View source for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The White Company

{{Cargo_Research_Articles
 |date=1994-01-01
 |author=Harold Orel
 |topic=Historical
 |summary=This critical essay analyses The White Company within the tradition of the historical romance, examining Arthur Conan Doyle's research methods, narrative technique, moral code, and relationship to Sir Walter Scott and other nineteenth-century writers. It argues that the novel represents his most ambitious literary achievement and a conscious attempt to elevate historical fiction through disciplined scholarship blended with vivid storytelling.
}}
''Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The White Company'' is an article written by [[Harold Orel]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994).

This critical essay analyses [[The White Company]] within the tradition of the historical romance, examining [[Arthur Conan Doyle]]'s research methods, narrative technique, moral code, and relationship to Sir Walter Scott and other nineteenth-century writers. It argues that the novel represents his most ambitious literary achievement and a conscious attempt to elevate historical fiction through disciplined scholarship blended with vivid storytelling. 


== Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The White Company ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p07-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 7)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p08-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 8)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p09-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 9)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p10-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 10)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p11-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 11)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p12-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 12)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p13-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 13)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p14-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 14)<br /><br />[[Sir Nigel|SIR NIGEL]] SUSTAINS ENGLAND'S HONOR IN THE LISTS.]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p15-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 15)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p16-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 16)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1995-vol6-p17-sacd-and-the-white-company.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 5, 1994, p. 17)]]

''The following article is extracted from an essay of the same title, which appears in Professor Orel's The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920; MacMillan Press, 1995. In the United States, the book is co-published by MacMillan and St Martin's Press (ISBN: 0-333-60762-7). The article is copyright © Harold Orel, 1995, and is included here by kind permission of the author and publisher.''

Even after [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] resurrected [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]], in [[The Hound of the Baskervilles]] (1901), he disliked, and possibly even despised, the way in which the cases investigated by [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] distracted him from his first and greatest love, the historical romance. (1) As he told a reporter from the New York Times shortly before the publication of [[Sir Nigel]], 'Sherlock and Gerard are all right in their way, but, after all, one gets very little satisfaction from such work afterward.' (2) 

More than once [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] cited the fact that [[Micah Clarke]], his historical romance about Monmouth's rebellion (1889). had been rejected by several publishers before Andrew Lang introduced him to the house of Longmans, which published it; [[Micah Clarke]] was to sell more copies during his lifetime than any of his [[Sherlock Holmes]] books. His public, he said, would always support him when he competed in the playing-field where The Cloister and the Hearth-in his view the greatest novel of the nineteenth century-had swept all before it. It was nonsense to say that the public could not be induced to read historical novels. [[Micah Clarke]] proved that the door was open to the temple of literature' if only he could find something worthy to bring in. 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s attitude towards the historical novel was not particularly complicated. He wanted the writer of such romances — and he used the term 'romances' much more frequently than 'novels' — to be broadhearted', tolerant of views other than those he might personally hold, willing, to understand that in every political cause and in every religious faith there are beautiful characters which are by no means beautiful'. (3) For [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] the word 'noble' was a talisman: noble souls on both sides' of even the most bitter controversy might be found in abundance if only one looked for them, or (perhaps more precisely) believed in their existence. 

His own romances, like most of those written by Stevenson, lacked a conventional love interest. The extended sighings of a Dorothy Foster or an Alison Durie did not appeal to him. His decision to exclude romance from his fiction was deliberate. A love affair. he argued, was 'a mere individual experience'. After two centuries or more had gone by, a novelist could not make it a matter of concern to a reader. Even such a master of narrative as Sir Walter Scott could not make the love scene between a crusader and high-born dame human or interesting, and no one cares whether Ivanhoe marries Rebecca or Rowena or neither of them.' (4) He added: 'One resents almost as an impertinence the intrusion of a conventional love story on a canvas which should contain the typical incidents and characters of a great age. His views might be called ungallant, but he had held them when he was writing [[Micah Clarke]], and never forsaken them. (5) (Similar views were held by Stevenson, Lang, and Haggard.) 

