Billy Budd, Sailor

Life's real tragedy, we are gravely informed in a quite famous and now quite old French film, is that "everyone has his reasons."  To someone of stern principles this may seem to be a throwaway observation by one of the forefathers of our contemporary relativists who don't like principles because principles imply responsibility, the mortal enemy of modern man – yet this is not the true context.  Our reasons may be our own and they may be complicated, deranged, or volatile.  The mere fact that they exist, however, allows us to choose or reject interaction with the other inhabitants of our world.  I have my reasons for writing, and some may suspect they involve egotism, megalomania, and moral preachment, charges that could be leveled against any writer.  Nevertheless, any regular reader of these pages would correctly enumerate as the motive forces aesthetic bliss and the discovery of inner truth because those are the only reasons one should write at all.  That's why when a second-rate poet once accused this great genius of writing in two languages out of excessive ambition, he simultaneously betrayed his commensurate ambition and inferior talent.  So if everyone has his reasons, how can we possibly enact legislation to govern millions?   Where do we cleave intent from result?  A few questions for the thoughtful reader of this incomparable tale.

According to our narrator it is no uncommon occurrence on a large ship, especially one with high turnover and many fresh new tars, to find one seaman who distinguishes himself solely by his good looks.  Upon this man is conferred the unspoken title of "Handsome Sailor" (sailors generally abjure fancy appellations) and he walks among his peers exuding some of the magnetism which in our days we normally reserve for movie stars or divas.  While he is "invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler," a perfect combination of "strength and beauty."  In short:

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates.

This is, we remember, only a typical portrait; our man Billy does not appear to have any of the puncher in him.  But he works hard on his ship, the Rights-of-man, earns an inordinate amount of respect given his petty duties, and his captain is soon loath to part with him.  Yet as fate would have it, a larger vessel by the name of Bellipotent (a lovely bell-ringing pun) requests his services, and he is transferred despite his being the Rights' "jewel" and "peacemaker" – which brings us to a small aside.  There could not be a clearer Christian parallel than the use of these two epithets, but not all parallels signify anything more than the recurrence of circumstance.  Billy's ingenuousness – he cannot even read or write – extenuates the impact of his looks and converts him not unquickly into a pleasant reminder to his shipmates of their long-lost youth.  For that reason, we learn, does he incur the wrath of a man by the name of John Claggart.

Claggart holds a special place in the pantheon of villainy because we are allowed two glances into his person.  The first is in his outward appearance ("a man about five and thirty, somewhat spare and tall ... his hand was too small and shapely to have been accustomed to hard toil"), by which he is likened to Tecumseh, a cleric during the English Civil War, and some distant Greeks, probably Spartans, with whom he, as the Bellipotent's master-at-arms, may have shared some notions of naumachia.  He is also rumored to have been a chevalier who was Anglicized and stowed aboard to compensate "for some mysterious swindle" (as with many manifestations of the Devil, he neither has an accent in English nor really speaks like a native).  The untraceability of his origin corresponds to that of evil itself, and as evil cannot exist in a vacuum and must have a referent, so must Claggart come upon something to unleash the demons that dance around his soul.  He finds his bugbear in the comely shape of William Budd, who one day just so happens to spill his supper upon the deck and Claggart's path:

It is more than probable that when the Master-at-arms in the scene last given applied to the sailor the proverb Handsome is as handsome does, he there let escape an ironic inkling, not caught by the young sailors who heard it, as to what it was that had first moved him against Billy, namely, his significant personal beauty.  Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth.  Is Envy then such a monster?  Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy?  Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.  And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man.  But since its lodgement is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.  But Claggart's was no vulgar form of the passion.  Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd, did it partake of that streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David.  Claggart's envy struck deeper.  If askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent.  To him, the spirit lodged within Billy, and looking out from his welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability it was which made the dimple in his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and dancing in his yellow curls made him preeminently the Handsome Sailor.  One person excepted, the Master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.

