In that often-cited list that Doyle made of his favourite Holmes stories he ranked “The Naval Treaty” nineteenth out of nineteen. Which, given that the original list he composed was of twelve stories and he later added seven more, and that the canon contains 56 stories total, sounds almost as though he didn’t like it much at all, or that he considered it at best mid.
I’d rate it much higher. It’s actually one of my favourites.
In part this is because Holmes displays an attractive side not often witnessed. He takes time to smell the roses, literally. The scent of a moss rose through an open window moves him to poetic reflections that reveal “a new phase of his character” to Watson, “who has never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.”
“Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but of course totally unscientific. As commentators point out, the smell and colour of a rose are not superfluous extras. Nor does it make much sense to me for Watson to say that Holmes had never shown a keen interest in natural objects. He made a study of many. What I like most about this passage though is the reaction of the couple who have hired Holmes. They are struck “with surprise and a good deal of disappointment.” They want him to find the stolen naval treaty, not talk about flowers!
A similar moment comes on the train journey back to London where Holmes sees the newly established Board schools through a window. “Lighthouses, my boy!” he says to Watson. “Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.”
This paean to education is even more of a digression than his thoughts on the rose, but also reveals more of his true character. Holmes is arrogant, but he’s not a snob.
“The Naval Treaty” is a long story, the longest in the canon, and was originally published in two parts. It’s also one that has attracted a more than the usual amount of critical nit-picking, beginning with the reference to “The Adventure of the Second Stain” in the opening paragraph and ending with speculation over who Joseph Harrison may have been working for. As usual, none of this meant anything to me. I guess it’s a fun game for Holmesians, but I don’t care for it.
What I liked most of all here was the fact that it’s a great little mystery story. For starters, a surprising amount of time is put into casting suspicion on the commissionaire and his wife. “The principal difficulty” in the case, Holmes explain at the end (“in his didactic fashion”), “lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.” Of course misdirection through giving the reader too much information to pay full attention to is now a staple of mystery of fiction, but it’s not something the Holmes stories went in for as much. As it is, we’re given enough clues to at least arrive in the general location of Holmes’s solution, which ends up feeling quite reasonable given what we have to go on. Indeed, Holmes points the way to where he’s going, even though it’s not easy to see what conclusions he’s drawing. Given the high stakes we’re led to believe that something larger is going on, so the fact that the theft was merely opportunistic comes as a surprise, but a satisfying one given that it makes sense of the evidence.
I did have to roll my eyes though at poor Percy Phelps. He doesn’t come off well. Using family connections to get a cushy desk job and then being struck with “brain fever” when the treaty he’s been copying is stolen. Brain fever was a nineteenth-century euphemism for a nervous breakdown, and Percy was really selling it, becoming “practically a raving maniac” before needing nine weeks of convalescence where he is alternately unconscious and raving mad before he is even capable of reaching out to Holmes. If he wants to keep working for the British foreign office he’ll have to work a bit on stiffening that upper lip.
Alex Good 