a

being Tartar. Tartar had retired from the navy to inherit his uncle's fortune, and really was, like Datchery, "a single buffer, of easy temper, living idly on his means," while his breezy style of address has a good deal that recalls Datchery. His assuming disguise at all at Cloisterham, where he was a stranger, is quite unnecessary, but may perhaps be only due to Dickens' melodramatic instincts. Dr. Jackson dismisses the theory as wholly impossible, but the apparently fatal bar-that Datchery appears at Cloisterham in Chapter xviii and only meets Rosa and hears of the story in Chapter xxi-is equally fatal to the Helena theory, which Dr. Jackson supports. Mr. Gadd, however, does not seem to have created a school.

The commonest theory is—or rather used to be, for it has grown somewhat musty-that Datchery is Bazzard. The evidence for it resolves itself at the last almost entirely into the remark of Grewgious to Rosa after Datchery has appeared at Cloisterham, "In fact he is off duty here altogether just at present." But there are two satisfactory explanations of this statement. One is that it might well be a blind, intended by Dickens to make the careless reader adopt this very theory. The other is that Bazzard really was in all probability employed in watching Jasper at this time, not, however, at Cloisterham but about the opium den. Mr. Proctor's ingenious conjecture, too, is worth notice, that the "place near Aldersgate Street" where Jasper puts up would have turned out to be Bazzard's house. Dickens had an absolutely unlimited belief in the long arm of coincidence. But even such identifications pour rire as those with Neville or Grewgious are hardly more hopeless than the one with Bazzard. Besides all the objections to the other cases, most of

which Bazzard seems to combine in himself, imagine the "pale, puffyfaced, doughy-complexioned," selfish, discontented, ungrateful, unlikable clerk, who writes tragedies that nobody will read, assuming at will the character of the easy, delightful Datchery! He, too, must unhesitatingly be brushed aside. Mr. Saunders' conjecture is far better, that he was to prove to be a traitor to Grewgious, and assist in some way against his will in entrapping Jasper. It is probably. for some such reason that Mrs. Billickin, with whom Rosa lodges, is made to be Bazzard's cousin.

The only remaining identifications of Datchery are the two that are by far the most startling, most melodramatic, most in keeping with Dickens' own description of the story as "a very curious and new idea" -those with Edwin Drood himself, and with Helena Landless. It is true that the idea of Watched by the DeadMr. Proctor's sensational title-would not be altogether new. In two short stories Hunted Down and (the Dickens part of) No Thoroughfare, the idea is to some extent anticipated, but the difference of treatment might be considered to make the story new. In fact this is just the melodramatic plot which would have strongly appealed to Dickens, and in his later days seemed to be growing almost into an obsession. So far then as the general idea of the plot, the evidence of the titles, the illustration on the cover, and the resemblance of Edwin's talk to Datchery's talk with the opium hag, Mr. Proctor and Mr. Lang have a very strong case indeed. We know that it could not have occurred in life, because though a disguise (something much better than Datchery's wig and eyebrows) might perhaps have been carried through, the voice cannot be disguised, and Edwin could not possibly have met Jasper; but we

must allow a considerable margin of convention for melodramatic plots.

But there are two culs-de-sac to this theory, both absolutely fatal, if Dickens played anything like fair with his readers. The first is that Datchery was really ignorant of Jasper's lodgings, and showed it when pretense could not be known to anybody, or of any service whatever to the plot.

The waiter's directions being fatally precise, he soon became bewildered,

and went boggling about and about the Cathedral tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope's was somewhere very near it.

Then he meets Deputy, and bargains to be shown the way to Tope's. The boy points to an arched passage. "You see," he says, "that there winder and door." "That's Tope's?" "Yer lie; it ain't. That's Jarsper's." "Indeed?" said Mr. Datchery with a second look of some interest. Special pleading has to go far indeed to make this second look given for Deputy's future benefit!

The second fatal bar is to be found in Datchery's conversation with the opium hag. "I'll lay it out honest," she says, "on a medicine as does me good." "What's the medicine?" he asks. "I'll be honest with you beforehand, as well as after. It's opium." "Mr. Datchery, with a sudden change of countenance, gives her a sudden look." But the woman had asked Edwin also for three and sixpence, and had told him that she wanted it for opium. There is no getting over this, if Dickens played fair.

