The Word Made Famous: Quotations from Arthur Conan Doyle
The Word Made Famous: Quotations from Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by Chris Redmond published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 3, 1992).
This article examines Arthur Conan Doyle's standing as a quotable author by analysing his representation in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, questioning which of his phrases have achieved lasting recognition. While acknowledging Holmes's dominance, it argues that many powerful and deserving lines from Conan Doyle's wider work remain overlooked.
The Word Made Famous
Quotations from Arthur Conan Doyle
The measure of an author — let us consider Arthur Conan Doyle, for the moment, only in his role as an author is the material he leaves us for entertainment and reflection. No Doylean will have difficulty naming the enduring characters who sprang from this author's pen, beginning with the universally recognised Sherlock Holmes and going on through Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard to Dame Ermyntrude and Miss Penelosa. Nor is it hard to think of books that bear rereading and rereading. Every enthusiast will name different favourites; my own. I do not deny, begin with The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, although I should not be in the least surprised to hear that yours were Micah Clarke and The Mystery of Cloomber.
But the measure of an author is more than characters and plots. It is memorable words as well, the art with which character is sketched and plot unfolded. Especially there must be shining phrases and sentences that echo in the mind even when the memory of plot and character is hazy, or that spring to the mind in contexts quite different from the original. An author can be expected, in short, to put together words that deserve to be quoted. And how, against such a standard, shall we measure Arthur Conan Doyle?
In North America, at least, the rough standard of an author's achievement in this respect is that venerable book Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, currently in its fifteenth edition and its hundred-and-forty-seventh year. The first Bartlett's was a little book assembled by John Bartlett, a Massachusetts bookseller. Within a decade Bartlett and his book had both become assets of Little, Brown, a still respected Boston publisher; and Bartlett had edited the first nine editions of his Familiar Quotations by the time The Return of Sherlock Holmes had first appeared (he died in 1905). Subsequent editions have appeared at a more leisurely pace, and in far greater printings than the thousand copies Bartlett first ventured in 1855. The current edition dates from 1980.
Reaching for my maroon-bound copy of Bartlett's, I find that it includes just about a column of quotations from Arthur Conan Doyle, on page 689. Authors are found in this volume, according to Bartlett's original plan, in chronological order of their birth, so Conan Doyle appears with Henri Bergson, Havelock Ellis, Kenneth Grahame, A. E. Housman, Jerome K. Jerome, Francis Thompson, and others who entered this life in 1859. I count fifteen quotations from his work, and the index advises me that a sixteenth appears in a footnote elsewhere in the volume on page 544, offering the phrase a face that a man might die for' from 'A Scandal in Bohemia, in association with 'a face to lose youth for, meet death with' from Browning's 'A Likeness'.
Sixteen quotations from Conan Doyle: fewer than the book's editors found in Housman or in Ellis, but one more than Thompson provides, and more than the total of Grahame ('messing about in boats') and Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) together. It is a striking list, and while one would not want to present it as an acceptable summary of Conan Doyle's life-work, we can perhaps see it as the flower of his wit and wordsmithing.
Interestingly, it is more than Bartlett's offered when it first included anything at all from Conan Doyle, in its eleventh edition, published in 1937. The co-editors of that edition were one Louella D. Everett and Christopher Morley, the latter being the founder of Sherlockian (and, by extension, Doylean) activity in North America. Morley was responsible for many innovations in Bartlett's when he got his hand on the tenth edition with an invitation to bring it up to date. He introduced A. A. Milne and also Clark Russell, on whose sea-stories Conan Doyle looked with favour (he made Russell a favourite author of Dr. Watson's as well). He, or perhaps his co-editor, greatly expanded the sections of Bartlett's devoted to contemporaries and colleagues of Conan Doyle such as Kipling and Hardy. Perhaps most remarkably, he introduced an author entirely out of his own imagination: Sir Eustace Peachtree, who did not survive into subsequent editions even though Morley did his best to immortalise him by using his supposed writings as the source of the epigraph for his own book Thunder on the Left.
Of an author who first introduces Conan Doyle to a trustworthy book of reference, seven years after Conan Doyle's death, much can be forgiven. Still, the enthusiast will face something of a shock on consulting that eleventh edition, for there are just four brief quotations from Conan Doyle, and one of them is utterly spurious. 'The game is afoot' is reasonable enough it could be attributed to Sir Nigel as well as to Sherlock Holmes, of course as is the description of Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory, as 'the woman.' It is hard to see why Morley selected 'I abhor the dull routine of existence' as a quotable Doyleism, but at least it is authentic. Not so the fourth quotation, said to be from 'The Crooked Man': 'Elementary, my dear Watson. No such thing: he never said that, as indignant Sherlockians are quick to point out whenever some shabby screen detective posing as Holmes utters those four words. The real Watson never heard them and the real Conan Doyle never wrote them. Either Morley nodded or he was playing a Peachtree-like joke on his readers and publishers.
