I
A young dog, inexperienced, sadly
lacking in even primary education, ambles and frisks
along the footpath of Fulham Road, near the mysterious
gates of a Marist convent. He is a large puppy,
on the way to be a dog of much dignity, but at present
he has little to recommend him but that gawky elegance,
and that bounding gratitude for the gift of life, which
distinguish the normal puppy. He is an ignorant
fool. He might have entered the convent of nuns
and had a fine time, but instead he steps off the
pavement into the road, the road being a vast and interesting
continent imperfectly explored. His confidence
in his nose, in his agility, and in the goodness of
God is touching, absolutely painful to witness.
He glances casually at a huge, towering vermilion construction
that is whizzing towards him on four wheels, preceded
by a glint of brass and a wisp of steam; and then
with disdain he ignores it as less important than
a mere speck of odorous matter in the mud. The
next instant he is lying inert in the mud. His
confidence in the goodness of God had been misplaced.
Since the beginning of time God had ordained him a
victim.
An impressive thing happens.
The motor-bus reluctantly slackens and stops.
Not the differential brake, nor the foot-brake, has
arrested the motor-bus, but the invisible brake of
public opinion, acting by administrative transmission.
There is not a policeman in sight. Theoretically,
the motor-’bus is free to whiz onward in its
flight to the paradise of Shoreditch, but in practice
it is paralysed by dread. A man in brass buttons
and a stylish cap leaps down from it, and the blackened
demon who sits on its neck also leaps down from it,
and they move gingerly towards the puppy. A little
while ago the motor-bus might have overturned a human
cyclist or so, and proceeded nonchalant on its way.
But now even a puppy requires a post-mortem: such
is the force of public opinion aroused. Two policemen
appear in the distance.
“A street accident” is
now in being, and a crowd gathers with calm joy and
stares, passive and determined. The puppy offers
no sign whatever; just lies in the road. Then
a boy, destined probably to a great future by reason
of his singular faculty of initiative, goes to the
puppy and carries him by the scruff of the neck, to
the shelter of the gutter. Relinquished by the
boy, the lithe puppy falls into an easy horizontal
attitude, and seems bent upon repose. The boy
lifts the puppy’s head to examine it, and the
head drops back wearily. The puppy is dead.
No cry, no blood, no disfigurement! Even no perceptible
jolt of the wheel as it climbed over the obstacle
of the puppy’s body! A wonderfully clean
and perfect accident!
The increasing crowd stares with beatific
placidity. People emerge impatiently from the
bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down from
its back, and either join the crowd or vanish.
The two policemen and the crew of the motor-bus have
now met in parley. The conductor and the driver
have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures
are quick and vivacious. The policemen, on the
other hand, indicate by their slow and huge movements
that eternity is theirs. And they could not be
more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had
them manacled and leashed. The conductor and
the driver admit the absolute dominion of the elephantine
policemen; they admit that before the simple will of
the policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened
leisure, docked wages, count as less than naught.
And the policemen are carelessly sublime, well knowing
that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary
on his throne yes, and a whole system of
conspiracy and perjury and brutality are
at their beck in case of need. And yet occasionally
in the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor
and the driver there is a silent message that says:
“After all, we, too, are working men like you,
over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances
in the service of the pitiless and dishonest public.
We, too, have wives and children and privations and
frightful apprehensions. We, too, have to struggle
desperately. Only the awful magic of these garments
and of the garter which we wear on our wrists sets
an abyss between us and you.” And the conductor
writes and one of the policemen writes, and they keep
on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves
to avoid them.
The still increasing crowd continues
to stare in the pure blankness of pleasure. A
close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a
copy of The Sportsman in his podgy hand, who
has descended from the motor-bus, starts stamping
his feet. “I was knocked down by a taxi
last year,” he says fiercely. “But
nobody took no notice of that! Are they
going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank
tyke?” And for all his respectable appearance,
his features become debased, and he emits a jet of
disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity
into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his
fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart.
And he stops and talks a long time with the other
uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform.
And the crowd never moves nor ceases to stare.
