The following alludes to the publication of a new edition of the work mentioned:

The next (undated) was written just after Queen Victoria desired that all Marie Corelli’s works should be sent to her:—

This of October 28th, 1892, forms the last of the batch of extracts placed in our hands. Throughout his business associations with Miss Corelli, it is apparent that Mr. Bentley was everything that was kindly, tactful, and encouraging. The imaginative temperament is always a difficult one to deal with, and Mr. Bentley excelled himself in this respect. Even when he wished to bestow a mild rebuke he did so with an old-fashioned courtesy that is truly delightful and only too rare in these days of dictated, typewritten epistles.

There are other letters, but from these it will be only necessary to cull a sentence here and there. All the above-quoted communications, we should add, were in Mr. Bentley’s own handwriting.

Marie Corelli has always been a neat workwoman, and here, in a letter from her publisher, dated August 28th, 1886, we find a tribute to the perfection of her “copy:”—

Vice versâ, one calls to mind a tale of Miss Martineau’s about Carlyle, who literally smothered his proof-sheets with corrections. One day he went to the office to urge on the printer. “Why, sir,” said the latter, “you really are so very hard upon us with your corrections. They take so much time, you see!” Carlyle replied that he had been accustomed to this sort of thing—he had got works printed in Scotland, and —— “Yes, indeed, sir,” rejoined the printer, “we are aware of that. We have a man here from Edinburgh, and when he took up a bit of your copy, he dropped it as if it had burnt his fingers, and cried out, ‘Lord, have mercy! have you got that man to print for? Lord knows when we shall get done with his corrections.’”

It is evident that Mr. Bentley deemed his protégée—if we may so term her—capable of turning her pen in many directions. “I am not sure that you could not give us a fine historical novel,” he wrote in 1887, “if you got hold of a character which fascinated your imagination.”

In a letter dated May 7th, 1888, he refers playfully to “the little blue silk dress” which seems to have taken his fancy on a previous occasion; nor did he forget the young novelist’s birthday, for in a previous letter of the same year he declares that, if he were in London, he would “be tempted to cast prudence to the wind, even to the perilous East wind, to offer you my greeting on the first of May.”

Besides being a keen judge of manuscript—as, indeed, he had need to be—Mr. Bentley wrote very pleasant prose himself. His reading was extensive and his comments thereon lucid and thoughtful. In 1883 he printed for private circulation among his friends a little green covered volume called “After Business.” A copy of this work, presented to Miss Corelli a fortnight after Mr. Bentley first met her, lies before us. There are seven chapters, whose nature can be divined from their titles: I. An Evening with Erasmus. IV. How the World Wags. V. An Afternoon with Odd Volumes—and so forth. A peaceful, soothing little book is this. Here is the final passage of the “Odd Volumes” chapter. It affords a happy example of the book’s literary flavor, of its truly “After Business” characteristics:

The influence of the kindly advice George Bentley dealt out to the young novelist cannot be overestimated. Was she upset by a criticism, he came to her aid with good humored badinage and sympathy; was she despondent, he laughed away the mood and bade “Thelma” be herself again! Always, indeed, he urged her to be herself—to embody in her books the message so nobly delivered by a poet:

CHAPTER VIII

“BARABBAS”—A “PASSION PLAY” IN PROSE

To write prose, perfect prose; to stir the heart and move the soul, is the highest phase of mental reasoning. It is the air and melody of spiritual conception, the so-called “supernatural.” All our lives we can talk prose, but to grasp tersely your brain’s creation, to fix upon your different dream characters and embody them with life, with passion, and with naturalness—the naturalness which has existed from creation—is the highest prose, for it is poetry and prose hand-in-hand, an achievement, a oneness of the two.

This was Marie Corelli’s idea in penning “Barabbas.” Setting her mind hard and fast to face creeds and defy criticism; true to the instincts which permeated her mind throughout her pristine works, she went on following her soul impression, her inspiration to see “good” in most things, nobility in men and women who might be scourged by the world. And thus “Barabbas,” though a robber, might have had some strong points, and though of an evil nature must certainly, from scriptural evidence, have had the sympathy of the populace. That sympathy gave the author the keynote to produce the human drama, which is lived over and over again to-day and forever,—and which is aptly called A Dream of the World’s Tragedy.

