Introduction to Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Introduction to Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by Harold Orel published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 3, 1992).
This introductory essay to Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle surveys the immense cultural impact of Sherlock Holmes while reassessing Conan Doyle's broader literary output, including historical fiction, war writing, science fiction, and spiritualist works. It traces the evolution of Conan Doyle criticism, from early reception and Baker Street scholarship to modern academic reassessments of his artistic, historical, and ideological significance.
Introduction to Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Editor's Note:
A review of Professor Orel's new book appears in the review section of this issue of the Journal. As stated in that review, the book contains a number of important. difficult-to-find articles and it is impossible to do full justice to the contents within the confines of a short review. With the publisher's permission, we are reproducing Professor Orel's Introduction to the new book, so that members can judge for themselves the variety and importance of the articles which have been included. The Introduction is abridged and adapted with permission of G K Hall. an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company, from Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited, with Introduction, by Harold Orel. Copyright © 1992 by G K Hall. [With the exception of a few minor textual changes, the Introduction is reprinted in its entirety].
Since Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in 1887, more than a full century has elapsed; the Great Detective seems to have become immortal. He is certainly much written about. The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, compiled by Ronald Burt De Waal, (1) was followed by a companion volume, The International Sherlock Holmes. (2) These two bibliographies list more than 12000 items, and a third volume is being prepared.
Studies of Holmes' cases, the iconography of Holmes, parodies and travesties, as well as works on contemporary history and sociology, are so numerous that one can hardly credit the fact that Conan Doyle wrote only 60 stories — 56 short stories and 4 novels and two pastiches about Holmes and Watson. More than 50 Sherlockian periodicals are published today. Workshops on Holmes' achievements are regularly offered at American universities. A three-volume paper edition of 1,848 pages was published in the People's Republic of China in the late 1980s. A large alcove devoted to Holmes publications, set aside in Tokyo's largest bookstore to celebrate the one hundredth year since he was first introduced to the public (1987), did a thriving business. The societies devoted to Holmes include the Baker Street Irregulars, the Red Circle, Mrs Hudson's Cliff Dwellers, the Montague Street Lodgers, the Noble Bachelors, the Scowrers and Molly Maguires, the Blind German Mechanics, the Cremona Fiddlers, the Clients of Sherlock Holmes, the Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problems, the Devil's Foot Society, the Giant Rats of Sumatra, the Five Orange Pips, the Three Garridebs, the Priory Scholars, und so weiter.
More than 500 films and radio and television adaptations have been made.
Some Holmes enthusiasts have accumulated collections of more than 20,000 items. Several actors have found it possible to make a living from impersonating either Holmes or Conan Doyle talking about Holmes. Tourists in London often find their way to the second floor of the Sherlock Holmes pub on Northumberland Street, only a 10-minute walk from Trafalgar Square. There they can inspect the reproduction of the sitting room at 221B Baker Street, originally prepared by the London borough of St Marylebone for the Festival of Britain in 1951, at which it was probably the most popular single exhibit. At least three other sitting-room replicas are tourist attractions in other countries.
In 1953 a large number of Englishmen and women dressed in Victorian costumes turned out for the opening of the Baker Street line on the Underground. In 1968 six women tried to force their way into a dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars, all of whom were men; their effort was frustrated by a vigorous counteroffensive. The women thereupon formed their own national organisation, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes; their journal, The Serpentine Muse, has a wider readership than just their membership. As the New York Times noted, 'As with the Baker Street Irregulars, membership is limited: petitioners are rarely admitted at their first request.' (3)
It may be that the best way to begin these prefatory remarks to a collection of essays and reviews based on the life and career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is to examine the extraordinary game, played by most members of the BSI (Baker Street Irregulars). that posits as its basic assumption a conviction that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are historical figures, and that Conan Doyle is a figment of their imagination — or at best acts as Dr. Watson's literary agent. The Baker Street Journal, founded in 1946, makes this assumption very plain, and indeed its contents in issue after issue simply continue a tradition established by the popular book Profile by Gaslight (1944). Long essays to this effect were written for that volume by Heywood Broun, Stephen Vincent Benet, Rex Stout, Christopher Morley, Dorothy Sayers, and Alexander Woolcott.
But did not this pretence begin as an attitude in the 1890s? A half-century before the publication of Profile by Gaslight, Andrew Lang meticulously destroyed Holmes' explanation of which candidate for the Fortescue Scholarship copied the examination papers in 'The Adventure of the Three Students'. Lang demonstrated that the story's explanation could not be believed; he demanded to know if Holmes were hiding the true explanation. (Conan Doyle never responded to the challenge, but then, so far as Lang was concerned, Conan Doyle's opinion was irrelevant to the problem posed.)
In 1912 Ronald A Knox, at the time an undergraduate at Oxford University and later one of England's leading Roman Catholic prelates, delivered to the Gryphon Club of Trinity College a lecture entitled 'Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.' It was cast in the form of a satire on contemporary German scholarship, and it postulated 11 basic parts of a Sherlock Holmes story; it even made space for a Deutero-Holmes and a Deutero- Watson.
Conan Doyle was amazed that Knox had got so much more out of his stories than he had put into them, though it was difficult for him to remain amused as the rules of the New Scholarship were hammered into place. These rules insisted that all characters in the stories really lived; that one must never mention the fact that they were real (fictional? Ed.) people; and that all questions of the Canon had to be treated with seriousness. As Dorothy Sayers wrote in 1946, 16 years after Conan Doyle had died, 'The rule of the game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's. The slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.' (4)
Thus, a plaque commemorating the first meeting of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson has been set up in St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. A steep elevation near Tulsa, Oklahoma, is today named Holmes Peak, despite a four-year struggle with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and, for that matter, the Catholic diocese of Tulsa, which owned part of the hill. A letter was written to the pope, reminding him that Sherlock Holmes had rendered a number of valuable services to the Vatican; the question was promptly settled in Holmes' favour.
Cait Murphy has collected these and similar stories of how far Holmes devotees are prepared to go, and in her wonderful essay 'The Game's Still Afoot' she describes how a number of dedicated readers were so impressed by the unfortunate wounding of Dr. Watson by a Jezail bullet at the battle of Maiwand (1890) — a bullet that shattered his bone and grazed the subclavian artery that they voted to erect a statue in Afghanistan, on the battlefield of Maiwand. They had actually worked out an agreement with the government of that nation in 1977 when the Russians invaded, putting a halt to their plans. (The money for the statue had already been committed.) Some of the Maiwand Jezails (such is their name in Nebraska) wanted to hire someone who would fly into Maiwand, touching down briefly but long enough to permit the inflation of a portable monument there. The project didn't fly, alas, but this inspired project may yet rise again. (5)
Scholars are intrigued by the question of how many times Dr. Watson married, since the Holmes stories seem to suggest confusingly that the good doctor married more than once. For that matter, we are not sure whether Watson was really struck in the shoulder by a Jezail bullet; though the opening paragraphs of A Study in Scarlet identify the location as the shoulder, later stories in the Holmes canon speak of the wound as being in the leg. A dread prospect looms before us: the wording of any plaque attached to a statue erected in Maiwand will either have to fudge the issue or ignore it altogether.
The Holmes stories represent little more than 10 per cent of Conan Doyle's total output. Conan Doyle could have written more Holmes stories than he did; no one had the formula more firmly under control. Though he complained about the mechanical aspects of plot construction, he experienced few difficulties in developing ideas suitable for the length of a contribution to the Strand Magazine.
