The Stark Munro Letters: Being series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884Doyle, Arthur Conan
General
The Stark Munro Letters: Being series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Epistolary fiction
Physically he was a fine athlete--one of the fastest and most determined
Rugby forwards that I have ever known, though he played so savage a game
that he was never given his international cap. He was well-grown, five
foot nine perhaps, with square shoulders, an arching chest, and a quick
jerky way of walking. He had a round strong head, bristling with short
wiry black hair. His face was wonderfully ugly, but it was the ugliness
of character, which is as attractive as beauty. His jaw and eyebrows
were scraggy and rough-hewn, his nose aggressive and red-shot, his eyes
small and near set, light blue in colour, and capable of assuming a
very genial and also an exceedingly vindictive expression. A slight wiry
moustache covered his upper lip, and his teeth were yellow, strong, and
overlapping. Add to this that he seldom wore collar or necktie, that his
throat was the colour and texture of the bark of a Scotch fir, and that
he had a voice and especially a laugh like a bull’s bellow. Then you
have some idea (if you can piece all these items in your mind) of the
outward James Cullingworth.
But the inner man, after all, was what was most worth noting. I don’t
pretend to know what genius is. Carlyle’s definition always seemed to me
to be a very crisp and clear statement of what it is NOT. Far from its
being an infinite capacity for taking pains, its leading characteristic,
as far as I have ever been able to observe it, has been that it allows
the possessor of it to attain results by a sort of instinct which other
men could only reach by hard work. In this sense Cullingworth was the
greatest genius that I have ever known. He never seemed to work, and yet
he took the anatomy prize over the heads of all the ten-hour-a-day
men. That might not count for much, for he was quite capable of idling
ostentatiously all day and then reading desperately all night; but
start a subject of your own for him, and then see his originality and
strength. Talk about torpedoes, and he would catch up a pencil, and on
the back of an old envelope from his pocket he would sketch out some
novel contrivance for piercing a ship’s netting and getting at her side,
which might no doubt involve some technical impossibility, but which
would at least be quite plausible and new. Then as he drew, his
bristling eyebrows would contract, his small eyes would gleam with
excitement, his lips would be pressed together, and he would end by
banging on the paper with his open hand, and shouting in his exultation.
You would think that his one mission in life was to invent torpedoes.
But next instant, if you were to express surprise as to how it was that
the Egyptian workmen elevated the stones to the top of the pyramids, out
would come the pencil and envelope, and he would propound a scheme for
doing that with equal energy and conviction. This ingenuity was joined
to an extremely sanguine nature. As he paced up and down in his jerky
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account