The "person excepted" is Edward Fairfax Vere, the Bellipotent's captain, who one night will become the third party in a dark reunion in the first mate's quarters.  Of Vere much has been said, both in Billy Budd and in the story's expansive secondary literature, so we would be best advised to keep our comments short.  Vere is praised as a brilliant sailor, the best of his active rank, and a man of philosophical bent – which makes his opinions on Billy's actions all the more damning.  Vere also persists as the object of much speculation because of his "pedantic" and allegedly "aristocratic" disposition (at one point his person is described as "a streak ... of King's yarn in a coil of navy rope").   That Billy will at different junctures be suspected both of blue blood and foreignness renders his relationship to Vere and Claggart all the more crucial – and no more needs to be said.   

If style were all that mattered, Billy Budd might be the best-written prose work in the English language, no meaner than the sagas of a bowelless Scotsman and a melancholy Moor.  As it were, some of Melville's far less gifted associates have entrapped our poor sailor in a Christian allegory, which it is in a way so obvious as to divest it of any allegorical meaning, or a study of latent homosexuality, which we can safely say it isn't.  Proponents of gender studies, that claptrap of indignation, have never really understood what could bond a squad of non-related heterosexual men together in an army or a sports team, a plain term called camaraderie.  That there are no women in Billy Budd, or scarcely any in this masterpiece, confounds and upsets them profoundly, but there is little we can do for such minds.  The best way to understand our boy Billy is as a victim of what can be bluntly described as fate and more roundly described as man's manifold reasons for opposing the good that rests in all of us.  That is to say, there may be one instance of justice in the codex memorized by the judge in a now dimly-recollected law school classroom, and another embedded deep within the valves of his almighty heart.  Billy falls distinctly between both natural categories and could just as easily be absolved as condemned.  There is also that pleasing ballad ("Billy in the darbies") that concludes the story.  The attentive reader may ask himself why the rather unusual "darbies" is an anagram of "seabird," or why, for that matter, the poem's name an anagram of "I, Billy, death's brine."  And that same reader will not fail to notice that very singular conversation between the ship's purser and its surgeon.  Maybe heavenly phenomena should be not limited to the firmament.

Pen, Pencil, and Poison

Since his death on the doorstep of a new century, this famous author's work has been denigrated and endorsed by various critics and yet retained the inviolable mark of greatness: no reader has shown himself indifferent.  How could anyone ultimately be indifferent to Oscar Wilde?  More than the other dismissive dandies of his or any age, Wilde was a supreme moralist.  That is to say, while he spared no one his thorns, he knew where to embed them if given the choice.  Morality was not something to mock in the day's spare hours but a mist that coated our every thought and action, an echo of our meanings, a prism of our treatment of others and ourselves.  While his most famous prose work is often construed as an ode to decadence, it is precisely the opposite: a protracted allegory on the shades of the soul.   Which is why we should view this essay with some healthy skepticism.

Our subject is undoubtedly a villain, if one of whom you likely know very little.  His poems are hardly read, much less studied; his drawings have garnered the interest of those who peddle morbid collectables; and even his reputation for evil has diminished.  How could a man of artistic ability and temperament consign himself to oblivion by murdering two family members and an old chum?  Wilde offers the rather reprehensible explanation that similar fates have befallen Roman emperors whose crimes have become the stuff of cocktail parties and other frivolous banter – reprehensible because it suggests that we slacken our morals as memory slackens its hold.  A survey of Wainewright's pursuits will give us an excellent idea of our subject's disposition:

This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something.  He recognised that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it ... His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.  He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.  He writes about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.  He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche and the Hypnerotomachia book-bindings, and early editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in which he lived or would have liked to live. He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier he was fascinated by that "sweet marble monster" of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.

From such a portrait we may draw several conclusions, even if they are all blurry sketches.  Our man is first and foremost in love with his taste, and then secondly in love with himself – both of which compose the halves of his genius.  To be a genius, an Argentine novelist once claimed, you have to think you're a genius and be right.  And while we harbor serious reservations as to the genius of many contemporary writers who spend years composing works of dubious character and authenticity, with Wainewright no such hesitation arises.  He is thoroughly convinced of his powers to create and destroy, the magic to which every author feels himself entitled.  But, as we know, he takes things a step or three too far.

