“a magical garden with rivers and bowers,”
haunted by fays and gnomes, dryads and fawns and the witchery and enchantment that have been in dusky woods, in misty fields, in twilight and midnight places since the beginning of time. Howbeit, even the ghostly atmosphere of “The Listeners” is pierced with a cry that is not of the dead, for in his farthest flights of fantasy he is not out of touch with nature and human nature, and it is a glowing love of these at the heart of his darkling visions and gossamer imaginings that gives them life and will keep them alive.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were more of a conventional man of letters—had he been just “a book in breeches,” as Sidney Smith said Macaulay was—it would not be so difficult to know where to make a beginning when one sits down to write of him. But no author could be farther from being “all author”; he is much too keenly interested in life to do nothing but write about it, and probably shares Byron’s scorn of “the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes,” and his preference of doers to writers. He has read much, but lived more, as a novelist ought to, giving freely of his time and thought and sympathy to lives outside his own. He has no fretful little moods of morbidity, cynicism, pessimism, but is essentially a big man and writes always like himself, with a complete freedom from affection, a naturalness, a healthy vigor and breadth of outlook that cannot be developed within the four walls of a study.
Characteristic of himself, I think, is this reflection in “The Tragedy of the Korosko”: “When you see the evil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly face behind.” And this, which he puts into the mouth of Lord Roxton, in “The Lost World”; “There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.”
You may depend he felt that time had come for him when he took up the cudgel for George Edalji and would not rest or be silent till the case had been reopened and Edalji proved innocent and set at liberty; it came again when he threw everything else aside to render patriotic services in the Boer War (which were to some extent recognized by the accolade), and again in the later and greater War; it came for him when he resolutely championed the cause of the martyred natives in the Belgian Congo; when, believing in Oscar Slater’s innocence, he wrote a masterly review of the evidence against him and strove to have him re-tried; and it came once more when, risking his reputation and in defiance of the ridicule he knew he would have to face, he openly confessed himself a believer in spiritualism and has persisted in that unorthodoxy until he has become one of the most powerful and insistent of its apostles.
These and other such activities may seem outside a consideration of Doyle’s work in literature, but they are not, any more than are his medical knowledge or his love of sport, for you find their influence everywhere in his books. There were ghosts in his fiction before ever he began to raise them at the seance. Some find it hard to square his absorption in spiritualism with his robust personality, with the sane philosophy of his stories, and the fact that he is so much a man of action, a lover of the open air and all the wholesome human qualities that keep a writer’s blood sound and prevent his ink from getting muddy and slow. But it is just these circumstances that add weight to his testimony as a spiritualist; he is no dreamer predisposed to believe in psychic phenomena; he is a stolid, shrewd man of affairs who wants to look inside and see how the wheels go round before he can have faith in anything.
He has played as strenuously as he has worked. He has tasted delight of battle with his peers at football, cricket, golf; he has made balloon and aeroplane ascents; introduced ski-ing into the Grison division of Switzerland; did pioneer work in the opening up of miniature rifle ranges; can hold his own with the foils and is a formidable boxer; he is a fisherman in the largest sense, for he has been whaling in the Arctic Seas, he used to ride to hounds and is a good shot, but has a hearty hatred of all sport that involves the needless killing of birds or animals.