Читать книгу The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories - Arthur Conan Doyle - Страница 7

But the Gerard voice seems to have taken form more easily than did Gerard himself. When we look at ‘A Foreign Office Romance’ it becomes evident that its narrator may have been their creator’s first idea for a series character taking the places of Holmes and Watson whereas the Gerard ‘Medal’ was simply devised as a singleton. The vision of the old raconteur in the cafe´ began with ‘A Foreign Office Romance’, but Conan Doyle soon found that a cunning spy embroidering his memories could not carry the tragedy, as well as the comedy, which he demanded for his Napoleonic series. Sherlock Holmes had been formally killed a year before Gerard’s first appearance, each being enshrined in the December Strand−1893 and 1894 respectively. Holmes had been born in A Study in Scarlet (written 1886, published 1887) with no noticeable intention of a series. Gerard came on the scene when Conan Doyle had already established as a genre the short story series of self-standing episodes with two constant protagonists. The decision to build another series around Gerard and Napoleon seems to have arisen from the success of the ‘Medal’ with Conan Doyle’s American audiences. ‘F.O. Romance’ was syndicated in the USA initially in early November 1804, before ‘Medal’ reached the audiences of the British and American editions of the Strand, but the more obvious singleton was the better prospect: Lacour was a Punch puppet with a fine bag of tricks but already Gerard was a character.

On his return from the USA, Conan Doyle settled down to a set of six new stories for the Strand. The ‘Medal’ had proved a little masterpiece by inverting the Holmes formula (this time the audience realises the solution while the protagonist is taken utterly by surprise), but the first of the new series plunged Gerard into the unknown. Granted that ACD drew one moment from ‘F.O. Romance’−the duel in the carriage−only to make it much nastier than its improbably benevolent precursor, the rest of the story (as was stressed by the greatest of all literary critics of Conan Doyle, the late Professor W.W. Robson of Edinburgh) is a shimmering kaleidoscope of the unexpected with constant shocks, twists and turns of the plot, the emotions, the atmosphere culminating in a conclusion so neat as to be unsurpassable. (And Wellington, who utters it, thereby receives the best line Conan Doyle ever handed a real historical person brought into his fiction.)

Some of the details in the Gerard stories have their source in Conan Doyle’s own background. His use of clerics is clearly grounded on memories of the Jesuits at Stonyhurst boarding school whose benevolent exterior might dramatically be altered for disciplinary purposes. And ACD’s brigand bands obviously owe something to stories he heard while staying with his landlord relations in Ballygally, Co. Waterford. The Irish Land War was at its height, and there were many stories of hideous retribution, hidden identities, oath-bound conspirators, and unknown leaders named ‘Captain Moonlight’. It is a theme which invades his novels of medieval history as well, and it accounts for his aptitude in deploying forces outside the formalities of historical conflict. Not surprisingly, Conan Doyle also mixed literary influences with his own witness, and his guerillas and conspirators owe another debt to sources as divergent as Scott’s Anne of Geierstein and Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ whose lines

Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng

Of Felonye, and al the compassyng; …

The smylere with the knyf under the cloke;

The shepne brennynge with the blake smoke;

The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;

The open werre, with woundes al bibledde …

harmonise with many themes in these stories, notably with the bandit chief called El Cuchillo (‘The Knife’) and another called ‘The Smiler’.

Yet the path ahead was anything but effortless, however elegant the prose and rich its wellsprings. The Holmes stories proved foremost of their kind in sheer scientific professional construction, partly because Conan Doyle was following the formula of Edinburgh medical case-studies with their enunciation, erroneous diagnosis, accurate diagnosis, course of treatment, final resolution with statement from protagonist as well as medical consultant. There was no such blueprint in historical short-story writing.