Why does Wainewright even merit mention?  Whom does the recapitulation of a murderer's habits befit?  With our contemporary fascination for real crime, this poet-poisoner would have gained a considerable portion of the limelight, but he would have faded much more rapidly than one would expect for two inevitable reasons.  Firstly, one may forget an above-average murderer, but a blessing indeed would be to remember an above-average poet; secondly, a murderer's fame rests either on the identity of his victims, their quantity, or the methods with which he dispatched them to extinction.  His methods were plain and bitter; his victims were relatively few for our gory times, only a triptych; and his victims were the most nameless of enemies, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, and then a long-time family friend.  None of this will make our subject into more than he was in real life, a petty demon with a taste for green, and the excerpts of Wainewright's own works resemble abstract heraldry, motley and cruel.  But Wilde insists on promoting one strand of this fiend's accomplishments:

Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.  To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented.  He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.  A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.

You may have never heard of the term "Asiatic prose" (the formulation of this man of letters), but it is akin to what in some circles is now termed "ornamental prose."  And Wainewright, to be described thus, seems to have been one of the first ancestors of many members of our social networking and blogging communities who are so eager to impart the minutest details of their lives to strangers in exchange for some fleeting attention. 

What is even more remarkable is the date of this essay's composition, 1889, six years or so before Wilde's detractors got the better of him and ended his hope if not his physical existence.  How odd to see a young man whom one could not but admire for his ingenuity, wit, and insight into morality construct the most decadent texts, chant the most rebellious slogans, and all the while conceal longings for things that Victorian society deemed ill and outlandish.  The "illegalities" of Wilde's "private life" caught up to him just as he was willing to explain everything to everyone and in so doing, cease to be the mysterious figure known as Oscar Wilde.  That could never do.  And if his favorite poisoner had still been around, he might have even asked him for a favor. 

Secular Knowledge not a Principle of Action

We have already belabored the back-and-forth between those who believe in something greater than themselves and those who think themselves the jewels atop evolution's crown, and readers of these pages know how I stand, not being able to do anything else.  The universe, say the men of science, is a vast mystery in which there is little room for divine revelation, yet we have discovered one hundred billion planets (or perhaps one billion galaxies each with one billion planets, the number is as fluid as the authorities that count).  What may or may not have happened two thousand years ago in a warm and intellectually rich desert land is a legend perpetrated by a long list of global conspirators, but the progression of those prehistoric monsters who died millions of years before we became sentient is as clear as the microscope used to examine their fossils.  And the universe itself, that bulging mass of infinite energy, decided one day that it should be, and exploded into what would become our world a long time down the line, so thinking that the universe is actually a stage designed by an Author would be the most preposterous mistake ever committed.  If you are convinced fully by these arguments, please proceed to your nearest popular bookseller and find your reading material in the largest and brashest displays scattered at strategic points throughout the store.  If, however, the more you consider these asinine gourds of leaking potions, all of which have the same bitter chemical aftertaste, the more you find the whole concoction a vile emetic, you may want to order your books from less complacent sources.  Which brings us to this short essay.

There is a basic principle in Newman's works that cannot be rephrased only reiterated, and it involves the concepts of assumption and assent.   The casual thinker − he knows who he is − may flip through a few pages of this masterpiece and conclude that the whole premise is based on religious faith, and he would only be wrong in his flipping.  Casual reviewers of the same work have commented that Newman's approach jettisons the medieval and ancient philosophies for something terribly modern, at least modern by the standard of the nineteenth century, but again this conclusion is the result of too much flipping and too many conclusions.  A simpler approach may be as follows.  Let us say that you believe your girlfriend to be loyal and loving − for the vast majority of us an assumption which a relationship can and should predicate.  You ask yourself time and again why you think this way, and are led to a number of observations that buttress and cancel each other in rather tawdry existential fashion.  First you assume that she loves you because you love her and love is as natural as the morning dew, as the morning itself, as oxygen.  You decide that this is so on the evidence of the hypocorisms and affection you exchange; you are supported in your sensations by our omnipresent and omniscient men of science who boldly proclaim that love, like chocolate and fear, is a chemical reaction illuminating a certain part of your brain as if it were a pile of links of a staggered Christmas tree light display.  You discard this sentiment when its hollowness begins to repulse you and then conclude that she loves you because she has made a decision to love.  You just happen to be the person with whom she is now as if life were a roulette wheel and she fell on your number.  This approach also has its drawbacks, namely that her willpower has been transformed into a justification for affection, which to both the logical and emotional mind cannot possibly be love.  So you entertain a third notion, love as destiny, as preprogrammed methodology on the part of natural selection or divine proportion, and understand that you must accept your lot as it is handed to you because otherwise your existence will henceforth be mired in regret.  At length you come to the fourth conclusion in your eternal square, that of deception, and now I should mention the essay in the title.

