“It’s a mercy,” said he.

I am not sure that he was right.  In this matter, as in most things in this perplexing world, there is much to be said on both sides.  It is lucky for some of us undoubtedly that we are condemned to be eternal strangers to ourselves, and that not merely to our physical selves.  We do not know even the sound of our own voices.  Mr. Pemberton-Billing has never heard the most sepulchral voice in the House of Commons, and Lord Charles Beresford does not know how a foghorn sounds when it becomes articulate.  I have no idea, and you have no idea, what sort of impression our manner makes on others.  If we had, how stricken some of us would be!  We should hardly survive the revelation.  We should be sorry we had ever been born.

Imagine, for example, that eminent politician, Mr. Sutherland Bangs, M.P., meeting himself out at a dinner one evening.  Mr. Sutherland Bangs cherishes a comfortable vision of himself as a handsome, engaging fellow, with a gift for talk, a breezy manner, a stylish presence, and an elegant accent.  And seated beside himself at dinner he would discover that he was a pretentious bore, that his talk was windy commonplace, his breezy manner an offence, his fine accent an unpleasant affectation.  He would say that he would never want to see that fellow again.  And, realising that that was Mr. Sutherland Bangs as he appears to the world, he would return home as humble and abject as Mr. Tom Lofty in The Good-Natured Man was when his imposture was found out.  “You ought to have your head stuck in a pillory,” said Mr. Croaker.  “Stick it where you will,” said Mr. Lofty, “for by the lord, it cuts a poor figure where it sticks at present.”  Mr. Sutherland Bangs would feel like that.

But if making our own acquaintance would give some of us a good deal of surprise and even pain, it would also do most of us a useful turn as well.  Burns put the case quite clearly in his familiar lines: 

    O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us
      To see oursels as others see us: 
    It wad frae monie a blunder free us
      An’ foolish notion.

We should all make discoveries to our advantage as well as 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.