Wilkie Collins, página 6 de 33

A Rogues Life was published in a magazine some twenty years before it was made into a book. It is a very clever story, and the interest is well sustained throughout. There is just about enough of it, inasmuch as a short tale like this is more interesting than some of the authors longer works, wherein the complicated plots and lengthened mysteries are too apt to weary the reader before his curiosity is satisfied. We cannot help feeling quite an affection for the "Rogue," perhaps because most of the other characters in the story are as selfish, more wicked, and not so frankly conceited as he is, and have none of his courage, audacity, and cleverness to redeem them. We must all sympathize in his marriage, though it is not celebrated under the most favorable circumstances, he being liable to the extreme penalty of the law at the time. It seems hard that he should be captured, tried, and sentenced to transportation immediately after securing his wife; but this proves the beginning of his upward career of prosperity and respectability, and we leave him happily settled with Alicia in Australia. We do not wish to destroy the interest of a book which is so dependent on the plot, by telling more of the story, and therefore leave it without further comment to new readers.

This extraordinary work ranks among the foremost purely melodramatic or sensation novels of modern times. Mr. Collins has thrown a force and power into this story, of which the reader has only seen intimations in his former works. After opening the narrative with a cheerful sketch of Professor Pesea, an Italian Refugee, combining in his small person all the pleasant traits of his nation, the author at once begins his work, and in a few sentences throws a weird and mystic glow over the story, which we feel to deepen and extend, until the disclosure of the plot by the discovery of the register and subsequent death of Sir Percival Glyde. This effort is all the more remarkable when we examine the simplicity of the means employed, which consist of a series of Runic repetitions so strongly exemplied in Edgar Poes compositions. The misfortune which must attach to all novels of the terrific school, is, that the termination of necessity explains that which the imagination has been before allowed to dwell upon, and a feeling of disappointment must succeed the denouement however horrible that may be. This, Mr. Collins has avoided as far as practicable, in withdrawing the attention of the reader from the eclaircissement, by relating a tremendous interview, tremendous from the self-control exercised by both parties, between Hartright and Count Fosca, a villain of entirely new stamp, except in his fondness for pets, in which he resembles, if we remember correctly, one of the Council of Three who, while condemning thousands to the guillotine, would fondle his cat with feminine tenderness. But we will not spoil the plot, plain yet complex, elaborate but not confused. What we can do, however, is to advise those who enjoy the stronger forms of light literature, to lose no time in reading this most interesting novel.

The author of The Woman in White and of No Name has had reprinted and published a collection of articles contributed by him to Household Words, and perhaps to other periodicals. The two papers which will attract most attention are probably those entitled respectively, "To Think, or Be Thought For," and "Dramatic Grub-street," inasmuch as upon their first appearance they provoked both private and public remonstrance, and they are now reprinted because Mr. Collins has seen a reason to abandon the convictions the expression of which called down upon him the aforesaid remonstrances. It is undoubted that this publication did not add much to the authors brilliant fame, but it is useful as a sort of meter by which one may measure his prodigious growth. This edition includes both original volumes.

Though perhaps this story does not equal, from a literary point of view, some of Collinss previous effortsit being less sensational and less complicated in its plotit is, nevertheless, one of the best he has ever written. It is an able and eloquent protest against the false state of society and that cruel sentiment which prevents an erring woman ever returning to the path of virtue. Aside from its moral purpose, the story is exceedingly interesting. It should be read thoughtfully by everyone.

Whether society should recognize a couple who, after being divorced, become reconciled, agree to forget their past difficulties and re-marry, is the question Mr. Collins tries to solve. The "evil genius "who makes all the mischief is the mother-in-law, who feels it is her duty to open her daughters eyes to her husbands admiration for the governess. The governess history takes up a good space in the opening chapters, and is full of interest. Her father is tried and found guilty of deliberately causing the loss of his ship in order to gain possession of a large package of diamonds. The trial, the unsuccessful attempt to find the stolen diamonds, the girls helpless condition, and so on are all told with the detail Mr. Collins has made specially his own. There is much dramatic power shown in the narrative.

