WH Auden on Sherlock Holmes
Apr. 22nd, 2010 12:24 amFor
damned_colonial.
Holmes is the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace becuase he is a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion. He is erudite but his knowledge is absolutely specialised (e.g. his ignorance of the Copernican system), he is in all matters outside his field as helpless as a child (e.g. his untidiness), and he pays the price for his scientific detatchment (his neglect of feeling) by being the victim of melancholia which attacks him whenever he is unoccupied with a case (e.g. his violin playing and cocaine taking).
His motive for being a detective is, positively, a love of the neutral truth (he has no interest in the feelings of the guilty or the innocent), and, negatively, a need to escape from his own feelings of melancholy. His attitude towards people and his technique of observation and deduction are those of the chemist or physicist. If he chooses human beings rather than inanimate matter as his material, it is because investigating the inanimate is unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies, which human beings can and do, so that in dealing with them observation must be twice as sharp and logic twice as rigorous.
From the Guilty Vicarage.
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Holmes is the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace becuase he is a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion. He is erudite but his knowledge is absolutely specialised (e.g. his ignorance of the Copernican system), he is in all matters outside his field as helpless as a child (e.g. his untidiness), and he pays the price for his scientific detatchment (his neglect of feeling) by being the victim of melancholia which attacks him whenever he is unoccupied with a case (e.g. his violin playing and cocaine taking).
His motive for being a detective is, positively, a love of the neutral truth (he has no interest in the feelings of the guilty or the innocent), and, negatively, a need to escape from his own feelings of melancholy. His attitude towards people and his technique of observation and deduction are those of the chemist or physicist. If he chooses human beings rather than inanimate matter as his material, it is because investigating the inanimate is unheroically easy since it cannot tell lies, which human beings can and do, so that in dealing with them observation must be twice as sharp and logic twice as rigorous.
From the Guilty Vicarage.