(1859-)
[Illustration: A. CONAN DOYLE]
The author of 'The White Company,' 'The Great Shadow,' and 'Micah
Clarke' has been heard to lament the fact that his introduction to
American readers came chiefly through the good offices of his
accomplished friend "Sherlock Holmes." Dr. Doyle would prefer to be
judged by his more serious and laborious work, as it appears in his
historic romances. But he has found it useless to protest. 'The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' delighted a public which enjoys
incident, mystery, and above all that matching of the wits of a clever
man against the dumb resistance of the secrecy of inanimate things,
which results in the triumph of the human intelligence. Moreover, in
Sherlock Holmes himself the reader perceived a new character in
fiction. The inventors of the French detective story,--that ingenious
Chinese puzzle of literature,--have no such wizard as he to show. Even
Poe, past master of mystery-making, is more or less empirical in his
methods of mystery-solving.
But Sherlock Holmes is a true product of his time. He is an embodiment
of the scientific spirit seeing microscopically and applying itself to
construct, from material vestiges and psychologic remainders, an
unknown body of proof. From the smallest fragments he deduces the
whole structure, precisely as the great naturalists do; and so
flawless are his reasonings that a course of 'The Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes' would not be bad training in a high-school class in
logic.
The creator of this eminent personage was born in Edinburgh in 1859,
of a line of artists; his grandfather, John Doyle, having been a
famous political caricaturist, whose works, under the signature "H.
B.," were purchased at a high price by the British Museum. The quaint
signature of his father--a capital D, with a little bird perched on
top, gained him the affectionate sobriquet of "Dicky Doyle"; and Dicky
Doyle's house was the gathering-place of artists and authors, whose
talk served to decide the destiny of the lad Conan. For though he was
intended for the medical profession, and after studying in Germany had
kept his terms at the Medical College of Edinburgh University, the
love of letters drove him forth in his early twenties to try his
fortunes in the literary world of London.
Inheriting from his artist ancestry a sense of form and color, a
faculty of constructiveness, and a vivid imagination, his studiousness
and his industry have turned his capacities into abilities. For his
romance of 'The White Company' he read more than two hundred books,
and spent on it more than two years of labor. 'Micah Clarke' and 'The
Great Shadow' involved equal wit and conscience. In his historic
fiction he has described the England of Edward III., of James II., and
of to-day, the Scotland of George III., the France of Edward III., of
Louis XIV., and of Napoleon, and the America of Frontenac; while, in
securing this correctness of historic detail, he has not neglected the
first duty of a story-teller, which is to be interesting.