he is thoroughly consistent: holding that the masses should work in
contented deference to their intellectual guides, but those guides
should qualify themselves by practical experience of life, that poetry
is not an amusement for lazy sybarites but the most elevating of
spiritual influences, that religions cut the roots of their power by
trying to avoid supernaturalism and cultivate intelligibility, and that
the animal basis of human life is a screen expressly devised to shut off
direct knowledge of God and make character possible.

To make his acquaintance first is to enter upon a store of high and fine
enjoyment, and of strong and vivifying thought, which one must be either
very rich of attainment or very feeble of grasp to find unprofitable or
pleasureless.

THE VIRTUES OF STUPIDITY

From 'Letters on the French Coup d'Etat'

I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the
most essential mental quality for a free people whose liberty is to be
progressive, permanent, and on a large scale: it is much stupidity. Not
to begin by wounding any present susceptibilities, let me take the Roman
character; for with one great exception,--I need not say to whom I
allude,--they are the great political people of history. Now, is not a
certain dullness their most visible characteristic? What is the history
of their speculative mind? a blank; what their literature? a copy. They
have left not a single discovery in any abstract science, not a single
perfect or well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks, the
perfection of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the
ideal forms of self-idolizing art, the Romans imitated and admired; the
Greeks explained the laws of nature, the Romans wondered and despised;
the Greeks invented a system of numerals second only to that now in use,
the Romans counted to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus
which we still call by their name; the Greeks made a capital and
scientific calendar, the Romans began their month when the Pontifex
Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Throughout Latin literature,
this is the perpetual puzzle:--Why are we free and they slaves, we
praetors and they barbers? why do the stupid people always win and the
clever people always lose? I need not say that in real sound stupidity
the English are unrivaled: you'll hear more wit and better wit in an
Irish street row than would keep Westminster Hall in humor for
five week