The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories Read Free

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 theauthor 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 storiesvoraciously 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