Moreover, he was offered impressive sums of money to continue writing them, far more than the $5,000 to $8,000 per story that made him shortly after the appearance of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901-2 — the highest priced writer of fiction in England. George H Doran, the Canadian-born American publisher, once proposed to Conan Doyle that, since he declined to write further Sherlock Holmes adventures in anything like their old form, he might undertake to write a biography of Dr. Watson, the friend and Boswell of Sherlock Holmes, and thus create perfectly legitimate vehicle for further cases. Conan Doyle responded that the idea was good indeed, the best he had heard for the revival of Sherlock Holmes — but that he could not take himself away from his psychic work. And shortly afterward he died.
When Raymond Blathwayt, one of the pioneers of the celebrity interview, published his record of an encounter with Conan Doyle, Conan Doyle remarked that he had based Holmes on Dr Joe Bell of the medical faculty at Edinburgh University. (6) He had been greatly impressed by Dr Bell's ability, while sitting in the patients' waiting room 'with a face like a Red Indian,' to diagnose an individual as he or she came in, even before the person had uttered a word. 'So I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes,' Conan Doyle went on. Even then Conan Doyle was tiring of his creation: 'Sherlock Holmes is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect.' He was quick to add that the best detective in fiction was Edgar Allan Poe's Monsieur Dupin and, after him, Monsieur Le Cocq, Gaboriau's hero. 'The greatest defect in detective fiction,' Conan Doyle told Blathwayt, 'is that he obtains results without any obvious reason. That is not fair, it is not art.' (7) Conan Doyle's affections were dedicated to his historical novels; his love for them should not be underestimated. He boasted time and again of The White Company as the best thing he had ever written. 'I endeavoured in that to reconstruct the whole of the fourteenth century,' he added, and he noted that Scott had always avoided this historical period. Indeed, he said, he had read 150 books in preparation for writing The White Company.
In an interview with Harry How that same year, Conan Doyle 'revealed' his trick of literary construction in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: invariably first to conceive the end of the story and then to write up to it. (9) His art lay in the ingenious way in which he concealed from the reader what the climax would be. A Holmes story took him about one week to write, and the ideas came at all manner of times — when out walking, cricketing, tricycling, or playing tennis. He worked between the hours of breakfast and lunch, and again in the evening from five to eight, writing some 3000 words a day. He was so confident that his next story was unsolvable that he even bet his wife a shilling that she would not guess the true solution of it until she got to the end of the chapter.
Early in 1893, toward the end of winter, Conan Doyle made up his mind about his popular fictional hero. In a conversation with Silas K Hocking, author of Her Benny (a tale of Liverpool streets, written for children, that sold more than a million copies), Conan Doyle confessed, 'The fact is, he has got to be an "old man of the sea" about my neck, and I intend to make an end of him. If I don't he'll make an end of me.' (10)
At the time, Hocking, Conan Doyle, and the archbishop of Canterbury were staying at the Rifel Alp Hotel, above Zermatt. They went for a walk to the Findelan Glacier. 'How are you going to do it?' Hocking asked Conan Doyle. 'I haven't decided yet.' Conan Doyle laughed. 'But I'm determined to put an end to him somehow. Rather rough on an old friend,' Hocking said, 'who has brought you fame and fortune. The archbishop, Edward White Benson, made a strong case for the continuance of Holmes. Finally, Hocking said, 'If you are determined on making an end of Holmes. why not bring him out to Switzerland and drop him down a crevasse? It would save funeral expenses.' Conan Doyle laughed. 'Not a bad idea.' (11) Shortly thereafter, Holmes, in 'The Adventure of The Final Problem,' disappeared over the Reichenbach Falls. The news of Holmes' supposed death, locked in the arms of Professor Moriarty as the two men fell into the swirling falls, caused consternation when the Strand Magazine appeared in December 1893. The strong public reaction against this heartless act, which Greenhough Smith, Conan Doyle's editor, and George Newnes, Conan Doyle's publisher, had both tried to avert, was without parallel in English literary history. A Holmes story itself could raise the Strand Magazine's circulation by more than 100,000 copies. Now, realising that no more Holmes stories would be written, some 20,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions. The Prince of Wales expressed dismay. In Piccadilly and in the City, young men wore mourning bands of black for Sherlock Holmes. One woman sent Conan Doyle a letter of remonstrance that began with the salutation 'You brute. Years later, in his autobiography Memories and Adventures. Conan Doyle admitted he had been 'utterly callous' but, he defiantly went on, was 'only glad to have a chance of opening out into new fields of imagination, for the temptation of high prices made it difficult to get one's thoughts away from Holmes. (12)
For years there was no shaking Conan Doyle's conviction that Sherlock Holmes was merely a mechanical creature, not a man of flesh and blood, and easy to create because he was soulless. One story by Edgar Allan Poe would be worth a dozen such.' (13)
Conan Doyle was moving on to greener pastures and believed that little more could be done with Holmes or, to be more precise, he did not want to do that little more. He was also modest about the value or originality of Holmes as a literary creation. He always gave full credit to his illustrator, Sidney Paget, and to William Gillette, the actor-manager who wrote the long-running play based on the Holmes stories. Trying to figure out a plot twist that would interest the audience, Gillette, while working on the script. cabled Conan Doyle from America, 'May I marry Sherlock Holmes?' Conan Doyle's response was a cable: 'You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like with him.'
In 1921 Arthur Guiterman, a minor critic, tried to identify Holmes with his creator. Conan Doyle was extremely annoyed at this 'interpretation.' He sent a verse letter to London Opinion, the journal in which Guiterman had made the observation. Into his normally equable temperament a darker hint of ill-temper might be seen to move:
- Sure, there are limits when one cries with acidity,
- Where are the limits of human stupidity?...
- Pray master this, my esteemed commentator,
- That the created is not the creator.
- Just grasp this fact with your cerebral tentacle,
- That the doll and its maker are never identical. (14)
The savagery of the thrust was surely related to Conan Doyle's abiding suspicion that, in spending so much time on the Holmes- Watson stories, he had diverted his best creative talents away from an entirely different kind of fiction.
Some Baker Street Irregulars have expressed uneasiness about what happened to Holmes after Conan Doyle resurrected him. They have argued that the final period of Holmes' life was weakly plotted and heavily reliant on ideas that had already been used in better ways; that an inartistic sense of macabre effects had seemed to come to the fore; and that revolting illnesses, exotic poisons, and so forth, proliferated in stories written right up to Holmes' final appearance. (15)
Still another reason lay beneath Conan Doyle's conviction that his historical romances, as a whole, constituted a superior body of work. He was uneasily aware that Holmes' knowledge of chemistry was more superficial than an author needed as a basis for Holmes' solutions to difficult cases. Holmes resembled Conan Doyle in that he knew some simple inorganic chemistry and just enough organic chemistry to understand how the body worked. Dr. Watson told us, in A Study in Scarlet, that Holmes knew a great deal about belladonna, opium, and poisons generally, and had a practical but limited knowledge of geology, an unsystematic sense of anatomy, and no interest in astronomy. Later stories contradicted this listing of what Holmes knew and didn't know, but there is no evidence that Holmes benefited from electricity; he owned no colorimeter; and he never used the basic absorption spectroscope, which was in wide use by the 1880s. Dr. Watson must have been mistaken when he claimed that Holmes invented 'a reagent which is precipitated by haemoglobin and by nothing else, or that Holmes at a glance could distinguish the ash of any known brand of either cigar or tobacco. (16)
When Holmes diluted a drop of blood in a litre of water, the degree of dilution had to be one part of 50,000 (1/50 ml in 1,000 ml), yet Holmes declared flatly that the proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million. (17)
Holmes did not bother to refer problems to the analytical laboratories of his day. He did not depend on fingerprint identification, though Galton's identification system was well known. In 'The Engineer's Thumb' he confused an amalgam with an alloy. He talked about a blue carbuncle despite the fact that carbuncles are a variety of garnet, and always red, never blue. He spoke of a 40-gram weight of crystallised charcoal when every diamond merchant would have measured its weight in carats. (18)
In Memories and Adventures Conan Doyle confessed with some chagrin that he had been mistaken in writing, in 'The Adventure of the Priory School', that Holmes could tell by looking at a bicycle track on a damp moor which way it was heading. 'I had so many remonstrances upon this point,' Conan Doyle wrote, 'varying from pity to anger, that I took out my bicycle and tried. I had imagined that the observations of the way in which the track of the hind wheel overlaid the track of the front one when the machine was not running dead straight would show the direction. I found that my correspondents were right and I was wrong, for this would be the same whichever way the cycle was moving.' (19)
Hence, it is most likely that Conan Doyle grew tired, over the years, of being criticised for getting his details wrong, particularly since Holmes insisted that whereas others might see, he observed, and observed accurately. Conan Doyle, who could be a dedicated researcher when it came to details about a South American jungle or a period of mediaeval history, simply didn't care enough about Holmes to spend the time needed for authenticating his scientific data. After all, he believed that Holmes' character admitted of no light or shade. That was tiresome enough in itself. But Conan Doyle, on more than one occasion, said that Dr. Watson never showed one gleam of humour or made one single joke: Holmes and Watson were not real characters.
