Wilkie Collins Page 6

  Basil: A Story of Modern Life was published by Richard Bentley in the middle of November 1852. The narrative of seduction and betrayal, of murderous violence and fatal infatuation, was strong meat for the Victorian public. In a long preface attached to the first version of the novel Collins declared that he was writing “a story of our own times” and confessed that “I founded the main event out of which this story springs, on a fact in real life which had come within my own knowledge.” The “fact” concerns Basil’s sudden infatuation with a young woman and his decision to marry her at all costs. It has been suggested that Collins was here recounting his own experience. Given his proclivities, this is possible. The only biographical sketch published in his lifetime, in part based on Collins’s own reminiscences, alludes to an unhappy love affair.

  Yet it is also possible that he was exaggerating the novel’s realism as a way of making it seem “new” and “up to date”; he wanted to acquire as many readers as possible. There can be no doubt that he did genuinely wish to extend the frontiers of literary realism by taking account of “the most ordinary street sounds that could be heard and the most ordinary street-events that could occur.” They become the setting for the drama, or the melodrama, of the narrative; Collins believed that “the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction.” So the frantic action is played out against the background noise of “the distant roll of carriages along the surrounding streets” and against the glow of the gas-lamps in the forlorn squares. It captures the theatre of modern life.

  Basil follows the woman from the omnibus to one of those half-completed north London squares that Collins loathed; he soon discovers that Margaret Sherwin is the daughter of a linen-draper. This is the first shock. He is the scion of a noble family, and the difference in “rank” is immense. Yet he perseveres and the linen-draper agrees to the marriage on the understanding that it is not consummated for a year; this will be time enough to placate Basil’s father. Yet on the very night they were to become fully united Basil discovers that his bride has been carried off to a “low” hotel (a brothel in the original version) by the linen-draper’s confidential clerk, Robert Mannion. From an adjacent room he hears her seduction. “I heard and I knew—knew my degradation in all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless horror.”

  This is the prelude to a narrative of revenge and suffering on a sensational scale. There is disfigurement; there is death; there is a violent climax in the wild scenery of Cornwall that Collins had recently visited. The obsessive relationship between Basil and Margaret Sherwin is preempted by the equally fatal association between Basil and Mannion. Collins seems to know well enough the nature of sexual jealousy and of jealous rage. Mannion himself is the archetype of Collins’s later villains, smooth, hypocritical, pitiless; the natural malice of his nature is subdued by caution and patience, while his precise and deliberate speech conceals the turbulent passions that animate him. Only at one moment, illuminated by lightning, does he appear in his true form. “It gave such a gloriously livid hue, such a spectral look of ghastliness and distortion to his features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend…” Although Collins was not at this stage dependent upon laudanum, he already evinces an addict’s imagination.

  It is true melodrama but melodrama of the highest kind in which a series of very intricate events and motives is effortlessly brought together. The plot, in the words of the narrative, “shall ooze out through strange channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous intangible processes; ever changing in the manner of its exposure.” It is a spiritual, as well as a material, melodrama in which overwrought passion is finely conceived and conveyed. It conveys also the steady drumbeat of fate or, as Basil puts it, the “superstitious conviction that my actions were governed by a fatality which no human foresight could alter or avoid.” Basil represents a very large advance in Collins’s craft. It is a novel rather than a romance; it is written in the first person, a device that liberates his innately confessional mode; and it has been in part inspired by Dickens.

  The critical reception was, to use a well-known word, mixed. The Westminster Review commented that the pivotal episode, in the seedy hotel, was “absolutely disgusting.” This was a period in which the novelist was supposed to exhibit a “high moral purpose.” The Athenaeum noted the “vicious atmosphere in which the drama of the tale is enveloped” but also praised its “gushing force.” The subtitle of the book, A Story of Modern Life, did not prevent one reviewer from criticising its pervasive air of unreality; Dickens himself noticed some improbabilities. In 1862 Collins stated that “I knew that Basil had nothing to fear from pure-minded readers…Slowly and surely, my story forced its way through all adverse criticism, to a place in the public favour which it has never lost since.” Yet his real triumphs were still to come.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On the Road

  Wilkie Collins, at the age of twenty-nine, was enjoying the fruits of his labours. He had a wide circle of friends; he attended Richard Bentley’s literary dinner parties; he reviewed plays and books for the Leader; he had been introduced to the circle of writers and journalists around Dickens in the offices of Household Words; he became a member of at least three London clubs; he liked to dine out in the fashionable restaurants. And of course he invited artists and writers to Hanover Terrace; according to Holman-Hunt he was the most affable of hosts. Hunt wrote later that “no one could be more jolly than he as the lord of the feast in his own house, where the dinner was prepared by a chef, the wines plentiful and the cigars of choicest brand. The talk became rollicking and the most sedate joined in the hilarity; laughter long and loud crossed from opposite ends of the room, and all went home brimful of good stories.”

