A. Conan Doyle: Poet
A. Conan Doyle: Poet is an article written by Thomas R. Tietze published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 10, may 2000).
This article argues that Arthur Conan Doyle should also be taken seriously as a poet, examining the poetic qualities of his prose as well as the themes, models, and narrative methods of his verse. It places his poetry in its literary context, especially in relation to Macaulay and other nineteenth-century writers, and shows how his poems reflect his ideals of energy, patriotism, and storytelling.
A. Conan Doyle: Poet
'What a charming and interesting task there is for some critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment to undertake rescue work among the lost books which would repay salvage!' enthused A. Conan Doyle in his literary appreciation, Through the Magic Door, in 1907. It is significant and certainly encouraging for us to note that the 'lost' writer he has particularly in mind is Herman Melville, whose vogue and reputation as a master of American literature was still some two decades in the future, though his books were produced in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, it is time to follow Conan Doyle's advice and try to do a little salvaging among his own lesser known works, where we are certain to find some lost treasures that are likely to shed light on the author's many talents and dimensions. Of all our author's forays into literature, however, perhaps the least likely wellspring of immortality is his collected verse, which he wrote throughout his career, contemporaneously with his most famous and more enduring books. It is fair to say that few people even know that ACD wrote poetry at all. But the fact is, as I hope to show, his was a poet's voice that turned itself to the composition of prose.
Readers of the novels and short fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will have noticed the straightforward and seemingly effortless expression of energy of his style. A glance at the recently published manuscript facsimiles of ACD's fiction seems to give evidence of a writer working with confident self-assurance and without the need to cross out or rewrite very much of what he set down on the page. Someone, I believe, has also commented on the simplicity of Conan Doyle's choice of words: most of them short and derived from Anglo-Saxon. Yet, despite these self-chosen limitations, he managed to achieve some remarkable effects in his prose through the use of poetical tools.
A full discussion of The Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, must take note of the poetical power of even such simple lines as: 'Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!' Whether through conscious effort or some subconscious process, the author has made use of the repetition of the same sound to drive home in the last line of his second chapter the central conflict of the novel: 'Holmes' and 'hound'. Note, too, that this famous line on the one hand uses words well within the range of a child's vocabulary, while on the other hand it is replete with explosive, percussive, and guttural consonants that underscore the meaning, excitement, and dread of the statement itself. Elsewhere in the same book, Conan Doyle makes effective use of sound, as he has Watson describe part of the journey to Baskerville Hall:
The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upwards through deep lanes worn by centuries. of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir.
It is perhaps an obvious point to make that the writer's medium is the word, just as clay is the medium of a sculptor, and further that the word has two properties of value to the writer: Meaning and Music. It is true that in our ordinary, unreflecting reading, we tend to focus almost exclusively on the word's meaning, but the way the word sounds even when we read silently can profoundly colour and intensify the word's impact, usually without our being conscious of the process. Here, in this passage, several sorts of effects contribute to its power. On the surface, of course, the narrator is simply describing a short leg of their journey towards a mysterious adventure, but the author is also laying the foundation for his later complete identification of the landscape and the hound. We can hear the onomatopoeia of 'dripping' and unconsciously think of other kinds of dripping tongues. We can hear the 'roaring' of the water and think of other things that roar. Finally, we can hear the pun on 'fur' at the end. If the author is skilled enough, and clearly our author is, the reader is unconscious of the techniques involved, but still experiences the effect.
But there is even more going on here than that. Some letters involve more muscles to pronounce and so tend to take longer to say and some think longer to read, even silently. These are called 'liquid' consonants and include many of the sounds to be found in this passage. When coupled with long vowel sounds, the musical effect is to lower the tone, increasing the gloom (a good example itself) and menace of the sound. Here is a list of words in these four simple sentences with such cello-tones: swung, round, road, curved, lanes, worn, centuries, wheels, moss, narrow, gushed, roaring, boulders, stream, through, and foaming; maybe some others could also be argued to be classified among these. Finally, the second. sentence is marked both by a striking rhythm and a very strongly accented alliteration: 'Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun'. In short, it is likely that even those of Conan Doyle's readers who, for whatever reason, restrict their attentions to the Sherlock Holmes material will have noticed that much of the energy and excitement of his work derives from its poetical expressiveness.