So much for Conan Doyle's ability to judge fairly the quality of what he had written in the Holmes- Watson canon. Though the wisdom of vox populi may often be questioned, the pleasure of six generations of readers will not be significantly reduced even if additional factual errors are discovered in the stories, or if a larger number of details turn out, on closer examination, to be ungenerous with the truth. Conan Doyle. though a giant in the flesh and one of the most colourful of all Victorian authors, will doubtless continue to seem less vivid, for many of his readers, than any of the 60 Holmes stories.
I
Opening the first part of this anthology is an elegantly written speculation about the problems created by an inconsistent use of Dr. Watson's first name. Dorothy L Sayers was a prime mover in the campaign to eliminate Arthur Conan Doyle from all consideration of the 'Canon', and she proceeds here (and elsewhere) on the basis of an assumption that most textual inconsistencies will yield to a rational approach. Goodwill is often unable to clear up the mystery, and anyhow, Holmes himself would approve of her assumption. It sweeps away cobwebs. One feels reassured that ambiguities and unresolved tensions in the text will ultimately be eliminated. And one derives additional reassurance from Sayers' argument that Dr. Watson sometimes rendered evidence inadequately or produced only a partial transcript of what went on.
A much-needed corrective to the usual patronising treatments of Dr. Watson can be found in Peter V Conroy's stimulating essay. After all, Watson is also one of the great fictional creations of the Victorian age. His intellectual powers are less than those of Holmes, but then, so are everyone else's. Watson, Conroy reminds us, is not only a competent doctor and Holmes' most loyal friend but also the very capable chronicler of Holmes' exploits. What a dreary comedown it would be if Holmes narrated all his own stories — or, an equally depressing though, Inspector Lestrade, or Mrs Hudson! The art of Dr. Watson's storytelling receives here a generous (and long-overdue) encomium. Inevitably Conroy's treatment reminds us that much of the power of the Holmes stories derives from the skill with which Conan Doyle characterises the good doctor.
Recent scholarship suggests that Holmes' personality and methodology can profitably be set against a larger historical setting, a context of Victorian history. Stephen Knight's investigation of 'the Great Detective' can be taken in conjunction with a provocative sociological inquiry conducted by Christopher Clausen. These two essays define Holmes as a commentary by Conan Doyle (however indirect) on the darker side of Victorian life. There was certainly much to deplore in industrial England, a savagery of doctrine and practice that constituted, in Knight's phrase, an 'economic world-view' of 'city workers, clerks and businessmen who patronised The Strand. A Victorian might even despair at the knowledge that so much evil had been so triumphant in a society supposedly dedicated to the ideals of science and progress. Knight's emphasis on anxiety as an underestimated factor of Victorian life is surely justified, though whether sexual tensions are as significant in Conan Doyle's fiction as they were in the short stories of any number of practitioners — George Gissing. Ella D'Arcy, George Egerton, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Rudyard Kipling, and Thomas Hardy, among many others is more debatable. It is noteworthy that Knight stresses the role played by the audience 'in the constitution of cultural ideology.'
Clausen's angle of approach suggests that he has far more on his mind than simply nostalgia or an appreciation of Conan Doyle's entertainment values. Clausen argues convincingly that the solutions to appalling crimes cannot be conceived by detectives like Lestrade, who are wedded to the orthodoxies of their profession and the platitudes of their age. Holmes stands outside the system. His eccentricities emphasise the need of modern heroes to separate themselves from the assumptions held by less imaginative contemporaries (Dr. Watson among them). Yet he never questions the aristocracy or industrialism; he refuses to indict institutions; he does not threaten the established order even as he pursues clues, identifies malefactors. and brings them to justice. Clausen ends by remarking that the decline in artistic merit of the later stores was related to an increasing public faith in the police, as well as to a growing conviction that crime would not deal a mortal blow to civilisation after all.
The remaining five essays in this part examine significant and rarely explored aspects of the Holmes- Watson stories that so frequently elicit love letters rather than serious criticism. Paul Barolsky, disturbed by what he regards as a strange neglect of major consideration, examines the relationship of Holmes to the fin de siecle. Though one may scoff at the notion of Holmes as a 'closet aesthete', the evidence amassed by Barolsky, linking the detective to Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray, is formidable. Holmes regards his profession as an art; he often speaks in the language patterns of an aesthete of the 1890s; he uses drugs to stimulate the senses; he relates details to overall impressions (his method resembles that of Bernard Berenson, who in turn was influenced by Pater); and he enjoys using theatrical gifts'. The essay concludes with an examination of the ways in which Holmes' ability to penetrate disguises looks forward to Nabokov's fictions.
Kim Herzinger's observation that dilettantism in Sherlock Holmes studies is defensible (she does a pretty good job of defending it) is based on the premise that Holmes repeatedly succeeds in the resolution of cases beyond the mere commonplace' and does so by creating his own world 'entirely.' Detection, instead of being bound by the restrictions of law, has been converted by Holmes to an art. Holmes is aroused by one thing, not by any thing.' Herzinger states, and it marks him as a dilettante, just as the kinds of cases he chooses mark him as an aesthete, an aesthete of detection. (The point resembles, but in subtle respects differs from, Barolsky's listing of the ways in which Holmes' character and method have affinities to those of the declared aesthetes of the 1890's.) Herzinger's essay, filled with provocative opinions and aperçus, redirects our attention to reader response, 'the matter of (Holmes') appeal.
Dr Pasquale Accardo's analysis of how Dr Joseph Bell influenced Conan Doyle's concept of ideal medical practice is as good as any that has reached print. More important, the observation-and-deduction methodology of Dr Bell was best put to use by Holmes himself. It is salutary to remember, as Dr Accardo asks us to do, that Holmes observations were not infallible; his diagnoses were frequently mistaken. But Holmes' willingness to risk doing something, to act boldly even when logic fails, is an integral element of his personality and, we should add, as Dr Accardo does, accounts for many of his successes.
