Arthur Conan Doyle and George Moore: A Note on "The Adventure of the Empty House"

251 ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND GEORGE MOORE: A NOTE ON "THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE" BY John J. Conlon (University of Massachusetts-Boston) In 1903, nine years after the return (5 April 1894) of Sherlock Holmes, who Dr. Watson presumed dead at the Reichenbach Falls on 4 May I89I, Conan Doyle has Watson chronicling Holmes' solution of the "locked room" murder of Ronald Adair by trapping Colonel Sebastian Moran , the Maréchal Ney of crime.1 Watson reports of the capture: "'Ah, Colonel,' said Holmes, arranging his rumpled collar, "'journeys end in lovers* meetings," as the old play tells us.·" (ASH, II, 342) William S. Baring-Gould identifies the "old play" as Twelfth Night and the source of the slight misquotation as a line from the clown's song, "Journeys end in lovers meeting" (First Folio, 1. 742).2 In his Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (NY: Potter, 1962), Baring-Gould discusses Holmes' interest in the theatre and chronicles his involvement with the Sasanoff Shakespeare Company in I87980 under the name of William Escott. Given Holmes* experience as a Shakespearean actor and his renowned and well-documented fidelity to the smallest of details, his misquoting of Shakespeare is surprisingly uncharacteristic of him. Baring-Gould's assumption may be only partially correct: Holmes may have been quoting Shakespeare and Watson may have misquoted Holmes. There is a more plausible explanation: a more contemporary play, "old" at the time Doyle has Watson reconstructing the case from his notes, may have confused Holme s' Boswell. Two months after Holmes captured Moran a new play opened as a "curtain raiser" on 5 June 1894 at Daly's Theatre - the play later moved to the Lyceum Theatre - with Ellen Terry in the lead role. That play, Journeys End in Lovers Meeting (A New Proverb in One Act), by George Moore and "John Oliver Hobbes" (Mrs Pearl Craigie), was hailed by Theatre's anonymous reviewer as a shrewd, biting comedy on "society" existence.3 Yet such topical "triffles," in the reviewer's word, pass quickly and are soon forgotten, except perhaps by those like Doyle's Watson reconstructing events at a distance of nine years with the help of "case notes" and other contemporary documents. Doyle was in a good position to remember not an obscure line from Twelfth Night but a "new proverb" that Moore and Mrs. Craigie borrowed from Shakespeare: at the time Ellen Terry was reading the piece and rehearsing it Doyle was at Norwood preparing a "full dress four act play" for Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.^ What appears, then, as a misquote to Baring-Gould may, quite possibly , be a misquote from Moore and Craigie, not from Shakespeare. In fact, the title has been misquoted so frequently that there is 252 some doubt about how the title is to be written.5 Whatever the version, it is far more likely that Conan Doyle got the phrase from the Moore-Craigie production, because of his association with Ellen Terry, than he did from Twelfth Night. Notes 1 "The Adventure of the Empty House" appeared in Collier's Magazine (26 Sept 1903) and the Strand Magazine (Oct I903); the edition I follow is William S. Baring-Gould, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (NY: Potter, I967), abbreviated in the text as (ASH), 2 Baring-Gould also remarks (ASH, II, 699) that Holmes misquoted similarly upon greeting Inspector Gregson in a later story, "The Adventure of the Red Circle": "Journeys end with lovers' meetings" (ASH, II, 698). 3 "Plays of the Month," Theatre (Lond) , XXIV (1 July 189^), 34-36 . 4 John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (NY: Harper & Row, 1949), p. 83. Mrs. Craigie published the play in Tales About Temperaments (Londs Unwin, 1902) without mention of GM's name, an action that resulted in a flurry of letters from GM to T. Fisher Unwin during 1905; see H. E. Gerber, George Moore in Transition : Letters to T. Fisher Unwin and Lena Milman, 1894-1910 (Detro it: Wayne State UP, I968) , pp. 291::3Ö"4". 5 Moore himself refers to the play's title with at least four variations, sometimes in the same letter: 1. Journeys End and Lovers...