Arthur & George

batches of ten. Eighty bursting leopardskins are whittled down to twenty-four, to twelve, to six, and then a final three. Those remaining are wonderful specimens, but one is a little short, and another a little clumsy, so they award the title, and with it a valuable gold statue, to a man from Lancashire called Murray. The judges and some chosen company are then rewarded with a late champagne supper. Emerging into the midnight streets, Sir Arthur notices Murray walking ahead of him, the statuette tucked casually beneath one powerful arm. Sir Arthur joins him, congratulates him anew, and, perceiving that he is a very simple country fellow, asks where he is intending to stay the night. Murray confides that he has no money at all, merely his return ticket to Blackburn, and is planning to walk the deserted streets until his train leaves in the morning. So Arthur takes him to Morley’s Hotel, and instructs the staff to look after him. The next morning he finds Murray cheerfully holding court from his bed to awed maids and waiters, his award glinting on the pillow beside him. It looks the very picture of a happy outcome, but this is not the image that stays in Sir Arthur’s mind. It is that of a man walking ahead of him alone; a man who has won a great prize and been acclaimed, a man with a statuette of gold under his arm and yet no money in his pocket, a man planning to walk the gas-lit streets in solitude until daybreak.
    Then there is Conan Doyle’s life, which is also in fine fettle. He is too professional and too energetic ever to suffer from writer’s block for more than a day or two. He identifies a story, researches and plans it, then writes it out. He is quite clear about the writer’s responsibilities: they are firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever. He knows his own abilities, and he also knows that in the end the reader is king. That is why Mr Sherlock Holmes was brought back to life, allowed to have escaped the Reichenbach Falls thanks to a knowledge of esoteric Japanese wrestling holds and an ability to scramble up sheer rock faces. If the Americans insist on offering five thousand dollars for a mere half-dozen new stories – and in return only for American rights – then what can Dr Conan Doyle do except raise his hands in surrender and allow himself to be manacled to the consulting detective for the foreseeable future? And the fellow has brought other rewards: the University of Edinburgh has made him an Honorary Doctor of Letters. He may never be a big man like Kipling, but as he walked in parade through the city of his birth, he felt at ease in those academic robes; more so, he has to admit, than in the quaint garb of a Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey.
    And then there is his fourth life, the one where he is neither Arthur, nor Sir Arthur, nor Dr Conan Doyle; the life in which name is irrelevant, as is wealth and rank and outward display and bodily carapace; the world of the spirit. The sense that he has been born for something else grows with each year. It is not easy; it will never be easy. It is not like signing up for one of the established religions. It is new, and dangerous, and utterly important. If you were to become a Hindoo, it would be regarded by society as an eccentricity rather than a derangement. But if you are prepared to open yourself to the world of Spiritism, then you must also be prepared to endure the jocosities and shallow paradoxes with which the Press misleads the public. Yet what are the scoffers and cynics and penny-a-liners when set beside Crookes and Myers and Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace?
    Science is leading the way, and will bring the scoffers low as it always does. For who would have believed in radio waves? Who would have believed in X-rays? Who would have believed in argon and helium and neon and xenon, all of which have been discovered in the last years? The invisible and the impalpable, which lie just below the surface of the real, just beneath the skin of things, are increasingly being made visible and palpable. The world and its purblind inhabitants are at last learning to see.
    Take Crookes. What does Crookes say? ‘It is incredible but it is true.’ The man whose work in physics and chemistry is everywhere admired for its precision and truth. The man who discovered thallium, who spent years investigating the properties of rarefied gases and rare earths. Who better to pronounce on this equally rarefied world, this new