Born, in London, Jan. 1824. Educated at private school. Tour with his parents in Italy, 1837–38. Articled to a firm of tea merchants [1838?]. Student at Lincoln’s Inn, 18 May 1846; called to Bar, 21 Nov. 1851. Began to devote himself to literature, 1848. Contrib. to “Household Words,” 1856; and to “All the Year Round.” “The Lighthouse,” produced at the Olympic theatre, Aug. 1857; “The Red Vial,” at Olympic, Oct. 1858; “The Frozen Deep,” at Olympic, 27 Oct. 1866; “No Thoroughfare” (dramatized from novel), at Adelphi, Dec. 1867; “Black and White” (written with Fechter), at Adelphi, March, 1868; “The Woman in White” (dramatized from novel), 9 Oct. 1871; “Man and Wife,” at Prince of Wales’s, 22 Feb. 1873. Visit to United States, 1873–74. “The Moonstone” (dramatized from novel), produced at Olympic, Sept. 1877; “The New Magdalen,” at Olympic; “Rank and Riches,” at Adelphi, 9 June 1883. Died, in London, 23 Sept. 1889. Buried at Kensal Green. Works: “Memoir of the Life of William Collins,” 1848; “Antonina,” 1850; “Rambles beyond Railways,” 1851; “Basil,” 1852; “Mr. Wray’s Cash Box,” 1852; “Hide and Seek,” 1854; “After Dark,” 1856; “Dead Secret,” 1857; “The Queen of Hearts,” 1859; “The Woman in White,” 1860; “A Message from the Sea” (with Dickens), 1861 [1860]; “No Name,” 1862; “My Miscellanies,” 1862; “The Frozen Deep” (with Dickens; privately printed), 1866; “Armadale,” 1866; “No Thoroughfare” (with Dickens), 1867; “The Moonstone,” 1868; “Man and Wife,” 1870; “No Name,” dramatized (privately printed), 1870; “The Woman in White,” dramatized (privately printed), 1871; “Poor Miss Finch,” 1872; “The New Magdalen,” 1873; “Miss or Mrs.?,” 1873; “The New Magdalen,” dramatized (privately printed), 1873; “Readings and Writings in America,” 1874; “Miss Gwilt,” drama adapted from “Armadale” (privately printed), 1875; “The Law and the Lady,” 1875; “Alicia Warlock,” 1875; “The Two Destinies,” 1876; “The Moonstone,” dramatized (privately printed), 1877; “The Haunted Hotel,” 1879 [1878]; “The Fallen Leaves,” 1879; “A Rogue’s Life,” 1879; “Jezebel’s Daughter,” 1880; “Considerations on the Copyright Question,” 1880; “The Black Robe,” 1881; “Heart and Science,” 1883; “I say No,” 1884; “The Evil Genius,” 1886; “The Guilty River,” 1886; “Little Novels,” 1887; “The Legacy of Cain,” 1888. Posthumous: “Blind Love,” ed. by W. Besant, 1890.

Personal

  I forgot to say that another of Foster’s guests was Wilkie Collins (the “Woman in White’s” author). He is a little man, with black hair, a large white forehead, large spectacles, and small features. He is very unaffected, vivacious, and agreeable.

  An invalid much of the time, with that enemy of Englishmen, the gout, threatening his eyes, Mr. Collins is nowadays little seen in London society; but for many years he has kept strictly at work in London, at his house in Gloucester Place, not far from the busy turmoil of Baker Street, though he is now leaving this house for new quarters. Here the great drawing-rooms were given up for his desk-work when he was writing a novel, or for striding up and down the floor, reciting speeches and acting out scenes, if it were a play he was at work upon. One finds him a man still of striking appearance, but much aged by illness since he was seen in America, with a leonine head, the plentiful hair and flowing beard nearly white, contrasting with a short and smallish though once powerful body, and tiny white hands. The stoop of his shoulders suggests long application to his work, but his manner and speech have the vigor and crispness of an unexhausted spirit of youth.