Barrie Hayne, in a full-length critique of the degree to which Holmes' behaviour and conversation fulfil classic definitions of comedy, begins with a consideration of Watson's common sense, the necessary counterforce to Holmes' 'fanciful or intuitive side. Holmes and Watson may be bonded in a 'comic marriage,' but it is only ostensibly that Watson seems comic (in terms of his obtuseness). Holmes, as Hayne does well to remind us, is a character of humours. Even as he guys the police he is capable of self-irony, and on occasion exhibits an attractive insouciance. The essay avoids exaggerated claims and recognises the problems that may arise from underestimating the serious tone of cases based on the perpetration of serious crimes. Hayne reaches a strong finale in his argument that a 'large sense of fun' runs through the stories, and that the society Conan Doyle describes, though reared on reason, is not always proof against the attacks of the irrational.'
Lydia Alix Fillingham identifies a number of historical events that affected the imaginations of many Victorians: the creation of the Criminal Investigations Department, the astonishing growth of Mormonism in the New World, the proliferation of secret societies and brotherhoods throughout Europe, assassinations and bombings in Europe, and the increasingly violent history of Ireland in the latter years of the century. She notes accurately the interest of other writers in these themes, and the names of Robert Louis Stevenson and H. F. Wood, which she cites. might be augmented by dozens of others (including that of Henry James). They were becoming alarmed by a large, unstable, and anonymous population that was developing within the metropolitan areas of the kingdom; the growth of states within the State seemed to threaten stability. 'Holmes' reticence incarnates and justifies the minimalist impulse of the Liberal state,' Fillingham writes. Crime in Holmes' day could not be fought successfully until more information became available to the members of London's police force. Ultimately, the more efficient organisation of the bureaucracy was to become intimately linked with the development of computerlike devices and filing systems; until the needed tools were at hand, however. Holmes, as an extragovernmental agent, was a necessary means whereby the right questions' might be asked to extract information already held by the bureaucracy.' In other words, Holmes helped to 'reconcile bureaucracy and the Liberal ideology.'
II
Any fair-minded treatment must make room for the proposition that Conan Doyle, as the author of all the Holmes stories, had a larger range of interests and exhibited more diverse talents than those stories were able to demonstrate. He was a writer of several historical romances that held their own in a strongly competitive market, and (it is worth repeating) he thought much more highly of them than he did of the Holmes stories. He was a novelist who touched on a number of modern social issues. He wrote histories of both the Boer War and the Great War that were not only popular but praised highly by military experts, reviewers, and the general public. He was an active practitioner in the short story genre. He pioneered in the field of science fiction. He wrote poetry that many people liked. He pursued contemporary political and ethical questions and wrote voluminously on criminal cases and what he considered to be miscarriages of justice. And all this gave way to the subject matter of Spiritualism, on which he wrote a good deal and for which he gathered the materials of an impressive history.
Horace Green, in reviewing Our Second American Adventure, recalled that Tolstoy, 'to the last,' was ashamed of Anna Karenina. Even though it was Tolstoy's most popular novel and exhibited a high degree of artistry, the Russian regarded it as a by-product, preferring instead the sermons he recorded, in narrative form, as Resurrection and The Kreutzer Sonata. A similar chagrin was present in Conan Doyle's responses to interviewers who persisted in wanting to talk about a phase of his life that he had wanted to end only five years after the first Holmes story was published.
The Holmes stories will always form the most substantial contribution made by Conan Doyle to world literature. Libraries throughout the world will retain Holmes collections long after most fictional work by Conan Doyle's contemporaries have been discarded, sold off, or pulped. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle wrote for a public that eagerly awaited whatever his subject matter might turn out to be, and many of his devoted readers shared his view as to the relative merits of his fictions. The importance of Holmes, in other words, was instantly recognised, but the possibility that the Holmes stories surpassed in literary value anything that Conan Doyle wrote, or might write in the future, was not taken seriously by a large number of common readers until after the Great War.
The second part of this anthology reprints a representative selection of reviews and articles focusing on those other writings. Such a gathering has not been made before, and perforce these writings constitute a miniaturised reception study of an extraordinarily popular writer, one whose active career as an author spanned almost a half-century. They demonstrate the respect reviewers felt for Conan Doyle's talents, even when the reviewers believed that those talents were not worthily employed or when they argued that Conan Doyle was operating below the level of his own best endeavour. Max Beerbohm, who had a genius for detecting literary fraud, regarded Conan Doyle with good-humoured affection, despite his conviction that Conan Doyle was treating historical matters too liberally. George Bernard Shaw, customarily less forgiving of theatrical clap-trap than Beerbohm, paid his respects to a playwright- actor collaboration that worked its magic successfully (in his review of A Story of Waterloo): assessed at their due worth the 'ready-made feeling and prearranged effects of such plays, wishing them a safe journey to the music hall, 'which is their proper place now that we no longer have a 'Gallery of Illustration'; but felt constrained to add, 'I enjoy them, and am entirely in favour of their multiplication so long as it is understood that they are not the business of fine actors and first-class theatres.' And Andrew Lang, possibly England's most influential reviewer before the advent of Arnold Bennett, spoke admiringly of Conan Doyle's 'old-fashioned notion that a novelist should tell us a plain tale,' while enumerating, as a responsible critic should, the limitations of Conan Doyle's artistic technique.
In all these notices of Conan Doyle's publications one may sense more than the homage owed to a professional man of letters whose hits outnumbered his misses and who continued to turn out 'product' year after year, in the manner of such professional entertainers as Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Anthony Hope, and Rudyard Kipling. (These are the names on Lang's list, but there were many others whose action-filled narratives dominated the pages of mass-circulation periodicals in the 1880's and 1890's.) Practically all the critics genuinely liked Conan Doyle as personality, as a living force who made the commercial world of publishing a more colourful and exciting milieu. Their codicils and reservations did not subtract from their overall admiration. The anonymous commentator in the New York periodical Critic (20 July 1895) who wrote that Sherlock Holmes was not known to this generation 'as well as Detective Bucket was to a previous generation' and who added that 'It was not by one character that Dickens and Thackeray were known, but by s whole library full' was charmed by Conan Doyle's diffidence about the modest fees he had earned on a lecture tour to the United States. Thackeray and Dickens had made money, and Conan Doyle added. 'When we have another Thackeray and Dickens, they may do the same.' (21) (Conan Doyle was not placing himself in that category; the critic liked him all the more for refusing to do so).
Critics regularly noted Conan Doyle's failings: his lack of subtlety, his lapses from a strict standard of grammatical usage, his repetition of epithets as a shorthand device for characterisation. But his virtues were inseparably bound up with his weaknesses as a literary artist, and were more important. An anonymous reviewer of The Great Boer War was appalled by the 'distressing frequency' with which Conan Doyle's infinitives fell apart but conceded that Conan Doyle was both lucid and vigorous. As the song said, it 'gets there all the same by means 'not easy to analyse.' and he acknowledged that Conan Doyle had the art, so conspicuous in Froude and Macaulay and J.R. Green, of luring the reader on, even when he is weary, from one paragraph to the next.' (22) (Conan Doyle was in the very best of company. placed there by a critic who perceived the rough-and-ready blemishes of a military history written under the pressures of a publishing deadline).
James Payn's admiration of The White Company led him to the remarkable statement (one that must have pleased Conan Doyle) 'I have read nothing of the kind so good since Ivanhoe, with which it has many points of resemblance.' Yet it is curious, and perhaps illuminating, that contemporary reviewers were less interested in comparing Conan Doyle with the great romancers of the past than in comparing Conan Doyle's latest work with his previous record of publications. Laurence Hutton thought that The Refugees 'invited comparison with his own admirable work in the same kind. David Christie Murray, though he spoke of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Reade, and Stanley Weyman, was most concerned by writing problems inevitable in the re-creation of past times — problems Conan Doyle had confronted, and not always successfully solved, in novels prior to the writing of Rodney Stone.
