and unprofitable.
And yet I am not convinced of it, I answered. The cases which come
to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough.
We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and
yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor
artistic.
A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a
realistic effect, remarked Holmes. This is wanting in the police
report, where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the platitudes of the
magistrate than upon the details, which to an observer contain the
vital essence of the whole matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so
unnatural as the commonplace.
I smiled and shook my head. I can quite understand your thinking so,
I said. Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and helper
to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents,
you are brought in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. But
here I picked up the morning paper from the ground let us put it to a
practical test. Here is the first heading upon which I come. A
husband s cruelty to his wife. There is half a column of print, but I
know without reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There
is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the
bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers
could invent nothing more crude.
Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument, said
Holmes, taking the paper and glancing his eye down it. This is the
Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing
up some small points in connection with it. The husband was a
teetotaler, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was
that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking
out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife, which, you will
allow, is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of the
average story-teller. Take a pinch of snuff, Doctor, and acknowledge
that I have scored over you in your example.
He held out his snuffbox of old gold, with a great amethyst in the
centre of the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his homely
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