Society and Crime: Conan Doyle's New Books
Society and Crime is an article written by Mary P. Abbott published in The Chicago Tribune on 29 january 1893.
Society and Crime
SOCIETY AND CRIME. I THEMES TREATED BY TWO WRITERS OF THE MODERN SCHOOL. Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger's Latest Book, .‘ The First Flight," I. Said to Re Flat and Profitless—Its Heroes Are Coarse, Its Heroines Vulgar, So One Woman Thinks—Conan Doyle's Volume of Short Stories Recommended to People Who Like Tales of Adventure. Of all pithless, pointless, soulless, marrow-less productions. Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cru-ger's latest book carries off the palm. It is a toddling imitation of Rhoda Broughton, with a touch of Amelie Rives ; but has not the clover cynicism of the one nor the genius of the cether to redeem it from flatness. The story is published in Lippincott's, thait flatter-ing medium through which "Julien Gordon" has usually transmitted her writings. It is known to fame as "The First Flight." If it were, there might be some excuse for it; but coming a long time after Mrs. Cruger's really clever " Diplomat's Diary " it is hopeless, and indicates deterioration of the mental powers, or too great assurance as to what the public will stand. The story is also called "A Prelude," but what it foreruns is not demonstrated. Not another story just like it? Heaven furefend! Mrs. Cruiser is a brilliant, dashing woman of the world. She writes good Engines, as a rule, and can present gentlewomen and g_en-tlemen without violating the unities. But these qualities do not necessarily make a great novelist. The story opens as if there might be some-thing in it, which makes the disappointment keener. "Mrs. Highty Tighty rested from her labors. She thought that they were 'very good,' " is a trifle blasphemous, but one par-dons a good deal in a clever woman. But Mrs. Highty Tighty is nothing, nobody. She is not amusing, nor dull enough to be comical. Her daughter, who is " brought up" too much, has to compete with her cousins, who are not brought up at all, and who are consequently far more fas-cinating, and who carry off the Earls and millionaires, and even the poor, wispy little clergyman, with whom Miss Hyatt Titus ("Eighty Tighty ") thought she might have been able to console herself. And they are unprincipled and beautiful, and have all the good times in life. Mrs. Larre-more, a society woman, who is brought in ap-parently for the sake of giving a party, at which she snubs and ignores poor little Miss Highty Tighty, is a nonentity; and still more of one is Mrs. Somebody Cunliffe, who hangs on the skirts of Mrs. Larremore, awl who would be cutout, if the story were dramatized, as having no excuse for even a " thinking part." Wrong Does Triumph. Victor Arthur Lucan Humphrey (Forge Draco, Earl of Brownlow, big, lumbering, and illiterate. carries off the prettiest of the cousins, who was to have been married that day fortnight to another man. He elopes with her, and later on the betrayed lover mar-ries a younger sister and is happy. Every-thing comes to the wrongdoer in this charm-ing novel. Alt the irresponsibles are bewitch-ing and all the conscientious are frumps. which may be the way of the world, but the philosophy is rather too raw to be palatable to the millions outlide the four hundred. Conversations upon indelicate subjects, coarsely put, are not shocking to the smart sets of some of our cities, but they still fall, thank heaven, upon many startled ears. Mrs. Hyatt Titus, who took exception to this style, was a ridiculous old prude, of course, not only according to the Larremores and Earls, but the novelist herself, who satirizes her feelings in describing them. Now and then there is an epigram in Mrs. Cruger's best style in the story : but the whole tone is so flippant that no amount of even sound, morel sentiment, jerkily interpolated. would-save it from lightness. Mrs. Titus "had not married in her first youth, and therefore, as is the case with spinsters of a certain maturity, looked upon matrimony as a career, not as an estate. We view with peculiar solemnity what has not happened to us." There are a good many such sentences as this. but they mean nothing, for they explain nothing and lead to nothing, in the story. Some of Mr. Hoppin's illustrations are fair, but contrasted with Gibeon's, for instance, in Mrs. Harrison's "Sweet Bells Out of Tune," are hardly worth mentioning. Take it alto-gether, Mrs. Cruiser has covered herself with anything but glory, and if she cannot do bet-ter would be wiser to restrain herself from taking a second "flight." Conan Doyle's New Books. It is an immense relief from so shallow a story to turn the pages of Conan Doyle's bcs,ks. This man is very high in the public's esteem, and justly, too. He is versatile, virile, and clever. He seems to have a head full of -plots, and some of them are worked out with great ingenuity. Admirers of Edgar Poe's Purloined Letter," `• Murders in the Rue Morgue," " Mystery of Marie Roget." will be delighted to see Conan Doyle's " Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," for that volume con-tains a dozen of the most interesting stories of the kind since Poe's. Sherlock Holmes is, like the hero of Poe's tales, very confident of his own powers, and rather impatient of everybody's else stupidi-ty. His theory is the significance of trifles which to every one else, including the most celebrated detectives, seem utterly unmean-ing. In order to make his wonderful perspi-cacity more remarkable