already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to

escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do

so.”


“And you are a benefactor of the race,” said I.


He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some

little use,” he remarked. “‘L’homme

c’est rien—l’œuvre c’est tout,’ as Gustave

Flaubert wrote to George Sand.”


III.A CASE OF IDENTITY

“My dear

fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his

lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything

which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things

which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that

window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and

peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the

plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through

generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all

fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale 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