PEOPLE WHO PRETEND TO KNOW.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19759, 9 April 1926, Page 5

PEOPLE WHO PRETEND TO KNOW.

Gay pretenders are usually rogues, but their presumptions have a touch of brilliance, and we find them entertaining—in history at any rate. Most of the pretenders whom we meet in the flesh are worthy people, who scarcely know that they are pretending, and they are very dull They are familiar with current opinion and with guide-book facts, and from this not very promising material they work up their own tastes and' views. And they make us hear them. Sometimes they are quit,- right in what they say, and sometimes they are quite wrong, but their judgments are always delivered with the same heaviness and certainty. Speaking of some world-famous building, praised tor its beauty through the ages, they will tell you, as if for your information, that its proportions are absolutely perfect. Whether they pronounce on architecture or any other art, they take up an attitude which might suggest their familiarity with all the standard works on the subject. Only had they absorbed, even from one book, the spirit in which true critics write, they could not be so utterly without discernment. Particularly do I dread the return from abroad of any acquaintance who is numbered among those who pretend to know To listen to her—or his, only men do not talk so much as woman of what they have seen—findings and rulings fills me with despair. Better, by far, than this, the uncultivated person who, if told that you were disappointed in the glass at Rouen would suppose that you referred to a drinking vessel. Not one in a thousand of us has the faintest right to come home and tell our fellows that Venice is beautiful, though less so than it was, or that Paris is gay, or that Bruges is quaint. The triteness of such observations, the impertinence of assuming that we have not heard them before, exasperates us. Particularly when our nerves are already frayed by the need of a holiday' and a London summer at its summerest. Of course there are people who have the right to tell us what they think, people of wide experience, and, more important still, of fine and delicate perception. But they, because they really know, perhaps, are usually silent. Or if they talk to us at all of their experiences they select just one unall but significant fact or observation which marvellously lights up for us the whole subject. Most of us have to live possessed of the merest shreds of knowledge. We have neither the leisure nor the means to acquire more. And some, of course, are quite content not to know more than we do Surely the mark of intelligence is the frank recognition cf our inadequacies and restrictions. Knowledge means knowing the soonreached limits of knowledge. But people who pretend to know believe that their cotton-woolly opinions embrace the universe Our own slender strands of knowledge are always interesting, not only to ourselves, but to other people. All real ex nerience, described simply, is “su-e of an audience.’’ But audiences are rarely sure of it. Dull pretenders are so many ! —M. L.. in the Daily Chronicle.