AN ANTI-VIVISECTION NOVEL.*
MR. WILKIE COLLINS, as his custom is, gives in the forefront of his latest book a semi-descriptive, semi-critical preface, which is, unlike the majority of such compositions, certain to be read. "In the aibstract," as Sydney Smith's Scotch young lady would put it, a preface to a work of art is a work of supererogation, possibly an impertinence ; for such a work ought not to need explanation or supplement, while, as for criticism, readers can supply that for themselves, and resent it as cordially as they resent unsolicited advice. Mr. Wilkie Collins, however, can dofor a preface what Swift, according to Stella, could do for a broomstick,—he can make it entertaining, which he does partly by the sheer force of a bright and perfectly lucid style, pleasantly salted with the special kind of humour which never fails him, but maiuly by his delightfully confidential manner, which probably leads some simple-minded readers tothink that, having been told how the books are written, they could write them for themselves, " if they had a mind."
In this particular preface, Mr. Wilkie Collins returns to am old theory of his, and insists that the qualities in fiction which find most favour with the British public are character and humour, and that incident and dramatic situation only find a second place in their favour. He tells us that he has "always tried to combine the different merits of a good novel in one and the same book," but that he has " never succeeded in keeping an equal balance," and that in the present story we shall " find the scales inclining, on the whole, in favour of character and humour." Perhaps Mr. Wilkie Collins hardly states the case quite correctly. The ordinary novel-reader of the day does, indeed, value character and humour, but he values also incident and dramatic situation,•as is amply proved by the continued popularity of the writer's own book, The Woman in White ; and we are inclined to think that he values most of all the simple skill in the art of narration which is one of Mr. Wilkie Collins's strongest points. Whether there be much or little story in a novel, the reader demands that it shall be well told, and it is in this telling of a story that Mr. Wilkie Collins is supreme. There is less plot in Heart and Science than in many of the writer's previous works, but we do not find this out until we have closed the third volume ; for what there is of story is so deftly managed, that we have in reading it the feeling of plot, just as in reading such an unrhymed poem as " Tears, Idle Tears," we have the feeling of rhyme.
When we began to speak about this preface we were, however, thinking not of such matters as these, but of the announcement that Heart and Science has been written partly as a contribution to the literature of the Anti-vivisection movement. We are not sure that this announcement is not a mistake, for if a novel have a distinct purpose apart from mere entertainment, it is, perhaps, better for several reasons that it should be left to reveal itself; but Mr. Collins has probably sufficient confidence both in himself and his cause to feel that he will lose little by thus showing his hand. We have never been able to see the force of an objection frequently brought against the polemical novel, that it attempts to substitute an appeal to the imagination and the feelings for the logical arguments which are asserted to be the only legitimate weapons in controversy. The heart, the conscience, and the imagination have their own arguments, not less than the reason ; and when Mr. Collins traces in one of his characters " the result of the habitual practice of cruelty (no matter under what pretence) in fatally deteriorating the nature of man," he is making as genuine a contribution to the settlement of a vexed question as that made by the physiologist who proves, by hard fact, that vivisection has been misleading to science, as well as repulsive to morality.
Dr. Benjulia, the vivisecting surgeon, is not only an impressive figure, but a curiously interesting psychological study. Nothing could be truer to human nature than this picture of a snan in whom the lust of knowledge has become as purely selfish and degrading as the lust of gold. Even granting, as in fairness we perhaps ought to grant, that a man like Benjulia begins his experiments with the desire of obtaining through them some knowledge which may be of use in relieving human suffering, it seems clear that indifference to suffering anywhere—say in a tortured dog or rabbit—must in the nature of things result in indifference to suffering everywhere ; and knowledge which had been but a means to a beneficent end becomes an end in itself, and an end pursued in the manner which is purely selfish. Benjulia's supreme aim at the time when we make his acquaintance is not that a beneficent discovery should be made, but that he should be the man to make it; and he dissuades his friend Ovid Vere from visiting Italy, and sends kim to Canada instead, because he fears that in Italy he may meet with physiologists who may put Vere on the scent which he himself has so long been following. This seems to us an entirely truthful conception, having behind it an irrefutable argument ; nor does Mr. Collins stray from the path of psychological certainty, when he goes still further, and represents Benjulia, in the absorbing passion of his unhallowed quest, as allowing Carmina, the charming heroine of his book, to reach the very gates of death, in order that he may study, under favourable conditions, the phenomena of "simulated paralysis."
