ABSTRACT
Mr. Wilkie Collins has again produced one of his ingenious puzzles. He has worked out once more a novel that is plot and nothing else but plot. No Name has all the faults, but it has all the merits, of this kind of fiction. It is a mere puzzle, in which the artist moves his puppets so as to make us wonder what is to be the end of them. We do not care, and are not meant to care, about the characters of the story. Indeed, nothing could be more unattractive than the main basis of the fiction. A girl, angry at finding that her illegitimacy deprives her of her father’s money, determines to cheat the heir out of it by marrying him under an assumed name. The heir, a selfish foolish invalid, is protected by a sly, sleek housekeeper; and the whole point of the story, the one source of interest it possesses, is the contest between these two deceitful, wicked, obstinate women. Will the pretty bad girl get the fool to marry her, or will the adroit, audacious, catlike housekeeper keep the fool to herself? This is the riddle we are asked to follow to its solution. It is a game which we are invited to watch, because the turns of the game itself have an interest quite apart from the moral character of the players. All that criticism has to say against this reduction of fiction to a puzzle and a contest of low artifices is too obvious, and has been said too often, to make it necessary to repeat it here. It is more important to notice the merits of this sort of book. Criticism says that Mr. Wilkie Collins invents a puzzling plot, and does nothing more. This is true; but then it is so very difficult to invent a puzzling plot. Any one who has ever tried to sketch a story-and most clever young people have hadmoments when they fancied they could write one-will remember that there were many things that came at once when called for, and which the instinct or genius of the composer seemed quite ready to furnish. There were the descriptions of scenery; the moral reflections; the colour of the heroine’s eyes and hair; the inner state of the head lover’s mind; the views on the Church, and on the scheme of creation, and the true aim of life-all these welled up spontaneously in the breast of the fertile dreamer. But between him and an embodied dream there was the great barrier of an unimagined plot. Who was the heroine to be; and why was she to be unhappy; and who was to bring in the philosophy; and how on earth was it to come in naturally? These are the fatal questions which have caused so many possible novels of the single-volume kind to die unborn. A good plot-a plot that interests, excites, and properly balances bewilderment and explanation-is a very considerable effort of the mind, and one which demands great practice, patience, and inventiveness. To have devised and worked out the plot of No Name is a sign of mental qualities that are by no means common, and we do not wonder that Mr. Wilkie Collins is so well pleased with his productions as his preface shows him to be. In order to do him justice, we ought to compare him not only with writers of real genius, but with the authors of the other sort of current popular novel-the novel where there is no plot that could cost ten minutes’ thought, but where there is any amount of digression, sentiment, and description. We shall then understand what Mr. Wilkie Collins means when he tells us that he regards himself as an artist in the construction of fiction….
