ABSTRACT
If there were such a word as ‘story-wright,’ corresponding to the term ‘playwright,’ Wilkie Collins would be styled the one great ‘story-wright.’ He indeed writes always good sound English, such as De Foe or Swift might have written; but he has none of the delicacies or mannerisms of style which characterize the works of Dickens and Thackeray. It would be hard to find in all his characteristic works a page which from mere form of expression any one could declare to be his rather than that of any other person who understands grammar and has at command a good store of good words. But Mr. Collins has the faculty of constructing a story in such a way that while no one when it is in progress shall even guess at its winding-up, yet when all is done the reader will wonder why he had not anticipated the end of the plot. Mr. Dickens somewhere complains that unscrupulous playwrights, taking one of his novels when half completed, ‘adapted it to the stage,’ anticipating the event which was to have formed the climax. Thackeray seems never to have had a plot in his mind. In the preface to Pendennis he tells humorously how, until the last chapter was to be written, he did not know how the work was to end. No one who reads Dickens’s Mutual Friend will doubt that the final explanation of Mr. Boffin’s strange conduct never entered into the mind of the author until long after the story was begun. More odd still is the fate of Paul Emanuel in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. Of ten critical readers of the story, five will be sure that he was drowned, and the other five will be just as sure that he came home, married Lucy Snowe, and ‘lived happily ever after.’ No such difficulties will confront the readers of any novel by Wilkie Collins. They may not be able to even guess, while the story is in progress, how it is to turn out. If they did guess, most likely their guesses would turn out wrong. Mr. Collins possesses the faculty, almost amounting to genius, of writing a novel. In the Moonstone he has come nearer to success than in any of his former stories. If he has fallen short of producing a great novel, he has succeeded in making a most readable story.
