Conan Doyle as Historian: A Starting Point
Conan Doyle as Historian: A Starting Point is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.
The article argues that Arthur Conan Doyle's historical method grew from the tension between Enlightenment rationalism and a deep sympathy for emotion, instinct, and ordinary human experience, shaping both his fiction and his approach to the past. It concludes that Conan Doyle was a serious historian in practice, using narrative "media" like Watson or Gerard to recover voices excluded from formal history and to insist that history, like medicine, must remain fundamentally about people.
Conan Doyle as Historian: A Starting Point
"Monmouth raised the book above his head". Illustration from the 1898 New Impression of "Micah Clarke".
Arthur Conan Doyle derived from two separate, and often conflicting, intellectual traditions: Catholicism, and the Scottish Enlightenment. His Catholic antecedents were Irish liberal, mingling with a London literary and artistic environment, on which an austere and culturally defensive Jesuit education was imposed; while from the Edinburgh medical school and his family's literary acquaintances he sustained the strong force of waning yet powerful traditions of the Scottish Enlightenment still present in his day in such figures as Sir Robert Christison, whose 55-year tenure of medical chairs at Edinburgh closed in 1877. A.C.D. repudiated the formal creed of the first of these, and the purely scientific priorities of the second. But the tensions of their legacies dominated his thought throughout his life.
On certain questions they enjoyed some harmony. Both traditions assumed an intellectual interest necessarily transcending the frontiers of specialisation. Both made some use of dialectic. The Jesuit no less than the doctor in Conan Doyle enjoyed playing with alternative hypotheses before proceeding to final conclusions, although he was to pursue this line of argument back to Plato, the parert lake of so much Jesuit and Enlightenment instruction (however much they both deferred to Aristotle). When Sherlock Holmes permitted Lestrade or Gregson or Athelney Jones to trot out their asinine theories, he was at once the Jesuit instructor setting up a heretical straw man for ultimate demolition, and the Edinburgh medical instructor outlining the theories of a rival before reducing them to ludicrous ruin; above all he is Socrates in The Republic disposing of Thrasymachus by various means including conversion of the sheer momentum of his opposition into its own destruction.
It is essential with Conan Doyle not to assume Holmes is where the heart is. He is where the head is, but the head never fully governs the heart. The heart often supplied alternative hypotheses which the pure logic of Jesuits or professors or Holmes should sweep away. By Holmes's logic, Watson should never have married. The Jesuits themselves might preach emotionless reason, yet their faith sustained itself by highly emotive stimuli to piety; the Edinburgh faculty might preach it, yet individual hypotheses could readily be perceived as at least assisted by rivalry, antipathy or conceit in contemplation of their colleagues' contributions. In fact, the Jesuit teachers Conan Doyle most admired were those who saw the need for affection in the direction of their human material, the doctors whom he would single out for the highest praise were often those whose "bedside manner" and responsiveness to human dignity gave their cases a success not open to the pure scientist.
Conan Doyle was genuinely fascinated by intellect. His background was poor enough for him to recognise in intellect the great emancipator. Intellect might, indeed, force another form of poverty, by priestly insistence on sacrifice for the needs of training, apprenticeship or research in pursuit of some financially unrewarding discovery. But intellect offered a way of escape from enslavement to purely mechanical drudgery, and if survival afterwards became dependent on drudgery, at least intellect had had its crowded hour of glorious life to be recalled with gratitude rather than frustration (if one were wise) and perhaps to reward its investor at some future time. Intellect, in Scotland, meant the myth of the "lad o' pairts" rising above a poverty — not necessarily an honourable poverty either — in pursuit of goals bespeaking a higher nature. Intellect, in Catholicism, meant a pursuit of studies, necessary for the priesthood, perhaps not after all culminating in ordination, yet marking the intellectual as having signs of the consecrated votary about him, however lacking in formal piety he might subsequently become. In practice Conan Doyle knew many Jesuits and doctors who were anything but an advertisement for intellect, yet the intellectual ideal was the theoretical basis for their situation. Many a priest might scrape ordination without intellect, but the length of Jesuit studies was intended — if not always successfully — to weed out the dullard. Many a doctor might qualify without intellect, but the airs Edinburgh gave itself — again, not always justifiably — were intended to leave the morons to London.
The impact of dialectic on Conan Doyle meant that his fascination with intellect carried with it an insistence on hearing the case for its opponent. He was by instinct not so much a rebel as a questioner. The orthodoxy of Calvinist Edinburgh silently assumed that he was damned, as a Catholic. The orthodoxy of Catholic Stonyhurst silently assumed that he was damned, as an ex-Catholic. The Baptist gang-leader he fought as a schoolboy in Edinburgh might be expected to make such a remark; so too might some Catholic boy at Stonyhurst who had observed Conan Doyle when, as a senior, he chose in conscience to abstain from Communion. Teachers in Stonyhurst or Edinburgh might have done no such thing, but he knew the primitive tribalism that lay behind Jesuit civility or Enlightenment sophistication. For his own sake, he had to question. Questioning might look like rebellion, and for him to call himself a rebel gave him a vantage-point. In fact, he seems simply to have been ready to give a better hearing to a dissenting opinion that the rhetorical mock-consideration of heresies in Stonyhurst or Edinburgh classes was truly ready to do. That did not mean that Conan Doyle would necessarily agree with the view that the thesis inimical to the master or professor was right: he simply wanted it to have a run for its money.