Marie Corelli, true to her colors in this later work, still adheres to poetic spirituality, the “ideal,” the sublime, the free, the sympathetic, mingled with the rendering of a forcible and traitorous character in that of “Judith” (the heroine of the book) in its full strength of weakness and evil, and in its final magnificent revulsion from a past to the glory of a holy repentance and in finding the King, in the symbol of the cross. Take this scene, where after madness and despair, she meets her death:

The conception of the character of “Judith” in “Barabbas” is fret with strong and sympathetic points. She is the mainspring of the work. The idea of the “Betrayal” emanates from her, yet the æsthetic treatment at the finale with the symbol of the cross, while closing her eyes in death, is poetry in itself.

Listen to Peter’s definition of a lie:

The critics were as usual up in arms over “Barabbas,” but in spite of them its sale has been immense. The book has made such headway since its publication that it has been translated into more foreign tongues than any other novel of either the past or present—the translations comprising thirty to forty languages. As a matter of original conception, tragical effect and clearness of diction, “Barabbas” is considered by many the best of Marie Corelli’s works.

In “Barabbas” there is no loitering by the way, as it were, to argue, although the moral throughout is strong enough. The author’s sensibility grasps the situation of that potent day in the World’s era with a subtle reasoning of how to-day things are precisely the same, and would be precisely the same at the advent of a new Christus, save possibly as regards the execution. For our lunatic asylums afford an infinitely better kind of torture than the cross.

The character of Jesus of Nazareth, “the dreamy Young Philosopher” of his short day, is the poem of the tragedy. Barabbas himself is a character of much force, despite his weakness in the hands of Judith. The soliloquies of Melchior throughout the first part of the book are somewhat drastic, though the character bears out well its own mission.

There is extreme spirituality in the sayings of this somewhat important creation. He might be the Cicero of the work. One of his replies to Barabbas, showing the vesture of his thoughts, occurs again thus:

A terse reasoning out of the living essence of the supreme, and an almost matchless soliloquy.

Here is another of Melchior’s speeches:

It was Marie Corelli’s idea in this particular work evidently to clothe her characters in the real human, that which is changeless and unchangeable as cycles in the world’s eye; and to show that the mind of man in its essentials does not change, and that its perfection is gained only by the spiritual side of things, overcapping the material and the so-called animal. That God intends men and women to attain this superiority over matter is one of the æsthetic treasures of Marie Corelli’s literature, generally not particularly well received, still less understood, but haply none the less welcome, as it is a conception of its own peculiar originality by no means local. The fictional character of Caiaphas in all his sycophancy and sacerdotal arrogancy occupies a measure of the romance, furnishing a tone of treachery throughout.

Naturally the description of the Magdalen is full of extraordinary beauty. It is the beauty of a regenerated soul, a soul of love and greatness, emancipated from the material, yet bearing the same. The death of the one Magdalen, and the rising therefrom of the new Mary, is pathetically described in her own words to Barabbas:

If Miss Corelli was bold in attacking so vast and so controversial a subject as the tragedy of the Christ, she was none the less inspired in her conception of the situation. The description of Jesus of Nazareth, upon whom the story centres and concludes, is simplicity itself. It teaches charity, love, brotherhood, and yet preaches humility; not humility of a universal ignorance, but that “humility” which puts even dignity in the shade, since it is dignity in another name. The pathetic touches are the cream of her story. It is not a long study, but what there is, is strange and touching with the wholesomeness of real pathos, not of one particular class, not mythical, but a tender theme as it were from a woman’s tender heart, possessing the faculty of a noble sympathy for the world’s greatest tale of inimitable love and sorrow therefrom. The chapter on the resurrection is one of the highest aims of the work, and has been read frequently as a “lesson” in the Churches on Easter day. The peculiar and idealistic spirituality of the angels at the tomb is told in a fashion distinctive of the writer. The scene of the resurrection, indeed, is worth giving in its entirety:

This appeals fully to the poetic imagination, and it seems to quicken a kind of personal interest as to the marvelous mystery of that stupendous occasion.