When we remember as well that Conan Doyle's era was the last great age of narrative verse, with most poets of the first rank producing poems that still live, it should be no surprise to find Conan Doyle, however modestly, attempting to throw his hat into the literary ring alongside Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Kipling. A less confident writer, however, might have been daunted by the thought of being compared, perhaps unfavourably, with them. Not only were. these giants of the nineteenth century fresh in everyone's memory-Kipling, after all, would outlive Conan Doyle-but narrative verse in English went back to the very roots of the language, so that a body of great works from Beowulf to Idylls of the King, from The Canterbury Tales to The Eve of St Agnes, from The Faerie Queen to Paradise Lost provided the core around which was built the widely held British assumption that English poetry was the best in the world. But the man who could contribute those countless letters to the press, announcing to one and all his opinions on every conceivable topic (and perhaps one or two inconceivable ones), was unlikely to be hindered by timidity or false humility. Nevertheless, he wasn't fooling himself. He knew that his stuff, if not pure doggerel, was not of the first rank. (A champion tennis player might, after all, try his hand at a few rounds of golf.) In what must seem to be a sensible state of modesty, Conan Doyle wrote:
If it were not for the hillocks
You'd think little of the hills;
The rivers would seem tiny
If it were not for the rills.
If you never saw the brushwood
You would under-rate the trees;
And so you see the purpose
Of such little rhymes as these.
The artistic aim of his poetry was not to puzzle his readers with a verbal problem, as twentieth century poets often seem to be doing; instead, Conan Doyle sought to 'inspirit' his readers. One of the most influential models for his verse was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) whose work was once enormously popular. Conan Doyle expresses a then common sentiment when he recommends 'Macaulay's glorious lays', for 'when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you can pluck quite a bouquet out of those.' He reminds us, too, that such material was very often memorized in past generations, a practice which in the author's case would have long range effects:
- I had the good fortune to learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf which waits for reference. (Through the Magic Door, 20.)
It is worth taking a moment to discuss an influence so marked as Macaulay's, and particularly the poem 'Horatius', since our author draws our attention to it.
The topic and setting of 'Horatius' is historical, dealing with events that occurred during an ancient Roman conflict with the Etruscans in 509 B.C. Macaulay captures the clatter and clamour of assembled armoured multitudes as they close in on Rome for the final phase of their conflict. The plot builds to the moment of confrontation as Roman hero Horatius, with two companions, stands up to thousands of enemies as he attempts to hold a narrow bridge that spans the Tiber — the only access to Rome. This is stirring stuff that almost any boy would rank as top literature. Here are a few lines that tell of the Tuscan champion Astur, who boldly steps up to slay Horatius:
Then, whirling up his broadsword
With both hands to the height,
He rushed against Horatius,
And smote with all his might.
With shield and blade Horatius
Right deftly turned the blow.
The blow, though turned, came yet too nigh;
It missed his helm, but gashed his thigh;
The Tuscans raised a joyful cry
To see the red blood flow.
He reeled, and on Herminius
He leaned one breathing-space;
Then, like a wildcat mad with wounds,
Sprang right at Astur's face;
Through teeth and skull and helmet
So fierce a thrust he sped,
The good sword stood a hand-breadth out
Behind the hero's head.
It is soon detailed for us that Horatius has to take three or four tugs to extract his sword from his opponent's head-just the sort of information a boy likes to have.
This little selection by no means demonstrates the range of Macaulay's poetic skills, but it does serve to hint at the qualities that Conan Doyle admired and found so 'inspiriting'. Comparing the aims and achievements of Macaulay and Scott, Conan Doyle enthused:
- What swing and dash in both of them! What a love of all that is manly and noble and martial! So simple, and yet so strong. But there are minds on which strength and simplicity are thrown away. They think that unless a thing is obscure it must be superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which is turbid, and the deep which is clear. (Through the Magic Door 16.)
Conan Doyle's own use of simple language reflects his admiration for Macaulay's style, and he certainly noticed that it was appropriate to the subject matter. Commenting on 'the baldness ... of the language' Macaulay used, Conan Doyle asserts:
- But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. (Through the Magic Door 17.)
Such style and subject matter were out of synch in ACD's own lifetime, and no one was more aware or more indifferent to that fact. than the writer himself. As would occur on other occasions and other subjects, when he found himself marching to a different drummer, Conan Doyle kept on marching, usually hoping that the rest of the world would one day catch up. If it seemed manly and patriotic to say something, he would say it-even in the overripe decadence of the late nineteenth century and the world-weary cynicism of the early twentieth. So, given these aims, it is no wonder that highly regarded poets, from the fleshly Swinburne to the obscure T. S. Eliot, would strike no responsive chords in his poetical bosom, despite what seems to us today the manifest strength of their work. Kipling with his rollicking rhythms and cockney dialect, Henley with his picture of indomitable personal courage, and Macaulay with his straightforward language would therefore be among his models-and rich use did he make of them.