General

  At the Olympic we have had, during the week, the opening of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s “Red Vial.” Intent upon the course of his narrative, the author has in this instance forgotten that in a drama characters are not less essential than a plot. There is not a character in the “Red Vial.” One person is, indeed, benevolent; another rigid in the sense of probity; another, represented by Mrs. Stirling, weak in the same, and wicked; and another, represented by Mr. Robson, a maniac, with wits of dimensions varying according to the convenience of the story; but they are all shadows for a tale that should be read in ten minutes, not characters to be offered bodily to our senses, for a two hours’ study. Still with the same exclusive care about the story, it happens also that the author of the “Red Vial” has taken no pains to secure pithiness of expression; there is no effort to say good things pointedly, and sometimes even a tendency to say even commonplace things tediously, as if they were worth elaborating into speeches.

  I must say I think the “Woman in White” a marvel of workmanship. I found it bears a second reading very well, and indeed it was having it thrown in my way for a second time which attracted so strongly my technical admiration.

  Wilkie Collins collects all the remarkable police cases and other judicial narratives he can find, and makes what Jean Paul Richter called “quarry” of them—a vast accumulation of materials in which to go digging for subjects and illustrations at leisure. Charles Reade does the same with blue-books and the reports of official inquiries. The author of the “Dead Secret” is looking for perplexing little mysteries of human crime; the author of “Hard Cash” for stories of legal or social wrong to be redressed. I need hardly say, perhaps, that I rank Charles Reade high above Wilkie Collins. The latter can string his dry bones on wires with remarkable ingenuity; the former can, as he fairly boasts, make the dry bones live.

  Next to Dickens, however, he ranked, qualis inter viburna cupressus, his very dear friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, “an artist of the pen, there are terribly few among writers,” was his terse eulogium, the plain fact being that this past master in the art of dramatic construction excels all competitors just where most English authors fail. His plots resemble nothing so much as the intricate arabesques of an Oriental designer. Their complexity dazzles, yet they are always simple, never obscure. Moreover—and here they commanded Charles Reade’s most earnest enthusiasm—they, or rather some of them, lend themselves intuitively to the stage. They dramatize easily and naturally; indeed “The New Magdalen” may be fairly termed one of the most effective of modern dramas. Mr. Wilkie Collins, therefore, if we may put it so, hit Charles Reade’s ideal, and secured in consequence, that sort of genuine admiration which an author offers his brother in art when he esteems him greater than himself.

  He was certainly a giant among novelists, and far above the pinchbeck sensationalists and the rocket-stick romancers of the present day. In his particular line there is no one who can come anywhere near him.

  Exit the novelist; enter the characters; that is Collins’s idea. One never sees him, never thinks of him, from first page to last. What he wishes you to know he makes his characters, his incidents tell for him; the purpose of the book always advancing, gradually reveals itself, and grows slowly into shape we hardly know how, as incident follows incident. And in all the books this purpose is sustained, consistent, and worthy. Occasionally in the preface to the story he tells us himself what this intention has been, tells it plainly, simply, manfully, and leaves the reader to say whether or no it has been achieved…. That Wilkie Collins was a great (one of the greatest) novelists we know; we, who have studied his works, have marked their range and power, their sincerity of purpose, their perfection of expression; but we know more than this, we know that in an age of self-advertisement, jealousy, and pretence, he was a type—not without faults, but still a type—of a genuine, kind-hearted, helpful-to-others man. He had blood, as well as brains, generosity, as well as intelligence, artistic pride and purpose in his work, as well as popular success.

  All the works of Wilkie Collins which we remember with pleasure are works of art as true as his godfather’s pictures, and in their own line as complete. His excellent sense, his perfect self-command, his modest devotion to his art, are qualities not more praiseworthy than they are obvious. And if it were but for their rarity they should command no less attention than respect. His most illustrious friend and contemporary did not always show himself at once so loyal and so rational in observance of intellectual or æsthetic propriety. Collins never ventured to fling down among his readers so shapeless or misshapen a piece of work, though doubtless he could not furnish them with a piece of work so excellent in parts and sections, as “Little Dorrit.”… It is apparently the general opinion—an opinion which seems to me incontestable—that no third book of their author’s can be ranked as equal with “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone:” two works of not more indisputable than incomparable ability. “No Name” is an only less excellent example of as curious and original a talent…. “The New Magdalen” is merely feeble, false, and silly in its sentimental cleverness; but in “The Fallen Leaves” there is something too ludicrously loathsome for comment or endurance. The extreme clumsiness and infelicity of Wilkie Collins as a dramatic teacher or preacher may be tested by comparison with the exquisite skill and tact displayed by M. Alexandre Dumas in his studies of the same or of similar subjects. To the revoltingly ridiculous book just mentioned I am loth to refer again: all readers who feel any gratitude or goodwill towards its author must desire to efface its miserable memory from the record of his works.

