Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2194 page)

AFTER a period of eight-and-thirty years devoted to the art of writing fiction, I am asked to look back at my experience of the readers of novels, and to place on record some account of the result.

If I allow myself to be influenced by first impressions, compliance with this request threatens to involve an elabouration of literary treatment which might produce hundreds of pages of dull reading, and startle my friend, the proprietor of this Review, by presenting him with a book when he only asks for an article.

Not to insist, however, on a fanciful obstacle, there is a serious reason for hesitating to avail myself of the proposal with which I have been favoured. I should be insensible indeed if I did not gratefully feel my obligations to the kindness of readers at home and abroad. At the same time I must not forget that there are exceptions to rules in all human affairs — the modest affairs of a literary man even included. Some of my relations with readers (English readers for the most part) have not been always amicably maintained. I find these words prefixed, more than a quarter of a century since, to the first cheap editions of one of my early novels called ‘Basil’: ‘On its appearance this work was condemned offhand by a certain class of readers as an outrage on their sense of propriety. Conscious of having designed and written my story with the strictest regard to true delicacy as distinguished from false. I allowed the prurient misinterpretation of certain perfectly innocent passages in this book to assert itself as offensively as it pleased, without troubling myself to protest against an expression of opinion which aroused in me no other feeling than a feeling of contempt.’ The conviction of the duty that I owed to my art, expressed in those terms, has remained my conviction to the present time. In the thousands of pages that I have written, I never remember to have asked myself: Will this passage be favourably received if the prying eyes of prudery discover my book? But if I am to write of readers of novels with anything approaching to a complete treatment of the subject, that section of the public which I now have in my mind must be included, or my record of experience will not be complete. Never having attached any importance to the opinions of these people, I have no inclination to notice them. I do not address them in my writings; neither do I care to remember them in this place.

Renouncing, for these reasons, any attempt at a serious presentation of the subject suggested to me, I think I see an alternative which permits me to gossip when I do not presume to instruct. What I might say in conversation with a friend can be said perhaps to many friends who will open these pages. They may accept a little light talk growing out of casual recollections, if they will kindly consent to be amused on easier conditions than I once encountered, when I was compelled to address my first audience in the bedroom at school.

The oldest of the boys, appointed to preserve order, was placed in authority over us as captain of the room. He was as fond of hearing stories, when he had retired for the night, as the Oriental despot to whose literary tastes we are indebted for ‘The Arabian Nights’; and I was the unhappy boy chosen to amuse him. It was useless to ask for mercy and beg leave to be allowed to go to sleep. ‘You will go to sleep, Collins, when you have told me a story.’ In the event of my consenting to keep awake and to do my best, I was warned beforehand to ‘be amusing if I wished to come out of it with comfort to myself.’ If I rebelled, the captain possessed a means of persuasion in the shape of an improved cat-o’-ninetails invented by himself. When I was obstinate, I felt the influence of persuasion. When my better sense prevailed, I learnt to be amusing on a short notice — and have derived benefit from those early lessons at a later period of my life. Like other despots, the captain had his intervals of generosity; I owe to his system of rewarding me that ‘passion for pastry’ to which Byron tells us he was indebted for the privilege of reading Wordsworth’s poetry. In after years, I never had an opportunity of reminding the captain that I had served my apprenticeship to story-telling under his superintendence. He went to India with good prospects, and died, poor fellow, a few years only after he had left school.

I have now to try if I can tell some stories of readers. Let me endeavour to be amusing at the other end of my life.

II

Some years since, being one of the guests at a large dinner party, I discovered a variety among the groups of individuals known to civilised society under the name of novel-readers.

The master of the house presented me (unfortunately, as the event proved) to the lady whom I was to escort to the dinner-table. A lazy, genial, companionable man, he numbered among his many social accomplishments a cultivated taste for all that is most enjoyable in the best eating and drinking. ‘There’s a devilish good dinner to-day,’ he whispered to me; ‘leave it to the lady to do all the talking: Before I could say ‘Thank you,’ I was presented. It might have been due to hurry, or it might have been due to hunger, my friend’s articulation failed to convey to me any accurate idea of the lady’s name. Before we had been long seated together at dinner, I became aware that
my predicament was her predicament also. And this was how it happened. As well as I can remember, we had only arrived at that second act in the drama of dinner which may be called the fish act, when my neighbour began to talk of novels. To a man who has been hard at work all day writing a novel, this interesting subject fails (especially in the hands of amateurs) to produce the effervescent freshness which stimulates the mind. I listened languidly. The lady’s method of criticism divided the works of my colleagues into books that she liked and books that she hated. On my side, I made such polite answers as are consistent with proper attention to one’s fish; and I really thought we three — I mean the lady, the fish, and the present writer — were getting on very well, when she suddenly turned to me, like a person inspired by a new idea, and said

‘I hope you don’t like Wilkie Collins’s novels?’

The enviable faculty which can say the right thing on the spur of the moment is possessed by few people; and I am not one of that quick-witted minority. The nearest visible refuge I could see presented itself under the form of prevarication. I had only to remember that I had written the novels, and the reply was obvious

‘I haven’t read them.’

The lady sincerely congratulated me; she was apparently, though I had not noticed it hitherto, a kind-hearted woman. I ventured nevertheless to change the subject. When we had done with novels, one of us was silently contented, and the other talked. I think our politics were Conservative; and our fashionable views on the art of music preferred noise to tune. The dinner reached its end at last; the ladies left us to our wine; and, in due time, we too rose from the table and followed them upstairs.

