The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories. Arthur Conan Doyle

Woman of No Importance, 1893, Act One). In fact the opening paragraph of ‘How the Brigadier Saved the Army’ is as close to a salute to the inspiration from Wilde as it was possible to get in 1902. ACD’s skill in inverting Englishness only begins here: ‘The Brigadier in England’ turns the trick again and again, with hilarious effects each time. A great deal of the joke arose from its effects on the English themselves, for English reviewers roared with laughter at the silly Frenchman’s inability to understand England, with very little awareness that the author was mocking all fox-hunters. Conan Doyle was a sportsman himself but his definition of that term demanded self-mockery: hence the lampooning of the cricket and pugilism he practised and loved. And then, at the close of ‘England’, the satire suddenly hisses hard and keen, its impact evident in the near-lethal shot which symbolises as well as summarises it. Nor is the target here mere Englishness: it is an entire Western cult. Conan Doyle detested the duel, ruthlessly demolishing its pretentions and barbarities in his ‘The Duello in France’ (Cornhill, vol. xv, 1890, new ser., pp. 618–26). It is the high-priest of this cult, Colonel Berkeley, who so justly receives the humiliation which he has encouraged all other parties to mete out to one another.

      This ability to play with satire, altering its intent from gentle amusement to searing anger, is part of the Irish literary engagement with England, from Jonathan Swift and George Farquhar through Richard Brinsley Sheridan to Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and beyond. In Conan Doyle’s case it was complicated by his anxiety to assimilate to Englishness, stronger than in many Irish literary cases of celebrity and all the more so because his origin was British: but by the same token his lash could be keener against those aspects of Englishness to which he had no intention of assimilating. In Through the Magic Door he writes bitterly of British army discipline in the Napoleonic era, the ‘floggings which broke a man’s spirit and self-respect’, and he condemns his admired Wellington for defending them. Hence we need to read Gerard with the recognition that, as with Swift, the satire may now be at the expense of his protagonist, now of his hosts or adversaries, now of his reader. Up to recently Conan Doyle’s infectious charm condemned him in the eyes of academic critics, and there still remains the danger it may blunt his impact: in essence he requires to be read with the same detached alertness with which he wrote.

      II

      Who and what is Brigadier Gerard? What are the author’s intentions and attitudes towards him? Shaw read the stories voraciously and frankly purloined El Cuchillo (from ‘How the Brigadier Held the King’), for his own Mendoza (and Devil) in Man and Superman (1903). In his preface to Major Barbara (1905) Shaw notices figures we may find comparable to Gerard and remarks on the ambivalences of satire:

      When Cervantes relented over Don Quixote, and Dickens relented over Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they simply changed sides, and became friends and apologists where they had formerly been mockers.

      It is not quite so simple. But the Adventures of Gerard had just appeared when Shaw made this comment, and if we survey the succession of stories from ‘Medal’ to ‘How Etienne Gerard said Good-Bye to his Master’ there is indeed a very obvious change. Nobody is very dry-eyed or smooth-throated at the crisis of ‘Good-Bye’, including Shaw, I suspect. It has the simplicity, goodness and truth that Tolstoy asked; it showed its author could use grand pathos no less than Cervantes and Dickens. But even in ‘Medal’ it is not easy to withhold sympathy from Gerard, as he weeps his chagrin before Napoleon, and Napoleon makes his own conquest of us by the humanity−and even humility−of his response. In certain respects the change is in Gerard’s intelligence, particularly at Waterloo when he shows his superiority to Napoleon by becoming Napoleon. The symbolism of that intensely powerful climax to ‘The Adventure of the Nine Prussian Horsemen’ involves an unconscious disillusionment for Gerard: he is not a thinker, but he feels the decline of the Emperor, instinctively supplants him and makes himself, as bogus Emperor, take the place of the real one whose reign is ended. Gerard makes himself the Napoleonic legend. Henceforth the imaginary Emperor must win the victories. The Gerard stories will perpetuate that legend, as told by Gerard, and as written by Conan Doyle. Holmes would have been nothing without Watson; Napoleon will live because of Gerard.

