Tushery
Tushery is an article published in The Bystander on 3 january 1906.
Tushery
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Who, from the writing of detective stories, has passed to the relation of chivalrous romance in the serial columns of a contemporary. Photo by Russell and sons.
However, let us put aside all "Tushery" doubt as to the genuineness of the Chivalry likely to be found in a story so put forward, and merely wonder whether the modern public is capable of being worked up to enthusiasm nowadays about the novel of knights, and monks, and caitiffs, and all that which R. L. Stevenson, in his letters to W. E. Henley, used to describe as "tushery" — because in such tales, and nowhere else, people said "tush!" to one another. R. L. S. was no admirer of the method, though he himself essayed it once in very brilliant style. His "Black Arrow" is, to my mind, infinitely the best-of its kind since Scott; and for true historic colour it is better than anything of Scott's. The Dialogue could only have been done by a man who had absorbed the Paston Letters. Yet I venture to think it is the least read of all his works; and what R. L. S. himself thought of it he described in one of his delightful letters. "What do you think I have turned to now?" he wrote "To tushery, by the mass!" And he went on to describe the tale (I quote from memory, but I think correctly) as one "wherein the tushery do tush me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush!"... No; I cannot convince myself that there is a present, much less a future, for the romance of "tushery." Anything of Sir A. Conan Doyle's will be read; but something of his very own, something with eccentric crime in it, would be read much more, and one would not feel the shock on seeing such a story "boomed" that one does when one finds a story of the knightly, the noble, and the great of heart, advertised like a new kind of blacking.
