of us--are oddly dim-sighted also in regard to the civil population. For
instance, we get into the empty motor-bus as it leaves the scene of the
street accident, and examine the men and women who gradually fill it.
Probably we vaunt ourselves as being interested in the spectacle of
life. All the persons in the motor-bus have come out of a past and are
moving towards a future. But how often does our imagination put itself
to the trouble of realising this? We may observe with some care, yet
owing to a fundamental defect of attitude we are observing not the human
individuals, but a peculiar race of beings who pass their whole lives in
motor-buses, who exist only in motor-buses and only in the present! No
human phenomenon is adequately seen until the imagination has placed it
back into its past and forward into its future. And this is the final
process of observation of the individual.

VII

Seeing life, as I have tried to show, does not begin with seeing the
individual. Neither does it end with seeing the individual. Particular
and unsystematised observation cannot go on for ever, aimless, formless.
Just as individuals are singled out from systems, in the earlier process
of observation, so in the later processes individuals will be formed
into new groups, which formation will depend upon the personal bent of
the observer. The predominant interests of the observer will ultimately
direct his observing activities to their own advantage. If he is excited
by the phenomena of organisation--as I happen to be--he will see
individuals in new groups that are the result of organisation, and will
insist on the variations from type due to that grouping. If he is
convinced--as numbers of people appear to be--that society is just now
in an extremely critical pass, and that if something mysterious is not
forthwith done the structure of it will crumble to atoms--he will see
mankind grouped under the different reforms which, according to him, the
human dilemma demands. And so on! These tendencies, while they should
not be resisted too much, since they give character to observation and
redeem it from the frigidity of mechanics, should be resisted to a
certain extent. For, whatever they may be, they favour the growth of
sentimentality, the protean and indescribably subtle enemy of common
sense.

PART II

WRITING NOVELS

I

The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it
that he absolutely must t