The anonymous reviewer of A Duet with an Occasional Chorus did not enjoy the colourlessness of the main characters, the digressions about Poets' Corner and 'the matrimonial relations of Mr and Mrs Carlyle, and the slenderness of the materials used. The critic apparently did not know enough about Conan Doyle's life to respond to the strong autobiographical notes that were struck repeatedly throughout the narrative, but he did know Conan Doyle's previous writings well. The result, he wrote, 'is a book, which is certainly quite unworthy of Mr Conan Doyle's reputation, and which, indeed, considering the sort of work that he has accustomed his numerous admirers to expect from him, is, we cannot refrain from saying, a rather daring experiment on the docility of his public.'
It is understandable that the occasion of the publication of a collected edition of Conan Doyle's novels in 1903 should intensify this desire to see whether Conan Doyle repeated or excelled himself in his later publications. The reviewer for the
Athenaeum had no doubt that Conan Doyle's many admirers believed that the time was ripe for such a claim of permanence, though he (like Conan Doyle himself, be it noted) believed that others — Dickens for a certainty, probably Kipling for another. and Stevenson as well better deserved the imprimatur. Correctly measuring Holmes importance as an ineffaceable part of the English language,' the critic compared novels one with another and confessed some puzzlement as to the path of Conan Doyle's future development: 'Sir A. Conan Doyle would appear to be deserting letters for affairs, so that it is difficult at present to judge of his true quality as a writer of fiction.'
Andrew Lang, an authority on the writings of Poe and Scott, had useful things to say about Conan Doyle's indebtedness to these originators of very different literary traditions. But he believed that Conan Doyle's genius was distinctive, and not dependent. in whole or even in large measure, on what had gone before. Lang argued that those who admired Holmes did not necessarily know (or care) about Conan Doyle's literary antecedents; it was enough that Conan Doyle pleased 'a great number and variety of his fellow-citizens,' and a critic's capriciousness might be written off as irrelevant to their enjoyment. All of which did not prevent Lang from severely censuring Conan Doyle's slandering of the Andamanese in The Sign of the Four (Lang's credentials as an expert in the newly developing science of anthropology were formidable), as well as Holmes' ignorance of 'the ordinary British system of titles.'
Lang's enjoyment of Conan Doyle's unaffectedness, as expressed in the lengthy essay reprinted herein, was shared by all his fellow critics. Lang had little patience with those who imitated Meredith's ornate style. His admiration of Conan Doyle's vigorous narratives recognised, and put to one side, Conan Doyle's willingness to employ trite phrases, his inability to speculate philosophically in ways that might educe character (as Fielding and Thackeray had done), and his dull rendering of female psychology. Conan Doyle dealt with stereotypes, with good people all too readily distinguishable from bad. But 'Sir Arthur can tell a story so that you read it with ease and pleasure,' and that singular art could not be taught. No 'research, or study, or industry' could substitute for it.
It is astonishing how often this line of argument was repeated in contemporary reviews of Conan Doyle's works. It was not advanced apologetically, as if enjoyment of a storyteller's art had fallen somewhere under suspicion. Nor was it presented with exaggerated claims for Conan Doyle's respectability as an artist, complete with references to the recognised literary masters of the past. It made due allowance for Conan Doyle's honest expression of personal feeling.
I have included several reviews of Conan Doyle's plays, not only A Story of Waterloo and Rodney Stone but Fires of Fate and The House of Temperley, to indicate that Conan Doyle's relations to theatre at the turn of the century were more intense, longer sustained, and (all things considered) more successful than many readers appreciate. One anonymous reviewer, pleased by the melodramatic flourishes of Conan Doyle's adaptation of The Speckled Band. applauded Lyn Harding's portrayal of the villain Dr Rylott: 'so striking and diabolical a figure... that Sherlock Holmes in this instance is outdone. (23) Though the play had no surprises (when once Dr Rylott has been seen with his serpent, the mystery is one no longer'), it remained 'good popular drama. Indeed, the play has never been wholly forgotten by amateur theatrical companies.
For that matter, Conan Doyle's interest in lucidity and his conviction that what interested him would in turn interest a large audience led to the publication of two minor works, collections of poems, that found their audience immediately. Conan Doyle proved correct in his assumptions about the existence of a large and faithful public interested in more than simply his ability to fictionalise crime cases. This anthology is not the place to reprint assessments of his writings on real-life criminal investigations those involving Roger Casement, George Edalji, and Oscar Slater. among others for the intention of Conan Doyle, in each of these celebrated cases. was not to exploit the injustice of various legal decisions for literary profit but to argue in behalf of human beings whose right to fair trial procedures had been abused.
Also, though it is easy to accumulate a large number of essays analysing the merits and limitations of Conan Doyle's treatment of two great conflicts, the Boer War and the Great War, I have assumed from the beginning that readers will be better served by critiques of Conan Doyle's literary works. Even so, it seems necessary to record one constant in such essays: appreciation of Conan Doyle's success in setting forth a clear picture of the chain of reasoning whereby he reached any given conclusion. The defence of British soldiers against the charges of inhumanity, made in The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, was painstakingly mounted and duly noted by reviewers. The 'admirable detachment' of Conan Doyle's A History of the Great War impressed fellow historians and contemporary critics. As one reviewer wrote. 'Occasionally, as in descriptions of phases of the first battle of Ypres, there are flashes of dramatic quality in the writing of the book. But for the most part it is a 'straightaway' narrative, depending for its force not upon any charm or intensity in its presentation, but upon its quiet, lucid, well-poised record of events. (24)
The last essay in this part, George E. Slusser's tribute to Conan Doyle's pioneering work in the field of science fiction (however that genre may be defined), supplies a corrective to the view that H. G. Wells must always be remembered as England's first and best response to the storytelling challenge posed by Jules Verne. Conan Doyle's concern with the impact of scientific advances on the way human beings define their relationship to the universe was serious, well informed, and imaginatively dynamic. (Indeed, one of his enduring characterisations was of an aptly named Professor Challenger.) Conan Doyle, Slusser reminds us, 'not only asserts man's involvement in the process of making machines but raises the question of human responsibility as well. This stimulating reconsideration of Conan Doyle's science fiction tales adds an important element to our understanding of Conan Doyle's formidable narrative powers and the uses to which he put them.
III
We come, finally, to Conan Doyle's writings on Spiritualism. Literary critics have found themselves no less baffled by the content of these writings than most readers who hoped to find in Conan Doyle's latest publication a new Holmes adventure, a Professor Challenger escapade, a Brigadier Gerard story, or a narrative about times past. To say that during the last quarter-century of his life Conan Doyle became increasingly obsessed by Spiritualism as a cause is only to state a truism. It does not seem excessive to add that Conan Doyle understood well the inherent potential of that obsession to damage his literary reputation. His more skeptical contemporaries scarcely knew what to say about his lectures on the subject, his 'conversion', his investigations. his troubled relationship with the Society for Psychical research, his noisy arguments with Houdini, or his faith in the sincerity of any number of mediums who held seances he attended. What might one say about either fairies or spirit communication with the dead, two major concerns of much of Conan Doyle's writing from the Great War onward?
No consideration would be complete without acknowledgment of the signal importance of Spiritualism in Conan Doyle's imagination, or of his passionate belief that he had discovered new insights into the truth. His hostile critics he denounced as 'bumptious and ignorant' in the final pages of Memories and Adventures. (25) His rejection of Christianity was bound to offend many of his most devoted readers. Am I not far nearer to my son than if he were alive and serving in that Army Medical Service which would have taken him to the ends of the earth?' he asked. 'There is never a month, often never a week, that I do not communicate with him. Is it not evident that such facts as these change the whole aspect of life, and turn the grey mist of dissolution into a rosy dawn?' (26) But what he regarded as facts, others regarded as mistaken opinion, delusion, or worse.
