Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically heis from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger ofremaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much maybe despaired that it might almost be called hopeless.I confessthat in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, thisconsciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur,all but failed to interest me.A little of him and his monoclewent such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of himby the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged withmurder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; andI do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele inhis drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang ofdrunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river wherethey have thrown him, and where his former client finds him.
From that point I could not forsake him to the end, though Ifound myself more than once in the world where things happen ofthemselves and do not happen from the temperaments of itsinhabitants.In a better and wiser world, the homicide would notperhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of theadvocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as oneconsents to a great deal besides in the story, which isimaginably the survival of a former method.The artist's affairis to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world,the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle.