good novelists, who more or less mirror their mid-Victorian mood. Wilkie
Collins may be said to be in this way a lesser Dickens and Anthony
Trollope a lesser Thackeray. Wilkie Collins is chiefly typical of his
time in this respect: that while his moral and religious conceptions
were as mechanical as his carefully constructed fictitious conspiracies,
he nevertheless informed the latter with a sort of involuntary mysticism
which dealt wholly with the darker side of the soul. For this was one
of the most peculiar of the problems of the Victorian mind. The idea of
the supernatural was perhaps at as low an ebb as it had ever
been--certainly much lower than it is now. But in spite of this, and in
spite of a certain ethical cheeriness that was almost _de rigueur_--the
strange fact remains that the only sort of supernaturalism the
Victorians allowed to their imaginations was a sad supernaturalism. They
might have ghost stories, but not saints' stories. They could trifle
with the curse or unpardoning prophecy of a witch, but not with the
pardon of a priest. They seem to have held (I believe erroneously) that
the supernatural was safest when it came from below. When we think (for
example) of the uncountable riches of religious art, imagery, ritual and
popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the
Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that
Dickens (wishing to have in _The Christmas Carol_ a little happy
supernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythology
for himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real and
human sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, Wilkie
Collins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; both
very good of their kind. He is one of the few novelists in whose case it
is proper and literal to speak of his "plots." He was a plotter; he went
about to slay Godfrey Ablewhite as coldly and craftily as the Indians
did. But he also had a sound though sinister note of true magic; as in
the repetition of the two white dresses in _The Woman in White_; or of