But that being said, it is also true that most of his verse is very much the kind of thing we would expect him to write. In fact, some of the narratives buried in these neglected poems might well have formed the plots for short stories that would have paid better, sold more, and perhaps have attained a kind of permanence that is inevitably denied them in our time's relative indifference to poetic form. A good example of a poem that obviously owes much to his influences, yet retains a characteristic flavour of Conan Doyle, is his 'Corporal Dick's Promotion', a sample of which is illustrative of his action verse:
The Corporal peered at the crimson West,
Hid his pipe in his khaki vest,
Growled out an oath and onward pressed,
Still glancing over his shoulder.
'Bedouins, mate!' he curtly said;
'We'll find some work for steel and lead,
And maybe sleep in a sandy bed,
Before we're one hour older.
'But just one flutter before we're done.
Stiffen your lip and stand, my son;
We'll take this bloomin' circus on:
Ball-cartridge load! Now steady!'
With a curse and a prayer the two faced round,
Dogged and grim they stood their ground,
And their breech-blocks snapped with a crisp clean sound.
As the rifles sprang to the 'ready'.
Say what you like about Imperialist stereotypes, whether such soldiers ever existed, or if the things for which they died were worth doing in the first place or any of a hundred other questions that might keep a modern reader at arm's length from this sort of jingoism-but isn't this exciting and just plain fun? Look at the economy and precision of movement and characterisation: we know one of them has been smoking a pipe, though we only know it because the character is putting it away; we can hear the tone of the Corporal's voice, signalled with the onomatopoeic 'growled'; we sense their bravery, even in the face of death, as they fall back on their good old British values of stiffened lips and the grim execution of their duty; we see the splashes of colour in the desert landscape, with khaki-clad soldiers moving on the yellow sand beneath a crimson sky. Not bad, I think, and deeper than it suggests at first reading.
It might be argued that this is the stuff of 'boys' books' and is intellectually bereft, since the whole story seems to hinge on the title's play on the word 'promotion'. (Later in the story, the Corporal dies in action, allowing ACD to remind us that, in Spiritualist jargon, the word is used as a euphemism to refer to death and afterlife.) Thus, in this reading, the whole battle, the soldiers, and the Arabs are spun out of thin air, an imperialistic racist objectification, imagined and created merely to glorify a militaristic ideal and to afford the writer an opportunity to make a witty remark. It might be this fact alone that, in our present political frame of mind, results in a muting of an effect that otherwise would be rousingly adventurous and politically sincere. It must be recalled, moreover, that this was composed before the author's conversion to Spiritualism, and so ought to be read in a more mainstream sense; thus, this could be a poem that refers to the commonplace religious notion of survival in a traditional heaven or even one that probably more resembles Valhalla than it does the Spiritualists' Summerland.
A similar twist at the end occurs in 'The Storming Party', which is precisely the kind of narrative that might have made a nice little ironic love story, such as 'Sapper', for example, frequently wrote in the teens and twenties. The plot is simple: Paul Leroy, a soldier in a risky campaign, makes the discovery that one of his comrades, Barrow, is in love with Leroy's wife. On his deathbed Barrow confesses that he had stolen a memento from her without her knowledge. Barrow tells Leroy that his love for Amy had been hopeless and that she loved her husband very truly. He dies, and Leroy returns after the battle to tell his wife the sad and secret story of Barrow's unrequited love. When the wife is told the story she is deeply moved but for a reason her husband will never guess: she thinks to herself of the nobility of the dying man's lie-a last gentlemanly effort to conceal their affair. Now this could have been a fine little story of heroism, hopeless love, and the honour of fellow fighting men, but Conan Doyle threw the plot into a poem that was, from the first, doomed to be ephemeral.
