any
dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a
prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1868
From a photograph by Gurney.]

EDWIN DROOD

_Pickwick_ was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled
up by Dickens. _Edwin Drood_, the last book, was a book designed by
Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The _Pickwick Papers_
showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions;
_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ shows how very little other people can make
out of Dickens's suggestions.

Dickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist; so that even
his literary end was melodramatic. Something more seems hinted at in the
cutting short of _Edwin Drood_ by Dickens than the mere cutting short of
a good novel by a great man. It seems rather like the last taunt of some
elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended,
this story which is only a story. The only one of Dickens's novels which
he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing. He
never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell; and that he has only
told in heaven. This is what separates the case in question from any
parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. That great
novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died
also in the middle of _Denis Duval_. But any one can see in _Denis
Duval_ the qualities of the later work of Thackeray; the increasing
discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which had been in
part the charm and in part the failure of _Philip_ and _The Virginians_.
But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment and to leave
a dramatic mystery. Any Thackerayan could have completed the plot of
_Denis Duval_; except indeed that a really sympathetic Thackerayan might
have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot to complete. But
Dickens, having had far too little plot in his stories previously, had
far too much plot in the story he never told. Dickens dies in the act of
telling, not his tenth novel, but his first news of murder. He drops
down dead as he is in the act of denouncing the assassin. It is
permitted to Dickens, in short, to come to a literary end as strange as
his literary beginning. He began by completing the old romance of
travel. He ended by inventing the new detective story.

It is as a detective story first and last that w