The Dinner to Dr. Doyle
From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
The Dinner to Dr. Doyle is an article published in The Critic on 1 august 1896.
The Dinner to Dr. Doyle
(The Queen, 4 July 1896)
On Monday last Dr. Doyle, who is as much beloved by his friends as by his readers, was entertained at a banquet by his fellow-members of the Authors Club. In the unavoidable absence of Sir Walter Besant, who had arranged to take the chair, Mr. Anthony Hope presided. * * * In reply, Dr. Doyle, after thanking Mr. Anthony Hope and the Club for their kindness, said :—
"In looking back at one's literary life it is natural to ask what originally inclined one towards romance. What inclines any of us? I doubt if you can tell. I only know that I had a strong inclination, and that when I was little I wrote little stories. and when bigger, bigger ones. My one saving grace was that I had always had the most absorbing appreciation of the works of others, and I still venture to think that that is the mark of a true vocation, and that, if any man who thinks of writing fiction does not find himself full of keen interest in what others are doing, he may be certain be is on the wrong road. However that may be, I was certainly always a rapid and omnivorous reader, so much so that a special bye-law was passed in my honour that no subscriber to a circulating library should change his book more than twice a day. And then there came a time when an empty purse had to be filled, and I brought my small wares into the market to try and fill it. I should like to say that I was led into the field of letters by a cheering ambition, but I fear it is more correct to say that I was chased into it by a howling creditor.
"I always marvel at the talents or good fortune of the men who at their first essay take possession, as by divine right, of the kingdom of literature. I know how long and bow weary my own struggle was; how often during ten years I seemed to feel the ground and was washed out to sea again. I sent out my manuscripts, and they came back to me as straight and true as homing pigeons. Some were worn to pieces in the post, and perished before they were born. One of the largest and most ambitious of them disappeared, and I have never seen it since. I regarded it as a great blow at the time, but I am inclined now to look upon it as one of the blessings of my lifetime. Certainly, my grief at its loss would be as nothing to my horror if I found it again (in print). If I dwell upon this personal experience, it is in the hope that if my words should chance to reach the ears of anyone who is going through the same ordeal, he may know that his is only the common lot. Gradually the clouds will thin away if a man struggles long enough. Here and there a story is accepted, and each small success leads to another one. Then comes a day when, instead of sending a story, a story is ordered, and that day marks the turning point in an author's career. These orders may lead him into strange places. The first that I ever executed was to translate an article about gas-pipes, from the German, for the Gas and Water Gazette. In another instance I was sent a picture. and asked to do a story to match it. The picture was a very bad one, and I fear that I matched it only too successfully.
"The chairman has been kind enough to refer to the historical novels which I have written. I trace my own inclination towards this class of work to the fact that when I was very young a complete edition of Scott was presented to me. I have always had those books at my elbow, and I cannot express what I owe to their robust, healthy influence. And next to him I should place Macaulay. I have a copy of the essays which has frozen with me in the Arctic Seas in over 80° of north latitude, and broiled with me on the west coast of Africa, but I never found it too hot or too cold to enjoy Macaulay. He was the object of my hero worship when I was a boy, and I remember that the first thing I did when I first came to London was to go and see his tomb. It has been the fashion to decry his style, but I know no more charming avenue by which to approach the study of either history or literature. If my imagination was attracted and not repelled by history, it was to Scott and Macaulay and Washington Irving that I owe it.
"The chairman has alludded to another class of work which I have attempted — namely, the Sherlock Holmes stories. I have been much blamed for doing that gentleman to death, but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me. For a man who has no particular natural astuteness to spend his days in inventing problems and building up chains of inductive reasoning is a trying occupation, Besides, it is better not to rely too much upon the patience of the public, and when one has written twenty-six stories about one man, one feels that it is time to put it out of one's power to transgress any further. One curious outcome of the stories was that the public would insist upon identifying me with my character, and that from all quarters of the world, varying as widely as from San Francisco to Moscow, I had private communications detailing family mysteries which I was at once to come and unravel. I had no idea before that there really were so many mysteries in existence. I refused to take any of them in hand, and I do not suppose that their solution was seriously delayed upon that account.
"And now I have said enough, and more than enough, about myself, and I would like before I sit down to say a few words about this work of storytelling at which so many of us spend our lives. I confess that I speak with all diffidence. for the subject has many sides to it. and when I read some cocksure critic laying down the law about it. I always feel, as Sydney Smith said of Macaulay, that I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything. But one thing I do know — that this art of ours, which has to appeal to the infinite variety of the human mind, should be treated in a very broad and catholic spirit. The narrow esoteric schools that talk of the writing of stories as if their own particular formula embraced all virtues take themselves much too seriously. There is nothing more absurd than the realist who denies merit to the romance writer, unless it be the romance writer who sneers at the realist. A healthy taste should respond to honest words of every kind. The man who does not care for the story is an incomplete man. The man who does not care for a true study of life is an incomplete man. The man who does not care for anything that has ever been or can be on God's earth is an incomplete man.
"There is interest in every view of life, and to interest is the ultimate object of all fiction. That is what every writer and all methods are aiming at, from the old wife telling tales in the nursery to Sir Walter writing in his study. Kipling seems to me to sum up the whole question with the unerring instinct of genius when he says, 'There are five-and-forty ways of writing tribal lays. and every blessed one of them is right.' Everyone is right if you can interest the tribe. That is the touchstone of our art. And we have a fine tribe to interest. They sit round, the great English-speaking race, a hundred millions of them, and they say, 'We are very busy folk, engaged in very prosaic work, and we should be glad if you could take us out of ourselves sometimes.' It doesn't matter what you tell or how you tell it if you can accomplish that. They don't care about the bickerings of cliques, but they welcome all that is good. You may take them back five thousand years with Whyte Melville, or on to the future with Bellamy or Wells. You may carry them to the moon with Poe, or to the centre of the world with Jules Verne, or go to some other world with Gulliver. Treat of man or woman, character or incident, and you will always get your audience if you do but put your heart and conscience into your work. If you wish to free yourself of all small dogmatism about fiction, you have but to look at those works which the whole world has now come to look upon as masterpieces, books varying as utterly as 'Don Quixote' and 'Clarissa Harlowe,' 'Ivanhoe' and 'Madame Bovary.' No narrow formula can cover these. But on whatever lines we roach our work, it is certain that the object of that work is a noble one. I am sure that if we could follow the course of a single good novel, if we could see the weary who have been cheered by it, the sick who have been comforted, the spent business men whose thoughts have been taken into other channels, we should realize that there is no field of human effort in which a man may better hope that he has attained the highest aim of existence by making the world a little pleasanter through his presence in it."
It is needless to say that the speech was received with the highest enthusiasm. Mr. Frankfort Moore then proposed the health of the chairman in one of his felicitous little speeches, and with Mr. Anthony Hope's brief reply the formal part of the program came to as end.
