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 facades 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