The portrait is rendered at once more truthful and more impressive by the fact that Mr. Collins does not yield, as an inferior artist would have yielded, to the temptation to make Benjulia wholly repulsive. There is something in the loveless solitude of his life, cut off as it is not only from human sympathy, but from the simple amenities of ordinary human intercourse, which irresistibly compels pity, even for a man who is himself pitiless ; and the strongly-conceived picture of the last day of a wasted life—the day in which Benjulia discovers that the prize he has been seeking has slipped from his grasp— is an adequate and powerful realisation of Aristotle's oftenquoted definition of the scope of tragedy. In one of the medical journals which are supplied to him every week, and which he examines, but never reads, Benjulia has at last found the thing that for years he has been fearing to find,—the review of a new book in which the problem upon which he has been working is solved. In the darkness of the winter evening, he starts for London, driving furiously, as if upon an errand of life and death —as indeed he is—and secures a copy of the fatal book. He drives to his club, and the library waiter finds him busily engaged in reading :— " The man whose business it was to attend the fires went in during the night, from time to time, and always found him in the same corner. It began to get late. He finished his reading, but it seemed to make no difference. There he sat—wide awake—holding his closed book upon his knee, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. This went on till it was time to close the club. They were obliged to disturb him. He said nothing; and went slowly down into the hall, leaving his book behind him. It was an awful night, raining and sleeting; but he took no notice of the weather. When they fetched a cab, the driver refused to take him where he lived on such a night as that. He only said, Very well ; go to the nearest hotel.' "
The bed at the hotel is unslept in, and the next day Benjulia sallies forth, to return home for the last time, staying only to make an attempt to see once more the little girl, Zoe Gallilee, the only human creature who has ever stirred in him something like affection. The attempt is unsuccessful ; the family has left the house ; but the old woman in charge admits him, and nothing that Mr. Wilkie Collins has written is fuller of pathetic power than the story of how Benjulia visited the deserted school-room, bringing away from it as a relic of his little friend a torn paper cover, "which bore on its inner side
a grotesquely-imperfect inscription,—' my cop book zo.' " Benjulia returns home, and until night he remains inactive. His pipe
is unlit, the so-called laboratory outside the house where his mys terious experiments are made is unvisited, and only one demand is made upon the servants, that one being, however, sufficiently startling. They are called up to receive written characters and their wages in lien of notice, and two of them are requested to witness the signature of their master's will. Then, when the darkness has fallen, Benjulia and his footman carry out into the still, cold starlight " the big basket for waste-paper, three times filled with letters and manuscripts, the books, the medicine-chest, and the stone jar of oil from the kitchen," and set them down at the door of the strange, dark building, the secret of which has been so well kept. Benjulia himself carries everything inside, and when the door is shut, the footman, bent upon discovery, posts himself close to one of the side walls :—
" Now and then he heard—what had reached his ears when be had been listening on former occasions—the faint, whining cries of animals. These were followed by new sounds. Three smothered shrieks, succeeding one another at irregular intervals, make his blood ran cold. Had three death-strokes been dealt on some suffering creatures, with the same-sudden and terrible certainty ? Silence, horrible silence, was all that answered. In the distant railway there was an interval of peace. The door was opened again, the flood of light streamed out on the darkness. Suddenly the yellow glow was spotted by the black figures of small, swiftly-running creatures— perhaps cats, perhaps rabbits—escaping from the laboratory. The tall form of the master followed slowly, and stood revealed, watching the flight of the animals. In a moment more, the last of the liberated creatures came out—a large dog—limping as if one of its legs was injured. It stopped as it passed the master, and tried to fawn on him. He threatened it with his hand. Ba off with you, like the rest !' he said. The dog slowly crossed the flow of light, and was swallowed up in darkness. The last of them that could move was gone. The death-shrieks of the others had told their fate."
The footman sees his master retire into the building, and hears him bolt the door behind him. He goes back to the house, and to bed, but, horror-stricken at his disco very, be can get no sleep. The thought of the dog torments him, and he wonders if the maimed creature has found a refuge. He steals downstairs, and gently opens the house-door :—
" Oat of the darkness on the step there rose something dark. He put out his band. A persuasive tongue, gently licking it, pleaded for a word of welcome. The crippled animal could only have got to the door in one way, —the gate which protected the house-enclosure must have been left open. First giving the dog a refuge in the kitchen, the footman, rigidly performing his last duties, went to close the gate. At his Brat step into the enclosure he stopped, panicstricken. The starlit sky over the laboratory was veiled in murky red. Roaring flame and spouting showers of sparks poured through the broken skylight. Voices from the farm raised the first cry,— ' Fire ! fire !' "
Such is the end of Benjulia. The chapter in which the terrible story is told has a more powerful effect upon the imagination than anything we can remember in recent fiction ; and vivid as
the picture is, it cannot be said that it owes its vividness to partial or exaggerated presentation. Benjulia is consistent throughout,—consistent with himself, consistent with human nature, consistent with that law of conscious being the operation of which is seen in the reflex influence of action upon character. He is shown to us as a man utterly devoid of imagination, and this one fact alone suffices to account for his life and
his death, and to give to the record of both a terrible homogeneity. We have heard it said that the portrait is drawn from life. We do not know whether this is so, and the question is not one of much interest. A picture so drawn is not necessarily lifelike ; but whether Benjulia has or-has not a living original, he is himself alive, we know him and understand him, and the conception owes its impressiveness to its imaginative veracity.
We have left ourselves without space in which to speak of the story itself, and of the subsidiary characters. The former is, it need hardly be said, thoroughly interesting, though a little slighter in conception than is usual with Mr. Wilkie Collins. The latter are, for the most part, average specimens of the writer's workmanship ; but the delightful child, Zoe, represents the high average, while the more elaborately drawn portrait of her mother, Mrs. Gallilee, represents the low one. If we are intended to regard Mrs. Gallilee's devotion to science and her combined cunning and cruelty as standing in the relation of cause and effect,—and it seems to us that something like this is intended,—then Mr. Collins is guilty of the exaggeration which is so conspicuously absent from the portrait of Benjulia. Mr. Mool, the lawyer, is admirable, and Mr. Galilee is very amusing, though not nearly so good as Zoe, whose reminiscences of her Scotch visit, in the third volume, are intensely funny. Quite apart from its special purpose, Heart and Science is a most -fascinating story, and is certainly none the worse as a novel because, to quote the words of the preface, it "pleads the cause of the harmless and affectionate beings of God's creation."
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