while forget
parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.

In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
insincere--though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion--for,
indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than
by telling the part-lie.

A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art--a
personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.

THE ARBITRARY CLASSIFICATION OF SEX

In an essay on Vauvenargues Mr. John Morley speaks with characteristic
causticity of those epigrammatists 'who persist in thinking of man and
woman as two different species,' and who make verbal capital out of the
fancied distinction in the form of smart epigrams beginning '_Les
femmes_.' It is one of Shakespeare's cardinal characteristics that _he
understood woman_. Mr. Meredith's fame as a novelist is largely due to
the fact that he too _understands women_. The one spot on the sun of
Robert Louis Stevenson's fame, so we are told, is that he could _never
draw a woman_. His capacity for drawing men counted for nothing,
apparently, beside this failure. Evidently the Sphinx has not the face
of a woman for nothing. That is why no one has read her riddle,
translated her mystic smile. Yet many people smile mysteriously,
without any profound