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  “But how——!” I cried.

  “It is as easy as possible,” said he, “and I leave its solution to your own ingenuity. In the meantime,” he added, raising his paper, “you will excuse me if I return to this very interesting article upon the trees of Cremona, and the exact reasons for their pre-eminence in the manufacture of violins. It is one of those small outlying problems to which I am sometimes tempted to direct my attention.”

  WAS SHERLOCK HOLMES AN AMERICAN? by CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

  I think the fellow is really an American, but he has worn his accent smooth with years of London.—THE THREE GARRIDEBS

  A CAPRICIOUS SECRECY was always characteristic of Holmes. He concealed from Watson his American connection. And though Watson must finally have divined it, he also was uncandid with us. The Doctor was a sturdy British patriot: the fact of Holmes’s French grandmother was disconcerting, and to add to this his friend’s American association and sympathy would have been painful. But the theory is too tempting to be lightly dismissed. Not less than fifteen of the published cases (including three of the four chosen for full-length treatment) involve American characters or scenes. Watson earnestly strove to minimize the appeal of United States landscapes of which Holmes must have told him. The great plains of the West were “an arid and repulsive desert.”{2} Vermissa Valley (in Pennsylvania, I suppose?) was “a gloomy land of black crag and tangled forest...not a cheering prospect.”{3} Watson’s quotation from the child Lucy{4}—“Say, did God make this country?”—was a humorous riposte to Holmes, spoofing the familiar phrase Watson had heard too often in their fireside talks. There is even a possible suggestion of Yankee timbre in the Doctor’s occasional descriptions of the “well-remembered voice.” The argument of rival patriotisms was a favorite topic between them. Watson never quite forgave Holmes’s ironical jape when after some specially naïve Victorian imperialism by the Doctor (perhaps at the time of the ’87 Jubilee) Sherlock decorated the wall with the royal V.R. in bullet-pocks. (Or did the Doctor misread as V.R. what was jocularly meant to be V.H.—because Watson too insistently suggested a sentimental interest in Miss Violet Hunter of The Copper Beeches? An H in bullet-pocks, if the marksman’s aim was shaken by a heavy dray in the street, or by the neighboring Underground Railway, might well look like an R.)

  Why, again, does Watson write, “It was upon the 4th of March, as I have good reason to remember,” that the adventure of A Study in Scarlet began? And why was Holmes still at the breakfast table? It was the 4th of March, 1881, and Holmes was absorbed in reading the news dispatches about the inauguration, to take place that day, of President Garfield.

  Was Holmes actually of American birth? It would explain much. The jealousy of Scotland Yard, the refusal of knighthood, the expert use of Western argot, the offhand behavior to aristocratic clients, the easy camaraderie with working people of all sons, the always traveling First Class in trains. How significant is Holmes’s “Hum!” when he notes that Irene Adler was born in New Jersey.{5} And Watson’s careful insertion of “U.S.A.” after every American address, which always irritates us, was probably a twit, to tease his principal. True, as Inspector MacDonald once said,{6} “You don’t need to import an American from outside in order to account for American doings.” But let us light the cherry-wood pipe and examine the data more systematically.

  * * * * *

  Holmes’s grandmother was “the sister of Vernet, the French artist.”{7} This of course was Horace Vernet (1789-1863), the third of the famous line of painters in that family. Horace Vernet’s father (who had been decorated by Napoleon for his Battle of Marengo and Morning of Austerlitz) came from Bordeaux; and Horace’s grandfather, the marine painter, from Avignon. Here we have an association with the South of France which he acknowledges by his interest in Montpellier{8} where he probably had French kindred, like Sir Kenelm Digby, who delivered there the famous discourse on the Powder of Sympathy.{9} Holmes knew Montpellier as an important center of scientific studies. It is deplorable that our Holmes researchers have done so little to trace his French relationship. It is significant that though he declined a knighthood in Britain he was willing to accept the Legion of Honor in France.{10}

  Much might be said of Sherlock’s presumable artistic and political inheritance from the Vernets. His great-uncle’s studio in Paris was “a rendezvous of Liberals.”{11} Surely the untidiness which bothered Watson at 221B is akin to the description of Horace Vernet “painting tranquilly, whilst boxing, fencing, drum and horn playing were going on, in the midst of a medley of visitors, horses, dogs and models.”{12} Holmes’s grandmother, one of this radical and bohemian and wide-traveling family, brought up among the harrowing scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, may quite possibly have emigrated to America.{13} It is not inconceivable then that at least one of Holmes’s parents was an American. My own conjecture is that there was some distant connection with the famous Holmes household of Cambridge (Mass.). Every reader has noticed Holmes’s passionate interest in breakfasts: does this not suggest the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table?

