These last three items were all published in London by Routledge, Warnes and Routledge, and bound in dark green cloth, with yellow end-papers. They contain no prefaces by Benjamin Disraeli, who contented himself with care for the text of his father's work.

NOTE

To a collected edition of his novels issued in 1870 Disraeli wrote an important preface, characterising the work of his youth from the viewpoint of a man in his sixties and indicating the considerable revisions carried out in nearly all the books.

No attempt has been made to include in the foregoing bibliography the reports of and selections from the speeches of Disraeli, which—not surprisingly—were issued in large numbers during his later life. Also are omitted two volumes of his early letters, published after his death.

WILKIE COLLINS
1824-1889

WILKIE COLLINS

Few novelists have enjoyed greater glory than did Wilkie Collins at the height of his fame; to few did loss of popularity in later years come more bitterly. For fame at one time undeniably was his. Not only had he a large and enthusiastic public; not only were his works translated into half a dozen languages within a month of their original publication; not only was he pestered by the editors of two hemispheres for stories and serials; but also he figured prominently in the professional literary life of the time, was the intimate friend of Dickens, and a member of the innermost ring of artistic and intellectual society. Probably to his intimacy with the chief literary personalities of his time is due the considerable survival of his reputation. Despite the fact that during the last period of his life he suffered severe eclipse, and although, beyond The Moonstone and The Woman in White, none of his books are regularly read to-day, he is a name more familiar to the world than Trollope, a name more notably literary than Marryat. In the sixties, no less than in the nineteen-twenties, to belong to the writing set was two-thirds of reputation. There is no log-rolling so expert, no admiration so mutual as that existing among members of the various groups that practise the arts. Whence it has come about that the name of Wilkie Collins—who as an artist may not be mentioned in the same chapter as Trollope or Marryat, or even Mrs. Gaskell—is a household word, while those of his greater fellows sound strangely, as the notes of some old-fashioned melody.

I do not seek to imply that Collins' survival is in no way due to the quality of his work. He won the admiration of his own age and may claim that of posterity as a superb teller of stories and, in his latter days, as a pathetic and courageous figure. But apart from his dexterity in the contriving of plot, apart from a great (if intermittent) talent for the portrayal of abnormal character, he is inferior as a painter of life to many writers of his time whose very existence is nowadays forgotten.

And yet he would, perhaps, himself be content to have it so. That it was the novelist's primary duty to tell a story was his own creed, and faithfully he abode by it. He does not reveal to us human nature as does Trollope; nor, like Disraeli, pique our interest with satiric brilliance on topics of follies of the day; he has none of Marryat's gay familiarity with the winds that blow and the sun that shines on the crossroads of life's pilgrimage; he has no fund of rough but genial humanity like Reade; he is not tender like Mrs. Gaskell, nor mystic visionary like Herman Melville; even Whyte Melville, with his stilted rhetoric and clumsy naïveté, has at times an attractive freshness that Collins lacks. But if we rid our minds of all thought of him as seeking to throw on the dark places of existence the light of interpretation, looking to him rather for entertainment and for excitement, for deft mystery and for extraordinary coincidence, he will not disappoint us.

Of his novels the largest category, and that including all the books (save perhaps two) that bear re-reading nowadays, is that of the dramatic and mystery stories.