Review:Myth and Modern Man in Sherlock Holmes/R. Dixon Smith
This review of the book "Myth and Modern Man in Sherlock Holmes", by David S. Payne was written by R. Dixon Smith and published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
Review
- Myth and Modern Man in Sherlock Holmes:
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Uses of Nostalgia
- by David S. Payne
- Bloomington: Gaslight Publications, 1992; 311pp; U.S.$24.95; ISBN: 0-934468-29-X
Reviewed by R. Dixon Smith
Profound scientific, technological, and social progress propelled the late Victorian world into the twentieth-century age of unceasing change and uncertainty. But the scientific advances that ushered in an era of material progress produced a profound psychological crisis.
The generation that lived before the Great War began to live through a permanent crisis that started to take hold during the period from 1870 to 1914-what might be called a pivotal period. At the beginning of this period, there was, figuratively speaking, a blacksmith's shop on every street corner; by the end of the period, there was a petrol station in its place. Never before had the velocity, pace, and variety of change-perpetual, self-generating, beyond comprehension or control-charged ahead so swiftly. For even beneficent change, if it occurs too quickly, can generate spiritual malaise: inexpensive soap and undergarments; medicine and anaesthetics; mass education and literacy, telegraphy and typewriting machines: railroads, horseless carriages, and airplanes; motion pictures and inexpensively produced books and magazines printed on cheap rag-pulp paper (of which The Strand Magazine was but the most successful). Revolutions in all forms of thought and expression-science (Einstein and Planck), literature (Proust, Eliot, Joyce), philosophy (Nietzsche), religion (Kierkegaard), psychology (Freud), painting (van Gogh, Gaugin), and music (Stravinsky) — began to affect society at all levels. Modernity itself generated anxiety and fear, and those fears created needs, chief amongst which was the despairing plea that the pace must be arrested; everything was happening too fast. The realisation dawned, albeit slowly, that if progress 'had any direction, it was toward ever greater speed and complexity'.
The unremitting pressures wrought by commercialisation, capitalisation, mechanisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation created the modernity in which we have lived ever since. [L]ife had finally slipped entirely its ancient moorings among the seasons and in the cottages and familial workshops,' for the census of 1851 had revealed that more people now lived in fast-paced cities than in slower-paced rural surroundings. In common with us, it had come upon them too swiftly to deal with except by an ever more frantic rushing-after.'
Historian David S. Payne assesses the popular mythology of Holmes and Watson, applying it to such topics as crime. class. race, religion, and gender, and discovers that Holmess spoke directly to the fears and needs of his day. For Holmes and his London, he suggests, were already part of a nostalgic past by the time they began appearing in The Strand Magazine in July 1891.
'Nostalgia ... as a means of dealing with too great or too swift change, is an old and universal human escapist and adaptationist tool.... Needless to say, the pasts we create never existed,' observes Payne. Nor did the world of Sherlock Holmes which Doyle and his publics together brought to life, and do still.... For nostalgia is indifferent to the actual past. Rather, it is an old means, both instinctive and conscious, by which we humans re-create the past, seeking rest and hope.'
Sherlock Holmes, who embodied the sound rationalism and positivism of Auguste Comte and Ernst Haeckel, was a vessel into which his loyal flock poured their fears, and from which they realised their fondest hopes and dreams. Holmes represented the need to preserve everything in its structured, rooted, permanent, immutable place. The best proof of this lies in Vincent Starrett's poem, '221B', in which we return to that world 'where it is always 1895'. The key word is 'always', for if it is always 1895, time and place are frozen, the velocity of change is slowed; we are given a breathing space. One of the curious things that Conan Doyle's stories do,' notes Payne, 'is slow things down. Certainly they leave a continuous feel of calm and of stately pace.' And for the improving working classes, lower middle classes, and upper middle class intellectuals and professionals who read his stories in The Strand Magazine, this was exactly what was needed.
The world of Sherlock Holmes is a complete world with its own geography and climate, speech and manner, its own social organization, values, and morality.' Conan Doyle 'had provided these details out of his own need-driven, instinctive, and persistent nostaligizing, had drawn them from his "real" world and constructed from them a new world in the past.' The comfort derived from Holmes's values, ideals, and methods, his defence of reason over peril and mystery, provided the perfect embodiment of the English rationalist tradition. His confidence, his empirical approach to reason, and his practical application of all its methods reassured Conan Doyle's generation as much as it speaks to our even more anxiety-ridden late twentieth century.
The fears and anxieties of late-nineteenth century Englishmen generated deep needs for domestic peace, comfort, and safety. Overburdened by change, their most profound need was for reassurance that the time-honoured values of traditional Victorian society would prevail. Holmes provided that stability: home and property would be safe-through science and reason-from crime, which was perceived as the main threat to society; happy endings were still possible.
'Driven by the novel fears and needs of too-soon-arrived modernity, the first truly literate, mass, urban public found in Holmes what their predicaments required a perfect past. In part instinctively, they unearthed in the emerging "canon" the promise that the best of the old values were equal to present fears.' In our own age, with its threat of nuclear and environmental annihilation, we have these fears and needs still, which is why Holmes — the most popular, reassuring fictional character of all time — continues to address those needs. It is hardly surprising to discover that these are the reasons why the Holmes stories still captivate us a hundred years on; the startling revelation lies in Payne's perception that this is the same reason why the stories appealed so strongly to Victorian readers in 1891.
Conan Doyle didn't intend this, of course; it was as instinctive as his timing was perfect. A representative of the generation that lived through the crisis, he struck a vein whose depth he never understood'. He never realized the extent to which he reflected the fears, anxieties, and needs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflected them more clearly, perhaps for that very ignorance, than any other writer of his time.' Yeats, Hardy, Eliot, and Joyce knew what they were dealing with when they cried out; Conan Doyle didn't. He was a middle-class story-teller who kept his vocabulary simple. Even in the stories written after the Great War, 'Doyle's dialogue language remains in the old world just as his deliberate nostaligizing set the stories themselves always before the war. Hence, as a place of retreat, of escape, of therapeutic nostalgia, it is without parallel. This was Conan Doyle's genius.
Payne's assessment of the reasons for Sherlock Holmes's enduring popularity, and his analysis of Conan Doyle's place in the history of literature and ideas, is the most comprehensive, authoritative account yet written.
R. Dixon Smith
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
