MARIE CORELLIS "EASIER CHRISTIAN."

Otago Witness, Issue 2436, 21 November 1900, Page 68

MARIE CORELLIS "EASIER CHRISTIAN."

A SCATHING REVIEW. Of the large number of notices of Miss Corelli"s "Master - Christian" that have lately appeared in Home and colonial journals, all of a. condemnatory nature, the pride of place must be yielded to Mr Henry Murray. This gentleman, in the Sunday ! Sun, in a criticism of marked ability, ap- j plie& the lash unsparingly, and in a keen, ! incisive style lays bare the shortcomings and glaring inconsistencies of the writer ' of this latest addition to the long list of j sensational novels. We have been obliged I to curtail Mr Murray's review, but our ' readers will find sufficient to interest them in the following : — j Upon what precise plane of artistic [ achievement, among Miss Marie Corela's ' other books, " The Master - Christian " i should be placed, is a question which I J must leave to critics wrth a wider know- j ledge of her work than I can boast. Ex- j cept for a perfunctory skimming of the ' pages of " The Sorrows of Satan and ' '" Barabbas " at the moments of their jmb- ' lication, I know no more of her literary j achievement than I have learned by hearing her books discussed in general society, 01from occasional notices in the critical press. Criticism has, I am told, been unkind and | unjust to Miss Corelli, and her contempt | for its jn'o^essors has been tolerably well ' advertised. Quite unbiassed by • the com- ' mon sentiments of the lady and her critics ' one for another, I have read "The Master- ! Christian " with the object of giving anhonest opinion of its merits for whatever that opinion may be worth. And in view of the enormous and ever-growing popularity Miss -Corelli's work enjoys with a vast section' of that curiously heterogeneous ' mass, the English-reading public, can only i hope that " The Master Christian " does ! not represent its author at her best. For, ; judged on its own intrinsic merits — the ! one and only fashion in which any work of art should be judged — it seems to me to ' be a quite surprisingly bad book. Its one good quality is a sort of wild and undis- .' ciplined strength — a strength which, had ■Miss Corelli been endowed with a very j moderate modicum of the faculties of sell- i criticism and self-correction, might have j clarified into genuine literary power. Miss Corelli reminds her readers of those unfortunate athletes who have fallen victims to the vice of over-training, and have be- , come " muscle-bound," with the result that ' it co&ts them as severe an effort to lift a j glass to their lips as to raise a three-nun- ! dred-pound dumb-bell. To vary the simile, j she is- as the pythoness of old, who could | not speak except in a scream, and with a i vast expenditure of froth. " The MasterChristian " is one prolonged and strident shriek from its first page to its last. Its most ordinary incident is recounted with the same wild and v, hhiing rush of verbiage as its most melodramatic. Everybody in the book is an abnormality on his on her particular lines — abnormally good, orwicked, or gifted, and they all express their different idiosyncrasies at abnormal length and with abnormal self-conscious satisfaction. Miss Corelli's emotional palette is set only with the purest and most glaring primary tints, she seems to have neither use for, nor knowledge of, the quiet greys and browns which round and reconcile the more brilliant colours of the social panorama. Among the figures of this book we have Cardinal Felix Bonpre, a monster of goodness ; Varillo, the artist, a monster of vanity and jealousy ; Angela Sovrani, a monster of genius ; Gherardi and Moretti, monsters of priestly craft ; the Marquis Fontenelle and Miraudin, the actor, monsters of sensuality ; and the " marvellous boy " Manuel, a monster of a (literally) supernatural sort, of whom mere anon. Each and all of these pesjile poses in his own little circle of limelight, and never for a moment quits the conventional scowl or leer by which his distinguishing peculiarity is impressed upon the reader. Miss Corelli would seem to have taken Ouida j for her model. There is the same sense of j theatrical unreality in the work of both, j The same incommunicable odour of sa^ydust and orange-peel which surrounds our memories of Astley's Theatre hangs about the pages of their books, the same solemnity in the perpetration of literary absurdities, the same monumental unhumorou&ness are common to both. This general resemblance is perhaps heightened in the pages of " The Master. Christian " by the circumstance that its scene is laid for the most part in Italy, a country which Ouida had pre-empted almost as strictly as Mr j Kipling has appropriated India. Miss Corelli's manner of reminding her reader j of the foreign atmosphere he is supposed j to breathe is also something Ouidaesque, and consists of the simple means of inter- j larding the conversation she puts into the ; mouths of her characters with such re- ' condite fragments of the Tuscan tongue as " Veramente " Che, che,"' " mia dol- ■ cezza," ""ebben," and the like. She has also, by the way, one or two French locu- ! tions of a peculiar kind — "Chocolat fondant, garaniie tres pure," and " Tv vas te crever &ur terns avaEb je te guitte," but tke o^uaiat-

