Elucidating Conan Doyle

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia

Elucidating Conan Doyle is an article written by P. W. Wilson published in The New-York Times on 18 june 1922.

The article starts as a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and ends as a critic for his belief in spiritualism.


Elucidating Conan Doyle

The New-York Times (18 june 1922, section 3, p. 1)
The New-York Times (18 june 1922, section 3, p. 19)
The New-York Times (18 june 1922, section 3, p. 24)

What interests the New World not less than the Old—and perhaps the next world also — is scarcely spiritualism, as such — for, to be frank, spiritualism, like history, is periodic and repeats itself — but rather the fact that no less an authority on frauds and shame than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, recommended to us by the greatest of all detective, Sherlock Holmes, should be found among the extreme devotees who at the moment credit a cult so widely discussed. Here assuredly is a problem in psychology which would have fascinated Holmes, and, indeed, Sir Arthur himself, could he be once more the plain but promising Dr. Doyle that he was in the '80s.

If the boy be the father of the man, then one could wish for nothing better than that the clock be put back, when we might have Conan, the youthful parent of earlier days, analyzing Sir Arthur, his venerable offspring, now on a visit to the United States. Indeed, the juvenile Doyle might even use the eccentricities of belief indulged in by his later self as material for fiction — yes, Sir Arthur, and for villainy in fiction! — just as the primitive peccadillos of the Mormons were used by Sherlock Holmes in the first of his lurid yet delightful thrillers, "A Study in Scarlet." Let us return, then, to the original manner of our tale-teller and dissect him as once upon a time he would have so enjoyed dissecting what he has since become.

For, to begin with, Conan Doyle had ancestors, Scientists! Hardly. They were artists, and persistently thus. For thirty years, John Doyle, his grandfather, produced pictorial skits, and note this — anonymously! He initiated them "H. B.," kept his own counsel and was the first blameless 'skeleton in the Doyle, family cupboard. For a handful of his picture, thirty years ago. the Brit. Museum was ready to pay no lees a 'rum than $5.000.

Of old John Doyle's sons, more-over, all, including Conan's father, were similarly artists; indeed, it was Sir Arthur's uncle who drew the cover for Punch, as you may see from the "D," with a bird on top, which appears to this day in the lower left-hand corner. Doyle was not bred of stolid or unimaginative stock — far from it. His mind worked in mysteries. He loved from the first that which had to be found out. And beginning his plots, as he did, at the end, it was with the Mormons and their visions, not with Sherlock Holmes, that he started his first book, "The Study in Scarlet." From the tenets of the Mormons, he worked backward, as it were to pure reason, as displayed so lucidly In the person of Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle's spiritualism, when you know his antecedents, thus ceases to be quite so surprising as it has often appeared. Edgar Allan Poe was also born of artist parents; in his case, the pedigree was of the stage. He also displayed an astonishing precision of logic in handling detective themes. His elucidation of a murder in New York by means of a story. "The Mystery of Marie Roget," of which the scene was laid in Paris — is a familiar, an oft-quoted instance of his deductive method. Yet Poe reveled in the luxury of weaving together the destinies of the living and the dead. No man could have affected a greater fondness for pure reason than at times did he; but in no man's mind did the imagination run its riot with less restraint. Poe's logic was — for I must employ the word — a pose only. It was like Giotto's O. a perfect circle, yet drawn with a gesture. And so with Conan Doyle's guard-scientific accuracies in the "Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes." To round off his crimes and their clues, he needed no pair of compasses. His eye was enough.

If Conan Doyle's Pedigree was exceptional, so was his education. Among the great public schools of England, Stonyhurst, with its long Roman Catholic traditions, its powerful Faculty of learned Jesuit fathers, its museum and collection of postage stamps, rivaled only by King George's, holds a peculiar and honored position. There it was that Conan Doyle, as a boy, spent seven years of his impressionable youth. He entered at 9 and left at 16. While Stonyhurst made him no mean cricketer, it also confronted him with the tremendous affirmations of revealed religion. And those affirmations were rooted in the authority of an ancient Church.

At sixteen years of age, however, Doyle was removed from Stonyhurst and, by a strange chance, plunged into a wholly different atmosphere, namely, Germany; and after Germany, into the medical school of Edinburgh University. It was subjecting his still immature soul to a turkish bath. After breathing the air of a warm, colorful, elaborate faith and bowing his will to a tremendous spiritual loyalty, the lad was assailed with a cold douche of pitiless negations. Driven underground, his beliefs vanished within his subconsciousness, and all the surface of his mind was covered with the shallow syllogisms of cause and effect. He thought himself an emancipated nationalist. He did not realise that his somewhat superficial physics could only be the veneer that would hide for a time his ineradicable mysticism.

As a medical student, what engrossed his attention was not the teaching, but a teacher. His name was Dr. Joseph Bell, and he was not merely the original of Sherlock Holmes; he was Sherlock Holmes. The uncanny actuality of this character in fiction is due to the fact that Conan Doyle did not imagine his hero, he described him. John Bell was to Sir Arthur what Johnson was to Boswell. It may have been a description with embellishments, but, in the main, it was photography. Doyle's eye was the lens. His memory was the plate. His books were the prints. We see in his authorship an absolute submission to another's personality. The novelist was simply a friend, Dr. Watson, taking down notes.

