It has been said by Wendell Holmes that every man has in him one good novel, if he could but manage to write it. Most men leave their novel carefully unwritten. It has not yet been noticed, we think, that even those novelists whose variety of conception strikes us as their most remarkable quality have usually had one favourite idea, which reappears again and again, even in the texture of works otherwise most varied in structure.

For example, even Sir Walter Scott has his favourite theme, which sometimes is the chief feature of the story, at other times occupies quite a subordinate position, but is nearly always present in one form or another. Scott's favourite idea, brought in so often that but for his marvellous skill in clothing it in ever-varying garb it would have become wearisome, is to present the youthful hero of his plot as a young and inexperienced man, treated by the older characters as little more than a boy, often their unconscious agent in important political plots, occasionally looked down upon by the heroine herself (who knows more of such plans and takes a more leading part in carrying them out than the hero of the story), but showing himself worthier, or at least manlier, than his elders had imagined him to be. Scott has not always, perhaps, contented us with his hero; often another character is more interesting, as Fergus than Waverley, Bois Guilbert than Ivanhoe, Evandale than Morton; possibly because all Scott's heroes show the peculiarity we have described. In Edward Waverley we have the original of the type. In 'Guy Mannering' Harry Bertram never shakes off the manner of a very young man, whether with Meg Merrilies, the Dominie, Mr. Pleydell, or Colonel Mannering. Frank Osbaldistone, in 'Rob Roy,' treated by his father as a mere boy, is afterwards a mere tool in the hands of older men. Even Die Vernon treats him till near the end as but an inexperienced lad. Lovell, in 'The Antiquary,' plays a similar part, alike with Monkbarns, with the Baronet, and with old Edie Ochiltree, and remains to the end unconscious of his real position, in regard both to his putative father and to Earl Geraldine. In 'Redgauntlet' the plot of which, by the way, is not very interesting we have a hero similarly situated, and unconsciously taking part in a dangerous political plot. The hero of 'The Black Dwarf' is still more cavalierly treated, insomuch that no one, I imagine, takes the least interest in him. Young Arthur, in 'Anne of Greierstein,' is a puppet in his father's hands to the end. The scenes between Quentin Durward and Louis XI illustrate well Scott's favourite theme. But Durward is also treated as a mere boy by Le Balafre, by Earl Crawford, and by Charles of Burgundy; we note, too, that he is entirely unconscious of the part he is really playing in the journey to Liege. Ivanhoe is under Cedric's high displeasure till near the end of the story, and is as boyish a hero as Quentin Durward, despite the bravery they both show in the saddle. Henry Morton, with his uncle, with Dame Wilson, and afterwards with Balfour of Burley; Halbert Glendinning, with the monks; Julian Avenel, with Lady Avenel, and afterwards with Queen Mary and Catharine Seyton; Harry Grow (and Conachar) with Simon; Edgar Kavenswood with the elder Ashton and Caleb Balderstone; Tressilian, in 'Kenilworth'; Monteith, in 'The Legend of Montrose'; Merton, in 'The Pirate' (with old Mordaunt, with Norna of the Fitful Head, and even with Minna and Brenda) and their father, all these are samples of Sir Walter Scott's favourite theme. It is the same with Damian, in 'The Betrothed'; with the Varangian, in 'Count Eobert of Paris'; with young Nigel, in 'The Fortunes of Nigel'; with Julian, in 'Peveril of the Peak'; and with the Knight of the Leopard, in 'The Talisman.' Only one exception, and that rather apparent than real, can be mentioned the 'Heart of Midlothian,' perhaps the finest of all Scott's novels: but this is a novel without a hero, or, rather, Jeanie Deans is both hero and heroine (for Keuben Butler can scarcely be considered a hero). Now, strangely enough, Jeanie, thus taking a double part, womanlike in her patience and goodness, manlike in her endurance and courage, illustrates Scott's pet theme (as obviously as Edward Waverley or Frank Osbaldistone) in the scenes with Staunton and Staunton's father, with the Duke of Argyll and Queen Caroline nay, even with Madge Wildfire.

