We now come to the evidence which Forster strangely overlooked, which Mr.
Proctor and Mr. Archer correctly deciphered, and which Mr. Cuming Walters
misinterprets. On December 22, 1869, Dickens wrote to Forster that two
numbers of his romance were “now in type. Charles Collins has designed
an excellent cover.” Mr. C. A. Collins had married a daughter of
Dickens. {77} He was an artist, a great friend of Dickens, and author of
that charming book, “A Cruise on Wheels.” His design of the paper cover
of the story (it appeared in monthly numbers) contained, as usual,
sketches which give an inkling of the events in the tale. Mr. Collins
was to have illustrated the book; but, finally, Mr. (now Sir) Luke Fildes
undertook the task. Mr. Collins died in 1873. It appears that Forster
never asked him the meaning of his designs—a singular oversight.
The cover lies before the reader. In the left-hand top corner appears an
allegorical female figure of joy, with flowers. The central top space
contains the front of Cloisterham Cathedral, or rather, the nave. To the
left walks Edwin, with hyacinthine locks, and a thoroughly classical type
of face, and Grecian nose. _Like Datchery_, _he does not wear_, _but
carries his hat_; this means nothing, if they are in the nave. He seems
bored. On his arm is Rosa; _she_ seems bored; she trails her parasol,
and looks away from Edwin, looks down, to her right. On the spectator’s
right march the surpliced men and boys of the Choir. Behind them is
Jasper, black whiskers and all; he stares after Edwin and Rosa; his right
hand hides his mouth. In the corner above him is an allegorical female,
clasping a stiletto.
Beneath Edwin and Rosa is, first, an allegorical female figure, looking
at a placard, headed “LOST,” on a door. Under that, again, is a girl in
a garden-chair; a young man, whiskerless, with wavy hair, kneels and
kisses her hand. She looks rather unimpassioned. I conceive the man to
be Landless, taking leave of Rosa after urging his hopeless suit, for
which Helena, we learn, “seems to compassionate him.” He has avowed his
passion, early in the story, to Crisparkle. Below, the opium hag is
smoking. On the other side, under the figures of Jasper and the Choir,
the young man who kneels to the girl is seen bounding up a spiral
staircase. His left hand is on the iron railing; he stoops over it,
looking down at others who follow him. His right hand, the index finger
protruded, points upward, and, by chance or design, points straight at
Jasper in the vignette above. Beneath this man (clearly Landless)
follows a tall man in a “bowler” hat, a “cut-away” coat, and trousers
which show an inch of white stocking above the low shoes. His profile is
hid by the wall of the spiral staircase: he might be Grewgious of the
shoes, white stockings, and short trousers, but he may be Tartar: he
takes two steps at a stride. Beneath him a youngish man, in a low, soft,
clerical hat and a black pea-coat, ascends, looking downwards and
backwards. This is clearly Crisparkle. A Chinaman is smoking opium
beneath.
In the central lowest space, a dark and whiskered man enters a dark
chamber; his left hand is on the lock of the door; in his right he holds
up a lantern. The light of the lantern reveals a young man in a soft hat
of Tyrolese shape. His features are purely classical, his nose is
Grecian, his locks are long (at least, according to the taste of to-day);
he wears a light paletot, buttoned to the throat; his right arm hangs by
his side; his left hand is thrust into the breast of his coat. He calmly
regards the dark man with the lantern. That man, of course, is Jasper.
The young man is EDWIN DROOD, of the Grecian nose, hyacinthine locks, and
classic features, as in Sir L. Fildes’s third illustration.
Mr. Proctor correctly understood the unmistakable meaning of this last
design, Jasper entering the vault—
“_To-day the dead are living_,
_The lost is found to-day_.”
Mr. Cuming Walters tells us that he did not examine these designs by Mr.
Collins till he had formed his theory, and finished his book. “On the
conclusion of the whole work the pictures were referred to for the first
time, and were then found to support in the most striking manner the
opinions arrived at,” namely, that Drood was killed, and that Helena is
Datchery. Thus does theory blind us to facts!
