Dr. Doyle on Doyle
Dr. Doyle on Doyle is an article published in the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester) on 22 november 1894.
Report of the lecture "Readings and Reminiscences" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 21 november 1894 at the YMCA Music Hall (Rochester, USA).
Report
DR. DOYLE ON DOYLE.
The Great Novelist Tells of His Life and Works.
DETECTIVE CREATIONS
His Avowed Preference is for the Work of Historical Romance and His Favorite Book is "The White Company."
Dr. A. Conan Doyle was last evening compelled to face a strange audience in a strange city without a sponsor, to walk upon the stage and announce himself.
To be sure, there are few foreign writers of the day who stand so little in need of introduction, for his works have been the vogue for several years, and no one who has wade the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes, or his more serious hero, Micah Clarke, can be chary of welcome.
The house was not thoroughly full, for there were powerful counter attractions to the people whom Dr. Doyle would certainly draw, but the ready responsiveness of those who were present and their cordial approval, showed that the subjects were familiar and congenial.
Dr. Doyle is an impressive man, robust, clean cut and well groomed. His more than six feet of stature does not seem excessive when one notices the breadth of his shoulders and the depth of his chest. His face is full of spirit and his voice is mellow and pleasant. His manner of speech is of the simplest. He seems to strive to he distinct in his utterance, but there is not a suggestion of the theatrical or the affected.
Judging from the reports of his lectures in other cities, and the quotations that have drifted through the press, it would seem that the doctor has radically changed his plan of campaign. He began by giving critical talks, but last evening almost everything he said was purely personal, and much of it purely biographical.
He began with his childhood and traced his experience as a school boy and the influences that contributed to determine his mental bent. There is something almost pathetic in the tale of the diversion of the first money he ever accumulated. Some of it he had earned and some of it had been given to him, and he had gloated over it and devised as boys of small allowance will, a dozen different and delightful ways of spending it, when, as he came down to his breakfast one morning, he found a thirty-volume edition of the works of Walter Scott upon the table, and learned that his whole fortune had been squandered in books, when he had not even a foot ball to bless himself with.
Time has taught him to appreciate the wisdom of his parents and to bless the day when he became the owner of these romances, which, as he says, inspired him with an interest in history which survived even the system of historical teaching in vogue in the English public schools. Nevertheless, he says that Scott's novels for some time occupied a place in his esteem between cod liver oil and parental discipline. He had other sad experiences, for he was soundly caned at school for keeping Euclid on the desk, while Macauley or Irving were held below. He asserts that his real education went on beneath the desk.
"At the age of 17,"
said Mr. Doyle, "I went up to London to study medicine. As an illustration of my spirit at the time, I will tell you that I left my luggage at the station, and, before finding lodgings, went to Westminster Abbey to visit the tomb of my idol, Macauley. In 1878 I wrote a short story for Chambers Magazine. Much to my surprise it was accepted. The more I have thought about the matter since, the more I have been surprised that this was the result. But the check came to me, in due course, and that money was the bounty that insured my enlistment in the army of letters. It is very sweet to feel that one is creating something, be it money or reputation, out of nothing and the fascination never passes away."
Dr. Doyle continued to write short stories for ten years, with a few such diversions as engaging in the study and the practice of medicine, a trip to the Arctic regions and a stay on the west coast of Africa. His stories were accepted and published, but in no year did his receipts from the work of his pen reach $250. During this time he suffered all the ill effects of the English system of anonymous publication in the periodicals, for, while he was occasionally criticised with great bitterness, the end of ten years of constant publication, found his name still a meaningless sound to the ears of England. After producing an ultra sensational novel, which most publishers considered very bad and he considered worse, Dr. Doyle drifted to the consideration of the detective as a possibility in literature. The beginning was in 1886.