Dickens, a writer of another type, had also his favourite theme. So far as I know, the point has not yet been noticed; but I think there can be no doubt that one special idea had more attraction for him than any other, and seemed to him the most effective leading idea for a plot.

The idea which, more than any other had a fascination for Dickens, and was apparently regarded by him as likely to be most potent in its influence on others, was that of a wrong-doer watched at every turn by one of whom he has no suspicion, for whom he even entertains a feeling of contempt. This characteristic, although, as I have said, it has been generally overlooked, is so marked that, so soon as attention is directed to it, men wonder it had not been noticed at once.

Of course, in a story like 'Pickwick,' started originally as a comic sporting tale, and only worked into a more serious form after the death of the sporting artist who was to have illustrated it, we should not expect to find any trace of an idea which Dickens valued chiefly for its effect in exciting tragic emotions. We have only to consider how he worked this idea to see how unsuitable it would have been in such a novel as 'Pickwick' if, indeed, 'Pickwick' can be called a novel.

But in two out of the first four novels which Dickens wrote we find this idea of patient watching even to death or doom a marked feature of the story. In 'Barnaby Rudge' Haredale steadily waits and watches for Rudge, till, after more than twenty years, 'at last, at last,' as he cries, he captures his brother's murderer on the very spot where the murder had been committed. In this case, too, it is to be noticed that Rudge has been supposed to be dead during all the years of Haredale's watch; and this was so important a part of Dickens's conception that he makes Haredale speak of it, even in the fierce rush in which he seizes Rudge. 'Villain!' he says, 'dead and buried, as all men supposed, through your infernal arts, but reserved by heaven for this.' It became a favourite idea of Dickens to associate the thought of death either with the watcher or the watched; and, unless I mistake, in the final and finest development of his favourite theme, he made one 'dead and buried as all men supposed' watch the very man who supposed him dead, and not only buried but destroyed.

In 'Nicholas Nickleby' it is the untiring enmity of Brooker, not the work of those he chiefly dreads, which drives Ralph Nickleby to self-murder. 'Ralph had no reason,' we are told, 'that he knew, to fear this man; he had never feared him before;' but he trembles when Brooker comes forth from the darkness in which he had been concealed, and confronts him to tell the story which is to be as the doom of death to him.

In the other two of these first four works 'Oliver Twist' and 'The Old Curiosity Shop' we find less marked use of Dickens's favourite idea, though it is not wholly absent from either work. In 'The Old Curiosity Shop,' the two Brass scamps (to include that 'old fellow,' Miss Sally Brass, in the term) are watched by the despised Marchioness, and it is by her their powerless victim, as they supposed that their detection is brought about. 'Oliver Twist' was written specially to attack the workhouse system in England, and other ideas gave place to that leading one.

In Dickens's next novel the idea is further developed. In passing, I note that naturally the idea could never be presented twice in the same precise form. It is indeed wonderful how many changes Dickens was able to ring on this general notion of an untiring watch kept on one not suspecting that he was watched, and least of all that he was watched by the man who was really holding his ways and doings constantly in view. In 'Martin Chuzzlewit' the two chief villains of the story, Jonas Chuzzlewit, the murderer (perhaps the most shadowy murderer ever pictured by novelist), and Pecksniff, the hypocrite, are both watched in the melodramatic way that Dickens loved. Jonas has no fear of Nadgett, and, indeed, never suspects that Tom Pinch's silent landlord is watching him at all. All his thoughts are directed towards Montague Tigg. To see how Dickens delighted in the idea I am considering, we have only to notice the way in which he presents Jonas Chuzzlewit's thoughts when Nadgett denounces him. 'I never watched a man so close as I have watched him,' says Nadgett; and the thoughts of the frightened murderer shape themselves thus: 'Another of the phantom forms of this terrific truth! Another of the many shapes in which it started up about him out of vacancy! This man, of all men in the world, a spy upon him; this man, changing his identity, casting off his shrinking, purblind, unobservant character, and springing up into a watchful enemy! The dead man might have come out of his grave and not confounded and appalled him so.' Later, Dickens meant to have made use of this supreme horror, a dead man watching his murderer; for note: Jonas thinks not of some dead man, but of the dead man whom he has murdered. We may observe also that Jonas Chuzzlewit, like the latest of Dickens's villains, is but a murderer in intent, and in the supposed achievement of his purpose, at first; he commits an actual murder to escape punishment for a supposed murder, as Jasper, in killing Neville Landless, was to be brought to death in trying to escape death; probably, too, by self-slaughter, like Jonas.

