This is yet another article in the series inspired by Through the Magic Door, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's little volume of essays about books, reading and associated topics.
This post highlights two propositions that Conan Doyle makes about inspiration and creative people: he suggests that inspiration comes from outside and that creative people are often frail and die young.
It also mentions a few other writers in connection with these topics.
Conan Doyle says this about the source of inspiration:
“...the feeling which every writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon the paper...Is it possible that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the least sense of personal effort.”
That last sentence is often very true. Rudyard Kipling said something similar when he gave his Daemon credit for assisting and inspiring him in his work: he said that the writing he did under this influence was 'frictionless'.
Conan Doyle's mention of a conduit pipe reminds me of another of Rudyard Kipling's Daemon-related images: he likens the end of a good run of genuine, friction-free creativity to “the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.”
Many other writers have speculated about where their inspiration might come from.
Robert Louis Stevenson for example said that it came from vivid dreams caused by the Brownies!
Frances Hodgson Burnett thought of herself as just the custodian rather than the originator of her gift. So where did this gift come from then?
Maybe some fiction writers really do channel or download their works and ideas from somewhere.
Conan Doyle continues with his musings:
“And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man*s materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses? It is an old tag that
'Great Genius is to madness close allied,
And thin partitions do those rooms divide.'
But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the body.”
Conan Doyle had obviously done some research: he had collected information and noticed patterns. He goes on to list many poets and writers who died young or at a relatively early age. He is particularly interested in Sir Walter Scott, who wrote two good books at a time when his health was at its worst.
Just as Conan Doyle's account of his narrow escape from being accused of plagiarism immediately reminded me of a similar account given by Rudyard Kipling - which is described in the first Daemon article - his speculation about the connection between creativity and an unstable nervous system reminds me of what John Buchan's Gap in the Curtain has to say about the connection between being able to see into the future and a weakened nervous system.
His ideas also remind me of the occultist Dion Fortune's proposition that gifts come at a price.
Ironically, Conan Doyle himself was very far from being a weak, sensitive and fragile person who burned out and died young: he was physically very tough, he was primarily a man of action and he lived to the age of 71.
Conan Doyle was a volunteer doctor during the Boer War:
