BOOKS.

W I LKIE COLLINS: A LITERARY ESTIMATE.* IT is just seven-and-twenty years since a young and almost un- known author made an audacious attempt to gain the public favour by the production of a long and elaborate historical novel, somewhat on the plan of Lord Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii.

- - ---- * Main Conivs'$ Works :—"Memoirs of "—.'Antonina, or he Ball of Romo"—

" hide end Seek "—"After Dark "--The Queen of llearts"—“The Woman in Whito"—“lio Name"—..My hliReellanlea"—"Armadalo"—" The

Moanstone"—"Man and Wife Boor Miss Finch ("--. The New Magdalen"— " The Law and the Lady ''—" The Two Destinies.' (verteas Publishers.) Few of our readers probably remember to have heard of Auto- nine, or the Pall of Rome, and fewer still are likely to have read it. The public verdict in these matters is generally the right one, and in this case the verdict was failure. The author lacked the peculiar gifts necessary to the production and realisa- tion of classical times, and had neither the cultured taste, the graceful fancy, nor the half-sportive, half-cynical philosophy which marked so specially Bulwer Lytton's masterpiece. But the book nevertheless disclosed some characteristics which were eminently hopeful for the author in the future, if he should direct

his labours into a more congenial channel. These were great industry in collecting material and unwearied patience in detail, and no mean skill in constructing a story and indicating char- aster; what the book really lacked was true feeling for the times in which it was written, all the accessories, social, historical, and archaeological, being almost painfully accurate. Perhaps the public opinion in this case might be best expressed in the words of the Irish jury, "Not guilty, but don't do it again." In any case, Wilkie Collins was wise enough to understand that he had better make a fresh start, and his next essay appeared as a plain English love-story of our own day. This time there was no doubt that he had found his vocation. Basil, though very inferior to his later works, was a novel of decided talent, and decided dis- agreeableness, and from that time forward Mr. Collins has continued among the chief of our story-tellers. We propose to examine, as well as our brief space will allow, the special bent of his works, and their peculiar merits and deficiencies. The key to Wilkie Collins's view of the proper subjects for fiction, and to his method of treating them, is to be found in his preface to Basil, and from that preface we extract the following Ben- tence,—a very significant one, if taken in connection with the sub- jects of his later works :—

" Believing that the novel and the play are twin-sisteri in the family of Fiction, that the one is a drama narrated as the other is a drama noted; and that all the strong and deep emotions which the play-writer is privileged to excite, the novelist is privileged to excite also, I have not thought it either politic or necessary, while adhering to realitios, to adhere to common-place, every-day realities only. In other words, I have not stooped so low as to assure myself of the reader's belief in the pro- bability of my story, by never onco calling upon him for the exercise- of his faith. Those extraordinary accidents and events which happen to few men seemed to me to be as legitimate materials for fiction to work with, when there was a good object in using them, as the ordinary accidents and events which may and do happen to us all."

In this quotation are foreshadowed the two chief peculiarities of Wilkie Collins's novels, and the words might have been written at the present time to apply to the whole aeries, as fitly as they were written a quarter of a century ago to apply to one. "A drama narrated,"—that is true of each of his books, of some so true that they have been put on the stage almost without altera- tion. The second peculiarity is indicated in the words of the last paragraph of the preface which assert that the abnormal is as fit a subject for fiction (under some circumstances) as the normal. Wilkie Collins might be almost called the novelist of disease, for in varieties of mental and physical deformity does he find his mont exciting subjects, and from them draw his most thrilling complications. It is evident that, taking these data, and supposing the treatment to be dramatic and the subject abnormal, the author runs a great risk of offending the susceptibilities of many delicate readers. As Aurora Leigh said so well,—

" Ono must not pump spring-water unaware

Upon a gracious public full of nerves."

Now Wilkie Collins has been, so to speak, "pumping spring-water" all his life, and the consequence is that though by this time he has gained a reputation which is too firmly established to be easily shaken or denied, yet in the opinion of many readers his books are "not nice," and as an almost necessary consequence, he has been systematically under-rated by reviewers and the public generally. Not to quote other instances, we remember that when the Woman in While first appeared, one of the most critical of our weekly journals (the Saturday Review) denied that there was any delineation of character in it, except, perhaps, Count Few() ; and Mr. Collins "had only succeeded better with him because he was a foreigner, and therefore easier to depict." Time has, we think, quite justified Mr. Collins in this instance, but in some quarters the reproach is still maintained against him, that his books are entirely dependent for their interest upon the sensational element, and it is this view of which we shall endeavour to show the falsity.