While Jonas is watched by Nadgett, whom he despises ('Old What's-his-name,' he calls him, 'looking as usual as if he wanted to skulk up the chimney; of all the precious dummies in appearance that ever I saw, he's about the worst; he's afraid of me, I think'), Pecksniff is watched by one whom he regards as to all intents and purposes dead, who had lived in his house, 'weak and sinking,' but who suddenly shows that he has been keen and resolute, 'with watchful eye, vigorous hand on staff, and triumphal purpose in his figure.' 'I have lived in this house, Pinch,' says old Martin, 'and had him fanning on me days and weeks and months; I have suffered him to treat me as his tool and instrument; I have undergone ten thousand times as much as I could have endured if I had been the miserable old man he took me for. I have had his base soul bare before me day by day, and have not betrayed myself. I never could have undergone such torture but for looking forward to this time. The time now drawing on will make amends for all, and I wouldn't have him die or hang himself for millions of golden pieces.'

It is clear that the idea of patient watching to bring an evildoer to justice must have been strong in Dickens's mind when he thus worked it into the warp of his most characteristic plots, and into both warp and woof of the work which was perhaps most characteristic of them all. That the theme is melodramatic and utterly unlike anything in real life makes this all the clearer. Probably no man that ever lived has been willing to devote months or years of his life to such a task as Dickens thus imagined; but so much the more obvious is it that the idea was specially his own.

In Dickens's next important work 'Dombey and Son' we do not find this characteristic idea in so marked a form. Yet it is present, and in more ways than one. Thus we find Dombey watched by Carker (whom he regards as a mere business manager for his great house), all his ways noted, and the ruin of his house wrought, by the man whom he considers so little worth noticing. But Carker himself in turn is tracked by those whom he regards as utterly contemptible old Mother Brown and her unhappy daughter. So again, in the pursuit of Carker by the man whom he has wronged and whom he despises, we have the same idt a, though in a changed form. The pursuit reminds one of a hideous dream, in which some enemy from whom we fly appears always at the moment when we imagine we have reached safety. 'In the fever of his mortification and rage,' we are told, 'panic mastered him completely. He would gladly have encountered almost any risk rather than meet the man of whom, two hours ago, he had been utterly regardless. His fierce arrival, which he had never expected, the sound of his voice, their having been so near meeting face to face he would have braved out this; but the springing of his mine upon himself seemed to have rent and shivered all his hardihood and self-reliance.'

In 'David Copperfield,' which was in large degree autobiographical, we might have expected that the idea we are considering would not present itself. Yet here also it is seen, and more than once. The plots of Uriah Heep are defeated by the close watch kept on him by Micawber, whom Heep thoroughly despises. Littimer, the 'second villain' of the story, is brought to punishment, as one of his gaolers tells Copperfield, by the devotion of little Miss Mowcher, who, once on his track, follows him till he is in the toils, and finally aids in his capture.

In 'Bleak House' the interest of an important part of the story turns on a murder. Mystery is suggested, not so much by the question, 'Who is the murderer?' (about which no reader of average intelligence can have any doubt), but by doubts as to the way in which the murder has been committed and suspicion thrown on two innocent persons. Here, again, Dickens adopts his favourite idea. Mademoiselle Hortense spares no pains to bring the charge of murder on another, who is her enemy a theme which Dickens was to have wrought out more fully in his latest work. In her anxiety to throw suspicion on Lady Dedlock she loses sight of her own danger. If she has any fears, she certainly has none of the woman with whom she lodged. Yet this is where her real danger lies. This woman keeps watch upon her night and day. This woman had undertaken ('speaking to me,' says her husband, Inspector Bucket, 'as well as she could on account of the sheet in her mouth') 'that the murderess should do nothing without her knowledge, should be her prisoner without suspecting it, should no more escape from her than from death.'

