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.