Arnold Bennett

The Author's Craft Arnold Bennett

It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension towards the crowd. Because in thematter of looking without seeing we are all about equal. We all go to and fro in a state of theobserving 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, wedetermine 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 shalldiscover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as itseems. Let a man resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a morning," andthe probability if that for many mornings he will see naught that is not trivial, and that his system ofperspective will be absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly attract him, tothe exclusion of what is fundamental and universal. Travel makes observers of us all, but the thingswhich 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 trainshad seats on the roof like a tramcar. He was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observedalmost nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. Hereturned home and announced that Paris was a place where people rode on the tops of trains. AFrenchwoman came to London for the first time-and no English person would ever guess thephenomenon which vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat walkingacross a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do not roam in thoroughfares, because thereare practically no houses with gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargementof cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first presented itself to me as a beautifulpastime, getting up very early and making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in questof interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in front of the all-nightcoffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I needed then was an operation for cataract. I alsoremember taking a man to the opera who had never seen an opera. The work was Lohengrin . Whenwe came out he said: "That swan's neck was rather stiff." And it was all he did say. We went and hada drink. He was not mistaken. His observation was most just; but his perspective was that of thoseliterary critics who give ten lines to point ing out three slips of syntax, and three lines to anungrammatical admission that the novel under survey is not wholly tedious.