Lie engenders lie. Once committed, the liar has to go on in his course of
lying. It is the penalty of his transgression, or one of the penalties.
To the habitual liar, bronzed and hardened in the custom, till custom
becomes second nature, the penalty may seem no very terrible price
to pay. To him, on the other hand, who, without deliberate intent,
and against his innermost will, is overtaken with such a fault, the
generative power of a first lie to beget others, the necessity of
supporting the first by a second and a third, is a retribution keenly to
be felt, while penitently owned to be most just.
Though it was afar off that Peter followed his Master to the
high-priest’s house, yet he did follow; and, we may be sure, with little
thought, and still less intention, of denying Him even once. But as he
sat by the fire and warmed himself, the identification of him by a
certain maid as certainly a disciple of Christ was boldly met by the
affirmation, or negation, “Woman, I know Him not.” The lie was uttered;
the winged word of falsehood was on its way. And there an end, he
perhaps hoped. But after a little while, another bystander recognised
him, and asserted the damaging recognition, “Thou art also of them.”
Another denial was the consequence: “Man, I am not.” An hour passed
away, and Peter, in sullen misery and bewilderment, self-consciously an
abject coward and confirmed liar, had to deny for the third time Him he
had denied once and again. “Of a truth,” affirmed another of the mixed
company, “this fellow also was with Him; for he is a Galilean.” And
Peter said, “Man, I know not what thou sayest.” And then the cock crew.
And then the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And at that look—so
upbraidingly expressive, so pathetically recalling recent protestations
of unfaltering allegiance, and the concurrent prediction of lapse and
abandonment—what could Peter do, but with shame and confusion of face,
and with a heart full to bursting, go out, and weep bitterly.
When he thought thereon, he wept: thought of the Master’s look, that
recalled to him the vehement assurance of loyalty met by the foretelling
of his fall. Thought, too, of the graduation of his denials; a first
involving a second, and the second exacting yet a third. The third was
the cost of the first. He had not counted the cost then. He had to pay it
now.
It was part of the prophet’s burden of woes against the doomed city, that
she had “wearied herself with lies.” Easily uttered, they may multiply
at a rate to trouble the teller of them, and weary him, if only with
the necessity of inventing new ones to back the old. He must ever be
devising fresh vouchers for his impaired and imperilled credit. He must
continually be endorsing his forged notes, and forging fresh ones that
will stand inspection. _Fallacia alia aliam trudit._ And this is weary
work.
“En quel gouffre de soins et de perplexité
Nous jette une action faite sans equité.”
And as with actions, so with words. The same speaker of the foregoing
couplet utters elsewhere the lament,—
“Ma fourbe est découverte. Oh! que la vérité
Se peut cacher longtemps avec difficulté!”
So we read in Molière. And Corneille has a play (not original) entirely
devoted to the illustration of this subject, showing _qu’il faut bonne
mémoire acrès qu’on a menti_; the Menteur κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, being one who
_entasse fourbe sur fourbe_, and is constrained by the law of his nature,
at least of habit, which is second nature, to be ever adding to the
heap of lies to which he has committed himself. A Spanish proverb—and
_Le Menteur_ is from the Spanish—declares that “for an honest man half
his wits is enough, while the whole are too little for a knave;” the
ways, that is, as Archbishop Trench expounds the adage, of truth and
uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly
sufficient for those who walk in them; whereas the ways of falsehood and
fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of
the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein—a
truth often and wonderfully confirmed in the lives of evil men.
Among the aphorisms of Dean Swift we read: “He who tells a lie is not
sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent
twenty more to maintain that one.”
It has been called the severe, but appropriate, punishment of historians
who desert the paths of truth for those of paradox, to be compelled to
defend the falsehood to which they have committed themselves against the
ever-accumulating evidences of the truth. Mr. Robertson, of Brighton,
feelingly sketches the case of one who, being unprepared and accosted
suddenly, says hastily that which is irreconcileable with strict
truth; then to substantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents
or invents something else; and so has woven round himself a mesh which
will entangle his conscience through many a weary day and many a
sleepless night.[31] One burden laid on fault, he goes on to show, is
that chain of entanglement which seems to drag down to fresh sins. “One
step necessitates many others. One fault leads to another, and crime to
crime. The soul gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound
knowledge which prophetically refused to limit Peter’s sin to once.
‘Verily I say unto thee ... thou shalt deny me thrice.’”