Then the new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed,
masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and yielding,
into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on.
And only that which is immortal and divine of the
puppy remains behind, floating perhaps like an invisible
vapour over the scene of the tragedy.
The crowd is tireless, all eyes.
The four principals still converse and write.
Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about.
At length the driver separates himself, but is drawn
back, and a new parley is commenced. But everything
ends. The policemen turn on their immense heels.
The driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus.
The bell rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears
snorting round the corner into Walham Green.
The crowd is now lessening. But it separates with
reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare
with intense absorption at the place where the puppy
lay or the place where the policemen stood. An
appreciable interval elapses before the “street
accident” has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.
The members of the crowd follow their
noses, and during the course of the day remark to
acquaintances:
“Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus
in the Fulham Road this morning! Killed dead!”
And that is all they do remark.
That is all they have witnessed. They will not,
and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars
of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the
dog or the number of the bus-service). They have
watched a dog run over. They analyse neither
their sensations nor the phenomenon. They have
witnessed it whole, as a bad writer uses a cliche.
They have observed that is to say, they
have really seen nothing.
II
It will be well for us not to assume
an attitude of condescension towards the crowd.
Because in the matter of looking without seeing we
are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a
state of the observing faculties which somewhat resembles
coma. We are all content to look and not see.
And if and when, having comprehended
that the rôle of observer is not passive but
active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves
from the coma and really to see the spectacle of the
world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and even street
accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall
discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act
of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it
seems. Let a man resolve: “I will
keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a morning,”
and the probability if that for many mornings he will
see naught that is not trivial, and that his system
of perspective will be absurdly distorted. The
unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly attract
him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which
as travellers we observe generally show how unskilled
we are in the new activity.
A man went to Paris for the first
time, and observed right off that the carriages of
suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar.
He was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that
he observed almost nothing else. This enormous
fact occupied the whole foreground of his perspective.
He returned home and announced that Paris was a place
where people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman
came to London for the first time and no
English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day.
She saw a cat walking across a street. The vision
excited her. For in Paris cats do not roam in
thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses
with gardens or “areas”; the flat system
is unfavourable to the enlargement of cats. I
remember once, in the days when observation had first
presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting
up very early and making the circuit of inner London
before summer dawn in quest of interesting material.
And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with
egg-shells! What I needed then was an operation
for cataract. I also remember taking a man to
the opera who had never seen an opera. The work
was Lohengrin. When we came out he said:
“That swan’s neck was rather stiff.”
And it was all he did say. We went and had a
drink. He was not mistaken. His observation
was most just; but his perspective was that of those
literary critics who give ten lines to pointing out
three slips of syntax, and three lines to an ungrammatical
admission that the novel under survey is not wholly
tedious.
But a man may acquire the ability
to observe even a large number of facts, and still
remain in the infantile stage of observation.
I have read, in some work of literary criticism, that
Dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street
and down the other, and then tell you in their order
the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged
as an illustration of his great powers of observation.
Dickens was a great observer, but he would assuredly
have been a still greater observer had he been a little
less pre-occupied with trivial and unco-ordinated
details. Good observation consists not in multiplicity
of detail, but in co-ordination of detail according
to a true perspective of relative importance, so that
a finally just general impression may be reached in
the shortest possible time. The skilled observer
is he who does not have to change his mind. One
has only to compare one’s present adjusted impression
of an intimate friend with one’s first impression
of him to perceive the astounding inadequacy of one’s
powers of observation. The man as one has learnt
to see him is simply not the same man who walked into
one’s drawing-room on the day of introduction.
There are, by the way, three sorts
of created beings who are sentimentally supposed to
be able to judge individuals at the first glance:
women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic
gift with which rumour credits them, they are never
mistaken. It is merely not true. Women are
constantly quite wrong in the estimates based on their
“feminine instinct”; they sometimes even
admit it; and the matrimonial courts prove it passim.
Children are more often wrong than women. And
as for dogs, it is notorious that they are for ever
being taken in by plausible scoundrels; the perspective
of dogs is grotesque. Not seldom have I grimly
watched the gradual disillusion of deceived dogs.
