July 9.
Conan Doyle, as he sprawled the Authors! Club, presented the picture of a' rubicund, country squire with the touch of the retired cavalry officer about him. He had nothing of the intellectual in his appearance; he had no "side" and he was amazingly modest about his work, To his hosts, at a memorable Savage Club dinner year or so ago—a dinner which marked a reconciliation gracefully acknowledged by him confided the secret of his success. Tt lay, 80 he said, in his being the first to discover that the magazine reader disliked the serial story which necessitated the purchase of every copy of the magazine and Prevented enjoyment instalment unless the previous instalments had been read, He conceived the idea of contributing a serial which would consist of self-contained instalment That was how Sherlock Holmes's exploits came to be chronicled and laid the foundations, not only, of their author's fame but the Success of the magazine in which he wrote, Nor was Conan Doyle less frank about ner of spinning yarns, no believer—in least—in worrying out local colour, He was there-not a whit abashed when an indignant New Zealander complained that, in setting a story in that distant Dominion he had 40 grievously failed to study his geography that the eruefal drawing room scene actually was place a hundred Admirers of Sherlock Holmes are not disposed to accept this airily modest dismissal of Conan Doyle's claim to remembrance, may not have been the creator of the detective story. There was Edgar Allan Poe who died six years before he was born and, iw his own day, Arthur Morrison was no mean exponent of the art, which has brought wealth, in the 20th Century, to the former Blackfriars-Bridge newsboy, Edgar Wallace and, in a less degree, to his host of imitators and rivals, Conan Doyle—a doctor by training but an artist' by inheritance—had that gift which lifts the fiction writer to the plane of genius, He could "create living figures and k them alive. Sherlock Holmes and his blundering Boswellian Watson have passed long ago into the gallery in which Mr. Pickwick, Becky Sharp, Sam Weller and Mrs, Tulliver are enthroned. That gem of the early 19th Century romance, "Rodney Stone" is an enduring delight to the lover of English sportsmanship and Conan Doyle's History of the South African War has been praised as a masterpiece of history and literature, Yet when all is said and done, Sherlock Holmes must return, as his author had to make him return, not once but at least thrice, to meet the importunity of publish ers and magazine editors. Is there any other detective of fic tion whose habits and tastes are a3 well known as those of thi hero of "My dear Watson"?
jon—for in physical and spects Ca:. Royle was duly A thoughtful letter from a Hongkong journalist deals in the correspondence columns to-day with one of the difficulties often confronting the conscientious chronicler of events and opinions, For various reasons the public is instructed less by elaborate trea in which the subtle shades of negation or affirmation are carefully explained, than by the downright, polemical, generalizations of the newspaper Press and the political platform, In these circumstances, the use of labels is found by the instructors and the instructed to be extraordinary convenient.
els are usually more effective when they are distinct in hue. The political _controversialist disdains the neutral or the subsidiary tint. Yellow, red and blue were the good, unsophisticated favours flourished in the days of the hustings in England. They are not al together unknown to-day, Even turncoats—who have numbered quite distinguished politicians and statesmen in their ranks—attracted far less contumely than the blue, who hovered on the brink of being green, or the yellow who preferred to be called orange. To be a true blue Tory was to be a stout fellow; to -ed Radical was a desperate but it had not the angemic stigma of the halfway house colour.
Mr, 'T'ang Leong-li makes an eloquent appeal for the display of more consideration to the Politicians in China who, for some reason of political ancestry, or of a quite honourable reluctance to be whol-hoggers in any one direction, are lized by this label habit. He inds the old army man of the dilemma of the sergeant-major who, falling in the men of his battalion for Church parade and up according to "Roman Catholic" of England" and nonconformist", was confronted by an agnostic in the shape of a very newly joined private, 'The great man hesitated, but sergeant-majors, unlike' other great men, cannot—and do not—hesitate long. "You there, fail in with the Church of England" was his verdict, Still there i much substance in Mr. T'ang's objections. It is unfortunate that Mr, Wang Ching-wei, for example, should be labelled' as a communist when, in all likelihood, he is firmly' persona non grata at Moscow and for solid reasons.
In China, as elsewhere there axe a number of people who are labelled communists when they are actually actively opposing communism. Indeed the most vehement denunciations in the armoury of Moscow are reserved, not for the die-hard constitutionalists of any country, but for the Labour or Socialist parties as any student of Moscow's opinions on Mr. Arthur Henderson or Mr. Ramsay Mac-Donald is aware. The danger of indiscriminate labelling lies in the fact that it really assists to swell the ranks of communists. When, for instance, a number of prisoners taken in battle are executed for being communists when they were simply enemies, the process of elevating con-munism to the plane of patriotic endeavour inevitably begins. On the other hand recent history in China has shown how dangerous its to ride ona tiger, The dis-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.