair, sweet cheeks, sweet eyes, sweet mouth
Each singly wooed and won!”

CHAPTER V
“ARDATH”—THE STORY OF A DEAD SELF—THE WONDERFUL CITY OF AL-KYRIS—THE MISSION OF THE BOOK

In no work produced by her busy pen has Miss Corelli given such range to her imagination, to her love of the beautiful and fantastic, as in “Ardath.” This, her fourth book, abounds in wonderful accounts of a strange people in a strange place. When she sets a scene of barbaric splendor in the city of Al-Kyris, she reaches great descriptive heights; she tells, indeed, a tale of beauty, of horror, and of extraordinary amours, whose like can nowhere be found, look where you will. “Ardath” stands alone—a prose poem and a startlingly vivid narrative in one. “I have read it,” wrote Mr. Bentley (referring to the work in manuscript form), “with wonder that one small head could hold it all.”

That the authoress has a quick and appreciative eye for the picturesque, her most bitter detractor will not care to deny; she loves to write of birds and flowers, field and forest, golden sunshine and blue waters. She exhibits a passion for the bygone—in architecture and in man. In her interesting miscellany, “A Christmas Greeting,” she reproves those who would take from the charming old-worldliness of Shakespeare’s birthplace by erecting in Stratford-on-Avon ugly villas and shops suggestive of Clapham or Peckham Rye. She would—as we all would—have Stratford kept as much as possible like Stratford was when Shakespeare wandered by Avon’s banks or brooded over the fire in his home near to the old Guild Church.

“Ardath” was written in a hot glow of inspiration. Its theme is drawn from the Book of Esdras, one of the apocryphal Jewish writings which, while not used for “establishment of doctrine,” are held to be of value for historical purposes and for “instruction of manners.” Like a constantly recurring refrain in a musical composition, the passage in Esdras chosen by the authoress for her text greets the reader ever and anon as he turns the pages: “So I went my way into the Field which is called ‘Ardath,’ and sat among the flowers.”

On this passage Miss Corelli built her romance, and so successfully did she work out her ideas that “Ardath” drew letters from all sorts and conditions of men—letters discussing the theories propounded in her writings, and asking for information and advice of encyclopædic character. Amongst the

A Boating Place on the Avon

A Favorite Reach on the Avon

correspondence were many flattering letters from men and women of light and leading, not only in England, but abroad. The novel under notice, which was issued in 1889, brought Miss Corelli a letter of praise from Lord Tennyson. The work was indeed so remarkable a piece of imaginative conception and picturesque writing that it appealed peculiarly to the Laureate’s sense of the poetic and artistic.

Of the mission of the book, which was of serious character, we shall speak anon. “Ardath” is one of the author’s finest efforts to further the cause of true religion. A strange outcome of the book was the proposed building, by some enthusiastic Americans, of a Corelli city in Fremont County, Colorado, U. S. A., on the Arkansas River, and a prospectus was actually issued explaining the project.

“Ardath” is divided into three parts. In the first is introduced a sceptic poet, Theos Alwyn. In the Second Book, Theos is transplanted into the city of Al-Kyris, in a bygone world, where he is supposed to have led a previous existence five thousand years before Christ’s advent. In the Third Book, Alwyn is back in London, amongst old associates, with the knowledge of all these strange experiences within him. The book has a sub-title, “The Story of a Dead Self,” and it is in the city of Al-Kyris that the peculiar “Dead Self” experience comes to Theos Alwyn, through whom Miss Corelli expounds lessons to all men—and women.

The story opens in the heart of the Caucasus Mountains, where a wild storm is gathering, and there is an early example of the descriptive delights with which the book is adorned. Miss Corelli is unique, not alone in her imaginings and in her treatment of them, but, too, in her powerful pictures of scenery. Here,

“in the lonely Caucasus heights, drear shadows drooped and thickened above the Pass of Dariel—that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above, and black abysmal depths below. Clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky.... Night was approaching, though away to the west a broad gash of crimson, a seeming wound in the breast of heaven, showed where the sun had set an hour since. Now and again the rising wind moaned sobbingly through the tall and spectral pines that, with knotted roots fast clenched in the reluctant earth, clung tenaciously to their stony vantage ground; and mingling with its wailing murmur, there came a distant hoarse roaring as of tumbling torrents, while at far-off intervals could be heard the sweeping thud of an avalanche slipping from point to point on its disastrous downward way. Through the wreathing vapors the steep, bare sides of the near mountains were pallidly visible, their icy pinnacles, like uplifted daggers, piercing with sharp glitter the density of the low-hanging haze, from which large drops of moisture began presently to ooze rather than fall. Gradually the wind increased, and soon with sudden fierce gusts shook the pine-trees into shuddering anxiety,—the red slit in the sky closed, and a gleam of forked lightning leaped athwart the driving darkness. An appalling crash of thunder followed almost instantaneously, its deep boom vibrating in sullenly grand echoes on all sides of the Pass; and then—with a swirling, hissing rush of rain—the unbound hurricane burst forth alive and furious. On, on!—splitting huge boughs and flinging them aside like straws, swelling the rivers into riotous floods that swept hither and thither, carrying with them masses of rock and stone and tons of loosened snow—on, on! with pitiless force and destructive haste, the tempest rolled, thundered, and shrieked its way through Dariel.”

It was such fine writing as this, doubtless, which caught Tennyson’s fancy on casually opening the book to inspect and arrive at conclusions concerning its contents for himself, regardless of anything reviewers might have said previously in its disfavor. It was a sympathetic perusal of its many pages that drew from him a letter of commendation which he duly dispatched to its writer. It was the poetic conception of the city of Al-Kyris which appealed to the lonely Man of Wight, pondering, in his long island walks, on the strange romance of pre-Babylonian times set down by a woman who had won the whole-hearted approval of his great contemporary, William Gladstone.

Not unlike this majestic opening of “Ardath” are many of the poet’s own sublime pen-pictures. A master of verse, standing high above all others of his time as well as above most who had preceded him, the warm encomiums that he deliberately awarded to Marie Corelli should surely silence the snarls of envious Grub Street.

