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.

There are, by the way, three sorts of created beings who are
sentimentally supposed to be able to judge individuals at the first
glance: women, children, and dogs. By virtue of a mystic gift with which