It would, of course, be even more impossible in actual life than Edwin's assumption, and the special pleading of Dr. Jackson, Mr. Walters, and Sir W. R. Nicoll on behalf of its many absurdities serves only to heighten them. Of course no girl could really stay at an hotel for weeks as an elderly gentleman, and be unsuspected. But when we are told that Helena after ordering a pint of sherry for dinner "perhaps did not consume it all," or that when she "fell to on the bread and cheese and ale with an appetite," Mrs. Tope "would have thought her strangely fastidious otherwise”—a new way of creating appetite-still more when her liking the old tavern way of keeping scores is explained as seen by her in country walks with Neville" (!)-it is plain that the argument is wearing very thin. The physical impossibilities seem hardly to be noticed by these interpreters. Helena was "slender, supple, fierce," and "very dark, almost of the gipsy type." Datchery "wears a tightish surtout"-the very last thing a girl could wear and, apart from his hair and eyebrows, the only bodily detail mentioned is that his head was unusually large-a likely thing for a girl! But the case is almost exactly parallel to Bazzard's. As that rested in the last resort mainly on Grewgious' remark, "In fact he is off duty here altogether just at present," so the case for Helena falls back continually on the remark of Neville to Mr. Crisparkle that in their childish runnings-away, she "dressed each time as a boy, and showed the daring of a man." It might have been thought that anyone would suspect that where Dickens was so anxious to hide his traces, so obvious a lead as this must be intentional. But here again, just as in Bazzard's case, it is not necessary to take it as a mere blind. There are plain enough indications given that

Helena is really to face and help to crush Jasper. And the most probable solution of this is that she does again assume male clothing, and keep Jasper occupied in Staple Inn by personating her twin brother Neville whom she so nearly resembles, while Neville escapes.

Dr.

But, as the book stands, she-like Grewgious and Tartar-is excluded from being Datchery by the sequence of events. Datchery appears at Cloisterham in Chapter xviii, while Grewgious, Tartar, Helena, and Neville — everybody but the stupid and disagreeable Bazzard-are all still at Staple Inn in Chapter xxi. Jackson points out that this is just as fatal to the Helena theory as to the Tartar or the Grewgious theory. So with singular and interesting boldness he deals with his text as Dr. Cheyne might do with a Psalm retaining any Pre-exilic traces He rearranges his chapters.

Now it is obvious that a theory which requires a teration of the text to begin with, starts with a very heavy handicap against it, especially since we know that Dickens revised the proofs to the end of Chapter xxi. Dr. Jackson shows too from the MS. (the Higher Criticism again) that the first half of Chapter xviii (the Datchery chapter) was written after Chapter xix ("Shadow on the Sundial"), and then transposed by Dickens. This makes an accidental transposition of the chapters after Dickens' death almost an impossibility.

But furthermore-if Dickens, as we ought to assume, played fair with his readers-Helena is barred from being Datchery for the same reason as Edwin. Helena knew where Jasper's

as only meaning that he "regards them now in a new light" (to which Deputy has contributed nothing whatever) is obviously special pleading of the kind of which the critics of Edwin Drood have furnished such an astonishing variety.

In short, most people will agree with Mr. Chesterton that the objection is not so much to the impossibility as that this assumption would not be melodrama but farce. "One might," he says, "as easily imagine Edith Dombey dressing up as Major Bagstock!"

Thus no satisfactory solution of the mystery has ever been propounded, and I submit that it never can be; because every theory not only involves improbabilities, but is impossible to reconcile with the existing text. If the MS. of the remaining chapters were suddenly discovered to be in existence, we should know what Dickens intended, but we should still not have a satisfactory solution, because he himself-perhaps owing to some uncertainty in his original idea, perhaps to a variation of it in the course of writing has in some way or other barred every conceivable outlet. It must always remain "The Mystery" of Edwin Drood. And it is not an unreasonable surmise that the hopeless task of finding a satisfactory solution may have precipitated the final attack of apoplexy while he was at work on it which brought the curtain so sorrowfully down.

Perhaps I may add here a few of the astonishing "Cathedralia" in the book, which would have made the late Mr. Mackenzie Walcott's hair stand on end. They scarcely affect the evidence, however, except as proving Dickens' amazing inaccuracy in matters not lending themselves to his particular gifts.

Jasper, a lay choral-clerk, is also called "a lay Precentor," and even "the Precentor." Mr. Crisparkle's

Minor Canonry must have been in private patronage, since he was "promoted by a patron grateful for a welltaught son." At service in the Cathedral, "the sacristan locks the ironbarred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel," the sanctuary at Cloisterham thus being the nave. Jasper "leads" the choir-boys in the procession to service. (This, by the way, is silently corrected by Charles Collins in the picture on the cover.) Jasper's "pathetic supplication to have his heart inclined to keep this law" is offered up, strange to say, The Church Quarterly Review.

"at

Vespers." But the best of all is that when the Princess Puffer wants to see and hear Jasper in the Anthem, she has to go to the Cathedral at seven o'clock. That would have been waking sleepy Cloisterham up with a vengeance! Still as the celebrated match of Dingley Dell v. All Muggleton clearly proves that Dickens had never played cricket in his life, and yet remains the most famous report of a match on record, so the impossible doings at Cloisterham have an interest never to be found in the lifelike and accurate Barchester.