E. T. Raymond, in his treatment of what he obviously considered to be an aberration from social norms, preferred the Holmes stories to the historical romances, and the historical romances to the 'spiritualistic expositions. Something (and Raymond did not seem to be sure just what) had gone wrong with Conan Doyle's respect for the truth: Conan Doyle's notion of evidence was 'a little different from that accepted in the King's Bench. Raymond's call for a 'friendly remonstrance' was that of a common reader, personally aggrieved that Conan Doyle had abandoned his formidable gifts for storytelling for 'vagaries.
More savage in his articulating of a widespread anger against fraudulent practices among spiritualists, Joseph Jastrow used the occasion of the publication of The Wanderings of a Spiritualist to denounce what he considered to be Conan Doyle's abuse of the scientific method. Jastrow would willingly have conceded to Conan Doyle the right to believe in Spiritualism as a religious consolation, but he was baffled by Conan Doyle's insistence that ectoplasm could be photographed, and by Conan Doyle's attempt to offer messages to the bereaved. Not only baffled but disgusted. Jastrow's examinations of Conan Doyle's increasingly embittered relationship with newspapers that refused to credit his discoveries or to publicise further the manifestations of apparitions that had already been proved false by other investigators is an important reminder that Conan Doyle never shirked from offending disbelievers, and that he often did so with a zest that alienated many who had hoped to remain neutral.
Jastrow's involvement with literary controversies was wider than simply a disagreement with Conan Doyle's beliefs; Jastrow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, held strong convictions about the impropriety of almost any attempt by an author of fiction to cross the boundary lines of the scientific disciplines that he defended. Nor was he the most hostile of Conan Doyle's adversaries. Others wrote more searingly about Conan Doyle's abdication of good sense. his repudiation of Holmes' methods of ratiocination, and his heavy-handed method for disposing of information that contradicted his set positions. Relatively rare was the kind of column that Heywood Broun, on one notable occasion, contributed to the Nation. Broun did not believe in Spiritualism, at least as practised by Conan Doyle's mediums. But he admired Conan Doyle's sincerity, and he thought that the ease of mind' Conan Doyle had gained for himself and for others through espousal of his doctrines was sufficient justification for continuation along the path he was following, despite jibes from the side lines. Broun noted, in a flash of shrewd insight, that the very creation of Holmes in the 1880's should have been marked, by careful observers, as the first stage of a longer pilgrimage. (Studying this connection might well become the subject of an extended analysis.) 'Most logically, Broun wrote, a belief in Spiritualism grows out of a faith and fondness for Sherlock Holmes.'
A scholarly essay by Jeffrey L. Meikle sets the larger scene by reminding readers that Conan Doyle's interest in Spiritualism grew inevitably from his hatred of a narrow-minded Roman Catholicism, his mother's 'merely nominal faith, his interest in the great agnostic scientists of the late Victorian age, his deepening involvement with the journal Light, his attendance at seances, and perhaps most important his intensifying sense of anguish caused by the holocaust of the Great War. His brother-in-law, his son, and his brother lost their lives at the front. His wife's newfound gift of automatic writing led to one 'revelation' after another, and Conan Doyle's extraordinary career suddenly became absorbed by a series of speaking engagements that far eclipsed in frequency, passion, and popularity any lecture tours in which he had previously been involved. Meikle's study, based on a careful review of primary documents. is as sympathetic toward Conan Doyle as the evidence will allow. It is particularly good in its summation of Houdini's behaviour (a sore point with many Conan Doyle admirers) and of the fascination with Atlantis that led Conan Doyle to champion the Arabian spirit Pheneas during the early 1920's. Many readers will subscribe to Meikle's view that Conan Doyle, despite a few pathetic lapses from his customarily strict moral code. maintained an overall record as a selfless campaigner for the world's moral reformation through Spiritualism.'
The status of Conan Doyle's posthumous reputation is not fixed; nor are even the most sympathetic critics certain as to what, beyond the Holmes stories, will survive. Moreover, the major lines of interpretation of the Holmes stories seem to be shifting. Perhaps. as critics deepen their consideration of Conan Doyle's contributions to imaginative literature. a fuller appreciation of Conan Doyle's personal attitude towards his detective stories will take hold. The excesses of some of the Baker Street Irregulars have irritated many admirers of the stories in the canon and have distracted readers from seeing Conan Doyle steadily and whole. A current vogue for semiotic studies may serve to document the assertion that critics with specialised interests tend to write for one another rather than for the general public. As one example, The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, (27) poses more difficulties as a critical approach than it ever successfully solves.
The emphasis on Conan Doyle's literary antecedents must give way to a more fruitful line of investigation, one that establishes links between Conan Doyle and his literary descendants.
Surely, enough has been said by now about Conan Doyle's grammatical lapses. Charges of bad writing seem odd when the critic who levies such charges goes on to concede, with an air of sheepishness, that Conan Doyle's ability to tell a good story is hardly in question. And perhaps more than enough has been said about Holmes as a 'reptilian' character, or Watson as a 'commonplace' individual whose only function is to set off Holmes' genius. Such debunking articles inspire wonder that their authors ever found attractive the task of writing about the Holmes stories in the first place.
Conan Doyle once claimed that he had pioneered in creating a fictional hero whose adventures, in issue after issue of the same periodical, sustained his readers' interest. The assumption of that kind of originality was unwarranted; other authors had preceded him in stimulating readers to care about what happened next to a hero or heroine. But Conan Doyle, because of the unusually long run of Holmes' adventures. supplied the audience that subscribed to. purchased, or read individual copies of The Strand Magazine with an extraordinary fund of information about Holmes and Watson. He thickened the outlines of his great detective by making his character far more than a catalogue of idiosyncratic habits: the seven per cent solution of cocaine, the violin playing, the chemical experiments. the esoteric interests. Holmes and Watson were consistent despite relatively minor discrepancies between one story and the next. Readers became confident that they recognised the wholeness of Holmes and Watson as human beings, and knew them as well as they thought they knew members of their own families.
In the essays I have chosen for the first part of this anthology. Conan Doyle's creation of a late Victorian world is stressed even more than his astonishing gift for characterisation. The direction of much Conan Doyle criticism in the coming decades will probably concentrate on the extent to which the Holmes stories resemble and differ from the historical truth of what went on in the 1880's and 1890's. Conan Doyle's London was so solid and three-dimensional that its images of Whitehall, dock areas, railway platforms, hotel lobbies, and fogbound streets have convinced Londoners (fully as much as overseas visitors) that they were, and always will be. definitive.
It is likely that future writers on the canon will want to explore the relationship between Holmes and the late Victorian concept of a scientist. The positiveness with which Holmes constructed his links of reasoning was not all that dissimilar from the certitude, held by many Victorian scientists, that answers to all questions about nature might be discovered if the questions were properly framed. As the twentieth century wanes, that conviction now seems unwarranted by the state of knowledge existing in almost any scientific discipline one might name. The more information we possess, the less likely we are to believe that we are close to drawing boundary lines around what remains unknown. But a little over one hundred years ago, Conan Doyle could indulge his fictional hero, who believed in the closeness of the correlations between his knowledge of discrete physical facts and the reality underlying the existence of those facts.
