Dr. Watson
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. By H. W. Bell. (Constable. 10s. 6d.) Sherlock Holmes, Fact or Fiction ? By T. S. Blakcney. (Bell. 2s. 6d.)
I xr.tv, I think, claim to have been a devout, if humble, admirer of Sherlock Holmes ever since the documents on which we have to base his biography began to appear in the Strand. I was frightened by the Speckled Band, and so much moved by Sherlock's decease—which I still believe to have been his only one—that I broke out into elegy :
" Toll for the brave, That was so strong and hearty, Who tumbled in the wave Along with Moriarty.
Ah, never shall we learn The tale of that mans life, Who took out his false teeth, And throw them at his wife.* Let scoundrels all rejoice
Throughout our mourning kind, For Sherlock Holmes is gone, Gone to a better Strand."
But, like all serious students of the subject, I was often i.orely bewildered by the strange lapses and inconsistencies of the biographer—if, indeed, the biographer was one man and not, like Shakespeare, a syndicate. How account for the fact that a remarkable exhibition of thought-reading not only mimics a' similar performance of Dupin, but is represented as
• See " The Case of Identity."
having occurred on two totally distinct occasions T How could Dr. Watson, have been wounded in but one place, and yet in two parts of his body ? How, further, explain the anomaly that Sherlock, who is clearly represented as a Londoner of the Londoners, is almost always wrong on his shells and wills—the one grammatical error that no genuine Londoner ever makes ? They are, in fact, precisely the errors we might expect if Holmes had been a native of Northern Ireland. And if, as we are informed, he was a university man, how could he, as appears from the Three Students, be so completely taken in by what is obviously an undergraduate hoax ? Unless the Oxford don, Mr. Soames, was in reality, as suspectel, Colonel Moran or Professor Moriarty in disguise, this narrative must, I was constrained to believe, be a fabrication of Dr. Watson's, who was thus subtly taking his revenge for the snubbings he had so often received front his partner. And how could John Watson be known to his wife as James ? Macaulay, we know, made a similar slip in talking of James Graham of Claverhouse, and was soundly trounced for it by Aytoun ; but we expect more accuracy in such matters from a wife than from a mere historian. And how could Holmes, who attached such importance to trifles. call the younger son of a Duke by the impossible title of Lord St. Simon ?
Of late years, these and other difficulties have received the attention of some very keen brains. Mr. Vernon Rendalt Mr. Desmond McCarthy, Mr. S. C. Roberts, Father Knox have all spent much ingenuity in trying to solve them, until the problem of Sherlock Holmes promises to give birth to as vast a volume of literature as Edwin Drood or the Casket Letters. And, latest but assuredly not last, appear two more works, both very able, dealing with this momentous question. Mr. Bell's, the more elaborate, considers every disputed date, tabulates every document, published or unpublished, and, in fact, provides the reader with a most thorough guide through the Watsonian labyrinth. Mr. Blakeney's, though smaller, is equally useful in its own way. He is interested in all the facts, and misses few : but his chief concern is the light they throw on the character of the hero. Till the papers of Myeroft Holmes are published, these two books will probably be in no danger of supersession.
It is a satisfactory feature of all these works, new and old, that none of them shows a sign of that exaggerated scepticism which characterizes so many Victorian histories. Here are no " Historic Doubts " in the fashion of Archbishop Whately ; no Strauss-like dissolutions of the hero into a myth, of the villain into a vapour. All these writers recognize that dis- crepancies in detail are the sure mark of actuality—the homage that history pays to fact. Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe are imaginary, and there arc no inaccuracies in their lives. But with Sherlock Holmes, as with Wellington, there are inaccuracies and contradictions. We are not certain as to the real truth underlying the Yellow Face ; nor are we as to Waterloo. We arc not certain as to the date of Sherlock's birth, nor are we as to Chaucer's. But we know that Crusoc was born in 1632—and therefore we know that he was never
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