Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/41

Rh he has kept the wily and doddering old diplomat delightfully in character. There are certain fundamental facts in human nature which I would advise anyone to study who wishes to become an adept in the art of flattery.

First. If you wish to flatter anyone in reality, you must seem to be telling the truth; and no form of truth-telling is so convincing as that of making reservations. Nothing gives the appearance of honest truth-telling so much as the taking of a statement that, upon second thought, you find too large for exact verity and then trimming it down conscientiously to the size of the truth itself. For there truth-telling is a complicate matter which goes on in the open; the conscientiousness is evident. And if the reservations would seem, from the teller's private point of view, to detract, candidly, from the importance of the other person, the statement becomes all the more effective as flattery, for he must indeed be an honest soul who would go so far as openly to take away anything from his meed of praise. It is important however that this seeming detraction should not, as a matter of fact, be any detraction at all. Polonius, by his way of putting it, very conscientiously denies the king a certain power of possession over him. He does not owe his soul to him. That he owes to his God. It would seem, to the person addressed, that anything so conscientious, even at the risk of coming close to detraction, could not be in-