But to our story. Within the Monastery of Lars, “far up among the crags crowning the ravine,” are seen a group of monks whose intonations strangely stir a listener,—an Englishman,—Alwyn, whose musings on the reverential exercises of the monks indicate the religious purpose that underlies the story which follows. For Alwyn at the time is not only a poet, but an egoist and an agnostic. What sort of fellows are these monks, he muses,—fools or knaves? They must be one or the other, thinks he, else they would not thus chant praises “to a Deity of whose existence there is, and can be, no proof.” He is none the less conscious that the ending of faith and the prevalence of what he regards as Truth, would be a dreary result, destroying the beauty of the Universe. With cold and almost contemptuous feelings he watches the proceedings of these monks, and listens to the recital of their seven Glorias:

“Glory to God, the Most High, the Supreme and Eternal!” And with one harmonious murmur of accord the brethren respond:

“Glory forever and ever! Amen!”

Vespers over, the monks leave their chapel, and immediately the agnostic poet is face to face with one who is presumably chief of the Order—the monk who had recited the Glorias. And who, indeed, is he? None other than the mystic scientist, the Heliobas of “A Romance of Two Worlds,” who has now adopted this secluded monastic life. To him Theos Alwyn explains that he is miserable, and that, though an agnostic and searcher after absolute and positive proof, he desires for a time to be deluded into a state of happiness. So, the Parisian fame of Heliobas having reached him, this modern poet does not hesitate to seek from him a peace and happiness which neither his world of success nor his agnostic opinions can give him. From Heliobas he learns that this strange monk possesses a certain spiritual force which can overpower and subdue material force—that he can release the poet’s soul—“that is, the Inner Intelligent Spirit which is the actual You”—from its house of clay and allow it an interval of freedom. Alwyn pleads—even demands—that Heliobas will exercise this power at once; but the monk, amazed and reproachful, declines.

“To-night!—without faith, preparation, or prayer,—you are willing to be tossed through the realms of space like a grain of dust in a whirling tempest? Beyond the glittering gyration of unnumbered stars—through the sword-like flash of streaming comets—through darkness—through light—through depths of profoundest silence—over heights of vibrating sound—you—you will dare to wander in these God-invested regions—you, a blasphemer and a doubter of God!”

Stranger than many of the marvels of the book is the scene that follows. It is a contest of Will between Alwyn and Heliobas. The former, concentrating all the powers of his mind upon the effort, declares that Heliobas shall release his soul:

“He felt twice a man and more than half a God ... what—what was that dazzling something in the air that flashed and whirled and shone like glittering wheels of golden flame? His lips parted—he stretched out his hands in the uncertain manner of a blind man feeling his way. ‘Oh, God!—God!’ he muttered, as though stricken by some sudden amazement; then, with a smothered gasping cry he staggered and fell heavily forward on the floor—insensible!...”

The soul of the poet had by a superhuman access of will managed to break its bonds and escape elsewhere. “But whither? Into what vast realms of translucent light or drear shadow?” Unable to answer the question, the monk betakes himself to the monastery chapel, and prays in silence till the heavy night had passed and the storm “had slain itself with the sword of its own fury on the dark slopes of the Pass of Dariel.”

Theos for a time lies as one dead. Anon he awakes, seats himself at a table, and writes. Sometimes he murmurs “Ardath,” but he goes on writing for hours. Then Heliobas rejoins him. “I have been dreaming,” Theos says. The monk points to the written manuscript as proof that the dream has been productive, at any rate. Alwyn reads from the manuscript and recites:

“With thundering notes of song sublime
I cast my sins away from me,
On stairs of sound I mount—I climb!
The angels wait and pray for me!”

But that, he remembers, is a stanza he had heard somewhere when he was a boy. Why does he now think of it? “She has waited,—so she said,—these many thousand days!” And there was the key to the dream. There was a woman in it; and an angel.

Theos explains his dream to Heliobas, tells how he had seemed to fly into darkness, how in wild despair he cried “Oh, God, where art Thou?” and heard a great rushing sound as of a strong wind beaten through with wings, while a voice, grand and sweet as a golden trumpet blown suddenly in the silence of night, answered, “Here!—and Everywhere!” And then all was brightness, a slanting stream of opaline radiance cleft the gloom, and Alwyn was uplifted by an invisible strength. And then he hears some one call him by name, “Theos, my Beloved!” and a woman of entrancing beauty appears, crowned with white flowers, and robed in a garb that seems spun from midsummer moonbeams; ... a smiling maiden-sweetness in a paradise of glad sights and sounds.

And this being, bidding Alwyn return to his own star, further directs him to seek out the Field of Ardath, where she will meet him. And so they part.

Theos Alwyn awakens from his dream madly in love with this vision of loveliness, and determines, if a Field of Ardath there is, to go there and keep the appointment. Heliobas shows him where the Field of Ardath lies. It is mentioned in the Book of Esdras, in the Apocrypha, and is described as situated four miles west of the Babylonian ruins. Alwyn decides on journeying thither, first sending the poem he had written to his London friend, Francis Villiers, with the request that as “Nourhàlma; a Love Legend of the Past,” it shall be published in the usual way.

By the waters of Babylon we next find Theos Alwyn, who is soon housed in the Hermitage, near Hillah, with one Elzear of Malyana, to whom Heliobas has supplied the traveler with a letter of introduction. So impatient is this lover to prove the truth or falsity of his mystic vision at Dariel, that, on the first night of his arrival at the Hermitage, he proceeds shortly before midnight to search for the Field of Ardath which was known to the Prophet Esdras. He sets forth, and the wondrous story of his experiences immediately commences. “Kyrie eleison! Christe eleison! Kyrie eleison!” sung by full, fresh, youthful voices in clear and harmonious unison, greets his ears; though whence comes the sound, and from whom, there is nothing to show. “Was ever madman more mad than I,” he murmurs. It is a sweet and fascinating madness none the less, for the angel-lover is true to her promise. “Behold the field thou thoughtest barren, how great a glory hath the moon unveiled!” quoth the Prophet Esdras, and as Theos treads the Field of Ardath, which had appeared, when first his eyes rested upon it, a dreary and desolate place, he finds the turf covered with white blossoms, star-shaped and glossy-leaved, with deep golden centres, wherein bright drops of dew sparkled like brilliants, and whence puffs of perfume rose like incense swung at unseen altars. And here he finds, moving sedately along through the snow-white blossoms, a graceful girl. He no longer has eyes for the flower-transfiguration of the lately barren land. “My name is Edris; I came from a far, far country, Theos,—a land where no love is wasted and no promise forgotten!” she tells him. More than that, she adds that she has waited and prayed for him through long bright æons of endless glory, and he recognizes in Edris at last the angel of his vision. She upbraids him for his doubts and unhappiness, speaks slightingly of fame as a perishable diadem; and crying “O fair King Christ, Thou shalt prevail!” she leaves him, and as she goes Theos is told “prayers are heard, and God’s great patience never tires;—learn therefore from the perils of the past, the perils of the future.” Alwyn, falling senseless, drifts into the dream wherein he is to learn the story of his new self.