Mr. Froude shows us Queen Elizabeth stooping to “a deliberate lie.” At
times, he says, writing of her embarrassed policy in 1565, she “seemed
to struggle with her ignominy, but it was only to flounder deeper into
distraction and dishonour.” In October of that year she publicly denied
that she had encouraged the rebellion in Scotland. In November, we read,
“Never had Elizabeth been in greater danger; and the worst features of
the peril were the creations of her own untruths.” Again, in May, 1566:
“Meanwhile Elizabeth was reaping a harvest of inconveniences for her
exaggerated demonstrations of friendliness” to the Queen of Scots. Mary
taking her at her word, “Vainly Elizabeth struggled to extricate herself
from her dilemma; resentment was still pursuing her for her treachery
in the past autumn.... She could but shuffle and equivocate in a manner
which had become too characteristic.”[32] She was but paying the price of
lies—the being constrained to go on lying still. It is certain, affirms a
popular essayist, that nobody yet ever did anything wrong in this world
without having to tell one or more falsehoods to begin with: the embryo
murderer has to tell a lie about the pistol or dagger, the would-be
suicide about the poison he purchases; and in fine, “the ways down which
the bad ship Wickedness slides to a shoreless ocean must be greased with
lies.”[33]
English reviewers not long since were prompt to recognise in Balzac’s “La
Marâtre,” as revived to Parisian popularity, what they rightly accounted
wonderful, a moral immaculate and beyond reproach. And what is that
moral? “The necessity of a life of lying as a punishment for the one
great lie of a mercenary marriage.” One great lie is put out to interest,
and the interest is compound. One great lie involves a ramification of
others, great or small, if there be comparatives of magnitude in such
matters; and memory, if not conscience, is for ever on the stretch. The
sad expedient of renewed issues is a necessity. As with the involved
victim in one of Crabbe’s Tales:—
“Such is his pain, who, by his debt oppress’d,
Seeks by new bonds a temporary rest.”
To another section, and with another starting-point from Holy Writ, may
be referred some remaining illustrations of the subject.
_LINKED LIES._
GENESIS xxvii. 19-24.
Jacob in Esau’s goodly raiment, and his smooth skin overlaid with
goatskins, was duly prepared for a consistent course of deception.
But the lie upon lie he had to tell before his end was gained,
must have sorely tried what of conscience he then had. The primary
falsehood,—distinctly enounced in answer to his blind sire’s “Who
art thou?” “I am Esau, thy firstborn,” come back from the chase with
the venison Isaac had desired of his firstborn,—this initial lie had
immediately to be backed by another. How had he found it so quickly?
There is something revolting in the style of the unfaltering fabrication
at once ready to hand, “Because the Lord thy God brought it to me.” Then
ensued that solution of the old man’s misgivings by a manual examination
of the disguised pretender; it was Esau’s hirsute skin, sure enough,
though the voice was Jacob’s. But the blessing was given. And even
after that eventful benediction, the patriarch, with a yet lingering
apprehension, renewed the pointed question, in its directest form, “Art
thou my very son Esau?” And Jacob said, “I am.” Lie linked to lie, in a
concatenation accordingly.
_Solent mendaces luere pœnas malefici_, says Phædrus: liars usually pay
the penalty of their guilt. And Mrs. Browning vigorously states one
distinctive penalty, where she speaks of those who—
... “Pay the price
Of lies, by being constrained to lie on still.”
The author of “Romola” powerfully illustrates in that remarkable book
the embarrassments involved in one cowardly departure from truth. In
the chapter headed “Tito’s Dilemma,” the occasion arises for Tito to
fabricate an ingenious lie; an occasion “which circumstance never
fails to beget on tacit falsity.” Many chapters farther on we find him
experiencing the inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves
for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually
determines character; and it becomes a question whether all the resources
of lying will save him from being crushed by the consequences of his
habitual choice. At another juncture we read: “Tito felt more and more
confidence as he went on; the lie was not so difficult when it was once
begun; and as the words fell easily from his lips, they gave him a
sense of power such as men feel when they have begun a muscular feat
successfully.” The penalty is enforced a few pages later. “But he had
borrowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had mounted and
mounted with the years, till he belonged to the usurer, body and soul.”
