AUGUST 409 



the highest efforts of our common nature which com- 

 mands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible 

 remnant of the brute, its most agonising struggles with 

 temptation, in unbroken silence. 7 But, on the other 

 hand, the same author thus describes the downward 

 career of one of her best -drawn characters : ' Tito had 

 an innate love of reticence let us say, a talent for it 

 which acted as other impulses do, without any conscious 

 motive, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, 

 he would now and then conceal something which had as 

 little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen 

 a flight of crows.' Some natures are born so secretive 

 and shy that it is a real difficulty to them to speak out 

 or ask advice, so that they cannot learn in any way 

 except from that exceedingly bitter source personal ex- 

 perience. I would advise the young to fight as much as 

 they can against concealment. There is of course one 

 subject which by its very nature can only live in privacy. 

 We all go through the stage sooner or later of under- 

 standing what love means, and we all think at the time 

 there is only one thing in the world of importance that 

 our hearts should not be unveiled. But with genuine 

 and open natures this passes, and they end very often by 

 open confession later on of that which torture would not 

 have drawn from them at the time. Why reticence, to 

 my mind, is so bad is that it so quickly grows into de- 

 ception, and the smallest events develop into something 

 quite different from what they really were. 



Yet no one can recognise more than I do the neces- 

 sity of some kinds of hypocrisy ; it is 'the respect that 

 Vice pays to Virtue,' and a form both of truth and 

 strength. ' The Englishman kisses and does not tell, the 

 Frenchman kisses and tells, and the Italian tells and 

 does not kiss ! ' so went the old saying. Admitting the 

 facts, the concealment of the Englishman is the best. 