Newman does not believe in any conclusions, he believes in what he modestly calls a beginning.  He tells us that many people will risk their lives for dogma, but never for a conclusion; he knows that people die for realities not calculations.  The rather gauche modern films and novels that describe suicidal characters as keeping a tally of their world in neurotic detail should not perish because of that detail, but because that detail has now replaced their entire reality (an instructive point made in this fine novel).  He has nothing horribly against science, as no one who believes in better living standards and health for humanity should, but he has something very much against a life of perpetual deduction which begins, appropriately enough, ex nihilo:

Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof.  We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries.  We shall never get at our first principles.  Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding "in the lowest depth a lower deep," till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism.  I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world.  Life is for action.  If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.

We may cast aside the criticism that life is not really for action, because to come to that assumption much action must already have been taken.  It is perhaps for that reason that a skeptic who has been treated with the cold, callous end of life's rod can be more justified in his mistrust of the world, and, for his insufferable ignorance, a young brash fool who thinks himself a god with two feet and lungs all the more chastened.

Whatever you may think of Newman, you will have to conclude that conclusions are based on assumptions (or perhaps that assumptions only end in further assumptions).  As silly and ultimately contradictory as it is to postulate that we may separate ourselves from the stream of time and ethics to reach some petty captions on our own, we must also understand that youth for natural reasons needs to rebel.  It needs to think itself invincible because only once it has been disabused of this notion can it weigh life's value and our cobweb of aging and loss.  If religion "has never been a message, a history, or vision," we can assert without fear of perjury that these are precisely the three elements common to all periods of youth.  We learn about ourselves and the world through our parents and their history, and we envision our future most often through the paradigms herein established, the future as an anagram of the past.  Yes, this can be said of faith, except that all future, past and present scenarios and thoughts are but anagrams of some greater meaning still.  That, if anything, is motivation enough to live what has been given us and to love.  And for what is love if not assent to the transcendental?

Miss Jéromette

The advent of the sexual revolution, or whatever it chooses to call itself, has brought with it the promise of equal rights in equal endeavours – a noble aim, regardless of its feasibility.  It is not so much that men and women cannot or should not be equal; in intellectual matters there is no distinction apart from what detractors will impose.  Rather, we face the age-old question of the physical equality that cannot be, simply because man will always carry an advantage of violence that cannot be reciprocated by his female counterpart.  As a result, two unbalanced sides will necessarily obtain, as in this story. 

The initial conceit involves two brothers sitting together one lonely night after dinner and poring over "a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form."  True crime has always fascinated us because our repulsion contains some elements of attraction and curiosity, as much the case one hundred thirty-five years ago as it is today.  It is the second brother, the non-reader in this case and a clergyman, who turns pale upon beholding the book as it reminds him of a famous trial from his youth, a trial in which the accused was ultimately acquitted.  And what does the clergyman aver about this wicked time?  "I know this," he said, "the prisoner was guilty."  They speak no more about what happened, although the clergyman also indicates that there were "circumstances connected with that trial which were never communicated to the judge or the jury."  Only on his deathbed does he become more voluble and reveal what he had concealed within his heart for almost an entire adult life.    

