It is pretty much taken for granted by decent folk that the truth
should be told in all circumstances. “It is never permissible to lie”
has been, ever since the Christian era came in, the common opinion,
if not the common practice. And yet, which one of us has never lied,
I will not say against his conscience, but for the very sake of his
conscience? Conventional religion has been assumed to be our sole
guide, while our actual conduct is usually based on the different,
and more explicit, code of honor. Honor is not religion, though with
real religion it has always been at peace; civilized manners are not
religion, though, again, they have always been at peace with it. In the
matter of lying, both honor and civilized manners have a great deal to
say; and the fact that we realize this subconsciously is responsible
for a great many minor perplexities.
Strictly speaking, in Candide’s “best of possible worlds” lies should
not pass human lips. There are many people who stick to the literal
interpretation of the precept: ladies, for example, who retire to
the back porch before they permit their maids to tell the unwelcome
caller that they are “out.” There, presumably, they gaze at the blue
sky, and congratulate themselves on their unimpeachable veracity. Yet
even scrupulous people allow their servants to say they are out when
they are in, because “out” is conventionally understood to mean many
things. On the other hand, Mr. Chesterton tells us that, under certain
conditions, mere silence is the most damnable lie of all. The matter is
not so simple as it seems: its intricacies may become a morass for the
unwary, and an enchanted garden for the casuist.
Very few people, I fancy, would say, after deliberation, that no lie
was ever justified. To be sure, I once heard a serious young man
protest that Shakespeare had damned Desdemona by allowing her, at her
last gasp, to exculpate Othello. I have also known people who objected
vehemently to the late Mark Twain because he said so many things that
were not so. But there are occasions when lies are taken for granted,
even by the law. A man on trial for his life is supposed to tell the
truth, but not if it will incriminate him. A wife is not dragged to
the witness-stand against her will to testify against her husband--no
one would legitimately expect anything but perjury from her. I do
not see much difference between legally permitting a man to say “Not
guilty” when he is guilty, and legally permitting him to lie. Is there
any solitary maiden lady who would not willingly give the midnight
marauder to understand that her husband was just coming down the
stairs, armed to the teeth? A man is not supposed, except by an extinct
type of Puritan, to “give away” the lady who has made sacrifices for
him; and even the extinct type of Puritan would hardly expect you
to tell your hostess that her dinner-party had been dull. From this
heterogeneous group of examples, one may infer that there are lies and
lies; and while it is never permissible to lie, it is sometimes quite
unpermissible to do anything else.
Most lies of the decenter sort are social. “The admixture of a lie doth
ever give pleasure,” said the moralist Bacon. There is certainly very
little defence for the lie that does not give pleasure. It is to save
other people’s feelings, not our own, that we tell lies. Let me put a
case quite bluntly. How, without lying, is a man to thank his small
niece properly for the necktie which she has selected for his Christmas
present? No one wants merely to be thanked for one’s trouble; every
one wants to be told that his taste has been perfect. Now that the
late Phillips Brooks’s handsome evasion of fact has become historic,
who ever dares _not_ to praise a baby explicitly? I confess that
it goes against the grain with me to say that I have enjoyed something
which I have detested; and I have frequently accepted invitations
(especially over the telephone) because my tongue would not twist
itself round the phrase “another engagement” when the other engagement
was non-existent. But I have never had the slightest compunction about
saying that I was sorry I had another engagement, when I did have
another engagement and was not sorry.
I know only one person whom I could count on not to indulge herself in
these conventional falsehoods, and she has never been able, so far as
I know, to keep a friend. The habit of literal truth-telling, frankly,
is self-indulgence of the worst. Nothing could be more delightful,
in an evil sense, than telling certain people that their Christmas
presents, their babies, and their hospitalities are all horrors which
defy description; especially if one could count it a virtue to one’s
self to say those things starkly. But one cannot keep that weapon only
for one’s foes: the only excuse for saying inexcusable things is that
one always says them. Roughly speaking, one’s friends are the people
of whom one thinks, habitually, pleasant things. But even friends can
be annoying, or unbeautiful, or dull. And it is of the essence of
those manners which are morals not to tell them so if one can help it.
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend”--and must sometimes be dealt.
But no stabbing over non-essentials! And above all, no stabbing when
it is a pleasure to stab. Sometimes these truth-tellers congratulate
themselves that their praise is immensely enhanced by its rarity.
There, I fancy, they are mistaken: for in the first place, praise
that is too long on the way loses its savor; and in the second, they
acquire, I have noticed, a censorious habit of mind that prevents them
from praising at all.
No: in the course of mere conventional living, a certain amount of
lying must be done. “How do you do?” “I am very well, thank you.”
