Conan Doyle (article 15 january 1921)
Conan Doyle is an article written by W. F. W. published in The Daily Mail (Brisbane) on 15 january 1921.
Conan Doyle
(by W. F. W.)
Years have gone by since I first read "Sherlock Holmes." It is a sort of landmark (or bookmark) with me. I am trying to remember exactly when it was, but I can't one reads so much when one is young — everything that comes is grist to the mill. A strange medley of books comes to my mind — such queer mixture as "Tom Frown's School Days," "Eric, or Little by Little," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Line upon Line," "Robinson Crusoe," "Swiss Family Robinson," "The House on the Marsh," "Robbery Under Arms," "Huckleberry Finn," "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab," and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." Many others, of course, but these stand out in my memory. We are such stuff as our books, and chiefly our early books, etc, make us — also our religion and our politics. All of these things we find so to speak, on our fathers' shelves, though we add a little here and subtract a little there as time passes and we begin to think and select for ourselves. In the main we are Anglicans, or Roman Catholics, or Presbyterians, or Methodists, or what not in religion, just as we are "little Whigs," or "little Conservatives" in politics, because our fathers were so before us. Strange how life after death persists.
Sherlock Holmes! ... I remember Chief Justice Why, of South Australia, once saying that his chief recreation was to get away at vacation time with a bundle of "penny dreadfuls." Delightful relaxation! Such complete change! Life is so different there! I, too, have known the joy of it. I had a friend whose home was on a station near Molong, and he used to go to Newington College, Sydney, and every holiday time he would bring a box full of "Deadwood Dicks" home to his pious father's house. Perhaps his father himself, when young, did eagerly frequent the same entrancing forests. Anyway, the father is dead now, and the son is a pious man given to lay-reading. It is wonderful what life springs out of dead wood! ... He is still my friend, and I think I love him chiefly for those old shockers that he lent me — particularly those about the secret stills in the fastnesses of the mountains, the mysterious rides in the dark forests at midnight, the wonderful working of the great detectives' brains and finally the lynching of the chief villain of the piece and the hero's rescue of the missing girl! Great yarns!
But greatest of all the detectives is Sherlock Holmes! You couldn't fool him. If you smoked a cigar he would trace you by the ash of it. If you gave a sneeze he would analyse it, and say whether you were guilty or not guilty. And it wasn't intuition — it was careful, calculating, cold analysis. Such detectives are neither born nor made, they are the creatures of imagination.
The man who imagined Sherlock Holmes has been on a visit to Brisbane this week, and he has been asking the people to believe far stranger things than he has written of in any of his novels. It in not fiction, he says, but truth; yet if it be truth then is it indeed, stranger than any fiction? Imaginative — yes; I have been with him, talked with him, and I know him to be a man of great imagination, though we all know this from his books, just as we know H. G. Wells to be such another. But men of great imagination — we have few of them in this country — are usually men with great brains, and I could readily believe Lady Doyle as I sat with her, listening to her husband's lecture the other night, when she said of him: "He has a wonderful brain!" And it is not all imagination ; it is a brain that can, as we know, be coldly analytical. The man who created Sherlock Holmes is a man of scientific knowledge and analytical temperament as well as imagination. Conan Doyle's is Sherlock Holmes — a man who has a clue, and is after the facts, a man who is out for the truth, and after many searching tests believes he has found it, and he is mow trying to convince the sceptics — of whom I am one.
I am a sceptic, and yet I am not, if you can understand me. I am an inquirer and have read numerous books and pamphlets on spiritualism and psychology. I have myself had one or two most remarkable experiences which are beyond my comprehension. I could, if I had time, tell of still more remarkable things concerning some friends of mine — things that I know to be true. I am as sincere as Conan Doyle himself in searching for the truth. I believe there are wonderful forces at work — wonderful laws — that we know nothing of, but may know hereafter. I would not call them supernatural laws, but just natural laws that are awaiting discovery in the same way as we have discovered the laws relating to wireless telegraphy and other marvels of science. There are men who say we should not "pry into the secrets of the Almighty," but I am not of them. When God gave man his reason and his inquiring mind. He intended man to use his powers, and one by one marvellous things have come to pass because we have had men who have devoted their lives to scientific investigation — and men who have not shrunk when the need arose to face the sneers and ridicule of their fellows. Honour to men like Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle — to all men who are sincere investigator! ...
A few years ago I lunched with Sir Oliver Lodge, the great scientist, in Sydney, and after lunch I "interviewed" him for the Sydney paper to which I was attached at that time. My chief recollection of the hour or two I spent with that great man of science is a sense of my own insignificance. And Sir Oliver Lodge, after investigating it, is a believer in Spiritualism! — "the greatest man this subject knows," according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Be careful how you answer such men as these!
And yet I cannot follow them all the way. It may be that my imagination, my mind, is too puny a thing to grasp it. I do not know what it is. I am as God made me — and a my reason dictates, and as my books (including "Sherlock Holmes") have fashioned me. When Conan Doyle shows we, as he did one day recently, pictures of fairies — remarkable for their likeness to tiny human beings, and to the pictures of Pucks and Robin Goodfellows that we are so familiar with — I confess I am incredulous. Yet Conan Doyle believes it, and says he has indubitable proof. So also with the "spirit photographs" — fraud, he declares, is out of the question. But I must confess to a feeling of amazement when I saw him throw on the screen on Thursday night a picture of "Goerdie," an alleged materialisation by Mrs. Mellon, a good many years age in Melbourne. I do not know the history of this particular "materialisation," but surely Sir Conan Doyle cannot be ignorant of the exposure of Mrs. Mellen at a seance in Sydney some 23 years age. I was a boy in the country at the time, but I well remember reading the accounts in the Sydney papers of the sensation it caused. Dr. McCarthy, a well-known Sydney investigator, was present at the time. Sir Conan Doyle, of course, has told us that mediums sometimes lose their power, temporarily or permanently, and sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, resort to trickery; but the mention of such names as Mrs. Mellon and the exhibition of such pictures as "Geordie" do not tend to remove the scepticism which some of us feel.
Still, I have an open mind. Call it Spiritualism of what you will, it is beyond doubt that there is something at work which is beyond our ken at present, whatever science may reveal in the future. A case has been established for investigation and research — so much is clear. Beyond that — who knows? Life is full of mysteries, and I for one stand bare-headed before this great investigator whom it has been our privilege to entertain in Brisbane. What mysteries the Great God may yet unveil to us, who can say? All life is a mystery to us, full of miracles. As for me, I find a miracle in the green grass growing in my garden.