The moment I entered the drawing-room the mistress of the house made a signal to me with her fan. We sat down together in a distant corner, and I heard a confession. My friend’s wife began by acknowledging that she had made a sad mistake. ‘But it is really not my fault,’ she pleaded. ‘When we left the dining-room, the lady whom you took down to dinner mentioned you to me as a pleasant intelligent sort of man. “I didn’t catch the name,” she said, “when your husband introduced us; who is he?” I innocently told her who you were — and provoked, to my utter amazement, an outburst of indignation. It seems that she had expressed an opinion about your books — .’ There we both burst out laughing; but the serious part of it was still to come. My reply was declared by the angry lady to have been unworthy of a gentleman. ‘A well-bred man, she said, ‘would have mentioned his name.’ This was surely a matter of opinion? I persisted in claiming for myself the modest merit of good intentions. My impulse was to spare the lady the embarrassment which she might possibly have felt if I had let her discover that I was the writer of the books which she hoped that I hated. My hostess agreed with me. ‘The best of it is,’ she said, ‘that this curious friend of mine wasn’t able to answer me, when I asked how it was that your books had failed to please her. She said : “ Oh, how should I know?”‘ This quaint reply interested me: it exhibited a state of mind which I had hitherto unaccountably overlooked. Assisted by the experience of later years I have discovered that the readers who like a book or dislike a book without knowing why are fairly represented, in respect of numbers, among the readers of novels. There is undoubtedly something to be said in favour of this independent frame of mind. Disputatious people are not able to entrap you into an argument; inquisitive people find it useless to ask for your reasons; you and your novel are on strictly confidential terms, and you keep your secret.

At the same time it is not to be denied that those persons who can give their reasons — by means generally of letters to the author — for offering or refusing a friendly welcome to a work of fiction, are readers who interest the novelist, although they write as strangers to him. Whether they are critics who praise or critics who blame — whether they are foolish and spiteful or wise and generous — they at least pay the writer of the book the compliment of taking him into their confidence. Sometimes they bear witness unconsciously to the extraordinary coincidences which so often present themselves in real life. Sometimes they write autobiography without knowing it, and present their own characters as freely to a stranger as if they were writing to their oldest and dearest friend.

I remember hearing from a reader (apparently apt to take offence) that he had closed ‘The Woman in White’ before he had got half way through the story because I had committed ‘a violation of the sanctity of private life.’ This gentleman’s house and estate happened to be situated in one of the few English counties which I have never seen. I had not heard of his name, or of the name of his house; none of my friends, when I made inquiries, had the honour of knowing him. I was accused, nevertheless, of privately entering his park, and availing myself of certain defects in the scenery (left unimproved through want of pecuniary means) for the purely selfish purpose of writing a piece of picturesque description. My offence will be found, by anyone who cares to look for it, at page 157 of the edition of the novel in one volume. The character named ‘Miss Halcombe’ is supposed to be writing a description of a stagnant piece of water in the grounds of a house called Blackwater Park, and she expresses herself in these terms: ‘The lake had evidently once flowed to the place on which I stood, and had been gradually wasted and dried up to a third of its former size. I saw its still, stagnant waters a quarter of a mile away from me in the hollow, separated into pools and ponds by twining reeds and rushes and little knolls of earth. . . . Nearer to the marshy side of the lake I observed, lying half in and half out of the water, the rotten wreck of an old overturned boat, with a sickly spot of sunlight glimmering through a gap in the trees on its dry surface, and a snake basking in the midst of the spot, fantastically coiled and treacherously still.’ Every word of this description, my correspondent assured me, applied to
his
lake — diminished, as I had treacherously discovered, to a third of its original size. The pools of stagnant water were his pools; the old overturned boat was his boat; the spot of sunlight shone on it through the trees, and the snakes basked in the warm light! Here, in short, was one of the strange coincidences, found constantly in the world of reality, reviled as improbabilities in the world of fiction. I made no attempt to reply in my own defence. In the first place, my correspondent would have refused to believe me; in the second place, I was not in the least angry with him. Had he not been so good as to inform me, on his own authority, that I had written a description which was true to nature?

I may also thank ‘Count Fosco’ for having laid me under similar obligations. He has introduced me to more of the readers who, when they dislike a story, can tell the reason why. A bourgeois of Paris, reading ‘The Woman in White,’ in a French translation, wrote to say that he had flung the book to the other end of the room on discovering that ‘Fosco’ was an absolutely perfect likeness of himself. He naturally insisted on receiving satisfaction for this insult, leaving the choice of swords or pistols to me as the challenged person. Information, on which he could rely, had assured him that I meditated a journey to Paris early in the ensuing week. A hostile meeting might, under such circumstances, be easily arranged.
His letter ended with these terrible words

‘J’attendrai Monsieur Vilkie avec deux témoins a la gare.’
[I will wait Mr Wilkie with two seconds at the station] Arriving at Paris, I looked for my honourable opponent. But one formidable, person presented himself whom I could have wounded with pleasure — the despot who insisted on examining my luggage.

A lady was so good as to inform me of another objection to the same story. She considered it to be the work of an incompetent writer, and here again ‘Count Fosco’ was to blame. When he made his appearance on the scene the feebleness of that conception of the character of a villain had destroyed my fair correspondent’s interest in the novel. If I thought of trying again, she would be glad if I would call on her. From her own experience she would undertake to provide me with literary materials for the presentation of the most tremendous scoundrel that had ever darkened the pages of fiction. ‘You may depend on my observing the strictest truth to nature,’ the lady wrote, ‘for the man I have in my eye is my husband.’ But one incident was required to make this proposal complete, and that incident was not wanting. Her husband was a friend of mine.