You may have indigestion, and in that case you have lied. Yet is it
your business to make your acquaintance uncomfortable by telling him
the facts in the case? Certain things are true of any man personally
which have nothing to do with his social existence: personally, if
he has a toothache, he has it; socially, he has not a toothache
unless he mentions it. Then, there are lies which are not verbal at
all--lies of implication. The early Puritans who objected to paint and
powder, objected to them, I fancy, on perfectly Catholic grounds--it
was immoral to make yourself attractive, and paint and powder were
literally meretricious. On the same principle, to this day, a nun cuts
off her hair. The modern feeling against paint and powder--for it
does in some quarters survive--is rather, I imagine, on the score of
dishonesty. You are not supposed to disguise a beautiful complexion
if you really have it. But if you have not a good complexion, you are
deceiving people--you are acting a lie--by making yourself look as if
you had. The ground of the objection has shifted.
Some author--is it Mr. Kipling?--says of one of his heroines that
she was as honest as her own front teeth. I know a great many people
who are as honest as their own front teeth are false; and certainly
no one expects them to go about calling attention to the skill of
their dentist. Perhaps some sophist will say that between wearing
false hair and declaring one’s false hair to be one’s own, there is
all the difference in the world. I protest that it is tacit falsehood
to wear it at all--unless one does it after the fashionless fashion
of an ancient lady I knew in my childhood who, quite bald at the age
of ninety-five, hung two wads of chestnut hair across her head, like
saddle-bags, on a black velvet ribbon. And such tacit falsehoods are
all in the spirit of the conventional politeness we use daily. To
rouge a pale face may be vanity; but to thank a stupid hostess for the
pleasure she has not given, is loving one’s neighbor as one’s self. I
am inclined to think that even rouge is more often than not altruistic
in intention. One does not wish, for the sake of society, to be either
a fright or a brute. Certain things are demanded of every man who meets
the world on its own ground. From the moment he has “accepted with
pleasure,” he has agreed to play the game; and it is as unfair of him
to give or take the wrong cues as it would be for the castle to insist
on making the knight’s move. No: we need not go out of our way to lie;
but we must not, even to be clever, tell the truth when an innocent
lie is innocently demanded of us.
It occurs to me that my examples of conventional falsehood are largely
feminine. So, I fancy, they should be. One of the reasons, surely,
why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is
that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them. A
man expects his wife to do this kind of thing for him. It is she who
accepts or refuses their common invitations, directs their joint social
manœuvres, encounters the world for them both on the purely social
side. He is not expected to do it any more than he is expected to order
the dinner. There is more straight-from-the-shoulder talk, I imagine,
among men by themselves than among women by themselves; but that is
partly because women slip out of the social harness less frequently and
less easily. A man among men is perhaps (I speak under correction) more
inveterately his personal self; a woman among women more inveterately
her social self. It may be that it is easier to wear the harness
constantly than to gall one’s shoulders afresh each day with putting
it on. I am inclined to think that women are as honest with their
intimate friends as are men; but--they have had an age-long training
in the penalties of making one’s self unpleasant. So many low motives
are imputed to women--and most of them, at the present day, quite
unjustly--that they are driven to the lesser mendacities for the sake
of getting some justice done them. When Mr. A. asks Mrs. B. if she does
not think Mrs. C. beautiful, she is almost bound to say that she does,
though she does not. Otherwise, she will be taken for a jealous fool.
One lie is better than two; and it is better to be thought a fool when
you are not, than jealous and a fool when you are neither.
Comparatively few people, however, will cavil at these mendacities,
which are indeed ψευδῆ ἀψευδῆ--as mechanical and uncalculated as a
gentleman’s “I beg your pardon” when a lady has insisted on colliding
with him in the street. Truth is not so difficult to bound on that
side; for most people recognize the social exigency, and if you
are praising some one’s unskilful cook on one day, the chances are
that she will be congratulating you on your amateur gardening the
next. We simply have to be polite, as our race and clime understand
politeness; and no one except a _naïf_ is really going to take
this sort of thing seriously. It is perhaps regrettable that we do not
carry courtesy even further; for nothing makes people so worthy of
compliments as occasionally receiving them. One is more delightful for
being told one is delightful--just as one is more angry for being told
one is angry. Let us pass, however, to more debatable ground.
There is an old refrain which runs, “Ask me no questions, I’ll
tell you no lies.” I am inclined to think that it is full of social
philosophy. Most of us, probably, have put up our hardest fights for
veracity on occasions when questions have been asked us that never
should have been asked. “Refuse to answer,” says the ghost of that
extinct Puritan whom we have evoked. An absurd counsel: for, as we all
know, to most of these questions no answer is the most explicit answer
of all. If the Devil has given you wit enough, you may contrive to
keep the letter of the commandment. But usually that does not happen.