Marie Corelli’s Christ embodies much of the human—the human that is divinely magnetic, almost, if not quite, undefinable, yet not exclusive, not idolatrous, but simply and gently human. The creation of the character of Jesus of Nazareth possesses no atom of bigotry. It teaches love and does not seek to embitter hate. The aura of the master character permeates each living character throughout the work. It preaches Love, Charity, and Brotherhood; it ignores the Church (i.e., sectarian misnomer), so it should have, as it has through so many tongues, its mission.

There is no new creed, no new passion, no new deed under the sun to-day. There is only the same recapitulation in a fresh garb. Our Saints still live to-day. It sounds drastic enough, but Miss Corelli feels this and knows that midst the fair field of fairness there is also the thorn and the poisonous flower any one may cull, or the simple field lily that lifts its face to Heaven, and sees only Heaven in its purity.

Kingsley said, “The history of England is the literature of England.” Possibly so. The strong advance of women writers ever since that excellent man’s passing has proved much of this. It is to the honor of women to-day. It is proved in the fine grasp of subjects, the faculty of dealing poetically with a theme, so widely known yet always fresh, under new lens, and without which this world to many would be a finite and a joyless place. There is just another quotation from “Barabbas,” quite at the conclusion of this remarkable book, which weighs in with this and also with the author’s idea,—just an exoneration of the Great Tragedy, a simplification of the whole story. It is the finale and in itself not only teaches powerfully, but is an invitation, as it were, from a potent mind to those to whom it sends its own message:

CHAPTER IX

“THE SORROWS OF SATAN,”—AS A BOOK AND AS A PLAY,—THE STORY OF THE DRAMATIZATION

The publication of “The Sorrows of Satan,” in 1895, caused a greater sensation than had followed the appearance of any other work by Miss Corelli. Many presumably competent judges of literature indulged in an absolute orgie of denunciation. In the Review of Reviews, Mr. W. T. Stead printed a column or so of sneers, though admitting that the conception was magnificent, and that the author had an immense command of language. Anxious, apparently, not to miss what would greatly interest the public, a good twelve pages of his periodical were devoted to extracts from the book. He knew, as all the critics knew, that all the world would soon be reading it, and forming its own judgment. The public must, in very truth, form an unflattering opinion of the fairness of some of those who attempt to force their own opinions of a book upon men and women who are not only fully capable of thinking for themselves, but who, sometimes,—as in the case of Marie Corelli’s publications,—insist upon doing so.

Most of the critics entirely missed the point of “The Sorrows of Satan.” There is a notable character in the book—Lady Sibyl Elton. Now the idea of Lady Sibyl was an allegorical one. She represented, to Marie Corelli’s mind, the brilliant, indifferent, selfish, vicious impersonation of Society offering itself body and soul to the devil. This was completely lost sight of by most of those who criticised the book, and who had not the imagination to see beyond the mere forms of woman and fiend. All the other characters are arranged to play round this one central idea, so far as the “woman of the piece” was concerned.

It utterly surprised the author to find that people imagined that she had taken some real woman to portray, and had contrasted her badness with Mavis Clare to advertise her own excellent character against the other’s blackness. Facts, however, are facts. Marie Corelli considers that the evils of society are wrought by women; hence the impersonation of Lady Sibyl as a woman, courting the devil. Secondly, she considers that the reformation of society must be wrought by women; hence the impersonation of Mavis Clare, as a woman repelling the devil.

“The Sorrows of Satan” is now in its forty-third edition. The book has not only been read by representatives of all classes in all countries, but is valued and loved by many thousands who, by the wonderful power of this single pen, have been forced to think; and, by meditating upon the problems which make the book, have found themselves better men and women for the exercise.

