The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesNovember 2005 Holmes & his commentators On a new annotated edition of Conan Doyle's "Holmes" novels. According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators. Something similar might almost be said —almost, but not quite—of Sherlock Holmes and his commentators. The gulf is not nearly as great as that between Shakespeare and his critics, of course, but if literary genius is required in order to create a mythological world that is more real and alluring to readers than any reality itself, that once read is never forgotten, that for a century has inspired the devotion of the literary and the unliterary unlike, and that is vastly and innocently entertaining without being wholly devoid of instruction, then Conan Doyle had such genius to a very considerable degree. He created some of the most memorable and witty dialogue in the whole of literature. Who can forget Holmes&r ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 November 2005, on page 4 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Holmes---his-commentators-1377
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
On Mrs. Woolf & the Servants: An Intimate History of Bloomsbury by Alison Light. A review of Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Ronald W. Dworkin Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}