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