IMPENETRABILITY.
THERE is a suggestion of emptiness about a too great receptivity ; a man should not have a spare room in his mind for the accommodation of every stray notion! That is the instinctive feeling of the typical Englishman. Ho is proud of his impenetrability—and he is not altogether wrong.
To say that impenetrability is a fine quality is perhaps absurd, but it is a fine attitude; and, paradoxical as it may sound, it is not an affectation, but the attitude in which a vast number of men and women stand most at ease. From the point of view of those who assume it the noisy chopping. of logic sound harmlessly through the everlasting halls of likelihood, where cleverness chips to no purpose at the great conclusions of common-sense. The impenetrable Englishman does not try to silence the clatter—it does not al. par to disturb him at his work. In the midst of the din, laborious application, the eager parsuit of recreation, and even the recollection necessary for worship are possible. Now and then from among the chippers and chatterers one voice rises shrill above the rest. It is the voice of some- one who is determined to be "Singled from the bar- barians," and whose glib tongue quickly lends him pro- minence. He is soon surrounded by a group of kindred spirits who hang upon his words. Sharp sounds of derogation and interrogation strike on the ears of the impenetrable man. He hears his ideals deprecated, his conclusions questioned, his intuitions ridiculed, and his conventions condemned. He listens, recognises, with more or less keen appreciation, accord- ing to his cultivation, the form in which the nonsense is offered to him, laughs if the speaker is witty, throws him a coin or a criticism, and immediately becomes reabsorbed in his amusement or his work. He is not disposed to study nor sup- posed to understand the inner meaning of what he has heard; but his criticism, if his opponent would only consider it, shows that his comprehension is wider than at first appears. Shake- speare makes him say, as he turns away from the strife of cultured tongues, "They have been at a great feast of language, and have stolen the scraps " ; then perceiving their mental attenuation, he adds, "They have lived long upon the
alms-basket of words." Shakespeare had a very good opinion of the brain of the impenetrable man.
Te, man we mean, though always of one type, belongs to all classes and holds almost all opinions. The mind of the impene- trable Englishman is by no means always an essentially Con- servative mind, though he will seldom accept the shilling from the recruiting sergeants of Radical reform. His mental strong- box may contain a greater or less number of assurances. Of one thing, however, he is always certain, and that is that extremes meet. The mind of the fervent Conservative is very receptive on the sentimental side, so long as the sentimentality offered to it is marked with the traditional stamp. All senti- mentality is made of the same stuff, but the traditional patterns upon it are more beautiful perhaps than those of newer design. The fancy pictures of the artist in reform are not painted within the domain of the likely, and belong to the regions of poetry rather than practice ; but exactly the same thing is true of half the picturesque conceptions of the past. It is unlikely that poverty ever looked pretty except from above, or that the very poor were ever content or " looked up" to " their betters " in any real sense of either phrase, though patience, loyalty, and love have never been without witness. Selfishness is as old as Adam ; as a whole the poor never reverenced the rich, and as a whole the rich never loved the poor ; as a class both desired their own profit—or history lies. The impenetrable poor man knows all this, however politely he may examine the picture of Merry England presented to him ; on the other hand, be is not taken in by the flat landscape painted by the leveller wherein all inequalities have been smoothed away, and the pitfalls of envy have been covered over, and the icy mountains of selfish disdain stand beyond the edge of the canvas. It is not likely that this will ever be a true picture, he says to himself. If he is an educated man, a competence drawn from the world's great fortune of words, and not from the alms-bag of the intellectual, may help him to his conclusion ; but if he have no learning common-sense may bring him to the same assurance. As a rule he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist ; he is, if we may coin a word, an actualist. He thinks things are a little better than they
were, and will be a little better still. This is what all the likelihoods point to, and the only verdict which common-sense will ratify, though it cannot quench hope.
" What an appallingly commonplace person you have made out the average Englishman to be !" we hear the reader exclaim. But he is a commonplace person. The great subject for thankfulness is that he is sufficiently in the majority to be commonplace. Seriously, however, he does not reach the greatest heights. He has no genius. The gods reserve their gifts for the other type ; and it is the men of genius who suddenly, and in contradiction to all the calculations of time, set the clock forward, especially men of moral genius. 'They are the abiding miracle of history, the abiding inspiration of hope, the crowd of witnesses who never fail, though science burst itself with indignation, to proclaim that human nature, at least, is not uniform. It is from the ranks of the receptive, again, that we get what may be called the Little Brethren of genius— the uninspired men who are yet distinguished for talent ; the men excellent for insight rather than for force. The receptive man of talent is charming indeed, but difficult to depict. He is himself only when he is alone. He reflects his friends, and, at times, even his company. It is impossible to gauge the capacity of his mind, for, by an extraordinary arrangement of mental mirrors, reality merges in counterfeit presentment.
But the "receptive" type touches a far lower level than the "impenetrable." Inspiration comes to the simple, and simplicity has some affinity somehow with folly. The world has not made a mistake there. The receptive man when be is a. fool—and by that we mean the fool who is neither stupid nor unsympathetic—isa singularly useless person. He gives pleasure, however, and often pleasure of a very harmless kind. He is almost always entertain- ing to talk to. He takes all that is new for true, and we all like sometimes to pretend that it is. Some pretence is necessary to the childish mind, and it is a great recreation now and then to grown-up people to take some very unlikely proposi- tion for granted and then discuss it seriously. The cultivated mind sickens alternately at certainty and at supposition, just as children turn from their pretences to demand a true story and will pretend again as soon as they are tired. For this game one receptive fool is almost a necessity ; he ap-
pears to act so well, because he is not acting at all. All the talkers are playing the fool except him, and he makes the game worth the candle. The odd thing about him is that, though he belongs to the family from which genius comes, he is not a judge of genius. It is the impenetrable man who recognises inspiration. It is he from whom the final judg- ment which decides between death and immortality comes ; he who drives away the false prophets who prophesy in jargon with all the lispers of shibboleths, and decides that the really great speak in tongues understanded of the people. In fact, in this country at any rate, it is the impenetrable man who has the last word.
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