A Bookworm and His Books
A Bookworm and His Books is an article written by S. D. published in the Daily Express on 20 november 1907.
A Bookworm and His Books
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Chats in His Library.
(PUBLISHED TO-DAY.)
Autobiographies are generally dull books to read. They must, one imagines, be most terribly dull books to write ; but if one wishes to be in the fashion in these days, it is absolutely necessary for the biography or autobiography to be published during-one's lite-time. Successful actresses of seventeen are forced to accept this fashion. For successful novelists in the forties avoidance is impossible.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has, however, discovered a fresh and altogether delightful way of writing about himself. He has written a modest little boot about his books. When one knows the books a man reads — the books he reads and reads again — one knows most of the essential man. And it is safe to say that, having read Sir Arthur's pleasant, chatty pages, one realises much more about the inventor of "Sherlock Holmes" than one could have learned from genealogical trees or the description of his favourite hobbies.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seems to be author by accident, and this is true although he is not only a successful novelist, but a novelist whose work has real literary value. "Micah Clarke," for example, was a splendid novel of its kind, and the description of the prize-fight in "Rodney Stone" is equal to anything written by Sir Arthur's own hero, George Borrow.
But the essential Sir Arthur is a large, open-air, healthy Englishman, a fine specimen of that class which has been, and still is, the best that England can produce ; and one feels this not only when he tells us what are his favourite books, but when he explains why they are his favourite books.
For example, he loves Macaulay. He admires his style. To most of us, perhaps, Macaulay is a most admirable writer — hopelessly prejudiced, hopelessly unfair — but gifted with a clear if somewhat oratorical style. But Sir Arthur actually admires his poetry, and is quite angry with Matthew Arnold because he sneered at "the glorious 'Lays.'"
Moreover, in an odd way, he finds "real similarity in the minds and characters" of Macaulay and Scott Surely an amazing combination — the Whig special pleader and the Tory romancer!
Over Scott he is enthusiastic, putting "Quentin Durward," quite properly, as it seems to me, next to "Ivanhoe" in order of merit among his novels, though, be it added, be would count them both inferior among historical fiction to Charles Reade's "The Cloister and the Hearth," a book which some of us have never managed to read right through.
Johnson and Boswell.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is sane about Johnson, as few people succeed in being, and he suggests that Johnson owes much more to Boswell, the king of biographists, than Boswell ever owed to him.
The Conan Doyle library, by the way, is evidently an admirable one. Books on pugilism jostle military memoirs ; Napoleoniana lie next to books on Arctic travel and science, and so on — all read and appreciated equally with the writings of Stevenson, Meredith, and Henley, the only poet, by the way (and this is rather characteristic), who appears to move Sir Arthur very much.
He is an enthusiast for Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall."
Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed only one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should choose.
There is a curious little criticism of the varying merits of Richardson and Fielding which is certainly not the opinion of most people. When comparing the two men, Sir Arthur writes that Richardson, poor, dear, dull Richardson, was "the subtler and deeper writer." But he shows himself a real appreciator of Fielding's genius when he rates the "Voyage to Lisbon" above the novels.
"Richard Feverel" appears to him the greatest thing Meredith has written, and he adds:—
I think that I should put it third after "Vanity Fair" and "The Cloister and The Hearth" if I had to name the three novels I admire most in the Victorian era...
One regrets, indeed, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has not fold us more. There must surely be many modern books that interest him and that he values as highly the work of the men that are dead.
S. D.
"Through the Magic Door." By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (Smith, Elder, 5s.)