      And Napoleon would have been nothing without Gerard. ‘Of bravery I say nothing’ remarks Gerard in ‘Millefleurs’:

      Those who have seen me in the field are best fitted to speak of that. I have often heard the soldiers discussing round the camp-fires as to who was the bravest man in the Grand Army. Some said Murat and some said Lasalle, and some Ney; but for my own part, when they asked me, I merely shrugged my shoulders and smiled. It would have seemed mere conceit if I had answered that there was no man braver than Brigadier Gerard.

      This is in part simply another brilliantly-polished facet of Gerard’s eternal self-congratulation; but it has its own self-deconstruction, in which ACD amused himself by occasionally indulging. There is no man braver than Gerard, because Gerard is all of them: ACD certainly gave him touches of his fellow-Gascon Joachim Murat (1767–1815), of the idolised Antoine Lasalle (1775–1809), of the martyred Michel Ney (1769–1815), just as he combined within him various touches and perceptions of the memorialists Jean Baptiste de Marbot (1782–1854) and Jean-Roch Coignet (1776–1860?).

      Thus it is that Gerard has to embody the Égalité which alone survived the French Revolution after Napoleon’s domestic rule emasculated Liberté and his conquests put paid to Fraternité, and he must reflect old aristocracy, new bourgeoisie and newest of all, the promoted peasants. The gallant, cheery Marbot might seem an obvious companion to the seventeenth-century Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas pére (1802–70), but Coignet, an illiterate risen from the ranks to Captain and self-educated raconteur, could look any hard-boiled modern proletarian autobiographer in the eye. Gerard would not think of himself as proletarian, of course, as his own account of his family background indicates:

      … my family, though of good repute, has never been wealthy, and I could not bring myself to take anything from the small income of my mother. On the other hand, it would never do for a man like me to be outshone by the bourgeois society of an English country town, or to be without the means of showing courtesies and attentions to those ladies whom I should attract. It was for these reasons that I preferred to be buried in the dreadful prison of Dartmoor. (‘How the King held the Brigadier’)

      This is revealingly autobiographical. Conan Doyle himself came from so complex a mixture of Irish ancestors, Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor, grandiloquent in claim and uncertain in fact, that he knows how to supply a hero who can straddle all classes and beat the lot of them in Gasconnades.

      ‘We say “Proud as a Scotsman”’ remarks the Duke of Buckingham in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers to which the Gascon d’Artagnan replies ‘And we say “Proud as a Gascon”: the Gascons are the Scots of France’. Etienne Gerard is of course a Gascon, and the Scots background to Conan Doyle’s British novel on Waterloo, The Great Shadow, gives us a hold on the identification. Formally it is to identify Gerard with his Dumas counterpart, much as contemporaries and modern biographers identified Jean Lannes (1769–1809) (‘How the Brigadier joined the Hussars of Conflans’) with his native Gascony and its most famous literary offspring. Actually, this use of Gascon identity makes helpful points about the wider rôle of poor peripheral provinces, with their resourcefulness, inferiority complexes, alleged boastfulness, and advantageous self-dependence. But the Gascon models and the Dumas exemplars include more than d’Artagnan. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson showed one means of using such influence in Allan Breck Stewart, whose drunken gambling away of his and David Balfour’s assets comes directly from Athos’s similar performance in The Three Musketeers. Gerard himself initially seems more like Porthos than the others, but he acquires something of them all, as in different ways does Allan Breck. Conan Doyle would have been the more conscious of the derivation, anxious as he was to appear French, where Stevenson needed simply to show a Francofying influence on the Jacobite Highlander Allan. But Stevenson no less than Conan Doyle had an Irish godfather alongside their Dumas, for it was the Irish novelist Charles Lever (1806–1872), who inspired Stevenson’s Chevalier Burke (The Master of Ballantrae), and who gave Conan