In 'Little Dorrit' we find Dickens's favourite theme in a new aspect. I think the importance of this part of the rather bewildering plot of 'Little Dorrit' obtained less recognition than Dickens intended. The murderous Rigaud-Blandois, or Blandois-Rigaud (as best suits his convenience), disguises himself as a much older man with white hair an idea which in a modified form was to reappear in Dickens's last novel. He is watched closely and patiently by the despised Cavaletto, the 'contraband beast,' as Blandois calls him. 'It is necessary,' says Cavaletto, telling the story, 'to have patience. I have patience ... I wait patientissamentally. I watch, I hide, until he walks and smokes. He is a soldier with grey hair. But ! ... he is also this man that you see.' What Dickens felt (or supposed) to be the effects of the sudden discovery that a watch of this sort had been kept is shown by the way in which even Rigaud-Blandois (whose chief characteristic, outside his villainy, is his coolness) blanches when he hears how Cavaletto had watched him so patientissamentally. 'White to the lips' yet when he knows that his story is known, he 'faces it out with a bare face, as the infamous wretch he was.'

The 'Tale of Two Cities,' of course, turns wholly on the general idea which we have thus found in more or less important parts of Dickens's chief works. It is the undying hate, handed on from generation to generation, of the despised French peasantry a hate patiently waiting for vengeance, even on the innocent descendants of the feudal tyrants of old which brings about the series of events leading to the catastrophe. Dickens himself called attention to this point. The objection was raised that the feudal cruelties did not come sufficiently within the date of the action to justify his use of them. 'I had, of course, full knowledge,' he replied, 'of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges;' but he had also sufficient knowledge of human nature, he went on to say, to know that hatreds which had been growing during twenty generations would not die out, or even perceptibly diminish, in the first few generations after their cause was removed nay, that even the direct effects of that evil cause would not quickly cease, and assuredly had not ceased when the French Revolution began.¹

In 'Great Expectations' the whole plot turns on two watchings, by men whom the watched persons despise. First, Magwitch keeps watch (and kindly ward, too, despised though he is) on Pip, whose disgust and horror when he learns who has been his unknown benefactor must be regarded as undoubtedly illustrating Dickens's favourite theme. But also the despised and thoroughly despicable Compeyson keeps patient and finally successful watch on his enemy Magwitch. The interest of the story culminates in the close of this long watch, the death of the watcher, and the mortal injury of the watched. A minor part of the action shows the same characteristic idea in the watch kept by Orlick, first on Mrs. Gargery, till he strikes her a death-blow, and then long and patiently on Pip, till finally he succeeds in inveigling him to the lonely place by the marshes, where he had intended that not only should Pip be slain, but destroyed from off the face of the earth. (Another villain was to have planned a similar end for his victim in Dickens's latest story.)

Never surely had any leading idea been so thoroughly worked by a novelist as this pet theme of Dickens had been worked and overworked, one would have said in the stories I have dealt with. It would seem as though Dickens conceived that nothing could more impress and move his readers than the idea of patient, unsuspected watch kept by someone supposed either to be indifferent or insignificant or powerless or dead, that he thus used the idea in so many forms in his chief works up to the time when 'Great Expectations' had appeared. It might be imagined that now at last he could feel it to be no longer available. The thought may indeed present itself that as a man advances in years his first notions become more and more his leading themes: yet it would seem as though Dickens could not, without repeating himself, make further use of his favourite idea.

