Subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen

I never saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov — those masters of such different methods entirely devoid of didacticism — but their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favoured by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism, holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.

John Galsworthy - Villa Rubein (1900)


It’s an interesting insight this, the idea of a subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen. Something George Santayana might have written. Perhaps contemplation is to be preferred over long and intricate brooding, but worthwhile insights do take time to acquire. And we know there are always better insights worth acquiring.

The fascination of the quote is that we seem to be at least as far away from it as people generally were in Galsworthy’s day. Ideology in particular has cut us off from anything resembling a subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen. Those who already know don’t need to see, especially when they are not supposed to see. 

As for modern journalism, it may still be a fluent chaos of clever insignificant impressions, but mostly without the cleverness. We don’t see much of that.