  I will not cloud the issue with futile speculation, though certainly it is of more importance than many of the controversies (such as, was Holmes’s dressing gown blue, purple, or mouse colored?).{14} But before proceeding to recount some specific passages which prove our hero’s exceptional interest in America let me add one more suggestion. The hopeless muddle of any chronology based on The Gloria Scott and The Musgrave Ritual is familiar to all students; Miss Dorothy Sayers has done her brilliant best to harmonize the anomalies. But all have wondered just what Holmes was doing between the time he left the university and his taking rooms in Montague Street. My own thought is that the opening of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1876, and the extraordinary and informal opportunities offered there for graduate study, tempted him across the water. He was certainly familiar with papers in the chemical journals written by Ira Remsen, the brilliant young professor who took charge of the new laboratories in Baltimore. Probably in Baltimore he acquired his taste for oysters{15} and on a hot summer day noted the depth to which the parsley had sunk into the butter.{16} In that devoted group of young scholars and scientists and in the musical circles of that hospitable city he must have been supremely happy. His American-born mother (or father) had often told him of the untrammeled possibilities of American life. The great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (1876) was surely worth a visit; there he observed the mark of the Pennsylvania Small Arms Company.{17} During his year or so in the States he traveled widely. He met Wilson Hargreave (who later became important in the New York Police Department){18} perhaps in connection with the case of Vanderbilt and the Yeggman, a record of which he kept in his scrapbook.{19} He went to Chicago, where he made his first acquaintance with organized gangsterism.{20} I suggest that he perhaps visited his kinsmen the Sherlocks in Iowa—e.g. in Des Moines, where a younger member of that family, Mr. C. C. Sherlock, has since written so ably on rural topics.{21} He must have gone to Topeka;{22} and of course he made pilgrimage to Cambridge, Mass., to pay respect to the great doctor, poet and essayist. From Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., then a rising lawyer in Boston, he heard firsthand stories of the Civil War, which fired his interest in “that gallant struggle.” Indeed he spoke to Watson so often about the Civil War that Watson repeated in the story of The Resident Patient the episode of the Henry Ward Beecher portrait which he had already told in The Cardboard Box.{23} It is interesting to note, in passing, that when Holmes spoke in that episode of having written two monographs on Ears in the Anthropological Journal, the alert editor of the Strand at once took the hint. A few months later, in October and November 1893, the Strand printed “A Chapter on Ears,” with photos of the ears of famous people—including an ear of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Surely, from so retiring a philosopher, then eighty-four years old, this intimate permission could not have been had without the privileged intervention of Sherlock.

  Speaking of the Strand Magazine, it is
odd that our researchers do not more often turn back to those original issues which solve many problems. The much belabored matter of Holmes’s university, for instance. There was never any question about it, for in Sidney Paget’s illustrations Holmes is clearly shown sitting in Trevor’s garden wearing a straw hat with a Light Blue ribbon.{24} (He was, of course, a boxing Blue.) Why has such inadequate honor been paid to those admirable drawings by Paget?—Oxford was unthinkable to Holmes; with what pleasure he noted that Colonel Moran{25} and John Clay{26} were both “Eton and Oxford.”