This style of literature the speaker regards as being exceedingly primitive, but affording a good setting for a dramatic idea. Dr. Doyle resented the old fashioned treatment of the detective, which makes all his success the result of some fortunate accident or some other aid equally vulgar. He held the idea that detective work might be done on systematic and semi-scientific lines, and it was to vindicate this view that Sherlock Holmes, the name is so real that one does not feel like placing it in quotations, came to be. The peculiarities of a professor in the medical school of Edinburgh, where Dr. Doyle was a student, furnished the hint upon which the scheme of the stories was laid out and, beginning in this accidental fashion they grew in number and popularity until they threatened to swamp the literary life of their author. Dr. Doyle said that he killed Holmes' first because he felt that his character was in danger of outstaying his welcome and also because the work had never been to his own taste, which is in the direction of historical romance. He said that he felt toward these stories as a successful producer of comic sketches might feel toward this work, if it stood between him and his ambition to be an academician. The lighter work might be better of its kind than the more serious, but it could never satisfy the painter.
Dr. Doyle declared that Poe is the discoverer of the detective as a literary possibility, and that Poe's "Dupin" is the type of all that has been successful since. He is, in fact, the precursor of Holmes. It was Poe who first discovered that the short story might he pushed to the verge of sensationalism without the essential sacrifice of art.
The speaker read the familiar description from one of his own stories of the scene between Holmes and his confidant and Boswell, in which the latter hands to Holmes a watch and the detective reads the character of the former owner. He also read the scene at the club describing the estimate placed upon the passers-by by Holmes and his brother, who sit in the bow window and apply the inductive system to them.
At the close of each of these readings the lecturer was loudly applauded. He then told of some of the amusing experiences connected with the life and death of Holmes. He has been confounded with his hero and has had pressing invitations from points all the way from San Francisco to Moscow, begging him to aid in the solving of mysteries, an art which he declares is quite beyond him. He has also had letters from many simple-minded and sincere souls, bitterly reproaching him for compassing the death of Holmes. He asserts that the latter will remain dead in spite of all temptation to yield to popular pressure.
Dr. Doyle says that his first historical romance, "Micah Clarke," was written to expoit his theory that the personal element in fiction is of little interest when the scene and the time of the story are remote. He asserts that the average reader of Ivanhoe does not care a rush whether the hero marries Rowena or Rebecca, but is interested in the incidents of action and the characters, the Black Prince, Frone de Boeuf, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, who take part in them. So he wrote a story of the last Puritan uprising in England in which there is scarcely a skirt. He meant, too, to impress the truth that not all the Puritans were good and that many of the cavaliers had their redeeming traits. He declared that the only exception to the rule as to personal interest is to be found in "The Cloister and the Hearth," in which the love of Margaret and Gerald is absorbing to the last, but he regards Reid's story as so supremely great as to stand quite by itself.
He found difficulty in finding a publisher for this romance. One of those rejecting it excused his action by saying that it only lacked interest to be a good book. At last, through the influence of Andrew Lang, the Longmans brought it out, and from that time all was clear sailing for the writer.
Dr. Doyle considers his romance of the wars between England and France in the fourteenth century, his best work. It is entitled "The White Company," and deals with a period which he says was almost virgin, a century earlier than Ivanhoe and a century later than Quentin Durward. In the preparation of this book, the author read 115 books before he used his pen in composition. He had to be a master of heraldy, of archery, of the armor of the time, of the monastic institutions, of all that made up its distinctive life. He quoted the words of Reid, who said that he milked 150 cows before he produced the "Colister and the Hearth," and yet most of the milk was his own.
Dr. Doyle said that he was inspired to the writing of "The Refugees" by a sincere interest in America, and by the absorbing devotion which he had always felt for the works of Hawthorne, Irving and Cooper. These with a close study of Parkman, whom he pronounces the greatest American historian, furnished him the clues to his American scenes and characters.
The lecturer closed by reading a very dramatic scene from a short story which has not as yet appeared in any collection and which was published in one of the English magazines. The story deals with the time of the Franco-Prussian war, and, if the extract read is a fair sample, must be one of its author's best works.