Of Doyle as a writer, this is not a criticism but an explanation. In the greatest of all literature, the Bible, many authors thus preserve their incognito. But we are now considering Doyle, not only as a writer but as a teacher, not as one under authority like the scribes, but as one having authority; and before we surrender our judgment to his, as he would have us do, we have to ask whether his own judgment has not also been surrendered, and, if so, to whom and to what. The truth is that Doyle has always been intellectually dependent. He visits the arctic regions and at once proclaims them the world's next health resort. He listens to a few speeches by Joseph Chamberlain and promptly stands for Parliament as a tariff reformer. Just now, the influence on him, or, as he would put it, the control, happens to be neither Catholicism nor pure reason nor freezing out the germs of diseases nor the ethics of the South African war nor tariff reform, but spiritualism.

This is his mood today. But we have no guarantee that the mood will continue. Awaiting our teacher may be other controls, and, if we accept his present gospel, we may find tomorrow that he has passed on his way to yet another equally infallible, though different, revelation.

Even in Sherlock Holmes Doyle was conscious that pure reason was not enough to make a man of convincing mold. John Barrymore, in the film, like William Gillette on the stage. If I remember the play aright, changes Holmes from an unrepentant bachelor into a lover and husband who lives happily ever after. That is a romantical heresy as sad as Oscar Wilde, love scenes between Salome and John the Baptist. What Conan Doyle did was to kill Holmes, unmarried, and the soul of the detective was only suggested, perhaps significantly, by his violin and by subconscious injections of a narcotic drug. The exponent of rationalism in common life could thus find his way about London anywhere except to church and to home. Of fireside as of religion he was disinherited, and, robbed of such heritages, his only fate was to die.

As years passed, Doyle the rationalist has found that he cannot exclude the unseen even front the logic of life. For he has known sorrow. His first wife was dearly loved and shared with him all his career, Including the old tandem tricycle with solid tires which they redo together when they lived near London. at South Norwood. How, then, was Doyle, when faced by the straw of war, to recapture his faith? The ecclesiastical authority which dominated his youth no longer held him. Of Protestant teaching he knows, or at least he understands, so little that he gravely suggests a new Christianity based on acceptance of the New Testament and rejection of the Old. Apparently, it has not occurred to him to compare the Magnificat with the Song of Hannah, or the parables of the Good Shepherd with the Twenty-third Psalm, or the majestic symbolism of the Apocalypse with the mystic dreams of Ezekiel.

On the entire range of Jewish history, poetry and jurisprudence, including the Ten Commandments. he passes an abrupt verdict, intimating his decision, not at some Oecumenical Council or other solemn conclave. but in the pages of an illustrated magazine. Then he proceeds to a stance where he sings "Nearer, My God, to Thee," apparently oblivious of the fact that it is derived. in part at any rate, from the story of Jacob's dream, just con-signed by the singer to the waste-paper basket of a better Christianity.

Like Wells, Lodge and many another doorkeeper in the house of reason, Doyle was startled by the war. In that dire emergency, some kind of a religion had to be improvised, even by those to whom such religion had long ceased to be a habit. He wanted faith, but he also wanted proof. Immortality, like murder, must he traced by finger-prints, by tobacco ash collected in eternity, by celestial cocktails, by handwritings submitted to experts in calligraphy. It was the method of Dr. John Bell of Edinburgh University applied to the eternal mysteries of the Jesuit fathers at Stonyhurst College. It was the Doyle of twenty-six years old trying to shake hands with the Doyle just turned sixteen. It was theological Jekyll seeking identity with the biological Hyde.

But has the rationalist in Doyle allowed reason fair play? Take these séances. Why the curtains of black velvet? Why the dim light? Why the red lamp? Why the dark grotto and eschatological cabinet? Why these tambourines and toy pianos? Surely, science may be allowed the full use of eyesight. Why not? The spirits around the burning throne of God, if they revisit our planet, will not blink at our sixteen candlepower electric bulbs. What true science desires through telescope and microscope and spectroscope is the utmost possible light and the clearest possible definition. The method of spiritualism is the reverse of this.

When I was a boy and spent my pocket money on The Strand Magazine, of which the earnests volumes lie on my table as I write, there was spiritualism as there is today. What retarded its advance was not the churches. as Sir Arthur suggests, but the famous and entertaining magic of the late Mr. Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall In London. All the tapping business and tambourine throwing and table turning which spiritualists did in the darkness he achieved under the foot-lights and by sheer mechanism. It Nits like the trick of cutting a young lady in half. which is incredible until you are shown how it is done. So with these spirit photographs. Sir Arthur was good enough, some time ago, to send me one — of the Gladstones. I had seen Gladstone only once — a pale, majestic visage, whose glance was of an eagle's eye. Hut what a photograph! Gladstone? Gladstone transfigured by immortality? Gladstone with the light of the divine upon him? No. Not even the dignity of death had been retained. It was a faint and senile face, distorted as if in some uneven mirror. Not that this matters. The point is that at this moment Maskelyne's grandson is producing, by natural means, these very ectoplasmic pictures which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been shown in New York — and young Maskelyne works in full view of the audience. An the mediums of W. T. Stead days were answered by the elder Maskelyne, so are the mediums of this day answered by the younger. The plates were bought by an independent clergyman in an ordinary shop; they were taken by him to the platform, sealed; they were heeded by him in a camera. carefully examined beforehand; after exposure, they were then developed by him in a dark room on the stage; and the result was a picture of the "medium," accompanied by the ever kindly spirit of Will Shakespeare.

