The Law and the Lady. A Novel. By Wilkie Collins.
(Matto and Windus.)--Mr. Wilkie Collins, presenting himself to the public as the autobiographer of a young bride, full of gushing faith in a bridegroom who has given her the soundest proofs of his untruthfulness and his moral cowardice, is a curious spectacle, but not particularly pleasing. With all Mr. Collins's ingenuity, he cannot invest a woman's character with true dignity, or her utterances with real delicacy. The invention of a set of fantastic circumstances, which are occasionally preposterous, and the mechanical arrangement of misleading indications for the reader's bewilderment, are arts of which he is a master. Without going into the question of the rank among the productions of Art which he claims for them, we freely admit that his "social problems," as he calls them, are readable and entertaining fictions, with no resemblance to fact, which do not call out our sympathies with any of the higher feelings or qualities of human nature, and, with a few exceptions in his earlier works, devoid of humour. There is "a funny man" in every novel by Mr. Wilkie Collins, but unfortunately there has never been any fun in him since Captain Wragge's time, and the laborious pleasantry of Major FitzDavid, who does the fun, and not a little of the coarseness, in The Law and the Lady, is dreary indeed. The great sin of the book against true art consists in the making of Endue Macallan, the heroine's husband, a contemptible cur, whom no woman could love without a violation of her self-respect. The inevitable journal which Mr. Collins's personages always keep, and always in an identical style—let their characters and circumstances be ever so various—is in this instance a positively offensive feature of the story. A man who confides to his journal such sentiments as those of Mr. Macallan towards his first wife, such comments on her personal appear- ance, and such facts as that he has kissed her on a certain day, and hopes she has not perceived the effort it cost him, is as unpleasant a creation in fiction as he is, happily, unnatural in fact. The legless monster, who is the chief feature of the book, is a decided novelty ; in so far, the author is to be congratulated upon him as a successful appeal to tastes of a poor order. There is power and there is ingenuity in the drawing of Mrs' errimus Dexter, and of the plot of which he holds the key ; but he is as repulsive as Hans d'Islande, without one touch of poetic grandeur in the tale to relieve the disgust which he creates ; and the passion which this horrid creature conceives for Eustace Macallan's second wife, after having been in love with his first, is an odious element in the story, which one reads with a half-suspicion that the author has been inten- tionally caricaturing himself. Local colour is more than usually defi- cient in Mr. Collins's latest work, and the nearest approach to the pic- turesque is a reference to the gleam of white clacks—poultry, not pantaloons—on a neglected lawn.
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