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Four applicants were incontinently rejected for manifesting a natural inaptitude at hitting the juste milieu, in this important part of the duty of a cabin-boy.
The disadvantages are an inaptitude for scholarly things, a want of the steadiness and clearness of the tone of letters, the need of a great deal of experimenting, a certain thickness and indistinctness of accent. The farmer and laborer in me, many generations old, is a little embarrassed in the company of scholars; has to make a great effort to remember his learned manners and terms.
He knew his own inaptitude for the higher kind of office work, and he had expected his dismissal by Mr. Chadwick long before it came. What he did resent, and profoundly, was Mr. Chadwick's refusal to aid his father in that last death-grapple with ruinous circumstance. At the worst moment Harry wrote a letter to Leonard Chadwick, whom he had never seen since he left school.
Apart from his moral inaptitude for the monumental achievements of authorship, Diderot was endowed with the gifts of the talker rather than with those of the writer. Like Dr. Johnson, he was a great converser rather than the author of great books. If we turn to his writings, we are at some loss to understand the secret of his reputation.
I did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intellectual man" was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of book-learning, and one-tenth himself.
Hundreds of battles have been fought, decided solely by dint of valour, without the assistance of military art or skill; the youth and most illustrious families have been sacrificed, and even entire populations have disappeared in a struggle so just, but unfortunately conducted with inaptitude or marked with cruelty.
Thus, far from having in that circle any counter-balance to my inaptitude, to keep me in the good graces of Madam de Luxembourg, everybody who approached her seemed to concur in injuring me in her good opinion.
Strether had, after posting his letter, the whole scene out; and it was a scene during which, coming and going, as befell, he kept his eye not least upon the daughter. He had his fine sense of the conviction Mrs. Pocock would take occasion to reaffirm a conviction bearing, as he had from the first deeply divined it to bear, on Mr. Strether's essential inaptitude.
This has been briefly adverted to in a former part of these descriptive observations. But the subject seems to merit a more amplified illustration, and may be of sufficient interest to excuse some appearance of repetition. The special view in which we wish to place it, is that of the inaptitude of uncultivated minds for receiving religious instruction.
Thus having consumed nearly half my life at all events, the better half at a public school and the University, preparatory to a profession, my antipathy for which was exactly proportioned by my inaptitude for it, the sole result is, that I can now answer to the definition of a real gentleman, "one who has no visible means of a maintenance."
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