Wilkie Collins

The Critical Heritage

Norman Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415134644
• eBook ISBN: 9781134781379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Later Novels 1875–89

The ten novels from The Law and the Lady to Blind Love are here dealt with much more summarily; for a discussion of their reception, and further quotations from reviews, see Introduction, pp. 20–9.

THE LAW AND THE LADY
1875

67.
Unsigned review, Saturday Review
13 March 1875, xxxix, 357–8

Mr. Wilkie Collins has the art of telling a secret at greater length than any one else, whether writer or merely speaker, that we have ever happened to come across. He wins his audience, as a clever child draws away her companions from their games, by the promise of telling them a secret; but when they are caught he does not quite so quickly let them go. The secret fills three whole volumes. We doubt, however, if it altogether repays the trouble of getting at it. Mr. Collins has done well in first publishing the story in weekly parts; for we should imagine any reader of common sense, when once he had the story in his hand, would save himself the labour of following the lengthy clue by going to the end by the shortest of all cuts. Mr. Collins perhaps has the same excuse as the sign-painter who, whatever was the name of the inn that he was hired to adorn, painted every sign a red lion, for the good reason that a red lion was all he had learnt to paint. So Mr. Collins tells secrets, for secrets are all that he has learnt to tell. Characters he cannot draw, and manners he cannot sketch. He can tie knots that are almost as ingenious as the knot of Gordius, and can form a puzzle that would be no discredit to a Chinaman. Untying knots and unravelling puzzles is at best but very dull work, though to people of a sluggish mind it would seem to be as pleasant as any other occupation. Mr. Collins begins to tie his knot in the first page of his story; he spends the reader’s time by giving him clue after clue, each of which turns out to be a false one; and does not let him unravel the mystery till the last chapter has been reached….

[The remainder of this long review is devoted to an ironic summary of the complexities and absurdities of Collins’s plot.]

THE TWO DESTINIES
1876

68.
Unsigned review, Saturday Review
20 January 1877, xliii, 89–90

This is an amazingly silly book. Indeed it is almost silly enough to be amusing through its very absurdity. It records, if we have counted rightly, three attempts at suicide, two plots to murder, one case of bigamy, two bankruptcies, one sanguinary attack by Indians, three visions, numberless dreams, and one shipwreck. The nearest approach to a tolerable character in the work is the hero’s mother, and even she is of the most foolish type of womankind conceivable to the human imagination. Indeed the characters generally are so weak and so sketchily drawn as to be beneath criticism….

[The reviewer continues at length, and in similar vein, with an analysis of the story.]

THE FALLEN LEAVES
1879

69.
Unsigned review, Saturday Review
2 August 1879, xlviii, 148–9

‘In my opinion,’ says Tristram Shandy, ‘to write a book is, for all the world, like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, ‘tis no matter how high or how low you take it.’ Mr. Wilkie Collins is certainly in tune with himself from the first page to the last of Fallen Leaves. He takes it low enough we must admit, but then he keeps low throughout. All his characters are forced and unnatural, and no less so are the incidents of his story. Everything, in fact, is so extravagant, so absurd, and so grossly improbable that a kind of low harmony is preserved throughout. We are not so much shocked as perhaps we ought to be by any one chapter, as each separate chapter is in strict keeping with all the rest. The story is as unpleasant as a story can well be; but then it is unpleasant throughout. It is not wholesome reading, but then its unwholesomeness is, as it were, sustained. Mr. Collins would seem to be aware that his book is likely to meet with severe criticism, and he thus guards himself against it in a kind of preface:—

Experience of the reception of The Fallen Leaves by intelligent readers, who have followed the course of the periodical publication at home and abroad, has satisfied me that the design of the work speaks for itself, and that the scrupulous delicacy of treatment, in certain portions of the story, has been as justly appreciated as I could wish. Having nothing to explain, and (so far as my choice of subject is concerned) nothing to excuse, I leave my book, without any prefatory pleading for it, to make its appeal to the reading public on such merits as it may possess.

