THE SORROWS OF THE STUPID.
WE have been hearing lately of the "Corse of Intellect," but we might with equal truth enlarge on the curse of stupidity,—or, not to use so strong a word, we will say the miseries of stupidity. In this age of philanthropy, we are for ever being exhorted about the rights of the wronged. Let vs now bewail the sorrows of the stupid I There is no doubt that, though not generally recognised, they are very reaL Stupid people are a trouble both to them- selves and to others. They can no more help being dill in mind than an invalid can help being weak in body. Bat whereas the sick man is generally deluged with sympathy in his woes, and very often ends by growing proud of his maladies as bestowing a sort of personal distinction on him, the poor stupid, an equally innocent victim, feels ashamed of
his dullness, and is looked down upon for the same defect. Of course be would not like his friends to say in so many words, " I am very sorry for you for being so dull ; it must be a great trial to you," but he suffers all the same from a lack of sympathy, and from the feeling that he is thought little of, for what he cannot help. And perhaps all the time he is trying to carry on the business of life under adverse con- ditions, as bravely as the invalid who makes an effort to do his duty despite his bodily weakness. The latter almost invariably receives a full meed of praise. Not so the other. And therefore we hereby desire to say a word in advocacy of our poor, dull friend, and cry "Bravo!" to the creaky little vessel that fights its way onward in the teeth of wind and wave.
But stupidity is such a large word, and is applied to the deficiencies of so many different species of its victims that we must try to distinguish between them a little. Paradoxical as it may sound, the worst cases of it do not demand the most sympathy. There are peopie in the world who are too stupid to know that they are stupid, and therefore not sensitive about their defects. They are as those born blind, never knowing the pleasures which sight bestows. We have all met them from time to time, people without an idea in their heads, who see no more out of their dull unimaginative eyes as they stare out into the world, than the most bare and obvious facts ; to whom life is like a narrow room containing just the furniture necessary for existence, but with no view worth mentioning out of window. Circumstances make com- paratively little difference to them. Send them round the world and show them the nine wonders of it, and they will come back as dull as when they set out. And yet, tiresome as they are, we cannot help feeling sorry for them. They may be unconscious of their loss, but it makes the world a very un- interesting place for them. And times do occur when the fact of it makes them thoroughly ill at ease and uncomfortable, as any one will know who has observed a really stupid person, who has strayed, accidentally as it were, into a circle of bril- liant talkers. He feels nonplussed and silenced by the thrust and parry, the repartees, and the play of the satire that go on around him. He cannot make out what the rest are all driving at. He takes the ironical remarks literally, and, if he speaks at all, expresses his ponderous dissent. He looks bored at the jokes, and annoyed with the jokers. If appealed to, he has nothing to say. In a word, he feels thoroughly "out of it," and that is a sensation that none can enjoy. And his mind must be dark with an utter density of dullness, if he does not perceive with a pang his own stupidity. Certainly poor Miss Bates, in Miss Austen's "Emma," was aware of hers upon occasion, as at the silent party on Boxhill, when in desperation Frank Churchill proposed that the company should say " one thing very clever two things moderately clever, or three things very dull in- deed."—" Three things very dull indeed.' That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, sha'n't I P " Emma could not resist. " Ah, ma'am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to the number,—only three at once." Miss Bates is not quick enough to catch her meaning at first; but when she does, her gentle and well-merited reproof to Emma for her impertinence, and her slight blush as she spoke, showed that though " it could not anger, it could pain her." "I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend," she says. If talkative stupidity is wearisome, like Miss Bates's, or Mrs. Allen's, in " Northanger Abbey "—that worthy woman who reiterates the same poor remark over and over again, like the note of a cuckoo—mum stupidity is equally trying. The stolid folk who sit and sit and say nothing—who require all topics to be supplied, and drop them as soon as started ; the sort of people who take out their knitting at a concert, and click away at their needles through the noblest or the moat pathetic strains of music—lie heavy on our souls. But then, as they miss so much of the sparkle of life, we must try to be sorry for them too.
And now having considered the case of real stupidity, let us rise a stage higher to the dim but not dark,—to that which has light enough to see its own deficiencies and to suffer keenly from the consciousness of them. The persons who belong to this class are not devoid of ideas, but they can never do justice to them. They are afflicted with a general inadequacy and incompetency of mind, which make the mental
operations that are a pleasant exercise to quicker wits, a toil, a weariness to theirs. They cannot keep pace with others. They go slowly, and they go lamely. If th( y try to repeat an argument they miss out an important link, and see with a pang a smile of amusement creep over the faces of their audience. An idea they may have floating before their minds would look highly respectable if some one else would state it, but in their hands it is a ridiculous, sorry scarecrow. They are interested in some subject, but when they take up a book about it, difficulties bristle in every page. To make even a simple arrangement costs them twice the amount of thinking that it does to normal minds. They are always at the bottom of the class in life, and grow more and more certain in their despondency, that the world is made for the clever. It takes a brave spirit to bear up against these depressions ; for if nothing succeeds like success, nothing fails like failure, which lowers the vitality of the mind, and diminishes what power it may have. And such trials as these are among the pains and the penalties of this class of feeble minds.