Nevertheless, the sentimental legend of the infallibility
of women, children, and dogs, will persist in Anglo-Saxon
countries.
III
One is curious about one’s fellow-creatures:
therefore one watches them. And generally the
more intelligent one is, the more curious one is, and
the more one observes. The mere satisfaction of
this curiosity is in itself a worthy end, and would
alone justify the business of systematised observation.
But the aim of observation may, and should, be expressed
in terms more grandiose. Human curiosity counts
among the highest social virtues (as indifference
counts among the basest defects), because it leads
to the disclosure of the causes of character and temperament
and thereby to a better understanding of the springs
of human conduct. Observation is not practised
directly with this high end in view (save by prigs
and other futile souls); nevertheless it is a moral
act and must inevitably promote kindliness whether
we like it or not. It also sharpens the sense
of beauty. An ugly deed such as a deed
of cruelty takes on artistic beauty when
its origin and hence its fitness in the general scheme
begin to be comprehended. In the perspective
of history we can derive an aesthetic pleasure from
the tranquil scrutiny of all kinds of conduct as
well, for example, of a Renaissance Pope as of a Savonarola.
Observation endows our day and our street with the
romantic charm of history, and stimulates charity not
the charity which signs cheques, but the more precious
charity which puts itself to the trouble of understanding.
The one condition is that the observer must never
lose sight of the fact that what he is trying to see
is life, is the woman next door, is the man in the
train and not a concourse of abstractions.
To appreciate all this is the first inspiring preliminary
to sound observation.
IV
The second preliminary is to realise
that all physical phenomena are interrelated, that
there is nothing which does not bear on everything
else. The whole spectacular and sensual show what
the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose scents, the
tongue tastes and the skin touches is a
cause or an effect of human conduct. Naught can
be ruled out as negligible, as not forming part of
the equation. Hence he who would beyond all others
see life for himself I naturally mean the
novelist and playwright ought to embrace
all phenomena in his curiosity. Being finite,
he cannot. Of course he cannot! But he can,
by obtaining a broad notion of the whole, determine
with some accuracy the position and relative importance
of the particular series of phenomena to which his
instinct draws him. If he does not thus envisage
the immense background of his special interests, he
will lose the most precious feeling for interplay
and proportion without which all specialism becomes
distorted and positively darkened.
Now, the main factor in life on this
planet is the planet itself. Any logically conceived
survey of existence must begin with geographical and
climatic phenomena. This is surely obvious.
If you say that you are not interested in meteorology
or the configurations of the earth, I say that you
deceive yourself. You are. For an east wind
may upset your liver and cause you to insult your
wife. Beyond question the most important fact
about, for example, Great Britain is that it is an
island. We sail amid the Hebrides, and then talk
of the fine qualities and the distressing limitations
of those islanders; it ought to occur to us English
that we are talking of ourselves in little. In
moments of journalistic vainglory we are apt to refer
to the “sturdy island race,” meaning us.
But that we are insular in the full significance of
the horrid word is certain. Why not? A genuine
observation of the supreme phenomenon that Great Britain
is surrounded by water an effort to keep
it always at the back of the consciousness will
help to explain all the minor phenomena of British
existence. Geographical knowledge is the mother
of discernment, for the varying physical characteristics
of the earth are the sole direct terrestrial influence
determining the evolution of original vital energy.
All other influences are secondary,
and have been effects of character and temperament
before becoming causes. Perhaps the greatest of
them are roads and architecture. Nothing could
be more English than English roads, or more French
than French roads. Enter England from France,
let us say through the gate of Folkestone, and the
architectural illustration which greets you (if you
can look and see) is absolutely dramatic in its spectacular
force. You say that there is no architecture
in Folkestone. But Folkestone, like other towns,
is just as full of architecture as a wood is full
of trees. As the train winds on its causeway
over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands
of squat little homes, neat, tended, respectable,
comfortable, prim, at once unostentatious and conceited.
Each a separate, clearly-defined entity! Each
saying to the others: “Don’t look
over my wall, and I won’t look over yours!”
