The Only Watson
The Only Watson is an article published in The Times on 1 december 1945.
The article discusses Adrian Conan Doyle's The True Conan Doyle and reappraises Watson as Holmes's indispensable counterpart and a key source of the stories' lasting pleasure.
The Only Watson
"Good old Watson!" exclaimed Sherlock Holmes "You are the one fixed point in a changing age." Such has been for years the general opinion. Watson may have mysteriously altered his Christian name from John to James; he may, as time went on, have developed a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour " which had hitherto lain dormant; but he had remained essentially the same secondary figure, solid, constant, immutable. And now a few words, dashed off as it would almost seem without a full sense of their staggering implications, must cause our view not only of Watson but possibly of Holmes himself to be re-examined. MR. ADRIAN CONAN DOYLE has written an interesting little book (Watson would have termed it a brochure) about his famous father, called "The True Conan Doyle." It appears that while he was writing it he unearthed among some old medical treatises in a chest a collection of manuscripts. One of these was the original of "A Study in Scarlet" with the title changed to "The Angels of Darkness," a name which incidentally suggests Stevenson's story, likewise on a Mormon theme, of "The Destroying Angel." Here, he says, Watson alone held the stage in company with Jefferson Hope, &c." There was no Sherlock Holmes in it.
MR. CONAN DOYLE remarks that "while it in no way detracts from Holmes, this discovery does confer a new and pleasing distinction upon Watson." A large body of devotees will be unable to take the matter with so comfortable a lightness. For them in the first flash of revelation the world will seem to have been turned upside down. In "Baker Street Studies" the late A. G. Macdonell propounded the ingenious and profane theory that Moriarty had never existed, but was to Holmes as Mrs. Harris was to Mrs. Gamp. He had invented the Professor as an excuse for failure and to bolster up a dwindling practice. Can it be that Holmes in his turn was but a figment of Watson's imagination, devised by him for some inscrutable reason to mask his own brilliance? No, this cannot and must not be. Such wild and whirling thoughts must at any cost be exorcised. A simpler explanation is that Watson had somehow been involved in the case of Enoch J. Drebber, perhaps as a medical expert, and was unequal to the strain. When Gregson or Lestrade or Athelney Jones are out of their depth," said Holmes, which by the way is their normal state, the matter is laid before me." That Watson would soon have been out of his depth can scarcely be doubted, and to whom should he turn? In this more plausible if admittedly duller theory there is a certain satisfaction. It is well known that Watson occasionally brought Holmes a client. The adventures of the Engineer's Thumb and the Naval Treaty will instantly occur to every student, and in a lesser degree those of the Reigate Squires and the Sussex Vampire may be attributed to his introduction. But these events occurred after Holmes had attained a European reputation. It would be a shock, though on the whole an agreeable one, to learn that it was Watson who had given him his first great chance in the tragical affair at Lauriston Gardens and that, knowing Holmes's rather touchy vanity, he had with a chivalrous self-abnegation disguised his own part in it.
"Data! data! data! I can't make bricks without clay," as Holmes once observed, and unless the manuscript of "The Angels of Darkness " is made public it is to be feared that we shall be left to guess. It is wiser and pleasanter not to allow our age-old faith to be shaken but rather to appreciate more fully than ever before how these two towering figures were each the perfect complement of the other. Each possessed great qualities not always apparent to his companion. Watson in early days set down Holmes's knowledge of literature as nil, but lived to hear him quote Goethe and Flaubert. Holmes disparaged Watson's popular literary methods, but had once at least to admit their merits. "Try it yourself, Holmes! the Doctor retorted when stung beyond endurance, and Holmes must surely have realized that as a narrator of stirring incident he was far below his friend, since he produced on his own account "The Blanched Soldier " of quite lamentable mildness. And here it is I miss my Watson," he wrote; it was hardly a generous acknowledgment but it was better than none. Finally, there is one reason for heartfelt rejoicing over this new discovery. To re-read the stories for perhaps the hundredth time gives us as a rule, mingled with the cosiest pleasure, a slight feeling of shame. Now we may indulge ourselves with unimpeachable motives, and in the same spirit of laborious enthusiasm with which Holmes fell upon the early English Charters "in one of our great University towns." The cloak of scientific research can cover our delightful laziness.
