as a rule, is either a natural gift, or else can be
attained only by people of strong critical powers, who will, firmly and
vigorously, test, examine, and weigh motives, and arrive through
experience at a direct and natural method of dealing with men and
circumstances. True simplicity is not an inherited poverty of spirit;
it is rather like the poverty of one who has deliberately discarded
what is hampering, vexatious, and unnecessary, and has learnt that the
art of life consists in disentangling the spirit from all conventional
claims, in living by trained impulse and fine instinct, rather than by
tradition and authority. I do not say that the dull people are not
probably, in a way, the happier people; I suppose that anything that
leads to self-satisfaction is, in a sense, a cause of happiness; but it
is not a species of happiness that people ought to pursue.

Perhaps one ought not to use the word dulness, because it may be
misunderstood. The kind of dulness of which I speak is not inconsistent
with a high degree, not only of practical, but even of mental, ability.
I know several people of very great intellectual power who are models
of dulness. Their memories are loaded with what is no doubt very
valuable information, and their conclusions are of the weightiest
character; but they have no vivid perception, no alertness, they are
not open to new ideas, they never say an interesting or a suggestive
thing; their presence is a load on the spirits of a lively party, their
very facial expression is a rebuke to all light-mindedness and
triviality. Sometimes these people are silent, and then to be in their
presence is like being in a thick mist; there is no outlook, no
enlivening prospect. Sometimes they are talkers; and I am not sure that
that is not even worse, because they generally discourse on their own
subjects with profound and serious conviction. They have no power of
conversation, because they are not interested in any one else's point
of view; they care no more who their companions are, than a pump cares
what sort of a vessel is put under it--they only demand that people
should listen in silence. I remember not long ago meeting one of the
species, in this case an antiquarian. He discoursed continuously, with
a hard eye, fixed as a rule upon the table, about the antiquities of
the neighbourhood. I was on one side of him, and was far too much
crushed to attempt resistance. I ate and drank mechanically; I said
"Yes" a