It ought also to bar the simply witty man; for what is more jarring
than a misplaced wit or an ill-timed jocularity?
No, the chief requisite for a seat among the glorious company of the
elect is a deep-seeing, far-reaching, sensitive comprehension; a
capacity to see not only through a thing but over it and under it and
beyond it; to see not only its derivation and ancestry, but its
purport and import and influence and posterity; to detect the inner
meaning and the double meaning, and to smile alone at its surface
meaning. There are those of us, particularly women, who must have this
all-enveloping comprehension if we are to be thought fit to live. Our
conversation is such that, if we were taken literally, we deserve to
be strangled.
In this day of mad competition in every walk in life, it is not those
who can shout the loudest, even in those busy marts where voice reigns
supreme, who are going to be heard. No one man can continue to shout
the loudest. A momentary audience and a raw throat are the most he can
expect. But it is he who can exaggerate the most intelligently and
overpaint the most subtly. That sort of impertinence will attract the
eye and ear of the most loudly howling mob. Even the wayfarer gets an
inkling from a poster, but it is a man of the widest comprehension who
gets the whole truth from the subtlest exaggeration, and he who
possesses a sense of humor who realizes its acuteness.
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