ABSTRACT
Mr Wilkie Collins is a writer of quite a different stamp from George Eliot, and in his own way he has achieved eminent successes. The interest of his books is absorbing, the ingenuity of his plots marvellous; and to go to bed after the perusal of the Woman in White or No Name, is like going to bed after supping on a pork-chop. Mr Collins can hide a secret better than any man, he is a master of mystery; but when once the secret is discovered, when once the mystery is unravelled, his books collapse at once, their interest perishes, they are flat as conundrums to which you have the answers. For to this writer plot and incident are all in all, character nothing. He has little spontaneity of humour, no reflection, no aphoristic wisdom, no poetry, but little painting of scenery, and, what there is, not of the highest kind. He relates his stories boldly and nakedly; he pursues his plot with the directness and pertinacity of a detective or a bloodhound. From the beginning of the first chapter of his work, he keeps his eye steadily fixed on the last. So long as you have his book open, you are spell-bound; whenever you close it, you feel you have been existing in a world of impossible incidents, and holding converse with monstrosities. The touches that make the whole world kin, the humour which is a perpetual delight, the pathos which makes sacred, are not in these books. Everything is tense, strained, and unnatural. The characters are preternaturally acute; they watch one another as keenly as duellists do when the seconds fall back and the rapiers cross. Then every trifling incident is charged with an oppressive importance: if a tea-cup is broken, it has a meaning, it is a link in a chain; you are certain to hear of it afterwards. In a short time, however, you discover the writer’s trick. If a young lady goes into the garden for a moment before dinner, you know that some one is waiting for her behind the laurels. If two people talk together in a room in a hot summer day, and one raises the window a little, you know that a third is crouching on the gravel below, listening to every word, and who will be prepared to act upon it at the proper time. Everything in these books is feverish and excited; the reader is continually as if treading on bombshells, which may explode at any moment. The incidents follow each other rapidly, and they are generally of the most improbable description. Every chapter is a shock of astonishment; but in a little while the feeling of astonishment perishes, the sense of wonder is dulled by the repeated calls made upon it, the marvellous becomes commonplace; and if Mr Collins described a dead man walking out of his grave, the reader would peruse the startling sentences without a thrill-just as if such a proceeding was the most ordinary thing in the world.