Another plot, however, is too slight for a short story, although it has potential: 'Pennarby Mine' tells the tale of an upper class stranger who visits a mine, only to have the miners laugh at him for his fancy clothes and lack of knowledge about the process of mining. When an accident places the life of one of the miners in danger, the stranger puts his own life on the line-literally-in order to rescue him, an act which causes the miners to re-evaluate their prejudices against the 'London swell'. This is one of several poems, written from the point of view of the working class, that give some glimpse of Conan Doyle's vision of the idea of order at the turn of the century. The theme of working class personal courage and self-sacrifice recurs, for example, in 'Now then, Smith!' Here, a sea captain and one of his men spot a little girl in a life-threatening position. Assessing the situation at a glance, the Skipper turns to his companion and murmurs, 'Now then, Smith!' The brave seaman instantly leaps into action and effects a daring and dangerous rescue, then he disappears before he can be thanked. The writer celebrates the ubiquity of heroic deeds among the working class, which are routinely performed without thought of thanks:
So has it been in every age,
In every age it still shall be,
Smith's name is not on history's page,
But who has made that page save he? The Warrior chief can frame his plan.
With all that wisdom can devise,
And then-ah, then it needs the man,
And 'Now then, Smith!' he loudly cries.
And when War raised its fearsome shape
And Europe shrank before its form,
Our England stood with no escape,
Unarmed before the rising storm,
'Twas Smith to whom at once we turned.
Five million Smiths obeyed the call.
To Smith the praise that he has earned,
For by his blood he saved us all.
Now then, Smith!
You're neither rich nor gifted,
But here's a job that must be done,
A job we may not shirk.
Now then, Smith!
Get down to it and shift it!
You're just the common working bee,
So work, you beggar, work!
Grooms, servants, horse trainers, hunting masters, fox-keepers, and loyal, good-hearted miners lurk everywhere on the social-but not on the political-terrain. All seem to be happy and accepting of their lot, the link they occupy in the great chain of economic being, sharing in their masters' triumphs and setbacks, alert and sensitive to their masters' moods and needs. (There is even one in which a servant offers to buy the master's horse, rather than send it to the knackers. for some paltry sum the master requires.)
There are other narratives as well that might bear examination, for they give us an opportunity to see this highly active imagination at work in the discipline of verse, but still displaying the values and interests that characterize his prose work. One little poem reminds us of ACD's letter to the press, since it expresses in verse his opinion about a public issue. 'H.M.S. Foudroyant' demonstrates the poet's outrage at the sale of Nelson's flagship to the Germans. One can almost hear his voice as he protests:
Who says the Nation's purse is lean,
Who fears for claim or bond or debt,
When all the glories that have been
Are scheduled as a cash asset?
If times are black and trade is slack,
If coal and cotton fail at last,
We've something left to barter yet—
Our glorious past.
There's many a crypt in which lies hid
The dust of statesman or of king;
There's Shakespeare's home to raise a bid,
And Milton's house its price would bring.
What for the sword that Cromwell drew?
What for Prince Edward's coat of mail?
What for our Saxon Alfred's tomb?
They're all for sale!
You hucksters, have you still to learn,
The things which money will not buy?
Can you not read that, cold and stern
As we may be, there still does lie
Deep in our hearts a hungry love.
For what concerns our island story?
We sell our work-perchance our lives,
But not our glory.
Go barter to the knacker's yard
The steed that has outlived its time!
Send hungry to the pauper ward
The man who served you in his prime!
But when you touch the Nation's store,
Be broad your mind and tight your grip
Take heed! And bring us back once more
Our Nelson's ship.
And if no mooring can be found
In all our harbours near or far,
Then tow the old three-decker round
To where the deep-sea soundings are;
There, with her pennon flying clear,
And with her ensign lashed peak high,
Sink her a thousand fathoms sheer.
There let her lie!
Another topic dear to Conan Doyle's heart was boxing, and a pleasant time is offered in his 'Bendy's Sermon', a poem profoundly influenced by the style and format of Kipling's then popular dramatic monologues:
You didn't know of Bendigo! Well, that knocks me out!
Who's your board school teacher? What's he been about?
Chock-a-block with fairy tales-full of useless cram,
And never heard o' Bendigo, the pride of Nottingham!
Bendy's short for Bendigo. You should see him peel!
Half of him was whalebone, half of him was steel,
Fightin' weight eleven ten, five foot nine in height,
Always ready to oblige if you want a fight.
This champion experiences a sudden call to become a Methodist preacher and becomes popular throughout the countryside, until one day a crowd of toughs heckle him mercilessly during one of his sermons.
A very pretty handful a-sittin' in a string,
Full of beer and impudence, ripe for anything,
Sittin' in a string there, right under Bendy's nose,
If his message was for sinners, he could make a start on those.
