ABSTRACT
Mr. Wilkie Collins’s new book is very suggestive of a game called ‘button,’ which children used to play, and probably play now. A number of little folks being seated in a circle, each with hands placed palm to palm in front of him, one of the party, who holds a button, comes in turn to each of the others, and ostensibly drops it into his closed hands. Of course, but one of the party can receive it, but in each case the same motions are gone through with; and having made his rounds, the principal performer enquires, ‘Who’s got the button?’ Each one, including him who has it, but who intentionally misleads the rest, guesses at the puzzle, and he who guesses right carries the button at the next trial. The Moonstone riddle is so like in its essential features to this child’s-play, that it might very well have been suggested by it. Mr. Collins’s art consists, in this particular case, in converting the button into a yellow diamond, worth thirty thousand pounds; in calling theplayers Hindoos, detective policemen, reformed thieves, noble ladies, and so on, and in thus more effectually distracting his reader’s attention from the puzzle itself, which turns out at last, like most of Mr. Collins’s mysteries, to have no vital connection with his characters, considered as human beings, but to be merely an extraneous matter thrown violently into the current of his story. It would perhaps be more correct to say that there is no story at all, and that the characters are mere puppets, grouped with more or less art around the thing the conjurer wishes to conceal until the time comes for displaying it. These books of his are, in their way, curiosities of literature. The word ‘novel,’ as applied to them, is an absurd misnomer, however that word is understood. There is nothing new in Mr. Collins’s stories, if the reader has ever read a book of puzzles, and they serve none of the recognized purposes of the novel. They reflect neither nature nor human life; the actors whom they introduce are nothing but more or less ingenious pieces of mechanism, and they are all alike-like each other and like nothing else. They teach no moral lessons; they are unsuggestive of thought, and they appeal to no sentiment profounder than the idlest curiosity. They are simply conundrums. It is for this reason that Mr. Collins, wise in his generation, deprecates any attempts on the part of his critics to tell the plot of his stories. One commits, however, no breach of trust in speaking of the theatrical properties which supply, in our author’s case, the place of dramatic ability. He cannot create a character, unless the solitary instance of Count Fosco be an exception; he can only dress a lay-figure with more or less of skill. Take his ‘Moonstone,’ for instance-which, as far as the real business of the plot is concerned, might as well have been a black bean or a horn button-call it a yellow diamond, stolen, centuries ago, from the forehead of an Indian idol, and make its recovery a part of the religion of three mysterious, lithe, swarthy East Indians in flowing white robes, and there is a chance of awakening, in the most hardened of novel-readers, a curiosity which would assuredly have slept over the possible whereabouts of a button.