What, however, do we find? In his next novel, 'Our Mutual Friend,' Dickens takes as the leading incident for his story' (I quote his own words) 'the idea of a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and being dead to all intents and purposes external to himself.' He presents this man as keeping patient watch on more than one character, in this the most varied in colouring of all Dickens's novels. He shows him trying to recall the manner of his own death, in order that the reader may more fully recognise how thoroughly dead is this patiently watching man to all external to himself. 'I have no clue to the scene of my death,' he says; 'not that it matters now.' 'It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,' he adds, 'to be looking into a churchyard on a wild, windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried as they lie buried; nothing uses me to it; a spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier, going unrecognised among men, than I feel.' In his latest story Dickens meant to have brought out still more prominently the idea of a man, supposed to be dead, thus looking into the place where, to all intents and purposes external to himself, he lay dead, buried, and destroyed.

Even this is not quite all, however. In 'No Thoroughfare' (in the part written by Dickens) we have a man described as dead if it means anything to say that his 'heart stood still' (not momentarily, but during events that must have lasted many minutes) coming to life, and confronting the man who supposed he had murdered him. The circumstances of this supposed murder are akin, by the way, in two striking circumstances, to the supposed murder which was the real mystery of Dickens's last story.

Again, in 'Hunted Down' we have a man whom the villain of the story supposes to be dying (as surely murdered by him as if he had slain him outright) turning out to be another man, disguised, who is not dying at all, but tracks Slinkton to his own death by self-murder, as it was to have been with the villain of Dickens's last story, and as it had been with so many of his earlier villains. 'You shall know,' says Meltham, speaking as Beckwith, 'for I hope the knowledge will be terrible and bitter to you, why you have been pursued by one man, and why you have been tracked to death at a single individual's charge. That man, Meltham, was as absolutely certain that you could never elude him in this world, if he devoted himself to your destruction with the utmost fidelity and earnestness, and if he divided this sacred duty with no other duty in life, as he was certain that in achieving it he would be a poor instrument in the hand of Providence, and would do well before Heaven in striking you out from among living men. I am that man, and I thank God that I have done my work.'

Before passing to the last work of all, I may note here that Dickens himself noted among his 'subjects for stories' a form of the theme we have been considering. 'Here is a fancy,' Forster says, 'that I remember him to have been more than once bent upon using; but the opportunity never came.' 'Two men to be guarded against' the words are Dickens's own now 'one whom I openly hold in some serious animosity, whom I am at the pains to wound and defy, and whom I estimate as worth wounding and defying; the other, whom I treat as a sort of insect, and contemptuously and pleasantly flick aside with my glove. But it turns out to be the latter who is the really dangerous man; and when I expect the blow from the other it comes from him.' In a sort this idea was worked out in 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood.' Here a young man, who seemed light and wayward, has been swept aside and is supposed to be dead, as an insect might be crushed. Jasper has no further thought of him; but he plots serious measures against a man whom he holds in serious animosity, and whom he has been at the pains to wound and defy. But the fatal blow was to have come from the man who had seemed so wanting in purpose, the 'bright boy' of the opening scenes.

Every conceivable form of his favourite theme had now been tried, save that which Dickens had himself indicated as the most effective of all that the dead should rise from the grave to confront his murderer. This idea was at length to be used, difficult though it seemed to work it out successfully. 'I have a very curious and new idea for my new story,' he wrote to Forster; 'not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work.' From what we know of Forster's restless inquisitiveness in regard to Dickens's plans, we learn without surprise that immediately after he had been told that the idea was not communicable he asked to have it communicated to him. Nor does it seem to have been regarded by Forster as at all strange that at once (his own words are 'immediately afterwards') Dickens communicated to him the idea which had been described as 'incommunicable,' or that the new and curious idea should be both stale and commonplace nothing, in fact, but the oft-told tale of a murder detected by the presence of indestructible jewellery in lime into which the body of the murdered man had been flung. Forster's vanity blinded him in such sort that the patent artifice was not detected. Yet he asked where the originality of the idea came in. Dickens explained, he naively adds, that it was to consist 'in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if not he, the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.' But of course, so far as this special feature was concerned, the idea had been already worked out in the 'Madman's Manuscript' in 'Pickwick,' and in the 'Clock-case Confession' in 'Master Humphrey's Clock.'