In more than one important regard, however. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] took his cue from Scott rather than Stevenson. He believed in painstaking research. [[Jean Elizabeth Leckie|Lady Jean]], [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s second wife. knew from personal experience that her husband took enormous pains to verify his information. For instance,' she wrote, 'before writing [[The White Company]] he soaked his brain with a knowledge of the period he intended to portray. He read over sixty books dealing with heraldry-armour-fal-conry-the mediaeval habits of the peasants of that time-the social customs of the higher folk of the land, etc. Only when he knew those days as though he had lived in them-when he had got the very atmosphere steeped into his brain-did he put pen to paper and let loose the creations of his mind.' (6)

If anything, she underestimated [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s labours in the vineyard. When he sat down to prepare his background materials for [[The White Company]], [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] claimed, he had looked into one hundred and fifteen books on heraldry, archery, armoury, monastic institutions. and other subjects, before he earned sufficient self-confidence to undertake a conscientious study' of the fourteenth century. It was very much as Charles Reade had said of The Cloister and the Hearth: 'I milked three hundred cows into my pail, but the butter was my own for all that.' (7)

There is still another source confirming the seriousness of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s research. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s son has written, with a kind of awed respect, about the year his father spent in a tiny cottage in the New Forest while he gleaned information about everything of possible applicability to the year 1366. He used a strange assortment of reference works, and copiced his notes into dozens of exercise books and note-books in a tiny copper-plate handwriting. interspersed with diagrams and sketches... Immense research was, in every instance, the plinth on which he erected the edifice of his literary prowess and the draperies of his imagination.' (8)

The heavy use of technical nomenclature in [[The White Company]] is directly traceable to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s earnest desire to get his facts in marching order. He found it hard to incorporate into free-flowing dialogue words that had long since passed from our active vocabulary. When an archer speaks of the common folk being so crushed down with gabelle, and poll-tax, and every manner of cursed tallage', or when a knight urges his fellow-warriors to raise up the mantlets and pavises as a screen' against the bolts of their attackers, or when the hero claims that he is 'better at rovers than at long-butts or hoyle', the learning is not worn lightly. An editor might well have remonstrated with [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] to remember his audience, who would find it difficult to appreciate the nuances of such terms as 'mangonels', 'trabuch', and 'sad scath' (damage done to a cog'), terms which proliferate during the chapters that describe a sea encounter with two pirate ships while [[the White Company]] is crossing from England to France. A knowledge of French would not come amiss, either, since bastardised forms of French phrases and proper nouns are used without accompanying translations: even the context often fails to make clear what they denote. 

Still, these are the correct names for objects which have long since disappeared. No other names can particularise their parts or their functions. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], who admitted that his new-won erudition had been acquired with great effort, may well have overdone it; but much of what he used was legitimate. Deliberately avoiding the arcane elements in the language of monks and knights might well have led to signs of greater stress than those readers might detect lying behind the activities of his characters. 

Historically accurate language was less important to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]. He did not strive for archaeological correctness, and he admitted that he had thrown in, every so often, some rare Chaucerian word to flavour the 'pure' Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. He also shrugged off complaints about the laundered oaths Clams and scallops!' 'By God's coif!', 'By Saint Paul!'. 'Dirt and dross!'. 'Holy cabbages!', and 'By my ten finger-bones!' (Astringent observations on an out-of-key prissiness turned up in more than one review.) [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] would work up similar substitutes for the more earthy expressions he discovered while doing new research for the adventures of [[Sir Nigel]]. In his sequel he would use many of the same knights and men-at-war, including Aylward the archer and Nigel Loring. 

Like Scott, he wrote his chapters as episodes and scenes. He did not experiment with technique. He concerned himself primarily with character and story. And he probably learned from Scott how to use an observer who kept some distance from the hero, and who judged (on some occasions somewhat obtusely) the significance of the events in which the protagonist was involved. (9)

Nevertheless, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] wanted his readers to understand that he was not slavishly imitating Scott. Scott had treated the English archer as an outlaw, but [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] claimed that the archer was a soldier. Scott had emphasised the athleticism of his knights; [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] wanted his knights to be more recognisably life-size. Scott concerned himself with English knighthood of a century earlier, a drier, more pragmatic era, than the one that fascinated [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], namely, the age of Edward III. when English power was at its apogee, when the English people were united in a common resolve, when they believed in a common religion. (Scott never believed that the English people had declined from a moment of supreme and unrecoverable greatness in the fourteenth century. If the Waverley novels contained any single message, it was that the romantic elements of mediaeval English history were bound to give way to a greater realism.) 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] did not see himself as a new Scott, and certainly never thought of his own historical romances as superior to those encased in the thirty bound volumes of the Waverley series that he had read so avidly in his childhood. Like Scott, he was essentially conservative. He approved of Queen Victoria. He feared the rising-up of an unpropertied, embittered populace. 'Wat' — a name that turns up several times in [[The White Company]] — invariably invoked the nightmare of blood in the streets. 

