Sir W. Robertson Nicoll

“ Yet this strong and fiercely passionate girl had herself under the strictest control.
She had no fear of Jasper. Rosa, Helena, Neville, Jasper, and Edwin meet in Crisparkle’s drawing-room. Rosa is singing under the control of Jasper. She bursts into tears and shrieks out: ‘I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!’ Helena immediately comes to the rescue, and with one swift turn of her lithe figure lays the little beauty on a sofa. Edwin says to Jasper:
‘You are such a conscientious master, and require so much, that I believe you make her afraid of you. ”

“ Datchery returns alone towards it. As mariners on a dangerous voyage, approaching an iron-bound coast, may look along the beams of the warning light to the haven lying beyond it that may never be reached, so Mr. Datchery’s wistful gaze is directed to this beacon and beyond.’ The detective of whom this is written cannot possibly be a mere detective. His heart is engaged in the search. This fits Helena, and Helena only, of all the characters that have been brought forward. A professional detective paid by Grewgious could never have behaved in that way. Helena’s whole heart was in the business. ”

“ It is very often those who most doubt Mr. Forster’s accuracy on this point who are in the habit of turning to his book when they are in the search of facts to establish some theory of their own; and they do not hesitate to do this, because they know that whatever views they may hold upon the work itself, or the manner in which it is written, absolute truth is to be found in its pages. ”

“ Collins himself was a lavish consumer of the drug, but I do not think it has been suggested that Dickens himself ever touched it. Nor is it likely, for Dickens with all his tenseness of nerve was an eminently self-controlled and temperate man. But in Edwin Drood he has inserted a sentence in praise of opium. The opium woman says to Datchery: ‘It’s opium, deary. Neither more nor less. And it’s like a human creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but seldom what can be said in its praise.’ The last sentence was an afterthought on the part of Dickens. ”

“ In the midst of thunder, lightning, and storm, many tremendous deeds have been committed; men, self-possessed before, have given a sudden loose to passions they could no longer control. The demons of wrath and despair have striven to emulate those who ride the whirlwind and direct the storm; and man, lashed into madness with the roaring winds and boiling waters, has become for the time as wild and merciless as the elements themselves. ”

“ But fulness of life and the sap which quickens it cannot be replaced by any dissimulation. The stupid person may persuade another stupid person to believe in his cleverness. But it is impossible to counterfeit cleverness before a clever person unless we possess a minimum of cleverness, because a certain amount of cleverness is needed for the deception itself. The real tone of truth’s voice can no more be copied than the fiery gleam of enthusiasm. ”

“ Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified, but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it. ”

“ She can dominate it even when it is wounded through her sympathy with you. . . . Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance she has faced malignity and folly for you as only a brave nature well directed can. So it will be with her to the end . . . [pride] which knows no shrinking, and can get no mastery over her.’
Immediately after, Neville says: ‘I will do all I can to imitate her.’
p. 157‘Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave woman,’ answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly. ”

“ He guards himself by saying, ‘I think,’ and this makes his testimony to the more important facts the more impressive. Madame Perugini, who thoroughly understood the relations between Forster and Dickens, finds it impossible to believe that Dickens should have altered his plan without communicating with Forster. Forster’s strong character, and the peculiar friendship that existed between him and Dickens, make it impossible to believe that Dickens should suddenly become ‘underhand,’ and we might say treacherous, by inventing a plot which he did not intend to carry into execution. ”

“ Miss Stoddart suggests that the opium woman was not wholly degraded, and that she is horrified by Jasper’s continually repeated threatenings while under the influence of opium; that her sympathies have been wakened for that hapless Ned who bears a threatened name, and she resolves to do her best to serve him. With an honest purpose she makes her way before Christmas to Cloisterham. She loses sight of Jasper, but actually meets Edwin Drood. The kind act of that young stranger causes her to unload her conscience, and she bids him be thankful that his name is not Ned. ”

“ Obenreizer is the culprit, though Vendale does not suspect it, and the two go to Switzerland together. Obenreizer keeps planning a murder, and contrives to give Vendale an opium draught. He drugs him again, and in the course of a perilous mountain journey Vendale is roused to the knowledge that Obenreizer had set upon him, and that they were struggling desperately in the snow. Vendale rolls himself over into a gulf. But help is near. Marguerite’s fears have been excited, and she has followed her lover on the journey. She engages a rescue expedition, and they find the lost man insensible. ”

“ The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a story, or, to speak more correctly, the half of a story, that has excited so much general interest and so many speculations as to its ultimate disclosures, that it has given rise to various imaginary theories on the part of several clever writers ”

