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 ''Obituary: William Wallace Robson'' is an article written by [[Owen Dudley Edwards]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993).
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{{Cargo_Research_Articles
|date=1993-01-01
|author=Owen Dudley Edwards
|topic=Obituary
|summary=This tribute commemorates William Wallace Robson, eminent literary critic and co-editor of The Oxford Sherlock Holmes, highlighting his decisive role in elevating Arthur Conan Doyle's literary reputation and reshaping critical understanding of the Holmes stories. Blending personal remembrance with close engagement with Robson's scholarship, it celebrates his critical authority, humanity, and lasting intellectual legacy.
}}
''Obituary: William Wallace Robson'' is an article written by [[Owen Dudley Edwards]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993).

This tribute commemorates [[William Wallace Robson]], eminent literary critic and co-editor of ''The Oxford Sherlock Holmes'', highlighting his decisive role in elevating [[Arthur Conan Doyle]]'s literary reputation and reshaping critical understanding of the [[Sherlock Holmes]] stories. Blending personal remembrance with close engagement with Robson's scholarship, it celebrates his critical authority, humanity, and lasting intellectual legacy.

== Obituary ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p121-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 121)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p122-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 122)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p123-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 123)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p124-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 124)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p125-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 125)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p126-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 126)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1993-vol4-p127-obituary-robson.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 4, 1993, p. 127)]]

: My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
: My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse or will,
: The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
: From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
:: Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
::: But I with mournful tread,
:::: Walk the deck my Captain lies,
::::: Fallen cold and dead.
:::::: Walt Whitman
:::::: 'O Captain! My Captain!'

It is publication day for ''The Oxford Sherlock Holmes''. It is a great moment, all the more because of the magnificent teamwork which has gone into it, the dedication of all four editors and the generosity, zeal and heart which my colleagues gave not only to the work which bears their name but to every aspect of the enterprise. But all our work is overshadowed by one single fact: W.W. Robson, Masson Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, editor of The Hound of the Baskervilles and [[The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes]], died two months ago, on 31 July 1993. He never saw the finished work, whose advance copies arrived only a few days after his death.

As a result, it was a few days more before I could bring myself even to look into the books. To-day it is different, as he would have wished. The series is a living monument to him, not an inviolable tomb. I have been engaged in my own little ceremony for him, alone, re-reading his introduction to the [[The Hound of the Baskervilles|Hound]]. How vividly it expresses the great qualities as man and critic inspiring not simply the series but the whole reassessment of [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] as the great undervalued writer Robson was quietly forcing academe to recognize. To his delight [[His Last Bow]] is now an assigned text in Scottish Literature at Edinburgh.

Looking at that introduction again, how profoundly his humanity and intellect shapes it: the two qualities always united in him, nominally divided between [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] and [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] (though as he says here Holmes by the time of the [[The Hound of the Baskervilles|Hound]] is showing the traces of humanity, while [[Dr. Watson|Watson]]'s 'efficiency and practical effectiveness are stressed; a semi-comic [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] would not be out of keeping with the tragic and romantic suggestiveness of the story he has to tell). Here I can find again that marvellous scope of allusiveness, so vast in its reach, so precise in its touch, as when he remarks that [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]'s 'remoteness from other people is subtly conveyed right at the beginning, when he stares at the coffee-pot, establishing himself as one of those who, in Gerard Manley Hopkins's words, "in smooth spoons spy life's masque mirrored". One of Robson's obituarists ([[The Daily Telegraph|Daily Telegraph]]: anonymous, but possibly his colleague Alistair Fowler) spoke of Robson's 'perfect pitch' as a critic. Those are the words.

I write of him as captain, father, pilot: I was the general editor, but it was his supremely professional critical sense and skill which told me where and how we had to go. The rest of us might hope, perhaps, that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was a great writer. Robson knew. And it was that knowledge whose fruits he imparted and whose methods he exemplified. We might say that to watch Robson at work or to ponder his finished criticism, was to look at the great surgeons who had inspired [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] and gave initial models for [[Sherlock Holmes]]. There, as Robson did it, was the sometimes microsurgical cut; there was the unfaltering diagnosis; there was the judicious prescription; and there too, when necessary, was the adverse verdict.