Besides, he had a very strong sense of humour, and few orthodoxies are wholly invulnerable to their own absurdities, however momentary. Sherlock Holmes made his first steps towards humanity, and obtained his first purchase on immortality, at that point when he was fooled by the supposed old woman in A Study in Scarlet, and at that other when with Watson he burst into a shout of laughter after the superb sense of smell of the dog Toby led them to the creosote barrel in The Sign of Four.
It is for this reason that Conan Doyle succeeded so well where so many failed, in his use of dialogue. Many of Socrates' young friends may be charming, but they are also unmemorable. Wilde, whose "The Decay of Lying" at least Conan Doyle read with profitable results (as shown in "A Case of Identity") fails in the same way: "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist" work well (apart from the limitations of their readers, as their author would stress) in that in them the opinions of Vivian and Gilbert can be distanced from those of Wilde, leaving the extent and duration of his agreement as an open question. But Cyril and Ernest, the other interlocutor in each, have so little to be said for them and have so little of substance said by them that Wilde threw in the line for Ernest:
- [the writer of a Platonic dialogue] can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument.
This is graceful, and indeed modest, but it is also a confession of failure. Watson, on the other hand, succeeds. He is memorable himself, and his existence as against that of Holmes is anything but contrived: in fact he must be more real to the reader by the judicious manipulation of his closeness to the reader's own identity. Conan Doyle reached a point of supreme artistry in giving Watson the ultimate victory, as Holmes concedes without the least intention of doing so, in The Sign of Four with a reference to A Study in Scarlet:
- "Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid."
What this reveals is that if Holmes had his way we would no more have the stories as we know and love them than we have, in Euclid, a volume to hold our eternal affection by reading and re-reading. Doubtless there are persons whose happiest moments are spent in re-reading Euclid. Doubtless many of them contribute much to their time and to posterity. But they play no appreciable part in the reading public of literature. The author, Conan Doyle is saying, must be Watson: he may admire Holmes, but he cannot be Holmes, for Holmes will never be capable of giving a satisfactory account of Watson. Holmes can dissect the problem: Watson is vital to place it in a human setting.
Orwell, in a valuable digression in his "The Art of Donald McGill", calls the partnership one of body and soul, citing Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Joyce's Bloom and Dedalus, Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster, remarking:
- the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two parmers have been transposed.
One may disagree — as the stories progressed, Holmes acquired a soul, e.g. in "The Veiled Lodger". But while this is to acknowledge another line of descent with which Conan Doyle literally fleshed out Plato, we must notice also that in the third stream of origin, Boswell-Johnson, and Macaulay's reading of the character of Boswell, the primacy of the alternative voice is established as presenter of the means of his consistent intellectual defeats. Like Boswell, Watson knows that whatever Holmes may think, he will never have the fortune of appearing to such advantage as in the pages of his almost invariably worsted antagonist and friend. Conan Doyle noted the Macaulay view of Boswell's contemptibility as the basis of his creation of his Johnson, and dissents from it in Through the Magic Door:
- It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, bur it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the language. He had some great and rare literary qualities... It is just these pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and his tricks with the orange-peel and lamp-posts, which fascinate the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than his writings could have done.
- For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life today ?... And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this is a sign of a narrow finality — impossible to the man of sympathy and imagination, who sees the other side of every question and understands what a little island the greatest human knowledge must be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which surround us.
At all events, whatever the merits or absence of it in Macalulay's belittlement of Boswell, A.C.D. had no intention of allowing his Watson to suffer from comparable faults. Watson's limit of comparability to Boswell in vices is an occasional tendency to betting or billiatds and largely unsubstantiated claim of interest in the fairer sex with not the slightest hint of Boswellian practice attaching itself to his accumulation of theory. Watson is, in fact, a scientific presentation of a Boswell keyed to admirable emotions, but as ready as Boswell to appear ridiculous in conversation in order to give he better means for the subject to display his nature, talents and prejudices.
Conan Doyle's spiritualism becomes of importance to us here. The dead, in the faith he came to hold, require a medium for communication. The medium cannot afford to impose its own personality where it might obscure the communications of the dead: it may offer a setting in which the dead become comprehensible. Holmes is not, of course, dead (although in the greatest of all the stories as fiction, "The Final Problem", the story is narrated by Watson and written by Conan Doyle in the belief that he is), but the same point applies.
Let us now consider the implications of this for Conan Doyle as historian.
In the actual business of writing history, Conan Doyle himself advanced on the subject with the apparatus of a scientist. The student of history as a discipline, the professor giving the inaugural lecture on the practice of history, the seminar tutor leading discussion on historical method, will do very well if they can reach the clarity and appropriateness of Holmes's comments on the correct approach to a problem.
The Sherlock Holmes stories may not be flawless — it amused the author that they were not — since Conan Doyle as a professional writer was concerned to tell a Story, not to invent a puzzle. But what Holmes says about how to approach a problem is as sensible a guide as any historian could ask. The maxims, the epigrams, the apophthegms, are a historian's vade mecum. Let us take but one: "One should always look for a possible alternative, and provide against it." (Black Peter). Had the Warren Commission on the death of President Kennedy borne that point in mind, much agony would have been averted and much public disquiet prevented. We may grant that many absurd theses were advanced in opposition to its Report, but even if the Report be correct in its conclusions, it failed in its purpose of reassuring the public by simply failing to show itself as governed by Holmes's maxim. If its conclusion be erroneous, once again it is because of the failure to consider the maxim.
