Micah Clarke (article 4 march 1889)
"Micah Clarke" is an article published in The Evening News (Portsmouth) on 4 march 1889.
Review of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel : Micah Clarke (1889).
Review
(4 march 1889, p. 2)
Dr. A. Conan Doyle had gone at one stride into the front rank of novelists. His last book. — "Micah Clarke" — is not only his best; it is the best historical novel that has been published for years. The "Study in Scarlet" was good — Sherlock Holmes being a real addition to the men we know — but both this and its successor "The Mystery of Cloomber," compared with "Micah Clarke," were studies in fiction, the necessary preparation for a great effort. Dr. Conan Doyle has now passed through the initial stage, and has made his first important step in the right direction and at the right time. People had been surfeited with tales of adventure that bore no relation to actual phases of life or history. The psychological and the theological novel had both palled upon them. Such novels of crime as Englishmen can write had been cast in the shade by the greater zest with which French authors threw themselves into the literary gutter. Yet all these had been eagerly seized upon by readers as a relief from the ceaselees stream of domestic stories, from which glorious girls, and men like Apollo, and afternoon tea, and bunions were never absent. Now comes Dr. Conan Doyle, prospecting with "Micah Clarke" in the long-neglected field of historical fiction, and lighting up one of the most romantic periods of our national life with his own inimitable character painting and fascinating powers in the description of places and events. We do not say this beeause Dr. Conan Doyle is a resident of Portsmouth. A man's own town is generally the last place to recognise his capacity. We are all so much alike in most things that to know a man creates prejudice against him. It is in spite of the author being our townsman, and not because of it, that we rank his last achievement so high. Micah Clarke was the son of an old Roundhead, who had been one of Cromwell's Ironsides, and after the Restoration had settled down at Havant as a tanner. The boy had none of the old Roundhead's fanaticism, but he had all his grim sense of duty, and a sturdy, surly, dogged honour of his own. The story proper commences just before the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion broke out in the West. Decimus Saxon, a soldier of fortune, appears on the scene with letters to the leaders of the Dissenters, urging them to take part in Monmouth's rising. This Decimus is one of the most delicious, oddest creations of the novelist's brain. There is a flavour of Dugald Dalgetty about him; but Decimus Saxon is less of a pedant than Dalgetty, and from his first wildly comical entry in the fourth chapter to the closing scene iu Poole Harbour, his dangling legs and thin, eager face are never out of the reader's eyes. There is no resisting this scraggy fighting man, whose tales of old campaigns and adventures trip off his tongue like water-drops off the mill-wheel. We could write of nothing else but his grotesque boastfulness and indifferent honesty, spiced with frequent quotations from "Hudibras." And there is nothing out of nature in him. The wars may have produced such cool, shrewd hands as he, ready to rant louder than any sectary if it served their purpose the while. Decimus Saxon is a triumph, but he is not the only triumph in this entrancing book. We think the author himself will take more pride in Sir Gervas Jerome, a cavalier who fell in with Decimus Saxon and Micah Clarke on the way from Havant to Monmouth's trysting place at Taunton, and out of sheer indifference took a share in their adventure. Readers must go to the book to find out what befel these strangely dissimilar companions. There are stirring inn scenes at Salisbury; a bloodhound chase ou Salisbury Plain; a night with a diviner near Amesbury; and many another odd, exciting encounter. The full power of the writer is seen when we come to the wars. Take the chapter describing a brush with the King's Dragoons. The pages become pictures as we read in the simple words of Micah how a band of fanatical country folk with their pastor, aided by Saxon's cool head and Micah's courage, withstood the shock of a cavalry charge. From this point onward the narrative never fails in brilliance. We can only indicate how Saxon and Micah, coming to Taunton, take a leading part in the training of the rebels; how Monmouth sets great store on the judgment of the one, and packs the other off to Badminton to tempt the Duke of Beaufort into the rebel fold; how in an outbreak of sectarian fury Wells Cathedral comes near to being despoiled; how Monmouth's chances are doomed at the onfall on Sedgemoor, and how Micah Clarke narrowly escapes the gallows at Taunton, and is saved from being sold into slavery by his touchy comrade Saxon. Interspersed with these main incidents are scenes in a smugglers' cave; adventures with a highwayman; the brutalities of Judge Jeffrey's Court, and love scenes in which a Puritan maid, daughter of Master Stephen Timewell, Mayor of Taunton, is the magnet. There is such a wealth of character in "Micah Clarke" that we had well nigh forgot an old salt, Solomon Sprent, whose vocabulary was so exclusively nautical that he made love in sea-faring similes, and touched his forelock, in the habit of sailor men, just before he died. It is only after we have laid down "Micah Clarke" that it occurs to us that in addition to being a story of absorbing interest, it is also a narrative of scenes some of which did occur, and all of which might have occurred, during Monmouth's rebellion. Dr. Conan Doyle must have taken infinite pains to be accurate in his types. The devil-may-care fop, Sir Gervas Jerome, might have stepped out of one of the old comedies. He is perfect down to the last oath, the latest whim on the Mall, or the nicest detail in the dress of a man of fashion. The sectaries speak in this book as they did two hundred years ago, but we know them better after reading these masterly pages than from any history. Monmouth is brilliantly sketched. His alternate moods of hope and despair; his pitiful assumption of manfulness that sprung out of very shame for his craven heart — so changed from the Monmouth of Bothwell Brig — make the man more clear to us than before. Buyse, a huge German, whose steel helmet Micah Clarke cleft in two, and whose hand he squeezed into a jelly in friendly contest, was every inch alive. So was Master Tetheridge, the Town Clerk of Taunton who climbed into a flour-bin in an empty mill after the fighting at Sedgemoor; and so, too, Doctor Ferguson, to whom military science appeared of much less account than exhortation or prayer. The reputation of Dr. Conan Doyle as a writer of fiction will be immensely enhanced by "Micah Clarke," which is published by Messrs. Longmans and Co.