Certainly there is nothing of ‘prefatory pleading’ in what the author says here. He does not plead, but asserts, and asserts roundly. Like Clive he is astonished at his own moderation. He has had to deal with a set ofdegraded wretches. He has had to take his readers among the lowest outcasts, and he has not been for one moment indelicate. On the contrary, there is, as he tells us, ‘scrupulous delicacy of treatment in certain portions of the story.’ He himself knows this, and intelligent readers have justly appreciated it.’ ”You are a moral man,” said Mr. Snawley. “I rather believe I am, sir,” replied Squeers. “I have the satisfaction to know you are, sir,” said Mr. Snawley. “I asked one of your references, and he said you were pious.” “Well, sir, I hope I am a little in that line,” replied Squeers.’ Mr. Collins has his references also, both at home and abroad. As we learn by the title-page, ‘translations into the French, German, Italian, and Dutch languages are published by arrangement with the author.’ No doubt this prefatory testimonial will be published with all the translations, and Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and Dutchmen will all alike know that Mr. Collins is famous for his scrupulous delicacy of treatment of a very unsavoury subject. They will know this, moreover, not only on the testimony of his own countrymen, who might speak with a fond partiality, but on that of intelligent readers abroad. It will be noticed that Mr. Collins claims for himself this scrupulous delicacy only in certain portions of his story. Is he, we might ask him, scrupulously delicate when he describes the open mouth of the quartermaster of an American steamer, ‘from which the unspat tobacco-juice trickled in little brown streams’? Where, in these days of word-painting, as it is called, are we to draw the line? Sailors too often have nasty habits; but that does not justify an author in disgusting his readers with nasty descriptions. Does Mr. Collins display this scrupulous delicacy for which he is so famed, in the account that he gives of an infamous hag, who is suffering under an attack of delirium tremens in the kitchen of a thieves’ lodging house?

[The reviewer’s attack on Collins’s story and characters, and his claims to ‘delicacy of treatment’, is pursued at length.]

JEZEBEL’S DAUGHTER 1880

70. Unsigned review, Specta
15 May 1880, liii, 627–8

In the dedication of this book to his Italian friend and translator, Signor Alberto Caccia, Mr. Collins takes occasion to remark that he respects his art far too sincerely to permit limits to be wantonly assigned to it which are imposed in no other civilised country on the face of the earth; that he has never asserted a truer claim to the best and noblest sympathies of Christian readers than in presenting to them the character of the innocent victims of infamy; and that he knows that the wholesome audience of the nation at large has done liberal justice to his books. He then goes on to allude to the ‘interesting moral problem’ which he has worked out in the present volumes, and affirms that the events in which the two chief personages play their parts have been combined with all possible care, and have been derived to the best of his ability, from natural and simple causes.

It would seem, therefore, that Mr. Collins is inclined to take himself quite seriously. It is the more interesting to know this, inasmuch as the ordinary reader of Mr. Collins’s books might conceivably fail to discover it from the evidence of the books themselves. It has been popularly supposed that Mr. Collins was a mighty weaver of plots, and that the dissemination of his works was in direct proportion to the intricacy of his webs. When the ordinary reader thinks of Wilkie Collins, he connects him in his mind with memories of The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and After Dark; whereas Mr. Collins himself has all the time been pluming himself on The New Magdalen, The Law and the Lady, and Fallen Leaves,—and this by no means because of the awful or entertaining ingenuity with which the dénouements were worked out, but because they enlighten humanity in regard to certain moral problemsof deep and momentous import, and hold up to nature a mirror which educates the soul even more than it diverts the understanding. The plots are there, it is true, but are no more than the necessary vehicle for the inculcation of profound ideas; they are not to be regarded as owning any intrinsic value beyond this. And Mr. Collins objects to the squeamishness of English taste; he vindicates the superiority of art to bigoted and temporary fashions in morals, and wishes, apparently, to give his readers to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as freely as M.Zola does, or as M.Théophile Gautier did.