We may go on from Holmes's observations and dicta to so many of the kinds of deduction which remind the historian of the needs of the craft. "Silver Blaze", for example, whatever its solecisms against the turf laws, teems with food for the apprentice in historical research. The clue of the curried mutton, for instance, is simply an exotic illustration of constantly bearing in mind who knew what, and why: the historian must take into account the sum of knowledge on some situation available to specific protagonists before attributing courses of conduct to them which must be based on what they knew. The Watergate Senate hearings acknowledged this: "what did the President know, and when did he know it?" And the dog that did nothing in the night-time is of overwhelming value. So much of history has been misunderstood because of the failure of historians to take into account what did not happen, and the significance of its not having happened. In both cases the matters in question may appear trivial in the extreme: the nature of a household's meal, the conduct of a domestic animal. Modern historians emphasise the necessity to learn from the social sciences, but the wisest of those who do, such as Fernand Braudel, realise that this involves the pursuit of apparently trivial information on apparently insignificant people.
Turn again to Holmes in "The Norwood Builder" where his advice to go first to Blackheath and then to Norwood means to the historian the necessity to look at the remote as well as the immediate origins of a problem, in that the youth and background of specific participants may very well contain vital pieces of information which a history restricting itself to protagonists as adults simply fails to grasp. We may find it more haunting to recall the lines of "AE" which so moved Graham Greene:
- In the lost boyhood of Judas
- Christ was betrayed
but they are, after all, asking for an artistic leap whereas Holmes's insistence, artistic in itself, is also founded on a case hard enough to invite imitation from the most stolid researcher. And much improvement would take place in biography if it were followed more closely, instead of the usual haste to get through a period where evidence is sparse and the subject a little absurd (or else, where the thing is twisted into Freudian requirements).
Take "The Noble Bachelor" with its famous note handed by Lestrade to Holmes:
- He took up the paper ina listless way, but his attention instantly
became riveted, and he gave a little cry of satisfaction. "This is indeed important", said he.
- "Ha! you find it so?"
- "Extremely so. I congratulate you warmly."
- Lestrade rose in his triumph and bent his head to look.
- "Why", he shrieked, "you're looking at the wrong side!"
The point is that in examining documents, or any other form of historical evidence, there is, and there can be, no "wrong side".
There are, as Holmes would say, "twenty-three other deductions which would be of more interest to experts than to you" — that is to say, the subject of Holmes's value as a teacher of historical practice should best be displayed in discussion at a seminar on historical method. In any case, like Watson, I have my limitations on space: although it must be added that much of Conan Doyle's effectiveness as a teacher rests on his mastery of the short story, much as his literary achievement so rests. The origins of Holmes's value for the historical investigator derives from Conan Doyle's training in medicine, not only the somewhat showy performances of Dr. Joseph Bell, but the forms of epigrammatic instruction and simple rule which Bell recalled from his master, James Syme, as economical in his teaching as he had been in his surgery — in which economy Conan Doyle followed him so well in the short story itself as an art-form. The methods of case exposition in print so ably laid out initially in Edinburgh itself by Christison and others, again showed its results in Holmes's summings-up and in Conan Doyle's forms of setting out his brief narratives. This is precisely what is meant by the Enlightenment transcendence of frontiers of Specialisation: Conan Doyle moved the expository as well as the investigative techniques of Edinburgh medicine from their own sphere into literature. The abrasive cut-and-thrust with which the Edinburgh medical rivals dissected one another's publications in public and in private trained him in the pursuit of the best, most succinct and most instructive forms of exposition. Edinburgh would have been in its element in preaching what to avoid, and here again A.C.D's own nature would have been judicious in testing how far the victims of objurgation deserved all the castigation received by them.
Turning now to the actual practice as well as the theory of history, we may pursue firstly the question of medium. What voice is the narrator to choose, and how far can that voice be separated both from the author, and from the subject matter? Here a word of caution is necessary. Conan Doyle was an artist: he was also scientist. It was the scientist who developed the technique of narration which used the brevity of the short story and the voice of the medium so effectively. But in sheer power of artistry, his own instinct for questioning showed itself in his occasional violation of the rules he applied so well. The artist could be at war with the scientist as literary craftsman, much as Watson the narrator was at war with Holmes the teacher, in the provision of background and setting. "The Final Problem", an epic in miniature, is a triumph partly because it violates all the rules of logic which hold the earlier and subsequent adventures of Holmes together so well. Holmes and Watson are seen at their most sublime; and from the strictly detective point of view, Holmes luring Moriarty away from the London where his apprehension is essential, could not be more ridiculous. It is the absolute subordination of the original rules to the necessity of the ultimate titanic meeting, with the overwhelming sense of inevitability prefaced from the very Start by the oblique statement of Holmes's death, that lifts the story to greater heights than the orthodox method could produce. Moreover, Watson's use of emotion comes So far into the ascendant, instead of being subordinated for much of the story to Holmes's exposition, that a reading of the story demands the audience's recognising that Watson is in tears as it concludes.
