Fiction and Literature. Dr. Conan Doyle at Lucerne
Fiction and Literature. Dr. Conan Doyle at Lucerne is an article published in The Daily Chronicle on 12 august 1893.
Report of the lecture "Fiction as a Part of Literature" given by Arthur Conan Doyle on 10 august 1893 in Christ Church, Lucerne.
Dr. Conan Doyle at Lucerne
FICTION AND LITERATURE.
DR. CONAN DOYLE AT LUCERNE.
[FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT.]
LUCERNE, August 10.
Dr. Conan Doyle has scored the credit of having drawn the greatest following of the month to his lecture on "Fiction as a part of Literature." In the program of the conferences being carried out under the auspices of Rev. Dr. Lunn, the current week figures as "The Young People's Week," and the editors of both the Young Man and the Young Woman are in Lucerne with strong contingents of their readers. There must have been over 400 persons to listen to Dr. Doyle, who spoke from the reading-desk of Christ Church, the walls of which fane resounded again and again with ringing applause as the lecturer made some apposite remark or cited an epigrammatic sentence from popular authors.
Dr. Doyle came down heavily on the critics who whine forth pessimistic lamentations over the decay of literature. The proneness of the critic, the doctor held, was always to depreciate the literary talent of the days in which he lived; but as a fact he maintained that the fiction of the present century was the most certain and permanent part of England's glory, and would last in the memory and appreciation of the people after the labours of the statesman and the soldier had crumbled away. One very striking feature in regard to the present century fiction was its breadth of view. The novelist was growing ever more cosmopolitan, and in this sense literary federation was preceding the federation of the empire. As examples of this thought Dr. Doyle instanced Kipling, whose volcanic style of writing showed traits of the glow of the East; Stevenson, who was gradually unfolding the literature of the South Seas, in which the beat of the waves and the rustle of the palm leaves were distinctly recognisable; Rider Haggard, who had shown a romance which overhung the frontier line of civilisation and revealed something of the debateable land where the white inpinged on the black human subject; Olive Schreiner, whose young life had shown such great literary triumphs and gave promise of so much in the future, and others. And on these grounds the doctor ventured the reasonable hope that the light literature of the future would not be less brilliant, if it did not exceed, the literature of the past. Indeed, his personal expectations went further, for he hoped the present day talent would develop as the tropical tree whose branches curve downward, till, reaching the ground, they take fresh root and unite the parent stem with many others as strong and as thick as itself.
Narrowing the view to fiction writers of very recent times, Dr. Doyle held that the present generation of authors are largely tinged with Robert Louis Stevenson — a man who ranked high among the few English writers who possessed the dual capacity of writing a book and a taking short story. These arts the doctor held to be quite distinct — Thackeray, Scott, Reade, and George Eliot to wit, none of whom had made any mark with the short story order of literature. And while so many writers were thus tinged with Stevenson, Stevenson himself was in the genesis of his authorship largely influenced by George Meredith. By the way, in the outset of the lecture Dr. Doyle had remarked that George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were both instances of men possessed of great powers, who, notwithstanding, had failed to hold the public like some of their predecessors. Returning to Stevenson, the doctor remarked that no one had shown a greater power of selecting exact language for the expression of exact ideas. For example — "His eyes clung coasting round to me" showed admirably the furtive glance of the guilty man, the expression "coasting" being there invested with quite a new and most exact meaning. "His voice shook like a taut rope" and "his blows resounded on the grave as thick as sobs" were other instances of the same characteristic of this author.
Olive Schreiner, J. M. Barrie (whom Dr. Doyle thought was destined to live in the memories of Scotsmen like Robert Burns), "Q," and other authors, were all given their meed of panygeric, and then Dr. Doyle came down to Rudyard Kipling — a man whose faults it would be easy for any one to enumerate, who evidently lacked the faculty of judging his own work, but who notwithstanding all this, stood out as a vivid Indian orchid amongst English roses; who had made himself a great political power, whose literary imagination had done more to unite England and India than the Suez Canal, and whose literary triumphs so early in life were equal to those of Scott, Thackeray, and others at nearly double his age.
On these lines the doctor held the close attention of his audience for over an hour, with not a dull or lagging moment from exordium to peroration, and at the close there was probably not a single person present who would disagree with Dr. Doyle's own deduction that the literature of a nation being what the people read, it influences what they think and what they think is embodied in what they do.
