Dr. Conan Doyle on Modern Novelists
Dr. Conan Doyle on Modern Novelists is an article published in The Bradford Daily Telegraph on 15 november 1893.
Report of a lecture "Facts about Fiction" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 14 november 1893 at the Bradford Mechanics' Institute (Bradford, UK).
Report
Last evening Dr. Conan Doyle lectured before a large and appreciative audience in the Mechanics' Institute on "Some Facts About Fiction." Observing that although name for name the novelists of to-day might compare unfavourably with those of a past generation, and we had no writers occupying an analogous position to that of Dickens or Thrackeray, he believed that the average was as high as before. He went on to remark with approval on the cosmopolitanism induced by our great empire in the younger writers of the day. India had given us Kipling, South Africa Alice Schreiner, and R. L. Stevenson was writing in the South Seas, and a promising school was springing up in other distant parts of the world. To him there was something solemn and pathetic in this deep calling to deep through our huge empire. After a brief reference to Hardy and Meredith, he spoke of Robert Louis Stevenson, who enjoyed the rare distinction of being equally able to write short and long stories. In all his novels woman played a subordinate part, this being a reaction against the abuse of the power of love. Marriage, with which the majority of novels terminated, was certainly a momentous incident in a man's life, but it was one of many, and he was also swayed by ambition, by his friendships, and by his business. Stevenson moreover stuck to his business of telling a story. Passing on to Miss Schreiner, a writer who struck a deeper note in a style almost as good, her story of an African farm was one of the greatest books ever written by a woman in the English language. It was to him a tragedy, because it told of a great and noble nature driven inwards. Mr J. M. Barrie's work would, he thought, be handed down with all the pride of a national possession, for it had the eternal value of truth. In spite of dialect and distance the sympathetic humour of Barrie made them feel their common humanity with the weaver folk of Thrums. There was a magnificent simplicity about Barrie's style, but it was the simplicity at the highest art, and that writer had himself told him that he had written some chapters ten times over before he was satisfied. Mr Quiller-Couch, that product of the Cornish coast and Oxford, had few equals amongst living writers. Then there was amongst modern novelists of mark Rudyard Kipling, with his bluff heartiness and his curious lack of self-criticism. Although he had obvious defects his readers were carried away by the gush of the story. He both was and is a political force. He had brought India nearer to us than the Suez Canal did, and yet he was but twenty-seven years of age. The art of fiction was the slowest to mature, and with few exceptions no great novel had been written by an author under 30. Dr Doyle closed with brief references to Maarten Maartens, Hornung, the Australian novelist, Frank Matthews, Jerome K. Jerome, Gilbert Parker, Geo. Gissing, I. Zangwill — that example of that perennial fountain of genius ever springing up in the Jewish race — and others, and the great value of the novelist who we might call the philanthropist of literature to the people.