Similarly, the highest moment of the "Brigadier Gerard" stories is again in that which discards so much of the normal detail of narrative: "The Last Adventure of the Brigadier". The essence of the Gerard stories, most of the time, demands that Gerard, as a soldier, is deeply concerned with getting himself from place to place and that his missions, while peculiar, are credible. On any level, the mission to rescue Napoleon is quite incredible, and the conclusion does everything to underline the fact — the inexplicable, and in strict narrative context, rather pointless, disappearance of Gerard's associates whose advent has been incredible enough, the half-remembered and confused story of how Gerard actually gets off St. Helena, the improbability of his having done so safely by the methods he gives, and so on. All this is needed to throw into the starkest relief the central, terrible moment when Gerard confronts the dead Napoleon. It is specifically because the rest of the story is in such chaos, that this moment crowns the entire series. Once again, it demands a narrator in the deepest of emotion.
The Brigadier Gerard stories are about Gerard, and it may seem strange to make so much of him as a medium, but the strength of Conan Doyle's use of the medium is in giving it such presence and character in itself. The point is that whether or not he appears in an individual narrative, Napoleon is the great, at times heartless, head, and Gerard the great, at times — though not at all times by any means — headless heart. Gerard is the case against intellect, far more strongly than Watson, for Watson is ready enough to appreciate the magnitude of what Holmes has done when he finally understands it, while to Gerard each individual action of Napoleon is of far less importance than the fact that he is Napoleon. In most cases, indeed, it is Gerard's own performance which excites his attention much more that Napoleon's. He is perhaps closest to Watson in the very first story, published in 1894 in serial form (when it was entitled "The Medal of Brigadier Gerard"):
- "Sire", said I, and the tears would trickle down my cheeks whilst I spoke, "when you are dealing with a man like me you would find it wiser to deal openly. Had I known that you wished the dispatch to fall into the hands of the enemy, I would have seen that it came there. As I believed that I was to guard it, I was prepared to sacrifice my life for it. I do not believe, sire, that any man in the world ever met with more toils and perils than I have done in trying to carry out what I thought was your will."
A few years later, the effect was employed with variations in The Hound of the Baskervilles:
- "... But how in the name of wonder did you come here, and what have you been doing? I thought that you were in Baker Street working out that case of blackmailing."
- "That was what I wished you to think"
- "Then you use me, and yet you do not trust me!" I cried with some bitterness. "I think that I have deserved better at your hands, Holmes."...
- "Then my reports have all been wasted!" — My voice trembled as I recalled the pains and the pride with which I had composed them.
Because Watson really is intelligent, as indeed he has shown in his own investigations in this story, his indignation is less pathetic, though for all that Holmes pays the price for his showmanship: Watson's pursuit of the man on the tor results in both men being left for a time under the illusion that Sir Henry Baskerville has been killed by the bound. It is in this sight of Gerard, the great booby, up to now hilarious as well as thrilling in his self-congratulatory adventures to carry through a dispatch, the reader has been given excellent clues for realising Napoleon wants to be captured, that the comedy suddenly evaporates and Conan Doyle, at his most scientific in his mastery of the reader's emotions, makes the whole thing a matter for deep compassion. The compassion need not involve anger against Napoleon: it is an assumption that Napoleon could not be Napoleon were he not formulating such schemes. On the other band, while the reader is glad Gerard gets his medal it is not with the same sense of all tears being forgotten. Gerard will be comforted, completely, as a child is: and the medium has done its work in getting the reader across space and time and into the presence of Napoleon, but the reader is left grieving at the hurt although Gerard is not. A child's grief is miserable for an adult to remember long after the child forgets it. Conan Doyle is less the historian than the doctor warning against excess in having Napoleon — and not Holmes — meet their brief Nemesis for an excess of intellect; for being too clever. (In a similar fashion Holmes, at his rudest to Watson in "The Solitary Cyclist" and "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax", is forced shortly afterwards to acknowledge blunders of his own.)
Gerard's polarisation of emotion against Napoleon's intellect is impressive, but it is the first stage of the use of the medium here. Watson as medium is needed to enable the reader, so similar to him (for, unlike the Gerard stories, the reader is unlikely to be much more astute than Watson), to realise what it is like to be in Holmes's presence. But Holmes at least is a contemporary, or was when Conan Doyle began his work. In the historical fiction the medium has the task of bringing an entirely dead world around the reader. Conan Doyle initially attempted it in Micah Clarke: the problem here is that Micah Clarke in opinions in his old age is rather too much like Macaulay (also son of a puritanical father from whom he had some dissents and with whom he sympathised) from whose essays and History the chief inspiration of the book comes. It was probably deliberate: the names have similarities. Micah Clarke's liberalism is a minor detail in the story, though vital for holding the reader's sympathies, and it reflects a similar schizophrenia present in Macaulay: now sympathising with the integrity of the Puritans; now repelled by their intolerance. Micah Clarke is a magnificent transposition of Macaulay back to the fictional metaphor of Scott from whom Macaulay originally made his own transpositions. Micah as a boy establishes himself much more fully in the reader's consciousness and affections than do many of Scott's central protagonists, if not quite to the level of Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, or Alan Fairford and Darsie Latimer in Redgauntlet, but well ahead of Waverley, Frank Osbaldistone in Rob Roy, Lovel in The Antiquary and most of the field. Of the book itself it seems fair to say that Macaulay would have felt this was what he meant to convey, and that he would have found in the description of Sedgemoor precisely that sense of what it meant to be caught up in the battle which he could only transmit fleetingly with his extent of canvas.