I dare say many moralists will not agree with me; but I hold that a
question put by some one who has no right, from any point of view, to
the information demanded, deserves no truth. If a casual gossip should
ask me whether my unmarried great-aunt lived beyond her means, I should
feel justified in saying that she did not, although it might be the
private family scandal that she did. There are inquiries which are a
sort of moral burglary. The indiscreet questioner--and by indiscreet
questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man’s duty
either to the community or to any individual to answer--is a marauder,
and there is every excuse for treating him as such. I am sure that
every reader remembers, in his own experience, such questions, and
counts among his acquaintance at least one such questioner. Let him say
whether, in these conditions, he has felt it his moral duty to hand
over information, any more than he would consider it his moral duty to
hand over his plate to a thief. I am not speaking of cases where the
temptation to lie is merely the temptation to save one’s face: it is
not permissible to lie merely to save one’s face. But it is sometimes
permissible to lie to save another person’s face--as it was pardonable,
surely, in Desdemona to declare that Othello had not murdered her.
In regard to the lie of exaggeration, a word should perhaps
parenthetically be said. We all know the child who has seen two
elephants in the garden eating the roses. We also know the delightful
grown-up who “embroiders” his narratives. He will never tell the same
adventure twice with the same details. The fact remains that he may
each time leave you with precisely the same impression of the adventure
in its entirety. It is quite possible that you trust him exceedingly.
Of course it is also possible that his _ben trovato_ is never
_vero_. You will have to determine after long experience of him
whether he is fundamentally false, or merely has a sense of style.
Personally, I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are
only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives
are only lies. There is a subtle distinction between the two. At the
risk of being at loggerheads with the rhetoricians, one must say
that truth goes deeper than words, and that there is not much in a
truthfulness which is only phrase-deep.
The old ladies who are shivering on the back porch will disapprove of
me for saying these things, almost as much as I disapprove of them
for being on the back porch. To speak frankly, I have not found that
the people who cling to the letter are always the people who cling to
the spirit of the law. Some of the men and women who will not say in
so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false
impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites
of truth. The ladies I have referred to may be technically “out”; but
they are really “out” only to the undesired visitor--exactly as much
as if they had stopped in their own sitting-rooms. (Remember, please,
that I am not speaking of the people who receive the unwelcome caller
rather than permit a maid to fib--they are in a very different case.)
I should not instinctively go to these people for an accurate account
of a serious situation. Any one whose conscience is satisfied with that
kind of loyalty to fact knows very little about the spirit of truth.
I do not jeer at literal accuracy: I think it an excellent safeguard
for all of us. The person who has never indulged in a literal falsehood
is the less likely to have indulged in a real one. Generally speaking,
words follow facts with a certain closeness. Not always, however. I
may truthfully say that my teeth are my own, if I have paid for them;
but I shall none the less give a wrong impression to the engaging
creature who has asked me if they are false. Substitute serious
equivalents for that kind of veracious reply, and you will see what I
mean. I am not at all sure that, where there is room for doubt, the
people I have cited will not largely take the benefit of the doubt
to themselves. I am not sure, for example, that the formula “I will
not tell any one” stands to them for anything but a fallible human
prophecy--something apt to be set at naught by the God who maketh
diviners mad. I strongly suspect that mere loyalty will never make them
hold their tongues. And I am quite sure that they will often be silent
when silence is the most damnable lie of all. For, in their technical
sense, silence can never be a lie.
In this short distance, we have come near to the heart of the matter.
Remember that the only lie forbidden in the Decalogue is false witness
against one’s neighbor. I may feel real respect for the lady on the
porch--when I think that it may be hailing, I feel positive awe--but I
should not like to make her the recipient of an intimate confidence.
Such a person is wholly at the mercy of the unscrupulous. To be, for
one’s self, at the mercy of the unscrupulous, suggests, I admit, the
saint; to be, for one’s friends, at the mercy of the unscrupulous,
suggests the cad. It is not, for the normal person, a pleasant thing
to lie: it is much easier to record the truth quite automatically.
There is in each of us who have been decently brought up a natural
antipathy to saying “the thing which is not.” The basis of truth is so
much the finest basis on which to meet one’s fellow-men! I have much
sympathy with the unpopular people who cannot bring themselves, even in
a ball-room, to “play the game.” Of all ugly things to be, perhaps a
liar is the ugliest. And yet, and yet--We may not go into Victor Hugo’s
rapture over the nun in _Les Misérables_ who gave the mendacious
answer to Javert; but which of us wishes she had told the inspector
that Jean Valjean was actually in the room? Fortunately, such crucial
instances are rare; and usually we can benefit our friends most by
telling the truth about them--if it were not so, they would not be
beloved. It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly. But in
the rare case like that of Sœur Simplice, let us hope that we, too,
should lie, and be as sure as she of making our peace with Heaven.
