Dr. Conan Doyle on Fiction of the Day
Dr. Conan Doyle on Fiction of the Day is an article published in the Manchester Evening News on 8 november 1893.
Report of a lecture "Facts about Fiction" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 7 november 1893 at the Harborne and Edgbaston Institute (Harborne, Birmingham, UK).
Report
At the Harborne and Edgbaston Institution, Birmingham, last evening, Dr. A. Conan Doyle lectured on "Fiction." As the field of fiction is so vast Dr. Conan Doyle confined his observations to the fiction of the day, dealing especially with the work of the younger writers. How far one who was himself, however humble, a writer of fiction — (hear, hear) — was justified in dealing on the public platform with the works of his brother authors might be supposed, be open to question. He acknowledged that if he were to use the position to depreciate the works of his fellows it would be most objectionable ; but he intended to talk only of those things which he liked. A writer of fiction was, so to speak, having a night off when he ventured to address an audience upon the subject of criticism. Stock ought to be periodically taken of English literature to see whether anything was being done which might at all worthily compare with the work of past authors. In judging the work of younger men promise had to be taken into account as well as performance. At the outset a meteor was very liable to be mistaken for a fixed star. There had been many wails in the critical press about the decay of literature, but it should be remembered that in every age critics had been a little inclined to take a gloomy view of the era in which they lived. Each generation lived in the shadow of that which preceded it. He hoped and believed that literature in the future might be not less but more brilliant than that of the past. Just as the older writers were influenced by Dickens so all the younger writers were tinged more or less with Robert Louis Stevenson. Speaking broadly, a young author, when starting, moulded his style on the model of some other writer. People talked about original young writers ; they might as well talk of original young potatoes. There must be an example set in order to give the writer some notion of style. In literature it would be found that every man, to some extent, stood upon the shoulders of his predecessors. Sometimes the influence was an obvious one. At other times it might be indirect, and the reader might fail to trace it ; but at the outset it existed. Later on a writer might possibly combine several influences, and so adding them to his own knowledge of the world, might produce, a style which was distinct. Most men did that ; some never did. Until recent years nine out of every ten books had held up marriage as the be all and the end all. An author thought that if the third volume closed with the hero's marriage the hero was permanently settled and done for. (Laughter.) In actual practice the audience, of course, knew that was not so. (Laughter.) The real interest of a man's life very largely began when he was married. On the part of the young writers, therefore, a natural tendency was shown to avoid a source of interest which had been so misused and overdone. In treating of the younger authors, the lecturer followed his own preferences and read extracts from the works of Hardy, Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, and others, in order to make his meaning all the more clear.
