ABSTRACT
We forgive this in Dickens, …and were it confined to him we should say nothing about it. But unfortunately it is not confined to him, for, being his weakest and worst trait, it is the very one which his imitators have seized upon, and reproduced with most success. They have caught the trick so completely that we cease to think of the great magician whom these little jugglers have elbowed off the stage. What a brilliant player, for instance, is Mr. Charles Reade, manipulating the balls ofprison-reform, mad-houses, and trades-unions; and how dextrous is Mr. Wilkie Collins, with the abuses of Irish and Scottish marriages! Mr. Collins is a man of genius, whose greatest defect is an excess of cleverness in the construction of plots, and whose greatest excellence is insight into character of a certain sort. His range is narrow, but within that range he is a master. One character in his last novel…is an addition to Literature. We mean, of course, Geoffrey Delamayn, an athlete, who exhibits in perfection the ultimate result of the extreme physical training which is having its apotheosis in England…. We commend Geoffrey Delamayn to Mr. Collins’ admirers, as being the finest study of character that he has yet produced,—the natural result of unnatural causes,—not such an arrested development as Mr. Kingsley’s Muscular Christian, but such a perfected development as Achilles, the Achilles of the nineteenth century,—slow, good-tempered, restrained, but brutal, cunning, murderous-the Muscular Pagan. We shall not enter into the plot of Man and Wife, partly because it is difficult to analyze the plots of Mr. Collins, and partly because the majority of novel-readers must already be familiar with it. Our opinion is that it is at once the simplest and the best that Mr. Collins has yet constructed; and we trust it portends a turning on his part to the world of probable occurrences. How clever he can be he has shown us over and over again; let him show us now that he can be natural. And let him in future drop social abuses, which Mr. Reade will make his own to the end of the chapter. What we want is not reformers, but novelists-such novelists as Dickens was in the early part of his career, as Thackeray was all through his career, and as Mr. Collins can be when he chooses. He has no equal in the art of telling a story, and but few equals in drawing character when character ‘pure and simple’ is his object, as it evidently was in several of the actors in Man and Wife, as Sir Patrick Lundie, Bishopriggs, and Geoffrey Delamayn.
