Novelist, and writer of verse, was born at Plymouth and educated at a private school. Devoting himself to journalism and authorship, he became connected with various newspapers, especially the London Globe. He was well-known as a writer of “vers de société.” Mr. Collins’ separate publications in verse are “Summer Songs,” 1860; “Idyls and Rhymes,” 1865; “The Inn of Strange Meetings and other Poems,” 1871. He was also the author of the following novels:—“Who is the Heir?” 1865; “Sweet Anne Page,” 1868; “The Ivory Gate,” 1869; “The Vivian Romance,” 1870; “Marquis and Merchant,” 1871; “Two Plunges for a Pearl,” 1872; “Princess Clarice,” 1872; “Miranda,” 1873; “Squire Silchester’s Whim,” 1873; “Mr. Carrington” (written under the name of R. T. Cotton), 1873; “Transmigration,” 1874: and “Frances,” 1874. A volume of essays published anonymously in 1871 and entitled, “The Secret of Long Life,” was also from the pen of Mr. Collins.
Personal
“I wholly agree,” he writes, “in the great saying, Laborare est orare: I add, Laborare est vivere.” Again he writes: “I should grow very weary of life if I did not feel that I had God for friend.” His marriage was an exceptionally happy one. He not only wrote poetry, but made life a poem. Says one of his friends: “He rejoiced in diffusing gladness; was intensely gentle and tender, and peculiarly sensitive to kindness.” By intuition he seemed to have a thorough faith in God and a future life. His writings indicate a highly poetical temperament, and he preserved his intellectual vigor and kindly nature to the last.
He possessed one of those comprehensive intellects that can at once embrace the highest truths and yet be alive to all the commonplaces of human life. Variously read, he had a keen appreciation of the works of others and a humble reverence for everything great and good. He had neither conceit nor envy in his composition, nor was he ambitious for fame, except so far as it might help to brighten his material welfare. He was a frank, genial, open-hearted man, and had a kindly, buoyant nature, as may be plainly seen from his writings. He was always happy, bore troubles patiently, and never grumbled at the hardness of his lot; was most helpful to others when they needed help, firm and affectionate in his friendships, a cheery companion and a delightful host, as those who visited him at Knowl Hill can testify. He was never ill-tempered or unsociable, was incapable of any kind of meanness or malice, and hated hypocrisy in every form; he was full of happy, wholesome life, believing that existence held more of joy than of misery.
Collins was a man of great physical and mental vigour. He was over six feet high and powerfully built. He wrote several hours in the day, and again from ten to two at night. Besides contributing to newspapers, he wrote several novels and other works, and turned out an enormous quantity of playful verse for the amusement of his friends. He was a great athlete, a first-class pedestrian, a lover of dogs, and a keen observer of nature. He revered White of Selborne, and wrote many interesting letters upon the habits of birds in the Times and elsewhere. He was a mathematician and a good chess-player.
General
“Frances” is not written in Mr. Mortimer Collins’s most culinary vein…. We are sorry that the amiable author of this novel should be out of temper. He is particularly angry with his critics. We had believed that Mr. Collins was spoilt by his critics who call his style crisp, as he himself calls the bacon, and say that his sentiments are breezy and his heroines ideal. He is even angry with his quills, the quills which have carried him triumphantly through so many reams of rubbish, the quills with whose origin he might have been thought to have sympathy. Perhaps the cause of this displeasure is his desertion from the bill-of-fare style of literature. Rather than see him angry we would counsel him to abandon his new alliance and return to his cutlets.
As a poet, without ever aiming very high, or, indeed, at doing more than producing facile vers de société, Mr. Collins succeeded more nearly than either Mr. Frederick Locker or Mr. Austin Dobson in reproducing the peculiar lyrical flow of the best and easiest French chansons, so that he suggests, at however great an interval, Béranger rather than Praed. The gift may not be accounted a very brilliant one, but it is so extremely rare (far rarer than more solid poetical qualities) that critics cannot afford to depreciate it, and many far more pretentious minor singers of the day could have been much more easily spared than Mr. Mortimer Collins.
He was a man of varied gifts; large and generous both in body and mind; very susceptible to all sights, sounds, and tastes, physical and mental; with a zest for enjoyment of all good things, from a poem or a picture to a cigar and a glass of claret, and a taste which was naturally healthy in almost all…. He was one of those men who suffered from over activity of mind, of whom it may be paradoxically said that their thoughts throng too quickly to let them think. Few can help regretting that he never permitted himself those reflective pauses in the midst of creation which are necessary for the production of sure work. Day after day he wrote, never caring to ascertain that his day’s work was “good,” content that it should be “good enough” for the immediate purpose. And it always was “good enough,” always full of fresh impressions freshly expressed, studied with bright epigram, sparkling with pleasant verse, overflowing with animal and mental spirits—the clear current of an honest, manly, and scholarly mind…. With the exception of James Hannay, there has been no man of our time whose career has ended in so great a literary disappointment.
The novels are indeed, as it were, a reflex of the author’s own mind—psychological studies rather than stories, pictures of himself and what he wished to be, full of bright refreshing bits that may be read again and again. They are readable if only for their terse, epigrammatic English, their original thought, and the purity of the moral tone which pervades them throughout. They depict all that is best and noblest in human nature, showing us the higher types of manhood in preference to the lower. The aim of the author seemed always to be directed against the follies of life; he stirs up all the manlier qualities of our nature, and those who read must needs feel refreshed in spirit.
Whose light and musical verses have much charm, has also a right to be mentioned in a record of English contemporary poetry.
His novels are too romantic and wild to abide as works of Fiction; he avowedly drew his characters, and invented his incidents, as he desired them to be, not as he supposed they were in real life. But his books are always worth reading, on account of the pleasant writing therein, and the numerous lyrics which every now and then sparkle as gems in the mass. The best of them are, perhaps, “Sweet Anne Page,” “Frances,” and “Mr. Carington.”
He was one of the last of the so-called Bohemian school in letters and journalism, something of a scholar, a fertile novelist, and a versatile journalist in most of the kinds which make up modern journalism.
Had a very happy knack for the lighter kinds of lyrical verse, half playful and half serious. Under pressure of circumstances he wrote too much, and the failure to “polish and refine” tells against a great deal of his work.
Whatever posthumous fame Mortimer Collins may gather will be won by his lyrics, and by passages in his longer poems. Here, even more clearly than in his prose, may be heard the jubilant ring of delight over the advent of the glorious climax of the year. Not the narrow purse nor the inevitable call to forced labor of the pen could mar the note of enjoyment or provoke a murmur of pessimism…. His work shows signs of the stress under which he worked from first to last, and literature is the poorer because leisure to perfect and polish was denied him. He had no weighty message to deliver, but he has left a legacy of consolation to the few who have learned his secret, a feat not always compassed by the greater prophets. Like his beloved birds, he sang because he must, a tendency which in itself would have been fatal to the proclamation of any serious evangel, for, let him start on any theme he might select, he would invariably drift back, after a little, to tell of some suggestive passage recently discovered in a book, or to chat about his dogs or his feathered friends, or some other delight of his little garden domain…. In all his work the influence of sound classical training is apparent…. Mortimer Collins was not a great writer in any sense, but he could treat with such subtle insight, such penetrating sympathy, those emotions and aspects of life which, for him, comprised the whole joy of living, that to all those who have fallen under his charm the sight or sound of his name will never fail to call up some pictures of the Thames in its summer glory, as he perceived or imagined it, of the chorus of the birds, of the quaint, loving humors of his dogs, of the jocund feast at the end of a hard day’s toil, or of the perfect domestic happiness of his later years.