But in his later historical novels Conan Doyle had more of a problem with his narrator. It is reasonable for Micah Clarke to single out these passages in his life; it is less reasonable for Rodney Stone to present in such detail Nelson and his associates on shore when he is supposed also to have beheld them in full naval warfare of which he gets to say virtually nothing. Monmouth, the main historical character in Micah Clarke, is most effectively realised, because the book turns on his strengths and weaknesses: Nelson, and his associates, are a detail, and while a much more fully-dimensional portrait of a Regency Buck than the norm is achieved in Sir Charles Tregellis, the authentic and deeply-researched material on historical persons stands in the way of the work and the medium becomes little more than a guide to moving waxworks. In Uncle Bernac, Napoleon posed the same problem: as Conan Doyle said in his preface to the Author's Edition, "I am well aware that the portrait is very much too large for its frame."
In the Gerard stories, economy does its work. (The argument against the intrusion of historical characters in the novels does not always apply: Sir "Walter Scott's appearance almost at the beginning of The Great Shadow is swiftly and admirably done, and provides the service of helping the narrator to achieve an authentic voice which, up to this point, has been largely Mummerset. But this is almost a classical address to a Muse, and the initial flaw of the Mummerset is worth it if only to show Scott putting his disciple to literary rights.)
The Gerard use of Napoleon, however, only begins its services to history in the boldness and realism of its strokes (the Uncle Bernac Napoleon has those, if out of synchronisation with the literary machinery). The great quality of the Gerard stories, it seems to me, apart from — and it is a huge "apart" — their speed, their wit, their humour, their tension, their charm, their superb flavour of the period — is the brilliant realisation of the theme of developing nationalism throughout Europe in opposition to Napoleon. Whether or not it arose from his visits to Ireland, and they certainly contributed, Conan Doyle showed a most profound awareness of the dimensions of nationalism: its ugliness, its cruelty, its victimisation, its implacable secret societies, its revelations of treachery, its creation of petty tyrannies, and yet its spirit, its indomitability, its glory, its supreme capacity for defying the rational and the pragmatic. Time and again the contriving genius of Napoleon and the bone-headed gallantry of Gerard crumble before it, or at best extricate themselves with tactical advantages and the certainty of ultimate defeat. The funniest exhibition of it, of course, is English nationalism as expressed in the great fox-hunt which Gerard concludes to the horror of the English; and it says much for Conan Doyle that he should have played so lightly with the patriotism which was, above all others, so dear to him. But as we move through Venice, Portugal, Spain, Germany and Russia, we see many other forms of nationalism, and its oppressions wreak hideous vengeance on many more beings than foxes. Something of the same achievement is revealed in The White Company where outlaws and masterless men stalk with dreadful menace at the fringes of the story, at times with murderous incursion at the expense of characters who have established themselves in the affections of the audience, and for all of their ugliness these threats from social outcasts make their own hard and bitter case against the children of fortune and gallantry. But in the context of Napoleonic intellect and Gerardian absurdity, Conan Doyle enables us to see ideological activity lying outside both. With due allowance for the inspiration of Ireland in the 1880s, it has to be recognised as a supreme intellectual leap and a remarkable contribution to the history of nationalism. ]1 deepens understanding. To read the stories is to get a stronger grip on the question and to make a further advance in awareness of the past. For this alone, Conan Doyle deserves the greatest of thanks from historians.
The question of intellect and its opposites again asserts itself instructively in its own historical right. The problem in some ways is an old one, confronted by the Greeks as they opposed Odysseus to Ajax in Homeric and post-Homeric treatments of the Trojan war and its sequels. Scott expressed some anxiety as to the inverse proportions of intellect and ethics. Dumas is very blunt about it, with the primacy of intellect in Aramis, the most unsavoury of his musketeers, and its virtual negation in Porthos, the most lovable. Conan Doyle takes the matter well beyond the immediate business of Gerard versus Napoleon, and makes it possible to understand the nature of an army which must win through its minds and yet would be paralysed without its emotions, so that the head may exploit the heart, but the heart would be powerless and indeed useless without the head. It is taking the doctrine that a soldier's business is not to think, and subjecting it to continued analysis, showing how it weakens and at times neutralises itself, and showing, too, in Gerard how material apparently hopelessly lacking in brain-power has instincts and resourcefulness which the normal processes of intellect can neither predict nor match. There is an element of corruption involved in the advancement of intellect, and quietly it is made clear that as men rise farther because they know more, their knowledge may diminish their integrity and bring consequently a greater bitterness and frustration than they could find without their sophistication. There is an Actonian assessment of power; there is a Scott-like concern about the dissolution of ethics. But there is also a splendid sense of the sheer complexity of human reactions in the context of war, military occupation, adventure and diplomacy. However much Conan Doyle admired Napoleon he would limit armies to nothing as one-dimensional as marching on their stomachs; the very simplicity of Gerard's own priorities throw into relief the variety of inducements and restraints on individual military motives, and the end is Tolstoyan in its multiplicity of figures however much two of them hog the limelight.
The intellectual sympathy which Conan Doyle extended to persons of instinct and emotion gave him exceptional advantages as a historian. The intellectual by nature is assumed to be on the side of intellect, to be on the look-out for literacy and buoyed up with enthusiasm should he catch sight of a chronicler or an imaginative writer. Even Scott in his more modern novels was a little inclined to give pride of place to persons of intellectual preoccupation, Jeanie Deans excepted, although the literate and the literary are sometimes made to look foolish at the hands of the transmitters of oral tradition (for instance Ochiltree exposing the Antiquary as assertive in what proves mere ignorance, or Waverley swept off bis feet by the legacy of Gaelic song of which Flora MacIvor gives him a brief taste). History may often seem a conspiracy between writers of one age and another, however ready the later may seem to refute the earlier in details. Conan Doyle asks us to look at the past from the perspective of the people who are not in that conspiracy.