The description of Theos’s dream fills over fifteen score of pages. The reader is impelled on and on, finding in every step new subject for wonder. The city of Al-Kyris is a feast of scenic splendors, the skill of the writer providing fascinating word-pictures of incidents more strange than were ever imagined in an Arabian Nights’ entertainment. And through all runs a steady and strong undercurrent made up of the solid lesson of the book, “learn from the perils of the past, the perils of the future.”

Theos Alwyn could not tell how long he slept on the Field of Ardath, for his awakening was confusing. He had a consciousness of his previous life, its conditions, his position, and opinions. All now was changed. He was before a gate leading into a walled city, the entrance to which consisted of huge massive portals apparently made of finely moulded brass, and embellished on either side by thick round stone towers from the summits of which red pennons drooped idly in the air. Through the portals was seen a wide avenue paved entirely with mosaics, and along this passed an endless stream of wayfarers. A strange city and a strange people. Fruit-sellers, carrying their lovely luscious merchandise in huge gilded baskets, stood at almost every corner; flower-girls, fair as their own flowers, bore aloft in their gracefully upraised arms wide wicker trays overflowing with odorous blossoms tied into clusters and wreaths. Theos understood the language spoken. It was perfectly familiar to him—more so than his own native tongue. What was his native tongue? Who was he? “Theos Alwyn” was all he could remember. Whence did he come? The answer was direct and decisive. From Ardath. But what was Ardath? Neither a country nor a city. And his dress!—he glanced at it, dismayed and appalled—he had not noticed it till now. It bore some resemblance to the costume of ancient Greece, and consisted of a white linen tunic and loose upper vest, both garments being kept in place by a belt of silver. From this belt depended a sheathed dagger. His feet were shod with sandals, his arms were bare to the shoulder and clasped at the upper part by two broad silver armlets richly chased. The men were for the most part arrayed like himself, though here and there he met some few whose garments were of soft silk, instead of linen, who wore gold belts in place of silver, and who carried their daggers in sheaths that were literally encrusted all over with flashing jewels.

“The costume of the women was composed of a straight clinging gown, slightly gathered at the throat and bound about the waist with a twisted girdle of silver, gold, and, in some cases, jewels; their arms, like those of the men, were bare; and their small delicate feet were protected by sandals fastened with crossed bands of ribbon coquettishly knotted. The arrangement of their hair was evidently a matter of personal taste, and not the slavish copying of any set fashion. Some allowed it to hang in loosely flowing abundance over their shoulders; others had it closely braided or coiled carelessly in a thick, soft mass at the top of the head; but all without exception wore white veils—veils long, transparent and filmy as gossamer, which they flung back or draped about them at their pleasure.”

Dazed and bewildered, Theos Alwyn gazed about him. Then, following the crowd, he was borne along to a large square which bordered on the banks of a river that ran through the city. A strange gilded vessel was seen approaching. Huge oars, like golden fins, projected from the sides of the vessel and dipped lazily now and then into the water, wielded by the hands of invisible rowers. The ship sparkled all over as though it were carved out of one great burning jewel. Golden hangings, falling in rich, loose folds, draped it gorgeously from stem to stern; gold cordage looped the sails. On the deck a band of young girls, clad in white and crowned with flowers, knelt, playing softly on quaintly shaped instruments; and a cluster of tiny, semi-nude boys, fair as young cupids, were grouped in pretty, reposeful attitudes along the edge of the gilded prow, holding garlands of red and yellow blossoms which trailed down to the surface of the water.

Theos, gazing dreamily and wonderingly upon the scene, was suddenly roused to feverish excitement, and with a smothered cry of ecstasy fixed his straining eager gaze on one supreme, fair figure—the central glory of the marvelous picture.

“A woman or a Goddess?—a rainbow Flame in mortal shape?—a spirit of earth, air, fire, water?—or a Thought of Beauty embodied into human sweetness and made perfect? Clothed in gold attire, and girded with gems, she stood, leaning indolently against the middle mast of the vessel, her great sombre dusky eyes resting drowsily on the swarming masses of people, whose frenzied roar of rapture and admiration sounded like the breaking of billows.”

Beauty-stricken, Theos was roughly brought back to a sense of his position as a stranger in the city. Al-Kyris was given up to the worship of a serpent, Nagâya. This woman who had passed was Nagâya’s High Priestess, the chief power in the place. All the people worshiped her, and Theos had not, with them, fallen down before her. Immediately he was seized and roughly handled by the mob, who proclaimed him an infidel and a spy. At this opportune moment the Poet Laureate of the Realm, one Sah-Lûma, made his appearance. In Al-Kyris the Laureate was a great man, next only indeed to Zephorânim, the King.

Sah-Lûma rebuked the crowd for their ill-treatment of the stranger; and then, hearing that Theos was a poet from a far country, took him to his own palace.

Probably no vainer person than Sah-Lûma ever existed, whether in a real or imaginary world. They were very artistic in Al-Kyris. Nobody ever seemed to work except the black slaves. Apparently there was no necessity for that. The people, including the King, positively doted on poets. No wonder Sah-Lûma was the Prince of Egoists, seeing that he was the chief poet in Al-Kyris.

The Laureate explained the religion of Al-Kyris to his guest:

“We believe in no actual creed,—who does? We accept a certain given definition of a supposititious Divinity, together with the suitable maxims and code of morals accompanying that definition—we call this Religion,—and we wear it as we wear our clothing, for the sake of necessity and decency,—though truly we are not half so concerned about it as about the far more interesting details of taste in attire. Still, we have grown used to our doctrine, and some of us will fight with each other for the difference of a word respecting it,—and as it contains within itself many seeds of discord and contradiction, such dissensions are frequent, especially among the priests, who, were they but true to their professed vocation, should be able to find ways of smoothing over all apparent inconsistencies and maintaining peace and order. Of course, we, in union with all civilized communities, worship the Sun, even as thou must do,—in this one leading principle at least, our faith is universal!