It is on the true story of Baron Carl Ludwig von Scheurer, in which so many insurance companies were interested, that Wilkie Collins based the plot of his novel Blind Love, a work which he did not live to complete by his own hand. In August 1889, when its publication in serial form had been under way for a couple of months, Mr. Collins realized that he would not be able to finish the story. So he sent for Mr. Walter Besant, and that versatile and rapid worker undertook the completion of the book. He has done it, as he says in the preface, to the best of his ability, but he is so conscious of the difference between the style of his own work and that of Wilkie Collins that he invites the critic to lay his finger on the spot where Wilkie Collins writing ends and his own begins. Every scene and situation in the novel from beginning to end had been, however, outlined by Mr. Collins before the hand of death was laid upon his pen, and the story, as a story, must therefore be credited to him. In Blind Love we find Baron von Scheurer transformed into Lord Harry Norland, the wild and reckless younger son of an Irish peer, while Dr. Castelnau furnishes the prototype of Dr. Vimpany, an impecunious and unscrupulous medical man practising in the English provinces. After some preliminaries in Ireland and England which serve to present the wild Irish Lord in a vivid way, and to lead the heroine, Iris Henley, into his clutches through the blind love which drives her to her ruin, the scene shifts to a suburb of Paris, where the conspiracy to swindle the insurance company is hatched and successfully consummated. In dealing with a plot of this character Wilkie Collins is on familiar ground, and it is needless to say that the whole business is managed in a masterly way. Blind Love possesses, as the last work of the author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, a peculiar and melancholy interest.

The joint-effort of Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins, apart from its merits or demerits, must excite curiosity and interest. It is clear that in " No Thoroughfare " the latter gentleman has had the lions share of the labour, whatever of lions share may fall to him besides. Mr. Dickenss portion is merely incidental, though some of his touches are surpassing fine and unmistakably marked. Mr. Collinss superb inventive faculty shows itself throughout, though under a little restriction here unfolding, doubling up, coiling, and uncoiling in its brilliant, baffling, serpentine fashion. And the result is exactly such as might be expected. Mr. Wilding is a little over-done, but full of humor ; and Joey Ladle, the cellar-man who insists on being a good pecking-machine is admirable. This is one of Joeys happiest deliverances : " Gentlemen, it is all wery well for you that has been accustomed to take your wine into your systems by the conwivial channel of your throttles, to put a lively face upon it ; but I says, I have been accustomed to take my wine in at the pores of the skin, and took that way, it acts different." But we mustnt say more on the matter, at once for our own sake and that of both writers and readers.

A curious story of two brothers who are tried for a murder and found guilty under strongly convicting circumstances. After pleading innocence of the crime, they strangely make a confession to the effect that they murdered the man, who at the last moment turns up alive. The author, in a note, says whatever seems improbable in the story is a fact, and whatever reads like truth is pure invention. Truth or fiction, however, the little book will while away an hour very pleasantly.

Wilkie CollinsLittle Novels is a collection of ingenious stories, told with some of the marvellous skill that made the author of The Woman in White famous. Villany is frustrated by devious ways, and a mind must be much preoccupied indeed that cannot for a time lose itself in Mr. Collins ingenious combinations. Mr. Collins does not favor us with any wicked monk, and there is little of that coarseness which intrudes into several of his earlier stories. All over a fantastic read.

