Conan Doyle as Poet
Conan Doyle as Poet is an article written by E. H. Lacon Watson published in The Bookman (UK version) in august 1929.
This essay reassesses Arthur Conan Doyle as a poet, arguing that his patriotic ballads and war songs, particularly in Songs of Action, reveal emotional sincerity and narrative vigour often overlooked by readers who know him chiefly as a novelist. While acknowledging unevenness, it contends that his best verse captures the heroic spirit and moral temper of his age.
Conan Doyle as Poet
I dare say a good many readers — even those exceptionally intelligent readers who peruse these pages — may be mildly surprised at this heading. Conan Doyle a poet? But that is the penalty of popularity. The vast majority know Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes and, perhaps. Brigadier Gerard. A respectable number recollect "The White Company" and "Sir Nigel," "Rodney Stone" and "The Refugees." Others may know him best by his war histories (to produce two such works as "The Great Boer War" and the recently issue of "British Campaigns in France and Flanders" (1) would have been enough work for most of us or by his various journalistic knight-errantries on behalf of the oppressed, or by his crusade against materialism. But I suspect only a few, relatively speaking, of his many admirers are aware that there has been published a collected edition of his poems, and that this has recently been reproduced in a cheaper form. (2) I write "relatively speaking," but it is clear that even that small proportion is not altogether inconsiderable. Not all our living poets can boast a "collected edition" at a popular price. Even in verse there is a more than negligible market for the works of Conan Doyle.
I do not know that he ranks himself seriously among the great poets. Probably not. To this collected edition he has prefixed a foreword in verse:
- "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 underrate the trees;
- And so you see the purpose
- Of such little rhymes as these."
Not many writers have deliberately announced their intention of entering any held in literature with the sole idea of supplying a foil to their betters. Not many of our moderns, at any rate. Io am reminded of that amiable humorist, Jerome K. Jerome, who has perhaps never been estimated quite at his just value, when he brought out his "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" — how many of us can remember that book coming out, and how it sold, and how Superior People talked disparagingly of the New Humour! In his preface he said quite bluntly:
- "This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever, All I can suggest is, that when you get tired of reading 'the best hundred books,' you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change."
There was something about the writers of that vintage, whether they were really more modest than their successors or not. I think they were, though perhaps this preliminary apologia was little more than a polite doffing of the cap to the critic. But there was a simplicity about them. They were not too much vexed by subtle cross-currents. They made a direct appeal to the emotions; their sense of humour was broad; they scented decadence in the young men and women who were beginning to write in the "Yellow Book," and publish little volumes of essays or verse in Vigo Street. They mistrusted anything that looked tired, or affected, or that savoured of the end of that so glorious century. The good old virtues were enough for them, They still believed in Patriotism. They thought the better class of English public schoolboy the salt of the earth. They preached the early Kipling gospel — keep your pores open and your mouth shut. It was well to be a White Man — and to shoulder his burden cheerfully.
In effect, they believed in health, and sanity, and the Manly Virtues. They even believed in the value of discipline and hard work. They thought perhaps that a little fighting now and then was good for the soul's health. The Great War had not arrived then to destroy the last vestige of the romance of battles.
Has it altogether destroyed it even now? Gunpowder, that filthy invention, was thought once to have done its business; will poison gas, flame throwers, bombing from the air, unrestricted submarine warfare, have a more decisive effect? Probably — indeed almost certainly — no! After every big war there has always come this inevitable reaction. Naturally, the bigger the war the longer the interval required for this partial recovery. We are still after more than ten years not back to the normal. Those sentiments which our poets voiced during, and just after, the little affair in South Africa that looked so big at the time seem to us now out of tune with modern ideas. Just at present we are inclined to regard the old brand of patriotism as parochial. We must be citizens of the world, aiming at a League of Nations that will at last put down war by force of public opinion. We listen to the songs of a Tyrtaeus with a suspicious frown.
Conan Doyle is a Tyrtaeus, without question. He has written a number of war songs and, generally speaking, they are among his best. There were bound to be war songs in his first volume, "Songs of Action," which was published in 1898. It opened with "The Song of the Bow":
- "What of the bow?
- The bow was made in England:
- Of true wood, of yew-wood,
- The wood of English bows;
- So men who are free
- Love the old yew-tree
- And the land where the yew-tree grows."
The five verses of this poem are typical Doyle: short, straightforward, simple, and full of sturdy patriotic feeling. This is, in fact, just the sort of thing that Conan Doyle can do superlatively well. He believes in his country, and its breed; he rejoices in its ancient glories. Give him too some old story, from Froissart or another, that touches the heroic, and he can do a ballad like "Cremona" or a lytic like that which he calls "A Forgotten Tale." Or again let the cheese-paring Treasury decide that some old battleship, famed in history, should be sold abroad. and his knight-errant lance is couched at once — facit indignatio versus:
- "Who says the Nation's purse is lean,
- Who fears for claim of 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."