“Thousands and tens of thousands throughout English-speaking Christendom,” declared Father Ignatius, “will bless the author who has dared to pen the pages of ‘The Sorrows of Satan’; they will bless Marie Corelli’s pen, respecting its denunciation of the blasphemous verses of a certain ‘popular British poet.’ Where did the courage come from that made her pen so bold that the personality of God, the divinity of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, the necessity of religious education should thus crash upon you from the pen of a woman?”

Courageous, indeed, is any author or speaker who attacks the selfishness, the materialism, the insincerity of much of our social life and of many of our social customs. And what made the attack so successful, what caused such bitter resentment on the part of those who hate Marie Corelli for her exposures of shams and impostures, and her valiant upholding of virtue and of truth, is the fact that the author has not only the courage which her convictions give her, but that she has the power that justifies her bravery! The book is a grand and successful attempt to show how women who are good and true hold the affection, the esteem, the devotion, the homage of men; it is an incentive to women to be in men’s regard the Good Angels that men best love to believe them; it is a lesson to women how to attain the noblest heights of womanhood.

As Marie Corelli, in discussing the “Modern Marriage Market,” has said, “Follies, temptations, and hypocrisies surround, in a greater or less degree, all women, whether in society or out of it; and we are none of us angels, though, to their credit be it said, some men still think us so. Some men still make ‘angels’ out of us, in spite of our cycling mania, our foolish ‘clubs,’—where we do nothing at all,—our rough games at football and cricket, our general throwing to the winds of all dainty feminine reserve, delicacy, and modesty,—and we alone are to blame if we shatter their ideals and sit down by choice in the mud when they would have placed us on thrones.”

The woman who reads and studies “The Sorrows of Satan” will desire to attain the angel ideal; and the lesson will be the better learned by the reading of this book because of the appalling picture of Lady Sibyl Elton, whose callousness and whose fin-de-siècle masquerading, lying, trickery, atheism, and vice, make up an abomination in the form of Venus that is a painting of many society beauties of the day,—soulless beauties whose bodies are as deliberately sold in the marriage mart as the clothes and jewels with which their damning forms are adorned.

And then in “The Sorrows of Satan” there is the unattractive personality of Geoffrey Tempest, a man with five millions of money, one of whose first declarations on the attainment of wealth is that he will give to none and lend to none, and who pursues a life of vanity, selfishness, and self-aggrandizement, until at last he repels the evil genius of the story, Prince Lucio Rimânez—the devil.

In the opening chapter of “The Sorrows of Satan” we are introduced to Mr. Geoffrey Tempest, at the moment a writer and a man of brains, but starving and sick at heart through a hopeless struggle against poverty, and railing against fate and the good luck of a “worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold by mere chance and heritage.” He is in the lowest depths of despair, having just had a book of somewhat lofty thoughts rejected with the advice that, to make a book “go,” it is desirable, from the publisher’s point of view, that it should be somewhat risqué; in fact, the more indecent the better. It was pitiful advice and wholly false, for the reason that the great majority of publishers most carefully avoid works of the kind. Tempest’s case is bad indeed. He must starve, because his ideas are “old-fashioned.” Moreover, he cannot pay his landlady her bill. And just at this critical moment two things happen. He receives £50 from an old chum and £5,000,000 from Satan. But he is not aware of the real source from which proceeds the latter sum. Presumably it comes from an unknown uncle whose solicitors confide to the legatee that the old man had a strange idea “that he had sold himself to the devil, and that his large fortune was one result of the bargain.” But who, with five millions to his name, would worry about an old man’s fancies? Certainly not Geoffrey Tempest. Probably no man.

On the very night that the intimation of his good fortune reaches him, the newly made millionaire receives a call from Prince Lucio Rimânez, whose person is beautiful, whose conversation is witty to brilliance, whose wealth is unlimited, and whose age is mysterious. The meeting takes place very suitably in the dark, and the hands of the pair meet in the gloom “quite blandly and without guidance”; and we soon hear from the lips of the Prince that it is a most beautiful dispensation of nature that “honest folk should be sacrified in order to provide for the sustenance of knaves!” and that the devil not only drives the world whip in hand, but that he manages his team very easily.

