Our Note Book (review 10 april 1926)
Our Note Book is an article written by G. K. Chesterton published in The Illustrated London News on 10 april 1926.
This is a review of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Land of Mist (1925-1926).
Review
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has just published a novel about Spiritualism ; it is called "The Land of Mist," and I for one find it intensely interesting. I do not agree with the mere disparagement of it that has been prevalent in the Press. It is not so neat and telling as one of the short stories about Sherlock Holmes ; nobody but a fool would expect it to be. Even Watson would not be such a fool as that. I have often wondered why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does not now write us a story about Sherlock Holmes as a Spiritualist. It would be better still if we had a new and psychical repetition of "The Return of Sherlock Holmes," with the detective making his positively last bow as a gaunt and grisly spectre. It would be glorious to have Watson as a worried medium and Holmes as a rather irritable control. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes really did die when he fell over the precipice in the Alpine pass, and all his after adventures were the actions of a revenant.
Perhaps we might go over all those admirable tales, one by one, and tell them the other way round from "the other side." Perhaps the Hound of the Baskervilles really was a demon hound, and the character of a blameless naturalist, collecting butterflies, was blackened merely in order to find a fictitious natural explanation. Perhaps the treasure in "The Sign of Four" really was weighted with some occult curse of the Orient, and Mr. Sholto died by more than mortal agency. It would be great fun to go through the whole series and find out how the fairies stole the racehorse, or how the Musgrave family ghost killed the Musgrave family butler. But nobody could expect an exposition of psychical theory, whether in fiction or no, to have the curt and compact interest of a criminal mystery. Nobody can expect it to have the snap with which the handcuffs are locked on the struggling purloiner of the Romanoff Rugby or the Moon of Bengal. That sort of finality cannot be asked of stories about the infinite. And if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has found it difficult to turn his moral philosophy into a really good novel, he is not the first to fail in doing that.
Instead of reviving Sherlock Holmes he has revived Dr. Challenger, as the distinguished convert to Spiritualism. Dr. Challenger was the hero of at least two other romances ; one about the discovery of a world still full of prehistoric monsters, and the other, I think, about me astronomical danger threatening the earth from a poisonous atmosphere in space. Both these Challenger stories would have been quite good stories if it had not been for Challenger. Challenger himself was a product of that unlucky and undignified tendency in the Teutonic and Imperialistic epoch ; the blunder of supposing that really big men are bullies. It came from Prussia ; or rather, it came from Prussia. But
Sir Arthur was quite innocent in being influenced by it ; he was only one of many millions who were so influenced. In this story the bully begins by being a materialist, and eventually becomes a Spiritualist ; but even before he becomes a Spiritualist he is a good deal less of a bully. He has been softened because his author has been oftened ; and his author has been oftened because he has really got a religion. And that, at any rate, is a real argument for spiritualism. But when we come to the more formal arguments for Spiritualism, as operating in the case of Challenger, we find the whole question raised in a way that is certainly itself open to question.
Challenger, who has come to scoff, remains to pray, or at any rate to praise, at the Spiritualistic séance ; because, after a doubtful exhibition by the professional medium, his own daughter goes into a trance and tells her father something reassuring about two dead men to whom he once secretly administered a drug, of which he has always feared that they died. Up to this moment Dr. Challenger has appeared to be as hard as a rock in his denial and as headlong as a cataract in his disdain ; he will not hear a word, or the whisper of a word, of there being the remotest suggestion of anything to be said for Spiritualism. He is as fierce as a mad dog and as deaf as a post. He bites anybody's head off who mentions the possibility ; he sweeps it away unexamined with nothing but roaring, rending, deafening contradiction. For Dr. Challenger is a Rationalist, and one of those lucid scientific enquirers who have adopted an attitude of Agnosticism.
This does not seem an attitude quite worthy of a professional man. But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has never been particularly flattering to his own profession. There may be doctors as simple and silly as Dr. Watson. There may also be doctors as stupid and rabid as Dr. Challenger. But at least Dr. Challenger's stubborn dogmas and strong unnatural antipathies ought to be a protection to him against a too ready acceptance of psychic marvels. A man of that extreme materialism has at least a long way to travel before he comes even within sight of the Land of Mist, let alone of the ultimate Land of Light. We should expect that he would have to be dragged every step of the way, that he would examine every step of the argument. And yet, when Dr. Challenger does receive his private revelation, he seems to me to take one wild and flying leap over half-a-dozen logical steps and land beyond the border-line to which he was being brought. He accepts more than the revelation reveals ; he is the fool who rushes in where the angels of the astral plane fear to tread.
If he is really certain that he inoculated his late patients secretly, so that nobody knew ; if he is quite certain that they died before anybody knew ; and if he is quite certain that he has heard certain words unmistakably referring to a certain incident that nobody knew — why, then he may be justified in saying that there must be some channels of communication other than the senses — something capable of receiving and repeating truths other than the limited human mind, or (if you will) some power that can communicate with the spirit by purely spiritual means. That he knows ; and that is all he knows; that he must admit, and that is all he need admit. Whether the new abnormal power is good or bad, whether the strange unexpected message is true or false, even whether the additional and unexplored faculty is inside him or outside him, he need not in the least confess to knowing. All he need admit (who had a moment before recoiled in disgust from admitting anything) is that a knowledge of his hidden thoughts exists somewhere in something that can act outside him and without his consent. But when Dr. Challenger suddenly leaves off denying everything, he instantly begins accepting everything, and that beyond anything he is required to accept. These are his words: "Others may try to explain what has occurred by telepathy, by sub-conscious mind action, by what they will, but I cannot doubt — it is impossible to doubt — that a message has come to me from the dead."
Now, I should not have thought it was impossible to doubt it. I should not certainly have thought it was impossible for so stubborn a doubter to doubt it, for so reckless a denier to doubt it. A message touching a secret need not come from the dead because it is about the dead. All we can say for certain about the secret message is that it came from somebody who knew the secret. All we know about the knowledge is that somewhere or other it is known. It need not necessarily be a dead man ; it might be a devil ; it might be a fairy ; it might be a dual personality or mysterious separate mind of some other sort ; it might be all sorts of things. I do not blame a man for having a mystical and intuitional faith and saying so. But I do blame a man of science for first of all furiously denying that any evidence can possibly exist ; and then, when he finds it does exist, blindly accepting it as proof of something that it does not prove. And I do not blame it the less because it does not only occur in the case of fictitious characters, but also in the case of real characters ; because it is not only found in an imaginary monster of a mad materialist, but in many a genuine and admirable Victorian agnostic ; because it is exemplified not only in an impossible person whom I dislike, but in a real person whom I respect and to whom I am grateful ; because it is not only the story of Professor Challenger, but of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