The real idea underlying 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' was a very striking and novel form of Dickens's favourite theme. But before showing this it may be well to make a few general remarks respecting this remarkable work.

The usual idea about 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' has been that the novel was one of the dullest Dickens ever began. I remember hearing an eminent novelist say, in 1873, that, as part after part came out, he felt that 'Charles Dickens was gone, positively gone' just as the great dramatic critic in 'Nicholas Nickleby' felt about the Shakespearian drama. Longfellow, however, thought differently, and I take him to have been far and away the better judge. He thought that 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' promised to be the finest work Dickens had written. That opinion, expressed within a few weeks of Dickens's death, led me to read a story which I had determined to avoid, as incomplete, and likely therefore to be tantalising in the reading; and I have always felt grateful to the poet for thus sending me to read a work which, even though incomplete, is worth, to my mind, 'Nicholas Nickleby' and 'Martin Chuzzlewit' together.

I take it that 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' is disliked chiefly because the idea presents itself to many readers that the plot really is formed on the commonplace and well-worn idea mentioned to Forster, and artfully suggested at every turn of the narrative. Longfellow, as a poet, felt the real meaning of the tones in which Dickens told that seemingly commonplace story, and heard beneath them voices telling a story full of pathos and tragic force. To the ordinary reader 'Edwin Drood' is merely the story of a murder, the murder of a wayward, careless young man. The very details of the murder seem clear. The reader knows, he thinks, how the murder is to be found out, whom the heroine and her friend are to marry, and how the murderer is to tell the story of his own crime as well as of his defeated attempt to bring about the death of the man he hates and fears.

In such a story there is little of interest; and the tone of the completed half of the book seems quite unsuited to the intrinsic insignificance of the narrative. Thus judged, 'Edwin Drood' promised to be as worthless as many considered it.

It was not of such a story, thus ill told, that Longfellow spoke with such enthusiasm. The real story is more mysterious, more terrible; it is at once more pathetic and more humorous.

How Dickens had proposed to explain in the denouement the details of Jasper's attack on Edwin, and subsequent attempt to destroy the body of his supposed victim, we do not know. But that Edwin Drood has been in some way saved from death (through the agency of Durdles, probably, though Durdles himself, half-drunk as usual at the time, knows little about it) is manifest to all who understand Dickens's ways. The very words by which he tries to convince us that Drood is dead show that Drood has not been killed. It is the 'bright boy' who is never to be seen again. Drood lives; and changed by a terrible shock from boyishness to manliness, Drood's carelessness towards Rosa is turned into earnest love. Moreover, Rosa knows that Drood is living, and is full of sorrow for him that she can give him but a sister's love. Rosa's sorrow for Edwin's hopeless love is so skilfully veiled in the later chapters of the story, that it is mistaken by most readers for sorrow because Edwin is dead. But every tone shows that it is sorrow for the living. Every tone, too, of all that Drood says, when his thoughts dwell on his new-born love for Rosa, shows that he feels that love to be hopeless.

All this must seem idle to those who imagine that Edwin is dead and therefore silent. The most careless reader, said Miss Meyrick in 'The Century,' can see that the idea that Edwin is alive is contradicted by Dickens himself in the story. Even so: Dickens so carefully contradicts this idea, that the careless reader, as Miss Meyrick shows, rejects it as out of the question. The careful reader forms another opinion, especially when he learns that Dickens had expressed his fear lest, with all his anxiety to keep his plot concealed, it had been disclosed for the keener-sighted.

