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 man of his time.  Apparently he didn’t know when he was sublime and when he was merely drivelling.  He didn’t know because he never got outside the hypnotism of self.

I have sometimes felt angry with that phrase, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” It is the watchword of a shallow Imperialism.  But I felt a certain truth in it once.  I was alone in the Alps, in an immense solitude of peak and glacier, and as I waited for the return of my guide, who had gone on ahead to prospect, I looked, like Richard, “towards England.”  In that moment I seemed to see it imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the years of my life in it.  I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the horizon.  I saw it with a fresh eye and a new mind, seemed to understand it as I had never understood it before, certainly loved it as I had never loved it before.  I found that I had left England to discover it.