every one als,.ut him is represented as rather more stupid than the average idiot, but that heightens the contrast and makes the stories absolutely thrilling. The effect upon tne reader's wits is curiously sharpening. In the first story he finds himself lost in a fog of doubt as to the method Mr. Sherloch Holmes can possibly adopt to bring anything out of a hopeless maze of contradictions and tangled threads. In the second he finds himself anticipating one or two.of the clews, and in the next and the next, so that at the end of the last one he feels himself qualified to become a first-class detective himself, and even finds Mr. Holmes a little bungling at times. " The Red-Headed League " is one of the best of these "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," and its plot is so slowly unraveled that it forms a series of. surprises, each one greater than the last. Mr. Jabez Wilson, a gentleman with fiery red hair, called upon Mr. Holmes and told him a story of his wrongs, which was utterly absurd, to begin with. his assistant in busi-ness, a very good young man, had come to hi in one day with an advertisement, it seemed, and asked him why he did not apply for a vacancy in what appeared to be a re-markable business. The advertisement read as follows: To the Red-Headed League : On account of the bequest of the late Ezekiah Hopkins of Leba-non, Pa.i U. S. A., there is now another vacancy open which entitles a member of the league to a salary of £4 a week for purely nominal services. All red-headed men who are sound in body and mind and above the age of 21 years are eligible. Apply la person Monday at it o'clock. Mr. Jahez Wilson, whose business had fallen off a little, and who was a simple soul, listened to his assistant, and called at the office of the Red-Headed League, where he found hundreds of other applicants. He was selected from them all, and then his duties were defined. He was, it seemed, to come at 10 o'clock every day and stay until 2. and in case he left the office fur an instant was to forfeit his £4 a week and lose his situation. His work was to copy the whole Encyclopae-dia Britannica! Mr. Wilson was rather pleased with this addition to his income, and undertook the work gladly ; • and, although he found it a little dry and laborious, he stuck to it and his post unceasingly until one day when he hid got ail far as Attica in the ency-clopedia he went to the office to find the door locked ana the announcement posted : " The Red-Beaded League Is Dissolved." This made him furious, for he had come to look for his £4 a week regularly and to depend upon its aid. So in his desperation, feeling for the first time that something must be wrong ( what a world of philosophy is con-tained in that), Mr. Jahez went to Sherlock Holmes to have the mystery unraveled and the Red-Headed League forced to go on if possible. Sherlock Holmes to the Rescue. Mr. Holmes was amused at the stupid fel-low's comic grief, and said, of course, instant-ly that no such absurdity as a Red-Headed League could exist, except for some deep laid scheme. The assistant, Mr. 1I ilson said, was a good one, and if he were not mad about photography and continually diving into the cellar to develop his pictures, would be without faults. He came for half wages and wes on the whole satieractory. When asked to describe him Mr. Wilson stated that he had a mark, as of acid, on his forehead. Holmes started and asked if his ears were not pier-bed for ear-rines, to which Mr. Wilson re-plied that they were. The steps in the unweavuig of the web are cautiously and cleverly described, and the reader is kept mystified throughout, and his interest intense. Mr. Holmes, accompanied by his friend, Dr. Watson, the narrator of the " Adventures," goes to the door of Wilson's pawnbroker's shop, which the assistant opens, and asks some casual question about his way. "Evidently," said I, "Mr. Wilson's assist-ant counts for a good deal in this mystery of the league. r am sure that you inquired your way merely in order that you might see him." " Not him." be What then?" " The knees of his trousers." This startling and laconic style Mr. Holmes much affects, but every word and every glance have a meaning. Before he rings Mr. Wil-son's door-bell he strikes the pavement with his stick, and that action, we learn later, had deep significance- It seems a pity to take away tine reader's pleasure in following these devious paths with Mr. Holmes, but to make the story short, the assistant was a renowned bank robber, and the Red-Headed League was a "plant" to keep the confiding Mr. Wilson away from his place of business four hours a day, while the burglar and his accomplices tunneled the cellar, thus affording themselves a passage into the cellar of one of the prin-cipal London banks, which backed Mr. Wil-son's shop. Mr. holmes' object in beating the pavement was to find whether the cellar extended in front or nut. His look at the knees of the assistant convinced him that he was burrowing constantly, the vicinity of the hank gave proof of the scheme, and the appearance of the man, coinciding as it did with the description of a notorious bank thief and murderer, made the proof over-whelming. The vacuity of Mr. .l ones of Scot-land Yard and the others who aocompanied Mr. Sherlock Holmes when he trapped the thieves as they were securing their Plunder, brings out in bright relief the marvelous acumen of Mr. Holmes himself. But the story is admirably told and is excessively entertaintug. No other one of these thrilling tales shall be