Bendy resists their jibes and jeers, but he must call on higher help in order to do so:
Bendy fairly sweated as he stood above and prayed,
'Look down, O Lord, and grip me with a strangle hold!' he said.
'Fix me with a strangle hold! Put a stop on me!
I'm slippin', Lord, I'm slippin' and I'm clingin' hard to Thee!'
Finally, however, the temptation to mix it up with the hecklers is too strong to resist:
Then Bendy said, 'Good Lord, since first I left my sinful ways,
Thou knowest that to Thee alone I've given up my days,
But now, dear Lord' and here he laid his Bible on the shelf—
'I'll take with your permission, just five minutes for myself.'
Bendy's subsequent straightforward pugilistic evangelism does the toughs a world of good and they derive almost instant benefit from Bendy's rigorous lesson. Here, as in the Gerard tales, Conan Doyle's rollicking sense of humour blends with sharply understated characterization in order to create a delightful effect.
A sharp dig at modern art is also an example of ACD in a lighter tone: A Post-Impressionist' tells the rueful tale of an atelier painter whose work finds no favour among the patrons of the arts. In despair and frustration, Peter Wilson takes up the painting on which he has been working that year and flings it out of the window into the dust-bin. Most readers can probably guess what is to follow. Of course, a critic who had earlier dismissed Wilson's work takes a look at the discarded painting, and likes it after its night in the rough:
[It's now] all exposed and bare, Mud-bespattered, spoiled and botched, Water sodden, fungus-blotched, All the outlines blurred and wavy,
All the colours turned to gravy,
Fluids of a dappled hue,
Blues on red and reds on blue,
A pea-green mother with her daughter,
Crazy boats on crazy water
Steering out to who knows what,
An island or a lobster-pot?
The critic's enthusiasm for Wilson's work soon spreads, and he is of course quick to pick up the secret of producing successful modern art: he paints the best he can and then lines the works up outside, against his garden wall, so that nature may takes its course with the canvases. Wilson's final judgment is succinct but ambiguous: 'English climate's best for art.' (It is to be left to the opinion of the present reader how prescient Conan Doyle was about the course of our century's subsequent contribution to the painterly arts.)
Another assault on the pompous and self-important literary critics of his day is found in 'Shakespeare's Expostulation', an imagined response by Shakespeare to the theory that he did not write the plays with which he has been credited, but that Francis Bacon was the secret playwright instead. Written experimentally in Shakespeare's own preferred form, the poem is in unrhymed iambic pentameter and argues that a simple examination of Bacon's surviving work ought to be enough to convince an objective reader that Shakespeare's work is better; that the well-educated Bacon could not have made the anachronistic mistakes so famously present in Shakespeare's plays; and that, if he had not been the writer of the plays, everybody in Stratford would have been aware of the fraud. Finally, the massive brow on the most familiar representation of Shakespeare ought to suggest the range of his genius. Conan Doyle's characteristic irritation at the learned critics, as well as his fondness for simple common sensical explanations is once again evidenced here, though the humour seems uncharacteristically heavy-handed, less whimsical than his title and parodic style might promise.
But there were also several poems in which the writer confronted serious philosophical and religious issues that were vexing him at the time, and no reader of his autobiographical material will be surprised at the content or the tenor of the verses. The rather spooky conceit at the core of 'The Inner Room', for example, is that there is a private room in which he stores various aspects of his personality — here personified as individuals: one is a soldier, another a priest with mystical predilections, while a third is a sceptic, all gathered in this 'inner room' along with many others only dimly seen in the room's dark corners:
And those shadows are so dense,
There may be
Many very many-more
Than I see.
They are sitting day and night
Soldier, rogue, and anchorite;
And they wrangle and they fight
Over me.
If the stark-faced fellow win,
All is o'er!
If the priest should gain his will,
I doubt no more!
But if each shall have his day,
I shall swing and I shall sway
In the same old weary way
As before.