Ultimately this is a break from Watson also, in that Watson is a mac of the pen as well as the stethoscope, a medical man of literary powers describing the work of a Specialist whose scientific austerity prevents his preaching to a wide audience. Gerard in that first magazine publication then called "The Medal of Brigadier Gerard" uses in mid-narrative the words "Ah, my friend, you who read this...", but that is his last flirtation with authorship. The excellent Richard Lancelyn Green and John Michael Gibson tell us in their Bibliography (p.93), that A.C.D. read this story during his lecture tour of America in late 1894, and this evidently gave him is signal for the future. The stories must be oral narratives, ultimately settled as cafe-conversation in the late 1840s or early 1850s (it may be a mirage — and Gerard's worship of Napoleon has some of the properties of a mirage — but the first set of stories, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, suggest the later days of the Orleanist monarchy while the second set, The Adventures of Gerard, are at least in part ("How the Brigadier rode to Minsk") delivered in the first years of the Second Empire. Emancipated from his improbable pen, Gerard can speak for the beart with no intrusion from the head. Conan Doyle's famous long title for Micah Clarke (discarded in later editions) made it clear that this, also, is an oral statement, dictated to Micah's grandchildren, but the work of an educated man however abrupt the termination of his schooling. Gerard became a leap in what intellectuals would certainly regard as the dark. A.C.D. in the Author's Edition recorded the debts of the Gerard series to the memoirs of Marbot, de Gonneville, Coignet, de Fezenac, Bourgogne and their fellows, and in "The Medal of Brigadier Gerard", as in A Study in Scarlet, we can see the traces of the literary origins. Gerard thinks of his mother and hence spares a pursuer much as Marbot was induced by an old man to think of his mother and spare a young Cossack. But, as with the Holmes cycle, the Gerard stories acquire their own momentum, and the historiographical apparatus sinks into unobtrusiveness.
It is the more ready to do so as one of the sources is a story by Conan Doyle himself, "A Straggler of '15", first published on 21 March 1891 in Black and White, and subsequently dramatised by him as Waterloo, sold to Henry Irving and first performed in September 1894. The Gerard stories were in preparation as Waterloo was coming to the stage. It is notorious that the play was hailed as a triumph solely for Irving, but Bernard Shaw knew better: "The entire effect is contrived by the author, and it is due to him alone." (Saturday Review, 11 May 1895.) Conan Doyle in Memories and Adventures said a word on it — a word that is exceedingly instructive on his scientific methods of emotional deployment:
- I had written a short story... which had seemed to me to be a moving picture of an old soldier and his ways. My own eves were moist as I wrote it and that is the surest way to moisten those of others.
(As Dr. Alvin E. Rodin has pointed out, as a doctor Arthur Conan Doyle conducted research much as had so many great Edinburgh doctors, using auto-experimentation, in which activity he was later to show Sherlock Holmes (when first introduced in A Study in Scarlet:
- "Let us have some fresh blood", he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger, and drawing off the resulting drop of blood in a chemical pipette"
The most drastic auto-experimentalist in literature, published just before it, was his fellow-townsman Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll), but perhaps the most dramatic example in the writings of Conan Doyle appears in "The Devil's Foot"
A.C.D. tells of the sale of the play and Irving's success :
- The house laughed and sobbed, exactly as I had done when I wrote it. Several critics went out of their way to explain that the merit lay entirely with the great actor and had nothing to do with the indifferent play, but as a matter of fact the last time I saw it acted it was by a real corporal from a military camp, in the humble setting of a village hall, and it had exactly the same effect upon the audience which Irving produced at the Lyceum. So perhaps there was something in the writing after all...
(A.C.D. never lost that dry Scottish wit: it is a mark of his internationalism that his
delightful sense of humour expressed itself in so many different cultural traditions.)
"A Straggler of '15" is in its origins a medical story, as its author had indicated by its inclusion in Round the Red Lamp. It presumably had some medical antecedent or antecedents from Dr. Conan Doyle's attendance on old and repulsive patients whose human qualities of fortitude and links with forgotten times might be hidden from a purely scientific medical practitioner. In the story, Corporal Gregory Brewster is introduced at first through exceedingly unsympathetic comments from a boozy housekeeper and, nasty as she is, her dislike of him has some cause:
- "... what with his coughin' and "awkin' and spittin', there ain't no gettin' a wink o' sleep. Hark at him now!"
- "Missus Simpson! Missus Simpson!" cried a cracked and querulous voice from above.
- "That's him", she cried, nodding her head with an air of triumph. "He do go on somethin' scandalous. Yes, Mister Brewster, sir."
- "I want my morning ration, Missus Simpson."
- "It's just ready, Mister Brewster, sir."
- "Blessed if he ain't like a baby cryin' for its pap", said the young woman.
The story skillfully establishes the old man as a ruin of a Waterloo veteran, and the link with Gerard's origin is shown in the very first thing we bear of Brewster from his unpleasing attendant's fellow-gossip, that he has a medal: Gerard first won his audience with his medal whose associations with pathos had to emerge from comedy much as Brewster's assert themselves from a background of squalor and senile debility. But the contrast is that Brewster can only convey Waterloo by shuffles and faltering steps imagining sentry-go and inarticulate shouting and flourishing of a yellowed newspaper cutting and contrasts with military appearance of the present day and venerated memories of an obviously trite pleasantry from the Regent and the repeated formula that "the Dook would ha' had a word to say". At the moment of death he has one single epiphany:
- ... Of a sudden they heard a shout that rang through the house. Loud and clear and swelling, it pealed in their ears, a voice full of strength and energy and fiery passion.