Another case that demands our sympathy, is that of the im- perfect minds. They cannot be charged like the others with a general all-round stupidity, for they have too much breadth of their own as a rule, and often gifts of a high order. Yet as they are signally and abnormally deficient in some respects, they not only pass for stupid in the eyes of the world, but are actually and practically so in the conduct of life. It is not that the machinery of their minds was originally planned on a poor mean, scale ; far from it. But some of the common screws or nuts are missing, and so they fail in the simple everyday work easily accomplished by far smaller intellects. There is naturally a great variety in the deficiencies of this class. Some members of it are clear-sighted enough about abstract ideas, but utterly stupid in business matters, in which an average National-school child would get the better of them. Others are thoroughly wrong-beaded, and unable to see what is obvious and self-evident to ordinary minds. They have a wrong judgment in all things, so that we should only wish for their advice, that we might avoid it. A third group in the class have plenty of ideas in their heads, but they are as confused and ill-arranged as poor Juliet's tangled silks in the tale in "Evenings at Home." A fourth can work very well alone, but from some want of tact or administrative ability, always act stupidly in conjunction with other people. They have a fine coach of their own to drive, but must needs charge into every other carriage they meet on the road, while smaller, meaner vehicles thread their way skilfully along to their destination. In all such cases, and in kindred ones, the owners of the imperfect minds suffer sharply under their failures, none perhaps more than the wrong-headed person, who cannot understand for the life of him, why other people cannot take his view of a subject, and who is like the man serving on a jury, who, finding himself in a minority of one, remarked that "he never knew eleven men more mistaken in his life." And their sufferings are aggra- vated by a curious perturbation of feeling. On the one hand, in watching the small profits and quick returns of the minds that work better within a far more limited range, they are filled with admiration of their little triumphs, and are always thinking how admirably their owners perform all that is required of them in life, and comparing themselves with the successful ones to their own disadvantage. On the other hand, they know all the time at the bottom of their hearts that, faulty and imperfect as their own minds may be, they are of far higher calibre, and that they see scores of things in heaven and earth undreamt of in the philosophy of the others. And the consciousness that this capacity of theirs is unrecognised or unappreciated rouses within them, a sense of being misunderstood and undervalued. Well ! we cannot make everything quite even and easy in this imperfect world. Bnt in all kinds and degrees of stupidity it is generally possible to help the lame dog over the stile, instead of making merry over his awkward struggles. And after all, even the cleverest people are apt to break down somewhere; witness the brilliant Dean Stanley, who had such an inaptitude for figures that, as his biographer expressed it, he never could understand the difference between eighteenpence and one-and-eightpence. " My father and Lady Elizabeth," writes Miss Edge- worth in one of her lively letters, "counted so quickly at cribbage that I was never able to keep up with them, and made a sorry figure. Worse, again, at some genealogies and intermarriages, which Lady E— undertook to explain to me, till at last she threw her arms flat down on each side in indignant despair and ex- claimed, Well, you are the stupidest creature alive !'" If such superior minds had their weak points, inferior ones may well claim allowance. And tiresome as stupid people may sometimes be, most persons know well enough where their own intellectual shoe pinches, to give them a fellow-feeling• for a fellow-creature. And there are times and seasons, too, when the stupid, above all others, have their special uses. So thought the man who, when asked who his banker was, replied "Mr. So-and-so ; and if I knew a stupider man I would go to him." In his opinion stupidity and safeness were synonymous. Cleverness is by no means always welcome. `• Pray let us get away from this fatiguing man," was the sotto voce remark we once heard a poor young lady make, who had been an unwilling listener throughout all the courses at dinner,. to a too-instructive father. There is a legend abroad that clever men prefer stupid wives, in which case there is a field open to the dull members of one sex at any rate. If the clever men have had to ride the intellectual high-horse all day them- selves, it is natural that they should like a complete rest from the exercise when they are off duty. There is no doubt that" we must one and all have tasted the charms of the society of " gentle dullness " at times. There is something really sooth- ing, when we are tired or lazy, in a downright honest plati- tude. It is as good as a pillow to our heads, and we love to- be with the dear old stupids who utter it in their simplicity, as if it were a great discovery. We can talk away to them with the pleasing consciousness that if we have lost or mislaid some of our facts, they will never miss them ; that if oar arguments leak a little and will not hold water, they will never find it out; and that our own commonplaces which we give them in exchange for theirs, will be received with due respect. Their society may not be improving, but it is extremely comfortable.
Previous page
