Уильям Уилки Коллинз – The Moonstone (страница 2)

The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Henry Kingsley’s once very popular Ravenshoe is written around a mystery of parentage which dictates most of the plot. The point to realise is that the Victorian story-tellers, and the Victorian story-readers, accepted crime and punishment as things that might happen to anyone in the course of life—and made the life-story that much more readable if they did happen. But these crimes and punishments happened to real characters—or characters as real as the novelist’s ability could compass. The characters were not subordinated and compelled to dance around to the exigencies of a plot which demands a body in a country-house library, a number of resident guests and servants each with their own discreditable and penetrable motives for murder, a paraphernalia of scientific instruments of detection, and a veneer of literary erudition to cover up the lack of any human interest; they were not imprisoned in a depressing mechanistic pattern. As counterbalance, of course, the Victorian novels tend to lack the puzzle fascination; they know little of the natural habitat of duck-weeds (Freeman) or the technique of electro-plating a murdered corpse so as to serve as a studio couch (Sayers). And the suspense they engender is not so much suspense about the identity of the criminal as suspense about how the innocently-accused is to be vindicated and the happy ending brought about without too many broken homes and death-beds on the way. (It must be admitted that Mrs. Henry Wood overindulged in death-beds as much as Trollope did in inheritance problems.) By all these criteria, The Moonstone is a Victorian novel, and not a detective story.

Not that it is any the worse for that. As a story, it is a very good one, excellently deployed, and it dispenses with any adventitious sensationalism. The death of Rosanna Spearman arises directly out of the character and past history of Rosanna Spearman; and in view of the date at which the book was written, the absence of any sentimentalising over that unfortunate girl is quite remarkable. Subsequent detective novelists—not, fortunately, Conan Doyle—were too often constrained, either by their publishers or by their own conception of what the public wanted, to insert a “love-interest” into their novels. “Love-interest” not fitting very well into mechanistic plots, the result was often deplorable. There is no need to particularise, only to mention that the introduction of a young lovely burning to avenge the corpse, or devoted to the chief suspect—or in any other capacity—tends seriously to hamper the activities of a detective who is working out the possible permutations of Bradshaw, or the chemical composition of a piece of tarred rope, or the significance of quotations from the works of T. S. Eliot scattered in unlikely places. It is not without significance that the English fictional detectives who have stayed the course best have been those expressly immune to amorous adventure—Sherlock Holmes, an egocentric neurotic, Dr. Thorndyke, a handsome kindly “block of teak,” Father Brown, a priest, Dr. Priestly, a disagreeable elderly scientist, and several policemen happily married to undistinguished wives: their French counterparts fall in and out of love with the victim, the criminal, or both—but that is Gallic levity frowned upon across the Channel.

In The Moonstone, however, there is a love-interest, that of the relations of Franklin Blake with the two women who loved him, which is both interesting and relevant to the story; and the further device of narration in turns by the people directly concerned adds to the human interest. No matter that it is not very probable that Gabriel Betteredge would ever have succeeded in putting pen to paper so as to cover the pages which he is made to cover here; this is what Gabriel, being Gabriel, would have written if he could have written it at such length. Similarly, this is what Miss Drusilla Clack would have written had she been completely frank—as, with a pen in her hand, she would probably not have been. And so with the rest. The net effect of all of which is that, though the paraphernalia of the Indian temple and the Buddhist priests is rather hastily written in, and though The Moonstone cannot be regarded as the master-pattern of the modern detective story, it remains something much more permanent—a thoroughly good novel.

G. D. H. and Margaret Cole

PREFACE

In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made here is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.

The same object has been kept in view in the handling of the other characters which appear in these pages. Their course of thought and action under the circumstances which surround them is shown to be (what it would most probably have been in real life) sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Right or wrong, their conduct, in either event, equally directs the course of those portions of the story in which they are concerned.

In the case of the physiological experiment which occupies a prominent place in the closing scenes of The Moonstone, the same principle has guided me once more. Having first ascertained, not only from books, but from living authorities as well, what the result of that experiment would really have been, I have declined to avail myself of the novelist’s privilege of supposing something which might have happened, and have so shaped the story as to make it grow out of what actually would have happened—which, I beg to inform my readers, is also what actually does happen, in these pages.

With reference to the story of the Diamond, as here set forth. I have to acknowledge that it is founded, in some important particulars, on the stories of two of the royal diamonds of Europe. The magnificent stone which adorns the top of the Russian Imperial Sceptre was once the eye of an Indian idol. The famous Koh-i-Noor is also supposed to have been one of the sacred gems of India; and, more than this, to have been the subject of a prediction, which prophesied certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses.

Gloucester Place, Portman Square,

June 30th, 1868.

PREFACE TO A NEW EDITION

The circumstances under which The Moonstone was originally written have invested the book—in the author’s mind—with an interest peculiarly its own.

While this work was still in course of periodical publication in England and in the United States, and when not more than one-third of it was completed, the bitterest affliction of my life and the severest illness from which I have ever suffered fell on me together. At the time when my mother lay dying in her little cottage in the country, I was struck prostrate, in London—crippled in every limb by the torture of rheumatic gout. Under the weight of this double calamity, I had my duty to the public still to bear in mind. My good readers in England and in America whom I had never yet disappointed, were expecting their regular weekly instalments of the new story. I held to the story—for my own sake as well as for theirs. In the intervals of grief, in the occasional remissions of pain, I dictated from my bed that portion of The Moonstone which has since proved most successful in amusing the public—the “Narrative of Miss Clack.” Of the physical sacrifice which the effort cost me I shall say nothing. I only look back now at the blessed relief which my occupation (forced as it was) brought to my mind. The Art which had been always the pride and the pleasure of my life became now more than ever “its own exceeding great reward.” I doubt if I should have lived to write another book, if the responsibility of the weekly publication of this story had not forced me to rally my sinking energies of body and mind—to dry my useless tears, and to conquer my merciless pains.

The novel completed, I awaited its reception by the public with an eagerness of anxiety which I have never felt before or since for the fate of any other writings of mine. If The Moonstone had failed, my mortification would have been bitter indeed. As it was, the welcome accorded to the story in England, in America, and on the Continent of Europe was instantly and universally favourable. Never have I had better reason than this work has given me to feel gratefully to novel-readers of all nations. Everywhere my characters made friends, and my story roused interest, Everywhere the public favour looked over my faults—and repaid me a hundredfold for the hard toil which these pages cost me in the dark time of sickness and grief.

I have only to add that the present edition has had the benefit of my careful revision. All that I can do towards making the book worthy of the reader’s continued approval has now been done.