Miss Marie Corelli
A very Woman among Men!
Her pæans, sung in ev’ry quarter,
Almost persuade Le Gallienne
To go and get his hair cut shorter;
When Kipling hears her trumpet-note
He longs to don a petticoat.
Her praise is sung by old or young,
From Happy Hampstead to Hoboken,
Where’er old England’s mother-tongue
Is (ungrammatically) spoken:
In that supremely simple set
Which loves the penny novelette.
When Anglo-Saxon peoples kneel
Before their literary idol,
It makes all rival authors feel
Depressed and almost suicidal;
They cannot reach within a mile
Of her sublime suburban style.
Her modest, unobtrusive ways,
In sunny Stratford’s guide-books graven,
Her brilliance, lighting with its rays
The birthplace of the Swan of Avon,
Must cause the Bard as deep a pain
As his resemblance to Hall Caine.
Mere ordinary mortals ask,
With no desire for picking quarrels,
Who gave her the congenial task
Of judging other people’s morals?
Who bade her flay her fellow-men
With such a frankly feline pen?
And one may seek, and seek in vain.
The social set she loves to mention,
Those offspring of her fertile brain,
Those creatures of her fond invention.
(She is, or so it would appear,
Unlucky in her friends, poor dear!)
For tho’, like her, they feel the sway
Of claptrap sentimental glamour,
And frequently, like her, give way
To lapses from our English grammar,
The victims of her diatribes
Are not the least as she describes.
To restaurants they seldom go,
Just for the sake of over-eating;
While ladies don’t play bridge, you know,
Entirely for the sake of cheating;
And husbands can be quite nice men,
And wives
are
faithful, now and then.
Were she to mingle with her ink
A little milk of human kindness,
She would not join, I dare to think,
To chronic social color-blindness
An outlook bigoted and narrow
As that of some provincial sparrow.
But still, perhaps, it might affect
Her literary circulation,
If she were tempted to neglect
Her talent for vituperation;
Since work of this peculiar kind
Delights the groundling’s curious mind.
For while, of course, from day to day,
Her popularity increases,
As, in an artless sort of way,
She tears Society to pieces,
Her sense of humor, so they tell us,
Makes even Alfred Austin jealous!
Yet even bumpkins, by and by,
(Such is the spread of education)
May view with cold, phlegmatic eye
The fruits of her imagination,
And learn to temper their devotion
With slight, if adequate, emotion.
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Dear Miss Corelli: – Should your eyes
Peruse this page (’tis my ambition!),
Be sure that I apologize
In any suitable position
For having weakly imitated
The style that you yourself created.
I cannot fancy to attain
To heights of personal invective
Which you, with subtler pen and brain,
Have learnt to render so effective;
I follow dimly in your trail;
Forgive me, therefore, if I fail!
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