In [[Through the Magic Door]] (1902). a series of essays about books in his library, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] decried the 'intolerable amount' of verbiage in Scott's novels. He detested the endless and unnecessary introductions' which made the shell very thick before the reader came to the oyster. They are often admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no relation in proportion to the story which they are supposed to introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order are traditional national sins.' (10)

His mother had told him more than once that her grandmother, Catherine Scott, had been related to the Scottish novelist. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] most likely did not believe the claim. He did not mention it in his autobiography, though he alluded to her passionate interest in constructing a family tree: '... she was great on archaeology, and had, with the help of Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King of Arms, and himself a relative, worked out her descent for more than five hundred years.' (11) 

But Scott was not the only novelist from whom [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] learned significant lessons about the pacing of his narrative. Many of these lessons were negative. Dickens had included ghost stories structurally unrelated to his main story; [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] shied away from the practice. Thackeray had written detachable essays, such as how to live on nothing a year (in Vanity Fair); [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] concentrated on the story-linc. Oscar Wilde had judged his own art harshly shortly after the publication of ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'': 'Between me and life there is a mist of words always.' [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] nodded assent, even though he admired Wilde as a friend, raconteur, and fellow-contributor to [[Lippincott's Magazine]]. He intended to use, in all his storics. simple, clear language because he believed in things happening. 'I cultivate a simple style and avoid long words so far as possible', he wrote in his autobiography; he was trying to explain why 'this surface of ease' sometimes caused his readers to underestimate the amount of real research' which all his historical romances possessed. (12)

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] wanted his mediaeval world to quiver with life. Tolstoy, he once wrote, was able to reconstruct the Russia of half a century earlier on the basis of documents, interviews with survivors, and family traditions. War and Peace had benefited from all that research. Nevertheless, research in and of itself was not enough. Knowledge had to be blended with imagination. The line of argument was pursued in his consideration of Charles Reade, the true heir-presumptive to Scott's throne, despite all his failures, his unevenness (There is always silk among his cotton, and cotton among his silk'), his descent in wild and unpredictable moments 'below the level of Surreyside melodrama'. Reade redeemed himself because his characters were 'as human and real as a 'bus-load in Oxford Street' ... It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a greater and rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer of historical romance.' (13)

This explains why, despite his insistence on getting the details right, he occasionally defended himself when critics pointed out where he had got the details wrong. There were the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] stories, for example; readers were not bashful about noting technical inaccuracies. In '[[The Adventure of the Priory School]]', [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] pontificated on the way in which a bicycle was heading because [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] assumed that a bicycle track on a damp moor would allow [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] to draw the correct conclusion. So many readers protested that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] took out his bicycle and tried to duplicate [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]'s chain of reasoning. He learned that his correspondents were right: the track of the hind wheel might overlie the track of the front one, but it would be the same whichever way the cycle was moving. He added, a little truculently, 'On the other hand the real solution was much simpler, for on an undulating moor the wheels made a much deeper impression uphill and a more shallow one downhill, so [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] was justified of his wisdom after all.' (14)

Similar justifications of other falls from grace may be found in increasingly irascible interviews (he was tiring of [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]'s personality). He protested that he had never' been nervous about details, and added that one must be masterful sometimes'. When an alarmed editor wrote to him, 'There is no second line of rails at that point', he responded airily, I make one.' Nor did he sound genuinely repentant when caught up on his dreadful ignorance about the laws of training and racing in Silver Blaze'. (15)

But on one matter he was consistent: he believed that the historical data contained in [[The White Company]] were reliable: the reader could trust them completely. In a remarkable interview he told the young Raymond Blathway that he had sought to reconstruct the whole of the fourteenth century' from every point of view (that of the soldier, the monk, the artisan); that he had succeeded; and that 'Any one who in the future wants to write on it, will refer to [[The White Company]] as a standard work on that special period.' (16)