- "The guards need powder", it cried and yet again, "the guards need powder."
- The sergeant sprang from his chair and rushed in, followed by the trembling Norah. There was the old man standing up, his blue eyes sparkling, his white hair bristling, his whole figure towering and expanding, with eagle head and glance of fire.
- "The guards need powder", he thundered once again, "and by God they shall have it!"
- He threw up his long arms and sank back with a groan into his chair. The sergeant stooped over him, and his face darkened.
- "Oh, Archie, Archie", sobbed the frightened girl, "what do you think of him?"
- The sergeant turned away.
- "I think," said he, "that the third guards have a full muster now."
Other than that, old Brewster's memories are touching but hopelessly inadequate in expression of their meaning for him, and their meaning as history:
- "And the battle — you remember it?"
- "Why, I sees it all afore me every time I shuts my eyes. Lordy, sir, you wouldn't hardly believe how clear is to me. There's our line from the paregoric bottle right along to the snuffbox. D'you see? Well, then, the pill-box is for Hougoumont on the right, where we was, and Norah's thimble for La Haye Sainte. There it is all right, sir, and here were our guns, and here, behind, the reserves and the Belgians. Ach, them Belgians!" He spat furiously into the fire. "Then here's the French where my pipe lies, and over here, where I put my baccy pouch, was the Proosians a-comin'up on our left flank. Jimini! but it was a glad sight to see the smoke of their guns."
- "And what was it that struck you most, now, in connection with the whole affair?" asked the Colonel.
- "I lost three half-crowns over it I did", crooned old Brewster. "I shouldn't wonder if I was never to get that money now. I lent 'em to Jabez Smith, my rear rank man, in Brussels. 'Only all pay-day, Grig', says he. By Gosh! he was stuck by a lancer at Quarter Brass, and me with not so much as a slip o' paper to prove the debt! Them three half-crowns is as good as lost to me."
The colonel gives him some money from the officers of the Guards and the old man is grateful, and is quite businesslike in arranging for a flag and firing-party for bis funeral. But for all of his gratitude, (and it is quite clear that the funeral arrangements mean much more than the belated reimbursement for Jabez Smith's debt with allowance for inflation), he tells his great-niece that the colonel "ain't fit to bold the surrup o' My Colonel Byng". A.C.D. is observing the witness to history in the fealty in which long-dead leaders and events are held, though the articulation of their character is impossible. In "A Straggler of '15" he showed how the pursuit of history was to find a voice for the voiceless. The old man's Waterloo is great because It cannot be realised in narrative. The play's title asserts itself as a history of an event which et its most profound can be neither written nor spoken. In artistic idea, it reaches forward into the theatre of the second half of our century, suggesting Samuel Beckett more than anyone else. In its consciousness of the meaning of history, it is a tremendous Cry against the limitations of formal scientific historical evidence. In medicine, it is a protest against the dismissal of human material to a bundle of diseases, complications and possible remedies.
As a success in its own terms it was unrepeatable, but as an idea it was capable of development through forms of speech, and hence he created Gerard, his career as dreadful a waste after Waterloo (and that one vision of the dead Napoleon) as the old mac's, with its revelation of a world that did not need Brewsters or Gerards save as cabbage-planters. But the very barrenness of the intervening years keeps the memory of the old glory credibly green, and Conan Doyle found new means of capturing the minds of men would could not speak or, if they could, could not wnite. Gerard progresses beyond the evidence of the memorialists since his combination of imbecility and instinct, strategic illiteracy and tactical brilliance, strikes far below me agreed bases for historical writing. Conan Doyle's lessons for the historian must be that existing sources will never be enough, that we must be perpetually seeking new means of recovering lost pasts, that the reduction of human experience to a set of textbook propositions is no more acceptable in history than in medicine. Our history, like Our medicine, must always know itself to be preoccupied with people.
To follow him into bis historical writing in greater depth must involve contemplation of these things, but it is also to open other matters too large to be given adequate discussion here. Terms such as ""the historical novelist", "the amateur historian", and so forth, are misleading. A.C.D. lived in a world which drew distinctions between amateurs and professionals — his brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, was amusing about his "amateur cracksman"', Raffles, and his rivalry with the "professors" as he termed the professional criminals, but it is only the police and their sycophantic press who call Sherlock Holmes an amateur.
Professional history was in its infancy in the nineteenth century, although Conan Doyle himself in his youth had known two of Scotland's leading professional historians, Cosmo Innes (after whom his brother was names) the Professor of Constitutional Law and History at Edinburgh University, and John Hill Burton (to whom his writings make many hidden references) the Historiographer Royal for Scotland. As far as history was concerned, if he had not been to school, he had met the scholars, as the Irish say, and the scholars had certainly given him some private education. But he was a professional in medicine, whence so much of his writing and his approach to history derived; and he was a professional in writing, of which history "was at once a branch and a method. His most inspirational authorities in writing in general and in history in particular were Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Babington Macaulay, and he learned from them the necessity of insisting on social, popular, sub-literary sources as a means of recovering the past. He also derived inspiration from their achievement as innovators, and we misunderstand him if we imagine that he lacked innovative powers and intentions. He was conscientious in indicating his debt to specific sources, and extremely anxious to show his proficiency in data already assembled and agreed upon by the authorities, but he experimented with history as he had with medicine and with literature. What we need to do now is look at the problems to which he addressed himself and consider what he added to what was known and, more important, bow he invited his readers to reconsider their ways of looking at specific problems.
