a thought about The Copper Beeches
I find the introductory part of The Copper Beeches more interesting than Violet Hunter’s strange domestic mystery. The story opens with Holmes in an unusually “disputatious” mood and taking it out on Watson. Holmes even seems to contradict himself:
“It is upon the logic rather than the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.”
Oh, certainly. Who doesn’t love a course of lectures?
But then also Holmes, barely three paragraphs later: “What do the public, the great unobservant public… care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!”
He then deprives Watson of the opportunity to call him on his (seeming) equivocation by immediately changing the subject to But it’s hardly your fault since there’s no good crime anymore, and anyway here’s my new case and there she is on the doorstep.
So what’s Doyle doing here? If it were an expository justification for Watson’s “tales” rather than Holmes’ preferred, pure-logic “lectures”, wouldn’t Watson get more opportunity to defend his literary choices?
I've only given this a little bit of thought, but here's what's occurred to me: Watson’s misunderstanding of Holmes’ frustration provides Doyle (through Holmes) the opportunity to explain (to all of us) that what looks like “egotism” or “selfishness or conceit”, isn’t that at all. It’s rather the passionate love of a skilled (and arguably autistic) expert for his obscure and mystifying art. It’s not Look how good I am at this amazing thing that I’m good at, but rather Look at this amazing thing that I love and want you to be able to understand and appreciate in the same way that I do because it is utterly and engrossingly wonderful.
Of course Watson’s “It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter” disappoints Holmes, because Holmes thinks that Watson’s missing the point. He tries to soften his criticism by praising Watson’s choice of cases, but is still frustrated by how Watson writes about them. Why do you pick the interesting cases and then highlight the boring parts?! AARGH!
I rearranged and abridged the first part of the story so that it’s chronological, which (I think) makes it clearer:
It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-colored houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
”To the man who loves art for its own sake,” he remarked, tossing aside the Daily Telegraph, “it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.”
“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.”
“You have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”
“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular character.
“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing- a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.”
He remarked after a pause, “At the same time, you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the king of Bohemia (*snip*, etc), were all matters which were outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.”
“The end may have been so,” I answered, “But the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest.”
“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!”
And then- realizing (not for the first time) that Watson still doesn’t “get it” (and maybe never will)- Holmes gives up and gives Watson an out. It’s a fake out and he knows it, but he also despairs of making himself completely understood: “But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past.”
I love that Doyle shows us this: the real, domestic frustrations that any two people will inevitably feel with one another over the course of a long and close association. No two friends/partners ever understand one another perfectly (or even necessarily well), and sometimes they need to blow off a little steam. Holmes and Watson both do it, they both understand that's what's happening, and their friendship remains intact. The struggle is real, and so is the love.
