Vernon Lee

“ Considering the great pleasantness, let alone the various uses, of the mental habits I have summed up as Intelligence, it is surprising there should not yet be more of it forthcoming. It has, at present, a way of giving out suddenly in individuals and nations, just when its mixture of light-hearted scepticism and steady hopefulness would seem most needed. By which inadequacy of its supply I am confirmed in the suspicion that Intelligence is a much more recent human accomplishment than the Past’s other achievements in art and poetry and wit and humour would lead us to expect. ”

“ Intelligence turns to whichever side the light comes from, adjusting itself, in discursive, often desultory fashion, to all manner of directions and distances, comparing and measuring with unabashed slovenliness, extracting the qualities which strike it and hastening on to connect them with something it was struck by before. Being thus rapidly responsive, Intelligence may often, I admit, seem on the pounce, and more so than politeness warrants. ”

“ Such do I see Intelligence in those who possess it; such do I feel it, on some delightful occasions, in myself. Such also I frequently notice it failing to make itself agreeable to some kinds of persons. Those who take a just pride in Reason or Logic are often a little ruffled; or else, as Wagner said of Mozart, they find Intelligence just a little frivol. But in the long run they recognize an ally; and their conscious superiority makes them indulgent. ”

“ I have brought in the word pleasure because the pleasantness of its varied exercise is one of the chief characteristics of what I mean by Intelligence, fostering that nimbleness, elasticity, hence also pervasiveness, which makes it a chief factor of human progress, as well as one of progressive mankind’s indisputable marks and unalienable rewards. ”

“ To this I would answer that, so far as my observation tells me, the soul will always find some shape and some material wherein to build, or to restore, the shelters needed in its moments of weariness and sorrow, there to await the consolation which no creed seems to bring without the supreme aid of time. On the other hand, that the instinctive part of our nature, when it is truly instinctive, can surely be trusted to keep itself alive in the face of the (alas!) inevitably feeble imperatives of such new-comers as Reason and Intelligence. ”

“ Angelo’s greatness was, on the contrary, due to presiding Renaissance villainy; but that pseudo-Nietzschian generation is, in its turn, superannuated, and the cult of immoralism along with it. Not only because paradoxes do not bear repetition, but for another reason which that quotation from Huxley has made me realize. Namely, that we have left off thinking of art as either moral or immoral, simply because morality no longer holds the same place in our thoughts as, say, in those of Ruskin, George Eliot, or, as that quotation shows, even in those of Huxley. ”

“ Since the more habitually we get to regard the Future as resulting from the Present and the Present from the Past, the more often we must admit that we know too little of the hidden Past, and less of the fleeting Present, to make sure what new combinations, including reciprocal neutralizations, are preparing to arise. The oftener we have watched the Old Man Proteus, the less, perhaps, our cocksureness about his next metamorphosis. Or, take another question which intellectual good breeding will refrain from because Intelligence foresees no answer: “In that case, what will you put in its place?” ”

“ Practical people like that are nearly always astonished and dismayed when confronted with Proteus; “they had forgotten....” Now Intelligence is as much memory as perception; and for it there is always in the transformations it is watching something familiar which carries it back to what it has already witnessed, and forwards, expectantly, to something it may be going to witness. Hence to Intelligence there is never mere repetition, just as there is never utter novelty. ”

“ Now these same pleasant properties, so often sacrificed by very studious persons, turn Intelligence into the stock-in-trade (eked out with plentiful surrogates) of that other branch of the Intelligentsia, those who make a livelihood by living down to their readers, [5] relieving their boredom, lapping their thick skins in sentimentality, and keeping up the sooty flame of their collective passions; for alas, the Man of Letters is tempted to serve his public not merely as an unconsidered jester but as a respected moral guide. ”

“ And since we are discussing the reciprocal uses of Genius and of mere Intelligence (Genius ever stimulating Intelligence, Intelligence ever keeping Genius within the bounds of sense and of decency) , allow me to set my face against all those oligarchies of genius and virtue which every Utopian philosopher from Plato to Comte, from Renan to H. G. Wells, has wanted to foist on dull, driven Mankind. ”