To base one's belief in a future life on the lens of a kodak is thus a hazardous enterprise In the new theology. In fact, Doyle, like his brethern of the seance, has little to do with the rival magicians of secular conjuring. On this side of the ocean, as on the other, their impertinent challenges are Ignored. To the Caesar of Reason, Doyle says, "I appeal," but he objects when some expert in legerdemain replies, "To Caesar shalt thou go." Caesar is then found to be too lacking in the needed sympathies.

As a spiritualist, Conan Doyle has been approached by multitudes of families bereaved during the war. Warm hearted. he has offered them comfort, but not, of course, the usual consolations of religion. He sends his disciples to consult mediums. In doing this his motives are disinterested. Instead of making money, be spends It on his labor of love. Rut, of course, the medium receives fees, and in Conan Doyle's recommendation obtains at once an advertisement and a standing, not without pecuniary value. There is not a medium the wide world over who does not regard men like Doyle and Lodge as assets to be cherished at all costs.

None who desires to follow up this aspect of the case should fail to study the ruthless inquiries into medium, some of them guaranteed by Conan Doyle, which inquiries have been conducted, to his intense irritation, strange to say, by the London Journal called Truth. Doyle's attitude of mind has sometimes seem-ed to lie that any independent person who goes to a 'seance and detects chicanery is guilty of a personal affront, a breach of faith. In one case, there is published a letter from him actually severing friendly relations with Pinion Young because the Impious person, at a seance, detected in a few minutes what Mr. Hudson Maxim calls the hocus pocus. It is thus no wonder that many mediums should wish to work upon — I will not my Sir Arthur's credulity — but his subdued scientific sense. Their methods are protected lay a ban of excommunication, threatened against all who find them out!

On the other hand. it is not pleas-ant to read of a young mother, after a seance, slaying her baby and then herself in the belief that from the next world she will be able to guide her husband: or of the professor who turns on the gun in his room in order to test whether, from the next world, he will be able to communicate with a friend; or of a lad, with a spiritualist pal, who ended his late in much the same fashion; or even of the young girl wandering at midnight in the graveyard because she heard the spirits. All these are incidents reported since Sir Arthur landed on these shores. He denounces suicide as short-circuiting Providence. He disclaims responsibility. But the suicides happen, and they show either that spiritualism weakens the character or that weak characters favor spiritualism.

That the Bible authorizes séances appears to he the direct contrary of the fact. Witches who peep and mutter and seek guidance from the sand are denounced as unworthy to live, and the seance at the Cave of Endor, in which King Saul raised the shade of the prophet Samuel was sternly condemned by the prophet, being, indeed, a final symptom of Saul's homicidal and suicidal mania. If I add nothing on the treatment of the subject in the New Testament, it is because this is not, perhaps, a convenient occasion for stating the fundamentals of the Christian faith. An interesting comparison, however, might be drawn between the crude details of a future life furnished lay Doyle and Lodge and the resplendent panoramas of heaven and hell attributed to St. John the Divine.

Somehow it does not seem to me that spiritualism has ennobled the human mind. Of all the devotees, Stead, Doyle, Lodge, and even Crook's, it is perhaps true to say that their prestige gained nothing from the ghosts that they saw. One might almost argue that those who have gone hence should suspend their communications with us who remain for a time on this planet until they have something worthwhile to say to us. It is such poor stuff that poets write and states-men talk when they send us their messages. Never has the long-distance telephone been used for such trivialities.

Not that Doyle's trust is staggered by such a misgiving. His faith is equal to molehills as well as to mountains. But Flammarion, the French astronomer, when the point was put to him, felt that an explanation was required. And what was it? Well, he thought that souls, like the gases in a balloon, have density. Heavy souls hover near the earth. More refined souls speed further away. And it is thus with the denser souls only that we can communicate. But if the soul really responds, like Newton's apple, to the force of gravity, then it follows that we are enveloped by a Dantesque materialism. And any soul that goes astray info stellar space may have to cling to the moon or to the planet Mars, instead of to our more domestic earth. What science makes of spiritualism is, perhaps, a less important — a less pathetic — topic than what spiritualism has made of some scientists.

After all, the immortality of the soul is best demonstrated, not by photographic effects, familiar in many movies, but by the lives — indeed, the martyrdoms — of the millions who for thousands of years have striven and suffered in this sure and certain hope.