Of Cleverness - Page 2

is the last desperate resort of the feeble, it is the merit of
the ambitious slave. You cannot conquer _vi et armis_, you cannot
stomach a decent inferiority, so you resort to lively, eccentric, and
brain-wearying brilliance to ingratiate yourself. The cleverest animal
by far is the monkey, and compare that creature's undignified activity
with the mountainous majesty of the elephant!

And I cannot help thinking, too, that cleverness must be the greatest
obstacle a man can possibly have in his way upward in the world. One
never sees really clever people in positions of trust, never widely
influential or deeply rooted. Look, for instance, at the Royal Academy,
at the Judges, at----But there! The very idea of cleverness is an
all-round readiness and looseness that is the very negation of
stability.

Whenever Crichton has been particularly exasperating, getting himself
appreciated in a new quarter, or rising above his former successes, I
find some consolation in thinking of my Uncle Augustus. He was the
glory of our family. Even Aunt Charlotte's voice drooped a little in the
mention of his name. He was conspicuous for an imposing and even
colossal stupidity: he rose to eminence through it, and, what is more,
to wealth and influence. He was as reliable, as unlikely to alter his
precise position, or do anything unexpected, as the Pyramids of Egypt. I
do not know any topic upon which he was not absolutely uninformed, and
his contributions to conversation, delivered in that ringing baritone of
his, were appallingly dull. Often I have seen him utterly flatten some
cheerful clever person of the Crichton type with one of his simple
garden-roller remarks--plain, solid, and heavy, which there was no
possibility either of meeting or avoiding. He was very successful in
argument, and yet he never fenced. He simply came down. It was, so to
speak, a case of small sword _versus_ the avalanche. His moral inertia
was tremendous. He was never excited, never anxious, never jaded; he was
simply massive. Cleverness broke upon him like shipping on an ironbound
coast. His monument is like him--a plain large obelisk of coarse
granite, unpretending in its simple ugliness and prominent a mile off.
Among the innumerable little white sorrows of the cemetery it looks
exactly as he used to look among clever people.

Depend upon it cleverness is the antithesis of greatness. The British
Empire, like the Roman, was built up by dull men. It may be we shall be
ruined by clever ones. Imagine a regiment of lively and eccentric
privates! There never was a statesman yet who had not some ballast of
stupidity, and it seems to me that part at least of the essentials of a
genius is a certain divine dulness. The people we used to call the