On Edwin Drood

Ever since the real tragedy of the premature death of Dickens interrupted the fictitious tragedy of the premature death of Drood, there has been a continuous series of suggestions for the conclusion of the last Dickens story. Evidently the interest both in Dickens and Drood is as fresh as ever 3 and I have just been reading a very lively and lucid pamphlet on the subject by Mr. Aubrey Boyd, of the University of Washington. His work is particularly refreshing, in comparison with many, because he realizes that the way to detect a crime is to keep cool like the detective, and not to go mad like the criminal lunatic. Some of the interpreters of Dickens seem to have conscientiously smoked opium in the den of the Princess Puffer before offering their conclusions about Jasper. Mr. Boyd touches on some other American critics with a graceful irony. "In 1875 a certain anonymous citizen of Brattleborough, Vermont, with an assurance less typical of angels than of our countrymen, completed the book by means of a spirit pen." His own logic is sane and self-respecting, whether it establishes his own conclusion or no. Broadly, that conclusion is that the tale was meant to be not so much a tale of opium as a tale of hypnotism. As Mr. Boyd expresses it, it would have anticipated Trilby. He can certainly quote much in support of this in the scene of Jasper's silent domination of Rosa, and in other places. It cannot be denied that Dickens was very likely to be attracted by what was then a new scientific ideaj but I hope he was not. New scientific ideas go so very stale.

Oddly enough, Mr. Boyd mentions but does not emphasize a more sensational possibility in the matter. If Jasper was a hypnotist in the rather vague romantic fashion, it seems possible that he was not the murderer at all in the material and concrete fashion. With the licence allowed to mesmerists in sensational fiction, why should not Landless have done the deed after all, but only as an automaton acting under the mesmeric eye of Jasper? This would help the theory of Mr. Boyd, who holds that Helena was to come in as a white witch or counter-hypnotist when all else failed. For all else certainly would fail, if every legal proof led nearer to the physical criminality of Landless. This is Mr. Boyd's theory and not mincj but one rather wild yet not untenable idea occurs to me in support of it. The controversy largely turns on a sentence in Forster's Life of Dickens about the author's intention of making a murderer describe his experience as if "some other man" had undergone it. I will mention in a moment why I think that Forster's impressions must necessarily have been often mistaken. Is it not just possible that he was mistaken here, and Dickens' meaning was something quite different which sounds somewhat the same? Is it just possible that Dickens really said: "The murderer will confess his crime, and yet when he comes to describe it, it will be the act of another man"?

The testimony of John Forster about Edwin Drood is almost always treated as if it were the sworn evidence of an expert witness on a question of fact. In reality it is merely the momentary impression, made on a sincere but not subtle mind, by the random remarks of a genius about his half-formed fancies, always confused, and in this case deliberately concealed. But, indeed, the very passage which the critics treat as exact is in itself decidedly inexact. Forster reports Dickens as announcing a new and strong idea, difficult to work and impossible to communicate for fear of spoiling the surprise. Afterwards Forster says that "the originality" was to consist of the criminal describing his crime as if it were somebody else's. Most people reading straight ahead would naturally suppose that the originality of the story was also the strong incommunicable idea of the story. They would therefore assume that Dickens, having first called the idea incommunicable, had immediately proceeded to communicate it 3 and having said that his story would be spoilt by telling his secret, had then told his secret to spoil his story. Anyhow, it is far from clear whether Forster regarded these two ideas as identical or not. Personally, I agree with Mr. Aubrey Boyd that they were not identical. Dickens had something in store more striking than that trick of talking in the third person. But the fact that Forster says that it constituted the whole originality of the story is enough to show that Forster's book is not an impregnable rock of holy scripture. But, in truth, it is absurd to treat as fixed and final, in the evidence of Forster, ideas that were not yet fixed and final even in the imagination of Dickens.

As to the problem of the return of Drood, I would venture to make a distinction. I agree with Mr. Boyd that the mere idea of Jasper "watched by the dead" was not new enough to be incommunicable.. But it does not follow that it was not useful enough to be used. Drood as Datchery might be an incident: in the story without being the climax of the story. And I doubt, as Mr. Boyd does, whether Datchery was in any case meant to be the climax of the story^ whoever he was. But while I attach little importance to Drood being Datchery, I still think there are good arguments for Drood being alive. The arguments-against it are all of a kind with the pedantry about Forster j the notion of accepting most literally the

■^i ^^■^•^■^■^■^.^■•^■•^■•^■■^••^•-^•'^■^^■•^■■^■.^■.^•.^.^■.^■^ very things that are always said most lightly. Anybody might say, of an uncompleted slaying in an unwritten story, that the man was "a murderer/' or that he "strangled" the other man. For instance, I think it quite fanciful of Poe to object to Mrs. Rudge being called a "widow." A person who lives and looks like a widow, and is legally regarded as a widow, is called a widow. He might as well call Dickens a liar for describing Miss Trotwood as Miss Trotwood.

But this idea of Edwin's escape has another interest for me. I have never had a real Drood theory of my own. But I have always had a vague notion of my own, which nobody has ever suggested to me. It is, if possible, even vaguer than the real notion probably was, when Dickens first had it and Forster first heard of it. So far as it follows anybody, it follows the admirable remark of Andrew Lang about the very title of The Mystery of Edvoin Drood: "If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him." By the way, is Mr. Boyd right in citing Andrew Lang among those who accept the theory of Helena Landless as Datchery? However, the point is that the unfinished story is called a mystery. But if it is only the mystery of who murdered Drood, it is not a mystery at all. It is not even an unfinished story at all. It is not unfinished but finished; and there seems no need of any sequel. Multitudes of

Dickensians, including myself, have been completing a complete incident j and considerably wasting our time. As this thought is too appalling to be endured, I will throw out my own vague hint for avoiding it.

I have sometimes wondered whether the mystery of Edwin Drood may have been, not the mystery of how he was killed or escaped killing, or why he reappeared or refrained from reappearing, but something altogether different j something, for instance, in connexion with who he was. The mystery might date back to the last generation, to the love-affair of Grewgious, the mysterious feud of the Princess Puffer, and the apparently Asiatic past of Jasper and perhaps of Jasper's sister, the mother of Edwin Drood. In any case, I am almost certain that the story would have worked backwards as well as forwards. Otherwise I cannot see why Dickens dragged in so many things requiring retrospective explanation, such as the opium hag's hatred of Jasper. An idea occurs to me even in connexion with the pact of Edwin and Rosa: the idea of some substitution or false relationship. All this is intentionally hazy 3 but it has the advantage that it might make a mystery that was a mystery of Edwin Drood, and not a mystery of Dick Datchery or even of John Jasper. It would allow of his rising from the dead and even reappearing as the detective, without these things constituting the real "incommunicable" revelation. That would be, not his doing these things, but rather why he did them. If, for instance, there was some secret of his parentage or identity, he was clearly unconscious of it at the start. But Jasper's attempt might be the beginning of revelations from which he could not, or would not, disentangle himself till they were complete. This would incidentally meet the natural objection to Drood as Datchery, that though the murdered might watch the murderer, he would hardly need to detect him. Suppose he were not detecting his own death but his own birth. Suppose the real mystery began before the story. That is the floating fancy I have always had about Drood j and I am happy to say that I do not care a brass button whether there is a word of truth in it or not.