ABSTRACT
In this particular preface, Mr. Wilkie Collins returns to an old theory of his, and insists that the qualities in fiction which find most favour with the British public are character and humour, and that incident and dramatic situation only find a second place in their favour. He tells us that he has ‘always tried to combine the different merits of a good novel in one and the same book,’ but that he has ‘never succeeded in keeping an equal balance,’ and that in the present story we shall ‘find the scalesinclining, on the whole, in favour of character and humour.’ Perhaps Mr. Wilkie Collins hardly states the case quite correctly. The ordinary novel-reader of the day does indeed, value character and humour, but he values also incident and dramatic situation, as is amply proved by the continued popularity of the writer’s own book, The Woman in White; and we are inclined to think that he values most of all the simple skill in the art of narration which is one of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s strongest points. Whether there be much or little story in a novel, the reader demands that it shall be well told, and it is in this telling of a story that Mr. Wilkie Collins is supreme. There is less plot in Heart and Science than in many of the writer’s previous works, but we do not find this out until we have closed the third volume; for what there is of story is so deftly managed, that we have in reading it the feeling of plot, just as in reading such an unrhymed poem as ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ we have the feeling of rhyme.