I like best in this first volume of his, as is only natural, those verses that have been written under the stress of some real emotion. This is one, and "The Home-coming of the Eurydice" is another; and there is also that ballad of the ranks in which each stanza begins with the words, "Who carries the gun?" But there are others that are worth attention — "The Franklin's Maid," for example, from "The White Company," and a short poem in a different vein called "A Tragedy," and a selection of hunting songs, some of which, like "The Old Grey Fox," deserve to become classics of the chase.
Some of them, it is true, merely rollick. But your poet can afford to rollick at times. Did not Robert Browning rollick now and again — in "The Pied Piper" for example? Still, I am not going to say that "Songs of Action" is first-class poetry all through. I admit that there are some verses in it that seem to me to miss fire. "The Storming Party" is to my mind one of them. This is an attempt to tell in rhyme what might possibly have been done in prose, as a short story, but even in this form would have taxed Doyle's powers. "Corporal Dick's Promotion" fails for the same reason. These two were stories in which the author saw possibilities of a dramatic point, but they had not really moved him — or at any rate not moved him enough to produce real poetry. So too he included in this first volume of his one or two pieces that were merely the result of high spirits — such as "The Farnshire Cup." It is good, rollicking stuff, and goes with a lilt, but it is verse that any competent writer could produce at will, However, that is neither here nor there. One must judge poets by the highest peaks they attain — not by the occasional swampy flats to which they may descend.
It was in 1874, we learn in Doyle's "Memories and Adventures," that his literary talent first began to manifest itself in the direction of verse. He was then, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, in the second highest class at Stonyhurst; and in that division it was apparently customary for an occasional copy of verses to be demanded as a task, on a given theme. I do not know how far our public schools have advanced now from the standard of my own day, but in 1874 this was something of a novelty. Latin and Greek verse might be all very well, but to labour at turning out a copy of English verse seemed to most boys then a dreary and unnatural task. I do not know that Doyle's heroics were any better, or noticeably worse, than most efforts of this kind. The particular theme set on the occasion to which he refers in his reminiscences was "The Crossing of the Red Sea." Three excerpts survive:
- "Like pallid daisies in a grassy wood
- So round the sward the tents of Israel stood"
ran the opening. Then, with a military touch:
- "There was no time for thought and none for fear,
- For Egypt's horse already pressed their rear."
There, one might say, spoke the future war correspondent. And then, finally, the climax:
- "One horrid cry! The tragedy was o'er,
- And Pharaoh with his army seen no more."
For a boy of fifteen these lines were not too bad. The author himself, looking back over half a century or so, gives as his verdict, "Workmanlike, though wooden and conventional." His contemporaries at school, it seems, thought them almost miraculous. At any rate they served to give the boy a start on the poetic path, and no doubt (as he shortly afterwards became editor of the college magazine) incited him to write a good deal of immature verse. Then he went out into the great world and had to make his way, with no time to waste in amusements that were unlikely to be profitable. It was not until he was writing "The White Company," some sixteen years later, that he tried his hand again at serious verse, writing for that excellent romance two excellent songs, "The Franklin's Maid" and "The Song of the Bow." Then he was silent again until war came and stirred his pulses once more.
"Songs of the Road" did not come out until 1911. It is perhaps the least satisfactory of the three collections that have now been brought together in a single volume, but it has its interest as a milestone. There are a few verses in it that I should like to cut out, but there are also half a dozen or more that have the tight authentic note in them, together with several, like "Religio Medici," "Mind and Matter" and "Darkness," that show traces of what we now discern to have been an incipient rebellion against too material a view of life. I think the story in verse that he calls "Now then, Smith" is the most characteristic piece in the collection. It sings, as Doyle was always fond of singing, the epic of the man behind the gun:
- "'Now then, Smith!' the skipper said.
- And at the word the thing was done.
- But where is Smith, whose hand and head
- Have played a match with death and won?
- He's just a chap among the chaps,
- Unknown, unhonoured, as before,
- And there he'll stay until perhaps
- The world has need of him once more."
That story might go into a new edition of the "Lyra Heroica." And so might many others — "The Guards Came Through," from the latest of the three slender volumes, among them, and perhaps "Ragtime," from the same collection. There is a strong family likeness between the poems of Conan Doyle and those of his predecessor, author of "The Private of the Buffs," and the other poems that appear in W. E. Henley's famous anthology. Sir Francis Hastings Doyle may not have been a great poet, nor is Sir Arthur, but both to my mind have the root of the matter in them. They can stir the pulses — even if it be only once or twice in a dozen attempts — and that is a great thing to do. They seem to have a saner, sounder outlook upon life than most of our modern poets. In Henley's own words, they use their art "to set forth, as only art can, the beauty of the joy of living, the beauty and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion — to a cause, an ideal, a passion even — the dignity of resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism."
(1) "The British Campaigns in Europe, 1914-18." (Geoffrey Bles.)
(2) "Collected Poems of Conan Doyle." New and cheaper edition. (John Murray.)