All this goes to show one of two things: either that a public may be lamentably mistaken in its author, or that the author may be curiously mistaken about himself. Is Mr. Collins, in fact as he declares himself to be in purpose, a moral reformer, or is he merely an ingenious story-teller? Are his ends greater than his means, or are his means so cunningly devised as to make his ends comparatively insignificant or invisible? Do his puppets exist solely for the sake of the dance, or is the dance contrived to elucidate the mechanism of the puppets? Or, to approach the matter from another side, is a noble warmth at the heart, or a creepy sensation down the spine, the commoner consequence of reading one of Mr. Collins’s novels? and can it be that Mr. Collins, incapacitated by the nature of the case from feeling the creepy sensation himself, has incautiously leapt to the conclusion that it is incumbent upon him to feel the warmth at the heart? …

When a novelist has written so long or so much that he begins to lose the pleasure of creation, and to suspect his ideas of a lack of freshness, he will generally (if he goes on writing at all) endeavour to justify himself in doing so by claiming a motive and a value for his work loftier and more abstract than satisfied him before. His quips and cranks have grown stale, and no longer produce their former effect; but since he cannot afford to be neglected, he must needs strive to arrest attention by blustering about his ‘motives.’

As regards Mr. Wilkie Collins, … we are the less disposed to press hard upon him because, in Jezebel’s Daughter, he is nearly as entertaining as he ever was, and the only trace of moral or elevated motive that the book contains is to be found in the above-mentioned dedication. The story is told in the fantastically realistic way which Mr. Collins has uniformly affected, and which, as much as anything else, classes him with those who possess inventiveness, as distinguished from imagination. In other words, Mr. Collins has not the power to bring an object or an event so vividly before his mind as to feel safe in removing it fromthe strictest relation to time, space, and cause. His ideas must grow laboriously out of the earth; they can never come to him from the sky; and as he lacks imagination himself, he inevitably postulates the lack of it in his reader, and in the effort to make him believe that he is reading a genuine ‘narrative,’ he succeeds in never letting him forget that he himself is penning unmitigated fiction. The story is intended to be very horrible, but what is true of all Mr. Collins’s stories is true also of this,—in his most horrible moments he is never otherwise than entertaining, except when he commits a breach of good-taste. And the reason is not far to seek; it lies in the unlifelikeness of the dramatis personae. You may place a character in the most appalling situation; you may subject him to the most inhuman tortures, mental or physical, and the most tender-hearted reader will not much mind, so long as he is persuaded that the character in question could never by any possibility have existed. If Mr. Collins possessed the faculty of making us believe in his fictitious people, the mind refuses to contemplate the appalling effects he would have achieved. Unfortunately, this is a sword that cuts both ways, or rather, it is as blunt of one edge as it is of the other. If Mr. Collins cannot terrify us, neither can he stir our tenderer emotions; if we do not lament when he mourns, neither do we dance when he pipes. But the reader sits with a pleased grin of suspense and curiosity widening his features, and he reads and reads, and does not want to leave off till he comes to the end. Say what you will, it is capital entertainment, smoothly and artfully prepared by a workman who knows the use of his tools. But why should Mr. Collins try to make us believe that Jezebel, the modern Lucrezia Borgia, who will poison you as soon as look at you, is at bottom what Artemus Ward or Mr. Barnum would call a ‘moral figger,’—is redeemed, in other words, by the supremacy of her maternal affection? This redemption is so palpably lugged in by the head and ears, and is in itself so grotesquely preposterous, that we should have supposed even Mr. Collins might have hesitated to suggest it. But he has done so in accordance with a fashion which was perhaps introduced by Dickens, and which has been violently developed since his time, the fashion of discovering exquisite traits of generosity, tenderness, and nobility in natures the most lost and degraded. It is a cheap and tawdry form of sentimentality; it would ascribe to the author a more than ordinary power of seeing into the depths of a millstone; but, so far as our knowledge and belief go, it rests upon a foundation of fact so small as to be practically non-existent. A man or a woman is wicked exactly in proportion as he or she is selfish; and no wicked person can ever do a’good’ action from other than a selfish motive. Moral deformity is as much a matter of growth, organisation, and permanence as is physical deformity; and the latter can be thrown aside at a moment’s warning, just as little as the former. But alas! some artists have so little regard for the integrity of nature, that they would be willing to let the sun rise in the west, if thereby they might create a more striking effect of light and shade for their lay-figure. If Mr. Collins would only consent to let his stories alone, and not insist upon our taking out of the bag more than was ever put into it, or other than it is capable of holding, he would save himself much trouble, and his readers a good deal of yawning.