It is many summers ago when his brother "was on [his] way to India" that the preacher, from whose perspective the tale is now recounted, has completed his studies at this university.  He chose law instead of his father's preference, which would have been for his son to join the clergy, and with this familial disappointment hanging as a black cloud over his everyday existence, he regales himself on what he can of the urban and urbane existence his choice permits ("I had no serious intention of following any special vocation.  I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of a London life").  One fine evening, walking through the public gardens that can only be properly enjoyed at high summer, he hears a foreign female voice warning an unseen male to take his leave.  He steps in and averts further confrontation (the perpetrator, in any case, is drunk and quickly accompanied off the grounds by a policeman), and then turns his attention to the voice and the shape from which it emanates:

Her figure was slight and small: she was a well-made miniature of a woman from head to foot.  Her hair and her eyes were both dark.  The hair curled naturally; the expression of the eyes was quiet, and rather sad; the complexion, as I then saw it, very pale; the little mouth perfectly charming.  I was especially attracted, I remembered, by the carriage of her head; it was strikingly graceful and spirited; it distinguished her, little as she was and quiet as she was, among the thousands of other women in the Gardens, as a creature apart.     

Other colors are added to her portrait: she is impoverished, "resigned to her lonely life among strangers," and without her parents for many years now.  She is French, of course, and yet, particularly in one cruel instance, "her temperament had little of the liveliness which we associate in England with the French nature."  They begin what could loosely be termed a courtship, although their relationship at every moment becomes more and more tenuous owing to the presence of another man in her life.  Our narrator asks as timid lovers tend to ask while being very afraid to know, and learns next to nothing: "He might be living, or he might be dead.  There came no word of him, or from him."  It is only when the narrator's mother, on her own deathbed, presses him to change his vocation that he quits Jéromette, abetted by the fact that she has just received a letter confirming that her love will soon return.

Unless you rank among the most ingenuous of readers what happens next cannot really be spoiled by commentary.  Our narrator, now indeed a man of the cloth, is appointed to a benefice in the West of England.  His steady income does not satisfy him, so he takes on a few students in need of help to gain entrance into the prestigious universities whose names their families covet.  The first two students are harmless teenagers, but then our narrator gives a sermon at his church about "the discovery of a terrible crime" which has held England in its thrall.  After this passionate lecture, of which, alas, we are given but a quoteless summary, the narrator receives a note written in pencil from a young man, "a member of my congregation, a gentleman," who wishes to see him as soon as the preacher has an opportunity.  The man leaves his own father's name as a reference, and it is verified as belonging to "a man of some celebrity and influence in the world of London" – the world, we remember, that our narrator wishes he had never left.   They meet and the narrator tells us all we need to know:

The women, especially, admired his beautiful light hair, his crisply-curling beard, his delicate complexion, his clear blue eyes, and his finely shaped hands and feet.  Even the inveterate reserve in his manner, and the downcast, almost sullen, look which had prejudiced me against him, aroused a common feeling of romantic enthusiasm in my servants' hall.  It was decided, on the high authority of the housekeeper herself, that 'the new gentleman' was in love – and more interesting still, that he was the victim of an unhappy attachment which had driven him away from his friends and his home.

The man in question is in his late twenties and yet has never been a college student.  And how could this be?  A dissolute life of excess is the hardly contrite explanation.  But our clergyman has been trained to detect human motivations in the depths of our being, and we can say without fear of perjury that, with this fellow, he does not like what he sees. 

Without going further, it is remarkable how the narrator is presented with both sides of an equation, but at different times and from the perspective of different professions, so that the fabulous structure of an otherwise simple tale becomes more involving without becoming more intricate.  Collins is most famously the author of two other works, a superb if overly long novel of suspense and one of the great literary mysteries of the nineteenth century, both of which can be recommended without reservation.  To Collins's great credit, there is little difference in style between the passages that develop his characters and the passages that develop his plots.  The same sure, curious hand instructs all forces to act and obey his whims.  I have always told myself that my predilection for Victorian storytelling has to do with the comity of its personages, who act with full acknowledgment of the laws of both beauty and morality, even if at certain times they choose to transgress them.  There is a gallantry to our clergyman narrator, an odd adherence to basic human goodness that should not strike us as odd at all.  But in our times of cynicism and vulgarity, little space is allotted to the simple virtues that we have not only taken for granted, but cast by the wayside with no small contempt.  That is not the reason, mind you, that I have omitted the story title's second half – the reason for that was its sounding a bit too quaint for my taste.  Far more quaint, however, than the notion of falling in love with a woman whose soul is hopelessly and dangerously possessed by another.  That tale, I think, we all know far too well. 

