Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

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      I went to Mr Walker on the Monday. His terms are 2 guineas a month but he lends me plenty of books. I was compelled to get 2 books from Livingstone, one second hand a Greek dictionary, the other new (a very small book) Blackie’s Greek conversations. Mr Walker has dispirited me awfully. He says that very often as many as 50 candidates go in for it, and that the high school curriculum leads, as it were, up to the bursary, and they generally secure it. Mr Walker is a young man and helps me very much; he did not get this identical bursary but one of £20.

      Baby is pretty good considering, Innes behaves wonderfully well. Lottie is, as she always is, a brick. Baa is cooking very well, and seems to enjoy acting as keeper of the house. Arthur is behaving so so. Papa is very quiet and nice; I don’t know about the Graphics money. I gave him your letter to read this morning, and when he came to that part I think he looked uncomfortable. However he is all that could be desired. Much as we all desire you back, pray make the best of the chance, and get a good mouthful of English air which is better than this stuff here.

      You must thank the Dr heartily for his kindness in giving [me] the flute. I don’t deserve it unless I win this bursary, in spite of all high schools and bugbears.

      to Dr Bryan Charles Waller 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1876

Many thanks for your kind letter, which went far towards restoring my equanimity, which was rather shaken by Mr Walkers statements. I had no idea there would be so many competitions, but I suppose three quarters of them go in without a vestige of a chance. Mr Walker is a very jolly fellow; he is very good at mathematics, though I don’t think his classical knowledge is very brilliant, and we are continually having long arguments over some disputed sense or word.* I do a Latin & Greek exercise every day, learn a chapter of Livy and Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’, and a certain quantity of Euclid and Algebra. In fact I seldom emerge from my cell except for meals and sometimes in the evening when I petrify our small family circle by reading Poe’s Tales. I hope you will excuse the liberty I have taken in making use of the ‘university calendars’ from your room. The bursary examen is in them, and I have done last year’s for practise. I found it easy enough, my only fear is that others may find it easier still. It is indeed, as you say, a very great consolation to know that I will never more need mathematics. Classics I like, and I shall always try to keep up my knowledge of them, but mathematics of every sort I detest and abhor.

      So when the time came to create an arch villain for Sherlock Holmes, he made Professor James Moriarty a mathematician.

       ‘He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.’

      —‘The Final Problem’

      Conan Doyle might never have created Sherlock Holmes at all were it not for discovering Edgar Allan Poe at an impressionable age—forming a lasting appreciation of his contributions to the short-story form, and particularly the tale of detection that the American writer had invented. Thirty years later in Through the Magic Door, his book about literature and writers, he called Poe, ‘[T]he supreme original short story writer of all time’, from whom had come

      nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime… Each may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point.

      In the first Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes scoffs at Poe’s detective Dupin, but that did not reflect its author’s view. Throughout his life he acknowledged his debt, insisting, ‘If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.’

      Conan Doyle did win the bursary competition, but then was informed that it was open only to arts students—and that the money for the next one had already been given out. In the end he received a ‘solatium’ of only £7—his first experience of the College of Hard Knocks he saw in Edinburgh University. ‘It was a bitter disappointment,’ he wrote. ‘I had a legal case, but what can a penniless student do, and what sort of college career would he have if he began it by suing his University for money? I was advised to accept the situation, and there seemed no prospect of accepting anything else.’

      Nor did his subsequent medical study and practice make him more sentimental about Edinburgh University. The Romance of Medicine addressed what he felt was the short-sightedness of its professors and students alike in his day. ‘I was educated in a materialistic age,’ he told the rising generation of medical students in 1910.

We looked upon mind and spirit as secretions from the brain in the same way as bile was a secretion of the liver. Brain centres explained everything, and if you could find and stimulate the centre of holiness you would produce a saint—but if your electrode slipped, and you got on to the centre of brutality, you would evolve a Bill Sikes.* That was, roughly, the point of view of the more advanced spirits among us. I can clearly see now as I look back that this frame of mind was largely a protest and a reaction against transcendental dogmas which had no likelihood either in reason or in science. Swinging away from dogma, we lost all grip upon spirituality, confusing two things which have little connection with each other—indeed, my experience is that the less the dogma the greater the spirituality. We talked about laws, and how all things were done by immutable law, and thought that was profound and final.

      Medicine was also going through great and stormy change. Anaesthesia was still relatively new; and Dr Joseph Lister of Edinburgh was revolutionizing surgery anew with a new antiseptic system not yet fully accepted by his peers, as Conan Doyle later recalled:

      [T]he wards of the infirmary were divided between the antiseptic people and the cold-water school, the latter regarding the whole germ theory as an enormous fad. One sardonic professor of the old school used to say, as he was operating, ‘Please shut that door, or the germs will be getting in.’ On the other hand, the Listerians seem to have been almost unnecessarily scrupulous in keeping the germs out. Every operation was conducted amid clouds of carbolic steam, which often made the details invisible to the spectator. We should have been very much surprised to learn that the Puffing Billy could be done away with, and yet that complete antisepsis could be maintained.

       It’s Lister’s antiseptic spray, you know, and Archer’s one of the carbolic-acid men. Hayes is the leader of the cleanliness-and-cold-water school, and they all hate each other like poison.

      —‘His First Operation’

      The debate could not be settled simply by judging the cleanliness-and-cold-water school silly or backward. Its adherents often achieved better patient survival rates in the face of infection than Listerians did, and one of Lister’s bitterest critics, an Edinburgh-educated surgeon named Lawson Tait, was revolutionizing abdominal surgery, which few others dared even attempt in the 1870s.

      He made it harder for himself, too, because of the family’s financial condition. ‘It was clearly very needful that I should help financially as quickly as possible, СКАЧАТЬ