Again: “To-night he had paid a heavier price than ever to make himself
safe.”[34]
In the American story of “The Gayworthys,” the like moral attaches to the
course of one unhappy woman who lets herself slide, half involuntarily,
into deeper wrong: she holds her peace; she makes herself passive. “Her
very soul lied to itself in its false, bewildered reasonings; that is
the inherent retribution of false souls.” There are some acts of folly,
remarks the most popular, probably, of contemporary English penwomen,
which carry falsehood and dissimulation at their heels as certainly as
the shadows which follow us when we walk towards the evening sun; and we
very rarely swerve from the severe boundary-line of right without being
dragged ever so much farther than we calculated upon across the border.
Corneille’s celebrated play, “Le Menteur,”—but for reading which Molière
asserts his belief that he would never have written a comedy himself,—is
“conveyed” from a Spanish original, and has itself been Englished by
Fielding; the ingenuity of the piece consisting in the manner in which
one lie is made to call for another, until their wholesale employer is
inextricably caught in the toils.
“This is the curse of every evil deed,—
That, propagating still, it brings forth evil,”
laments the elder Piccolomini, in Schiller’s trilogy. The commission of
one wrong, says Owen Feltham, puts a man upon a thousand wrongs, perhaps,
to maintain that one: injury, with injury is defended; and we commit
a greater, to maintain a less. “A lie begets a lie, till generations
succeed.” Mr. Carlyle sternly moralises on the growth of accumulated
falsities,—“sad opulence descending by inheritance, always at compound
interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on such
immensity of standing capital.” One lie, says Owen, must be thatched with
another, or it will soon rain through.
Benvenuto Cellini records in his autobiography, the bitter experiences
he endured in being tempted to lie to the duke, his patron, lest he
should forfeit the favour of the duchess—he who “was always a lover of
truth and an enemy to falsehood, being then under a necessity of telling
lies.” “As I had begun to tell lies, I plunged deeper and deeper into the
mire,”—till a very Slough of Despond it became to him.
Fool that he was, exclaims Mr. Trollope, of one of his characters in
“Framley Parsonage:” “A man can always do right, even though he has done
wrong before. But the previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the
path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last
is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.” Mr.
Thackeray sermonises to the same effect: “And so, my dear sir, seeing
that after committing any infraction of the moral laws, you must tell
lies in order to back yourself out of your scrape, let me ask you whether
you had not better forego the crime, so as to avoid the unavoidable, and
unpleasant, and daily-recurring necessity of the subsequent perjury?” And
the cleverest character this master of social satire ever drew, confesses
how it jarred on her to begin telling lies to a confiding, simple friend:
“But that is the misfortune of beginning with this kind of forgery. When
one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the
old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably
multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.”
Jeremy Taylor quaintly says of the devil in the ancient oracles, “When
he was put to it at his oracles, and durst not tell a downright lie, and
yet knew not what was truth, many times he was put to the most pitiful
shifts, and trifling equivocations, and acts of knavery, which, when they
were discovered, ... it made him much more contemptible and ridiculous
than if he had said nothing or confessed his ignorance.”
A lie has been called a two-edged sword without a hilt, which is sure
to slip and cut the hand that holds it. “After telling one lie, we
are sure to tell another; and usually, after spinning a silly, very
complicated, and disgusting web, which entangles and chokes us, we find
out that if we had told the truth, it would have been much the easier and
better plan.” Lying is likened, again, to borrowing of money-lenders;
for the credit which we get by it we have always to pay heavily for;
and at last we find that the interest by far exceeds the principal,
and we get so inextricably involved that we never fully recover. “He
who tells a lie,” says Pope, “is not sensible how great a task he
undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain
that one.” Johnson observes that nobody can live long without knowing
that falsehoods of convenience or vanity are very lightly uttered, and
when once uttered are sullenly supported. He reminds us that Boileau,
who desired to be thought a rigorous and steady moralist, having told
a petty lie to Lewis the Fourteenth, continued it afterwards by false
dates, thinking himself obliged in honour to maintain what, when he said
it, was so well received. Pope himself is taxed with similar mendacity
by Mr. de Quincey, who charges him, on a certain literary question,
with knowingly “preparing for himself a dire necessity of falsehood....
Once launched upon such a course, he became pledged and committed to
all the difficulties which it might impose. Desperate necessities would
arise, from which nothing but desperate lying and hard swearing could
extricate him.” And at a subsequent stage in the _facilis descensus_
he is described, rather imaginatively, as feeling, and groaning as he
felt, that fresh falsehoods were in peremptory demand. “This comes of
telling lies,” is supposed to be his bitter reflection: “one lie makes a
necessity for another.”