Probably the best sustained achievement in the field to date had been that of the American Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). But it was not a model Conan Doyle liked. ‘The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect.’ (Through the Magic Door, pp. 119–20.) He could pick up some tricks from Hawthorne, among them the use of terrain he knew and situations preserved through local folklore: ‘How the King held the Brigadier’, the second story of his series, was set in the Dartmoor he knew from his days in 1882 as a Plymouth doctor while the French prisoners in Edinburgh and Penicuik had been a famous tradition retold down the nineteenth century. The next, ‘Ajaccio’, neatly drew on the Irish constitutionalist politicians around Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) and the anger against them from some of the intransigent Fenians from whose secret society certain constitutionalist leaders had made a profitable evolution. One of its finest effects is reworked in ‘Good-bye’, but in a much more profoundly tragic key: the immature Gerard had thought of suicide but the veteran has risen beyond so superficial a gesture. (The last great Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Veiled Lodger’, is a similarly emotive testament against suicide even when hope has gone.) But thenceforward the series became self-sustaining: it is even signalled in the formality with which the next story, ‘Gloom’, opens. Gerard has settled down.

And the occasion marks a new departure in space and time. A set of short stories set in a time when History had been overturned may allow the past to be, as it were, guillotined, by the French Revolution and then beaten into recurring new births and deaths by Napoleon’s armies: and why look for more? ‘Medal’ has no past to give us, even for Gerard, and, as we know, little more future for Napoleon. ‘Brigadier-King’ profits by the Britishness of the Peninusular War, ‘King-Brigadier’ by the more intimate Britishness of Dartmoor. ‘Ajaccio’ opens up the theme of the past, in a direction we do not expect it: we never see Corsica, nor does Gerard, yet however fragmentarily we learn of it, it supplies the past whence Napoleon has escaped, and everyone else’s past is his enemy. Napoleon is above all at war with History. Yet History continues, regardless of dynasties overturned for the beatification of Bonapartes and their artificial aristocracies, and here in ‘Gloom’ is a past working out its hatreds invisibly under the cloak of Napoleonic pacification. Suddenly Napoleon’s synthesis of Ancien Régime and Revolution is twitched away like a checkered quilt, and we are left to witness enthroned Savagery confronted by its Nemesis. And in the close of that encounter Gerard becomes the greater Justice, for despite his life being apparently inseparable from Napoleon or his legend Gerard is momentarily reclaimed by the past, and, quite deliberately, reveals himself as a true knight beneath the Napoleonics:

‘You have no cause of quarrel against me’, he panted.

‘I owe you some little attention’, said I, ‘for having shut me up in your store-room. Besides, if all other were wanting, I see cause enough upon that lady’s arm.’

Sir Nigel could take no higher place than Gerard at that point.

But when Gerard is the agent of Napoleon, he finds himself at war with the past, as in History’s discovery of a new meaning in ‘Kingdom’, or its burial of all the enemies it can take in its death-grasp in ‘How Brigadier Gerard Lost His Ear’. And it is this which must account for the greatest mystery of the whole Gerardien cycle: ‘Ear’, alone of all the stories, is historiographically nonsensical. Gerard’s exaggerations and Conan Doyle’s principle ‘I make a road’ (when an editor said there was no road where his story required one) can get the Brigadier to Minsk and back; but ‘Ear’ is impossible from start to finish, as far as real events are concerned. If there was a secret Venetian reign of hidden terror after Napoleonic occupation, it was so secret that it left no mark. Venice seemed to have lost the will to survive, though it certainly had not lost the will to paint. Now, ACD was in some ways the most conscientious historical novelist who ever lived: his assimilation of detail was so thorough and his delight in its deployment so full, that his historical fictions are sometimes stopped in their tracks by the facts or, as Hesketh Pearson put it in his stimulating Conan Doyle: His Life and Art (1943) ‘while the background is being filled in, the foreground fades out’. The Gerard stories, being short stories, do not suffer from this.−So why should he defy the historical truth for which he so passionately cared, when he came to write ‘Ear’?