That as a rule there is little minute analysis of character is certainly true, but it does not appear to us that this arises from any lack of ability to understand or depict the more complex workings of the mind, but rather from the excessive force of the

dramatic instinct, which inclines the author to indicate the mental action with a few bold touches, and then allow it to explain itself by the action of the story. Throughout the whole series of books, the authorseldom or never expresses in his own person, approval or disapproval of the actions of his characters, but narrates their doings with something of the grand impartiality of Shakespeare, dealing equal measure to the just and the unjust. it icz, we should imagine, only in the rarest instances that the reflective and analytical powers requisite to the minute delineation of character can co-exist with a strong dramatic faculty, and even where they do, the one must constantly give place to the other. This may be seen specially noticeable in the works of Balzac, whose marvellous exhaustiveness of description and fullness of analysis often impede the dramatic interest of the story. But although this minute analysis is not one of our author's merits, there can be no doubt that he is essentially a delineator of character, and we do not remember one of his stories which is not enriched by some specially vivid and life-like sketch. Leas than justice has been commonly done Mr. Collins on this head. The interest of his plot is, as a rule, so intense, that it quite carries his readers away, and they never stop to consider the delicate strokes of wit and observation with which the book abounds. Thus, for instance, in the Woman in White, how many thousand of readers have hurried on to the end without noticing that wonderful description of Count F osco letting his favourite white mice run up and down his body, and teaching his canaries "to go up stairs" on his fat fingers. It is this presentment of another and a totally different side of this old villain's character which tends to make him a living personality to us, and to single him out from the crowd of undistinguished and undistinguishable villains of fiction. Take another example, Captain Wragge, in /Vo /Vatne, is as thorough a scamp as one could wish to see, who consistently cheats and defrauds every one who comes in his way, from his wife downwards. lle has assisted Magdalen in her scheme to marry Noel Vanstone, and when at the last moment before the marriage she repents, and is inclined to turn back, the Captain's better nature breaks out for a moment. Magdalen Vanstone is speaking :—

"'You arc a kinder man than I thought you were,' she said ; 'I am sorry I spoke so passionately to you just now,—I am very, very sorry The tears stole into her eyes, and she offered him her hand, with the native grace and gentleness of happier days. 'Be friends with me again,' she said pleadingly; I'm only a girl, Captain Wragge,—I'm only a girl l' Ho took her hand in silence, patted it for a moment, and then opened the door for her to go back to her room again. There was genuine regret in his face, as he showed her that trifling attention. He was a vagabond and a cheat; he had lived a mean, shuffling, degraded life, but ho was human, and she had found her way to the lost sym- pathies in him which not even the self-profanation of a swindler's existence could wholly destroy. 'Damn the breakfast!' he said, when the servant came in for her orders. 'Go to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and pair at the door in an hour's time.' She has rubbed the edge off my appetite,' he said to himself, with a forced laugh, 'I'll try a cigar and a turn in the open air.'"

The reader feels an interest in him directly, understands him, feels that, after all, though a scamp, he is a human being, like the rest of us,—a possible respectable, under other issues. We do not mean to say that this is the highest art, far from it, it is only, to use an artist's simile, the art of the etching as compared with an oil painting ; a rough, suggestive black out- line, instead of all the myriad delicacies of curve and harmonies of colour. But though such character-painting is not that of Thiickeray or George Eliot, it is none the less true delineation, as far as it goes, and is indeed more appropriate to the general scope of the design than more finished work would be.

