The Cruise of the Nona

detective story very properly commands a large sale, especially among the intelligent: that is why a good detective story is bought by men as well as by women, whereas your ordinary bestseller, so full of what they call “psychology,” is fed to the other sex, not mine. Bismarck also, intelligent among the Germans, delighted in the detective stories of fiction; but, for my part, though I take pleasure in them also (especially when they are of first-rate construction and diction, like Trent’s Last Case, Mr. Bentley’s book, which is, without a doubt, the best detective story in English today), yet it is a pale pursuit compared with problems set in the midst of reality: it is all the difference between dreaming and doing. Moreover, the wretched writing man can never forget that a story written is at the author’s pleasure. That author knew the solution from the beginning⁠—as is proper to a creator⁠—and as we read we know that he can make the evidence fit any way he chose. But when you are dealing with reality, the evidence upon either side of the problem is not made to fit any end. You have to reconcile as best you can two opposite sets of equally certain things, which seem the one set to contradict the other. If the problem as to who that Needles man was, and where he had come from, had involved great issues, racial hatreds, the fate of a fortune, or the destiny of a realm, it would have become an historical problem; and historical problems are the most fascinating of all.

There come first in order those involving human motive, and the known probabilities of human action. Take three of them. The affair of the Diamond Necklace, the Tichborne case, and the Dreyfus case. In each of these the difficulty of finding the solution lies in the discovery of motive, and in the estimate of truth proceeding from a group of witnesses, or sometimes from only one witness, and in each of these there is an opposing set of accounts, and of depositions contradictory the one to the other.

In the affair of the Diamond Necklace, you have either to believe that a man, living in the heart of the court life of Versailles, accepted a ludicrous signature as that of the Queen; or else you have to believe that about twenty people, who had no connection one with the other, and were separated by every conceivable kind of social circumstance, place and time, conspired to tell unshaken the same lie. If you ask whether a man living in the heart of the rich society of London would accept as normal the signature “The Hon. Henry Hound, Esq.” at the end of a letter (he having known for many years the said Henry Hound, let alone the fantastic nature of such a signature) you would certainly say that the thing was morally impossible. But what if you had to decide between such a moral impossibility and the necessity of believing that a railway porter at North Berwick, a small farmer in County Clare, a dilettante friend of the said Henry Hound, and Henry Hound himself, and a chance taxi-man who had once driven him, and a policeman who had noted the taxi go by, and about a dozen others equally separate, did all swear and remain unshaken under examination, and after a long process of time, to testimonies which, combined, made the conclusion inevitable that this man, accustomed to all our social usages, and living in the heart of our rich society, did regard such an absurd signature as normal?

The Tichborne case depends upon contradictions in which I have little reading; but, if I remember right, the main contrast in it lay between two sets of undoubted facts. On the one hand, a man’s mother recognised him; his distinguished advocate preferred ruin to the concealment of his own passionate conviction of the man’s identity⁠—and, after seeing all the evidence, and hearing everything in confidence, deliberately broke the most sacred rules of his lawyers’ trade union, inviting certain disaster in order to leave conviction to posterity. As against a set of things like that you had the unaccountable ignorance of a man of middle age upon habits and words, and the rest, in which his youth must have been steeped, and many other contradictory points as well. There has been formed a comfortable legend upon this particular problem: a legend which affirms the certain justice of the verdict.

Personally, I mistrust such legends. The tendency of men to believe what it makes them happier to believe is so strong that one should lean with all one’s weight against it in public as in personal affairs. But that does not mean that the verdict was not just: it only means that the accepted legend has no authority in itself. During my boyhood the opinion of men amply qualified to judge, men eminent in the legal profession, men of the Tichbornes’ social standing and religion, was as violently divided as were later men of the same capacity for judgment in the matter of the Dreyfus affair.

Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between my elders, especially those which regularly took place in one of the Sussex houses, the squire of which had no doubt at all of the claimant’s right; and my reason for such interest in a matter to me remote is this: that the Tichborne verdict is the first thing I remember. We were living in a house in Westminster, and my nurse, who was excited in the matter, as all folk then were, rich and poor, took me into the press of people at Westminster Hall to hear the result. Of course, very early memories like this (I was but three years old) are falsified by the continual repetition of the subject by one’s elders, but I am as certain as