| "To
the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing
aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in
its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to
be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped
this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good
enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have
given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials
in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial
in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and
of logical synthesis which I have made my special province." "And
yet," said I, smiling, "I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the
charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records." "You
have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs
and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay
when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood --" you have
erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements
instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning
from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing." "It
seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter," I remarked
with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once
observed to be a strong factor in my friend's singular character.
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