He celebrated what [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] did well; he noticed frankly what he did not.

: [[Sir Henry Baskerville]] is indispensable to the plot, and thematically relevant to the design in representing modernity and science (for example his suggestion about electric lamps). But he is a disappointment as a character. Graham Greene, speaking about Ida in his ''Brighton Rock'' (1938), made some interesting remarks about novelists' characters who refuse to come to life. [[Sir Henry Baskerville|Sir Henry]] is one of these.

Leavis-trained, and a defender of Leavis, Robson made the great scientific attainments of his Mentor an invaluable and ultimately instinctive skill, but he denounced a 'Great Tradition' obsessed by its own exclusions, and he insisted on a historical dimension being evaluated in the business of criticism. So such a judgment as this would have the Leavis precision, without the Leavis insistence on producing a Lord High Executioner's little list. This realism on [[Sir Henry Baskerville]] throws in sharp relief the magnitude of the task before his creator, and the extent of his unquestionable success, e.g. [[Jack Stapleton|Stapleton]], 'enigmatic ... His jealousy ... a human touch The most memorable glimpse (chapter 9: Sir Henry suddenly drew Miss Stapleton in front of the lovers.'] we have of Stapleton has an emblematic quality There is a suggestion that Stapleton, seeking to enmesh others in his net, is himself enmeshed.' And the close of the Introduction, that it is dramatically right that the chief tribute' to the 'overarching symbol ... the moor itself" 'should be paid by Stapleton' (chapter 7: 'It is a wonderful place, the moor... so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.").

Robson's readiness to learn from, but refusal to be bound by, literary convention, is at its finest in his judgment of the [[The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes|Case-Book]]. While ready to concede that that volume has weaknesses, and some poor stories, he showed how it captured the disillusionment of the 1920s in which the stories were written. "There was no place for the one-time cosiness of Baker Street in the cruel, disenchanted post-war world." He recognised the decline of England as motif in the collection, signalled all the more because

: The [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] we have learned to respect and admire, the Victorian Holmes, had been a man at peace with his time; the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] of the [[The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes|Case-Book]] is not.

So in fact the reader's illness-at-ease with the stories becomes evidence of the precise nature of their significance. This may apply both in the failures, and in what Robson makes us see are in fact successes. His introduction transforms our appreciation of 'The Blanched Soldier', hitherto unjustly condemned largely because Holmes (outside a [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] framework) does not work as narrator. Robson shows us its 'poetry' which 'to some extent, atones for its shortcomings. The other memorable quality is the evocation of the leper hospital... which has the immediacy of direct experience'. 'Surely the reader is there, in that sunlit room.'

Robson's authority as a critic placed at his fingertips comparative mechanism for the greater understanding and judgment of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] (I pick up but one of his volumes of essays (The Definition of Literature) to be confronted by seminal discussions of Tennyson, Robert Frost, Hopkins, Eliot, Stevenson, L. A. Richards, Yvor Winters, The Wind in the Willows, the present state of the novel, the role of the evaluative in criticism, the justification of interpretation, the title-topic. Athlone Press will be bringing out the last harvest of his critical essays in a few weeks). It was an authority he used for enlightenment, never for intimidation: the fact that as a critic he could play the head off more colleagues over more subjects than almost anyone else was simply a mastery he used to illuminate, to demythologise, to make accessible.

So an analogy with Shakespeare could parallel [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] in weakness as in strength. On the reappearance of Holmes after the supreme finale of 'His Last Bow":

: Similarly The Tempest has often been seen as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, but he seems to have gone on writing plays, thereby giving another example of the positively last appearance' common among members of his profession.