“ According to Proctor it is suggested clearly in No Thoroughfare that Vendale has been murdered beyond all seeming hope. Proctor’s real argument seems to be that Vendale is not marked for death, and does not die, and that Edwin Drood belongs to the same class. He says that Nell and Paul, Richard Carson and the other characters who die in Dickens’s stories are marked for death from the beginning, but that there is not one note of death in all that Edwin does or says. I believe that this is entirely contrary to the facts. There are some who like Edwin, but none who love him. ”

“ Blake Odgers points out, every one at Cloisterham knew the murdered man: a mere white wig would be no disguise at all. I may add that if Jasper had discovered him he would almost be justified in finishing the murder this time. For what would be Drood’s object? The theory is that, in spite of his being drugged, throttled, perhaps thrown from a tower, at all events buried in quicklime, and in all probability locked up in the tomb, Drood got away when his uncle was triumphantly flinging his watch and scarf-pin into the river. ”

“ We cannot lay great stress on the topography of Cloisterham. The Sapsea monument is a pure invention, having no counterpart in Rochester, and Dickens manifestly used the utmost freedom in dealing with his materials. Mr. Lang, by the way, makes a strange mistake in saying, ‘As he walks with Durdles that worthy explains (in reply to a question by Jasper) that, by tapping a wall, even if over six feet thick, with his hammer, he can detect the nature of the contents of the vault.’ [139] The wall is not six feet thick. ”

“ But Dickens tells us that Mr. Jasper withdrew to his piano, and sat chanting choir music in a low and beautiful voice for two or three hours; ‘in short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is about to rise.’ I take it, then (1) that the iron key was lent to Jasper by the verger for use in this nocturnal expedition; (2) that no wax model of it has been made up to the time of starting; (3) that the verger will look for the return of the key next day. ”

“ Vendale was not marked for death. I think the unsophisticated reader, knowing how he is loved and how he is waited for, and how unconsciousness may pass into consciousness, would fully expect him to live. When he comes to life, he is supported on Marguerite’s arm. There was no arm on which Edwin Drood could lean. Dickens can provide for his old bachelors like Newman Noggs, but he had no provision for Edwin. ”

“ It is impossible, I think, to read this and not to see that Dickens is afraid that we may too soon suspect Helena Landless of being Datchery.
Neville’s sufferings under the suspicion are unmistakable and cruel. When Crisparkle saw him he wished that his eyes were not quite so large and quite so bright. ‘I want more sun to shine upon you.’ Neville tells him that he feels marked and tainted even when he goes out at night, and he never goes out in the day. He says, though Dickens did not mean us to read the sentence: ‘It seems a little hard to be so tied to a stake, and innocent ”

“ Let us suppose that an advertisement for a ring known to have been in the possession of the late Edwin Drood appears in the local newspaper, and that Jasper, now for the first time aware of the ring’s existence, goes to the crypt to look for it. Dickens might well suppose him at such a moment to see a vision of the murdered man, and might instruct Collins to represent what Jasper imagined himself to see. Indeed, I fancy that I recognise an intentional contrast between the two figures: the one in the foreground, full of movement, solidly drawn ”

“ This is very hard to believe. Mr. Andrew Lang himself says: ‘Fancy can suggest no reason why Edwin Drood, if he escaped from his wicked uncle, should go spying about instead of coming openly forward.’ Mr. Archer says the flaw is that the theory provides no motive whatever for Drood’s disguising himself as Datchery. Why should Drood devote himself to an elaborate scheme of revenge upon his near kinsman and friend? He would want to hush the matter up, and save Jasper from himself. Why did Drood let Neville lie under the suspicion of murder, and why was not Rosa let into the secret? ”

“ In the upper side-piece, the girl is, I am sure, Rosa flying from Jasper’s pursuit, in full view of a placard announcing Edwin’s disappearance. It is true that the hatless girl with her hair streaming down her back does not answer very well to Dickens’s description of Rosa, and has no resemblance to Sir L. Fildes’s pictures of her: but if Dickens, when he had not yet thought out his conception of her personality, told Collins to draw a frightened girl of seventeen running away from school, no more than this could be expected. ”

“ His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July. ‘What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way?—Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate.’ This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed. ”

“ Poe admits that his preconceived ideas were not entirely correct:
The gardener was murdered, not before, but after p. 99his master; and that Rudge’s wife seized him by the wrist, instead of his seizing her, has so much the air of a mistake on the part of Mr. Dickens that we can scarcely speak of our own version as erroneous. The grasp of a murderer’s bloody hand on the wrist of a woman enceinte would have been more likely to produce the effect described (and this every one will allow) than the grasp of the hand of the woman upon the wrist of the assassin. ”