England Articulate
England Articulate is an article published in The Times on 7 december 1925.
Report of Arthur Conan Doyle's speech at the 68th annual dinner of the Savage Club held on 5 december 1925 at the Victoria Hotel.
England Articulate
SIR A. CONAN DOYLE'S TRIBUTE TO MR. KIPLING.
The 68th annual dinner of the Savage Club was held at the Hotel Victoria on Saturday night. Mr. Norman O'Neill, presided.
Mr. R. Storry-Deans, M.P., who proposed the toast of "The Arts and Science," said that with regard to painting and sculpture he was a little old-fashioned. He had never been able to understand that the ugly was beautiful, nor to believe that a woodland nymph was a disproportionate old hag. (Laughter.) He preferred Rodin and Gilbert to "Epstein and company."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in responding, said he shared Mr. Storry-Dean's views as to art and sculpture, and as to science she came forward with valuable gifts in one hand while in the other she held poison gases, bombing aeroplanes, and a thousand other horrors. Science had been a very mixed blessing to the world. He had a message once from a source which was usually supposed to talk drivel, and that was that the most terrible thing for man or nation was when the intellect get ahead of the spirituality. That was very profound and it was exactly what was the matter with the human race.
In a reference to his great fellow-workman, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who lay between life and death, he said that if he were to pass, England would lose something very essential, something irreplaceable, something which was England articulate to an extent possessed by no other man. He well remembered the day when Kipling came into literature. The critics were deploring the fact that English literature was dead and that there was no sign of a literary crop springing out of the old soil. At that time he himself was practising in a small way as a doctor, and at a draper's close by there was an assistant whose name was H. G. Wells. There was also a raw-boned Irishman roaming about London. His name was Bernard Shaw. There was also a young man named Thomas Hardy, and a young journalist struggling for a living writing paragraphs in Nottingham, whose name was Barrie. So it was all along the line. These men were rising up, and if at the present time it was said that the soil was unfertile, they should never forget that in different guises and in different forms the old crop would always come out.
In a series of personal reminiscences Sir Arthur recalled the time when, while attempting to combine writing with medicine, he used to black his own boots and pour water on his top hat to induce a gloss which would excite some sort of confidence in his patients. (Laughter.) He remembered how he used to "play ping-pong" with the editors, who knocked his MSS, back to him as he sent it to them, and generally it was on his side of the net. It was ten years before he got his head above water, and he remembered one instance in which an editor sent him a picture — a very bad one — and told him to write a story to correspond with it. (Laughter.) When at last he had the privilege of getting a story published in the Cornhill Magazine a friend came across the street to him waving the magazine and saying, "Have you seen what they say about your story?—
- "The Cornhill of this month begins with a story which would make Thackeray turn in his grave."
At last he began the Sherlock Holmes stories, which opened some sort of audience to him, and he would like to say that the greatest theatrical representation of Holmes ever made was by their guest, M. Gemier, the great French actor. Those stories were written at a time when he was endeavouring to work up a practice as an oculist in Wimpole-street, where he had a consulting-room — and a waiting-room. (Laughter.) It was during the long waiting hours that be began to write, and he then conceived the idea of writing self-contained stories in contra-distinction to the serial stories of which the magazines were filled. If the Strand Magazine had a phenomenal success it was not due to his stories, but to the fact that they realized the disadvantage of serial stories.
M. Gemier, of the Odéon, Paris, proposed the toast of the Club, and the Chairman responded.
