1895: Elspeth Mallard
Fragment of a letter to Jeanne d’Anatis
Lady Hortense delivered her promised lecture on “What Intelligence Is” on Wednesday, and I am still somewhat entranced by it, though whether by the philosophy or the performance I cannot yet decide. You would have smiled to see her—magnificent as a minor deity, rearranging the lecture table so that it appeared to obey her rather than support her. She began by declaring, in her silvery and conspiratorial tone, that intelligence “is not something one has but something one is.” This, as you may imagine, produced a faint shock of admiration throughout the room, for most of us have been endeavouring, rather vainly, to have intelligence the way one might have a new riding habit or a reputation.
The examples she employed were so charmingly unreasonable that I copied several into my notebook. She spoke of the fox, whose walk through the landscape means everything though he never tells a story about it; of the duck, who balances by not believing in balance; of the mountain, which refuses even to consider reformation yet never errs. At first, I feared she was slipping into fable, but the more she spoke the more her comparisons seemed almost scandalously correct. She said that our mischief is not stupidity but comparison—that we should learn to let knowledge pass through us, as water through a cupped hand, instead of trying to trap it like butterflies. There was a silence after that which felt longer than common; most of us, I believe, were busy inspecting the gaps in our fingers.
Lady Hortense has a special gift for pulling the rug elegantly from under our intellectual chairs. Near the end, she paused—oh, she knows so well how to pause—and remarked quite casually that when the question “How intelligent am I?” finally becomes uninteresting, intelligence is probably already present. It sounded at first like one of her little absurdities, the kind we collect for amusement, but later that evening I could not stop turning it about in my mind. I wrote it on the margin of my French composition, which has improved greatly since last term, though still smells faintly of translation.
I begin to see her point: to be interested in measuring one’s intelligence is to stand outside it, as one might stand outside a greenhouse counting panes of glass, instead of going in among the geraniums. The preoccupation with cleverness, she says, is the surest symptom of its absence. I suppose that is what she means by intelligence being a “vessel.” If we busy ourselves deciding the value of the vessel, we forget that it was meant to contain, even if only briefly.
After the lecture, several of us took tea on the terrace, all pretending to discuss the weather but each secretly trying to sound unintelligent enough to appear profound. It was a hopeless exercise. Miss Anstruther pronounced that she had decided to be “as unreflective as a duck,” which is not the same as actually succeeding. For my part, I fetched my sketchbook and attempted to draw a fox in motion, but all my foxes looked as though they had been educated badly and gone into trade. Perhaps intelligence, like grace, cannot survive being posed.
What I most admire in Lady Hortense is how she contrives to say the most anarchic things in the tone of a prayer. When she advised us never again to compare ourselves, it sounded less like a rebuke than an invitation to rest. The idea that every mind may serve its own shape, like cups or ponds or clouds, is a curiously comforting one. It makes one’s limitations appear architectural rather than shameful. I confess I have thought better of myself since Wednesday—not because I am cleverer, but because I mind less if I am not.
Do tell Papa that his book on agricultural rotations has at last reached the Common Room. Lady Hortense used it as an example of constancy: she said each crop accepts the soil it’s given and extracts precisely what it needs, which is another kind of intelligence entirely. This remark made me blush, though I could not explain why.
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