you have only seen it from the inside.
You are rather in the position of the valet. No gossip and gabble
of yours about braces and sock-suspenders will make your hero less
a hero: you will only establish your title to be considered an
unperceptive and low-minded creature among the only people whose
opinion is worth having."

He was always very decided on what he called "mock sincerity," the
people whom he described as "professional crystals," who always
"speak their mind about a thing." "The art of life," he said,
"consists in knowing exactly what to keep out of sight at any given
moment, and what to produce; when to play hearts and diamonds, ugly
clubs or flat spades; and you must remember that every suit is trumps
in turn."

The following passage from a letter about a leading politician will
illustrate this:

"I have always admired him intensely," he writes, as an instance of a
public man who has succeeded by sheer adherence to principles.

"You can't ensure success; three parts is luck, the genius of time
and place. The only thing you can do seems to me to work hard, and
always take the highest line about things. The highest line, that is
to say, not the line you may _feel_ to be highest, but the line that
you _recognize_ to be so. Not what your fluctuating emotions may
commend, but that which the best moral tact seems to pronounce best.
You can't always expect to feel enthusiasm for the best, so be true
not to your sensations, but your deliberate ideals--that is the
highest sincerity; all the higher because it is so often called
hypocrisy."

But his Determinist, almost Calvinistic, views were mellowed and
tempered by a serene and deep belief in a providence moving to good,
and ordering life down to the smallest details with special reference
to each man's case; in fact, as he said, the two were so closely
connected that they were like the convex and concave sides of a lens.

He wrote to me, "I often feel, when straining after happiness, just
like the child who, anxious to get home, pushes against the side of
the railway carriage which is carrying him so smoothly and serenely
to the haven where he would be, while all he effects is a temporary
disarrangement of particles.

"Life shows me more and more every day that there is something
watching us and working with us, so that now and then in unexpected
moments when I have felt particularly independent for some time back,
I come upon a little fact or incident