Mr. Cuming Walters connects the figure of the whiskerless young man
kneeling to a girl in a garden seat, with the whiskered Jasper’s proposal
to Rosa in a garden seat. But Jasper does not kneel to Rosa; he stands
apart, leaning on a sundial; he only once vaguely “touches” her, which
she resents; he does not kneel; he does not kiss her hand (Rosa “took the
kiss sedately,” like Maud in the poem); and—Jasper had lustrous thick
black whiskers.
Again, the same whiskerless young man, bounding up the spiral staircase
in daylight, and wildly pointing upwards, is taken by Mr. Cuming Walters
to represent Jasper climbing the staircase to reconnoitre, at night, with
a lantern, and, of course, with black whiskers. The two well-dressed men
on the stairs (Grewgious, or Tartar, and Crisparkle) also, according to
Mr. Cuming Walters, “relate to Jasper’s unaccountable expedition with
Durdles to the Cathedral.” Neither of them is Jasper; neither of them is
Durdles, “in a suit of coarse flannel”—a disreputable jacket, as Sir L.
Fildes depicts him—“with horn buttons,” and a battered old tall hat.
These interpretations are quite demonstrably erroneous and even
impossible. Mr. Archer interprets the designs exactly as I do.
As to the young man in the light of Jasper’s lamp, Mr. Cuming Walters
says, “the large hat and the tightly-buttoned surtout must be observed;
they are the articles of clothing on which most stress is laid in the
description of Datchery. But the face is young.” The face of Datchery
was elderly, and he had a huge shock of white hair, a wig. Datchery wore
“a tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and grey trousers; he had
something of a military air.” The young man in the vault has anything
but a military air; he shows no waistcoat, and he does not wear “a
tightish blue surtout,” or any surtout at all.
[Picture: Under the trees]
The surtout of the period is shown, worn by Jasper, in Sir L. Fildes’s
sixth and ninth illustrations. It is a frock-coat; the collar descends
far below the top of the waistcoat (buff or otherwise), displaying that
garment; the coat is tightly buttoned beneath, revealing the figure; the
tails of the coat do not reach the knees of the wearer. The young man in
the vault, on the other hand, wears a loose paletot, buttoned to the
throat (vaults are chilly places), and the coat falls so as to cover the
knees; at least, partially. The young man is not, like Helena, “very
dark, and fierce of look, . . . of almost the gipsy type.” He is blonde,
sedate, and of the classic type, as Drood was. He is no more like Helena
than Crisparkle is like Durdles. Mr. Cuming Walters says that Mr.
Proctor was “unable to allude to the prophetic picture by Collins.” As a
fact, this picture is fully described by Mr. Proctor, but Mr. Walters
used the wrong edition of his book, unwittingly.
Mr. Proctor writes:—“Creeping down the crypt steps, oppressed by growing
horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered
by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper
opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the
thought of what it may reveal to him.
“And what sees he? Is it the spirit of his victim that stands there, ‘in
his habit as he lived,’ his hand clasped on his breast, where the ring
had been when he was murdered? What else can Jasper deem it? There,
clearly visible in the gloom at the back of the tomb, stands Edwin Drood,
with stern look fixed on him—pale, silent, relentless!”
[Picture: Durdles Cautions Mr. Sapsea against Boasting]
Again, “On the title-page are given two of the small pictures from the
Love side of the cover, two from the Murder side, and the central picture
below, which presents the central horror of the story—the end and aim of
the ‘Datchery assumption’ and of Mr. Grewgious’s plans—showing Jasper
driven to seek for the proofs of his crime amid the dust to which, as he
thought, the flesh and bones, and the very clothes of his victim, had
been reduced.”
There are only two possible choices; either Collins, under Dickens’s oral
instructions, depicted Jasper finding Drood alive in the vault, an
incident which was to occur in the story; or Dickens bade Collins do this
for the purpose of misleading his readers in an illegitimate manner;
while the young man in the vault was really to be some person “made up”
to look like Drood, and so to frighten Jasper with a pseudo-ghost of that
hero. The latter device, the misleading picture, would be childish, and
the pseudo-ghost, exactly like Drood, could not be acted by the
gipsy-like, fierce Helena, or by any other person in the romance.