A study of the ways in which Holmes is like and unlike the detectives of his own times the detective story of the late Victorian age was much more popular than most critics realise when they speak of Conan Doyle's 'originality — would be similarly instructive. A large part of the appeal of the Holmes stories rested on the variety of puzzles solved; though written to order and bound by conventions Conan Doyle willingly imposed on himself, these narratives were not restricted to crimes committed within locked rooms. Conan Doyle obviously delighted in the ingenuity of problems he posed, problems no ordinary detective could be expected to solve. The connections between Conan Doyle's source materials (often newspaper clippings) and the finished Holmes stories deserve fuller treatment than they have received. Fully one quarter of Holmes' adventures have nothing to do with a legally definable crime. Analysing the kinds of information Conan Doyle selected for construction of his stories would require the compilation of an ingeniously cross-filed dossier, and an investigator would also have to evaluate the kinds of information Conan Doyle omitted.
Holmes, like anyone of his time, knew a number of things that later research has invalidated. He believed that the influence of heredity on criminal psychology was greater than modern criminologists credit. He entertained a number of unworthy prejudices against entire classes of people. His views on the nature of memory, the workings of the mind, and women in general were occasionally ill-formed or ill-tempered. The study of Holmes as an essentially Victorian man of the middle classes, complete with prejudices that occasionally prevented him from understand- ing the data of a given crime, has surprisingly often been slighted in favour of a eulogistic treatment of all the ways in which Holmes' knowledge and intuition led directly to the solving of a crime, or anticipated future developments in criminology. (That favourite figure of nineteenth-century fiction, the boarding-house bachelor who appears to defy social norms by not marrying, has scarcely been studied in relation to the most extraordinary bachelor of all.) A careful study of Holmes as a representative of his class will, however, have to take into account the fact — noted by Christopher Sykes, among others that Holmes rises in class during the series: he first becomes known to us as a person from a commonplace background but eventually emerges transfigured as 'a University man, with strong College loyalties,' able to converse on an equal level with the bloods in all spheres.' (28) All of which suggests that Holmes, as an individual and as a socio-cultural phenomenon, will survive closer scrutiny, and remain a fascinating focus of interest.
Possible directions in future scholarship about the rest of Conan Doyle's creative writings more than one hundred short stories, novels, plays, and poems — may be charted partly on the basis of what is reprinted here and partly on the basis of current trends in critical analysis for other Victorian authors. Not enough has been done with Conan Doyle's self-conscious relationship to the Scott tradition of storytellings. Micah Clarke His Statement as Made to His Three Grandchildren Joseph, Gervas, & Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 is, among other things, a novel that imagines Jeffreys and Monmouth interacting with vividly sketched personalities like Colonel Decimus Sexton and Sir Gervas Jerome as well as Micah Clarke himself; the extent to which Conan Doyle drew on histories of Cromwell's era and the degree of Conan Doyle's skill in authenticating character, setting, and event deserve renewed consideration. It is not particularly useful to say (as Conan Doyle's contemporaries sometimes did) that the Scott tradition had played itself out. Historical romances very much like Ivanhoe are written to this day, and are widely read; the British statesman who exclaimed, 'Bring me a novel to read. Bring me something that is true. Don't bring me history, for that, I know, is a lie,' spoke for countless thousands who formed Conan Doyle's audience at the turn of the century, and their hunger for a fiction they could believe in cannot easily be dismissed. Conan Doyle's use of Scott went far beyond the mingling of historical figures like Cromwell, the Pretender, and Napoleon with fictional creations of his own. There is a French chevalier,' wrote one reviewer of The Great Shadow, 'who is more real, more historical. than any French chevalier known to history.' (29) Poetry, as the ancients knew, incorporates a higher truth than conventional history can ever hope to do.
Closely related to this concern in the question that Conan Doyle's biographers often treat and sometimes fumble: how autobiographical are Conan Doyle's stories? One critic complained that the hero of The Stark Munro Letters spoke too directly for the author: 'It is his creator's fortune to be himself a medical man, and his misfortune to have views upon religion and upon various social problems. The book is full of the slang of the surgery, enlivened by interpolated disquisitions on subjects which are beyond the writer's reach.' (30) He was attacking what he believed to be Conan Doyle's views on religion before he addressed the substance of the hero's opinions, without analysing the characterising function of such views within the novel. Moreover, the possibility that Conan Doyle was playing variations on the whole concept of authorial omniscience has not been seriously treated by critics. It deserves to be, if only because Conan Doyle, well read in the novels of both Great Britain and of France, was duly aware of the controversy about the proper distance to be maintained between storytellers and the events they recounted.
Two inter-twined problems exist here: the right of an author to speak in propria persona and the right of a critic to censure the interference of an author in the unfolding of a story. The anonymous poet of Punch who complained. Whenever someone's going strong, / Sir Arthur|Sir A. dispatches several pages / To tell how codes of right and wrong / Have altered since the Middle Ages (31) had a point: 'speechifying' introduced an alien element to the story, a 'booklore-laden atmosphere' that 'knights don't really care for.' But this too may turn out, on closer examination, to be still another convention of the Scott historical romance, and Scott, after all, did not invent the historical romance.
A full-scale treatment of Conan Doyle's adventures in the Victorian and Edwardian theatre would do much to inform readers of the ways in which he adapted stories originally written for another medium, the compromises that Conan Doyle made to actor-managers to get his plays on the boards, and his relationships with actors and actresses in general.
It goes without saying but perhaps should be said nevertheless that the quality of Conan Doyle's writings as a historian of two major wars should be reassessed. Are lucidity and vigour sufficient to redeem Conan Doyle's overstatements about gallantry on the fighting front, his overconfident expressions of faith in the permanence of the British Empire (despite temporary setbacks), his unwillingness to criticise military tactics that turned out badly, and the incompleteness of his evidence (not always appreciated by Conan Doyle himself)? How much of Conan Doyle's The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct is special pleading for example, his defence of British soldiers against the charges of inhumanity? Were Boer mothers with their 'natural instinct' to cling to their children, thereby preventing them from being moved into quarantine more responsible for the excessive mortality of minors. than the British who created overcrowded conditions in the camps? Were the Boers wholly committed to a disregard of 'the recognised rules of warfare'? (32)
As for the Great War, did Conan Doyle concentrate too much on the British role in the fighting at the expense of the French (who, after all, lost twenty-five-per-cent of their troops in the Battle of the Frontiers in the first six months and a half-a-million more at Verdun)? Did Conan Doyle, like other war historians, accept too credulously the information supplied to him by generals and officers, who had vested interests to defend? For that matter, was his optimistic conclusion to The British Campaign in France and Flanders justified by the evidence that he himself had collected? Pierre Nordon, whose summary of Conan Doyle's work as a historian is more thoughtful and detailed than any other treatment in print, saw Conan Doyle's restraint as the primary virtue of his account of the Great War: 'The book is in fact a memorial to the fighting-men, in the form of a narrative which he tried to make as plain and unadorned as possible.' (33)
Many of Conan Doyle's miscellaneous writings on divorce-law reform, home rule for Ireland, tariff questions relating particularly to the Scottish woollen industry, unjustly accused prisoners like Oscar Slater and George Edalji, Congo crimes, the civilian national reserve, polemical pamphlets supporting the Allied cause, and even the travel books reviewing his adventures on three continents — have served their day and will not attract much critical attention in the future.
Nevertheless, Conan Doyle's prolific output on questions relating to paranormal phenomena requires consideration if we hope to appreciate the full dimensions of his career. Beginning with The New Revelation (1918), Conan Doyle became swiftly and completely obsessed with the problem of how to make sense of that land from whose bourn no traveller returns. There followed Life after Death (1918), The Vital Message (1919), Our Reply to the Cleric (1920), Spiritualism and Rationalism (1920), The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), The Coming of the Fairies (1922), Spiritualism — Some Straight Questions and Direct Answers (1922), The Case for Spirit Photography (1922), The Early Christian Church and Modern Spiritualism (1925), Psychic Experiences (1925), The History of Spiritualism (1926), Pheneas Speaks (1927), Spiritualism (1927), What Does Spiritualism Actually Teach and Stand For? (1928), A Word of Warning (1928), An Open Letter to Those of My Generation (1929), The Roman Catholic Church A Rejoinder (1929), A Form Letter and A Second Form Letter (1930), and The Edge of the Unknown (1930). The intensity of feeling recorded in these publications suggests that biographers and critics who ignore a full one-third of Conan Doyle's life do so at their peril.
