Dr. Conan Doyle's Lecture
Dr. Conan Doyle's Lecture is an article published in The Sheffield Daily Telegraph on 18 november 1893.
Report of a lecture "Facts about Fiction" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 17 november 1893 at the Music Hall, Surrey Street (Sheffield, UK).
Report
There was a crowded attendance of members of the Literary and Philosophical Society at the Music Hall, Surrey street, last night to hear Dr. A. Conan Doyle give his interesting lecture, entitled "Facts about Fiction." Few authors of the present day are better known than the creator of "Sherlock Holmes," and no wonder there was a great desire to see and hear the writer whose detective stories have made such mark in contemporary literature. Mr. Simeon Snell, president of the society, was in the chair.
The Lecturer, who was cordially welcomed, restricted his remarks to the fiction of the present day, and further curtailed them by speaking only of the writers, those whose work might possibly have reached maturity by the commencement of the coming century. England, he remarked, possessed a permanent asset in her literature. Come what would always remain that long line of British authors, extending from the days of Chaucer, which would show to all time how high the tide of thought had surged in these islands. The material glories of Rome and Greece had departed, but their literature remained intact. The Forum and the Colosseum were now crumbling masses of ruins, but Homer, Virgil, and Horace were as fresh to us as they were to their contemporaries. In this sense it might well be said that the marble of men's shaping had outlived the marble. There was nothing more difficult to appraise than the work of one's own generation. One was so near to it that there was no perspective by which it could be judged. In the critical Press there had been many walls about the decay of British literature. They must remember, however, that in every age critics had been a little inclined to take a gloomy view of the era in which they happened to live. It was impossible to deny that we had no living writers who could compare, in the hold they had on the general estimation of the public, with either Dickens or Thackeray. But if, name for name, novelists now might compare badly with those who cast a lustre upon the first half of the Victorian era, it was none the less the fact that fiction, as an art, had improved since that time, and that writers had a more clear conception of the laws which governed it. It was still possible that the average remained as high as ever. The growth of the British Empire had broadened the sympathies of the younger school of writers, and made their ideas less insular. It was wonderful how cosmopolitan our literature had become, and the tendency was for it to become more so year by year, as each of the colonies and dependencies had begun to produce a literature of its own. Coming more to details the lecturer said that R. L. Stevenson had had more to do with forming the younger generation of writers than anyone else. Those who were now springing up were all strongly tinged with his characteristics. Miss Olive Schreiner had a style little inferior to Stevenson, but is struck a deeper note. Much of the work of J. M. Barrie would be handed down in Scotland with the pride of national possession. There was a magnificent simplicity about his style, yet it was the outcome of the highest art. He often re-wrote a chapter ten times before being satisfied with its ultimate form. Nothing could be more clear-cut, nervous, and delicate than some of his paragraphs. With regard to Rudyard Kipling no man since Dickens had shown such brilliant qualities at so early a time of life. He had some obvious defects, but one was carried off one's feet by the rush and go of his stories, Dr. Doyle also spoke of Rider Haggard, Rolf Boldrewood, Quiller-Couch, and Jerome K. Jerome, and concluded a capital lecture by a defence of the novelist's art and a declaration of its beneficial effects upon humanity.
Dr. Snell, in moving a vote of thanks to Dr. Conan Doyle, commented on the fact that notwithstanding the prominent past taken by the lecturer in the literature of the present day, there had been an utter absence of any references to his own work.
The vote was very heartily recorded.
