ABSTRACT
Melodrama was Wilkie Collins’s forte, but he worked better as a novelist than as a dramatist. Of the creator of Count Fosco, of Better-edge, of Miss Gwilt, and of Mercy Merrick it cannot be said that he was not a bold and painstaking student of character, and his zeal in eccentric portraiture went so far as to become an infirmity in his later writings. But his best creations were puppets, and he was pre-eminent as a manipulator of marionettes. As a novelist ‘with a purpose’ he was a disciple of Dickens, preserving his own individuality, and showing some affinity to Poe. As a weaver of plots he has no rival in England, and in certain respects he surpassed, if in others he could not equal and widely differed from, Gaboriau and the rest of the French contrivers of elaborated plots. His mastery of details, all cunningly contrived and ordered with a view to startling and realistic effects, aimed at, and often achieved, more than a verisimilitude of actual life. Whether he was right or wrong, whether he pleaded in fiction for charity towards erring women, or whether he attacked vivisectionists, or whatever else he attempted or did, he never failed to preach what seemed to him some moral doctrine that needed to be enforced. Though many people strongly resented his Heart and Science and I Say No, and though his art was always crippled by his moralizing, he deservedly holds high rank as a literary artist as well as a zealous moralist, and in both respects is vastly superior to many younger imitators and rivals.
