philosophy, astronomy, and the rest. Indeed, by the time of “The Lion’s Mane” late in the Canon, the reader is not surprised to hear Holmes himself speaking of the vague and half-remembered information stored somewhere in the “box-room” that his mind has become.
Holmes’s intellectual limits extend at least to these distances:
• A vast knowledge of (non-fictional) criminal literature and the history of crime and strange occurrences, which he is wont to cite for the bewilderment of professional detectives.
• Technical knowledge of tobacco ash, footprints, tattoos, ciphers, manuscript dating, and other such subjects, on all of which he claimed to have written monographs — to say nothing of “the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand.” At the end of his career he prepared The Whole Art of Detection.
• A detailed knowledge of London, including its geography and an extraordinary number of its people among all classes.
• An enjoyment of serious music and at least a superficial acquaintance with composers and performers, although it appears that he attended concerts as a means of relaxation rather than to be stimulated through close attention as a genuine musical aficionado might. He also showed the ability to play the violin passably, and the flexibility to extract noises from it while it was flung carelessly across his knee rather than held in the usual position.
• An acquaintance, perhaps broad rather than deep, with literature in a number of languages; he refers to Hafiz, Horace, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, Goethe, and even the occasional English author, and claims at one point to be carrying “my pocket Petrarch.”
• “A good practical knowledge of British law,” as Watson puts it — the sort of familiarity that bred contempt, judging from a number of incidents in which Holmes lets malefactors go free, breaks into dwelling-houses in the nighttime, extorts evidence in defiance of the Judges’ Rules, and otherwise comports himself outside the law.
• Considerable knowledge of chemistry, to the point that he spent months (at least) conducting researches at Montpellier shortly before the affair of “The Empty House.” He used chemistry in his professional work at times, probably chiefly to detect poisons, but also apparently did experiments to occupy his mind in the intervals between cases. He was frequently unable, however, to explain his work clearly to Watson, who reports him attempting to “dissolve” a hydrocarbon as though that were a difficult achievement.
• An unparalleled ability to observe trifles about a person, room, or road and to apply logic and a knowledge of daily life in order to reconstruct the events of the past.
HOLMES THE MAN. But there is more to Sherlock Holmes than this intellectual catalogue; there remain the traits that caused Watson to label him “best and wisest.” Such traits are not so easily listed, for they are conveyed to the reader — as they were to Watson — through long acquaintance and leisurely intercourse.
Christopher Morley, selecting episodes from the Canon and preparing a school edition of them in 1944, called his volume Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship. The modern reader may snicker at the portrayal of a close, emotional friendship between two adult men, and certainly at such sentiments as Holmes and Watson express about one another in “The Three Garridebs” at the dreadful moment when Watson is wounded. Are they lovers? one may wish to ask. They are not, although one or two pornographers have chosen to interpret them that way. They are simply close friends, demonstrating a kind of relationship that was common both in the literature and in the real life of the 1890s. It was an era when friendship between men and women on equal terms was virtually impossible, and when the bonds one might associate with soldiers under fire could also be formed between men in the world of London clubs and flats. The picture of it seen in Holmes and Watson appears wholesome indeed beside the male relationships in, say, George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894).
Holmes evidently has some of the qualities one might want most in a friend, the right combination of loyalty (emphasized in “The Dying Detective” when Holmes is obliged to pretend betrayal) and independence. The mutual affection of Holmes and Watson is understated, both as a demonstration of the friendship’s firmness and as a natural consequence of Victorian formality. “My dear Watson,” and “My dear Doctor,” Holmes still calls his colleague after twenty years of shared danger. He is obeying the conventions of his time and place, but no doubt the stress was all on the “dear.”
How tolerable Holmes may have been as a companion is another question altogether. His “cat-like love of personal cleanliness” is balanced by a pack-rat love of clutter, an indifference to the proper places for household objects, a taste for strong tobacco to the point of filling his rooms with a thick blue haze of smoke. He is demanding, both of Watson and of strangers; he is secretive, preferring to spring surprises rather than take a companion into his confidence. He is also a captive of many Victorian prejudices, seen in their ugliest form in his baiting of a black man in “The Three Gables” and one or two remarks that may be anti-Semitic. At times he fawns on the rich and aristocratic, although he can be contemptuous of those, such as the King of Bohemia, who do not live up to noblesse oblige, and he can occasionally be very gentle with the lowly.
Most notably, Holmes is moody, alternating periods of energy, enthusiasm, and prodigious work with periods of languor, inactivity, and apparent depression. Alan Bradley and William Sarjeant in Ms. Holmes of Baker Street (1989), affecting to believe that the detective was secretly a woman, attribute this alternation of moods to the influence of a strong menstrual cycle. Most other commentators have unhesitatingly seen it as a manic-depressive personality at work. Holmes could be arrogant (though rarely as disagreeable to Watson as Basil Rathbone makes him in his films of the 1940s) and nervous (though not nearly so full of tics, shrill cries, and mindless movement as Jeremy Brett makes him in the television series of the 1980s).
In the early stories, most explicitly The Sign of the Four, Holmes is seen as a user of drugs, “a seven-per-cent solution” of cocaine, which is a stimulant and anti-depressant. Watson scolds him for this abuse of his body, but seems resigned to it. Use of such drugs was legal in the England of the 1890s, and is used to emphasize Holmes’s mercurial personality and his pose of sophisticated eccentricity. Many details are elucidated by Jack Tracy and Jim Berkey in Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson (1978):
Holmes’s cocaine habit was in no way unlawful. . . . Not until 1916 was the sale of cocaine restricted to a doctor’s prescription. . . . If Holmes made use of a 10- to 20-mg. dose in each of his three-times-daily injections, then his habit was costing him between 2¢. and 4¢ a day. . . . 10 percent became the official strength of solution in the British Pharmacopoeia in 1898. . . . One grain, or 65 mg. — legally purchased from the neighbourhood chemist — would then provide three ample doses, one day’s supply, and a grain a day was often mentioned in the literature of the time as a recommended dosage for the treatment of melancholia.
The horrified reaction of modern readers, aware of contemporary drug abuse, is a misunderstanding of the character as Doyle was drawing him and his habits.
HOLMES AND WOMEN. “Women have seldom been an attraction to me,” Holmes says in “The Lion’s Mane,” “for my brain has always governed my heart.” But the converse is far from true; something in Holmes’s character has attracted the opposite sex since the days when the first stories were being published, and Doyle received proposals of marriage on his character’s behalf. One contemporary woman has observed that “I feel sorry for men Sherlockians, because they don’t have Sherlock Holmes to fall in love with.” Even within the Canon, such women as Violet Hunter (“The Copper Beeches”) and Mary Morstan (who eventually marries Watson) show some attraction to Holmes. He does not reciprocate, making a number of derogatory remarks about women, although he does demonstrate an expert knowledge of perfumes
