Conan Doyle Reads
Conan Doyle Reads is an article published in The Inter Ocean on 27 october 1894.
Report of the lecture "Readings and Reminiscences" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 26 october 1894 at the Central Music Hall (Chicago, USA).
Illustrations
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"My father was an artist." -
"I wrote a story at the age of six." -
"I cannot consider myself a very observant man."
Report
CONAN DOYLE READS.
The Distinguished English Novelist on the Platform.
HIS EARLY INFLUENCES.
Wrote a Story with Illustrations When Six Years Old.
Sherlock Holmes and Micah Clarke Two of His Best-Liked Characters.
A real, live, successful author, telling about his own life, struggles, and works, attracted a large and fashionable audience to Central Music Hall last night.
Evidently, from the extent and character of the attendance, Dr. Conan Doyle's novels must be familiar household books in many Chicago homes. Among the audience were a number of leading citizens, some of whom would hardly be suspected of ever looking between the covers of a novel, who came to hear personally from the writer who had beguiled a few of their leisure hours. The ladies were there in special force.
They were all assempbled, as Mr. Harlow N. Higinbotham put it in introducing Dr. Conan Doyle, "on the prospect of a feast of the rich literary viands prepared by one of the most eminent writers of our own time."
Dr. Doyle bowed his acknowledgment of the round of applause that greeted him and at once plunged into bis subject. He said, in opening:
"It is naturally repugnant for a man to stand up on a public platform and to talk about himself and his own work. It is only when he attempts to do so he realizes how very insignificant things both himself and his own work are, and how very difficult it is to make the work interesting to any third person. If anybody is good enough to come to hear me lecture it is not because they want my criticism on this or that, but because something I have written has come in their way and they want to make a bond of sympathy between us."
Early Life and Influences.
Dr. Doyle then described his early life and the initial influences that swayed his literary inclinations. His father was an artist, as were all his people, and lived in Edinburgh, where the lecturer was born. One day a big man with a big voice came into their little flat and took upon his knee the lecturer, then only 4 years old. "That was William Makepeace Thackeray, and that was the first personal knowledge I had of the world of letters."
The lecturer's mother was a very interesting domestic story-teller, and gave vivid instalments of fictions from week to week. At the age of 6 the lecturer wrote his first story on foolscap, four words to the line, and illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches by the author. There was a man in it and a tiger, but they got blended by the time the tiger met the man. At this time he was a voracious reader of books ; he suspected that it was on his account that the committee of a certain library gave orders that no book should be changed more than three times a day. At the age of 12 he felt he had traversed every ocean and explored the Rockies, and could fill a graveyard with the Indian braves he had killed in Edinburgh, having been nursed to recovery after every fight by a faithful young squaw.
"Since then I have shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was very flat compared with what it was in the days I did it with Fenimore Cooper and Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow."
Having filled his little savings box with money his parents invested it in a set of the Waverley novels, which, however, he did not appreciate, as at that time he put Sir Walter Scott somewhere between cod-liver oil and English grammar in the list of his antipathies. Nevertheless it was a good thing for a lad to have good books at his elbow ; he reads them because he has nothing else to read, and eventually he prefers them.
Entered the Field of Letters.
In 1878 he sent a small manuscript to a provincial journal ; it was accepted, and the small check which accompanied the editor's letter was the bounty money that enrolled the lecturer in the army of letters. For the following ten years he wrote short stories. During that time also he sailed in the arctic seas, visited the coast of Africa, and took out his degree as doctor of medicine. During that time he did not make more than £250 in any one year by his pen. His stories were published anonymously, according to a bad rule which prevailed with some English magazines and also with some American ones, so that he was as little known at the end as at the beginning. On this he might have escaped "slatings" by critics, but even their abuse would have been better than their silence, as it would at least have attracted attention. Once, when he got a story in the Cornhill Magazine, published in London, a critic said:
"Cornhill has a story this month which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave."
"It was then,"
continued Dr. Doyle, "I first realized that British criticism had fallen into a shocking state of decay. It dawned upon me that I must drop the short story and write a book. It was a serious novel, very incoherent and disjointed. When publishers wrote to say they could see no merit in it I was of the same way of thinking. It found its way into print, and my conscience would be lighter if it had not done so. At this period a gentleman appeared in my life to whom I think I afterward behaved in a very ungrateful manner — I mean the late Mr. Sherlock Holmes, of Baker street."
Here the audience applaudes with a warmth which showed that most of them had made appreciative acquaintance with Dr. Doyle's unique creation.
Sherlock Holmes and His Death.
The lecturer then described how he had come to write his detective stories and expressed regret at having killed off Sherlock Holmes, "It was only after Holmes' death."
he said, "I realized what warm friends he had made. I assure you if I had killed a man I could not have received more vindictive letters. Some wrote asking for locks of his hair and for his photographs at different ages."
[Laughter.]
He told of the writing of "Micah Clarke" and his difficulty in getting it published until the critic Andrew Lang recommended it to the firm of Longmans. This was in 1888. "The White Company" followed, dealing with life in the fourteenth century, and necessitating the study of archery, armory, monastic institutions, and other subjects, in order to produce a conscientious study of the times. Then came "The Great Shadow," dealing with the campaign of Waterloo, in which battle five of the author's ancestors took part and one was slain ; and "The Refugees," prompted by the extraordinary interest he took in and the great admiration he had always felt for America ; in writing it he was influenced by Parkman, Hawthorne, and Washington Irving.
Dr. Doyle read impressively, but without much attempt at dramatic force, an extract from a short story of his, recently published, in which the Lord of Chateau Noir, a French nobleman whose son had died a prisoner among the Germans after having been subjected to much insult and humiliation, manages to secure a German officer, who had been sent to arrest him, and punishes and favors him alternately in imitation of the treatment his son had received in captivity.
In conclusion Dr. Doyle said as a story writer it was a privilege to exercise an art one loved and which had no finality to it ; it was a privilege to carry about one's possession under one's hat and be able to exercise it at any time, to know one had friends the world over and that he had written what occasionally cheered a heart or brightened a dark hour. These were the joys of the author and they repaid him for the griefs which came to him when a good story went wrong or a bright idea grew dark io the telling.
"As author has his dark hours, but if he knows he has brought a smile upon sad lips or cheered one hour of pain his own troubles are all the lighter for that."
The audience were apparently well pleased and saluted the lecturer with a hearty parsing salvo of applause before they left their seats.