  He might be described as an eligible bachelor, except that he had no intention of marrying. He delighted in the companionship of women, and they enjoyed his company in return; one of those ladies, Eliza Chambers, said that to sit beside Collins at the dinner table was “to have a brilliant time of it.” But he never once contemplated matrimony. He had already written in the memoir of his father that it was “the most momentous risk in which any man can engage.” It was not a risk he cared to undertake, and instead he engaged in what might be described as two illicit relationships. In an article for Household Words, “Bold Words by a Bachelor,” he declared that “the general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is a miserably narrow one”; he did not intend, in other words, to bow to convention and propriety in the matter. He once ate a bride-cake, to be distributed to wedding guests, “without the trouble of being married, or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma.” In his novels, too, he dilates upon the injustices and defects of the married state. It was one of his principal themes.

  The pleasures of social life, however, were curtailed in the spring and early summer of 1853. He had completed almost half of a new novel, to be called Hide and Seek, when he was afflicted by an illness that may have anticipated the rheumatic gout or neuralgia of later years. Gout is associated with the pleasures of the flesh, but is often a genetic condition that provokes unusually large levels of uric acid in the blood; the acid crystallises in the joints, causing an acute form of arthritis with accompanying pain, stiffness and swelling. It may attack the hands and feet but, as in the case of Collins, the uric acid may accumulate around the eyes.

  The fact that his father had suffered the same symptoms suggests that Collins may have inherited a predisposition to them, but anxiety and overwork may also have taken their toll upon his somewhat frail constitution. Whatever the diagnosis, he was in subsequent years often to be incapacitated by pain in the eyes and legs. He reflected on his experience in a later novel. “The medical profession thrives on two incurable diseases in these modern days—a He-disease and a She-disease. She-disease—nervous depression. He-disease—suppressed gout. Remedies, one guinea, if you go to the doctor; two guineas if the doctor goes to you.”

  He spent much of May and J
une in bed, and was only able to “toddle out” with the aid of a stick; his brains were so “muddled” that he was not able to continue work on his new novel. Yet by the end of July he was well enough to accept an invitation from Dickens to spend a month or two with the Dickens family in Boulogne; Dickens had rented a villa here, on the side of a steep hill overlooking the town, and it seemed to be the ideal spot for recuperation from long illness. Collins was lodged in the upper half of a small pavilion in the grounds, from which he ventured into the town itself where he was once found eating pâté de foie gras for breakfast. He was diverted by French wines as well as by French cookery. In his letters Dickens mentions visits to the local theatre as well as attendance at the various Sunday fêtes and fairs and markets. Yet his guest also found time to work on his uncompleted manuscript, and managed to complete several chapters of Hide and Seek.

  While in Boulogne Collins sketched out a long European holiday with Dickens and with a fellow guest, Augustus Egg, to be undertaken in the autumn of the same year. Egg was a gentle, quiet and good-natured man who could act as a suitable foil for the sharp and decisive Dickens. This was to be a glorious journey, the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Grand Tour, taking in France, Switzerland and Italy—from Paris to Geneva, from Milan to Naples, from Rome to Venice.

  Dickens was invariably the leader whose energy and purposefulness would have irritated less tractable companions. He was the inspirer, the organiser, of the enterprise. “I lose no opportunity,” he informed his sister-in-law, “of inculcating the lesson that it is of no use to be out of temper in travelling.” Consequently, as Collins wrote to his mother, “we travel in a state of mad good spirits, and never flag in our jollity all through the day.” The note of overstrained gaiety is quite familiar in any account of Dickens’s company. “We observe the Managerial punctuality in all our arrangements,” he told his wife, “and have not had any difference whatever.” Dickens of course was the Manager.

  So he hurried them along. “I am so restless to be doing—and always shall be, I think, so long as I have any portion in Time—that if I were to stay more than a week in any one city here, I believe I should be half desperate to begin some new story!” They started off from Boulogne by railway to Paris, and found the French capital full of English travellers; from Paris they travelled by rail to Strasbourg and then on by carriage into Switzerland, the landscape of which furnished fresh material for Collins’s descriptive pen. He did not care for the hotels or the landlords, however; at Basel the hotelier looked like an undertaker, and treated his guests accordingly. In Lausanne the little party visited a school for the deaf and blind; Collins, who at the time was creating a profoundly deaf heroine, was more than usually interested.

  From Lausanne they went on to Geneva, and from Geneva to Chamonix “in a queer little box called a char, drawn by a mare and a mule” which shook and rattled so much on the stony roads that “my very jaws clatter and my feet play a perpetual tattoo on the bottom of the char.” On the following morning, after their arrival at Chamonix, Dickens led them on an ascent of the Mer de Glace through deep snow. Collins was by now thoroughly discomfited, even if he took care not to show it to his companions. He had, after all, only just recovered from a serious illness. Towards the end of their time in Switzerland he was obliged to take to his bed for two days.

