OF CLEVERNESS

APROPOS OF ONE CRICHTON

Crichton is an extremely clever person—­abnormally, indeed almost unnaturally, so.  He is not merely clever at this or that, but clever all round; he gives you no consolations.  He goes about being needlessly brilliant.  He caps your jests and corrects your mistakes, and does your special things over again in newer and smarter ways.  Any really well-bred man who presumed so far would at least be plain or physically feeble, or unhappily married by way of apology, but the idea of so much civility seems never to have entered Crichton’s head.  He will come into a room where we are jesting perhaps, and immediately begin to flourish about less funny perhaps but decidedly more brilliant jests, until at last we retire one by one from the conversation and watch him with savage, weary eyes over our pipes.  He invariably beats me at chess, invariably.  People talk about him and ask my opinion of him, and if I venture to criticise him they begin to look as though they thought I was jealous.  Grossly favourable notices of his books and his pictures crop up in the most unlikely places; indeed I have almost given up newspapers on account of him.  Yet, after all——­

This cleverness is not everything.  It never pleases me, and I doubt sometimes if it pleases anyone.  Suppose you let off some clever little thing, a subtlety of expression, a paradox, an allusive suggestive picture; how does it affect ordinary people?  Those who are less clever than yourself, the unspecialised, unsophisticated average people, are simply annoyed by the puzzle you set them; those who are cleverer find your cleverness mere obvious stupidity; and your equals, your competitors in cleverness, are naturally your deadly rivals.  The fact is this cleverness, after all, is merely egotism in its worst and unwisest phase.  It is an incontinence of brilliance, graceless and aggressive, a glaring swagger.  The drunken helot of cleverness is the creature who goes about making puns.  A mere step above comes the epigram, the isolated epigram framed and glazed.  Then such impressionist art as Crichton’s pictures, mere puns in paint.  What they mean is nothing, they arrest a quiet decent-minded man like myself with the same spasmodic disgust as a pun in literature—­the subject is a transparent excuse; they are mere indecent and unedifying exhibitions of himself.  He thinks it is something superlative to do everything in a startling way.  He cannot even sign his name without being offensive.  He lacks altogether the fundamental quality of a gentleman, the magnanimity to be commonplace.  I——­

On the score of personal dignity, why should a young man of respectable antecedents and some natural capacity stoop to this kind of thing?  To be clever 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!