  2

  In The Bruce-Partington Plans one of our most suggestive passages occurs. “You have never had so great a chance of serving your country,” cries Mycroft. But is Holmes moved by this appeal? “‘Well, well!’ he said, shrugging his shoulders.” All emotions, we know, were abhorrent to that cold, precise mind,{27} and certainly militant patriotism among them; at any rate until many years later when bees, flowers, Sussex, and long association with the more sentimental Watson had softened him to the strange outburst about “God’s own wind” on the terrible night of August 2nd, 1914.{28}—Plainly he resented Mycroft’s assumption that England was his only country. Mycroft, seven years older, had earlier outgrown the Franco-American tradition of the family. If Mycroft had ever been in the States he had striven to forget it; indeed no one can think of Mycroft without being reminded (in more respects than one) of the great expatriate Henry James.{29}

  That Holmes had a very special affection and interest in regard to the United States is beyond question. He had much reason to be grateful to American criminals, who often relieved him from the ennui of London’s dearth of outrage. The very first case recorded by Watson was the murder of Enoch J. Drebber, the ex-Mormon from Cleveland. Irene Adler, the woman, was a native of New Jersey. In The Red-Headed League the ingenious John Clay represented The League as having been founded by the eccentric millionaire Ezekiah Hopkins of Lebanon, Pa., “U.S.A.” In The Five Orange Pips, Elias Openshaw emigrated to Florida, rose to be a Colonel in the C.S.A. and made a fortune. Although Watson tries to prejudice the reader by painful allusions to the habits of these people, there is plentiful evidence that Holmes considered America the land of opportunity. (Watson preferred Australia.) Both Aloysius Doran{30} and John Douglas{31} had struck it rich in California. Senator Neil Gibson,{32} “iron of nerve and leathery of conscience,” had also made his pile in gold mines. Hilton Cubitt, the Norfolk squire, had married a lovely American woman;{33} and Holmes was glad to be able to save Miss Hatty Doran from Lord St. Simon who was not worthy of her.{34} He yawns sardonically at the Morning Post’s social item which implies that Miss Doran will gain by becoming the wife of a peer. That case is a high point in Holmes’s transatlantic sympathy. He praises American slang, quotes Thoreau, shows his knowledge of the price of cocktails, and utters the famous sentiment:

  “It is always a joy to meet an American, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being someday citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

  Which reminds one obviously of the fact that when Holmes disguised himself as Mr. Altamont of Chicago, the Irish-American agitator; to deceive Von Bork, he greatly resembled the familiar cartoons of Uncle Sam.{35} He visited Chicago again in 1912-13 to prepare himself for this rôle; I wish Mr. Vincent Starrett would look up the details.

  Holmes’s fondness for America did not prevent him from seeing the comic side of a nation that lends itself to broad satiric treatment. In The Man with the Watches, one of the two stories outside the canon,{36} Holmes remarks of the victim, “He was probably an American, and also probably a man of weak intellect.”

  (This rhetorical device for humorous purposes was a family trait: we find it in Mycroft’s description of the senior clerk at the Woolwich Arsenal—“He is a man of forty, married, with five children. He is a silent, morose man.”{37}) After his long use of American cant for Von Bork’s benefit Sherlock says “My well of English seems to be permanently defiled.”{38} But these japes are plainly on the principle “On se moque de ce qu’on aime.” He kept informed of American manners and events; when he met Mr. Leverton of Pinkerton’s he said “Pleased to meet you” and alluded to “the Long Island cave mystery.”{39} He knew “the American business principle” of paying well for brains.{40} He did not hesitate to outwit a rascal by inventing an imaginary mayor of Topeka—recalling for the purpose the name of the counterfeiter of Reading years before.{41} (Those who escaped him were not forgotten.) But nothing shows more convincingly his passionate interest in all cases concerning Americans than his letter about the matter of the Man with the Watches, alluded to above. Even in Tibet, where he was then travelling as a “Norwegian named Sigerson,”{42} he had kept up with the news.

  This was in the spring of ’92; how Watson, after reading the letter in the newspaper, can have supposed his friend was really dead passes belief. There are frequent humorous allusions to American accent, the{43} shape of American shoes,{44} American spelling.{45} I suspect that Holmes’s travels in these States never took him to the South or South-west,{46} for he shows a curious ignorance of Southern susceptibilities in the matter of race, and{47} in spite of his American Encyclopaedia{48} he did not know which was the Lone Star State. Let it be noted that the part of London where he first took rooms (Montague Street, alongside the British Museum) is the region frequented more than any other by American students and tourists.