Mr. Wilkie Collins brings to his work, along with other and valuable qualities, the special talent of the private detective and the criminal lawyer. Almost no modern novelist stands in any comparison with him for skill in constructing the engrenage, as a Frenchman would call it, of personal complication, for subtle delicacy in fitting together wheel and spring, pivot and pinion of his dramatic clockwork, in such fascinating interplay as shall lead the attention of the breathless spectator smoothly, imperceptibly, but inevitably to the final wind-up of the catastrophe. This skill in combining events is supplemented by, or rather cognate with, his shrewd analysis of character and motive. It is his favorite plan to suppose a case of private relation where virtuous personages or important interests are threatened by the schemes of some clever villain. Against him Mr. Collins, in the person of his beneficent and equally clever hero or heroine, straight sets his wits to defend the interests or persons attacked. The resulting struggle is carried on with the most exquisite skill of fence, involving both practical device and metaphysical penetration and shrewdness, till the final triumph of the right and confusion of the wrong-doers. In this book the metaphysical element assumes unusual importance. The book is in so far an exception to the usual run of Mr. Collinss works, that it is less a leaf from the records of Scotland Yard than an extract from the diary of a psychologist. There is a villain and a protecting genius, as usual ; but the villain is only a half one after all, and we are less interested in the actual facts of his rascality than in the causes which lead him to it, and the temperament which renders it possible. In the leading character, poor Miss Finch herself, the author develops an interesting question of medical psychology. A young girl, blind almost from her birth, loves one of two twin brothers, who has, in the process of medical treatment for epilepsy, been terribly disfigured in complexion by the use of nitrate of silver. From Lucillas instinctive horror of dark objects, the injudicious and timid concealment by the lover of his dusky hue, and the treacherous advantage taken of these things by the other twin, Nugent, to supplant his brother the whole complicated by Lucillas temporary restoration to sight and subsequent relapse arises the whole intrigue of the story

Gerard Roylake, returning from the continent to England to receive his in heritance, nds that one of his tenants a miller in the old mill on the banks of that dark, gloomy, repellant river, the Loke, has a lodger and a fair daughter. The lodger is a strange man, remarkably handsome, deaf, and an odd combination of knave and tool, the former characteristic predominating. It is from these picturesque elements, that Mr. Collins evolves his tragedy. The details of mystery are worked up in the author s skillful way. The denouement is a surprise. The question of heredity is finely handled.

The special charm of No Name is the uncertainty in which the reader is kept. The most experienced of novel-readers is unable to predict whether Magdalen succeeds in her scheme, or marries Capt. Kirke, or retires from the scene to die, baffled and broken-hearted. Each crisis in the progress of the story takes the public by surprise. The death of the elder Vanstone, the marriage of Magdalen with his son, the trust by which Noel Vanstone prolongs the contest, even after his decease to quote the word which he himself preferred to the vulgar one of death are all startling surprises, unpredicted and unforeseen Much higher praise cannot be given. There is, too, both about Capt. Wragge and Old Mazey, a dry, delicate humour, for which before one should hardly have given Mr. Collins credit. No Name has added to the authors fame and many readers have derived so much pleasure in reading it, that it is hard to speak ungratefully of this book. Still it is fair to warn the novel-reading public that, if they want really to enjoy the great sensation novel, they should read it at the rate of not more than a chapter a day.

The main actor in this play, that was co-written with Mr. Charles Dickens, is Richard Wardour, a man of violent passions, who has been supplanted in the affections of the woman to whom he was ardently attached. He discovers his successful rival in a comrade in an arctic expedition. Eager, mad for revenge, he determines to kill him. They go forth together in the rear of a party dispatched in search of succor, Richard Wardour with murder in his thoughts, Frank Aldersley unsuspecting, conding. Companionship in suffering restores the heart of humanity to Richard Wardour. Instead of being the destroyer of his rival, he becomes his savior.

Mr. Wilkie Collins can tell a story well, and he has an ingenious knack of stringing stories together. After Dark consisted of a series of stories, and admirable they were, and The Queen of Hearts is a work of the same description. The author lives in the region of fiction; but he does not aim at the higher objects contemplated by the more gifted writers of his class. He does not affect to be profound, philosophical, or didactic. His great object is so to write as to sustain interest and to amuse. But, though he does not aim at anything beyond that, thanks to his sympathies with many of the better qualities of human nature, he achieves something much higher.