The story belongs to the second Gerard series, afterwards published as The Adventures of Gerard. The making of Gerard, now a Colonel, into temporary aide-de-camp to General Suchet suggests that its initial design was set in the Peninsular War where Suchet was the most successful of all Napoleon’s generals, possibly in Tarragona southwest of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, which had been captured by Suchet in June 1811. But the idea of a homicidal underground conspiracy, as opposed to straightforward guerilla brutality, would have had more of an Italian ring, especially when ACD travelled to Naples in April 1902. The decision to place the story in Venice would seem to have stemmed from Venice being History’s greatest casualty at Napoleon’s hands.

In this respect, ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’ by William Wordsworth offered a haunting temptation:

And what if we have seen those glories fade

That title vanish, and that strength decay?

Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid

When her long life hath reached its final day.

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

Of that which once was great, hath passed away.

I think Conan Doyle answered as we might expect. ‘How Brigadier Gerard Lost his Ear’ is really a ghost story, where the ancient history of Venice comes to life to give an energy to Venetian hatred of the usurper, despoiler and executioner which the debased inheritors could never supply. The ghosts are certainly substantial, and their physical effects graphic enough; the influence of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ by Conan Doyle’s revered precursor Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) shows itself in atmosphere and resolution; but the heart of the story is something more akin to Hawthorne than Poe, a sense of the hopelessness of fighting History. Conan Doyle was being so antihistorical in order to record History’s revenge. And the consequence is nearer to a story of the supernatural than any other Gerard story. It is also one of the least comic, this Death in Venice.

But in the mass of the stories, this is History forced to laugh at itself. And here, as in so much elsewhere, Conan Doyle shows himself supremely worthy of his Scottish heritage. As Professor David Daiches has reminded us, even in its varying epiphanies of the Gothic, the tragic and, at its close the patriotic, The Antiquary of Sir Walter Scott is essentially comic in its prevailing atmosphere. This is so true of so much of Scott, and Conan Doyle, Scott’s devoted disciple, was the most zealous of all his followers in the fulfilment of that ideal.

Indeed, in his first Waterloo story, The Great Shadow, ACD brings in Walter Scott as a character: not, as often with his other real-life characters, to transmit historical knowledge in an interesting and enlightening form at the expense of the story, but rather as the invocation of a Muse at the story’s beginning. He is in and out by the fifth page, and in four sentences. But he is perpetually in Conan Doyle’s mind, as the great salute to him in Through the Magic Door bears witness. Professor John MacQueen (The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature, Vol. ii. The Rise of The Historical Novel) has picked up point after point to do with Scott’s place in the development of Scottish historical fiction which we ourselves can see reflected in Conan Doyle−the use of character as a dynamic which is substantially non-rational, most fully expressed in action, often containing ‘a quality of the unexpected’; the sense in which a subtext of a remoter historical epoch may charge the drama of a work such as Redgauntlet; and the specific Scottish confrontation and contrast of old and new and the author’s place in their reconciliation. It must be acknowledged that Conan Doyle did not admire Scott’s Napoleon−it was the one production of his master he thought ‘hackwork’:

How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a portrait of one of Murat’s light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the Old Guard, drawn with the same strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers of the French King’s Guard in Quentin Durward? ( Through the Magic Door, pp. 31–32.)

We can pay Conan Doyle no finer compliment than to say that he himself more than rose to the challenge, with the stories collected in this book.

Arthur Conan Doyle was far too modest and too much of a gentleman to tolerate any such ascription, even if Scott might well have owned it. Yet their juxtaposition is all the more apposite when we think of the theatrical adaptations of Scott in the Edinburgh of Conan Doyle’s youth, of the success of the stage adaptation of Gerard in London in 1906, and of the coup de théatre which concludes the present volume. Scott celebrated the comedy of courage, the king of fools, the lawyer mocking the law, and the soldier as reliable signal for laughter, when he brought Paulus Pleydell to Guy Mannering and Dugald Dalgetty to A Legend of Montrose. And who, therefore, would be more ready to approve than Scott when after the grandeur of ‘Good-bye’, Arthur Conan Doyle gives us ‘The Marriage of the Brigadier’ as the Gerardien ‘last bow’?

Owen Dudley Edwards