FALDER. It’s easy enough to put a face on it, sir, when you’re independent. Try it when you’re down like me. They talk about giving you your deserts.… - John Galsworthy

My friend has alluded to the “romantic glamour” with which I have sought to invest this case. Gentlemen, I have done nothing of the kind. I have merely shown you the background of “life” — that palpitating life which, believe me — whatever my friend may say — always lies behind the commission of a crime. Now gentlemen, we live in a highly, civilized age, and the sight of brutal violence disturbs us in a very strange way, even when we have no personal interest in the matter. But when we see it inflicted on a woman whom we love — what then?

JAMES. Same thing. He’s gone to work in the most cold-blooded way to defraud his employers, and cast the blame on an innocent man. If that’s not a case for the law to take its course, I don’t know what is. WALTER. For the sake of his future, though. JAMES. [Sarcastically] According to you, no one would ever prosecute. WALTER. [Nettled] I hate the idea of it.

He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste. No realist can love romantic Art so much as he loves his own, but when that Art fulfils the laws of its peculiar being, if he would be no blind partisan, he must admit it. The romanticist will never be amused by realism, but let him not for that reason be so parochial as to think that realism, when it achieves vitality, is not Art. For what is Art but the perfected expression of self in contact with the world; and whether that self be of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is of no moment whatsoever. The tossing of abuse from realist to romanticist and back is but the sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind side turned toward each other. Shall not each attempt be judged on its own merits? If found not shoddy, faked, or forced, but true to itself, true to its conceiving mood, and fair-proportioned part to whole; so that it lives — then, realistic or romantic, in the name of Fairness let it pass! Of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms. Shall we waste breath and ink in condemnation of artists, because their temperaments are not our own?