"Im sick to death of novels with an earnest purpose. Im sick to death of outbursts of eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic descriptions, and unsparing anatomy of the human heart, and all that sort of thing. Good gracious me ! Isnt it the original intention or purpose, or whatever you call it, of a work of fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story? And how many of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as telling a story is concerned, the greater part of them might as well be sermons as novels. Oh, dear me! what I want is something that seizes hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it is time to dress for dinnersomething that keeps me reading, reading, reading, in a breathless state, to find out the end." Wilkie Collins confession of faith as a novelist is comprised in the above speech of his sprightly heroine, Miss Jessie Yelverton, in The Queen of Hearts. He is emphatically a story-writer. He is unrivaled in the construction of an elaborate and intricate plot, and he certainly succeeds in making his readers "go on reading, reading, reading, in a breathless state, to find out the end." Wilkie Collins career has been a progressive one. There are some ardent novel readers who will doubtless remember the publication of Antonina, and a few years later of Basil two books of singular power. Soon after Mr. Dickens commenced the publication of Household Words, there appeared in that periodical a number of short stories which were remarkable for the perfection of their style, the elaboration and originality of their plots and their general artistic finish. Then came a novel, The Dead Secret, also published in Household Words, in which the wonderful skill of the author in con structing and unfolding a plot was for the first time fully displayed. The Woman in White followed, and the claims of Wilkie Collins to be considered a great novelist were at once firmly established. He is, however, no mere weaver of intricate plotsno teller of elaborately constructed stories only. Few characters in modern fiction are as well drawn and sustained as that of Count Fosco, the cool, sensible, intellectual villain in The Woman in White. Collins also possesses, in common with Anthony Trollope, the power of delineating a heroine who shall be neither a dressed-up doll nor an impossible angel. Rachel Verinder in The Moonstone bears witness to the truth of this assertion. This novel is the best that Mr. Collins has given to the world and possibly the best he has ever written. The story is singularly original; and when we remember the force and extent of Hindoo superstition, we can scarcely venture to pronounce it improbable. And how admirably is the story told! Clear, lucid and forcible in style, never straying into the alluring but pernicious paths of description or dissertation, the narrative moves onward in its unbroken and entrancing course. Let the impatient reader, hurrying to reach the denouement, skip half a dozen pages. Instantly the thread of the story is broken, the tale becomes incomprehensible, the incidents lose their coherence. The Moonstone is a perfect work of art, and to remove any portion of the cunningly constructed fabric destroys the completeness and beauty of the whole.

The novel revolves around two totally different ladies, both of which happen to be widows. In England, we have Mrs. Wagner, who wants to run the business of her deceased husband and hire more women; she has a philanthropic vein and takes Jack Straw from the Bedlam asylum right into her own house. Then we have Madame Fontaine, whose husband was a scientist and an expert on toxins. She has had monetary problems since the death of Mr. Fontaine, and gets very excited, when her daughter Minna starts to date Fritz Keller, the son of Mrs. Wagners business partner

The Law and the Lady is one of the most ingenious and most repulsive of Wilkie Collinss novels, and we doubt, if having begun, that anyone would leave it unfinished. The heroine marries a man and soon discovers that she is his second wife, and that he has been tried in Scotland for the murder of his first, the jury returning a verdict of" Not proven," which, not establishing his innocence, simply declared that the evidence was not sufficient to convict him. She resolves to devote her life to the task of proving her husbands guiltlessness, and sets to work, without his knowledge. When he becomes aware that she has learned his secret, he leaves the country, convinced that she must despise him. The narrative of the wifes labors is intensely interesting, and marked by the ingenuity in handling and adapting evidence in which Mr. Collins is pre-eminent. In time the two are reunited, and later the wifes task is accomplished. Two characters, so original as horrible, figure in the story, Miserrinius Dexter and his niece, Ariel. Though Dexter could not possibly belong to real life, he is the most striking and absorbing personage in the book. Whether the author violates physiological probabilities by endowing this mere atomy with the furious passions which controlled him, we shall not undertake to decide ; but it is certain that the rules of Scottish courts must differ widely from ours if they permit a witness under examination to argue and declaim as did Mr. Dexter at the trial of Macallan. Like all the authors novels, this one is wholly devoid of warmth and tenderness and the light of human affections : even in the love of Macallan and Valeria there is a somber reserve. But his admirers will find in the story no reason to abate their admiration for his power of construction and development.

Miss or Mrs.? is a story in outline, and maybe the only instance in which Mr. Wilkie Collins has wasted his material; an entire novel might be constructed in his architectural style from its Incidents. There are several specimens of Mr. Wilkie Collinss neat, precise humor in this story, and the rudiments of at least one capital character. We hope to meet Lady Winwood on a wider field of action, and should be very glad to hear details of her household policy, and the final pulverization of her ladyships step- daughters.