Well, the offending words are gone now, along with the dull routine of existence. A few other passages have come and gone in intervening editions, but the fifteenth offers the longest list to date. It will hardly be surprising, to any Doylean who realises that most of the author's reputation rests on Sherlock Holmes, to find that of the sixteen quotations only two are from works other than the Sherlock Holmes 'canon'. One is from Through the Magic Door: 'It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.' The other comes from 'The Song of the Bow', originally from The White Company, although it later appeared as verse independent of that novel: 'The bow was made in England, Of true wood, of yew wood, The wood of English bows.'
Of the fourteen quotations from Sherlock Holmes, one is a mere title: 'The Speckled Band'. Oddly, a still more familiar title, The Hound of the Baskervilles, is not given in its own right, although it appears as the source for the spine-chilling sentence that does qualify as an entry: 'They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!' From 'The Copper Beeches' comes 'Elementary', this time in its proper context; 'The game is afoot' is still in the list, with a footnote cross-referencing Shakespeare's Henry V. and so is 'the woman.'
The precise sources of the others are left as an exercise for the reader: 'London, that great cesspool ..' 'When you have eliminated the impossible ... The Baker Street Irregulars.' 'The lowest and vilest alleys of London ... The dog in the nighttime.' 'You know my methods, Watson.' 'The fair sex is your department.'
Finally comes what seems a curious choice: 'Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius.' As a dazzling phrase in a detective story it will hardly pass, but as an early form of the modern advice to hire people smarter than yourself' it as at least perceptive. Still better, perhaps, it might well serve as Conan Doyle's epitaph, honouring his ability to spin the extraordinary out of what seemed commonplace.
But the knowledgeable Doylean, scanning this list, will feel that much is missing. Absent, first of all, is any recognition that the phrase 'Steel-true and blade-straight', which appears on page 669, is the source of the epitaph that was in fact carved on Conan Doyle's gravestone. How many of his followers, dare one ask, know that the reference to steel and blade was borrowed from an author Conan Doyle greatly admired: Robert Louis Stevenson, in Songs of Travel?
Absent, furthermore, are many phrases and passages from Conan Doyle that we have come to know well and admire, and passages that we might reasonably commend to other readers also. Exactly what makes a quotation 'familiar' is of course subject to disagreement, but at least since Morley's eleventh edition, fifty-five years ago, the criterion for inclusion in Bartlett's has been 'literary power... rather than width and vulgarity of fame. A few suggestions that appear to meet that criterion are not difficult to make. One might uncontroversially start with the Sherlock Holmes tales, suggesting that the phrase 'Napoleon of Crime' be included, as well as a few lines from the Musgrave Ritual, the passage from 'The Greek Interpreter' about 'art in the blood, and the exchange in 'The Devil's Foot' about 'what you may expect to see when I follow you.'
There is, of course, more to Conan Doyle than Sherlock Holmes, and there should be more than just Sherlock Holmes in a dictionary of quotations that fairly reflected his achievements. Here, however, we truly enter untrodden ground, with only a few reliably familiar posts visible. Where, at least, are a few haunting lines from 'The Inner Room', that poem in which Conan Doyle worries about the soldier and the priest disputing over his soul? As applicable to all the rest of us as to the author is his observation that until the battle is settled, 'I shall swing and I shall sway, In the same old weary way, As before. From Conan Doyle's non-fiction, one might extract his notorious exchange with the income tax authorities: Most unsatisfactory.' 'I quite agree. From the fiction, one might start with A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, from which my own fancy suggests a sentence or two of the passage about the dove-grey silk dress. And where is a witty extract about Brigadier Gerard? 'If he has the thickest head, the Emperor says at the end of one tale, he has also the stoutest heart in my army', and it is hard to forget that tribute when one has heard it. Numerous other suggestions are possible.
The one real difficulty in drawing up such a list is that so much of Conan Doyle's effectiveness paradoxically depends on the apparent dullness of his style. It is mechanically perfect well, I have spotted the occasional grammatical error, hardly surprising in long passages written at high speed, but never is there a sentence whose meaning is in doubt, or which can convey anything but the emotional effect the author had in mind. Time after time, he begins a short story with the most prosaic detail of geography or history or technology, and the reader is lulled into a security in which the subsequent shock of horror or adventure is all the more jarring. To list two or three dozen gems as 'familiar quotations', and offer them as the best of Conan Doyle's writing, might be to betray the master: to praise him for what was by no means his metier. Or perhaps it is at least safe to say that if we look only at the familiarly famous quotations, the sauces and pickles, we shall miss the meat of the meal.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