est of her merely verbal blunders is attributed to the philanthropist and orator, Aubrey Leigh, who tells an audience of some thousands of people that he has " seen the consummation of many godless marriages." Ouida in her o,wn gifted person has never done anything better than that. One of the chief faults of " The Master Christian " is the struggling and indeterminate character of its construction. Only two of the scores of people with whose saying and doings the book concerns itself are at all continuously in evidence before the reader, the Cardinal, Felix Bonpre, and the boy he adopts as his travelling companion, Manuel, an otherwise nameless waif whom he finds at midnight on the steps of the cathedral" at Rouen, and they are by no means the most interesting personalities in the book. The Cardinal, though introduced and accompanied by a great flourish of trumpets as a living antithesis and reproof of the faults and failings of the Church of Rome and of its priesthood, does nothing to justify his Creator's constant panegyrics. He moves through much of the action of the succession of disjointed episodes with which the book is filled, and talks as indefatigably as the rest of the people concerned, but his effect on the- course of the story is practically, nil. So, also, with his protege, whom Miss Corelli has invested with a spururas interest by presenting him as a reincarnation of Christ. A critic who frankly takes his stand in the ranks of Agnosticism, and whose attitude towards Divine mysteries is far nearer that of blank negation than of hope in their reality, may perhaps be conscious of some incongruity in venturing to reprove for profanity a writer like Miss Corelli, who loudly, and I believe, •with perfect sincerity, proclaims herself, not merely ethically, but dogmatically, a Christian. But I cannot think that Miss Corelli is doing good service for the faith she professes herself so anxious to serve and to purify by what is, and must inevitably be, a vulgarisation of the Divine figure of Jesus. That -Miss Corelli is not the first novelist who has been guilty of such a blunder I am quite aware, but the absolute failure which has- attended all attempts to reconstruct the character of Christ for purposes of fiction might surely have acted as a deterrent. The author of " The Master Christian " gives sufficient proof in that "volume of a long and intimate acquaintance with the New Testament, with copious citations from which, her book is thickly strewn, so she can scarcely plead ignorance of the plain and categorically expressed warning that the second coming of Christ will not be in any form of disguise, human or otherwise, but in His full powers and terrors as the Lord of heaven and earth. By .what warrant — • as a Christian — does Miss Corelli, merely for" her own purposes as a story-teller, bring Him down in the form of a lost and' homeless tramp? There is, surely, little reverence in such a liberty. And it is, to . me, amazing that so clever a person as Miss Corelli should not be able to see how grave a mistake, merely from the artistic point of view, she has made in this proceeding. Short of assuming some such direct Divine inspiration as that claimed by the evangelists to whom we owe the biography of Christ, how can she justify her assumption of such a task as the presentation of such a personality in action, among the men and things of this world? How is a writer — any merely human writer — to rise to the height of such an x argument? What a serene, what an ineffable confidence in his proper genius such a. writer must possess ! Did Miss Corelli ever study the mere literary style of the utterances of Christ — of the Lord's Prayer, of the Beatitudes, of the story of the Prodigal, of the words regarding the little children or the lilies of the field? — utterances which, setting apart the alleged divinity of their speaker, and forgetting for the moment the divinity of their significance, are, merely as human speech, flawlessly beautiful in melody and unapproachable in the terseness and pregnancy of their expression, exquisite as flowers and tense as steel. Voaaire, Pascal, De Foe, or Ruskin would have shrunk from the task of forging a pastiche of such a stylej Miss Corelli undertakes ifc with perfect readiness and perfect self-approval Manuel visits the Vatican, accompanied'by Cardinal Bonpre, and has an interview with the Pope. St. Peter's successor* is overwhelmed by the torrent of reproaches uttered by the boy-angel, and when his numberless derelictions of _ duty are pointed out to him shrinks "like a white mummy set in a gilded sarcophagus.' The reviewer then proceeds : Miss Corelli treats us to eight pages of this eloquence — Manuel in this one interview, speaking, I should fancy, several times as many -words as are recorded as having been spoken by his Divine prototype in the entire course of His sojourn upon earth. And he is obviously qmte capable of going on, and, like the occupant of the ancient tripod alladed to by Mr Montagu Tigg, "prophesying to a perfectly unlimited extent," but that the Pope faints — as well he might, poor old gentleman I — an d the Cardinal and his protege " go " out of the Vatican unaccompanied by his Holiness. This scene inevilaSly brings to mind another book, whose purport and intent are one with those of "The Master Christian "—Zola's "Rome," and, once again, the comparison is hardly -to Miss Corelli's advantage. Bar denunciation passes away in noise and froth, the cold, calm, intimate analysis of Zola is biting to-day like ' a mordant acid into the very fabric of the Vatican. Miss Corelli's sketch of Leo XIII seems only a pale and inefficient replica of the august and pathetic figure we owe to the genius of the great Frenchman. "The Master Christian"' has two main themes, the defections and imperfections of the Catholic clergy, and— a matter regarding which Miss Corelli never seems tired of holding forth— the hatred and dread