This should not be thought of as mere braggadocio, though [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] cheerfully abandoned modesty whenever he referred to [[The White Company]]. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] derived much of his inspiration from historians; but the historians he loved best were good story-tellers. Gibbon, despite his pomposity, wrote a tremendous narrative covering half the world's known history': his work was greater than himself. About Gibbon the man little needed to be said: he did not know how to tell good stories about his own life. If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. (17) (And so on, with additional tart comments on the inability of an Englishman to be frank while writing an autobiography.) 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], who detested Napoleon and wished that Scott had not spent so much time on his biography of Napolcon at the expense of the novels he might have written, collected a large library of Napolconic histories. He admired Justin McCarthy's History of Our Own Times and W. E. H. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, because, he said. both authors rose above their Irishness and treated their subject-matter with a becoming tolerance. He also spoke affectionately of Francis Parkman's history of carly American settlements and of French Canada, as well as of the great chroniclers. particularly Jean Froissart and Philippe De Comines: Kazimierz Waliszewski, biographer of Ivan the Terrible; Washington Irving. historian of the conquest of Granada; and many Englishmen who wrote accounts of their explorations, voyages and wars. His lengthy catalogue of the volumes that might appropriately make up a 'sea library' mixed works of fiction and non-fiction. For [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], history was one marvellous tale after the other. As a novelist, he loved the great historians, and when he became a historian himself of both the Boer War and the Great War-he always found room, while discussing strategy or the movement of battalions and divisions, to include still one more rattling good yarn. 

Most readers of [[The White Company]], however, were not consulting it as a reference-work. Like the romances of Stevenson. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s novel appealed to readers of all ages; indeed, the late Victorian Age was an extended period in which publishers. authors and common readers agreed on the high value of story-telling pursued for its own sake. When Cosmo Hamilton dined at the Authors' Club in 1902, he thrilled at the sight of the great men seated near him at the same long table, story-tellers all: Ascott Hope. W. W. Jacobs. Hugh Walpole, Robert Hichens, W. J. Locke, A. E. W. Mason. Jerome K. Jerome, Robert Barr (an American who lived and wrote in England), H. Rider Haggard, Maurice Hewlett, and [[Arthur Conan Doyle]]. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s books were liked especially by boys at school and those neglected but numerous readers who gain great refreshment and relaxation from good honest stories of gallant and daring deeds, from the quick flash of swords, from the colour of pageantry and from love at first sight which ends, or begins rather, in great happiness.' (18)

Hamilton assumed correctly-that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s avoidance of four epithets and scenes of lewd behaviour was deliberate; hence his failure to mention [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s moral code. For Hamilton, indeed for all the writers of historical romances whom he admired, the existence of a moral code went without saying. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] admitted that sexual misconduct afforded an unscrupulous writer ample opportunity to betray his sacred trust-the confidence in his good judgement which a reader, before beginning his novel, willingly confided in him. 'The difficulty does not lie in [creating a 'spurious effect', gained from writing about immoral behaviour]. The difficulty lies in avoiding it. But one tries to avoid it because on the face of it there is no reason why a writer should cease to be a gentleman, or that he should write for a woman's eyes that which he would be justly knocked down for having said in a woman's ears.' [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] denied that any artist had to draw the world as it is'. 'Surely it is just in selection and restraint that the artist is shown. It is true that in a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions, but life itself had fewer restrictions then. We are of our own age, and must live up to it.' (19)

He drew distinctions between the vice depicted sympathetically by 'wicked' writers, vice delineated neutrally by 'realistic' writers like Fielding, vice shown as a hunting-field for coarse humour by eighteenth-century writers like Smollett and Sterne (the latter employed 'finicky methods'), and vice presented with some freedom for the purpose of condemning it' by moralists like Richardson. He doubtless saw himself as a writer in the last category, though admittedly more code-bound; at any rate, he never counted himself among the realists. His duty was to entertain and edify as large a public as possible. 

The mediaeval world of [[The White Company]] is not one in which virtue ultimately and invariably triumphs, though chivalrous knights and stout-hearted followers, in God's plenty. stand ready to defend the right, the Church, and the good name of Edward III. as well as their own honour and the virtue of any beautiful maiden in need of a champion. [[The White Company]] numbers, among its members, men of pride who behave with thoughtless arrogance, venerate bloodlines inordinately, express a base greed for worldly treasures, and exhibit a reckless bravado that defies both understanding and sympathy. 

