ABSTRACT
There are certain ideas, combinations, and trucs which constantly preoccupied the author. He wished to excite and sustain curiosity as to a secret; or, again, he liked to foreshadow the progress of the story, and then to interest the reader in the fulfilment of what had been foreshadowed. This latter is the process in No Name and in Armadale; the former is the process in The Moonstone and The Woman in White. In these aims Mr. Collins competes with M.Gaboriau, and with M. Fortuné du Boisgobey. But he escapes Gaboriau’s defect, his habit of first powerfully exciting curiosity, and then explaining inexplicablecircumstances by going back almost as far as the First Crusade. Nor does Mr. Collins, like M.Boisgobey, secure his secret by making some person act quite out of character, as in that very clever tale, Le Crime de l’Opéra. Perhaps even The Moonstone is not more craftily wrought than Les Esclaves de Paris, and it would be false patriotism to set Mr. Collins above M.Gaboriau in the qualities that were common to both. But there are defects in M.Gaboriau’s manner which Mr. Collins escaped. The vehement admirer of Mr. Collins may object to the comparison, yet it is almost inevitable. Mr. Collins frequently required for his purposes a character of only occasional sanity, or a blind person, or a somnambulist, and he ventured most unsuccessfully on what M.Gaboriau and Edgar Poe never attempted, the introduction of the supernatural. True, he tried to ‘hedge’ about his supernatural, to leave it hazy, in a dim penumbra. But any one who wishes to see failure here has only to look at Armadale, while in Hawthorne he will find the same attempt made with success. Another favourite device was to make one character personate another, as in Armadale, and in The New Magdalen; but here, again, Mr. Collins did not cope with M.Gaboriau, nor perhaps with Miss Braddon, in Henry Dunbar.1 In all but his very best novels his combinations were apt to be too intricate, too like a very difficult game at chess, and in passing from one coincidence to another, we gradually lose our power of belief, and with it, of course, our interest. That Mr. Collins aims frequently at being didactic and reformatory is, of course, not necessarily a fault. But when he attacks society and social verdicts, in The New Magdalen, he is certainly unfair in his handling of the characters. His repentant and beautiful Magdalen does not repent much of her imposture till she gets into an inextricable position, while her respectable and offensive foil is handicapped by ugliness in opposition to the beauty of the woman who has stolen into her place, and thrown her, destitute, wounded, and morally maimed, on the world. As to Fallen Leaves, that novel involves much that may excite our partisan feelings in a time of furious debate, and so had better be left out of the question as a work of art. Again, in Man and Wife, Mr. Collins attacked ‘athleticism’ without really knowing what the life of athletes at the universities is like. To any one who knew them well, who had seen so many of them, not debauched and brutal clods, but men of refinement, sometimes scholars, occasionally wits, interested in most of the arts, and capable, as time has declared, of taking and making honourable positions in life, the satire of Man and Wife seemed blunt and ignorant….