  * * * * *

  That Holmes was reared in the States, or had some schooling here before going up to Cambridge, seems then at least arguable. His complete silence (or Watson’s) on the subject of his parents suggests that they were deceased or not in England. A foreign schooling, added to his own individual temperament, would easily explain his solitary habits at college.{49} If he had gone to almost any English school the rugger jargon of Cyril Overton would have been comprehensible to him{50}—or he might have picked it up from Watson, who played for Blackheath.{51} Watson moreover, if he knew more about Holmes’s family, may have been moved by jealousy to keep silent. Already he had suffered by the contrast between the corpulent Mycroft and his own older brother, the crapulent H.W.{52} Or his neglect to inform us may just have been the absent-mindedness and inaccuracy which we have learned to expect from good old Watson—and which were even acquired by his wife, who went so far as to forget her husband’s first name and call him “James” in front of a visitor.{53} The Doctor has hopelessly confused us on even more important matters—that both Moriarty brothers were called James, for instance. Considering the evidence without prejudice, the idea that Holmes was at any rate partly American is enticing. As Jefferson Hope said,{54} “I guessed what puzzled the New Yorkers would puzzle the Londoners.” So I leave it as a puzzle, not as a proven case, for more accomplished students to re-examine. But the master’s own dictum{55} is apposite:—“When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.”

  NUMMI IN ARCA OR THE FISCAL HOLMES by R. K. LEAVITT

  IN THE EARLY 70’s of the last century there was at Cambridge{56} a long, lean young man of strange tastes and taciturn, not to say misanthropic, disposition. His name was Sherlock Holmes and he was so far from being a social success that during his first two years at that University he made only one friend, and that one through the accident of being bitten by a bulldog.{57}

  But like so many youths whose early years are turned in upon themselves, Holmes had developed abilities—powers, he liked to have them called—of a most surprising order. And once the social ice had been broken by his acquaintance with Victor Trevor he made use of those talents to such good effect that by the time he left Cambridge he was not only known but admired by a considerable circle of friends and acquaintances including the suave, languid, dandified, and exceedingly aristocratic Reginald Musgrave.

 
Equally marked and comparably belated triumphs are, of course, common in every college generation on both sides of the Atlantic, though few of them are attained by the display of a methodology in observation and inference. But there is, to the psychologist interested in manifestation of the inferiority complex, little difference between a performance in deduction and one in legerdemain or in playing upon the saxophone. Holmes’ early amateur displays were motivated by that potent admonition, invaluable to advertisers of correspondence courses in piano-playing or in conversing with waiters in French, “Astonish your Friends!”

  That Holmes’ séances created a sensation we know from his account of young Musgrave’s reference to “those powers with which you used to amaze us.”{58} At times he not only astounded his friends but literally knocked them cold with his demonstrations, as witness the elder Trevor’s reaction to a typical bit of Holmesian deduction.{59}

  Indeed it was this involuntary tribute from Trevor père, coupled with the old gentleman’s extravagant, but all too obviously sincere verbal tribute which “was, if you will believe me, Watson, the very first thing which ever made me feel that a profession might be made out of what had been up to that time the merest hobby.”{60} “Mr. Holmes,” Justice of the Peace Trevor had said, “it seems to me that all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in your hands. That’s your line of life, sir, and you may take the word of a man who has seen something of the world.”

  It is not surprising, therefore, that the shrewd young Holmes, on coming down from the University and up, as he puts it, to London, should have essayed the career of consulting detective. He had, among his friends of the University days, a group of young men whom he counted upon either to get into trouble themselves or to spread the word of his prowess among such of their friends in the well-bred and moneyed world as might be embarrassed with adventures. He had also, one must infer, sufficient capital to carry him through the first and most difficult years of getting established in his chosen profession. And so, in 1876,{61} Mr. Sherlock Holmes set up in practice in Montague Street, just around the corner from the British Museum. For some two years the Holmesian practice was slim indeed. “Now and again,” he told Watson later, “cases come my way, principally through the introduction of fellow students.” But these were fewer than the hopeful graduate had hoped. The Musgrave Ritual case, in 1878, was only the third of them.{62} And while these cases may well have yielded fees of considerable size, it may be conjectured that Holmes would hardly have been able to live upon his takings from the carriage trade. “You can hardly realize,” he told Watson in narrating the affair of the Musgrave Ritual, “how difficult I found it at first, and how long I had to wait before I succeeded in making any headway.”