G. E. Jeans.

De

The closest analogy in the history of English literature to the career of William De Morgan, whose gentle, humorous spirit passed into the Great Beyond on January 17 last, is the case of Samuel Richardson, the Aldersgate printer. But Richardson was barely fifty years of age when Pamela, his first romance, was published. Morgan had reached the age of sixtyseven when he burst upon a world satiated with sex problems and halfbaked antinomian doctrines, with Joseph Vance. An unsuccessful painter, a moderately good designer in stained-glass windows, and the rediscoverer of the lost process of lustre -these were the three stages of his career until he came to his own as a novelist. As the designer and producer of tile-pictures he achieved considerable success, though his artistic temperament prevented him from securing the full financial reward of his work. But it gave him entrance to the famous Chelsea æsthetic set whom we know as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and he became an unobtrusive but welcome intimate of William Morris, Dante Gabriel Ros

setti, Burne Jones, and Ford Madox Brown. Ill-health caused his withdrawal to Florence for the winter months, and in the later period of his life the city on the Arno was his permanent residence, broken only by brief summer trips to England. De Morgan had, therefore, slipped out of the artistic world altogether when he suddenly reappeared in the unexpected guise of a writer of romance. Only eight years elapsed between the appearance of his first and last novels, and he passed away at the age of seventy-seven.

George Gissing, in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, gives a definition of Art as "an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life." Whatever may be thought of its general application, this definition exactly fits the literary art of William De Morgan. No young man could have written his books. The attitude of whimsical detachment and of placid tolerance towards the riddles of existence which characterizes all his work is only possible to one who had lived and suffered. No trace is found of fierce revolt or intolerable resentment

against life's disillusions. He learned resignation, perhaps in a hard school; but it is the cheerful resignation without repinings, and as he looks back upon life from the vantage-point of late middle age he finds it good. Life never lost its savor or its thrilling mystery for him, and it is this quality of his work as well as the play of his flickering humor that commends his books to this generation in spite of their inordinate length.

Though all his novels bear the imprint of the twentieth century upon their title-pages, their atmosphere is that of the early eighties. The only illustrator who could have done justice to his characters would have been Du Maurier. In some of his novels we meet with taxi-cabs and tube railways, but the people who use them belong to the more leisurely Victorian age. They bear the hallmark of that era in their placidity, in their very slang, and in their whole attitude to life. Sitting on the brink of the twentieth century volcano De Morgan turned his eyes to the comfortable years, never to return, when, if wars took place, they were fought out in far-off corners of Africa or Asia, and served only to season the morning newspaper, too remote to disturb the serenity of British ease. In effect he excels as the portrayer of comfortable middle-class interiors. He has an irresistible way of hitting off the distinctive features of the Englishman en famille, and more particularly of the Englishwoman. Most of all is he effective in the delineation of the British matron-when that pillar of Society wore lace caps and moved about the world with a conscious dignity-"Like Convocation coming downstairs," De Morgan describes her movements in Alice-for-Short. All the little foibles of the estimable middleaged lady, her complacent evaluation of her own exceeding righteous

ness, her incorrigible habit of putting her husband or her children in the wrong, and her ready assumption of the air of resigned martyrdom if her will or prejudices are crossed-De Morgan brings out these characteristics with a genial if gently malicious chuckle. Equally penetrating are his descriptions of the ways that are dark and the tricks that are vain of the jerry-builder. Joseph Vance's father, that delightful rascal, is the classic instance of this skill, but in several of the other novels-notably in When Ghost Meets Ghost-the reader is brought into contact with examples of the mental workings of the small builder and his crafty devices for scamping jobs. De Morgan's business experiences in the production of decorative tiles doubtless gave him plenty of opportunities to make studies at first hand in this genre.

Like Dickens, whom he consciously followed as a literary prototype, De Morgan was a Cockney, frank and unashamed. Born and bred in Gower Street, he had all the true Londoner's affection for the big city, and he displays little knowledge of life outside the Metropolitan cab radius. His mother was deeply interested in the improvement of the lot of slum children, and this accounts for the sympathetic knowledge of the conditions of child-life in the inner ring of London which is found in nearly all the De Morgan stories. In particular it explains the novelist's realization of the havoc wrought by alcoholic drink upon the little ones of the city slum. As a rule one does not look for wholehearted condemnation of the liquor traffic in the possessor of the artistic temperament; and it may be conceded that De Morgan does not consciously assume the rôle of temperance advocate. But no temperance tract could portray the ravages worked in the lives of the children of the poor by