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Certain Personal Matters - Of Cleverness · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter thirteen of Certain Personal Matters. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
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  Speaker 1: by Greg Giardano. Certain Personal Matters by H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter thirteen of Cleverness, Apropos of One Crichton. Crichton is
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  Speaker 1: an extremely clever person, abnormally indeed, almost unnaturally so. He's
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  Speaker 1: not merely clever at this or that, but clever all round.
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  Speaker 1: He gives you no consolations. He goes about being needlessly brilliant.
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  Speaker 1: He caps your jests and correct your mistakes, and does
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  Speaker 1: your special things over again in newer and smarter ways.
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  Speaker 1: Any really well bred man who presumed so far would
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  Speaker 1: at least be plain, or physically feeble, or unhappily married
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  Speaker 1: by way of apology. But the idea of so much
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  Speaker 1: civility seems never to have entered Crichton's head. He will
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  Speaker 1: come into a room where we are jesting, perhaps, and
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  Speaker 1: immediately begin to flourish about less funny, perhaps, but decidedly
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  Speaker 1: more brilliant jests, until at last we retire one by
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  Speaker 1: one from the conversation and watch him with savage, weary
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  Speaker 1: eyes over our pipes. He invariably beats me at chess.
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  Speaker 1: Invariably people talk about him and ask my opinion of him,
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  Speaker 1: And if I ventured to criticize him, they begin to
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  Speaker 1: look as though they thought I was jealous, grossly favorable
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  Speaker 1: notice of his books, that his pictures crop up in
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  Speaker 1: the most unlikely places. Indeed, I have almost given up
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  Speaker 1: newspapers on account of him. Yet, after all, his cleverness
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  Speaker 1: is not everything. It never pleases me, and I doubt
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  Speaker 1: sometimes if it pleases any one. Suppose you let off
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  Speaker 1: some clever little thing, a subtlety of expression, a paradox,
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  Speaker 1: an elusive, suggestive picture. How does it affect ordinary people?
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  Speaker 1: Those who are less clever than yourself? The unspecialized, unsophisticated.
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  Speaker 1: Average people are simply annoyed by the puzzle you set them.
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  Speaker 1: Those who are cleverer find your cleverness mere obvious stupidity,
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  Speaker 1: and your equals, your competitors and cleverness are naturally your
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  Speaker 1: deadly rivals. The fact is, this cleverness, after all, is
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  Speaker 1: more egotism in its worst and unwisest phase. It is
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  Speaker 1: an incontinence of brilliance. Graceless and aggressive, a glaring swagger.
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  Speaker 1: The drunken hellet of cleverness is the creature who goes
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  Speaker 1: about making puns. A mere step above comes the epigram,
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  Speaker 1: the isolated epigram, framed and glazed. Then such impressionist art
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  Speaker 1: as Crichton's pictures mere puns in paint. What they mean
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  Speaker 1: is nothing. They arrest a quiet, decent minded man like myself,
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  Speaker 1: with the same spasmodic disgust as a pun in literature,
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  Speaker 1: the subject of a transparent excuse. They are mere, indecent
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  Speaker 1: and unedifying exhibitions of himself. He thinks it is something
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  Speaker 1: superlative to do everything in a startling way. He cannot
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  Speaker 1: even sign his name without being offensive. He lacks altogether
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  Speaker 1: the fundamental quality of a gentleman, the magnanimity to be
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  Speaker 1: commonplace I on the score of personal dignity. Why should
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  Speaker 1: a young man of respectable antecedents and some natural capacity
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  Speaker 1: stoop to this kind of thing? To be clever is
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  Speaker 1: the last desperate resort of the feeble. It is the
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  Speaker 1: merit of the ambitious slave. You cannot conquer vi et
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  Speaker 1: armis you cannot stomach a decent inferiority so you resort
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  Speaker 1: to lively, eccentric and brain wearying brilliance to ingratiate yourself.
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  Speaker 1: The cleverest animal by far is the monkey. And compare
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  Speaker 1: that creature's undignified activity with the mountainous majesty of the elephant.
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  Speaker 1: And I cannot help thinking too that cleverness must be
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  Speaker 1: the greatest obstacle a man who possibly have in his
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  Speaker 1: way upward in the world. One never sees really clever
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  Speaker 1: people in positions of trust, never widely influential or deeply rooted.