This gift of dramatic insight, which operates in hindrance of Mr. Collins's powers in some directions, increases them in others where we should hardly have expected it. By nature, we imagine that our author is not a man endowed with any keen sympathy with the rural or picturesque phases of nature, but is essentially a dweller in towns and observer of men. Nevertheless there are few of our living writers who can present a scene to us more vividly or truly than can Mr. Collins, when the exigencies of his story require it. We will not select any of the numerous bits of the Woman in White, as they are probably known to most of our

readers, but a paragraph from Arnzac/a/e, describing the approach of a picnic party to the Norfolk Broads,—

"An hour's steady driving from the Major's cottage had taken young Arreadale and his guests beyond the limits of Midwinter's solitary walk, end was now bringing them nearer and nearer to one of the strangest and loveliest aspects of nature which the inland landscape, not only of Norfolk, but of all England, can show. Little by little the face of the Country began to change, as the carriage approached the remote and Io noi y district of tho Broads. The wheat-fields and turnip-fields became perceptibly fewer, and the fat green grazing-grounds on either side

grow wider and wider in their smooth and sweeping range. Heaps of dry rushes and reeds laid up for the basket-maker and tho thatcher began to appear at the road-side. The old gabled cottages of the early part of the drive dwindled and disappeared, and huts with mud walla rose in their place. With the ancient church-towers and wind and water-mills, which had hitherto been the only lofty objeots seen above the low marshy flat, there now rose all round the horizon, gliding slow and distant behind fringes of pollard willows, the sails of invisible boats moving on invisible waters. All the strange and startling anomalies presented by an inland agricultural district, isolated from other districts by its surrounding net-work of pools and streams— holding its communications and carrying its produce by water instead of land—began to present themselves in closer and closer succession. Nets appeared upon cottage palings, little flat-bottomed boats lay strangely at rest among the flowers in cottage-gardens, farmers' men passed to and fro clad in composite costumes of the coast and the field, in sailors' hats and fishermen's boots and ploughmen's smocks, and oven yet the low-lying labyrinth of waters, embosomed in its mystery of solitude, was a hidden labyrinth still. A minute more, and the car- riages took a sudden turn from the hard high road into a little weedy lane. A lonely outlying cottage appeared, with its litter of nets and boats. A few yards more, and the last morsel of firm earth suddenly ended in a tiny creek and quay. One turn more to the end of the quay, and there, spreading its great sheet of water, far, and bright, and smooth, on the right hand and the left,—there, as bright in its spotless blue, as pure in its heavenly peacefulness, as the summer sky above it, was the first of the Norfolk Broads."

Could we have a more delicately suggestive outline of a picture than this ?—and if we had space and did not fear to weary our readers' patience, we could quote as fine descriptive passages from nearly all the books.

But we must pass to another part of our subject, and having endeavoured to exonerate Wilkie Collins from the charge of being nothing more than a mere sensational writer, we must now say a few words of his work in that capacity, the one in which he stands probably unapproached by any living writer. It is as a story-

teller that this writer will go down to posterity, and as a story- teller his wonderful power is, we think, chiefly due to the dramatic unity which is to be traced throughout all his finer works.

There is the utmost possible concentration of interest, and no, irrelevant matter is allowed for a moment to intrude itself. Each work represents a design, and each character, and even each speech of the characters, assist to the fulfilment of the action whereby the design is completed. This is particularly noticeable in Armadale, perhaps the most stirring sensation novel that has ever been written, in which, during the course of an excep- tionally lengthy book (it took nearly two years to come out in the Cornhill Magazine, if we remember rightly), it would be diffi- cult to find a single speech or description which does not directly bear upon and assist the purpose of the story.

Add to this power of subordinating all the details to one design, a great command of terse, nervous English, a power of seizing the salient features of any situation or character, and a mind apparently peculiarly gifted by nature for the evolution of intricate problems of moral and physical eccentricity or disease, and we have the main elements of Wilkie Collins's power of ex- citing a reader's attention, and sustaining it at full stretch throughout his story. It would be, we feel, quite unnecessary for us to give any description of the plots of his various works they must, as a rule, be familiar to our readers, but alrew words may be said as to the relative merit of his successive novels, from Basil, down to the Two Destinies, published early this year.