Each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its
own individuality! Each a stronghold an
island! And all careless of the general effect,
but making a very impressive general effect. The
English race is below you. Your own son is below
you insisting on the inviolability of his own den
of a bedroom! ... And contrast all that with
the immense communistic and splendid façades of a French
town, and work out the implications. If you really
intend to see life you cannot afford to be blind to
such thrilling phenomena.
Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity
would be capable of walking through a French street
and through an English street, and noting chiefly
that whereas English lamp-posts spring from the kerb,
French lamp-posts cling to the side of the house!
Not that that detail is not worth noting. It
is in its place. French lamp-posts
are part of what we call the “interesting character”
of a French street. We say of a French street
that it is “full of character.” As
if an English street was not! Such is blindness to
be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical
faculty, most properly termed common sense. If
one is struck by the magnificence of the great towns
of the Continent, one should ratiocinate, and conclude
that a major characteristic of the great towns of
England is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness.
It is so. But there are people who have lived
fifty years in Manchester, Leeds, Hull and Hanley
without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy
is in that awful external slovenliness too, causing
it, and being caused by it. Every street is a
mirror, an illustration, an exposition, an explanation,
of the human beings who live in it. Nothing in
it is to be neglected. Everything in it is valuable,
if the perspective is maintained. Nevertheless,
in the narrow individualistic novels of English literature and
in some of the best you will find a domestic
organism described as though it existed in a vacuum,
or in the Sahara, or between Heaven and earth; as
though it reacted on nothing and was reacted on by
nothing; and as though it could be adequately rendered
without reference to anything exterior to itself.
How can such novels satisfy a reader who has acquired
or wants to acquire the faculty of seeing life?
V
The net result of the interplay of
instincts and influences which determine the existence
of a community is shown in the general expression
on the faces of the people. This is an index which
cannot lie and cannot be gainsaid. It is fairly
easy, and extremely interesting, to decipher.
It is so open, shameless, and universal, that not to
look at it is impossible. Yet the majority of
persons fail to see it. We hear of inquirers
standing on London Bridge and counting the number of
motor-buses, foot-passengers, lorries, and white horses
that pass over the bridge in an hour. But we
never hear of anybody counting the number of faces
happy or unhappy, honest or rascally, shrewd or ingenuous,
kind or cruel, that pass over the bridge. Perhaps
the public may be surprised to hear that the general
expression on the faces of Londoners of all ranks
varies from the sad to the morose; and that their general
mien is one of haste and gloomy preoccupation.
Such a staring fact is paramount in sociological evidence.
And the observer of it would be justified in summoning
Heaven, the legislature, the county council, the churches,
and the ruling classes, and saying to them: “Glance
at these faces, and don’t boast too much about
what you have accomplished. The climate and the
industrial system have so far triumphed over you all.”
VI
When we come to the observing of the
individual to which all human observing
does finally come if there is any right reason in it the
aforesaid general considerations ought to be ever present
in the hinterland of the consciousness, aiding and
influencing, perhaps vaguely, perhaps almost imperceptibly,
the formation of judgments. If they do nothing
else, they will at any rate accustom the observer to
the highly important idea of the correlation of all
phenomena. Especially in England a haphazard
particularity is the chief vitiating element in the
operations of the mind.
In estimating the individual we are
apt not only to forget his environment, but really
strange! to ignore much of the evidence
visible in the individual himself. The inexperienced
and ardent observer, will, for example, be astonishingly
blind to everything in an individual except his face.
Telling himself that the face must be the reflection
of the soul, and that every thought and emotion leaves
inevitably its mark there, he will concentrate on the
face, singling it out as a phenomenon apart and self-complete.
Were he a god and infallible, he could no doubt learn
the whole truth from the face. But he is bound
to fall into errors, and by limiting the field of vision
he minimises the opportunity for correction.
The face is, after all, quite a small part of the
individual’s physical organism. An Englishman
will look at a woman’s face and say she is a
beautiful woman or a plain woman. But a woman
may have a plain face, and yet by her form be entitled
to be called beautiful, and (perhaps) vice versa.
It is true that the face is the reflexion of the soul.
