Mr. Lang admits that Proctor’s theory of the murder is thin, and that ‘all this set of conjectures is crude to the last degree.’ I am content to leave it at that. Mr. Lang has conjectures of his own. He conjectures that Mr. Grewgious visited the tomb of his lost love, Rosa’s mother, and consecrated to her ‘a night of memories and sighs.’ He says: ‘Mrs. Bud, his lost love, we have been told, was buried hard by the Sapsea monument.’ This is not told by Dickens. It is better to stick by the narrative.
Supposing that Edwin was not dead, what was the meaning of the long silence? Why did he allow Neville to rest under a cloud of suspicion, and exposed to great peril? Why did he allow Jasper’s persecution of Rosa? Why did he allow Helena Landless, whom he had begun more or less to love, to suffer with the rest? Are we to suppose that he came back disguised to fix the guilt on his uncle? Can we believe that he did not know that his uncle had tried to murder him? If not, are we to believe that he suspected his uncle and was not sure, and came down to try to surprise his uncle’s secret and to punish him? He could only have punished him at most for an attempt at murder. Even that might have been hard to bring home, supposing he himself was not clear as to the facts. ‘Fancy can suggest no reason,’ writes Mr. Lang, ‘why Edwin Drood, if he escaped from his wicked uncle, should go spying about instead of coming openly forward. No plausible, unfantastic reason could be invented.’
Dr. M. R. James, one of the few who still think that Edwin might not have been murdered, says in his last writing on the subject: ‘I freely confess that the view that Edwin is dead solves many difficulties. A wholly satisfactory theory of the manner of his escape has never been devised; his failure to clear Neville from suspicion is hard to explain.’ Mr. Lang, in what has unhappily proved his last article on the subject, in Blackwood for May 1911, explains that while he believed in 1905 that Jasper failed in his attempt to murder, ‘now I have no theory as to how the novel would have been built up.’
V.
Those who more or less strongly still believe that Dickens meant to spare Edwin rest their case mainly on a subjective impression. Says Dr. James: ‘On the other hand, whether the result would be a piece of “bad art” or not, I do think it is more in Dickens’s manner to spare Edwin than to kill him. The subjective impression that he is not doomed is too strong for me to dismiss.’ [122] It is difficult to argue against a subjective impression. The fact remains that Edwin Drood becomes superfluous. He has effected no lodgment in any human heart. Mr. Walters says that Drood is little more than a name-label attached to a body, a man who never excites sympathy, and whose fate causes no emotion. Proctor, who believes that Edwin Drood survived, admits that he lived unpaired. ‘Rosa was to give her hand to Tartar, Helena Landless to Crisparkle, while Edwin and Mr. Grewgious were to look on approvingly, though Edwin a little sadly.’
Mr. Lang in the Gadshill edition of Dickens wrote: ‘Edwin and Neville are quarrelsome cubs, not come to discretion, and the fatuity of Edwin, though not exaggerated much, makes him extremely unsympathetic.’ But in his book on the subject Mr. Lang changes his view and writes: ‘On re-reading the novel I find that Dickens makes Drood as sympathetic as he can.’ Thus impressions alter. Gillan Vase, in her continuation of the story would make us believe that on Edwin’s reappearance Rosa transferred her heart from Tartar to her old lover! But taking the story as it stands, we see that the sorrow for his death is not deep, and that no heart is broken by his disappearance. Rosa is consoled, and more than consoled. Helena grieves for her brother, and flings a shield over Rosa. Neville and Edwin have never been good friends. Grewgious has cheerfully acquiesced in, if he has not instigated, the breaking of the engagement between Rosa and Edwin. The appropriate explanation is: ‘Poor youth! Poor youth!’ That is all.
It has been suggested that there is a parallel between No Thoroughfare and Edwin Drood. 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. He is hated by his uncle, and hated perhaps by Neville.
In No Thoroughfare, a story written by Wilkie Collins and Dickens in 1867 as a Christmas Number, we have the story of a man supposed dead coming to life again. It may be noted that the only portions of this story furnished exclusively by Dickens were the overture and the third act. Collins contributed to the first and fourth act, and wrote the whole of the second. Vendale, a wine-merchant, is in love with a Swiss girl, Marguerite. She returns his affection, but her guardian Obenreizer is bitterly opposed. He consents, however, to the marriage if Vendale can double his income and make it £3000 a year. Vendale discovers that a forgery has been committed, through which £500 are missing. He is asked by the Swiss firm with which he deals to send a trustworthy messenger to investigate the fraud and discover its perpetrator. Vendale resolves to go himself, and tells Obenreizer. 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. He is delirious and quite unconscious where he is. Then he seems to sink in the deadly cold, and his heart no longer beats. ‘She broke from them all, and sank over him on his litter with both her living hands upon the heart that stood still.’ But by and by, when the crisis of the exposure comes, ‘supported on Marguerite’s arm—his sunburnt colour gone, his right arm bandaged and slung over his breast—Vendale stood before the murderer a man risen from the dead.’ I cannot see that this is a great surprise. 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.
THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE DISAPPEARANCE THEORY
From the Wrapper.—I am convinced after a careful perusal of nearly all that has been written on the subject that the real strength of the disappearance theory is to be found in the bottom picture of the wrapper. When Madame Perugini published the article from which I have quoted, Mr. Lang in a letter to the Times [127] rested his whole case on the cover design. He said: