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 masters—­Shakespeare, Raphael, Milton, and so forth—­had a certain simplicity Crichton lacks.  They do not scintillate nearly so much as he does, and they do not give that same uncomfortable feeling of internal strain.  Even Homer nods.  There are restful places in their work, broad meadows of breezy flatness, calms.  But Crichton has no Pacific Ocean to mitigate his everlasting weary passage of Cape Horn:  it is all point and prominence, point and prominence.