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The Inadequate Eye
Harper’s Weekly (January 30, 1909) : 31
hathitrust : link
 

      The wholly undeserved responsibilities which attack the simple-minded human are enough to make him a much more serious soul than he is. He bears up wonderfully, and takes a desperate header through them as they loom near. For instance, there is seeing things and all the attendant difficulties. A person unprejudiced by foreign travel might suppose that if one stood with one’s eyes fixed on an object and one’s mind concentrated on it, there might be some hope of one’s seeing it. But no such easy state of affairs exists. Seeing things is an art which most of us cannot ever aspire to. We think we can, and we intend to try, but it is a dour outlook, and the man who is starting off for Italy on one of the comprehensive winter cruises takes with him a heavy heart, though it may not be visible to those on the dock. If it is his first trip he is grovelling with incompetency, he knows he will not see properly, and he has it on the best authority that if he does not see in the one and only way there is no use in his seeing at all. He would cut a much more respectable figure if he were blind. He hears from his friends’ own lips that they went abroad four or five times before they saw with the true eye, and he marvels at himself for having the courage to make the first start. Yet one must work off those preliminary trips of not seeing sometime. One must brace oneself to stare and gape at the wrong things in the hope that some day years hence the veils will fall away and one will know by instinct what to scorn.
      It is a sad sight to see a man feeling friendly toward an entire piazza. He beams around, showing no partiality and murmuring indiscriminately, “Beautiful, beautiful.” Then directly behind him a voice says, “Of course this is the only thing built of notice; the rest either built in the last decadent days, or else are bald imitations of a bad period.” The poor man in front experiences a collapse of his enthusiasms, an uncomfortable chill creeping over his pleasure, and his relations with the piazza are strained. He fixes his eye on a street gamin or any other unimportant object that he thinks his eye may be capable of, and when the knowing people behind him have moved on he gazes accusingly at the surrounding buildings, as much as to say: “Why didn’t you help me out? Couldn’t you see that I meant well? I felt kindly toward you — wasn’t there any sign you could make, any tip you could give me?” and the buildings stare back at him with a horrid blankness and fail to disclose, even after his appeal for help, which of them was considered worth while by those people who knew.
      It is not as though the blind travellers were content with their view of things, and had the courage to say, “Bah!” stoutly and with conviction when told that they were admiring the wrong thing. Their humility is touching. Their willingness to improve, unlimited. They trust so implicitly the folk who really see. They stand before a tower, their fists clenched, determination straining their sinews. A pair of eyes that cannot be deceived says, “This tower has a noble lightness, it shows the naïve strength of the builder,” and the unseeing soul’s first instinct is to mumble, “Yes’m.” The instructor goes on, “You feel at once the piety of the times.” The willing listener waits, does not feel it, but, undiscouraged, pipes: “It’ll come, it’ll come. Talk some more. Don’t give me up yet.” And with expectancy centred at about the waist line he still hopes to be rewarded at any moment with an upward rush of appreciation.
      It has, no doubt, been noticed by every one that people in picture-galleries or at museums talk with a nervous softness of tone and stand in little separate groups, edging away from each other if carelessness brings them too near together. This has for a long time been thought to be a desire to enjoy things undisturbed by the chatter of others, but it is really nothing of the kind. It is, and it will take a bold man to deny it, a frightened, humble huddling together, so that near-by ears will not overhear and so discover exactly what stage of development the speaker’s eyes have reached. This concealment is not to be spoken of disparagingly. It is an honest realization of one’s wormlike qualities and a painful, inconvenient longing to be capable of better, more difficult things. If you have passed through this stage, be kind to those who are still in it. Do not scowl at them when you see them standing first on one foot, then on the other, torturing themselves with a work of art. Earnest endeavor is always to be respected; theirs is more than earnest, it is Scotch. Two women stand in front of a case of jade, and though they may appear calm, no matter what to the uninitiated observer they may seem to do or say, these are the thoughts which are really behind their eyes:
      “It’s beautiful, Agnes.”
      “Yes, it is beautiful — I see that; but there’s something more, something we haven’t got to yet. Any one could see it was beautiful, Hannah.”
      “Ah, it’s the knowing why. You haven’t discovered that yet, have you, Agnes ?”
      “No. As far as I can see, there’s no reason, and yet I know I’m wrong.”
      “Would it be because it isn’t useful?”
      “No, no, Hannah. Any one could see that; it’s something deeper. It may be because they had such a time making it.”
      “It’s a pity they troubled themselves.”
      “Hannah?”
      “I'm sorry, Agnes; I was only joking. I can see perfectly that there’s some dark reason we’re ignorant of. Would it be because the people who made it were not civilized? There’s nothing like a product of the dark ages for striking awe in the heart of we civilized folk.”
      “No, Hannah, you haven’t hit it yet. We’ll just have to come again.”
      “Then perhaps we’d better be going on to the next case, Agnes ”
      “Perhaps, Hannah,” and off they go, carrying gloom in their hearts. The sadness of it. Such good intentions, so worthy an object, and no after-effect except self-abasement and perhaps a headache. Picture a fragment of a torso, world-famed, and you before it. You open your eyes slowly, still it remains just — a fragment. Very well, then, you open your eyes suddenly. Nothing has happened yet, but there are still other ways open. You close your eyes, think tensely of all you have read on the subject, then open pops your left eye, not a particularly startling result, but there is still a chance. With your right eye closed and the left gazing viciously, you recall all the other statues which you can at the moment remember; open flies your right eye, and your voice says, though you will maintain to the end of your days that you had nothing to do with it, “I wonder how the poor thing got broken.” You turn disconsolately away, and this is the time to remember that you may live for years and the fragment will be waiting for you every time you come. Though it is hard to be cheered by such a thought when there is no denying that you are enjoying yourself. Ah, that’s the shame of it. You are having a royal time, and without the slightest idea as to why. “Unintelligent, brute satisfaction,” you hiss to yourself, is there no way of saving you from disgracing us both? It would be better for you to be unhappy than to be grinning in that approving manner at a doorway that may be downright good for nothing. In Heaven's name stop encouraging it and manage to conceal your ignorance. You feel yourself to be on a par with the woman who said she wanted to pat Perugia (it is said she was overheard by a number of people — they naturally felt sincerely for her family), and you would not be in the least surprised if the very next beautiful thing you approached jumped out at you, and, stamping its foot, shouted: “Now move right along. I’ve no time for any such trash as you. I don’t like the feel of your inadequate eyes on my canvas. Go along, now; move right out of here.” And though you would obey it and scuttle ignominiously away, you would smile at it if you ever happened to meet it again, and there you would be in the undignified position of nodding chumily to a person who had always taken pains to cut you publicly.
 

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