ABSTRACT
If Mr. Wilkie Collins is contented with the praise of not having hastily meditated or idly wrought out his new story, he may be sure that his claims to such praise will not be disputed. But the concluding sentences of his preface do away with the modest effect of the opening sentence, and plead for a less qualified verdict. ‘Estimated by the Clap-trap morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.’ Mr. Wilkie Collins is fond of challenging his critics, and we see no cause to shrink from accepting his challenge. We have no love for Clap-trap morality, even when it is dignified with a large C, and we have never shown any wish to restrict the development of modern fiction within such narrow limits as exclude Crime, Fraud, and those kindred elements which Mr. Wilkie Collins honours with the same emphasis. But when we find a book daring enough to speak the truth, and appealing to Christian morality, we have a right to demand the whole truth, and some more reference to that morality than is contained in the modern tag which is called a preface. Is it, then, the whole truth about the world in which we live that it is peopled by a set of scoundrels qualified by a set of fools, and watched by retributive providence in the shape of attornies and spies? Is it the object of half the world to cheat the other half, and the object of the other half to put itself in the way of being cheated? Is it true that all women are idiots till they are twenty, intriguers and murderesses till they are forty, and customers of hags who restore decayed beauty till they are eighty? Do the hags and intriguers exchange cynical letters sparkling with the epigram of a practised writer, and do the murderesses keep journals of equal literary merit and equal power of mental anatomy? If the world is such Mr. Wilkie Collins is certainly daring and Christian. But if he has only taken disjointed facts, which at best are fragments of truth, and patched them together,—if he has expended his wonderful ingenuity in producing a discordant mosaic instead of a harmonious picture, his plea falls to the ground, and the fact that there are characters such as hehas drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his overstepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what Armadale does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of thirty-five, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol, and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty. The plot turns on this woman’s attempt to murder a boy whom she had first attempted to marry, and to pass herself off as his widow by means of her marriage to another boy who is secretly his namesake. And these attempts are told frankly in a diary, which, but for its unreality, would be simply loathsome, and which needs all the veneer of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s easy style and allusive sparkle to disguise its actual meaning. If we needed any proof of our assertion we should point to Mr. Thomas’s pictures. It is well that a novelist should see the effect produced by the images of his fancy on the man who has to give them form and shape. So long as Miss Gwilt is talking about Beethoven’s sonatas, eclipsing Byron’s sarcasm about girls in their teens, and Dickens’s joke about church bells, we are tempted to forget the character of the speaker. But if we turn to the illustration no doubt is left in our mind:—
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen.