From this little effort, we can sense the internal conflict that so deeply occupied him in the years before his conversion to Spiritualism; like so many of his contemporaries, Conan Doyle was drawn toward the religious view of the world at the same time that his scientific education made it impossible for him to accept the dogmas and superstitions of the Church. 'The Inner Room' provides us with what appears to be a more straightforward and candid. discussion of how seriously affected he was by these philosophical tensions than he ever permitted himself in prose. The profound sense of disappointment that he felt in the irrational bigotries of those who professed themselves to be religious left him with a bitter taste that he did discuss in letters to the press and in his apologetic work as well. (See particularly ACD's letters anent religion in August of 1906 in the Daily Express, in which he details precisely his objections to 'Dogmatic Faith, which has done far more harm to the human race than pestilence or famine' [Gibson and Green, Letters to the Press, 118-123].) He was no more mellow in his verse. In fact, he took the occasion to comment directly on the deficiencies of organized religion in another poem, 'The Bigot'. Including allusions to two other works that confront the idea of Meaning — Pope's 'Essay on Man' and Tennyson's In Memoriam — it is so forcefully and bitingly satirical that it bears reprinting in full:
The Bigot
The foolish Romans fondly thought
That gods must be the same to all,
Each alien idol must be brought
Within their broad Pantheon Hall.
The vision of a jealous Jove
Was far above their feeble ken;
They had no Lord who gave them love,
But scowled upon all other men.
But in our dispensation bright,
What noble progress have we made!
We know that we are in the light,
And outer races in the shade.
Our kindly creed ensures us this—
That Turk and infidel and Jew
Are safely banished from the bliss
That's guaranteed to me and you.
The Roman mother understood
That, if the babe upon her breast
Untimely died, the gods were good,
And the child's welfare manifest.
With tender guides the soul would go
And there, in some Elysian bower,
The tiny bud plucked here below
Would ripen to the perfect flower.
Poor simpleton! Our faith makes plain
That, if no blest baptismal word
Has cleared the babe, it bears the stain
Which faithless Adam had incurred.
How philosophical an aim!
How wise and well-conceived a plan
Which holds the new-born babe to blame
For the sins of early man!
Nay, speak not of its tender grace,
But hearken to our dogma wise:
Guilt lies behind that dimpled face,
And sin looks out from gentle eyes.
Quick, quick, the water and the bowl!
Quick with the words that lift the load!
Or, hasten, ere that tiny soul
Shall pay the debt old Adam owed!
The Roman thought the souls that erred
Would linger in some nether gloom,
But, somewhere, sometime, would be spared
To find some peace beyond the tomb.
In those dark halls, enshadowed, vast,
They flitted ever, sad and thin,
Mourning the unforgotten past
Until they shed the taint of sin.
And Pluto brooded over all
Within that land of night and fear,
Enthroned in some dark Judgment Hall,
A god himself, reserved, austere.
How thin and colourless and tame!
Compare our nobler scheme with it,
The howling souls, the leaping flame,
And all the tortures of the pit!
Foolish half-hearted Roman hell!
To us is left the higher thought
Of what eternal torture cell
Whereto the sinner shall be brought.
Out with the thought that God could share
Our weak relenting pity sense,
Or ever condescend to spare
The wretch who gave Him just offence!
'Tis just ten thousand years ago
Since the vile sinner left his clay,
And yet no pity can he know,
For as he lies in hell today
So when ten thousand years have run
Still shall he lie in endless night.
O God of Love! O Holy One!
Have we not read your ways aright?
The godly man in heaven shall dwell,
And live in joy before the throne,
Though somewhere down in nether hell
His wife and children writhe and groan.
From his bright Empyrean height.
He seeks the reek from that abyss—
What Pagan ever dreamed a sight.
So holy and sublime as this!
Poor foolish folk! Had they begun.
To weigh the myths that they professed,
One hour of reason and each one
Would surely stand a fraud confessed.
Pretending to believe each deed
Of Theseus or of Hercules,
With fairy tales of Ganymede,
And gods of rocks and gods of trees!
No, no, had they our purer light
They would have learned some saner tale
Of Balaam's ass, or Samson's might,
Or prophet Jonah and his whale,
Of talking serpents and their ways,
Through which our foolish parents strayed,
And how there passed three nights and days.
Before the sun or moon was made!
O, Bigotry, you crowning sin!
All evil that a man can do
Has earthly bounds, nor can begin
To match the mischief done by you—
You, who would force the source of love
To play your small sectarian part,
And mould the mercy from above
To fit your own contracted heart.
At first, such fulminations seem almost sophomoric; after all, it is a rare youth today who has not thought such things by the time he's reached his seventeenth birthday. But a little reflection will show us that in Conan Doyle's days these were daring and even scandalous observations for a 'popular writer' to make, made all the more painful by his sarcastic, scornful, and outraged tone. It may be that our contemporary religious views have been softened and, to use one of Cardinal Newman's darkest terms, become more 'liberal' in the years since the second Vatican Council, but even today Conan Doyle's unblushing assault on the doctrinal cornerstones of Baptism and Original Sin seem daring, however commonsensical and humane he may be. In addition to being interesting for their boldness, these lines also give us a much deeper understanding of the emotional sincerity of the writer's break with mainstream religious ideas, and help us to understand why he was so attracted to the claims of Spiritualism to be a faith based on a verifiable phenomena.