“ It is no easy matter to be always clean inside and out, especially when, like the little boy in Stevenson’s rhyme, “your dear Papa is poor,” poor in spirit, perchance one of a long line of moral paupers. ”

“ There is quite enough to be done in the way of selection, assimilation and elimination (since all understanding means that) without setting such Intelligence as we have to play scavenger to wasteful or slatternly genius.... And yet, and yet.... May not those trashinesses of genius, and the scavengering entailed thereby, be that which secures to Intelligence its highest activities, and in so far fulfils one of Genius’s chief missions? For, after [55] all, Intelligence is the living, changing mass of unprofessional thought, the averaged, habitual thought of the majority of us. ”

“ That explains why Intelligence is so chock-full of prejudices, as all those are aware who have ever asked it to accept miracles and ghosts on their testimony or on someone else’s authority. Such people exclaim at the sceptic’s blindness to evidence, because they do not know that doubting and even denying are part of Intelligence’s active rhythm of grasping and acquiescing; a process of assimilation and elimination in which the already experienced and accepted selects that which shall be accepted or rejected. ”

“ Proteus, multiform and ever-elusive, represents that which Intelligence (lighter equipped than specialized Intellect for such rapid hunts) can sometimes catch sight of and, for however brief a contact, sometimes even clutch. Proteus, in my mythology, is the mysterious whole which we know must exist, but know not how to descry: Reality. For, whatever else we may believe it to be, Reality when thus partially revealed, is never twice the same. ”

“ Here, in art’s interludes of life, we can obtain what religious creeds lay open to the reproach of being false because they give it for true; and what love seeks to make unchanging, only to taste the bitterness of change. So that many as have been and will be the successive responses to our æsthetic cravings, the manifold satisfactions thereof, embodying as they do the purified essence of our feelings and activities, will, in the endless shifting of our valuations, perhaps constitute the one region where we need not be watching for Proteus. ”

“ It is the natural purifier and tidier-up where Genius and Stupidity, disrupting and corrupting by turns, have between them played the deuce with our poor mortal heritage. And in the face of the millionfold sacrifices of self and others which Ideals [60] and Heroisms have once again presented to our foolish admiration, I would go so far as to add that Intelligence is often more humane than Sentiment, and, oftener still, more beneficent than what we call Virtue. ”

“ Intelligence, and only Intelligence, can see to it that, even to-day, such rare and precious impulses and sensibilities be not diverted to evil results, wasted in barren self-sacrifice, or the fostering of hide-bound selfishness. Wasted, above all, in hecatombs to the Molochs of collective superstition, like the one which is only just over, and may begin again to-morrow. ”

“ Seen by the mental eye of Intelligence, which, like the bodily one, moves in every direction and focuses to all distances, thereby informing us of the proportions and relations of whatever is not ourself, and following step by step the actions which are not our own. ”

“ The habit of taking “otherness” into account, and a wider and wider circle thereof, might serve as a rough test of Intelligence and of its progress: young children, as is notorious, referring everything to themselves; and “uneducated” people, from the narrowness of their knowledge, rarely conceiving anything beyond their own personal experience. At the risk of incurring the same criticism, I hazard my own impression that the dominance of possessive pronouns, the restriction of interest to one’s own history and circle of acquaintances, has become less usual among “educated” persons. ”

“ In the language of contemporary youth, it will not be decent. [1] That substitution of the word decency for the word virtue gives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more intelligent and, in some ways, more indulgent, morality; but a morality on the whole more austere, a stark notion of duty armed with the relentless imperative which nowadays makes us abashed at the revelation in ourself of physical cowardice or bodily dirtiness. ”

“ Therefore, it strikes me that in view of this multifold reincarnation of the spirit of prophecy in our Men of Science and of Letters, some increase of Intelligence may well be needed to steady our nerves and allow us to recognize the real dangers of which, heaven knows, there are plenty requiring to be faced with ... well, the far-too-little Intelligence already at our disposal. For, possibly because it is not “creative” (and creation usually implies chaos and refuse-heaps) , Intelligence is especially preservative and sheltering. ”