Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
THE COPPER BEECHES
"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 color 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.