Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/65

 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