A truly disturbing poem, composed before 1898, is called 'The Passing'. This comparatively long narrative seems reminiscent of Wordsworth's 'Lucy Gray' cycle, with its Gothic romanticism, its instinctive connection of love with death, and its interest in depicting an intensified psychological state. It certainly indicates that Conan Doyle was interested in the fictional portrayal of ghosts and spirit communication, and I suspect we are intended to read it as a sort of bittersweet romance with a happy ending. Unfortunately, however, the effect is more like reading a horror story by Poe, and it seems more or less directly to take a very unspiritualistic attitude toward suicide. I will condense it here:
It was the hour of dawn,
When the heart beats thin and small,
The window glimmered grey,
Framed in a shadow wall.
And in the cold sad light
Of the early morningtide,
The dear dead girl came back
And stood by his bedside.
The girl he lost came back;
He saw her flowing hair;
It flickered and it waved
Like a breath in frosty air.
As in a steamy glass,
Her face was dim and blurred;
Her voice was sweet and thin,
Like the calling of a bird.
'You said that you would come,
You promised not to stay;
And I have waited here,
To help you on the way.
'I have waited on,
But still you bide below;
You said that you would come,
And oh, I want you so!
'For half my soul is here,
And half my soul is there,
When you are on the earth
And I am in the air.
'But on your dressing-stand
There lies a triple key;
Unlock the little gate
Which fences you from me.
'Just one little pang,
Just one throb of pain,
And then your weary head
Between my breasts again.'
More chilling than romantic, this offer of assistance turns out to be much needed, for the lover's ardour has cooled sufficiently for him to have second thoughts about joining his girl in death. Taking up in turn a gun, a hunting knife, and a bottle of poison, the man rejects each one with a shudder. The ghostly girl encourages him, but he can't bring himself to the point. Then, suddenly, he realizes that he is looking at his own dead body:
A silent figure lying
A-sprawl upon a bed,
With a silver-mounted pistol
Still clotted to his head.
And as he downward gazed,
Her voice came full and clear,
The homely tender voice
Which he had loved to hear:
'The key is very certain,
The door is sealed to none.
You did it, oh, my darling!
And you never knew it done. ...'
The ghost continues to congratulate the newly converted ghost of the man, adding that, just as he once helped her when she had had troubles in the past, now she is returning the favour, which she finds. it 'sweet to do'. The text does not offer any information about the way in which the dead lover receives this tender solicitude, but the girl proceeds to lecture him on the dynamics of afterlife:
'There's not a trick of body,
There's not a trait of mind,
But bring it over with you,
Ethereal, refined,
'But still the same; for surely
If we alter as we die,
You would be you no longer,
And I would not be I.
'I might be an angel,
But not the girl you knew;
You might be immaculate,
But that would not be you.
'And now I see you smiling,
So, darling, take my hand;
And I will lead you outward
To a sweet and pleasant land,
'Where thought is clear and nimble,
Where life is pure and fresh,
Where the soul comes back rejoicing
From the mud-bath of the flesh.
'But still that soul is human,
With human ways, and so
I love my love in spirit,
As I loved him long ago.'
So with hands together
And fingers twining tight,
The two dead lovers drifted
In the golden morning light.
But a grey-haired man was lying
Beneath them on a bed,
With a silver-mounted pistol
Still clotted to his head.
From the erotic to the spiritual to the grisly in one genuinely weird poem, 'The Passing' seems to blend the interests of his polemical work with his horror fiction. As Poe begins his famous 'Annabel Lee' with lilting romanticism and finishes it with the confession of a necrophiliac rummaging in a sepulchre, so too does Conan Doyle want to connect death with the true continuation of earthly love. Spiritualists, of course, denounce the idea of suicide as a shorter route to eternal bliss, and the later Conan Doyle would refute arguments against the faith that were based on the premise that it drove people to madness and suicide, but here the young poet seems not only to mind, but actually to be interested in, the psychologically unhealthy implications of the narrative.