It was the flick of the master-duellist of criticism before getting down to business: let the nay-sayers condemn the Case-Book as they might, they could not deny it was in excellent company. That it is a contrast from the previous Holmes he warmly admits:

: Simone Weil remarks that whereas in real life goodness is wonderful and beautiful, it tends to be rather dull and unconvincing in fiction. This aspect of [[Sherlock Holmes]] [seen in '[[BLUE|The Blue Carbuncle]]' at the close] is surely an exception to that rule, along with Samuel Pickwick and, perhaps, Alyosha Karamazov.

A profoundly religious thinker such as Simone Weil is an unexpected analytical tool for a literary critic: but Wallace Robson could write about goodness, because he was deeply concerned with it, thought about it, read about it, and typified it.

But the strengths of the Case-Book lay elsewhere:

: At times we have the sense that we are being given glimpses of hell ... On the whole the world of the Case-Book is depicted with a ruthless realism rare in the canon. The stories conjure up a gallery of monstrosity and cruelty.

(He quotes the house-servants' discovery of Gruner after the vitriol-throwing.)

: The horror here is enhanced by the effect of the disfigured face on others (I remember that one of them fainted'),

(He cites the milkman's spilling his milk on sight of the Veiled Lodger.)

: But it is a particular excellence of this fine story that it gives no description of the shattered face, and the reader sees only 'Two living and beautiful brown eyes looking sadly out of that grisly ruin'.

His major analysis is achieved by cumulative assembly of the horrors - the above instances, the leper-hospital awakening, Jacky's fraternal hatred glimpsed in the window, Maria Gibson shrieking curses at Grace Dunbar from the bridge, Edith Presbury seeing her father's face outside her upstairs bedroom window, the dying Fitzroy McPherson's lacerated back and blood-dripping lip, Josiah Amberley's sole moment of self-revelation, and finally in Shoscombe Old Place 'The World of evil extends itself to the dead'. Robson vindicates the book, by treating it as a book: in the process he sees a new immersion in Poe, but a much more gruesome Poe than the world of the Dupin and Legrand puzzles.

I find myself turning to him now, and apologising for making his obituary almost become a commercial: and I can half-hear his whispering chuckle and an excellent use of obituary. What a pity we aren't on royalties!' My world of literature seems a very hollow, empty one with him no longer there: but however much I weep at losing him, and at the terrible loneliness of his widow and son, my memories almost always turn into recollections of his laughter. He knew that to establish another's greatness one must never take oneself too seriously. And this gave him the perfect insight on what [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was doing with [[Sherlock Holmes]]: 'Although [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] himself professed not to take the Holmes stories very seriously, they are, in their unpretentious way, literature - unlike most of their innumerable imitators.' He says it so gently, and thus he says it all.

Yet while sharing Edmund Wilson's conviction of the literary distinction of the Holmes canon, Robson differed from the great New Yorker critic on detective fiction in general. Not only did he regard the Father Brown stories by G. K. Chesterton as literature: he wrote the great critical essay 'Father Brown and others' that said so. He had completed an annotated selection of, and penultimate draft of an introduction to, Father Brown for the Oxford University Press World's Classics: and following his instructions in his last days, Anne Robson, Hugh Robson and I have completed its preparation for the Press. He also regarded Chesterton as one of the greatest critics of all time, and I think would hold The Victorian Age in Literature the best single volume of literary criticism ever written.

He made strong claims for Dorothy L. Sayers, above all for Strong Poison. An old Oxford student and teacher, his love of the place (notwithstanding very happy and productive professorships at Sussex and at Edinburgh) would bring him back to Gaudy Night with an affection which local pride enabled to triumph over all obstacles. Yet I wonder (not that he went in for competitiveness) if he put any of Sayers's books quite as high as he did Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger as a novel, or The Murder at the Vicarage as a document in social history. One of the last things he said to me was that Murder is Easy contains a finely observed character in its murderer, Honoria Wayneflete. (Another was a serious consideration of S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance being a portrait, or satire, of T. S. Eliot.)

