Quotes of Quotes of Quotes:
Just who was the True Bartlett of Baker Street?

John H. Watson really deserves some kind of award.

“Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhbhnen was sie nicht verstehen,” Sherlock Holmes commented to him in an idle moment during SIGN. It is one of the many idle moments in the Canon where Holmes uses the time to comment on how the current case is going, philosophize a little, and throw out some quote in German or French. And on not one of these occasions does the excellent Dr. Watson turn to Holmes and say the natural thing:

"Huh?"

Watson was really quite talented that way. Not only did he take such untranslated phrases in stride, he also managed to remember them, holding them verbatim in his mind until such time as he could put them in his notes for the eventual write-up of the case. No easy feat, that. One certainly has to wonder -- was Watson familiar with all the quotations Holmes threw out during their cases? Had Watson read Goethe, Flaubert, Despreaux, and the rest? And was he also fluent in German and French? Probably so.

"Are you well up on your Jean Paul?" Holmes asks Watson in SIGN.

"Fairly so, I worked back to him through Carlyle," Watson replies, ever so casually. But how many people do you know that have read much Carlyle, much less worked their way back to the German author Jean Paul Richter?

John Watson was a very educated fellow to begin with. Add to that what he gained from the spare time he had for reading following his return from the war, and you have a veritable litterateur on your hands. His writing skills alone are ample evidence of this. Which brings us to an interesting point: Many of the times Holmes quotes Goethe or whomever, he does it at a place where it neatly rounds off a story or chapter. Perhaps too neatly.

A prime consideration for any student of the Canon is that every fact we are given about Sherlock Holmes, every quote or demonstration, comes to us through Watson's pen. Is it not possible that Dr. Watson, looking to make sure he sold his chronicles of the skilled criminologist, embellished them a bit? A few foreign language quotes here, and a few obscure bits of knowledge there, could make aft already extremely intelligent fellow seem like a true super-mind. A closer-to-reality Sherlock Holmes may have been the fellow who, in STUD, professed to know nothing of the Copernican Theory.

"Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones," Holmes said, justifying his ignorance. "You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work."

This was the Sherlock Holmes who soon vanished, never to be seen again -- a Sherlock Holmes who mastered his trade by gathering every scrap of knowledge that might be of help to him and forcefully putting all else out of his mind. He was a criminal expert and could catch nearly any wrong-doer, but did he know what made up the solar system? No. Did he know of the current political scene? No. And did he have the vaguest notion who Thomas Carlyle was, much less Jean Paul Richter? Certainly not.

And if that Sherlock Holmes was the true Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson is to be both congratulated and condemned. Congratulated for not being the prime example of Boobus Britannicus, the image stereotypically foisted upon him; condemned for not giving us an accurate picture of the man so many people have come to admire. Sherlock Holmes may have been the first with such a condemnation if Watson was "doctoring" up the Canon, for in the opening of SIGN the detective says:

"Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner." He is speaking of Watson's treatment of their first case together (STUD). Holmes may have been letting Watson have it, not only for tainting his record with romanticism, but for presenting a somewhat distorted version of the detective himself as well. Of course, we can never be quite sure. Before we turn to Holmes and say, "You said it!" . . . we must first stop for a moment and think -- did he?

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, April 1985)