ABSTRACT
This, in the interests of art, it is necessary to protest against. The Foscos of ordinary life are not likely, we admit, to take encouragement from Mr Wilkie Collins; but if this gentleman has many followers in fiction, it is a matter of certainty that the disciples will exaggerate the faults of their leader, and choose his least pleasant peculiarities for special study. Already it is a not uncommon result of fictitious writings, to make the worse appear the better cause. We have just laid down a clever novel, called East Lynne,1 which some inscrutable breath of popular liking has blown into momentary celebrity. It is occupied with the story of a woman who permitted herself, in passion and folly, to be seduced from her husband. From first to last it is she alone in whom the reader feels any interest. Her virtuous rival we should like to bundle to the door and be rid of, anyhow. The Magdalen herself, who is only moderately interesting while she is good, becomes, as soon as she is a Magdalen, doubly a heroine. It is evident that nohow, except by her wickedness and sufferings, could she have gained so strong a hold upon our sympathies. This is dangerous and foolish work, as well as false, both to Art and Nature. Nothing can be more wrong and fatal than to represent the flames of vice as a purifying fiery ordeal, through which the penitent is to come elevated and sublimed. The error of Mr Wilkie Collins is of a different kind, but it is perhaps even more dangerous. Fosco in suffering would be Fosco in collapse, totally unmanned and uninteresting. It is the perfect ease, comfort, and light-heartedness of the man-what virtuous people would call his ‘simple tastes,’ his thorough enjoyment of life, and all the pleasant things within reach-his charming vanity and amiableness, as well as his force, strength, and promptitude, that recommend him to our regard. Whatever the reason may be, few good men are permitted in books to enjoy their existence as this fat villain is permitted to enjoy his. He spreads himself out in the sun with a perfect pleasure and satisfaction, which it is exhilarating to behold. His crimes never give him an apparent twinge; his own complacent consciousness of the perfect cleverness with which they are carried out, confounds all compunctions. He is so smilingly aware of the successful evil he has done, and unaware of the guilt of it, that it seems heartless to take so innocent and genial a soul to task for his peccadilloes. Such is the great and radical drawback of the most notable of sensation novels. Fosco is, unquestionably, destined to be repeated to infinitude, as no successful work can apparently exist in this imitative age without creating a shoal of copyists; and with every fresh
imitation the picture will take more and more objectionable shades. The violent stimulant of serial publication-of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident-is the thing of all others most likely to develop the germ, and bring it to fuller and darker bearing. What Mr Wilkie Collins has done with delicate care and laborious reticence, his followers will attempt without any such discretion. We have already had specimens, as many as are desirable, of what the detective policeman can do for the enlivenment of literature: and it is into the hands of the literary Detective that this school of story-telling must inevitably fall at last. He is not a collaborateur whom we welcome with any pleasure into the republic of letters. His appearance is neither favourable to taste nor morals. It is only in rare cases, even in real life, that bystanders side with those conspirators of justice; and in fiction it is almost a necessity that the criminal who is tracked through coil after coil of evidence should become interesting, as we see him thrust into a corner by his remorseless pursuers. The rise of a Sensation School of art in any department is a thing to be watched with jealous eyes; but nowhere is it so dangerous as in fiction, where the artist cannot resort to a daring physical plunge, as on the stage, or to a blaze of palpable colour, as in the picture-gallery, but must take the passions and emotions of life to make his effects withal. We will not deny that the principle may be used with high and pure results, or that we should have little fault to find with it were it always employed with as much skill and self-control as in the Woman in White; but that is an unreasonable hope; and it seems but too likely that Mr Wilkie Collins, in his remarkable novel, has given a new impulse to a kind of literaturewhich must, more or less, find its inspiration in crime, and, more or less, make the criminal its hero.