“‘And yet,’ he went on thoughtfully, ‘the well-instructed know through our scientists and astronomers (many of whom are now languishing in prison for the boldness of their researches and discoveries) that the Sun is no divinity at all, but simply a huge Planet,—a dense body surrounded by a luminous flame-darting atmosphere,—neither self-acting nor omnipotent, but only one of many similar orbs moving in strict obedience to fixed mathematical laws. Nevertheless, this knowledge is wisely kept back as much as possible from the multitude;—for, were science to unveil her marvels too openly to semi-educated and vulgarly constituted minds, the result would be, first Atheism, next Republicanism, and, finally, Anarchy and Ruin. If these evils—which, like birds of prey, continually hover about all great kingdoms—are to be averted, we must, for the welfare of the country and people, hold fast to some stated form and outward observance of religious belief.’”

These views were strikingly similar to those held by Theos when he was in the world, and he could thus endorse the further assertions of Sah-Lûma, who deemed even a false religion better for the masses than none at all, urging that men were closely allied to brutes. If the moral sense ceased to restrain them they at once leaped the boundary line and gave as much rein to their desires and appetites as hyenas and tigers. And in some natures the moral sense was only kept alive by fear—fear of offending some despotic invisible force that pervaded the Universe, and whose chief and most terrible attribute was not so much creative as destructive power. Thus Sah-Lûma again on the theology of Al-Kyris:

“To propitiate and pacify an unseen Supreme Destroyer is the aim of all religions,—and it is for this reason we add to our worship of the Sun that of the White Serpent, Nagâya the Mediator. Nagâya is the favorite object of the people’s adoration;—they may forget to pay their vows to the Sun, but never to Nagâya, who is looked upon as the emblem of Eternal Wisdom, the only pleader whose persuasions avail to soften the tyrannic humor of the Invincible Devourer of all things. We know how men hate Wisdom and cannot endure to be instructed; yet they prostrate themselves in abject crowds before Wisdom’s symbol every day in the Sacred Temple yonder,—though I much doubt whether such constant devotional attendance is not more for the sake of Lysia, than the Deified Worm!”

Lysia, High Priestess of Nagâya, was the charmer of the God of Al-Kyris, charmer of the serpent and of the hearts of men. “The hot passion of love is to her a toy, clasped and unclasped so!—in the pink hollow of her hand; and so long as she retains the magic of her beauty, so long will Nagâya-worship hold Al-Kyris in check.” Otherwise,—who was to know? Not Sah-Lûma and not Theos, though both were to learn later. Already in Al-Kyris, it was explained to Theos by his new friend, there were philosophers who were tired of the perpetual sacrifices and the shedding of innocent blood that marked the worship of the city. There was a Prophet Khosrûl who even denounced Lysia and Nagâya in the open streets, and gave out the faith that was in him—that far away in a circle of pure Light the true God existed,—a vast, all-glorious Being, who, with exceeding marvelous love, controlled and guided Creation towards some majestic end. Furthermore, Khosrûl held that thousands of years thence (the times described in Al-Kyris are assumed to be 5000 B.C.) this God would embody a portion of His own existence in human form, “and will send hither a wondrous creature, half God, half man, to live our life, die our death, and teach us by precept and example the surest way to eternal happiness.”

It is the prophet who gave out this faith against whom the King and the people of Al-Kyris are mostly incensed. They prefer their worship of Lysia, “The Virgin Priestess of the Sun and the Serpent,” who “receives love as statues may receive it—moving all others to frenzy she is herself unmoved.” So ’tis said. There is, however, the threatening legend:

“When the High Priestess
Is the King’s mistress
Then fall Al-Kyris!”

And the fall of Al-Kyris is imminent.

To the splendors of the court of Zephorânim, King of Al-Kyris, Theos is duly introduced by the Poet Laureate. He finds there that the poetic muse is adored, and Sah-Lûma is scarcely less esteemed than the King, who, indeed, his friend and devotee, would almost make the Poet supreme. The government and religion of Al-Kyris is mainly humbug. They sin freely and get absolution at an annual feast where a maiden is always slaughtered and offered as a sacrifice to Nagâya.

Theos has some quaint experiences. His great friend Sah-Lûma enchants the court with a poem—one that Theos faintly remembers he himself had written in days of old. The poet and his friend, after a court function, proceed to a reception at the Palace of Lysia. There they witness and take part in marvelous scenes; and the garden of the Palace gives the novelist an opportunity for those beautiful word-pictures that her pen evolves so brilliantly. The poets attend a midnight reception and there witness an extraordinary ballet which follows a banquet even more astounding in its incidents and in its revelations of the real character of this so-called Virgin Priestess. One, Nir-jalis, who had received favors from Lysia, and who, filled and flooded with wine, was indiscreet in his utterances, is given by her a cup of poison—the Chalice of Oblivion—which he drinks, and before a laughing, bacchanalian crowd dies a horrible death with the jeering words of Lysia in his ears, her contemptuous smile upon him. Nobody cares. In Al-Kyris, and certainly in Lysia’s Palace, they enjoy such scenes.

Theos, amazed, watches all. He, too, has another strange revelation before the night is through. In the midst of the revelry he hears a chime of bells, which reminds him of the village church of his earlier years, and of odd suggestions of fair women who were wont to pray for those they loved, and who believed their prayers would be answered. As he meditates thereon he is suddenly seized and borne swiftly along till in the moonlight he recognizes Lysia. Dramatic indeed is the scene that follows. Theos makes a passionate declaration of love to her, and has the promise from Lysia: “Thou shalt be honored above the noblest in the land ... riches, power, fame, all shall be thine—if thou wilt do my bidding.” The bidding is “Kill Sah-Lûma,” and it is Lysia who shows Theos his sleeping friend and places in his hand the dagger with which to strike. Horrified at the suggestion, Theos flings the weapon from him, escapes from the Palace, and reaches the home of Sah-Lûma, where, later, the Poet Laureate rejoins him.

The sands of Al-Kyris were fast running out, and events crowded one upon the other in rapid succession. Theos was terrorized when Sah-Lûma recited “the latest offspring of my fertile genius—my lyrical romance ‘Nourhàlma.’” Then the full title was proclaimed—“Nourhàlma: A Love-Legend of the Past”; and we are given the first line of this mysterious poem:

“A central sorrow dwells in perfect joy.”

