Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (article 3 may 1922)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by Vilhjalmur Stefansson published in The Outlook (US) on 3 may 1922.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lady Doyle, and their children looking at New York City from the roof of the Ambassador Hotel. (C) Paul Thompson.
By Vilhjalmur Stefansson
The years when Conan Doyle was not as yet my hero are faint in the mists of childhood. At first he was Sherlock Holmes, tall and slender, stooped, with keen features and nervous hands (like William Gillette's, which I was not to see on the stage for two decades). From my fellow-cowboys I used to hear tales of Buffalo Bill, who had been their associate and who fitted into our life, for he was indeed part of it. But Sherlock Holmes was equally real to me, though he belonged to the strange world of hansom cabs and street lamps seen hazily through a drizzling rain, which, somehow, I imagined could not at all resemble the drizzle that soaked me to the skin as I rode herd. To me Sherlock Holmes was a vivid, resilient figure moving through a blurred, unreal London — unreal so far as concerned St. Paul's or the Tower, though I could always see a cameo face at the window of the one substantial house of a gossamer city, No. 221 Baker Street.
It was Sherlock Holmes that was real; his pen-name was Conan Doyle.
Sherlock Holmes was my hero because he was not handsome and muscular and stupid like the knights of the mediaeval romances that were then coming into fashion. In him the body was incidental to the mind. He fought with a weapon keener than steel, the one weapon (as I then thought) of the future. At that and in my next stage of development I saw no excitement (but great anthropological interest) in a football game — a pageant, T conceived it, of our caveman ancestry. My thrills were in debate and in chess. The reign of brute force was over and the intellect had come to rule. That idea did not leave my head till 1914. I am not fully over it vet, for I sometimes think brains may have had something to do with winning the war.
While still a college student I worked my way over to Europe. Had I been able to cross two years earlier, I should probably have made a pilgrimage to many literary shrines, among them Stratford and "The Abbey." When I did get across, I had a notion to visit the Doone country, but the only shrine I actually searched for was 221 Baker Street. Of course it was not there. The absence of the house made the tenant more real, through relief from a suspense not acknowledged. One feels so much better about the gods if they are in the sky and not perched on a hill like Olympus. They are so much safer in the sky.
Now that 221 Baker Street had through its absence relieved me of my one (unconscious) misgiving about Sherlock Holmes, I forgot any curiosity I might have had about Conan Doyle. For I could feel the nearness of Holmes (who was Doyle) in every crowded street. Especially in fogs and at night he peered at me out of passing hansoms and stepped aside to let me pass through dark and narrow alleys. Why should I search for a man who brushed against me in every crowd? Busy as he was, why should I bother him? So I went from theater to theater seeking instead I knew not what. At last I found Bernard Shaw and a statement, if not a solution, of the Irish question in what is still my favorite Shaw play — "John Bull's Other Island."
It was on my third visit to England that a friend of mine who was a friend of Doyle's took it upon himself to bring us together. I have heard this friend tell that I wanted to meet Doyle because I thought him the greatest man in England. That was not my point of view. I have not thought deeply nor analytically about who may be the greatest man in England. What I felt was that, apart from the friends I knew well enough to need no exchange of words with them to find them: good company, there was but one personality I realized in England — Sherlock Holmes, who as yet was Conan Doyle.
But when I first met Conan Doyle he was Dr. Watson. This was a hard trial for Sherlock Holmes. A personality less individual than his would have lost ground. To him it gave added strength. On coming to the top of Olympus I realized that I had always subconsciously known that the gods would not he visible to a casual eye. No real gods would be. Invisibility is an attribute of the godhead, to the disciple a precious sign confirming his belief.
Not merely at first was Conan Doyle Dr. Watson. He still is. But Sherlock Holmes has gradually asserted himself. Dr. Watson's kindness, his unselfish way of refusing to take the center of the stage, his generous interest in friends and mere people and in simple things (even in the weather), at first make him appear as a single personality. But he is really a composite personality, and you presently catch the analytic mind of Holmes peering out at you. The penetration he applies to his problems in crime is focused, and you feel that he reads legible upon the innermost walls of your mind things that even you did not know were there. Still, Sherlock Holmes under these conditions seems to suffer a strange astigmatism, for when he looks at you through the kind eves of Conan Doyle he sees little but the good. Your weaknesses and wickednesses have to be pretty conspicuous if he sees them at all.
In his home Conan Doyle is not merely a sturdier Watson and a kinder Holmes. He is also a gentler Sir Nigel and a mellow blend of all the host of his nobler characters. Lady Doyle, Denis, Malcolm, and wistful little "Billy" are there in appropriate settings as proxies for the fair ladies, sturdy lads, and dainty little maidens of his whole-some books.
But to Sir Arthur this is not his whole family. His son Kingsley fought without serious hurt through more than half the war. Then, because he had been a medical student and surgeons were needed at the front, he was sent back to England to his studies and to his death from pneumonia. Same time after that, with a conventional outlook and a literal acceptance of the formula "dust to dust," I came into a family where Kingsley still occupied a place no than Malcolm and Denis, and I gradually learned to adjust myself to a new relation between those who are living and those who are called dead.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is now in America to preach the gospel which enables Kingsley to keep his place as a loved member of the family at the side of his brothers and sisters. Sir Arthur is a better spokesman for himself and for his case than any of us who are his devoted friends. He will probably address himself to his audience with such direct simplicity that there will be no ovations. Let us hope, for our sakes rather than his, that we listen with the attention given Paul at Athens. He speaks with the same sincerity, with the same conviction, that he brings a new revelation of truth and power.
His plea is only the plea of Paul: "Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good."
