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
