These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of the
Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amount
to no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary recording one day in
twenty which happened to stick in the fancy--the only kind of diary the
author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep
by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the
topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive.
As the reader’s eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it
probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window
blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at
something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not
write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post
or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as “The
Bed-Post; Its Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--Night
Felt as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture,” and so on. He could
not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even
in the form of a summary. “The Window-Blind--Its Analogy to the Curtain
and Veil--Is Modesty Natural?--Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun,
etc., etc.” None of us think enough of these things on which the eye
rests. But don’t let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy?
Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that
run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular
athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured
cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else
may do it better, if anyone else will only try.