Tempest and Rimânez forthwith become friends—even more, chums inseparable; and soon we find Mr. Geoffrey Tempest very aptly playing the part he had formerly rallied against—that of a worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold, and gluttonously swallowing the evil and corrupting maxims of his fascinating friend. He eats the best of food, drinks the most expensive of wines, and rides in the most luxurious of carriages; his book is published and advertised and boomed at his own expense, and he has not a particle of sympathy for the poor or the suffering. “It often happens that when bags of money fall to the lot of aspiring genius, God departs and the devil walks in.” So asserts Rimânez—who ought to know; and so it proves in the case of his rich and ready disciple, Mr. Geoffrey Tempest. Nothing seems to disturb the serenity of the multi-millionaire in the early days of his new-found wealth and power—for the world bows before him—except a mysterious servant of the Prince’s, a man named Amiel, who cooks mysterious meals for his master and, imp of mischief, plays strange pranks upon his fellow-servants.

Soon Tempest, through the instrumentality of his princely friend, makes the acquaintance of the beautiful Lady Sibyl Elton. “No man, I think, ever forgets the first time he is brought face to face with perfect beauty in woman. He may have caught fleeting glimpses of many fair faces often,—bright eyes may have flashed on him like starbeams,—the hues of a dazzling complexion may now and then have charmed him, or the seductive outlines of a graceful figure;—all these are as mere peeps into the infinite. But when such vague and passing impressions are suddenly drawn together in one focus, when all his dreamy fancies of form and color take visible and complete manifestation in one living creature who looks down upon him, as it were, from an empyrean of untouched maiden pride and purity, it is more to his honor than his shame if his senses swoon at the ravishing vision, and he, despite his rough masculinity and brutal strength, becomes nothing but the merest slave to passion.” Thus Geoffrey Tempest when the violet eyes of Sibyl Elton first rest upon him.

The scene is a box at a theatre, the play of questionable character about a “woman with a past.” The picture is complete with the lady’s father—the Earl of Elton—bending forward in the box and eagerly gloating over every detail of the performance. There is assuredly no exaggeration in this portraiture. Such scenes can be witnessed every night during the season. Nor does Marie Corelli go beyond the unpleasing truth in asserting that novels on similar themes are popular amongst women and are a sure preparation for the toleration and applause by women of such plays.

The Earl of Elton is hard up, as his daughter knows, and she has been trained to manœuvre for a rich husband. The idea of a marriage for love is out of the question; she is too wary to brave “the hundred gloomy consequences of the res angusta domi,” as old Thackeray puts it. She is not the sort of girl who marries where her heart is, “with no other trust but in heaven, health, and labor,”—to quote the same mighty moralist.

As Prince Rimânez has explained to Tempest, Lady Sibyl is “for sale” in the matrimonial market, and Tempest determines to buy her; or, in other words, decides that he wants to marry her and that his millions will enable him to achieve that object. Poor Lady Sibyl! A victim of circumstances, it is impossible not to pity her! Cold, callous, heartless, calculating, corrupt, she is what her mother has made her—the mother herself being a victim of paralysis and sensuality, a titled, worn-out rouée.

“Madame, we want mothers!” Napoleon once said truly to one who sorrowed over the decadence of French manhood; and to the Countess of Elton might have been applied, with more justice than to the less sinful sisters from whom society sweeps its skirts, the name of wanton.

Tempest loses no time in pursuing what now becomes the main object of his life—marriage with Lady Sibyl Elton, who is quite ready to be wooed. Incidentally, the book contains stirring pictures of the times. There is a visit of Tempest and Rimânez to an aristocratic gambling-house, and Miss Corelli’s account of the scene there enacted is but a true description of what is going on constantly “in the West.” How often, when the Somerset House records of the wills of deceased men of note are revealed, do people marvel that So-and-so, with his vast income, was able to put by so little!

