ABSTRACT
Mr. Wilkie Collins, a short sketch of whose career I propose to write, is without doubt the most conscientious novelist of the present day. No barrister or physician ever worked harder at his profession, devoted more time, or thought, or trouble to it, was prouder of it, or pursued it with more zeal and earnestness than Mr. Collins has done with regard to literature. By Mr. Thackeray’s own confession in the preface to Pendennis, we learn that his plot was not clearly defined beforehand, but was liable to alteration and modification,—for does he not tell us, that until the very morning on which the ‘copy’ was to be delivered to the printer, he was uncertain whether or not to kill Amory by a fall from the window? Writing on this present eighteenth day of May, I am in strong doubt whether the author of Little Dorrit has even yet made up his mind how to dispose of some of his dramatis personæ; but, after long and careful observation of Mr. Collins’s writings, I am perfectly certain that he never enters upon a story until the plot, in all its ramifications and bearings, has been thoroughly weighed and digested in his own mind; and also, that when once he has set to work, his original intention is never departed from. All his honesty of purpose, all this labour, this artistic preparation would, however, be useless had he not the power tocarry out his intentions; but this power he has. Placing him in my own estimation as the fourth in rank among the British novelists of the present day (and among those prior to him I have classed that wondrous woman whose biography has so recently been given to us), I contend that as a story-teller he has no equal; that he possesses the art de center above all living writers. Inferior to Dickens in pathos and humour, inferior to Thackeray in the knowledge of the secret workings of the human heart, and in the popular exposition of a cynical philosophy, inferior to Miss Brontë in his grasp of persons and places, his power of description, and in the quaint uttering of startling and original doctrines,—he yet possesses a considerable amount of the qualifications of all these authors; while in the talent with which the foundations of his story are laid, and the edifice afterwards raised to completion, he far surpasses them.