For one’s self alone, it is a question whether any lie could bring such
luxury as that of telling the simple truth. To lie to save one’s self
is the mark of the beast; to lie to save another person may make one
distrust the cosmos, but at least it is a purer fault. For it seems
to be agreed on by all codes that the unselfish motive is a mightily
purging element. On the whole, I should say that the person who likes
to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the
lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
Perhaps the greatest conflict for Puritan youth has always come when it
faced for the first time the unfamiliar shape of Honor. Honor and John
Calvin have fought on many a strange battlefield for the young soul,
and the young soul must often have wondered which was friend and which
was foe.
Honour and wit, foredamned they sit,
sings Kipling in an atavistic moment. Which of us has not at some time
or other shudderingly understood him? And yet it is only the fortuitous
trappings of Honor which can so disturb. For the truest thing about
Honor is that, like Charity, it “seeks not itself”; and Honor in the
mediæval sense was the darling child of the Church. Honor does not
break its word; it protects the weak against itself, and against
others; it keeps its engagements. It is more immediately concerned with
its duty to humanity than with its duty to God; which is doubtless
why the Puritan mystic saw it as a foe. The code of honor is the
etiquette-book of the Christian; and the people who have attacked it
are the people who have considered that Christians needed no etiquette.
By our ancestors who were bred in the cold and windy times of the
Reformation it was held to deal chiefly with duelling, gaming, and
illicit affairs. “The debt of honor,” “the affair of honor”--what do
even these corrupted phrases mean except that the gentleman has found
more ways to bind himself than the laws of the land afford? I do not
know that Honor ever compelled a man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel;
but if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled--if he has undertaken to
play the lamentable game--he must not skulk behind a policeman, like
a cry-baby or a _sans-culotte_, because things have not gone his
way. If he has broken, he must pay.
Part of the code of honor begins only when the Christian precept has
been broken. Is it so bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told
what to do after you have once done something wrong? The Catechism,
as a practical guide, is wofully incomplete without the code of the
gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, the Puritan told you to
repent; and he was quite right. But there is work left for the sinner
after the repenting has been done. Both Honor and the Catechism will do
their best to keep you out of a mess. The difference comes later: for
after you have got into a mess, the Catechism leaves you to God, while
Honor shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow beings, to repair
that ill and not extend it.
Honor is a matter of practical politics--frightfully unpractical
politics, in another sense, they often are. A cynical young woman once
said to me that she found cads more interesting than gentlemen, because
you could always tell what a gentleman would do in a given situation,
whereas you could never tell, in any situation, what a cad would do.
Cads may or may not be the proper sport of cynical young women; but to
the average busy creature the gentleman is wholly delightful in that he
is wholly predicable. The Christian is not predicable, for the simple
reason that he has been given a counsel of perfection. You know that
any given Christian will, by the day of his majority, have done some,
at least, of the things which the Catechism has expressly warned him
not to do. “The way that can be walked upon is not the perfect way,”
said Laotse long ago. The Church does not believe that you have always
done everything that your sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you
would do. The confessional is itself the greatest confession that the
Church has ever made. One of the most convenient things about Honor is
that its explicit code is limited; and you can say of some men when
they die that they have never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen.
Honor is of the world, worldly--and some people have distorted that
magnificent fact into an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has done
in “Tomlinson.”
All this about Honor is not so much a digression as an approach.
For if few people will quarrel with the lies of implication and of
convention, and most people pray to be delivered from the lie of
self-defence, the lie “of obligation” cannot be juggled away; and it is
the lie of obligation which Honor commands. Honor has never permitted,
still less commanded, a lie for personal gain or satisfaction of any
kind; but there are cases when the gentleman must lie if he is to be
a gentleman. The gentleman does not betray the friend who has trusted
him, even though he may bitterly object to having that friend’s
secrets on his hands. From that supreme obligation lies sometimes of
necessity result. I said just now that Honor and John Calvin must often
have fought for the young soul; and it does not take an over-vivid
imagination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of the Decalogue)
has tended to lump all lies together as the offspring of the Devil,
while the code of the gentleman has always set aside a few lies as
consecrated and _de rigueur_. But the gentleman, I venture to
say, has always told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays down
his life for his friend. For no gentleman lies, on any occasion, with
unmixed pleasure. He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags.
It is easier--as some sociologists do--to plot the curves of a
desire than to fix the boundaries of truth. The domain of truth
is not world-wide: that, we know. They must be home-keepers
indeed--perpetually cradled--who need never lie. Literal truth is
imprisoned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, affecting to be
the ruler of the world. Even the faithful know that the claim is vain.
The lies of obligation and convention are not, in the deepest sense,
unveracious; for they are not pre-eminently intended to deceive. We
expect them of other civilized beings and expect other civilized beings
to expect them of us. Speaking such falsehoods, and such falsehoods
only, we are still on truth’s own ground. The lie told for the liar’s
own sake marks the moment when a man has passed from beneath her
standard, across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is already
hot-foot into the jungle.