The mechanical bride 27 Could anything exceed the sentimentality or the lavish emotion with which Doyle (and all other writers of crime stories) embellish the figure of the detective? It is through the eyes of some doting Watson, dim of brain, or the dewy eyes of the female secretary, wistfully adoring, that the superman is seen and felt by the reader. This Nietzschean figure achieves his self-dramatization not directly, like the nihilistic malcontents of the Elizabethan stage, but on the inner stage of a mass dream. The sleuth is a recognizable descendant of the heroes who died in the odor of Seneca, but here he lives on, indestructibly, to report his own cause to the unsatisfied. Like the malcontent, the sleuth embodies an attitude, a personal strategy for meeting an opaque and bewildering situation. Both reject the attitude of submission and adjustment to obvious social pressures, affirming themselves as vividly as they can. But where have we met Doyle’s description before? Writing in 1868, Thomas Henry Huxley said: That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in his youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work, that as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all the parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready like a steam engine to be turned to any kind of work…. To many people in 1868 this sentimental robotism didn’t seem especially laughable as a “human” ideal. Perhaps not everybody even today would be prepared to recognize it for the lethal formula that it is. The connections between “the law of the jungle,” “the spirit of enterprise,” and “ringside seat” for the diesel-engine show become evident. Between “The Sparrow versus the Hawk” spirit in education and society, and the Holmes-Huxley- Kipling circuit, the relationship appears in Doyle’s views of education in his inventory of Holmes’s intellectual tools: 1. Knowledge of Literature—Nil 2. Knowledge of Philosophy—Nil 3. Knowledge of Astronomy—Nil 4. Knowledge of Politics—Feeble 5. Knowledge of Botany—Variable, well up in belladonna, opium and poisons generally 6. Knowledge of Geology—Practical but limited 7. Knowledge of Chemistry—Profound 8. Knowledge of Anatomy—Accurate 9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. In addition, Holmes is a violinist, an all-around athlete, and a lawyer. That is what Doyle considered the ideal mental kit for the man-hunter. Note the slavering chop-smacking stress on Holmes’s “immense” erudition in mayhem and murder. That is seemingly the price our world has paid for developing a mind that it sentimentally regards as a cold logic engine. And the curious reader will find it profitable to consult Wyndham Lewis’s Art of Being Ruled on the nature of the modern scientist’s obsession with the romance of destruction.