  We have the advantage of Dickens’s letters to throw light upon Collins. “He takes things easily,” he told his wife, “and is not put out by small matters.” Also he “eats and drinks everything, gets on very well everywhere, and is always in good spirits.” His only fault was that “he sometimes wants to give people too little for their troubles.” He was, in other words, parsimonious. In homage to their foreign and exotic surroundings Dickens proposed that they should all grow moustaches; it was then considered that shaving was the mark of respectability and Collins enquired, four years later, whether “the most trustworthy banker’s clerk in the whole metropolis have the slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his chin?” Dickens’s moustache grew luxuriant, but those of Collins and of Egg did not “take.” Dickens compared that of Collins to the eyebrows of his one-year-old child. It was yet another mark of the older novelist’s superiority.

  Italy was the true destination of the three men and, as soon as they crossed the Simplon Pass, Collins began palpably to relax. At their first stop over the border, in Domodossola, he was delighted by the food which he considered to be infinitely superior to that of Switzerland. And the wine was only eighteen pence a bottle. He was back in the country he had visited when he was a schoolboy fifteen years before; the flood of powerful memories was such that, when listening to a blind Italian fiddler singing Italian songs, Collins was almost moved to tears. He also heard “that sort of chaotic and purposeless general screaming which constitutes the staple of ordinary Italian conversation.”

  On the journey to Milan in an ancient carriage they were advised to attach a length of string to their luggage which could then be held; this would alert them to any attempt to steal it. So “we held out three impromptu bell ropes all the way to Milan. It was like being in a shower-bath and waiting to pull the string.” Augustus Egg, a significant and serious painter of the Victorian world, had come in part to see the art; he and Collins would converse about the work they saw, much to Dickens’s impatience; he had no particular interest in the Old Masters, and considered artistic discourse to be so much humbug. “To hear Collins learnedly holding forth to Egg (who has as little of that gammon as an artist can have) about reds, and greens, and things ‘coming well’ with other things, and lines being wrong, and lines being right, is far beyond the bounds of all caricature.” Dickens was also mildly irritated by Collins’s general untidiness; while Dickens lived in perfect neatness and order, Collins’s room was always messy with random objects strewn all over the place.

  Over the next six weeks they made their Grand Tour of the country, with stops in Genoa, Naples, Rome and Venice. The steamboat from Genoa to Naples was overbooked and the three companions were obliged to spend the first night on the deck along with other passengers who were arrayed, in Dickens’s evocative phrase, like “spoons in a sideboard.” Dickens managed to obtain a cabin on the following night, while Collins and Egg “pigged together” in a storeroom. In Naples Collins met an acquaintance from the previous trip. Did you not break your arm? No, my brother did. “Galway’s dead.” Galway was the boy responsible for Charles Collins’s injury. While in Naples they found time to climb to the crater of Mount Vesuvius where Collins saw “a blood-red setting sun gleaming through the hot vapour and sulphur smoke.”

  Rome was exactly as Collins remembered it. He recognized all his old haunts on the Pincian Hill. He saw the same bishops with purple stockings, the same men with pointed hats and the same women with red petticoats. The beggars, and the urchins, were always there. He observed the pope, looking anxious and miserable. As the pontiff passed all of the people fell on their knees, except for Collins, who took off his hat; the pope bowed gravely to him. This was the Roman world.

  In Venice they entered another landscape. They were met by the gondola of the Hotel Danieli at the railway station and were then whisked across the dark waters of the Grand Canal; with the ancient houses on either side, it seemed to Collins that he might have returned to the Middle Ages. They hired a gondola for the duration of their stay, and attended the opera and the ballet; they lived among pictures and palaces, but the weather was so cold that Collins purchased a voluminous Venetian greatcoat complete with hood.

  They returned to England, in December 1853, by way of Lyons and Paris. Collins discovered, when their expenses were shared, that he had spent more than he had intended. It was difficult to be frugal in the company of Dickens. It was necessary for him, however, to attend to business once more. His letters to friends and relatives from the Continent were designed to provide material for a series of travel articles in Bentley’s Miscellany. So at the beginning of 1854 he put togethe
r the first instalment of “Letters from Italy” and delivered it to Bentley’s office. Unfortunately a series on the same subject, “A Journey from Westminster to St. Peter’s,” had only just finished in the Miscellany; Collins had not concerned himself to check, and was thus doubly disappointed by the rejection. He may have then offered the series to Household Words but, if so, Dickens did not accept it.

  In suitably chastened mood Collins then went back to his work on the partly completed novel which had been broken off by illness and foreign travel. He worked quickly on it in the early months of the year, and had completed it by the spring. Hide and Seek was published by Richard Bentley in June, and dedicated to Charles Dickens “as a token of admiration and affection.”

  It had an enthusiastic reception, since it was considered to be free of “the close, stifling, unwholesome odour” that had lingered about its predecessor, Basil; the anonymous reviewer of the Leader praised it for the “complicated clearness” of its plot, an appropriate phrase for much of Collins’s fiction. Dickens told his sister-in-law that “I think it far away the cleverest novel I have ever seen written by a new hand.” Its reception was not helped by the outbreak of the Crimean War at the end of March. The travails of the war monopolised national attention; the public was more interested in reading newspapers rather than novels. So Hide and Seek languished on the outer edges of public consciousness. The first edition was sold but no other appeared.