In a poem composed around 1895, 'Religio Medici', Conan Doyle courageously explores the alternatives to a humane religious philosophy and in doing so sets forth a disturbing scientific theodicy. In the face of the knowledge he acquired as a medical student, it became increasingly difficult for Conan Doyle to accept the concept of a loving and kindly God. This piece examines the grim consequences of omniscience and design:
God's own best will bide the text,
And God's own worst will fall;
But, best or worst or last or first,
He ordereth it all.
For all is good, if understood,
(Ah, we could understand!)
And right and ill are tools of skill
Held in his either hand.
He strews the microbes in the lung,
The blood-clot in the brain;
With test and test He picks the best,
Then tests them once again.
He chokes the infant throat with slime,
He sets the ferment free;
He builds the tiny tube of lime
That blocks the artery.
He lets the youthful dreamer store
Great projects in his brain,
Until He drops the fungus spore
That smears them out again.
And still He trains the branch of good
Where the high blossoms be,
And wieldeth still the shears of ill
To prune and prune His tree.
More reflections on the idea of God suggest that our ideas about His nature are based on a lack of knowledge and a magnified projection of ourselves. Again confronting the theological issue which C. S. Lewis has since called 'the Problem of Pain', Conan Doyle asserts in 'Man's Limitation':
Man says that He is jealous,
Man says that He is wise,
Man says that He is watching
From His throne beyond the skies.
But perchance the arch above us
Is one great mirror's span,
And the Figure seen so dimly
Is a vast reflected man.
If it is love that gave us
A thousand blossoms bright,
Why should that love not save us
From poisoned aconite?
If this man blesses sunshine
Which sets his fields aglow,
Shall that man curse the tempest
That lays his harvest low?
If you may sing His praises
For health He gave to you,
What of the spine-curved cripple,
Shall he sing praises too?
Ah dark, too dark, the riddle!
The tiny brain too small!
We call and fondly listen
For answer to that call.
There comes no word to tell us
Why this and that should be,
Why you should live with sorrow,
And joy should live with me.
'Darkness', another work in the same vein, suggests the deep sense of irony that pervaded Conan Doyle's mind before it settled into the conviction of Spiritualism:
A gentleman of wit and charm,
A kindly heart, a cleanly mind, One who was quick with hand or purse
To lift the burden of his kind.
A brain well balanced and mature,
A soul that shrank from all things base,
So rode he forth that winter day,
Complete in every mortal grace.
And then the blunder of the horse,
The crash upon the frozen clods, And-Death? Ah! no such dignity,
But Life, all twisted and at odds!
At odds in body and in soul,
Degraded in some brutish state, A being loathsome and malign,
Debased, obscene, degenerate.
Pathology? The case is clear,
The diagnosis is exact;
A bone depressed, a haemorrhage,
The pressure on a nervous tract. Theology? Ah, there's the rub!
Since brain and soul together fade,
Then when the brain is dead-enough!
Lord help us, for we need Thine aid!
And he does so effectively in a story I think very highly of, 'De Profundis': here, too, Conan Doyle provides us with a cold and bleak set of alternative interpretations to natural events, lacking entirely the warmth and optimism that his Spiritualist conversion would later give him. Here, the effort to find the outlines of a kindly, traditional, and benevolent God is cynically and clinically dismissed by the voice of the narrator, a person who has found the answers to life's deepest questions. Only in the last line does this tone of supercilious certainty break into a prayerful confession of the fundamental condition of ignorance that must be the only honest result of a life committed to the rational pursuit of theological issues. Without faith, which is increasingly untenable in the face of such medical horrors as daily confront the practising doctor, nature is grim, random, pointless, mysterious, and painful; had he lived another fifty years, he would have been taken to the edge and offered a view of the Existential abyss. Or maybe he had been there already.
It is tempting to close with an assessment. Was this poetry good. enough to survive? The pure fact is that it has not survived, as it is no longer in print. Our schoolchildren do not memorize his work, literature anthologies do not provide selections for college students to read and analyze, and these are two perhaps necessary conditions for the maintenance of the claim to have created enduring literature or to have attained the rank of Major Poet. But perhaps we haven't the need to find assurances of the 'greatness' of his poems, or to provide an estimate of the future evaluation of them. After all, we can find. pleasure in the reading of them because they represent the poetical styles of the turn of the century, and most of all because they shed light on the interests, thoughts, values, emotions, and psychological states of A. Conan Doyle — material that will help to provide depth and perspective for future scholars as they pursue the 'charming and interesting task' of literary criticism.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