If the only test of fiction is that it shall secure interest, then Mr. Wilkie Collins has succeeded to the full with this novel. The construction is almost perfect, and the interest is so graduated, and the plot so skillfully developed, that no portion can be skipped without loss. Mr. Collins is facile princeps in invention, and introduces no detail that is not of importance in reference to the whole. His novels, indeed, are too complete and self-contained to wholly satisfy any taste that is still simple enough to look at life as it is with anything of the pause and wonder that must often overtake the disinterested observer. There are so many loose threads always to be seen even upon the right side of the tapestry of life, that such an one is persecuted with the wish to get a look at the other side, which remains inscrutably hidden. No real story can ever be so completely told that everything at the end can be satisfactorily wound-up and disposed of. Mr. Wilkie Collinss characters seldom go their own way. They are kept rigidly moving on the puppet-strings of his plot. He is versatile in his knack of pulling a very large number about so cleverly that, while they cross and recross each others paths in every imaginable way, they never really knock against each other. Take an instance: was it at all likely that Mr. Arnold Brinkworth, who was wholly unsuspicious of the risk he was running in visiting, as his wife, at Craig Fernie "Hottle," the woman Mr. Geoffrey Delamayn had promised to marry, should have been so oblivious as not to have looked after the letter which he had carried to Anne Silvester, and with whose contents he was fully acquainted? Had he been alive to the risks he ran, his want of attention to her and her interests might have had some excuse. But the letter needed to be lost, to make the leading complication of the novel; and accordingly Bishopriggs, the smug waiter at the "hottle," is called in to do his part. All the complications arise out of most glaring improbabilities; it is only Mr. Wilkie Collinss consummate invention which, by decoy circlings, diverts the mind from dwelling on them in a way which would prove fatal to the story.

In Fallen Leaves, Mr. Wilkie Collins has touched on some very difficult problems, and has done it with delicacy. Though the main interest of the story does not lie in the plot, but rather in the characters and in the novel situations he has found, yet there is a sense of consistency and completeness, which draws from the reader as he proceeds the keenest interest, in spite of an occasional touch of melodrama, which Mr. Wilkie Collins finds it very difficult to leave behind him. Amelius Goldenheart, the representative of an old English family, has been educated at a socialist institution in America ; and having fallen under a misconstruction, is glad to make his way to England, a tour for which his independent income of 500 a year is a happy sine qua non. On the voyage he makes acquaintance with a certain Rufus Dingwell, an admirable type of the better class Yankee ; and these two gentlemen are speedily on intimate terms with the family of a Mr. Farnaby, a rich City man, of some incidents in whose earlier life we have had a very significant glimpse in the opening. Mr. Farnaby had, in fact, for purposes of his own, to steal and to convey away his own illegitimate child, that he might compel Mr. Ronald, his rich master, to acquiesce in his wishes for marriage with his daughter. In this he completely succeeds ; and the story turns on the interest of the search for this lost daughter, on the success of which the poor mother finds her one hope. The sketches of Regina, Mr. Farnabys niece, of Phoebe, the maid, and her lover Jervy, are admirably done, and we should not forget the inevitable Mrs. Lowler, who, though her counterparts have been well done by Dickens and others, still, in Mr. Collinss hands, has traits wholly her own. The scene in the low public-house, where Phoebe fell under the anger of Mrs. Lowler, and was cleverly saved from the results of it by Jervy, is very cleverly executed. Mrs. Farnaby soon takes Amelius into her confidence, and charges him to aid her in the search for her lost child, to which he agrees ; and whilst she is allowing herself to pass into the hands of swindlers, Amelius has all unconsciously found the lost child in Simple Sally, whom he has rescued from the cruel treatment of a foul wretch who held her as his property. The style of life to which these incidents conduct us is what gives the title to the book ; but Mr. Wilkie Collins has taken care to treat everything with such caution and reserve that he would be either a very sensitive or a very coarse person indeed who would feel any other than touched and elevated by the picture here presented.