The Press.
London, England, 1854-06-24 00:00:00

594

As we have been compelled to give a quali-
fied opinion on Mr Wilkie Collins as a writer,
we shall quote an extract which reveals at
once his merits and faults. We dislike, with
the majority of English novel-readers, having
our attention rivetted by elaborate descrip-
tions of scenes like the following
:
The Temple of harmony, as its name denotes, was
principally devoted to the exhibition of musical talent, and
opened at a period of the night when the performances at
She theatres were over. The standing orchestral arrange-
ments of the place were all comprised in one bad piano ; to
which were occasionally added, by way of increasing the at-
tractions, performances on the banjo and guitar. The
singers were called " ladies and gentlemen." The Temple
itself consisted of one long room, with a double row of
benches, hearing troughs at their backs for the reception
of glasses of liquor. It had a slightly raised stage at the
end for the performers: and its drab-coloured walla pre.
tended to be panelled, but made so bad a pretence of it as
to merit no notice, and even to got none.
Innocence itself must have seen at a glance that the
Temple of Harmony was an utterly vicious place. Vice
never so much as thought of wearing any disguise here.
No glimmer of wit played over the foul substance of the
songs that were sung, and hid it in dazzle from too close
observation. No relic of youth and freshness, no artfully-
assumed innocence and vivacity, concealed the squalid,
physical deterioration of the worn-out human counterfeits
which stood up to sing, and were coarsely painted and
padded to look like fine women. Their fellow performers
among the men were such sodden-faced blackguards as no
shop-boy who applauded them at night would dare to walk
out with in the morning. The place itself had as hale of
the allurement of elegance and beauty about it as the peo-
ple. Here was no bright guilding on the ceiling—no
them of ornament, no comfort of construction even in
the furniture. Here was no viciously-attractive pictures
en the walls—no enervating sweet odours in the atmo-
sphere—no contrivances of ventilation to cleanse away the
stench of bad tobacco-smoke and brandy-fiavoured human
breath with which the room reeked all night long. Here,
in short, was vice wholly undisguised ; recklessly showing
itself to every eye, without the varnish of beauty, without
the tinsel of wit, without even so much as the flavour of
aleanliness to recommend it. Were all beholders instino-
tively overcome by horror at the sight? Far from it. The
Temple of ii exmouy was crammed to its last benches every
and the proprietor filled his pockets from the purses
of applauding audiences,
The tendency of Mr. Collins's pen is to
stray into such delineations, after the fashion
of the French writers; and one with so many
social resources open to him ought to be more
select iu the choice of his scenes. He may
Le satisfied that his powers are not suited for
"low life." The passage in which he moralises
on the phenomenon, so often witnessed, of
inen deserting the road that leads to wealth
and social comfort in search of the laurels of
the artist or the author, exhibits his peculiar
fluency of rhetoric, an exclusive reliance on
which is his besetting fault. It is true in the
main, and forcibly written.

If he had really possessed genuis there would have been
nothing very remarkable in his history, so far ; but, having
nothing of the kiwi, holding not the smallest spark of the
great creative fire iu his whole mental composition, surely
*here was something extraordinary and unaccountable,
something very discouraging to contemplate, iu the specta-
ale of a man resolutely determining in spite of adverse
borne circumstances and strong home temptations, to aban-
ton all those paths in life, along which he might have
walked fairly abreast with his fellows, for the one other
path in which he was predestined by Nature to be always
loft behind by the way. Do the announcing angels, whose
mission it is to whisper of greatness to great spirits, ever
match the infection of fallability from their intercourse with
mortals? Do the voices which said truly to Shakspeare,
So Raphael, and to Mozart, in their youth time—You are
chosen to be. gods in this world, ever speak wrongly to
souls which they are not ordained to approach ? Tt may

be an, There are men enough in all countries whose lives
would seem to prove it—whose deaths have not contra-
dicted it.
But even to victims such as those, sacrificed as they s7e
to a delusion which seems, on first sight, to be the most
total offspring of all mortal fallibilities, there are pleasant
sest.m.,splaces on the thorny way, and flashes of sunlight,
slow and then, to make the cloudy prospect beautiful,
though only for a little while. It is not all misfortune and
disappointment to the man who is mentally unworthy of a
great intellectual vocation, so long, as he is morally worthy
of it ; so long as he can pursue it honestly, patiently, and
affectionately, for its own dear sake. Let him work,
though ever so obscurely, in this spirit towards his labour,
and he shall find the labour itself its own exceeding great
reward. In that reward lives the divine consolation, ever
gentle and ever true, which,though Fame turn her back on
him contemptuously, and Affluence pass over unpitying to
the other side of the way, shall still pour oil upon all his
grounds, and take him quietly and tenderly to the hard
journey's end. To this one exhaustless solace, which the
work, no matter of what degree, can yield always to earnest
workers, the man who has succeeded, and the man who
has failed, can turn alike, as to a common mother ; the one
for refuge from envy, from hatred, from misrepresentation,
from all the sorest evils which even the thriving child of
Fame is heir to ; .the other from neglect., from disappoint-
ment, from ridicule, from all the petty tyrannies which the
pining bondman of Obscurity is fated to undergo.