It is equally true that the carriage and gestures
are the reflection of the soul. Had one eyes,
the tying of a bootlace is the reflection of the soul.
One piece of evidence can be used to correct every
other piece of evidence. A refined face may be
refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict
the voice; the gait may nullify the smile. None
of the phenomena which every individual carelessly
and brazenly displays in every motor-bus terrorising
the streets of London is meaningless or negligible.
Again, in observing we are generally
guilty of that particularity which results from sluggishness
of the imagination. We may see the phenomenon
at the moment of looking at it, but we particularise
in that moment, making no effort to conceive what
the phenomenon is likely to be at other moments.
For example, a male human creature
wakes up in the morning and rises with reluctance.
Being a big man, and existing with his wife and children
in a very confined space, he has to adapt himself to
his environment as he goes through the various functions
incident to preparing for his day’s work.
He is just like you or me. He wants his breakfast,
he very much wants to know where his boots are, and
he has the usually sinister preoccupations about health
and finance. Whatever the force of his egoism,
he must more or less harmonise his individuality with
those of his wife and children. Having laid down
the law, or accepted it, he sets forth to his daily
duties, just a fraction of a minute late. He
arrives at his office, resumes life with his colleagues
sympathetic and antipathetic, and then leaves the office
for an expedition extending over several hours.
In the course of his expedition he encounters the
corpse of a young dog run down by a motor-bus.
Now you also have encountered that corpse and are gazing
at it; and what do you say to yourself when he comes
along? You say: “Oh! Here’s
a policeman.” For he happens to be a policeman.
You stare at him, and you never see anything but a
policeman an indivisible phenomenon of
blue cloth, steel buttons, flesh resembling a face,
and a helmet; “a stalwart guardian of the law”;
to you little more human than an algebraic symbol:
in a word a policeman.
Only, that word actually conveys almost
nothing to you of the reality which it stands for.
You are satisfied with it as you are satisfied with
the description of a disease. A friend tells you
his eyesight is failing. You sympathise.
“What is it?” you ask. “Glaucoma.”
“Ah! Glaucoma!” You don’t know
what glaucoma is. You are no wiser than you were
before. But you are content. A name has contented
you. Similarly the name of policeman contents
you, seems to absolve you from further curiosity as
to the phenomenon. You have looked at tens of
thousands of policemen, and perhaps never seen the
hundredth part of the reality of a single one.
Your imagination has not truly worked on the phenomenon.
There may be some excuse for not seeing
the reality of a policeman, because a uniform is always
a thick veil. But you I mean you, I,
any of us are oddly dim-sighted also in
regard to the civil population. For instance,
we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene
of the street accident, and examine the men and women
who gradually fill it. Probably we vaunt ourselves
as being interested in the spectacle of life.
All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a
past and are moving towards a future. But how
often does our imagination put itself to the trouble
of realising this? We may observe with some care,
yet owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are
observing not the human individuals, but a peculiar
race of beings who pass their whole lives in motor-buses,
who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present!
No human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination
has placed it back into its past and forward into
its future. And this is the final process of
observation of the individual.
VII
Seeing life, as I have tried to show,
does not begin with seeing the individual. Neither
does it end with seeing the individual. Particular
and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever,
aimless, formless. Just as individuals are singled
out from systems, in the earlier process of observation,
so in the later processes individuals will be formed
into new groups, which formation will depend upon the
personal bent of the observer. The predominant
interests of the observer will ultimately direct his
observing activities to their own advantage. If
he is excited by the phenomena of organisation as
I happen to be he will see individuals
in new groups that are the result of organisation,
and will insist on the variations from type due to
that grouping. If he is convinced as
numbers of people appear to be that society
is just now in an extremely critical pass, and that
if something mysterious is not forthwith done the
structure of it will crumble to atoms he
will see mankind grouped under the different reforms
which, according to him, the human dilemma demands.
And so on! These tendencies, while they should
not be resisted too much, since they give character
to observation and redeem it from the frigidity of
mechanics, should be resisted to a certain extent.
For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of
sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle
enemy of common sense.