MARIE CORELLI.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19050, 1 July 1924, Page 9

MARIE CORELLI.

A PERSONAL MEMOIR. (By T. P. O’Connor, M.P.) One of the first men t me* of any importance in London was Charles Mackay. It was at the Reform Club, and I was introduced to him by a fellowtownsman who had acquired wealth and high position in the Colonies, and who owed my father some gratitude for consistent support at a time when disloyalty spoiled his chances of a Parliamentary career. I remember Mackay well—a short, stoutish, red-faced man, with a certain bitterness in his talk, though to the poor, trembling youngster who had just embarked on the tempestuous seas of London literary life he was kindness itself. I should here interpolate, for a generation that has forgotten Mackay, that he was the author of 11 Cheer, Boys, Cheer’ ’ and “To the West, to the West, to the Land of the Free” —songs that made a great appeal to the people at a time when the great country across the Atlantic was just beginning to reveal its possibilities as an asylum for those who found conditions too hard and too unpromising at home. Charles Mackay had a son, who inherited and even surpassed some of the poetic gifts of his father; and this son played an important though a somewhat mysterious part in the life of Marie Corelli.

She was of Italian and Scottish parentage, and was adopted in infancy by Charles Mackay, with whom she lived in the closest intimacy, and, as it appeared, in the most warm affection. Eric was a little like his father—short, stoutish, ruddy-faced. He had even more than the usual share of the irritability and unaccountability of the race of poets to which he belonged. I have received within a week or a fortnight two letters from him in reference to paragraphs that had appeared about him in a paper of which I was editor at the time; the first would denounce me as an unmitigated Scoundrel, and, above all, as no gentleman; and the second would hail me as the best of friends and the most perfect of gentlemen. So apparent was his talent that a good many people were strongly under the impression that the books of Marie Corelli, with their astounding success, were due largely to his inspiration, if not actually to his pen. This well-spread rumour played an important part in a subsequent episode in her career. Marie Corelli was probably a writer from her earliest days; printers’ ink was in her veins, although probably she suspected as little as anybody else the extraordinary success she was ultimately to attain. With her first important work, “A Romance of Two Worlds,” fame came to her with a rush. The public, both in England and America, devoured the book; it became a. “best seller,” sold by the tens of thousands, and went into one edition after the other with lightning rapidity. I cannot speak of the book myself; I found it always impossible to read Marie Corelli; but probably what I. i would have considered the defects of her style—inflation of language, romantic invention beyond all probability, and a certain mingling of unctuous religion ond ardent love—were their chief recommendations. From that time forward every novel of Marie Corelli immediately became a gigantic success; she could command almost any price she demanded, and those skilful in such calculations estimated that the value to her of each novel she wrote was at least £lO,OOO.

One would have thought that such gigantic and perhaps such unexpected success, bringing a woman in genteel poverty to great wealth, would have produced a very soft and satisfied characted. But this did not happen. I met her first after she had already achieved some of her early and brilliant successes. She was welcome, of course, at semi-literary gatherings, and a very pretty figure she made. If you had expected to meet a tall, lank lady, with spectacles and blue stockings, you had a pleasant surprise when you met her in those days of the ’eighties and the ’nineties. She had a small, well-pro-portioned figure, abundant clusters of fair hair, rosy cheeks, lightish blue eyes, and very small and dainty features. If I wanted to describe her in a single French word, I would call her mignonne; what I did ca 7/ her, as a matter of fact, was a beautiful little bit of Dresden china. The compliment was successful beyond all expectation, for it was constantly quoted in those articles about herself which were circulated with the genius of a publicity agent, but always with the denial of any impulse or authorship from her—a statement that was generally received with a sceptical smile.

In those far-off days she was agreeable—a little young-ladyish, but not disagreeable. In time those qualities seemed to be obscured. It may have been that she had some disappointment in her intimate life; it may be that she fretted a little under the lack of recognition which she found among the more educated men of letters, who did not usually respond to the echoes, however loud, of the general mass of readers; it may have been that irritability of temper which is not unknown in her sex when it has not been subjected to the softening influences of marriage and maternity. One should, however, make allowance for poor health. For years she suffered from a severe internal malady, and in bearing the tortures of disease and then in facing the perils of a severe operation she revealed those inner depths of courage which her sex so often displays. She insisted on postponing an operation until she had finished a contract with a publisher, and then, when the operation came, she chose one of her own sex to perform it, and she faced the operating table with the courageous and unselfish observation that if anything went wrong the blame must be put on her, and not on the operator. Towards middle-age she shook the dust of London from her feet, and settled down in a comfortable cottage in Stratford-on-Avon. Doubtless she sought peace, but she did not find it, for the public were pretty frequently made aware of altercations between her and the local authorities, and she fought these authorities with a certain shrillness of tone. On the other hand, she

doubtless got a certain degree of satiation in the connection of her name with that of the greatest of England’s men of letters, and she enjoyed herself in being the local hostess of the wandering pilgrims to the Stratford shrine. Now and then her strong feelings overflowed when topics outside literature were exercising the public mind, and she wrote trenchantly on all such subjects, with more vehemence than reason. When Eric Mackay died there came an episode which is almost incredible. Marie Corelli issued a short pamphlet, in which she spoke very disparagingly of him, charging him, among other things, with having made a false claim to part authorship of her books. It was a painful episode, and perhaps the less said about it the better. Such, then, was this little woman—bursting with energy, full of herself crowned with extraordinary and disproportionate honors and prosperity, and yet dissatisfied, restless, quarrelsome, t just that bundle of contradictions between outer and inner life between varying moods, which make up the problem and the perplexity of human character and human existence.