The story must be judged as a whole. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was correct in believing that his narrative art had advanced significantly; the elements of [[The White Company]] are not separable one from the other, as they are in [[Micah Clarke]]. The episodes crowd one another. After a relatively quiet prologue, in which the hero, a young monk named Alleyne Edricson, is released from the Abbey of Beaulieu for a year to learn whether his true vocation is a life of holiness, the romance concentrates on the different kinds of adventure that a warrior might well encounter in a single lifetime: an episode with pirate ships: a battle at Bordeaux; the siege of a chateau by murderous peasants; a ferocious battle fought in the Spanish Pyrenees. The siege at Villefranche-du-Perigord is so vivid that James Payn, after grumbling that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s tournament scene injudiciously' challenged a comparable scene in Scott, conceded that not even the taking of Front de Boeuf's stronghold can surpass the sack of the Castle of Villefranche by the brushwood men, and the defence by the five heroes of its keep. (20) Payn accepted the manuscript for serialisation in The Cornhill (beginning in January 1891), and called it 'the greatest historical novel since Ivanhoe'. 

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] also set free his historical characters, those who had attracted attention from contemporary chroniclers and had become more than names; men about whom much was known, and more might be surmised. In doing so, he moved some distance from Scott's known practice, and from a number of dicta that Scott had frequently proclaimed. 

Scott had been wary of the possibility that his plotting might have to accommodate itself to the weight of history; he certainly knew a great deal about the historical princes and barons whose names he employed. but he reduced their function to a chorus-like commentary on the behaviour of wholly fictional characters. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], more so than Scott, wanted to use his historical figures as major characters; and did: John Chandros. the stainless knight, the wise councillor, the valiant warrior, the hero of Crecy, of Winchelsea, of Poictiers, of Auray, and of as many other battles as there were years to his life': Pedro of Castile (of whom Chandros said, 'There is overmuch of the hangman in him, and too little of the prince'); the Black Prince and his father, the noble Edward III, still speaking in French; for, though he could understand English, he had never learned to express himself in so barbarous and unpolished a tongue': the semi-mythical Bertrand du Guesclin; and the great lords whom [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] introduced by name and reputation in the Assembly scene at the Abbey of St Andrew, Bordeaux. 

These men easily dominate conversations. They determine the fate of large armies. Nevertheless, they fight as individuals, nowhere more gallantly than in the Spanish barranca of the Cantabrian mountains. 

It is possible to complain that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s treatment is too egalitarian, that all is foreground; that the distinction between major and minor characters blurs, and we lose track of what has been invented, and what actually took place. The fault (if it be one) is venial. No reader enjoys a sense that a writer's imagination falters, and the charge seems inappropriate when applied to [[The White Company]]. 

The cast is very large, and includes an astonishing range of social classes. Alleyne is presented as gentle, virtuous and intelligent, the direct opposite of his vicious brother, the Socman of Minstead, who nurses a malignant hatred' towards the entire world, and who betrays his coward's soul when confronted. Peter Peterson, a very noted rieve, drawlatch and murtherer', claims the protection of the Church even as he continually betrays its ideals. Tête-noire, the Norman, has the strength of six and the crimes of six upon his soul'. A Pardoner preaches a mercenary sermon. Denied his fee-which he regards as his due because he is 'the unworthy servant and delegate of him who holds the keys'--he breaks out with foul oaths. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] gives [[Sir Nigel]] the damning judgement, one with which he doubtless personally concurred: 'I cannot but think that it shame that a man should turn God's mercy on and off, as a cellarman doth wine with a spigot.' The supposedly blind palmer who sells credulous knights his 'sacred relics' helps to make his customers the poorer both in pocket and in faith'. [[Sir Nigel]] meets, at the siege of Retters. 'a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt to rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. 

And there are many others, cach colourfully individualised, each worth a moment's attention. 

