Mr. Cuming Walters argues that the story is very tame if Edwin is still
alive, and left out of the marriages at the close. Besides, “Drood is
little more than a name-label, attached to a body, a man who never
excites sympathy, whose fate causes no emotion, he is saved for no useful
or sentimental purpose, and lags superfluous on the stage. All of which
is bad art, so bad that Dickens would never have been guilty of it.”
That is a question of taste. On rereading the novel, I see that Dickens
makes Drood as sympathetic as he can. He is very young, and speaks of
Rosa with bad taste, but he is really in love with her, much more so than
she with him, and he is piqued by her ceaseless mockery, and by their
false position. To Jasper he is singularly tender, and remorseful when
he thinks that he has shown want of tact. There is nothing ominous about
his gaiety: as to his one fault, we leave him, on Christmas Eve, a
converted character: he has a kind word and look for every one whom he
meets, young and old. He accepts Mr. Grewgious’s very stern lecture in
the best manner possible. In short, he is marked as faulty—“I am young,”
so he excuses himself, in the very words of Darnley to Queen Mary! (if
the Glasgow letter be genuine); but he is also marked as sympathetic.
He was, I think, to have a lesson, and to become a good fellow. Mr.
Proctor rightly argues (and Forster “thinks”), that Dickens meant to kill
Neville Landless: Mr. Cuming Walters agrees with him, but Mr. Proctor
truly adds that Edwin has none of the signs of Dickens’s doomed men, his
Sidney Cartons, and the rest. You can tell, as it were by the sound of
the voice of Dickens, says Mr. Proctor, that Edwin is to live. The
impression is merely subjective, but I feel the impression. The doom of
Landless is conspicuously fixed, and why is Landless to be killed by
Jasper? Merely to have a count on which to hang Jasper! He cannot be
hanged for killing Drood, if Drood is alive.