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!

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.