THE BLACK ROBE
1881

71.
E.A.Dillwyn, from an unsigned review, Spectatord
7 May 1881, liv, 606–7

Although the review is generally unfavourable, the reviewer (herself a minor novelist) concludes rather surprisingly by recommending the novel for its readability.

The chief fault of the book is the unnaturalness which pervades it, and which is met with in plot, situations, and people alike. Many novels seem, as it were, to enlarge our circle of friends when an author shows us persons whom he has really known; and his work is often a vehicle of introducing us to himself, at all events, because he is very apt to take his knowledge of the human race from that member of it with whom he is most intimately acquainted, and to put somewhat of his own identity into the various individuals whom he depicts. But Mr. Wilkie Collins has not chosen to do this, and, consequently, his book lacks human nature. His characters come and go, and he is clever enough to keep the reader amused in following their progress; but, with one exception [the housekeeper Miss Notman], they do not give the idea of studies from life….

HEART AND SCIENCE
1883

72.
Unsigned review, Academy
28 April 1883, xxiii, 290

In several respects, which are too obvious to stand in need of being pointed out, the genius of Mr. Wilkie Collins resembles that of Edgar Poe; and, like Poe, Mr. Collins has invited the public into his workshop, exhibited his materials and tools, and affably expounded the methods by which the finished product comes to be what it is. Indeed, while the American story-teller wrote only one essay on ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ the English novelist has written at least two or three Prefaces any one of which might put in a claim to the title. In the Preface to Heart and Science, Mr. Collins again takes his readers into his confidence, and gives them various pieces of information, of which the most important is his declaration that, while in all his works he had endeavoured to combine the character and humour which the British public love with the incident and dramatic situation for which he thinks the said public does not care, his latest work is one in which we are to ‘find the scales inclining, on the whole, in favour of character and humour.’ In spite of his Prefaces, however, it seems to me that we learn more of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s methods from his books themselves than from what he has to tell us about them; and the reader who can distinguish any quality in Heart and Science which differentiates it from the majority of its numerous predecessors must be a reader whose critical perceptions have been refined to a pitch of rare subtlety. Certainly the plot, qua plot, is not nearly so complex as the plots of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and it therefore absorbs a smaller proportion of the total interest of the story; but of the special interest of ‘character and humour’ there is neither more nor less than in any of the writer’s previous works. Even the fact that Heart and Science is in part polemical(being not merely a novel, but an anti-vivisection manifesto) does not set it in a place apart, for in one or two previous books Mr. Wilkie Collins has said his say concerning current controversies in as effective a manner as the limitations of the vehicle would allow; and here he is not less successful than in Man and Wife in the difficult task of mixing art and argument. That he is wholly successful cannot be said, for Heart and Science will be found more entertaining than convincing, save by those who do not need to be convince...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• NOTE ON THE TEXT
• ANTONINA
• BASIL
• HIDE AND SEEK
• THE DEAD SECRET
• THE QUEEN OF HEARTS
• THE WOMAN IN WHITE
• NO NAME
• ARMADALE
• THE MOONSTONE
• MAN AND WIFE
• POOR MISS FINCH
• LATER NOVELS 1875–89