Of the fox and the wolf
It has long been the habit of those who study the deeper constitution of mankind to seek their truest illuminations not in the courts of kings nor in the lecture-halls of natural philosophers, but in the older and more patient record of myth, wherein two figures recur with such insistence across so many civilizations, so many centuries, and so many tongues, that the thoughtful observer cannot but conclude they answer to something coiled within the very structure of the blood itself, something as twinned and inseparable as the twin spirals lately observed by men of science within the cellular matter of all living creatures.
The wolf is the first of these figures, and in many respects the more immediately comprehensible, for he is constituted after the fashion of all that mankind has most openly admired: he commands by nature rather than by contrivance, governs his kindred through a hierarchy at once severe and tender, prosecutes the chase across miles of inhospitable country with a coordination so finely wrought it resembles nothing so much as military discipline, and offers to those within his circle a loyalty so absolute that Rome herself, understanding what foundation was most worthy of a great empire, chose to rest her founding legend upon his broad and indomitable back.
The fox operates by an entirely different principle, one more difficult to admire openly and yet impossible, upon honest reflection, to despise, for he is above all a reader of the world as it actually presents itself rather than as it has been declared to be, moving through human arrangements as a skilled mariner moves through water, attending not to the surface, which deceives, but to the deep and largely invisible currents that determine where every vessel, however confidently steered, must ultimately arrive; and it is in this quality of attending, of patient and unsentimental observation, that the fox discovers the gap in every fence, the weakness in every presumption, the door which the powerful, in their confidence, forgot to lock.
The great failure of ordinary thinking on the matter is to set these two natures in opposition, as though the possession of one precludes the other, when all of history’s most consequential figures have demonstrated precisely the contrary, wearing their cunning beneath their loyalty as a man of quality wears his finest linen beneath a travelling coat, and understanding, as lesser men have not, that fidelity without ingenuity is mere sentiment dressed in noble clothing, while ingenuity unanchored by fidelity is vanity of the most corrosive and ultimately self-defeating kind.
We were not fashioned to elect between these natures, but to bear the full and difficult weight of both, and to be judged, in the end, by how faithfully we have answered for each.