ABSTRACT
The position of Mr. Wilkie Collins in literature was a very unusual one. He was an extremely popular writerdeservedly popular, as we think-who was not very highly esteemed. Of all the Englishmen who read novels, few have failed to read some of his best stories; fewer, having begun them, ever laid them down unfinished; and fewest of all ended their reading without some criticism of more or less depreciatory friendliness. That is an odd position, and we do not know that it has been quite satisfactorily explained. That which Mr. Collins pretended to do, he did, when he was doing his best work, admirably; and it is by his best work, and not by his early failures, or the inferior stuff he wrote after he took, as his friend Mr. Yates explains, to opium-eating on the grand scale, opium-eating like Coleridge’s or De Quincey’s, that he ought to be judged. In four of his books, The Woman in White, No Name, The Moonstone, and Man and Wife, he showed himself exactly as he was,—that is, as a literary chess-player of the first force, with the 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 revindication of a fortune, the tracking of a crime, or the establishment of a doubted marriage, and then bring on other characters to resist and 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 the stories, the one which will live for years, The Moonstone, the pretence that it is anything else is openly discarded. There are two games going on at once,—that of the Indians who are seeking their diamond, against the heirs of Major Herncastle; and afterwards that of Frank Blake against his traducers. Both are fought out with a slow skill which enchains the observer, and both end in admirably contrived and most surprising mates. In The Woman in White, the deliberate play is less manifest, because all through one side plays blindfold, at the bidding of a higher power or Fate; but in No Name the play is again of the most open kind, the players, Margaret Vanstone and Mrs. Lecount, setting to the game with a will, and turning up their faces now and then to see if you admire the skilfulness of their moves.
