O yes; I was to explain why I sometimes use roundabout methods even with him. If you tell all you know to everyone you meet, or disclose your real character, it will generally be a waste of good material which might better be economized. By the way, what is my real character? How should I know? One sees one side of it, another another. I see all that have turned up yet, but there may be many more, thus far latent; and how am I to harmonize them all, and take the average of a succession of phenomena? I am complex, like Truth.
But I must not interrupt myself any more. Let us fall back on the utilitarian basis of ethics. You see, if I had talked like this to Jim when we met last May, he would have put himself on guard and begun to study me, whereas I wanted to draw him out—as I did. I have no objection to people studying me when I don't care to study them; but when there is anything to be done for them you have got to understand them first, and to this end it is best to appear simple and not distract their minds from the contemplation and disclosure of their own qualities: you can play on their vanity if your own does not stand in the road. Hartman has a fine mind, but in his innocent rural way he took for granted that I had stood still since we were together at college. So I played to his lead, and pretended, for instance, to know nothing about poetry; whereas, as you must have noticed, I am pretty well read, and my memory is remarkably copious and accurate. (Clarice did indeed say that I sometimes got the lines wrong; but what she meant was that the passages I quoted in my well-meant efforts to console her were of too gay a character for her melancholy mood.)
In this way I secured Jim's regard and confidence, which I am using for his good: if I had put myself forward, and been anxious to impress him with my importance, he might have looked on me with the cynical indifference which is all the feeling he can afford to most people, and I should never have got him out of the woods. So when I was taking him to Newport, I said what it was desirable to say, and omitted what was not: how else should a rational man talk? And that first night there, I took the tone that he required, as a host is bound to do: sacred are the duties of christian hospitality. Poor Jim is as good as a play; he takes Life in such dead earnest, and expects his friends to be rampant idealists too: so I mounted the high horse for once to gratify him. He will never forget that, nor cease to respect me accordingly: he thinks I was serious then, and joking at all other times. You and I of course understand that Life is but a series of appearances; and if I seem to contradict myself, to say one thing on one page and its opposite on the next, I am only reporting the various phases assumed by facts without and moods within. 'The shield is gold.' 'No, it is silver.' Well, shall we fight about that? Probably it is both. A thing may be black in one light, and white in another, for what I know. Of all fools the positive philosophers seem to me the worst; and the most abject kind of conceit is that of alleged consistency. Why will you insist on a definiteness which has so little place in nature? The world is a chameleon, and you and I are smaller copies of it.
I must try to explain all this to Hartman, and make him see that it is time he took on another color. He has been down in the depths all this while; now let him get up on the heights. But he would never do it of himself, nor without the management of a more practical mind. If I took things as he does, I should be tempted to say, "You monumental idiot, to fling a rash word at a girl as proud as Lucifer, and then to take her hasty repartee as a final verdict from doomsday book!" Happily there is one person around with sense enough to see that both these moon-struck babes are forgivable, and therefore capable of such bliss as may be found in a world of which the best to be said is that we are in very small measure responsible for it. They were both foolish, of course; but what proportion does their joint offence bear to their punishment—and ours? That is the Order of Things—this blessed and beautiful Kosmos.
[2][Note. The unwary reader may possibly need to be reminded that R. T. is not to be taken too seriously, especially in this his Apology for Lying.—Pub.]
XXI.
JANE TO THE RESCUE.
It may seem unfeeling in me to indulge in dissertations like the above at so critical a juncture: but they serve to fill the time while I am waiting for marching orders. I have written to Jim, and that is all I can do at present. Jane thinks differently: she ought to have been a man, she is so fond of action. She got me in a corner to-day.