To measure his achievements will not be easy. The White Company is so effective in its use of episodic material to bridge the gap between short story and novel what its ease in consumption prevents our inquiring, where was it going? It is gratefully read as a tale of mediaeval chivalry, and we can look closer within it and recognise how, lacking a first-person narrator, it works its magic by the mingling of intellectual and anti-intellectual, realist and romantic, body and soul in Orwell's term, head and heart in mine. But the specific nature of the quest itself has received oddly little attention. It now emerges that Conan Doyle had discovered an area beyond the classical lines of Anglo-French conflict during the Hundred Years' War, and that in deing so he had opened up questions whose significance historians are only coming to appreciate in our time. We must await the publication of the results of the researches of Professor Kenneth Fowler, of Edinburgh, before we can make any satisfactory assessment of The White Company, and he will draw on documentary evidence from French and Spanish archives hidden from Conan Doyle. But as of now we can salute in Conan Doyle the achievement of a writer who, seeking a subject in mediaeval history, found a problem of which historical writing in bis own day and for a century since was to show itself largely destitute of knowledge. He realised that his imaginary Sir Nigels and his real Bertrand de Guesclins had to be considered outside as well as inside the assumptions of national conflict with which bis contemporaries viewed the France and England of the Hundred Years' War. He pursued it into a story of heroism, brutality, rapacity, chivalry, clericalism, anti-clericalism, diplomacy, and war: he compounded it by producing a delightful if fantastic hero in Sir Nigel and showing how his profession, obsessions and preoccupations resulted in his best efforts being spent to assist one of the ugliest figures in mediaeval politics, Pedro the Cruel. So far from Conan Doyle being merely derivative, he had a genius for combining the assessment of what had been accomplished, and then driving himself to use the same techniques in directions where the implications were untested and often uncharted. He threw himself thoroughly into the period with his Froissart; he had no modern guides, advisers or above all technical apparatus to further his quest. One is tempted to say that he was well fitted to write about chivalric quest, whether Sir Nigel's or (often) Sherlock Holmes's, for he himself pursued the possibilities of the past with the same Quixotic energy, resourcefulness, humour and spirit.
We may also notice a further factor, which in some ways links him to the work of the archaeologist in whom, (witness his character of Dr. Mortimer in The Hound of the Baskervilles,) he had a strong interest. He followed Scott in looking closely at specific historical objects and allowing himself to draw deductions, perhaps even paranormal deductions, from their examination. His use of the mirror at Holyrood, in "The Silver Mirror", evidently something recalled from his father's work on the mantelpiece in that Palace, gives us a vivid illustration not only of how to write a ghost story, but how to present a historical event in a single moment of observation: the mirror at once being medium and microscope. He played with the idea in more horrific terms in "The Leather Funnel" but here our admiration and indeed our apprehension at the artistic achievement should not cloud us to the scientific work carried out on the funnel itself as a means of showing the nature of the event described and of the person subjected to it, quite apart from the hideous dream its presence calls up. "Giant Maximin" is prompted by a coin, and here it is instructive to see the awareness of numismatics joined to analysis prompted by phenomena seen in his own lifetime and career — the loss of identity on the periphery in the pursuit of metropolitan success, and the destruction so probable within it, in many other points of history as that in question in the decline of the Roman empire. The story of Maximin's career and death end:
- I sit in my study, and upon the table before me lies a denarius of Maximin, as fresh as when the triumvir of the Temple of Juno Moneta sent it from the mint. Around it are recorded his resounding titles — Imperator Maximinus, Pontifex Maximinus, Tribunitia potestate, and the rest. In the centre is the impress of a great craggy head, a massive jaw, a rude fighting face, a contracted forehead. For all the pompous roll of titles it is a peasant's face, and I see him not as the Emperor of Rome, but as the great Thracian boor who strode down the hill-side on that far-distant summer day when first the eagles beckoned him to Rome.
As a doctor, Conan Doyle was accustomed to seeing human beings stripped of their protective social frills, of their ordinary garments, sometimes even of their skin and underlying tissue. It was his greatness that led him to believe more, not less, in human dignity with that knowledge. But it meant that he was no more impressed by the disguises history throws around its actors than those which modern life gives to its profiteers. In much the same way, Holmes finds in the portrait of the Cavalier Hugo Baskerville a family resemblance:
- "Do you see anything there?"
- I looked at the broad plumed hat, the curling love-locks, the white lace collar, and the straight, severe face which was framed between them. It was not a brutal countenance, but it was prim, hard, and stern, with a firm-set, thin-lipped mouth, and a coldly intolerant eye.
- "Is it like anyone you know?"
- "There is something of Sir Henry about the jaw."
- "Just a suggestion, perhaps. But wait an instant!" He stood upon a chair, and, holding up the light in his left hand, he curved his right arm over the broad hat and round the long ringlets.
- "Good heavens!" I cried in amazement.
- The face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas.
- "Ha, you see it now. My eyes have been trained to examine faces and not their trimmings. It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise."
And it should also be the first quality of a historian.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
