If the only test of fiction is that it shall secure interest, then Mr. Wilkie Collins has succeeded to the full with this novel. The construction is almost perfect, and the interest is so graduated, and the plot so skillfully developed, that no portion can be skipped without loss. Mr. Collins is facile princeps in invention, and introduces no detail that is not of importance in reference to the whole. His novels, indeed, are too complete and self-contained to wholly satisfy any taste that is still simple enough to look at life as it is with anything of the pause and wonder that must often overtake the disinterested observer. There are so many loose threads always to be seen even upon the right side of the tapestry of life, that such an one is persecuted with the wish to get a look at the other side, which remains inscrutably hidden. No real story can ever be so completely told that everything at the end can be satisfactorily wound-up and disposed of. Mr. Wilkie Collins’s characters seldom go their own way. They are kept rigidly moving on the puppet-strings of his plot. He is versatile in his knack of pulling a very large number about so cleverly that, while they cross and recross each other’s paths in every imaginable way, they never really knock against each other. Take an instance: was it at all likely that Mr. Arnold Brinkworth, who was wholly unsuspicious of the risk he was running in visiting, as his wife, at Craig Fernie ‘Hottle, ‘ the woman Mr. Geoffrey Delamayn had promised to marry, should have been so oblivious as not to have looked after the letter which he had carried to Anne Silvester, and with whose contents he was fully acquainted? Had he been alive to the risks he ran, his want of attention to her and her interests might have had some excuse. But the letter needed to be lost, to make the leading complication of the novel; and accordingly Bishopriggs, the smug waiter at the ‘hottle, ‘ is called in to do his part. All the complications arise out of most glaring improbabilities; it is only Mr. Wilkie Collins’s consummate invention which, by decoy circlings, diverts the mind from dwelling on them in a way which would prove fatal to the story.
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