BAKER STREET STUDIES
The Diversions of
Scholarship
By DESMOND MacCARTHY
The Sunday Times (London, England), Sunday, Augustus, 26, 1934;
pg. 6; Issue 5811.
I PERUSED this work of careful research and
wild conjecture with mixed feelings: resentment, envy, uneasiness. With
resentment, because I am only mentioned in it once, and then merely as one who
had been puzzled! With envy, because the investigations of Vernon Rendall,
Roberts, Starrett, Bell, Macdonnel and Knox, of Dorothy Sayers and Helen
Simpson—their thoroughness and their daring—have made my own earlier researches
and conjectures appear perfunctory and tame in comparison. With uneasiness,
because there are, alas, signs that public patience on this subject is nearly
exhausted. Any day a cry may start, “Let us rid the country of these
Holmes-cum-Watson bores who are saping the common-sense of our race.” A
“clean-up” of Baker Street investigations is
by no means impossible. Even in a most respectful review of this book in a
literary journal there sounded a warning, and in at least one notice of
Starrett’s book, “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” which immediately
preceded the publication of this one, there was something far more ominous—an
unmistakable note of hostile fanaticism[1].
The brilliant young man who wrote
that notice (though to judge from his former writings you might have supposed
him over-indulgent to the weaker sides of human nature) revealed suddenly a
moral and intellectual exasperation, an utter lack of sympathy with elderly
childishness—and especially with this form of it—which bodes ill to all of us.
“The Watson cult,” he wrote, “now combines an intellectual with an emotional
escape.” He evidently thinks “escapes” evil, forbidden. “Back to Baker Street,”
he continues scornfully, “Back to Baker Street, where there are muffins still
for tea, a settled income for the middle classes, no danger of getting run
over, and Mother Watson, the goddess of Mediocrity triumphant, of Not having to
make up one’s mind, there to welcome us; and back to the common-room, the
metaphysical limericks, the acrostics (‘Can anyone think of a main besides the
Spanish main?’) and the homeliness of exact knowledge.”
No Escape?
Mr. Cyril Connolly calls the sphere
of our study “the paradise of the soft-boiled,” and I am only thankful he did
not add, “and of the half-baked.” “Paradise,”
I protest, is too strong a term, but I see what he means. He won’t allow the
panting fox even a little temporary whimsical bolt-hole. We must never, not
even at weaker moments, distract ourselves from Realities by contemplating the
charm of a civilisation which did allow us “a settled income”; we must never
nestle down in “the homeliness of exact knowledge.” No more elaborate notes to
the classics of any period. What are such pursuits but “escapes”? We are not
allowed to “escape.” Henceforth we must never allow our imagination to play
round Horace on his Sabine farm, Mr. Woodhouse taking a little gruel in the
bosom of his family, Montaigne in his tower room, Robinson Crusoe behind his
pallisade once he has drawn his ladder up, Watson and Holmes by their fireside,
when fog is at the window and the crash and clatter of an arrested hansom
announces some fresh adventure. I see what he means, but his meaning is harsh
to the middle-aged who crave a little cosiness. The times are against us, and
in reviewing this latest addition to Baker Street
researches it behoves me, out of caution, to be brief.
Holmes’ College Career
Speaking as one impenitently
childish in this respect, and as a Cambridge man, I am grateful to Miss Dorothy
Sayers for having gone so far towards proving that Sherlock Holmes was educated
at Cambridge, though it is mistake to say educated—no curriculum made him what
he became. The main passage on which all conjectures on this point rest occurs
in the adventure of “The Gloria Scott.”
[Victor Trevor] was
the only friend I made during the two years that I was at college. I was never
a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and
working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with
the men of my year. Bar fencing and boxing, I had few athletic tastes, and then
my line of study was quite distinct from that of the other fellows, so that we
had no points of contact at all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only
through the accident of his bull-terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as
I went down to chapel.
You would think that this
established the fact that Sherlock Holmes went down without taking a
degree—and, in my opinion, it does. But there is another passage in “The
Musgrave Ritual” which renders it apparently uncertain, for there Holmes speaks
of his “last years at the university.” This, I maintain, is a slip on the part
of Watson who reports the words. No one speaks of his “last years” at Cambridge, where three is
the normal period, unless he stayed up after taking a degree. The probability
that what Holmes said was, during “my last year
at the University” is to my mind overwhelming, and it is therefore with regret
that I declare all Miss Sayers’ ingenuity in reconciling the two passages to be
wasted. On the other hand, I consider her argument that he was at Cambridge, not Oxford,
irrefutable. Read the passage again. Holmes was bitten by a dog on his way to
chapel; dogs are not allowed in college; Holmes must therefore have been in
“digs” in the town; it is only at Cambridge that undergraduates go into
lodgings when they first come up; at Oxford it is the other way round; Holmes
was his first or second year when he was bitten, therefore he was a Cambridge
man. Bravo, Miss Sayers!
A Trinity Man
On the other hand, her argument that
he was at one of the smaller colleges has this weakness. Most of them in the
seventies had ample room for their undergraduates. It was the large colleges
which overflowed, and as John’s had greatly extended its buildings before
Holmes came up, probability points to his having been a Trinity man. Again, his
sole acquaintances among undergraduates, the rich young Trevor and the
aristocratic young Musgrave (whom Holmes could never look at without
associating him with the grey archways and mullioned windows), are more likely
to have been at Trinity than, as Miss Sayers conjectures, Sidney Sussex.
If the above discussion strikes you
as unspeakably boring you will not enjoy this book. No: I am wrong, you may
still be amused by the fantastications of Father Knox, who writes on “The
Mystery of Mycroft”—at any rate, with his picture of the two brothers in their
boyhood.
A call on the Holmes family must
have been an unnerving business; you could be sure that you would be turned
inside out the moment you had left. “Mummy,” little Sherlock would say, “Who
was that man who came to luncheon? I mean the victim of chronicle alcoholism
with the dirty finger-nails? I could see, of course, that he has trouble with
his wife, and that his gas bill for the last quarter remains unpaid; that he is
thriftless, absent-minded, and Eurasian by descent; but I couldn’t quite make
out whether he was a company promoter or just a common black-mailer?” Then from
the heart-rug: “Don’t make such an unnecessary ass of yourself, you blighter;
do you mean to say you can’t tell a publisher from the way he licks his finger
before turning over a page of manuscript?”
“My dears,” Mrs. Holmes would
expostulate, crushing down a Sempronia’s pride in the interest of manners, “you
really must not say such things.”
The rest of the essay in which an
attempt is made to show that Mycroft was implicated with Professor Moriarty
seems to me a regrettable piece of Verrallian[2]
ingenuity calculated to darken counsel. But I must be brief. I dare not
expatiate on the solid scholarship of Rendall who writes a masterly essay “The
Limitations of Sherlock Holmes,” in which admiration is nevertheless well maintained,
or on Roberts’s handling of his relations to “the fair sex,” or on Bell’s
important contribution to the problem of the date of “The Sign of Four,” which
is the pivot on which the whole of Watson’s chronology turns—I dare not for
fear of precipitating that exasperation of which I spoke at the beginning.
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