ABSTRACT
The Moonstone is not worthy of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s reputation as a novelist. We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics, or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzle on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity. Still if readers like a book containing little besides a plot, and that plot constructed solely to set them guessing, there is no particular reason why they should not be gratified. The making and guessing of conundrums are both harmless exercises of ingenuity, but when men of intellect engage in them they ought atleast to succeed. If the work is to be done at all, the better it is done the nearer does it rise to a work of genuine intellectual interest. Hitherto Mr. Wilkie Collins has done his work well, has been among the makers of conundrum-novels something more than chief, the only one whose writing was endurable by cultivated taste. Few men who could read the Woman in White at all read it without pleasure, or forgot its one character, the subtle, cowardly, intellectual sybarite Count Fosco. The plot of No Name also was worked out with rare skill, such skill as to suggest a regret that it had not been all expanded on the heroine, Magdalen Vanstone, the born actress, and the single person in the story with a character at all. Captain Wragge only appears to have one, and is obliged to tell you every five minutes what kind of villain he is. The excessive and morbid improbability of Armadale could not destroy all its interest, or the curiosity of its readers in the proceedings of that vulgarized Becky Sharp, Miss Gwilt. In the Moonstone, however, we have no person who can in any way be described as a character, no one who interests us, no one who is human enough to excite even a faint emotion of dull curiosity as to his or her fate. The heroine is an impulsive girl, generally slanging somebody, whose single specialty seems to be that, believing her lover had stolen her diamond, she hates him and loves him both at once, but neither taxes him with the offence nor pardons him for committing it, a heroine who seems to have been borrowed from one of those old novels where everybody is miserable because nobody will talk common sense for five minutes. The hero has no qualities at all. In the beginning of the book Mr. Wilkie Collins had apparently an idea of describing a rather remarkable figure, a man who, educated in many countries, has so far imbibed their intellectual specialities that he by turns displays the French, German, Italian, and English side of his nature. The idea is not a bad one, for though no such human being ever existed, even a lay figure may be made interesting by carefully selected costume, but it is clumsily worked out even at first, through nonsensical talk about objective and subjective, and very soon found burdensome and abandoned; after which Franklin Blake becomes a person to whom all manner of fascinating qualities are attributed, but who does nothing remarkable except, indeed, cry when the girl he loves declares that he has stolen her jewellery. Of the minor characters Miss Clack is an absurd exaggeration of the bitter evangelical type, a woman who reveals her greed and spitefulness and love of power in broad splashes, not touches, in her own letters; Godfrey Ablewhite is the most ordinary of hypocrites; Gabriel Betteredge a butler like no butler theworld ever saw, now a garrulous old goose, now shrewd enough to detect the effect of several educations on his interlocutor; and Mr. Bruff is a very inferior copy of Pedgift Senior in Armadale…. Such an array of dummies was never got together in any book of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s before, or, we venture to say, in any book written by a man with the same literary reputation.
