(1824-1889)
[Illustration: WILKIE COLLINS]
Wilkie Collins has proved that the charm of a story does not necessarily
depend upon the depiction of character or an appeal to the sympathies.
As he said:--"I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the
primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story." He also
aspired to draw living men and women, in which he was less successful.
Count Fosco, Miss Gwilt, Armadale, Laura Fairlie, and others, are indeed
distinct; but the interest centres not on them but on the circumstances
in which they are involved. This is the main reason why the critics,
even in admiring his talent, speak of Collins with faint depreciation,
as certainly not one of the greatest novelists of the century, although
holding a place of his own which forces recognition. For novel-readers
have delighted in his many volumes in spite of the critics, and there is
a steady demand for the old favorites. Translated into French, Italian,
Danish, and Russian, many of them continue to inspire the same interest
in foreign lands.
Wilkie Collins, born January 8th, 1824, did not show any special
precocity in boyhood and youth. He probably learned much more from his
self-guided reading than from his schooling at Highbury, especially
after his acquisition of French and Italian during two years in Italy in
his early teens. The influences about him were strongly artistic. His
father, William Collins, was distinguished as a landscape painter. The
well-known portrait painter Mrs. Carpenter was his aunt, and the
distinguished Scotch artist David Wilkie his godfather. But human action
and emotion interested him more than art. He was very young when he
expressed a desire to write, and perpetrated blank verse which justified
his father in vigorous opposition to his adoption of authorship as a
profession. So, his school days ended, he presented the not unusual
figure of a bright young Englishman who must earn his bread, yet had no
particular aptitude for doing it. He tried business first, and became
articled clerk with a City house in the tea trade. But the work was
uncongenial; and after a few unsatisfactory years he fell in with his
father's views, and was entered at Lincoln's Inn and in due time
admitted to the bar, although he never practiced law.
He continued writing for amusement, however, producing sketches and
stories valuable as training. On his father's death he prepared a
biography of that artist in two volumes (1848), which was considered a
just as well as a loving appreciation. His first novel, however, was
rejected by every publisher to whom he submitted it. His second,
'Antonina,' a story of the fall of Rome, was mediocre. He was about
twenty-six when he met Charles Dickens, then a man of forty, at the
height of his fame, and with the kindliest feeling for younger writers
still struggling for recognition. Dickens, whose own work was always
prompted by sympathetic intuition, and to whom character development
came more easily than ingenious plots, cordially admired Collins's skill
in devising and explaining the latter. He invited the younger man to
become collaborator upon Household Words, and thus initiated a warm
friendship which lasted until his own death. Encouraged by him, Collins
essayed drama and wrote 'The Light-House,' played at Gadshill by
distinguished amateurs, Dickens himself among them. At first thought,
his would seem an essentially dramatic talent, and several of his novels
have been successfully dramatized. But the very cleverness and intricacy
of his situations make them unsuited to the stage. They are too
difficult of comprehension to be taken in at a glance by an average
audience, in the swift passage of stage action.
It was also the influence of Dickens which inspired Collins to attempt
social reform. In 'Man and Wife' he tries to show the injustice of
Scotch marriage laws; in 'The New Magdalen,' the possible regeneration
of fallen women; in 'Heart and Science,' the abuses of vivisection; and
other stories are incumbered with didactic purpose. Mr. Swinburne
comments upon this aspect of his career in a jocular couplet--
"What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered, 'Wilkie! have a mission!'"
But in all "tendency" novels it is not the discussion of problems that
makes them live; and Wilkie Collins, like others, survives by purely
literary qualities. Soon after his death the critic of the Spectator
gave the following capable summary of his peculiar method:--
"He was a literary chess player of the first force, with power of
carrying his plan right through the game and making every move tell. His
method was to introduce a certain number of characters, set before them
a well-defined object, such as the discovery of a secret, the
re-vindication of a fortune, the tracking of a crime, or the
establishment of a doubted marriage, and then bring in other characters
to resist or counterplot their efforts. Each side makes moves, almost
invariably well-considered and promising moves; the counter-moves are
equally good; the interest goes on accumulating till the looker-on--the
reader is always placed in that attitude--is rapt out of himself by
strained attention; and then there is a sudden and totally unexpected
mate. It is chess which is being played; and in the best of all his
stories, the one which will live for years,--'The Moonstone,'--the
pretense that it is anything else is openly disregarded."
This analysis however must not be too narrowly construed, as petty
critics often do, to mean that the only interest in Mr. Collins's novels
is that of disentangling the plot. If this were so, no one would read
them more than once; while in fact the best of them are eminently
readable again and again. This shallow judgment evidently galled the
novelist himself, and 'The New Magdalen' in one aspect was a
throwing-down of the gauntlet to the critics; for in it he tells the
plot page by page, almost paragraph by paragraph, as he goes along, and
even far in advance of the story, yet it is one of the most fascinating
of his novels. He proved that he could do admirably what they said he
could not do at all--make people read his story with breathless
absorption when they knew its end long before they came to it; and it
was as interesting backward as forward. 'No Name' is in some sort a
combination of the two methods,--a revelation of the end, with perpetual
interest in the discovery of means.
'The Moonstone' and 'The Woman in White' are unquestionably his
masterpieces. In both he throws light upon a complex plot by means of
his favorite expedient of letters and diaries written by different
characters, who thus take the reader into their confidence and bewilder
him with conflicting considerations, until the author comes forward with
an ingenious and lucid solution. 'The Moonstone,' however, is immensely
superior in matter even to its fellow; its plot is better (in one place
'The Woman in White' comes to a dead wall which the author calmly
ignores and goes on), and some passages are worth reading over and over
for pure pathos or description. Mr. Collins was in fact, aside from his
special gift, a literary artist of no mean power, even if not the
highest: with an eye for salient effects, a skill in touching the more
obvious chords of emotion, a knowledge of life and books, that enrich
his stories with enough extraneous wealth to prolong their life for many
years, and some of them perhaps for generations.