His sense of the importance of [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] and [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] in literature naturally far transcended the detective story. He held their greatest progeny, Jeeves and Wooster, in the reverence which only perfection drew from him. (Not that he thought the entire Wodehouse canon was perfect: he accepted a reconciliation of Bertie Wooster and Sir Roderick Glossop after the Sidney Carton salvation in Thank You, Jeeves, but saw Glossop turned nice guy in later books as a failure, especially when disguised as the stage butler Swordfish. He would dismiss aberrations of this kind as 'the dotage'.)

But he knew where to take [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] and [[Dr. Watson|Watson]]. ''The Oxford Sherlock Holmes'' does not have all the answers. As Bertie Wooster would put it, if those lads imagine that by tying us up in nine volumes of introduction, text, and notes, they have drawn our sting, and the world may take a breather, they have another think not only coming but preparing to land. And I have only to pick up one of Robson's essays to see what treasures the bereft Holmes enthusiast can still obtain from him, outside those nine little golden-egged goslings he never saw. It is from an essay Oscar Wilde would have hailed as the perfect example of 'The Critic as Artist': one work of art created by the contemplation of another, in this case Kenneth Grahame's ''The Wind in the Willows'' (1908)—

: Generally speaking, after his joyous self-liberation, the Mole is Sancho Panza, [[Dr. Watson]] to Rat's [[Sherlock Holmes]] (remember the episode of Badger's door-scraper).

But Mole at one point has to coerce Rat:

: The most psychologically interesting chapter is, however, 'Wayfarers All'. Here at last is the really powerful challenge to the River Bank - Rat's restlessness and boredom reinforced by the seductive, the hypnotic influence of the Sea Rat.

And Robson quotes:

: He pressed resolutely forward, still without haste but with dogged fixity of purpose; but the Mole, now thoroughly alarmed, placed himself in front of him, and looking into his eyes saw that they were glazed and set and turned a streaked and shifting grey - not his friend's eyes, but the eyes of some other animal!

[[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]? [[Dr. Watson|Watson]]? Yes, if we turn to the very next story [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] wrote after publication of ''The Wind in the Willows'':

: At the same moment, in some effort of escape, I broke through that cloud of despair, and had a glimpse of Holmes's face, white, rigid, and drawn with horror the very look which I had seen upon the features of the dead.

Back to The Wind in the Willows:

: Grappling with him strongly he dragged him inside, threw him down, and held him.

Once more to 'The Devil's Foot' (Strand, December 1910):

: I dashed from my chair, threw my arms round [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]], and together we lurched through the door, and an instant afterwards had thrown ourselves down upon the grass plot and were lying side by side, conscious only of the glorious sunshine which was bursting its way through the hellish cloud of terror which had girt us in.

No, I had not the remotest idea I was going to discover that, when I paused in writing three paragraphs ago and took up the dearly-loved essay to commune with my friend in the only way I can (apart from prayer: he was born and died a Roman

Catholic and I am one, so we have the doctrine, so curiously akin to spiritualism, of the communion of saints). Robson identifying [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] and [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] as progenitors of Mole and Rat, even links their book's occasional 'would-be evocative writing' to the Watsonian report in 'The Retired Colourman' which prompted Holmes, vulgarly, to demand that [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] 'Cut out the poetry'. But Robson's essay has now led me to the first major source I discover our edition to have missed: my own notes to '[[DEVI|The Devil's Foot]]' do not include the connection with 'Wayfarers All' (for all that I can remember from childhood my actual terror in the words 'some other animal!").

Thank God, my old friend still has many tricks to teach me, and to teach all of us, if we will but listen. Be you spiritualists, materialists, or whatever, when you turn to the writings of W. W. Robson, you will know there is Somebody There.

OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS

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William Wallace Robson (obituary) - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 16:44, 20 February 2026