It was the poem written by Theos after the vision of Edris! He had to hear Sah-Lûma proclaim it as his own; to praise it, too, as the work of the other. Assuredly the cup of self-abnegation for Theos Alwyn was very full. As they talked about the poem a great commotion was heard in the streets. Theos and Sah-Lûma found themselves in the midst of a turbulent crowd, who, for once, even disregarded the Poet Laureate. The Prophet Khosrûl was predicting in the midst of excited multitudes the early destruction of the city, and the coming of the Redeemer. Upon Theos was again forced the knowledge which was his in the world whence he had been transported to this pre-Christian age; and, suddenly roused to excitement, he declared to these talented barbarians—“He HAS come! He died for us, and rose again from the dead more than eighteen hundred years ago!”

From the astonishment caused by this declaration the people had scarcely been roused by words from Sah-Lûma, when King Zephorânim appeared. Khosrûl, having delivered his last dread warning, fell dead; and his decease was immediately followed by the collapse of the great obelisk of the city. The people’s final terrors had begun. The last words of the Prophet Khosrûl had been a reiteration of the old forgotten warning regarding the relations of the High Priestess and the King, and the fall of the city was foretold for that night.

Escaping the destruction caused by the fall of the obelisk, Sah-Lûma and Theos returned to the Palace of the former, and there the Poet Laureate for the first time showed real emotion on learning that his favorite slave, Niphrâta, had left him forever. Soon Sah-Lûma and Theos were summoned by Zèl, High Priest of the Sacrificial Altar, to take part in the Great Sacrifice; for the people were terrified by the many strange happenings and were about to join in solemn unison to implore the favor of Nagâya and the gods. The Temple of Nagâya was magnificently decorated for this New Year’s Festival. There Sah-Lûma found that the maiden to be sacrificed was Niphrâta, and he made an impassioned demand, then an appeal, for her life. Niphrâta was permitted her choice, but she repudiated Sah-Lûma, appearing to be in love with some ghostly representation of the Poet and to be unconscious of his material existence. She had, she plaintively cried, waited for happiness so long; and, the Sacrificial Priest calling for the victim, she rushed upon the knife the Priest held ready for her. One second and she was seen speeding towards the knife; the next—and the whole place was enveloped in darkness. Fire broke out in every part of the Temple. A terrible scene of destruction was enacted, and the terrified people rushed hither and thither in the effort to save their lives;—efforts vain, because the last day of the city had come,—Al-Kyris was doomed,—there was rescue neither for people nor priests.

Sah-Lûma, death being certain, desired to die with Lysia, but his claim was contested by the King. Sovereign and Poet then learned that they had been rivals in love. The prophecy of Khosrûl was being fulfilled. The barbarous Lysia, even in these last moments, was fierce in her hate, and demanded of the King that he should kill Sah-Lûma. Her last order was obeyed. She could secure the death of the Poet, but she could not save herself. Her own death was one of the most terrible and appalling scenes ever conceived or described. Nagâya, the huge snake that the people of Al-Kyris had worshiped, claimed its own. Frightened by the flames, in its fear it turned upon its mistress Lysia, and, with the King vainly striving to drag her from the coils of the python, the High Priestess, chief of the city of lies, atheism, and humbug, died a death which she had many times remorselessly and gleefully decreed for others.

Theos, gazing at the funeral pyre, as it vaguely seemed to him, of a wasted love and a dead passion, passed from the scene, taking with him the dead body of his friend the Poet. And as he kept his steadfast gaze on Sah-Lûma’s corpse, “the dead Poet’s eyes grew into semblance of his own eyes, the dead Sah-Lûma’s face smiled spectrally back at him in the image of his own face!—it was as though he beheld the Picture of Himself, slain and ‘reflected in a magician’s mirror!’” Humbly he prayed to God to pardon his sins and to teach him what he should know; and again he heard soft, small voices singing Kyrie Eleison, and AWOKE to find himself on the Field of Ardath, the dawn just breaking, and the angel Edris near him. Then Edris told him that in the past he had been Sah-Lûma, that in those days he would neither hear Christ nor believe in Him, and that his talents had been misused; she also told Theos how his future years should be spent. She promised that afterwards he should meet her in the highest Heaven, but “not till then, unless the longing of thy love compels.”

It is in that portion of the work called “Poet and Angel” that the serious aim of Marie Corelli in writing this romance is clearly and emphatically brought out. Theos Alwyn is himself once again; but he is a very different self. Returning to London he is received warmly by his friend Villiers, and hears that “Nourhâlma” has brought him much of fame and profit. He had ceased to care for one or the other. He tells Villiers he has become a Christian, anxious, so far as he is able, to follow a faith so grand, and pure, and true. In his declarations on the subject we hear what our author again and again urges in many books—that Christianity and Religion are not determined by one sect or the other. In the words of Theos:

“I am not a ‘convert’ to any particular set form of faith,—what I care for is the faith itself. One can follow and serve Christ without any church dogma. He has Himself told us plainly, in words simple enough for a child to understand, what He would have us do,—and though I, like many others, must regret the absence of a true Universal Church where the servants of Christ may meet all together without a shadow of difference in opinion, and worship Him as He should be worshiped, still, that is no reason why I should refrain from endeavoring to fulfil, as far as in me lies, my personal duty towards Him. The fact is, Christianity has never yet been rightly taught, grasped, or comprehended;—moreover, as long as men seek through it their own worldly advantage, it never will be,—so that the majority of people are really as yet ignorant of its true spiritual meaning, thanks to the quarrels and differences of sects and preachers. But, notwithstanding the unhappy position of religion at the present day, I repeat I am a Christian, if love for Christ and implicit belief in Him can make me so.”

This is the text on which many of Alwyn’s powerful arguments are based, in dealing, both in and out of society, with those opinions of sceptics and agnostics which had formerly commended themselves to him but which he now combats with convincing clearness and strength. To emphasize his position he quotes that terse rebuke of Carlyle’s, in “Sartor Resartus,” as to the uselessness of Voltaire’s work:

“Cease, my much respected Herr von Voltaire,—shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thy six-and-thirty quartos and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos and folios and flying sheets of reams, printed before and since on the same subject, all needed to convince us of so little! But what next? Wilt thou help us to embody the Divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live? What! thou hast no faculty of that kind? Only a torch for burning and no hammer for building?—Take our thanks then—and thyself away!”