  Mr Collins’s method is that of Mr. Browning in “The Ring and the Book.” His characters view the same set of circumstances, but with very different eyes. The method has its obvious advantages and disadvantages; perhaps it is most artfully worked in “The Woman in White.” Again, after reading and re-reading, one keeps one’s old opinion—that for a writer so conscientious and careful, Mr. Wilkie Collins was but rarely successful in the full measure of his success. A few of his short stories, his “Woman in White,” his “No Name,” and, above all, doubtless, “The Moonstone”—reach a level of ingenuity and of interest which the many others fall very far short of. The humorous passages, for example, in “Armadale” and “Hide and Seek” are very laboured and melancholy.

  Was an author of special power. There is moral tonic in his books, stimulating thought, fine and persuasive appeals to the imagination, as well as marvellous plot and weird incidents. His strikingly dramatic stories clothed in language as simple and direct as it is strong and beautiful. The uniform fascinating grace and ease of his diction ceases to surprise us when we read with what minute and painstaking care it is produced.

  The work of all novelists, except those perhaps in the very first rank, has a tendency to age; and the author of “The Woman in White,” “No Name,” “Armadale,” does certainly not now hold in the world’s esteem the place that he held twenty-five or thirty years ago. Ingenious plot-puzzles were his forte; and though a good mystery still has its charm for the modern reader, yet to produce its full effect the mystery must be surrounded by something of exotic circumstance—the scene must be laid in the South Seas, India, America. Then Collins’s characters have no permanent vitality, and his general reflections on men and things can hardly be called valuable.

  The special power of Mr. Wilkie Collins, as afterwards developed, was for the construction of plots, and the use of all the most elaborate machinery of the story. His was the art which keeps the reader breathless, not through a scene or act of adventure, but during the long and elaborate following out of intrigue and incident, those tangles of the web of fate, or intricate combinations of circumstance, conducting certainly to an often unsuspected end,—which never lose their effect so long as they are skilfully and powerfully done, as was the case in the earlier works of this novelist. He did not possess the still more interesting and far higher gift of creation. There is no character, no living being in his works, with the exception, perhaps, of Count Fosco, of whom the reader will probably at this distance remember even the name; but, notwithstanding this, his power of holding his audience spellbound, and of rousing the same kind of curiosity and eager interest with which we watch day by day the gradual unfolding of the links of evidence in a great trial, was unsurpassed, we might say unequalled, in his day. The sensation produced by the “Woman in White,” the first and consequently most striking of the series of stories in which he has displayed this power, and which came out in a serial form in “Household Words,” thus doubling the excitement of those who had to wait from week to week for a fresh instalment of the story—was prodigious. It was the subject of conversation and speculation everywhere, and the reader followed every turn, and commented upon every incident, as if some personal interest of his own hung upon the identification of the gentle, witless creature who was the shadow heroine, and the unhappy lady who was the real object of all those highly wrought and intricate snares.

  Great as was the vogue of Collins’s works for a time, the seal of permanency is scarcely to be looked for in them. They are conspicuously wanting in the higher literary and artistic qualities. His characters are mechanically drawn: they do not live, or convey to the reader an impression of reality. His style, too, lacks distinction. His supreme quality is seen in his clever handling of sensational narrative, and especially in his ingenious construction of a plot, so woven around a mystery as to hold the reader’s attention and curiosity enchained to the last.

  Collins’s descriptions have the effect of a nightmare; his power of the consistent development, even of the most improbable plot and characters, forces us under his spell. The character of Count Fosco is, besides, a real work of art.