A reader will also note the constant presence of good humour, a healthiness of attitude toward the outrageous changes of fortune that alternately raise his characters up and send them crashing back to earth. Tilting a lance at the tournament is a 'poking game'. A knight cries that he would give his feather-bed to see a friend at a spear-running'. [[Sir Nigel]] writes a letter to his wife with 'four t's and never a letter betwixt them'. When Alleyne points out to [[Sir Nigel]] that she will never be able to read what he has written, he confesses, 'By Saint Paul! it seemed strange to my eye when I wrote it. They bristle up together like a clump of lances. We must break their ranks and set them farther apart.' 

When Hordie John begins to list the seven reasons why he has left the Abbey at Beaulicu, Aylward tells him that he is satisfied with the first, and that the other six should be sent to the devil. The champion of the Bishop of Bontaubon-whom we meet suspended from a huge steel hook that has been passed through the collar of his leather jerkin-boasts of his physical prowess; yet, after being set free, he finds excuses not to hunt down his oppressors: 'I hurt my leg and cannot ride. I strained a sinew on the day that I slew the three men at Castelnau.' 

Medicine is in a sorry state. A doctor who sells pills and salves is described as 'very learned in humours, and rhcums, and fluxes, and all manner of ailments', but the landlady who points him out to Alleyne adds, May good St Thomas of Kent grant that it may be long before either I or mine need his help!' A tooth-drawer kceps in his bag the teeth he has drawn at Winchester fair, and another says of him, 'I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work, and a trifle dim in the eye. 

Nor will a reader soon forget Sir Oliver Butteshorn, the hearty trencherman, whose fondest memories are of dining tables at places like Libourne: 'Hast no space in thy frame for the softer joys? Ah, even now I can scarce speak of it unmoved. So noble a pie, such tender pigeons, and sugar in the gravy instead of salt!' 

Undertaking to write [[The White Company]] was the greatest challenge that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] had yet set himself, and triumphed over; at least so he regarded it. He knew, as he wrote chapter after chapter, that his self-confidence was steadily improving. His entire career has on record no more a poignant moment than the one in which, completing his draft, a sense of liberations swept over him: 'I remember that as I wrote the last words of [[The White Company]] I felt a wave of exultation and with a cry of 'That's done it!' I hurled my inky pen across the room, where it left a black smudge upon the duck's-egg wall-paper. I knew in my heart that the book would live and that it would illuminate our national traditions.' (21)

And so it has. 


'''References:'''

1. Christopher Redmond, ''Welcome to America. Mr Sherlock Holmes'', p.163. 

2. [[The New-York Times|New York Times]], [[Conan Doyle's Hard Luck as a Playwright|19 November 1905]], Part 3, p. 7. 

3. Redmond, p. 164. 

4. Ibid., p. 163. 

5. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] preferred to forget that a love story ran through [[Micah Clarke]]. Even so, his disclaimer applied to all his other historical romances. 

6. [[Jean Elizabeth Leckie|Jean Conan Doyle]], 'Preface', Sir Arthur Conan Doyle / The Historical Novels, Vol. 1 (Poole, New York, Sydney: New Orchard Editions, 1986), p.vii. 

7. Redmond, p. 164. 

8. [[Adrian Conan Doyle]], [[The True Conan Doyle]] (New York: Coward-McCann, 1946), p.29. 

9. [[Owen Dudley Edwards]] has written that [[Dr. Watson|Doctor Watson]] was exactly this kind of character, and that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] owed a literary debt to Scott on this account. ''The Quest for Sherlock Holmes'' / ''A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle'' (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p.131. 

10. [[Arthur Conan Doyle]], [[Through the Magic Door]] (1902). 

11. [[Arthur Conan Doyle]], [[Memories and Adventures]] (1923). 

12. Ibid. 

13. [[Through the Magic Door]]. 

14. [[Memories and Adventures]].

15. Ibid. 

16. Raymond Blathwayt, '[[A Talk with Dr. Conan Doyle|A Talk with Dr Conan Doyle]]'. [[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] [London]. Vol. II, No. 8 (May 1892), p. 51. Blathwayt helped to introduce and develop the 'celebrity interview' in the early 1890s, a feature which greatly increased the circulation of general-interest periodicals such as [[The Strand Magazine]]. 

17. [[Through the Magic Door]]. 

18. Cosmo Hamilton, People Worth Talking About (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1933), p. 160. 

19. [[Through the Magic Door]]. 

20. James Payn, 'Our Note Book', Illustrated London News, 14 November 1891, p.622. 

21. [[Memories and Adventures]]. 








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