The theologian and the lay thinker alike must follow with keen interest the arguments of Theos Alwyn against atheism, materialism, and, what Miss Corelli calls, Paulism. Uncompromisingly should those writers be denounced who take immorality for their theme, and achieve considerable sales thereby. The declarations of Alwyn are of particular interest because in them expression is given to many of Marie Corelli’s own views on sacred things. The man or woman who is bewildered by the quarrels of the religious sects of these days, and whose bewilderment is increased by the teachings of the cynics, may well exclaim with Alwyn what a howling wilderness this world would be if given over entirely to materialism, and conclude with him that, if it were, scarce a line of division could be drawn between man and the brute beasts of the field! “I consider,” says the poet, “that if you take the hope of an after-joy and blessedness away from the weary, perpetually toiling Million, you destroy, at one wanton blow, their best, purest, and noblest aspirations. As for the Christian Religion, I cannot believe that so grand and holy a Symbol is perishing among us. We have a monarch whose title is ‘Defender of the Faith,’—we live in the age of civilization which is primarily the result of that faith,—and if, as it is said, Christianity is exploded,—then certainly the greatness of this hitherto great nation is exploding with it! But I do not think, that because a few sceptics uplift their wailing ‘All is vanity’ from their self-created desert of agnosticism, therefore the majority of men and women are turning renegades from the simplest, most humane, most unselfish Creed that ever the world has known. It may be so, but, at present, I prefer to trust in the higher spiritual instinct of man at his best, rather than accept the testimony of the lesser Unbelieving against the greater Many, whose strength, comfort, patience and endurance, if these virtues come not from God, come not at all.”

To those who, through the atheistic views of some in the churches and of the hosts outside, begin to feel doubt as to the truth of the Christian faith, this book “Ardath” will be of enormous value. It will strengthen their faith and aid greatly to carry conviction to those who pause, unable to decide amid the chaotic teachings of conflicting theorists. We praise this book more especially for its virtue as an antidote to the pitiful writings of some female novelists whose vicious themes must do much harm amongst the women of the day. “If women give up their faith,” declares Alwyn to the Duchess de la Santoisie, “let the world prepare for strange disaster! Good, God-loving women,—women who pray,—women who hope,—women who inspire men to do the best that is in them,—these are the safety and glory of nations! When women forget to kneel,—when women cease to teach their children the ‘Our Father,’ by whose grandly simple plea Humanity claims Divinity as its origin,—then shall we learn what is meant by ‘men’s hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.’ A woman who denies Christ repudiates Him, Who, above all others, made her sex as free and honored as everywhere in Christendom it is. He never refused woman’s prayers,—He had patience for her weakness,—pardon for her sins,—and any book written by woman’s hand that does Him the smallest shadow of wrong is to me as gross an act as that of one who, loaded with benefits, scruples not to murder his benefactor!”

The reading of “Ardath” will help many to the conviction of Theos Alwyn—“God Exists. I, of my own choice, prayer, and hope, voluntarily believe in God, in Christ, in angels, and in all things beautiful, and pure, and grand! Let the world and its ephemeral opinions wither; I will not be shaken down from the first step of the ladder whereon one climbs to Heaven!”

Such is the teaching of this remarkable book “Ardath,” which inculcates these lessons interwoven with a romantic story of fascinating interest.

Towards its close there occurs, again in the person and in the words of Heliobas, a scathing comment upon “spiritualists,” for whom six tests are suggested:

“Firstly.—Do they serve themselves more than others?—If so, they are entirely lacking in spiritual attributes.

“Secondly.—Will they take money for their professed knowledge?—If so, they condemn themselves as paid tricksters.

“Thirdly.—Are the men and women of commonplace and thoroughly material life?—Then, it is plain they cannot influence others to strive for a higher existence.

“Fourthly.—Do they love notoriety?—If they do, the gates of the unseen world are shut upon them.

“Fifthly.—Do they disagree among themselves, and speak against one another?—If so, they contradict by their own behavior all the laws of spiritual force and harmony.

“Sixthly and lastly.—Do they reject Christ?—If they do, they know nothing whatever about Spiritualism, there being none without Him.”

There is a charming finale. Theos marries the angel Edris. An angel? Yes; but an angel because a woman, most purely womanly. That is all, and all women can be angels—“A Dream of Heaven made human!”

CHAPTER VI
“WORMWOOD” AND “THE SOUL OF LILITH”

Some day a selection of extracts from “The Works of Marie Corelli” will be published, and excellent reading it will prove. For, scattered about the novelist’s goodly list of books, one may light on many interesting little observations concerning human nature which will well bear reproduction without the context. In the course of this biography a modest choice of Miss Corelli’s thoughts on religion, men, women, education, and such-like topics will be found; but it is impossible in the narrow scope of the present publication to quote everything that one would like to.

Early in “Wormwood” there occurs a passage of the kind to which we refer. It is a pretty description of the ill-fated heroine of the story, and of her “soft and trifling chatter.” Pauline de Charmilles is eighteen, newly home from school—“a child as innocent and fresh as a flower just bursting into bloom, with no knowledge of the world into which she was entering, and with certainly no idea of the power of her own beauty to rouse the passions of men.” Pauline, by mutual parental head-nodding, is thrown much into the society of young Beauvais (who tells the story), a wealthy banker’s son. His description of the girl forms the passage alluded to above:

“Pauline de Charmilles was not a shy girl, but by this I do not mean it to be in the least imagined that she was bold. On the contrary, she had merely that quick brightness and esprit which is the happy heritage of so many Frenchwomen, none of whom think it necessary to practice or assume the chilly touch-me-not diffidence and unbecoming constraint which make the young English “mees” such a tame and tiresome companion to men of sense and humor. She was soon perfectly at her ease with me, and became prettily garrulous and confidential, telling me stories of her life at Lausanne, describing the loveliness of the scenery on Lake Leman, and drawing word-portraits of her teachers and schoolmates with a facile directness and point that brought them at once before the mind’s eye as though they were actually present.”