spoiled by a ruthless hand ! There are others better even than the Red-Headed League, and the first one in which even the well-nigh invincible Sherlock Holmes is checkmated by a cleverer woman, is possibly the beat. But it is hard to dis-criminate; they are all so good ; and to the lover of this kind of fiction one cannot re-member any stories so thoroughly interesting and exciting. Like Eugene Wrayburn, you feel at the end of the book " as if you bad committed every crime in the Newgate cal-endar," and as if your own father, brother, husband, or wife might be an assassin or a professional blackmailer in disguise. And Ouse, as everybody knows, ere the proper sensations after reading successful stories. A Totally Different Story. " The Great Shadow," by the same writer, is so utterly different in manner and matter as to make one incredulous about its author-ship being the gams. It is a wonderful story of Bonaparte's time, with the scene laid on the coast of Scotland, close to England. The hero's bedroom, the room in which he was born, might have been divided by a ooundary line, so •• knowing folk " said, into an En-glish half and a Scotch half, and the cot in which he slept was so placed that his head was to the north of the line and his feet to the south of it. "My friends say that if I had chanced to be the other way, my hair might not have been so sandy nor my mind of so solemn a cast. . . . When there was a battle be-tween the Scotch and the English boys one side would kick my shins and the other cuff my ears, and then they would both stop and laugh as if it were something funny." The girl who comes upon the scene, blasting the lives of two simple Scotchinen, and run-ning away with a third—one of Bonaparte's staff who fled to Scotland for refuge--is a remarkable study of irresponsible femininity, wicLed, and yet unnunishable because so morally oblique as to be insensi-ble to her own sine. When she calmly ruined lives she said prettily to her victims: "Don't scold me." And they didn't. They cursed her instead, but privately, so she went on her way rejoicing and continued to slay men. we know in hearen why it is that men go mad over the worst women always? But the great story of Waterloo was never better told than in this novel. Some of the episodes are as realistic as Verest-chagin's pictures, but in no wise so revolting. it is a terrible disillusionment for women to know what men think anti feel, or cease to think and feel, in great battles. Tne few who ride superb chargers into the thick of the fight, urging their troops on to victory, with brandished swords and waving plume?, exist, no doubt: but what are they among the hundreds who babble, or are benumbed? And what of the equally brave chieftains who back their noble coursers in defeat? One soldier "scribbled 71's with a lump of chalk " on the guns staring him in the face, "like the schoolboy that he was another. who stoutly denied this, by the bye, the next day, " kept telling " (in the midst of the fight) "about his maiden Aunt Sarah and how she had left the money which had been promised to him for the chil-urea of drowned sailors." When the battle was over he took his oath that he never opened his lips. Judgmg from the accounts of the actual participators in the great fights of the world, no man is in possess'on of his exact normal mind. Either he is keyed up to the most un-natural distinctness of sight, hearing, and memory of the past, or else he is like one drunk, blind, and deaf. Those who are cool are almost invariably brutal. Men are mor-tal and a battle is like a plunge into the in-fernal regions, where mortals cannot be ex-pected to retain their faculties unimpaired. An Act of Personal Vengeance. Jim Horscroft, the betrayed Scotchman, led the charge against the French. Promi-nent among them was the man who had taken his faithless Bye from him. The Frenchman had done him a great service, if he had only known it, but men do not see things in those lights, and Conan Doyle takes pleasure in making the charge almost an act of personal vengeance. The account of the breathless five minutes which followed is horrible. " I remember putting my musket against a bluecoat and pulluig the trigger and that the man could not fall, because he was so wedged in the crowd; but I saw a horrid blotch upon the cloth, and a thin curl of smoke from it, as if it had taken fire. Then I found myself thrown up against two big Frenchmen, and so squeezed together, the three of us, that we could not raise a weapon. One of them, a fellow with a very large nose, got his hands up to my throat, and I felt that I was a chicken in his grasp. Rendez-vous, coquin, rendez-vous,' said he, and then suddenly doubled up with a scream. for some one had—" It is like Vereetchagin, after all. One must, perhaps, be disgustingly realistic in depicting a cruel battle, but it is too un-pleasant to quote. The style of this "Great Shadow" is of the Lorna Doone oraer, although its scene is so recent as to make its vernacular modern. It is terse, simple to childishness. Wild very vig-orous. This book presents a direct contrast to Mr. Doyle's other works, many of which are familiar to the modern reader. His "The Refugees," at present running in Harper's, bids fair to be the favorite, but he has so far written nothing which is not well worth reading. With Morley Roberts and Conan Doyle yet unread there are treats in store for those who lament that there is noth-ing new in literature and who have as yet not fallen in with either of these attractive authors. MARY P. Minos's.