At least three avenues of promise stretch before us. The first has to do with the fact that Conan Doyle believed himself to be among the new intelligentsia in the early decades of this century. He aligned himself with Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Barrett, Sir William Crookes, General Sir Alfred Turner, Dr Ellis T. Powell, and Lady Glenconner: men and women who had achieved distinction in widely disparate fields and who were united in their dissatisfaction with orthodox religion's answers to spiritual questions. The explanation of why Conan Doyle so completely trusted his colleagues in the search for final answers must be sought in a fuller history of ideas, especially those relating to late Victorian attitudes toward science, than has thus far been written.
A second promising study would extend Conan Doyle's interest in Spiritualism to see whether it exists in his own creative works published before 1918. Some investigators have studies Holmes' disdain for supernatural explanations of worldly crimes as if that were the only note about Spiritualism struck in the canon (which is not true). Biographical considerations must be taken into account (the nature and quality of the influence exerted by Mary Doyle, the importance of Michael Conan as godfather, Conan Doyle's revulsion against his Jesuit-dominated education, and the conversations Conan Doyle held with Dr Bryan Waller, as well as Conan Doyle's readings in Spencer, Darwin, and Huxley) if we are to assess fairly the rumblings about religion that are to be found in The Stark Munro Letters, Micah Clarke, The Refugees, and even The White Company, The Poison Belt (1913), second of the Professor Challenger novels, has been re-examined by Dana Martin Batory and found to signal Conan Doyle's acceptance of a life after death: 'Convinced by thirty years of Spiritualistic study that our conduct in this life quite possibly affects our understanding in the next, Conan Doyle was trying to frighten his readers into moral reform but instead of the usual foreign invasion to scare the English, Conan Doyle warned all of humanity by summoning the Apocalypse.' (34) This may overstate the case for a straight-and-steady line of development in Conan Doyle's thinking about suprasensory possibilities, but the older line of thinking about a clear break between the 'earlier materialistic Conan Doyle' and the later Conan Doyle who argued for the power of spiritual forces ('a vapour which used to be called animal magnetism, or odyllic force. but is now called ectoplasm, issues from certain specially endowed persons) are reductive. After all the debris of hostile criticism has been cleared away. Conan Doyle's speculations about Spiritualism as a new religion that might unite men and women of goodwill everywhere may be traced back to his childhood. They certainly lie imbedded in a surprisingly large number of his fictions.
A third interesting research possibility has to do with the way in which Conan Doyle's ideas about Spiritualism were received, contradicted or rejected, endlessly debated. and occasionally welcomed, even by those who had no patience with mediums and seances. A detailed reception study would be welcome. Conan Doyle was one of the most visible literary figures of England, quoted as an authority on all kinds of topics almost as frequently as H. G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw; though not always believed, he was given credit for believing what he wrote, for writing in good faith. Some contemporary critics patronised his ideas as puerile, unworthy of the man who had created Sherlock Holmes. Others agreed with Conan Doyle's basic proposition. that the evidence relating to the Spiritualism movement had to be evaluated carefully because the sources of all force' could be traced 'rather to spiritual than to material causes.' (35) Conan Doyle would never have maintained that his involvement with Spiritualism had much to do with the good health of literature. or even the nurturing of his own literary talents. But he was justified in saying, as he did in the concluding lines of Memories and Adventures, 'For my part, I can only claim that I have been an instrument so fashioned that I have had some particular advantages in getting this teaching across to the people.' (36)
We cannot and must not subdivide Conan Doyle. From first to last he remained a fearless fighter for the truth as he believed it to be. He is worth getting to know more so than we have known him in the past.
References
1. De Waal, R. B. (Ed.): The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: 1974: Bramhall House, New York.
2. ———————: The International Sherlock Holmes; 1980; Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut.
3. The New York Times; 11 January 1991, C14.
4. Quoted by Murphy, C.: The Game's Still Afoot', The Atlantic; March 1987; Vol. 259, No. 3. p. 61.
5. Ibid., p. 58.
6. Blathwayt, R.: 'A Talk with Dr Conan Doyle', Bookman[London]: May 1892: Vol. II. No. 8. pp. 50-51.
7. Ibid., p. 51.
8. Ibid., p. 51.
9. How, H.: 'A Day with Dr Conan Doyle', The Strand Magazine; August 1892; Vol. IV, pp. 182-83.
10. Hocking, S. K.: My Book of Memory A String of Reminiscences and Reflections: 1923; Cassell and Company, Ltd., London, p. 153.
11. Ibid., p. 153.
12. Conan Doyle, A.: Memories and Adventures, 1924; Little. Brown, and Company. Boston, p. 94.
13. Menpes, M.: War Impressions: being a record in colour: transcribed by Menpes, D.; 1901: Charles Black, London, p. 151. Conan Doyle's comment, made to the famous artist Menpes in Bloemfontein, South Africa, during the Boer War, was repeated many times in various interviews over the next three decades.
14. Conan Doyle, A.: 'Sherlock Holmes on the Screen', Arthur Conan Doyle on Sherlock Holmes: Speeches at the Stoll Convention Dinner, an Exchange of Rhymed Letters, with an introduction by Roger Lancelyn Green; 1981; Favil Press, London, pp. 5-6.
15. See, for example, lan Ousby's Bloodhounds of Heaven The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle: 1976; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 171-75.
16. Simpson, K.: Sherlock Holmes on Medicine and Science; 1983: Magico, New York, p. 22. Cf. A. E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (1978; Peter Owen. London. pp. 182-85) for a gloomy assessment of Holmes' limited awareness of recent developments in criminological science.
17. Ibid., p. 23.
18. Ibid., p. 26.
19. Conan Doyle: Memories and Adventures, p. 102.
20. The New York Times; 25 May 1974; Section 3, P. 17.
21. 'The Lounger', Critic[New York): 20 July 1895.
22. Literature; 3 November 1900; p. 341.
23. Athenaeum; 11 June 1910; No. 4311, p. 716.
24. Anonymous: 'Conan Doyle's History of the War'. The New York Times: 21 January 1917: Section 6, p. 18.
25. Conan Doyle: Memories and Adventures, p. 396.
26. Ibid., p. 397.
27. Eco, U. and Sebeok, T. A. (Eds.): The Sign of the Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce; 1983; Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
28. Sykes, C.: 'The Baker Street Case', Books and Bookmen[London]: August 1977; p. 34.
29. Hutton, L.: 'Literary Notes', Harper's New Monthly Magazine: March 1893; p. 348.
30. Smalley, G. W.: New York Herald: 13 October 1895: reprinted in Literary Digest New York]; 26 October 1895; p. 761.
31. Punch; 12 December 1906; Vol. 131, p. 432.
32. Anonymous: 'Dr Conan Doyle on the Boer War, Outlook(New York); 1900: pp. 128-29.
33. Nordon, P.: Conan Doyle; 1966; Murray, London, p. 99.
34. Batory, D. M.: 'The Poison Belt as a Morality Tale', Riverside Quarterly, March 1982: Vol. VII, No. 2, p. 100.
35. Conan Doyle: Memories and Adventures, p. 398.
36. Ibid., p. 399.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