Pauline’s ingenuousness and alluring looks quickly enslave young Beauvais. He cannot understand the reason of this fascination. He quite realizes that she is a bread-and-butter schoolgirl, and “a mere baby in thought,” but—she is beautiful. So, having granted that the net in which he finds himself immeshed is purely a physical one, he thus descants on the reasonableness of his fall:

“Men never fall in love at first with a woman’s mind; only with her body. They may learn to admire the mind afterwards, if it prove worth admiration, but it is always a secondary thing. This may be called a rough truth, but it is true, for all that. Who marries a woman of intellect by choice? No one; and if some unhappy man does it by accident, he generally regrets it. A stupid beauty is the most comfortable sort of housekeeper going, believe me. She will be strict with the children, scold the servants, and make herself look as ornamental as she can, till age and fat render ornament superfluous. But a woman of genius, with that strange subtle attraction about her which is yet not actual beauty,—she is the person to be avoided if you would have peace; if you would escape reproach; if you would elude the fixed and melancholy watchfulness of a pair of eyes haunting you in the night.”

The love of Beauvais is apparently returned by Pauline, and all goes merrily in the direction of marriage-bells, whose ringing seems a matter of no great distance off when the two young people become betrothed; although it is apparent to a great friend of Pauline’s, Heloïse St. Cyr, that the schoolgirl is not so sure of herself in the matter of being in love as she should be.

Among the many charmingly French touches in this book is Pauline’s reassuring speech to her lover. “Be satisfied, Gaston; I am thy very good little fiancée, who is very, very fond of thee, and happy in thy company, voilà tout!” And then, taking a rose from her bouquet-de-corsage, she fastens it in his button-hole, enchanting him completely.

Then comes Silvion Guidèl, nephew of M. Vaudron, Curé of the parish in which live the De Charmilles. Guidèl is destined for the priesthood and possesses considerable personal charms. Beauvais père comments on them:

“A remarkably handsome fellow, that Guidèl!” he said. “Dangerously so, for a priest! It is fortunate that his lady penitents will not be able to see him very distinctly through the confessional gratings, else who knows what might happen! He has a wonderful gift of eloquence too. Dost thou like him, Gaston?”

“No!” I replied frankly, and at once, “I cannot say I do!”

My father looked surprised.

“But why?”

“Impossible to tell, mon père. He is fascinating, he is agreeable, he is brilliant; but there is something in him that I mistrust!”

As events prove, Beauvais fils has only too good reason to distrust the embryo priest. Soon after, Beauvais père is called away to London for several weeks, and, as a consequence of the superintending of the Paris banking house falling entirely to the son, Gaston sees but little of his fiancée. But he is often in the company of Silvion Guidèl, to whom he becomes much attached in spite of his previous feelings towards M. Vaudron’s nephew. So, writing the history of those days long afterwards, Beauvais acknowledges that he was mistaken in changing his attitude towards Guidèl:

“Though first impressions are sometimes erroneous, I believe there is a balance in favor of their correctness. If a singular antipathy seizes you for a particular person at first sight, no matter how foolish it may seem, you may be almost sure that there is something in your two natures that is destined to remain in constant opposition. You may conquer it for a time; it may even change, as it did in my case, to profound affection; but, sooner or later, it will spring up again, with tenfold strength and deadliness; the reason of your first aversion will be made painfully manifest, and the end of it all will be doubly bitter because of the love that for a brief while sweetened it. I say I loved Silvion Guidèl!—and in proportion to the sincerity of that love, I afterwards measured the intensity of my hate!”

The wedding day draws closer, and Beauvais remains blind to everything save his own joy and the bliss which he fondly imagines will result from the union. True, he sometimes notices a certain lack of enthusiasm in Pauline’s view of the approaching ceremony, but he attributes this and her wistfulness of expression to “the nervous excitement a young girl would naturally feel at the swift approach of her wedding day.” Strangely enough, Guidèl, too, shows signs of physical and mental distress, but when Beauvais rallies him on his manner and appearance, he puts the young banker off with light speeches in which, however, there is a certain bitterness which puzzles the latter considerably. However, Beauvais still suspects nothing. At length Pauline shatters all his dreams of the future, and makes him a miserable wretch for life, by confessing that she loves Silvion Guidèl, that her love is returned, and that, in consequence of this mutual passion, the worst of possible fates has befallen her.

Then Beauvais flies to absinthe drinking, which is the keynote of the story. From that time on it is all absinthe. A broken-down painter, André Gessonex, lures him on to this disastrous form of begetting forgetfulness; and this is the first step down the short steep hill which leads to the young banker’s utter ruin. Having once tasted the potent and fascinating mixture, he returns to it again and again, and gradually it warps him, physically and mentally, finally transforming him into one of the meanest scoundrels in Paris.

But this is after many days. On the morning after his first bout of absinthe drinking, Beauvais decides to challenge Silvion, but discovers that the betrayer of Pauline has disappeared from Paris. Thereupon, though sore at heart, he determines to save Pauline’s family an infinity of shame by marrying the girl; and so the preparations continue.

But in the interval that elapses between this decision and the date fixed for the nuptials, the absinthe works a terrible change in Beauvais’ attitude towards Pauline, with the result that, when the day of the ceremony arrives, he denounces her before her parents and the large assembly of guests as the cast-off mistress of Guidèl, and harshly refuses to make her his wife.

The awful effect of this speech may be imagined; poor Pauline’s looks confirm the truth of his statement; the guests quietly leave the broken-hearted parents with their daughter; there is no marriage. Take the decorations down; fling the wedding feast to the mendicants who whine round the house; there is no marriage!

Even Beauvais père turns on his miscreant of a son as they quit the desolate girl’s abode:

“Gaston, you have behaved like a villain! I would not have believed that my son could have been capable of such a coward’s vengeance!”

I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders.

“You are excited, mon père! What have I done save speak the truth, and, as the brave English say, shame the devil?”

“The truth—the truth!” said my father passionately. “Is it the truth? and if it is, could it not have been told in a less brutal fashion? You have acted like a fiend!—not like a man! If Silvion Guidèl be a vile seducer, and that poor child Pauline his credulous, ruined victim, could you not have dealt with him and have spared her? God! I would as soon wring the neck of a bird that trusted me, as add any extra weight to the sorrows of an already broken-hearted woman!”

More than this, the indignant old man gives his son a substantial sum of money, and turns him out of his house.

Pauline, too, leaves her home in a mysterious and sudden fashion, without telling any one where she is going. The death of her father, M. de Charmilles, quickly follows. Beauvais drinks himself stupid every night, and spends his days doggedly hunting for Pauline, who, he feels sure, has hidden herself in the loathsome slums in which Paris abounds. And in time he does meet her, but long before this he encounters her seducer, Silvion Guidèl, and, after a mad struggle, throttles him, and casts the corpse into the Seine.