First, then, his novels appear to us to fall broadly into three orders of merit, which may be described as the works of his youth, his manhood, and his age ; and of these three, the best aro, as might naturally be expected, those which lie between the two extremes. From 1850 to 1860, that is, from the age of 26 to the age of 36, Wilkie Collins advanced in power with each successive novel, and during that time he published three long tales, besides two sets of shorter ones. Basil appeared in 1852, and was suc- ceeded by Hide and Seek after a lapse of two years, which was in its turn succeeded by the Dead Secret, the first of this author's novels where he succeeded in fully mystifying and exciting his readers. These three novels, together with Antonina and Memoirs of his Father (published in 1848), form what we venture call the early works of our author. In 1860 the Woman in White was produced, and was succeeded rapidly by No Name, Armadale, and the Moonstone. These four novels are undoubtedly the finest works of the author, and he has since produced no work which is equal to the worst of them,—indeed, since then his works have fallen off little by little, and his conceptions have grown more and more extravagant, till even the patience of his oldest admirers is somewhat hardly taxed. Man and Wife and Poor Miss Pinch, which succeeded the Moonstone, were decidedly inferior, both in interest and humour, the former perhaps suffering from its plot being fettered by the adoption of a definite purpose, that of drawing attention to the abuse of athletic sports. The New Magdalen, despite some fine touches, was inferior to Poor Miss Finch, and so on, till the last work is almost puerile, compared to the elaborate former produc- tions of this author. Were it not for certain peculiarities of dic- tion, no one would recognise the author of No Name in that of the Two Destinies or the Law and the Lady; and this is the more provoking, as it does not appear to be from any actual falling-off in power, but rather from the want of sufficient care in the pro- duction and elaboration of the plot. The design, which was once so full of subtlety and beauty, has lately become a mere skeleton, with form filled out by hardly disguised padding. Will not Mr. Collins rouse himself once more, and become worthy of the author of the Woman in White ? It would hardly seem natural to close this somewhat long account of our author without giving a specimen of his sensational writing, and though this cannot be done justly in a short quotation, the following, from No Name, may serve as an example. It is the place where Magdalen, unable to bear the thought of her marriage to Noel Vanstone, determines to set her life upon the hazard of a chance. Sitting at her window in the early morning, she sees a little fleet of fishing-boats drifting past :— " If in half-an-hour an oven number passed, the sign given should be a sign to live ; if the uneven number prevailed, the end should be death. With that final resolution she rested her head against the window, and waited for the ships to pass Two minutes to the end of the half-hour, and seven ships; twenty-nine, and nothing followed in the Wake of the seventh ship. The minute-hand of the watch moved on half-way to thirty, and still the white, heaving sea was a misty blank. Without moving her head from the window, she took the poison in one hand and raised the watch in the other. As the quick seconds counted each other out, her eyes, quick as they turned from tho watch to the sea, from the sea to the watch, looked for the last time at the sea, and saw the EIGHTH ship. She never moved, she never spoke. The death of thought, the death of fooling, seemed to have come to her already. She put back the poison mechanically on the ledge of the window, and watched, as in a dream, the ship gliding smoothly on its silent way, gliding till it melted dimly into shadow, gliding till it was lost in the mist. The strain on her mind relaxed when the messenger of life had passed from her sight. 'Providence?' she whiepered faintly to herself,

or chance ?' Her eyes closed and her head foil back. When the sense of life returned to her, the morning sun was warm on her face, the

blue heaven looked down on her, and the sea Was a sea of gold The maid entered the room, remained there a moment or two, and came out again, closing the door gently, 4 She leeks beautiful, Sir,' said the girl, 'end she's sleeping as quietly as a now-born child."

To sum up, Mr. Collins has for the last quarter of a century been a writer of fiction, and during that time has produced six- teen finished works, besides many short stories, articles, Sze. It is surely no small praise to an author that he has for such a period of time amused and interested thousands—we might say hundreds of thousands—of readers, and has done that with such success, that he has made one department of literature entirely his own. And it is, we think, a still greater praise that he has never used his magnificent gifts to the detriment of morality, nor in- culcated in any form the Hasa indifferentism which is such a prevalent feature of nineteenth-century fiction. His char- acters are by no means ideal ones, but often very erring fellow-crtures ; but they are always fellow-creatures whose errors are not held up as virtues, and whose folly and ignorance are not extolled as wisdom and light. That he has chosen to illustrate the abnormal events of nature and man may be a grave error on his part, but at least he has done it honestly, and not disguised the fact. And lastly, be has held up an example to the great mass of sensation-writers which they would do well to follow, for he has shown that it is possible to be exciting with- out immorality, and realistic without coarseness, though to that last word of praise Basil is a partial exception.