A friend of mine who is intimate enough with me to guess my secrets, said
to me quizzingly the other day: "Do you know 'Alpha of the Plough?'"
"I have never seen the man," I said promptly and unblushingly. He laughed
and I laughed.
"What, never?" he said.
"Never," I said. "What's more, I never shall see him."
"What, not in the looking-glass?" said he.
"That's not 'Alpha of the Plough,'" I answered. "That is only his
counterfeit. It may be a good counterfeit, but it's not the man. The man I
shall never see. I can see bits of him--his hands, his feet, his arms, and
so on. By shutting one eye I can see something of the shape of his nose. By
thrusting out the upper lip I can see that the fellow wears a moustache.
But his face, as a whole, is hidden from me. I cannot tell you even with
the help of the counterfeit what impression he makes on the beholder. Now,"
I continued, pausing and taking stock of my friend, "I know what you are
like. I take you all in at one glance. You can take me in at a glance. The
only person we can none of us take in at a glance is the person we should
most like to see."
"It's a mercy," said he.
I am not sure that he was right. In this matter, as in most things in this
perplexing world, there is much to be said on both sides. It is lucky for
some of us undoubtedly that we are condemned to be eternal strangers to
ourselves, and that not merely to our physical selves. We do not know even
the sound of our own voices. Mr. Pemberton-Billing has never heard the most
sepulchral voice in the House of Commons, and Lord Charles Beresford does
not know how a foghorn sounds when it becomes articulate. I have no idea,
and you have no idea, what sort of impression our manner makes on others.
If we had, how stricken some of us would be! We should hardly survive the
revelation. We should be sorry we had ever been born.
Imagine, for example, that eminent politician, Mr. Sutherland Bangs, M.P.,
meeting himself out at a dinner one evening. Mr. Sutherland Bangs cherishes
a comfortable vision of himself as a handsome, engaging fellow, with a gift
for talk, a breezy manner, a stylish presence, and an elegant accent. And
seated beside himself at dinner he would discover that he was a pretentious
bore, that his talk was windy commonplace, his breezy manner an offence,
his fine accent an unpleasant affectation. He would say that he would never
want to see that fellow again. And, realising that that was Mr. Sutherland
Bangs as he appears to the world, he would return home as humble and abject
as Mr. Tom Lofty in _The Good-Natured Man_ was when his imposture was found
out. "You ought to have your head stuck in a pillory," said Mr. Croaker.
"Stick it where you will," said Mr. Lofty, "for by the lord, it cuts a poor
figure where it sticks at present." Mr. Sutherland Bangs would feel like
that.
But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of
surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well.
Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines:
O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us:
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion.
We should all make discoveries to our advantage as well as our
discomfiture. You, sir, might find that the talent for argument on which
you pride yourself is to me only irritating wrong-headedness, and I might
find that the bright wit that I fancy I flash around makes you feel tired.
Jones's eyeglass would drop out of his eye because he would know it only
made him look foolish, Brown would see the ugliness of his cant, and
Robinson would sorry that he had been born a bully and as prickly as a
hedgehog. It would do us all good to get this objective view of ourselves.
It is not necessarily the right view or the complete view. You remember
that ingenious fancy of Holmes' about John and Thomas. They are talking
together and don't quite hit it off, and Holmes says it is no wonder since
six persons are engaged in the conversation. "Six!" you say, lifting your
eyebrows. Yes, six, says he. There is John's ideal John--that is, John as
he appears to himself; Thomas's ideal John--that is, John as Thomas sees
him; and the real John, known only to his Maker. And so with Thomas, there
are three of him engaged in the talk also. Now John's ideal John is not a
bit like Thomas's ideal John, and neither of them is like the real John,
and so it comes about that John and Thomas--that is, you and I--get at
cross purposes.
If I (John) could have your (Thomas's) glimpse of myself, my appearance, my
manner, my conduct, and so on, it would serve as a valuable corrective. It
would give that faculty of self-criticism which most of us lack. That
faculty is simply the art of seeing ourselves objectively, as a stranger
sees us who has no interest in us and no prejudice in our favour. Few of us
can do that except in fleeting flashes of illumination. We cannot even do
it in regard to the things we produce. If you paint a picture, or write an
article, or make a joke, you are pretty sure to be a bad judge of its
quality. You only see it subjectively as a part of yourself--that is, you
don't see it at all. Put the thing away for a year, come on it suddenly as
a stranger might, and you will perhaps understand why Thomas seemed so cool
about it. It wasn't because he was jealous or unfriendly, as you supposed:
it was because he _saw_ it and you didn't.
Even great men have this blindness about their own work. How else can we
account for a case like Wordsworth's? He was one of the three greatest
poets this country has produced, and also an acute critic of poetry, yet he
wrote more flat-footed commonplace than any man of his time. Apparently he
didn't know when he was sublime and when he was merely drivelling. He
didn't know because he never got outside the hypnotism of self.
I have sometimes felt angry with that phrase, "What do they know of
England, who only England know?" It is the watchword of a shallow
Imperialism. But I felt a certain truth in it once. I was alone in the
Alps, in an immense solitude of peak and glacier, and as I waited for the
return of my guide, who had gone on ahead to prospect, I looked, like
Richard, "towards England." In that moment I seemed to see it
imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the
years of my life in it. I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its
mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its
squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the
horizon. I saw it with a fresh eye and a new mind, seemed to understand it
as I had never understood it before, certainly loved it as I had never
loved it before. I found that I had left England to discover it.
That is what we need to do with ourselves occasionally. We need to take a
journey from our self-absorbed centre, and see ourselves with a fresh eye
and an unprejudiced judgment.