The murder is not traced home to Beauvais, who drinks more deeply than ever of the deadly absinthe, and becomes more surely its slave with every draught. Gessonex, the disreputable artist who introduced him to this form of vice, ends his failure of a career by shooting himself on the pavement outside of a café after one of these carousals, and it is while Beauvais is visiting the artist’s grave that he at last sets eyes on Pauline, kneeling by the tomb of the De Charmilles. For he cannot mistake the figure crouching by that closed door: “She was slight, and clad in poorest garments—the evening wind blew her thin shawl about her like a gossamer sail,—but the glimmer of the late sunlight glistened on a tress of nut-brown hair that had escaped from its coils and fell loosely over her shoulders,—and my heart beat thickly as I looked,—I knew—I felt that woman was Pauline!”

When he endeavors to track her to her lodgings, however, she unconsciously eludes him, and he obtains no clue as to where she may be found.

Weeks go by, and Beauvais swallows more and more absinthe by way of deadening thought and feeling. The insidious poison is beginning to tell on his brain. At times he is seized by the notion that everything about him is of absurdly abnormal proportions, or the reverse. “Men and women would, as I looked at them, suddenly assume the appearance of monsters both in height and breadth, and again, would reduce themselves in the twinkling of an eye to the merest pigmies.” So, while the absintheur’s brain and body decline, the summer fades into autumn, and he is still looking for Pauline. At length, one dismal November evening, whilst wandering home in his usual heavily drugged condition, he hears a woman singing in one of the by-streets. She is singing a well-known convent chant, the “Guardian Angel”:

“Viens sur ton aile, Ange fidèle
Prendre mon cœur!
C’est le plus ardent de mes vœux;—
Près de Marie
Place-moi bientôt dans les cieux!
O guide aimable, sois favorable
A mon désir
Et viens finir
Ma triste vie
Avec Marie!"

It is Pauline at last! Then the absinthe tells its tale, and Beauvais completes his scheme of vengeance. With cold-blooded ferocity he confesses that he has slain her lover, whereupon the desolate girl, the hopes she had fostered of meeting Silvion again being forever shattered, buries her woes in the dark bosom of the river of sighs.

Beauvais haunts the Morgue for two days, and his patience is rewarded. Here is a piece of description which, in its way, is perfect:

“An afternoon came when I saw the stretcher carried in from the river’s bank with more than usual pity and reverence,—and I, pressing in with the rest of the morbid spectators, saw the fair, soft, white body of the woman I had loved and hated and maddened and driven to her death, laid out on the dull hard slab of stone like a beautiful figure of frozen snow. The river had used her tenderly—poor little Pauline!—it had caressed her gently and had not disfigured her delicate limbs or spoilt her pretty face;—she looked so wise, so sweet and calm, that I fancied the cold and muddy Seine must have warmed and brightened to the touch of her drowned beauty!

“Yes!—the river had fondled her!—had stroked her cheeks and left them pale and pure,—had kissed her lips and closed them in a childlike, happy smile,—had swept all her soft hair back from the smooth white brow just to show how prettily the blue veins were penciled under the soft transparent skin,—had closed the gentle eyes and deftly pointed the long dark lashes in a downward sleepy fringe,—and had made of one little dead girl so wondrous and piteous a picture, that otherwise hard-hearted women sobbed at sight of it, and strong men turned away with hushed footsteps and moistened eyes.”

And that, practically, is the end of the story, for Gaston Beauvais, having revenged himself on his sweetheart and her betrayer, has nought to do now save drink absinthe. Delirium tremens ensues, Beauvais is laid up for a month, and at the end of that period the doctor speaks plain words of wisdom and warning to him:

“You must give it up,” he said decisively, “at once,—and forever. It is a detestable habit,—a horrible craze of the Parisians, who are positively deteriorating in blood and brain by reason of their passion for this poison. What the next generation will be, I dread to think! I know it is a difficult business to break off anything to which the system has grown accustomed,—but you are still a young man, and you cannot be too strongly warned against the danger of continuing in your present course of life. Moral force is necessary,—and you must exert it. I have a large medical practice, and cases like yours are alarmingly common, and as much on the increase as morphinomania amongst women; but I tell you frankly, no medicine can do good where the patient refuses to employ his own power of resistance. I must ask you, therefore, for your own sake, to bring all your will to bear on the effort to overcome this fatal habit of yours, as a matter of duty and conscience.”

But the physician’s admonition falls on heedless ears. Beauvais returns to the alluring glass, and the book ends with the confession that he is a confirmed absintheur—“a thing more abject than the lowest beggar that crawls through Paris whining for a sou!—a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous, that if you met me by chance in the daytime, you would probably shriek for sheer alarm!”

Such is the graphic and terrible picture drawn by Marie Corelli of the effects of this iniquitous draught. If Beauvais had not been tempted by Gessonex to taste it, it is not probable that Pauline’s piteous confession would have resulted in such wholesale tragedy; for Heloïse St. Cyr, the sweet woman-friend of the bride-elect’s, dies, too, and so an entire happy household is destroyed by reason of one man’s uncontrollable savagery.

Had Beauvais never put his lips to the fatal glass, he would in all probability, on hearing what had befallen his sweetheart, have quietly broken off the match. For, it must be remembered, he was a respectable young banker, of sober mien and quiet ways, not a Bohemian and frequenter of all-night cafés. But he tasted absinthe, and so brought about his undoing, as many another young Parisian is bringing it about at the present day. Here is the novelist’s fierce denunciation of the vice:

“Paris, steeped in vice and drowned in luxury, feeds her brain on such loathsome literature as might make even coarse-mouthed Rabelais and Swift recoil. Day after day, night after night, the absinthe-drinkers crowd the cafés, and swill the pernicious drug that of all accursed spirits ever brewed to make of man a beast, does most swiftly fly to the seat of reason to there attack and dethrone it;—and yet, the rulers do nothing to check the spreading evil,—the world looks on, purblind as ever and selfishly indifferent,—and the hateful cancer eats on into the breast of France, bringing death closer every day!”

“Wormwood” is undoubtedly a work of genius—a strange, horrible book, yet fraught with a tremendous moral. The story of inhuman vengeance goes swiftly on, without a stop or stay; one feels that the little bride-girl is doomed, that the priest must die, that unutterable misery must be the final lot of all the actors in the story.

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.