BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Happy-Go-Wilkie
SINCE, some 25 years ago and on both sides of the Atlantic, an urge to " re-valuate " a Victorian man or woman of letters took possession of contemporary authorship, there has always been one —frequently more than one—eager aspirant to the role of biographer of Wilkie Collins. Trollope (it was argued), Reade, Kingsley, Bulwer-Lytton, Charlotte Yonge, Lever, Gissing (not to mention such giant perennials as Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot and Meredith—writers admired and therefore studied in their own day as well as in ours) have all found appraisers of varying merit. Why, then, not Wilkie Collins ? Surely the father (or, if you insist on Edgar Allen Poe, the uncle) of the detective story, the master of sensation, one of Dickens's. few really intimate friends, after Dickens perhaps the most widely read of any novelist of his day, should be a subject ideally suited to an age sold on murder and detection ? And so he seemed ; with every ingredient for a full-length portrait happily available except one—the essential one ; the model ; who persistently evaded the probings of the curious. This elusiveness of Wilkie Collins as an individual either dis- couraged would-be resurrectionists altogether or, canalising their opinions of his written work, directed them into critical or biblio- graphical, rather than biographical, channels. Prior to the courageous emergence of Mr. Kenneth Robinson, ivho has stuck undauntedly to his guns and can now claim a creditable victory, only the late S. M. Ellis had tackled on any scale the story of Wilkie's life*; but even his valuable essay, for sheer lack of definitive information, admittedly improvises at many points, Mni Robinson has had access to a considerable quantity of docu- mentary material not known to Ellis, and very illuminating some of it- is (especially the letters to the Lehmann. family and to Frank Arthur and several of those preserved in the great Parrish collection -at Princeton). To this extent he had an advantage peculiar to him- self. But his genuine achievement is to have brought Wilkie to life by intelligent sifting and interpretation of evidence, direct and indirect, already printed in other men's letters, in books of reminis- cence, in magazine-articles and elsewhere, and therefore accessible during the. last 40 or 50 years to anyone who took the trouble to track it down. We now meet Wilkie as he undoubtedly was—a little man with a large head and a fine bulging forehead, a lover of life and enjoy- ment, a bon-viveur, a being without pomposity or snobbery, who treated domestic servants with human sympathy and welcomed young writers in search of advice as justifiable claimants on his time and attention. Further, we come to know and like him as a hater of censorious prudery and, in consequence, with provocative light-heartedness, always on the side of transgressors against conven- tion and code, provided the wrong-doers were having fun and harming no one but themselves. "I do not like well-conducted young men," he wrote to his brother, and one knows what he meant and likes him for meaning it.
It was this mercurial tolerance which endeared him to Dickens who—distraught between domestic troubles, histrionic conscious- ness of his own fame and dogged pursuit of authorship—found in Wilkie the one friend with whom he. could.-relax, the ideal playfellow before whom he need never wear a mask of greatness. And, as Mr. Robinson well demonstrates, the very qualities which Dickens prized were anathema to John Forster, Dickens's, jealous impresario, the Victorian panjandrum par excellence—Assessive, arrogant and peremptory. Any enemy of Forster's, we incline to say, is a friend of ours.
For his love of good living Wilkie paid the penalty of years of torment. Rheumatic gout attacked his eyes ; and, to calm the pain and get sleep at nights, he took laudanum in steadily increasing quantities. To this habit (about which he was cheerfully candid) Mr. Robinson attributes the (to us) obvious falling-off in his pub- lished work from The New Magdalen (1873) onward. "One cannot expect a complex elaborately constructed plot to emerge from a brain alternately clouded and stimulated by narcotics." But the decline in quality was apparently not realised by Wilkie himself nor, strangely enough, by his reading public, for he maintained_ to the end his earning power as a popular novelist, a fact of which I,. at any rate, was not previously, aware. It is astonishing to learn that, with the exception of The Fallen Leaves (1879), he never had a failure. Of course the enduring triumphs of The Woman in White and The Moonstone were not repeated ['but he wrote in 1886 to a friend in Australia that, what with syndicated serials, colonial editions, pay- ment from Harpers in New York and the basic earnings from Chatto & Windus's three-decker edition for the home market, that mechanical, -repetitive story The Evil Genius "has given me the largest sum I ever received for any of my books before."
Well, though the mediocre stories of the last decade may have Succeeded beyond their deserts, the man who wrote them did not. He devoted to them as much careful toil as to the major novels of his heyday. He never gave his public less than his best, fighting all the time against semi-blindness and crippling pain.
Mr. Robinson is the first to admit that much of Wilkie Collins's personal life still remains—probably always will remain—obscure. "He was a master of the story which hangs upon a well-kept secret. The steps he took suggests that he wished the story of his own life to remain something of a mystery." The reasons for thus covering his tracks are obvious. Wilkie over many years enjoyed a menage which might nowadays be benevolently regarded as eccentric, but in the mid-nineteenth entu1yp save Among a few unprejudiced intimates? *mkt have been th liktrageous. Had he disclosed to posterity any indication'of thg naTure of this ménage in its various phases, undeserved social punulpnt would have descended on the daughter Harriet of his, faithful' friend 'Caroline Graves by her dead or vanished husband, and also on the three children of his own, born to him out of wedlock by Martha Rudd (later known as Mrs. Dawson). During his life-time he freely admitted paternity of these well-loved children, mentioned them in letters to close friends, and in his will scrupulously provided for them, as also for Harriet Graves, to whom he was devoted. Mr. Robinson summarises the com- plexities of Wilkie's domestic background with restraint and sympathy, and points out that chance favoured secrecy in that Dickens made a bonfire of all available letters to him, Charles Reade's letter-files disappeared at his death, and neither Charles Ward nor Francis Carr Beard seems to have preserved any of Collins's letters, though whether by design or mischance will never be known.
We close Mr. Robinson's warm-hearted and workmanlike book with affectionate admiration for its central figure. We 'thought Wilkie was like that ; now we know.
As a postscript two trivial suggestions toward the next edition of this excellent work: (i) Should it not be said that Tom Trollope's second wife Fanny was the sister of Ellen Ternan, already referred to in connection with Dickens ? (ii) Surely Charles Collins's enchanting book A Cruise upon Wheels (1862) deserves at least brief
* Wilkie Collins. Lefany and Others. By S. M. Ellis (Constable. I55.)
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