ABSTRACT
With all her faults, however, a writer like George Eliot may look down from a very far height on such a dweller in the plains as he who wrote The Woman in White. In this novel, which claims a passing notice from the marked disproportion of its actual merits to its seeming popularity, the spirit of modern realism has woven a tissue of scenes more wildly improbable than the fancy of an average idealist would have ventured to inflict on readers beyond their teens. Mr. W.Collins has for some years been favourably known to the general reader as a painstaking manufacturer of stories, short or long, whose chief merit lies in the skilful elaboration of a startling mystery traceable to some natural cause, but baffling all attempts to solve it until the author himself has given us the right clue. Some praise is also due to him for the care with which these literary puzzles are set off by a correct if not very natural style, a pleasing purity of moral tone, and a certain knack of hitting the more superficial traits of character. When we have said all we can for him, we have said nothing that would entitle him to a higher place among English novelists, than the compiler of an average schoolhistory would enjoy among English historians. But to a higher place he seems ambitious to rise, if his readers would only estimate his last performance as highly as he does himself. At any rate, he has tried his best to make the world a partner in his own illusions. The Woman in White opens with a grand flourish on the author’s own trumpet, and echoes of the same sweet music greet us ever and anon throughout the work. That many have thus been lured to take him at his own valuing, is likely and natural enough; and the pleasure that comes to most of us in reading a story full of movement and strange surprises, will often be enhanced by contrast with the surfeiting effects of certain other tales wherewith the genius of a great living novelist has made us too familiar. But to us it seemed as if all this self-approval rendered us the more alive to the author’s weakness, even in those very points where he had hitherto come out best. If he has never yet succeeded in writing a noteworthy novel, he has signally failed for once in that field of mechanical excellence which redeemed his former essays from utter neglect.