The Priory School

Readers looking for continuity in works featuring serialized characters are often unaware of the amendments (and resulting inconsistencies) that the authors themselves tend to make as the personalities of their creations grow and change.  I remember reading as a child, for example, that there was much acrimony when a comic book artist switched the eye color of a certain super hero from dark brown to bright blue.  Although it was unclear whether the change was made out of ignorance or preference, such tweaks turned out to be far cries from what has subsequently become known at retconning.  If you are not familiar with this term, worry not — it is still in the embryonic stages of its dissemination.  Yet you could define it yourself by thinking about any type of serialized fiction: it is the art of changing past events or facts to induce retroactive continuity.  As you might imagine its most prolific use would be in soap operas or the comic book world, where heroes die and come back to life at alarming rates.  Still, even in more serious literature, retconning allows the author to make up for some indiscretions at the genesis of an idea.  We all know that hindsight is twenty–twenty; but time does often lend itself to less capricious characterizations, especially if the characters end up accompanying their creators through the long walk of life. 

I have mentioned Conan Doyle’s two near–fatal mistakes with his prized sleuth, errata that would have changed the course of Holmesian history (if anyone cares about such matters, as I am suggesting they should).  The first involved Holmes’s love life, which after a brief attempt at generating crossover romance readership, Conan Doyle smartly eliminated; the second, of course, was much more severe and involved the tardy resurrection of Holmes, who had never really died after all but gone traveling in, among other places, these parts.  The masses surely rejoiced when Conan Doyle brought Holmes back to Baker street, although a small slew of detractors insisted that the new Holmes was not quite the same one who left.  And how exactly could he be?  Conan Doyle himself had gone through quite a few changes in his life in the intervening decade (1893–1902, although in the Holmesian chronology, the absence is from 1891—1894), and the Holmes who returns for this magnificent novella is older, wiser, a little less sprightly and a little more considerate of his brethren.  Some of his more insolent, almost prankster qualities are toned down and replaced with a literary irony that belies the observations made by Watson (and we know what to think at times of the good doctor’s observations) in this other novella, Holmes’s first–ever appearance.  Over time, Holmes becomes less of a forensic freak and more of a Renaissance man, which makes much more sense given his innate ability to deduce plausible conclusions from some of the most obscure details.  Yet connoisseurs know that the detective has a few magisterial interests, one of which happens to be the various types of bicycle tire tracks, and his monograph on the subject covers forty–two different impressions.  A rather handy bit of knowledge considering the plot developments of this story.

The son of the Duke of Holdernesse is reported missing, last seen, in fact, traipsing across the Lower Gill Moor with a rather presciently named German teacher called Heidegger.  Actually, this is the assumed course of events.  No one ever saw the departure of Heidegger and the boy — ten years of age and somewhat alone at the prestigious school in the shadow of his father’s massive estate — but both are missing as is the teacher’s bicycle.  Upon the request of the school’s principal but ultimately on the behalf of the Duke himself, Holmes and Watson set off for Northern England.  They talk with the Duke, who rejects the notion that the boy’s mother, his estranged wife living in Southern France, may have had anything to do with the abduction.  The Duke’s secretary James Wilder has other ideas, however, and lets them be known surreptitiously.  

Slowly but suspensefully, details come to light, including the boy’s hat in the possession of gypsies (who were also conveniently included in this story previously reviewed) and the much more grisly mud–laden fate of poor Heidegger.  As in Silver Blaze, our four–legged friends have some role in assisting the investigation, owing in no small part to the fact that, unlike human beings, their actions and reactions can be predicted with much greater accuracy.  Any aberration in their behavior, like a guard dog who doesn’t bark right when he is supposed to be guarding and barking, is more than a tip–off, it is often the key to whole solution.  As one of the finest Holmes adventures, The Priory School benefits from the misty surroundings and murky dealings that make both Victorian London and the gorgeous moors and countryside of England the prototypical settings for the uncanny.  Finally, the new and improved Holmes does something almost completely out of character at the end of this story.  Maybe this is now in character for Holmes, whose values may have been altered by his wanderings, or maybe he’s just making an exception.  A human exception, in any case.