We might never have heard of the fear thus expressed were it not that a few hours afterwards Dickens was dead. Miss Hogarth naturally mentioned all that Dickens had said to her during those last few days. Forster's words are these : 'Dickens had become,' he says, 'a little nervous about the course of the tale, from a fear that he might have plunged too soon into the incidents leading to the catastrophe, such as "the Datchery assumption" in the fifth number a misgiving he had certainly expressed to his sister-in-law.' Observe the words, 'the Datchery assumption,' and consider how much they mean. The character of the quaint, half-sad, half-humorous stranger is, then, an assumed one. That Datchery is disguised is of course obvious, even to Miss Meyrick's 'careless reader.' But the part is assumed, and the assumption is one which suggests the nature of the denouement. This, in reality, is telling the whole secret. For, passing over, as 'too cruel silly,' the idea that the genial yet sad and sympathetic Datchery might be Bazzard, Grewgious's dull and self-conceited clerk, there is no one else in the story who can have assumed the part of Datchery, except the man whom the careless reader will be the last to think of Edwin Drood himself.

But in reality it needs no keenness of sight, but only a good ear for tone and voice, to show that Drood and Datchery are one. I venture to say that Longfellow did not need to have any external evidence to show that this is so. I do not know if Dr. Holmes has read Dickens's half-told tale, but I am confident that if he has, he will not have doubted for an instant that the man who talks to Princess Puffer as Edwin Drood, just before Drood disappears, is the same man, with the same feelings at work in his heart (in particular, the same sense of all he has thrown away by his own waywardness) as he who later talks to her at the same place as Datchery, in the assumed character of Datchery, 'an idle buffer living on his means.' We know even, as the music of the words is heard, that, in some instinctive way, the old opium-eater feels this. But we feel still more strongly that the same thought saddens the man that saddened the boy the thought of what-Rosa has become to him now he has released her from a foolish tie the thought how hopeless is his new-born love. The reader must be more than 'careless' who does not feel that the half sad, half humorous Datchery of this conversation is Drood, moved by anxiety about the dangerous duty he has determined to fulfil, and by doubts as to what will follow. Who but Edwin himself would be so moved by thoughts of the Edwin of old, so stirred by sadness at the thought of some sacrifice past, so wistful at the thought that 'the haven beyond the iron-bound coast might never be reached'? Dickens had indeed lost all his old power, his music had indeed become 'as sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh,' if the tender refrain heard so often in that last scene but one of the half-told story has no deeper meaning than the business meditations of a detective!

Those who love Dickens (with all his faults), but have not cared to read his unfinished story, or, having read it, have failed to note the delicate clue running through it, may find in the knowledge that Drood is saved from death to be his own avenger, all that they need to make 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' incomplete though it is, one of the most interesting of Dickens's novels. All that we know of Dickens's favourite ideas, all that the story really tells us, all that is conveyed by the music of the descriptions, assures those who really understand Dickens that his favourite theme was to have been worked into this novel in striking and masterly fashion. Jasper was to have been tracked remorselessly to his death by the man whom he supposed he had slain. Risen from the grave, Drood was to have driven Jasper to his tomb. Nay, we know from the remarkable picture which appeared on the outside of the original monthly numbers (a picture², be it remembered, which was designed before a line of the story was published), that Drood was to have forced Jasper to visit the very tomb where he thought that the dust of his victim lay there to find, alive and implacable, the man whom he had doomed to a sudden and terrible death.

* * * * *

¹. In the last chapter of the fourth volume of Alison's 'History of Europe' (I refer to the first edition of twenty-one volumes, the form in which I read that light and elegant little work as a boy) this is very fully pointed out perhaps even somewhat too fully.

². In this picture we see Edwin standing in the tomb as Jasper enters it, doubtless to seek for the jewelled ring, of which he would be told by Grewgious, purposely that he might be driven to that dreadful search. Grewgious obviously knew of Edwin's escape, from the tomb (witness the scene with Jasper, and Grewgious's subsequent seeming carelessness about the ring which we know to have been most precious in his eyes). It has been objected that it would have been cruel for Edwin and Grewgious to let Neville Landless remain under suspicion but Grewgious may very well have regarded this as a discipline much needed by Neville, and likely to be very beneficial in a young man of his fiery nature. The keen and kindly old man was evidently watching that no harm should come to Neville.

Cornhill Magazine, January 1886.