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  Speaker 1: Look for instance at the royal ac atomy at the
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  Speaker 1: Judge's at But there the very idea of cleverness is
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  Speaker 1: an all around readiness and looseness that is the very
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  Speaker 1: negation of stability. Whenever Crichton has been particularly exasperating getting
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  Speaker 1: himself appreciated in a new quarter or rising above his
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  Speaker 1: former successes, I find some consolation in thinking of my
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  Speaker 1: uncle Augustus. He was the glory of our family. Even
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  Speaker 1: Aunt Charlotte's voice drooped a little in the mention of
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  Speaker 1: his name. He was conspicuous for an imposing and even
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  Speaker 1: colossal stupidity. He rose to eminence through it. And what
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  Speaker 1: is more to wealth and influence. He was as reliable
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  Speaker 1: as unlikely to alter his precise position or do anything
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  Speaker 1: unexpected as the pyramids of Egypt. I do not know
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  Speaker 1: any topic upon which he was not absolutely uninformed, And
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  Speaker 1: his contributions to conversation, delivered in that ringing baritone of his,
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  Speaker 1: were appallingly dull. Often I have seen him utterly flatten
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  Speaker 1: some cheerful, clever person of the Kriton type with one
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  Speaker 1: of his simple garden roller remarks, plain, solid and heavy,
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  Speaker 1: which there was no possibility either of meeting or avoiding.
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  Speaker 1: He was very successful in argument, yet he never fenced.
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  Speaker 1: He simply came down. It was, so to speak, a
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  Speaker 1: case of small sword versus the avalanche. His moral inertia
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  Speaker 1: was tremendous. He was never excited, never anxious, never jaded.
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  Speaker 1: He was simply massive. Cleverness broke upon him, like shipping
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  Speaker 1: on an iron bound coast. His monuments like him, a
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  Speaker 1: plain large obelisk of coarse granite, unpretending in its simple
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  Speaker 1: ugliness and prominent, a mile off among the innumerable little
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  Speaker 1: white sorrows of the setary. It looks exactly as he
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  Speaker 1: used to look. Among clever people depend upon it. Cleverness
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  Speaker 1: is the antithesis of greatness. The British Empire, like the Roman,
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  Speaker 1: was built up by dull men. It may be we
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  Speaker 1: shall be ruined by clever ones. Imagine a regiment of
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  Speaker 1: lively and eccentric privates. There never was a statesman yet
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  Speaker 1: who had not some ballast of stupidity. And it seems
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  Speaker 1: to me that part, at least of the essentials of
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  Speaker 1: a genius is a certain divine dulness. The people we
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  Speaker 1: used to call the masters, Shakespeare, Raphael, Milton, and so forth,
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  Speaker 1: had a certain simplicity. Kriton lacks. They do not scintillate
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  Speaker 1: nearly so much as he does, and they do not
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  Speaker 1: give that same uncomfortable feeling of internal strain. Even Homer
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  Speaker 1: nods there are RESTful places in their work, broad meadows
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  Speaker 1: of breezy flatness. Calmson has no Pacific ocean to I
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  Speaker 1: mitigate his everlasting, weary passage of Cape Horn. It is
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  Speaker 1: all point and prominence, point and prominence, No doubt this
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  Speaker 1: Crichton is having a certain vogue now, but it cannot last.
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  Speaker 1: I wish him no evil, of course, but I cannot
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  Speaker 1: help thinking he will presently have had his day. The
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  Speaker 1: epoch of cleverness must be very near its last flare
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  Speaker 1: the last, and the abiding thought of humanity is peace.
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  Speaker 1: A dull man will presently be sought like the shadow
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  Speaker 1: of a great rock, and a thirsty land. Dullness will
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  Speaker 1: be the new genius. Give us dull books, people will cry,
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  Speaker 1: great dull and RESTful books. We are weary, very weary,
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  Speaker 1: this hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we travail Fon
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  Speaker 1: du secla decadent, and all the rest of it will
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  Speaker 1: pass away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in ame, colossal
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  Speaker 1: in execution, rotund and tranquil will lift its head, and
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  Speaker 1: this criton will become a classic Messr's Moodie will sell
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  Speaker 1: surplus copies of his works at a reduction, and I
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  Speaker 1: shall cease to be worried by his disgusting success. And
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  Speaker 1: of Chapter thirteen. Recording by Greg Giardano, Newport Richey, Florida,