Very often it is the gaming-table that supplies the reason. For the gambling fever is raging in the world of to-day from peers, statesmen, lawyers, aye, and ministers, to the street-boys who stake their trifles on a race or a game of shove ha’penny. There are book-makers who, as the police records show, do not hesitate to accept penny bets on horse races from boys. There are “swell” boardinghouses, we know, in secluded country retreats, where roulette, rouge et noir, and baccarat are played nightly all the year round, not for pounds, but for hundreds of pounds, and the police of the districts concerned never disturb the accursed play. There are luxurious flats in London where similar play goes on, equally undisturbed by the police. And there are the gaming hells, such as Miss Corelli describes, where often may be seen men of distinction, whose names are familiar to every ear, destroying their peace, their prosperity, the happiness of themselves and their families, for the luck of the cards.

To such a place as this—where wealth and position were the only “open sesames”—went Tempest and Prince Rimânez. Both, so rich that it mattered not to them what resulted, play and win heavily, mainly from a Viscount Lynton. Rimânez here stays one of the only good impulses that came to Geoffrey Tempest after his accession to wealth. He would have forgiven the Viscount his ruinous losses. And so the play goes on, and then—a merry bet—Lynton plays with Rimânez at baccarat for a queer stake—his soul. Of course he loses, and Rimânez has but a short time to wait to collect the wager, for the mad young Viscount blows out his brains that night. Such is the history—less only the last specific bet—of many a young aristocrat’s suicide.

In the furtherance of his marriage scheme, Tempest purchases Willowsmere Court, in Warwickshire, a place which, in his palmy days, the Earl of Elton had owned, but which had subsequently got into the hands of the Jews. Near to Willowsmere lives Mavis Clare, the good angel of the story. It has been said “in print,” and it is popularly believed even now, notwithstanding positive denial, that Mavis Clare was intended to portray Miss Marie Corelli. It was an unwarrantable and unfair suggestion, because it implied to Miss Corelli that gross libel, often falsely attributed to her, of vanity and self-advertisement. In very truth, if she were vain it would be a sin easy to condone in one who has achieved so much. Yet, happily, she is so true a woman that vanity has no part in her character, and she is incapable of deliberately applying to herself the Mavis Clare description.

In the Review of Reviews it was stated: “A leading figure in ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ is none other than the authoress herself, Marie Corelli, who, like Lucifer, the Son of Morning, also appears under a disguise. But it is a disguise so transparent that the wayfaring man, though a fool, could not fail in identifying it. Mavis Clare, whose initials it may be remarked[B] are the same as those of the authoress, represents Marie Corelli’s ideal of what she would like to be, but isn’t; what in her more exalted moments she imagines herself to be. It is somewhat touching to see this attempt at self-portraiture.” The suggestion thus put forward, that Mavis Clare was a deliberate portrait of Miss Marie Corelli, was at once accepted by the public—be it said to the credit of the public, who, having read her books, must have been instilled with the accurate idea that the talented author must be good and true, like Mavis Clare. Color was naturally lent to the suggestion of her deliberate self-portraiture by the similarity of the initials, and also of the circumstances of Miss Corelli and the lady of the story.

Nothing, however, was further from Miss Corelli’s thoughts or intentions than this, and the similarity of the initials was purely accidental. The name was written in the manuscript and appeared in the proofs as “Mavis Dare” and not Mavis Clare. Not only just before the book went to press, but actually whilst it was in the press, the second name was suddenly altered, because it was pointed out to Miss Corelli that the name was so very like the “Avice Dare” of another writer. When these facts were brought to Mr. Stead’s notice he did Miss Corelli the justice to apologize for the statement which had been made in the Review of Reviews.

It is Lady Sibyl who suddenly and violently breaks the thin wall between Tempest’s desire to marry her and the formal request that she shall become his wife. She, with just enough glimmering of honor to detest the “marriage by arrangement,” informs him of her knowledge that her charms are for sale and that he, Tempest, is to be the accepted purchaser. Her language is plain enough in very truth to demonstrate the hideousness of the bargain, for this is the picture of the bride-to-be that she herself draws for the edification of her future husband: