The Creator of Sherlock Holmes
The Creator of Sherlock Holmes is an introduction written by James MacArthur published in Stories of Sherlock Holmes by Harper & Brothers Publishers in 1904.
The Creator of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. He comes of an artistic family, and is the grand-son of John Doyle, the famous political caricaturist, whose pictorial sketches appeared for more than thirty years under the initials of "H. B.," without disclosure of the artist's identity. Many of these were so famous in their day that they were frequently purchased at large prices by the British Museum. John Doyle had four sons, who also became artists. His eldest son, Charles Doyle, was the father of the novelist, and another son was Richard Doyle, who came by his nickname of "Dicky" Doyle through his signature of a "D" with a little bird perched upon it, which may yet be seen on the cover design of Punch.
Conan Doyle's education began in England, at Stonyhurst, in Lancashire, where already in his tenth year he exhibited a wonderful precocity for telling stories. But even at the early age of six the future novelist and creator of Sherlock Holmes was anticipated in a story of terrible adventure, written in a bold hand on foolscap paper, four words to the line, and accompanied with original pen-and-ink illustrations. "There was a man and a tiger in it,"
he says of this infantile effort; "I forget which was the hero; but it didn't matter much, for they became blended into one about the time when the tiger met the man. I was a realist in the age of the romanticists. I described at some length, both verbally and pictorially, the untimely end of that wayfaring man. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on. 'It is very easy to get people into scrapes and very hard to get them out again,' was my sage comment on the difficulty; and I have often had cause to repeat this precocious aphorism of my childhood. Upon this occasion the situation was beyond me, and my book, like my man, was engulfed in my tiger."
At Stonyhurst, and also at Feldkirch, in Germany, his literary inclination was shown in the editorship of school magazines. In 1876 he returned to Edinburgh and took up the study of medicine at the university there, where he remained until he obtained his diploma, five years later. The story-telling instinct, however, was stirring within him, and, while still in his teens, urged him to the writing of tales, one of which he sent to Chambers's Journal two years after the commencement of his medical studies. It was accepted and paid for with an alacrity that gave a mighty impetus and direction to his future career. Had it been rejected, he says that he should have given up writing. He received three guineas for the story, which was entitled "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley," and was based on an old Kaffir superstition concerning a "gloomy, bowlder-studded passage" notoriously haunted by a demon "with glowing eyes under the shadow of a cliff." The glowing eyes were found to be diamonds embedded in rock-salt, so that the intrepid young adventurers in search of demons were rewarded with a prize of greater value. For ten years after that he wrote anonymously, producing during that time some forty or fifty short stories.
In 1880 Dr. Doyle left the university to make a seven-months' trip to the Arctic seas as unqualified surgeon on board a whaler. There was very little demand for surgery aboard the Hope, and he has described his chief occupation during the voyage as being employed in keeping the captain in cut tobacco, working in the boats after fish, and teaching the crew to box. He utilized his experiences later in his story, "The Captain of the Polestar," which was written for Temple Bar, and was subsequently published in a volume of short stories.
Two years later, in 1882, after a four months' voyage to the west coast of Africa, he settled down as a medical practitioner at Southsea, in England, where he remained until 1890. Those were arduous and trying years, in which he came to regard the calls of the profession he had adopted as interruptions in the real work of his life, and found that the writing of stories was a very slender prop upon which to lean for a livelihood. "Fifty little cylinders of manuscript," he says, "did I send out during eight years, which described a regular orbit among publishers, and usually came back, like paper boomerangs, to the place that they had started from." All this time he was writing anonymously, and during the ten years of his literary apprenticeship, he states that, in spite of unceasing and untiring literary effort, he never in any one year earned fifty pounds by his pen. Another grievous disappointment which added to his harassing experience at this period was the disappearance of a long story entitled The Narrative of John Smith, upon which he had spent a great deal of pains and time. It was lost in the mails and never heard of again.
Then, in 1887, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual a story from his pen called A Study in Scarlet. It is a significant point in the author's career, for in this story Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance. It was published later in book form, and went forth as his first novel, and immediately began to attract attention. Under these favoring circumstances he undertook the writing of Micah Clarke. It was completed after a year's reading and five months' writing, and represented the most ambitious and hopeful work the author had yet accomplished. But it came back to him from one publishing house after another, until he began to despair of its acceptance. "I remember,"
he says, "smoking over my dog-eared manuscript when it returned for a whiff of country air, and wondering what I should do if some sporting kind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and make me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot."
When the book at last fell into the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang, then acting for Messrs. Longmans, Green & Company, the success of Micah Clarke was assured, and its author's literary career placed on a firmer footing. The Sign of the Four followed in 1889, in which story Sherlock Holmes, who had made his bow to the public in A Study in Scarlet, reappeared and increased Dr. Doyle's rising reputation. His heart, however, was in the historical novel, and in 1890 he followed up the success of Micah Clarke with The White Company, in the preparation of which he read one hundred and fifteen volumes, French and English, dealing with the fourteenth century in England. His delight in the work is expressed in his own words: "To write such books,"
he once said, speaking of Micah Clarke and The White Company, "one must have an enthusiasm for the age about which he is writing. He must think it a great one, and then he must go deliberately to work and reconstruct it. Then is his a splendid joy."
About this time Dr. Doyle abandoned his practice at Southsea and came to London as an eye specialist. He studied at Paris and Vienna, where he wrote The Doings of Raffles Haw. But on his return to England he finally decided to give up medicine, and, impelled by the interest which the reading public was taking in the two detective stories he had written, he settled down in earnest to work on The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. His subsequent career is familiar to the reading public. In historical fiction he has added The Refugees and The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was succeeded by The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and a new volume of the Brigadier Gerard's adventures has just been published on the eve of Sherlock Holmes's reappearance in a new series of detective stories.
It is with Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes that we are immediately concerned in the publication of this new edition of his most popular books. However Dr. Doyle may prefer to write historical romances, and whatever his personal estimate of his great detective may be, the fact remains that in Sherlock Holmes he has created a character whose exploits are as familiar as household words, and who has entered into the very fibre of Anglo-Saxon life and literature. It is actually said that at times Dr. Doyle has expressed a wish that Dr. Watson had never met Sherlock Holmes. It is on record that he thought so little of A Study in Scarlet, the story in which Sherlock Holmes first appeared, that he sold it outright for $125. The value of Sherlock Holmes has gone up since those days, however, for it is understood that he is now receiving nearly two dollars a word for the new series which has just been launched.
The story of the genesis of Sherlock Holmes, as Dr. Doyle tells it, is of real interest. It was on his return to Edinburgh after his Arctic trip that he became acquainted with Dr. Joseph Bell, who, in the first instance, suggested the great detective. "Sherlock Holmes,"
says Dr. Doyle, "is the literary embodiment, if I may so express it, of my memory of a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, who would sit in the patients' waiting-room with a face like a red Indian, and diagnose the people as they came in before even they had opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, he would give them details of their lives, and he would hardly ever make a mistake. Gentlemen,' he would say to us students standing around, I am not quite sure whether this man is a cork-cutter or a slater. I observe a slight callus or hardening on one side of his forefinger and a little thickening on the outside of his thumb, and, I assure you, that is the sign of his being one or the other.' His faculty of deduction was at times highly dramatic. 'Ah!' he would say to another man, 'you are a soldier, a non-commissioned officer, and you have served in Bermuda. Now, how did I know that, gentlemen? He came into the room without taking his hat off, as he would going into an orderly room. A slight authoritative air, combined with his age, shows that he was a non-commissioned officer. A slight rash on the forehead tells me he was in Bermuda and subject to a certain rash known only there.'"
Dr. Doyle also acknowledges some indebtedness to Dupin, the detective in Poe's short stories, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." This is the more interesting for the reason that in A Study in Scarlet Sherlock Holmes is made to speak rather contemptuously of Dupin's skill and acumen. To quote Dr. Doyle again: "In work which consists in the drawing of detectives there are only one or two qualities which one can use, and an author is forced to hark back upon them constantly, so that every detective must really resemble every other detective to a greater or less extent. There is no great originality required in devising or constructing such a man, and the only possible originality which one can get into a story about a detective is in giving him original plots and problems to solve, as in his equipment there must be of necessity an alert acuteness of mind to grasp facts and the relation which each of them bears to the other."
Dr. Doyle went to work, therefore, to build up a scientific system in which everything might be logically reasoned out. Where Sherlock Holmes differed from his predecessors was that he had an immense fund of exact knowledge upon which to draw in consequence of his previous scientific education. He was practical, he was systematic, he was logical, and his success in the detection of crime was to be the result, not of chance or luck, but of his characteristic qualities. "With this idea,"
says Dr. Doyle, "I wrote a small book on the lines I have indicated, and produced A Study in Scarlet, which was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. That was the first appearance of Sherlock; but he did not arrest much attention, and no one recognized him as being anything in particular. About three years later, however, I was asked to do a small shilling book for Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, which publishes, as you know, a short story in each number. I didn't know what to write about, and the thought — occurred to me, 'Why not try to rig up the same chap again?' I did it, and the result was The Sign of the Four. Although the criticisms were favorable, I don’t think that even then Sherlock attracted much attention to his individuality."
It was when Dr. Doyle gave up the struggle between medical practice and the literary impulse and bent his energies on the stories that comprise The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and combined the science of deduction he had evolved with that story-telling quality which has always enabled him to give real human interest to the most commonplace narrative, that the detective story in his hands took on the stamp of creative genius, and caused such a furore that the reading public has not ceased from that day to this to call for more. That these stories live in the memory and fill the imagination with pleasant recollections is, for the most part, due to the fact that, notwithstanding Dr. Doyle's self-depreciation, he has made of Sherlock Holmes a real, live, human character. After you have read all the stories, and reread them, and forgotten the details so that you can read them again with renewed pleasure, the figure of Sherlock Holmes remains indelible and unforgettable. Dr. Doyle can do everything that Gaboriau and Poe have done, but he adds to the masterly mechanism of the one and the intellectual power of the other the human element of personality.
"In the very best of the Sherlock Holmes stories," Dr. Harry Thurston Peck has said, "he is as ingenious as Gaboriau, as imaginative as Poe, and in addition he creates for us characters that are broadly human and that interest us wholly apart from their relation to the plot." Again he says: "Sherlock Holmes himself interests us simply as a man. His curiously varied tastes, his fondness for good music and rare books, his disorderly room, his utter boredom when not absorbed in disentangling mysteries, his smoking of tobacco when working out his problems, his addiction to the cocaine habit — a curious touch — all these things amuse or interest or pique us, until we grow fond of him, and get at last to know him as well as though we, too, shared his rooms in Baker Street. Watson is another creation. Like all true artists who do their best work by instinct rather than self-consciously, it is probable that Dr. Doyle had no idea of how supremely clever a thing it was to make Watson the companion. and chronicler and also the foil of Sherlock Holmes. Watson, the matter-of-fact, sensible, and friendly surgeon, always planting both his broad feet squarely on the earth, is a typical British character, and his lack of insight makes Holmes, with his wonderful intuition, appear twice as wonderful by the force of contrast. Moreover, by making Watson the narrator of the stories, they are made to seem always plausible to the reader because of their sober, unemotional manner."
It is doubtful whether Dr. Doyle will ever surpass himself in the stories which are gathered in these three volumes. They represent, not only the best of his work, but the most masterly detective stories which have ever been written. As has been said, "there is not one story in the whole cycle which does not contain many touches that positively fascinate one by their ingenuity and unexpectedness." In spite of the fact that Dr. Doyle has been pressed to resuscitate Sherlock Holmes in a new series of adventures, it may be seen from something he himself said about three years ago that it is his conviction that the best about Sherlock Holmes has been told. "By the time I had finished the Adventures and Memoirs,"
he said, "I was absolutely determined it would be bad policy to do any more Holmes stories. When I was interested in Holmes, I wrote about Holmes, and it amused me making him get involved in new conundrums. But when I had written twenty-five stories, each involving the making of a fresh plot, I felt that it was becoming irksome, this searching for plots. And if it were getting irksome to me, most certainly, I argued, it must be losing its freshness for others. From that day to this I have never for an instant regretted the course I took in killing Sherlock."
Dr. Doyle, as we know, has changed his mind since then. But whether or not he succeeds in bringing the new adventures up to the level of the work he has already done, nothing can shake the extraordinary hold he has gained on the public or detract from the permanent place in literature which his cycle of stories, whose central figure is Sherlock Holmes, has secured to him.
James MacArthur.
