Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (article 20 december 1924)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by Sidney Dark published in Birmingham Gazette on 20 december 1924.
The article portrays Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a vigorous, plainspoken, quintessentially English man whose extraordinary gift for storytelling, especially in Sherlock Holmes, made him a major popular novelist, even as his ardent spiritualism puzzled and divided observers.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, he is, in appearance and in mind, the typical Englishman, or rather, the Englishman as with proper national pride we like to think he is.
It is many years ago, when I was a nervous young reporter (reporters are always young, because they die before they grow old, unless they change their profession, and they are far more nervous than the world imagines), that I was sent to interview Conan Doyle, who was then living on Hindhead. He was delightfully kind and helpful, and thanks much more to him than to myself the result was an article that received editorial commendation. And for this I have always held him in high esteem.
He is a large man, incapable of any sort of littleness. When he was younger he was an excellent cricketer. He used to play football, and still plays golf. He was a pioneer with the skis. and is an excellent shot; and readers of "Rodney Stone" will not be surprised to learn that he is a handy man with the gloves.
He is the out-of-door Englishman. In manner he never for one moment suggests the literary artist. I do not believe that he would understand literary jargon, and he has no affinity with the poseur.
Conan Doyle possesses a genius for story-telling. Our generation has known no more efficient story-teller, and many of his novels, particularly, in my opinion, "Rodney Stone" and "The White Company," are as good of their kind as anything in the language. Sherlock Holmes, which has given Conan Doyle fame and fortune, is, without question, a supreme creation.
The Sherlock Holmes stories are sneered at by the intellectuals, mainly because they have been such an unqualified popular success, but while they are unequal, and while the later of them have obviously been written because of a magazine demand, no more ingenious detective stories have ever been written in any language.
I do not compare Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Edgar Allan Poe, who ranks with the immortals. But there is no question that among the detectives of modern fiction, Sherlock Holmes stands supreme and unrivalled. Conan Doyle himself is a man of straight lines. As a business man he is almost the equal of H. G. Wells, and he has exploited his talents with satisfying success. But he has no subtleties, even though he certainly has no lack of imagination.
It may have seemed remarkable that a man of his type, the large open-air, no-damn-nonsense-about-him Englishman, should have become the most celebrated of modern spiritualists. But it is really perfectly natural.
No man with character, understanding, and the smallest dowry of imagination is content to accept life as a mere series of physical phenomena. We all cry aloud for the mystical. Most of us realise the existence of the veil, and long to peep behind it.
The very simple and the very sophisticated are both likely to be satisfied with the orthodox and accepted explanations of the mystery of living. It is from these two classes that recruits are found both for the ranks of the sceptics and for the ranks of the mystics who, often rejecting the facts of religion as incredible, find it easy to accept the infinitely less credible explanations of the Spiritualist or the propagandist of some new faith.
I do not for one moment suggest that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rejects anything that I believe, but I find his very directness and comparative simplicity of character an explanation of why he accepts a great many things which I certainly do not believe.
It is sheerly futile to deny the truth of a great many Spiritualistic phenomena, but while it may be admitted that things not to be explained by the materialist continually occur either to us or around us, it is still possible to be extremely sceptical about the direct communication between the living and the dead, which is the basis of the Spiritualist's belief, and to which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so firmly holds.
In this, as in most other things, I am simply orthodox, and to me, Spiritualism is half diabolism and half fake. Still, there it is, and it is an interesting aspect of modern life. The writer of rattling stories, the inventor of the most interesting detective of fiction, the mighty player of many games is convinced that he can converse with the dead, and that fairies can be photographed as they gambol in the woods.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle now belongs to the older generation of English novelists. He is 65 years old, and practised for some years as a doctor before he started novel-writing, and published his first story in 1887. Everything that he has written is clean and wholesome and English, as well as being the deft work of a master craftsman.
There is no greater public benefactor than the man who can tell good stories, stories full of interest and movement and colour; stories that make the reader forget the greyness of life, and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, that take him away from a real world of baker's bills and income-tax collectors to the world of thrills and romance.
And among these benefactors of their kind, these weavers of magic carpets, Arthur Conan Doyle takes a very high place.