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•which. are-^according to Miss Corelli — inevitably .kindled in the masculine bosom by any proof <of feminine artistic genius. Such knowledge as I possess of the intellectual history of the world leaves me quite in the dark as to the evidence on Which Miss Corelli accuses the male half of humanity of a brutal and cowardly hatred of every woman who rises an inch above her sisters in intellectual attainment. I do not remember that George Sand or Rosa Bonlieur or Elizabeth Barrett Browning suffered any very virulent persecution on account of their sex, nor, at the present day, do I believe in the existence of one single critic who " slates " work simply because it is the product of a female hand. Miss Braddon r Mrs Lynn Lynton, "Mrs Steel, Lady Butler, Miss Clara Montalba— have any. of these gifted ladies any such tale of woe' to pour into the public ear, and, if so, why are they silent? Is Miss Terry hissed at the Lyceum because she wears an unbifurcated garment? Does the gallery "guy" Miss Julia Neilson at the Haymarket? Is the femininity of Miss Marie Lloyd a hissing and a reproach to the habitues of the Pavilion and the Tivoli? Miss Corelli, apparently,, would have us believe something ■of the sort. In a score of passages in "The Master Christian" she accuses men — not merely individuals, but men.jas a "body — with hating, decrying, and hounding down all women who prove their Tight to intellectual consideration. The great .scene of the book describes how Angela, Sovrani, who has painted a great allegorical picture, equalling, if not surpassing, any creation we owe to the genius of Titian or Raffaelle, is stabbed in the back with a dagger by a rival artist, who is her affianced -lover, simply because he could not bear to see .the , powers of himself and his brother * craftsmen put to shame by the genius of a woman ! Having stabbed, and, as he thinks, killed Angela, Varillo conceives the idea of claiming the. picture as his own. . . Were Varillo presented as~ a type of insanity, this incident might pass. But he is not so presented, he is offered to the reader as a type — and a common type — of male humanity. Comment- is needless — he would be a curiously stupid reader who needed to have the glaring absurdity of such a situation dwelt upon, and the writer capable of presenting it is surely quite beyond the poAver of argument or remonstrance. The amiable Varillo, it may be "stated, comes to an end almost worthy of him. He finds refuge in a'Trappist monastery on the Campagna. The circumstance that the monastery was an abode of the ! Trappist Order gave me a momentary pleasure, because one of the strictest rules of that Order is the rule of silence, which seemed to promise at least a brief sur--cease of the flobd of gabble in which all Miss' Corelli's characters indulge. But she very cleverly gets over the difficulty by the introduction of Brother Ambrosio, who is mad, and, therefore, allowed to talk — a liberty, of which he takes abundant advantage. He overhears a plot laid by Varillo and a Roman prelate, the obfeet of which is further mischief to Angela Sovrani, and, while the other monks are digging their graves in the garden, he fires the monastery and incinerates the wicked painter and himself, and the curtain falls Upon them, Varillo shrieking for mercy and Brother, Ambrosio, like a sort of ecclesiastical Nero, playing the organ among the flames. I am as far from holding a brief for the personnel of the Catholic clergy as I am from "being the advocate of any form of supernatural faith, but I would ask such readers of " The Master Christian " as may peruse this article to take with a very large grain of salt one very serious charge brought by Aliss Corelli against a body of men who, according to their lights, are for the tnost part men of honest, blameless, and laborious lives — the accusation of general •unchastity. It is true that that accusation is never definitely formulated. It would have spoken more loudly for Miss Corelli's honesty of purpose if she had had the sad courage of her conviction, and had stated in plain terms a belief which this book certainly inculcates, that the priestly profession of celibacy is a mere cloak for licentious living. With the exception of Cardinal Bonpre — who is pretty obviously suspected by his fellow ecclesiastics of being • the father of the waif Manuel — there is hardly a priestly figure in- the book who is not a more or less shameless profligate. There is the Abbe Vergniaud, a professed atheist, who wears clerical" dress and performs clerical functions, and who preaches a sermon in the church of Notre Dame de Lorette in the course of which he confesses to being the father of an illegitimate son, swhich said son brings the .sermon to an untimely close by firing a pistol at him. There is Cazeau, a priestly official of the Cathedral of Rouen, who has seduced and deserted a peasant girl, so driving her to insanity, and causing her to end her life as his murderess and her own. There ■& Gherardi, a prelate high in the entourage of the Pope himself, who keeps a mifctress at a villa at Frascati. One is reminded oi' •the mildly sarcastic remark of the good Thomas of Sarranza regarding the merry stories of the " Decameron " : " Excellent Italian, but a thought monotonous. Monks and nuns were never all unchaste." Satire, to be effective; must needs keep some measure of verisimilitude. Miss Corelli may ihave private and particular reasons for hating the Church of Rome and its servants, or she may be merely moved by an exaggeration of that distrust and fear of the Catholic priesthood which actuates many other worthy people ; but, be thai as it may, she should remember that too crude or violent a denunciation of anything or any person is certain to create a revulsion of feeling in favour of the thing or person denounced. France and Italy aie not- so far away from England but* li)Pt .thousands of English men and women Ikno-v the minutiae of their social life quite as w.ell ,as Miss Corelli can claim to do, and only the most credulous of her readers will believe that the priests of either country are as she has cho&eu to Jpaint them.

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