Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863», sayfa 9

SYMPATHETIC LYING

If "all men are liars," and everybody deceives us a little sometimes, so that David's dictum hardly needs his apology of haste, it is a comfort to remember that many lies are not downright, but sympathetic; and an understanding of their nature, if it does not palliate them, may put us on our guard. Sympathetic we think a better name than the unfortunate title of white, which was given them by Mrs. Opie, because that designation carries a meaning of innocence, if not even of virtue; and instead of protecting our virtue, may even expose us to practise them without remorse. Of laughing over them and making light of them, and calling them by various ludicrous synonymes, as fibs, and telling the thing that is not, there has been enough. We have a purpose in our essay, than which no preaching could be more sober. Our aim is to give for them no opiate, but to quicken the sense of their guilt, and their exceeding mischief, too; for, if Francis Bacon be right in declaring the lie we swallow down more dangerous than that which only passes through our mind, how seriously the wine-bibbing of this sweet poison of kindly misrepresentation must have weakened the constitution of mankind! Lying for selfish gain or glory, for sensual pleasure, or for exculpation from a criminal charge, is more gross, but it involves at once such condemnation in society, and such inward reproach, as to be far less insidious than lying out of amiable consideration for others, to shield or further kinsfolk or friends, which may pass unrebuked, or stand for an actual merit. Yet, be the motive what it may, there is a certain invariable quantity of essential baseness in all violation of the truth; and it may be feared our affectionate falsehoods often work more evil than our malignant ones, by having free course and meeting with little objection. "Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for Him?" severely asks the old prophet of those who thought to cheat for their own set, as though it were in the cause of religion; and no godly soul can accept as a grateful tribute the least prevarication, however disinterested or devoted in its behalf. Indeed, no smart antithesis has been so hurtful as the overstated distinction between black lies and white. They are of different species, but have no generic difference. Charles Reade's novel, of "White Lies," in which the deceptions of love are so glorified, charming story as it is, will sap the character of whoever does not, with a mental protest, countermine its main idea. The very theory of our integrity is gone, if we do not insist on this. God has not so made the world that any perjury or cover of the facts is necessary to serve the cause of goodness. Commend it though English or German critics do, can we not conceive of a speech grander than the untruth which Shakspeare has put into the dying Desdemona's mouth?

Let us, then, examine some of the forms of sympathetic lying.

One of them is that of over-liberal praise. That a person is always ready to extol others, and was never heard to speak ill of anybody under the sun, appears to some the very crown of excellence. But what is the panegyric worth that has no discrimination, that finds any mortal faultless, or bestows on the varying and contradictory behaviors of men an equal meed? To what does universal commendation amount more than universal indifference? What value do we put on the lavish regard which is not individual, or founded on any intelligent appreciation of its object, but scattered blindly abroad on all flesh, as once thousands were vaguely baptized in the open air by a general sprinkling, and which any one can appropriate only as he may own a certain indeterminate section of an undivided township or unfenced common? To have a good word for everybody, and take exception to nothing, is to incapacitate one's self for the exquisite delight of real fellowship. We all know persons who seem a sort of social favorites on account of this gracious manner which they afford with such mechanical plenty. But what a dilution and deterioration their external quality of half-artificial courtesy becomes! It is handing round sweetened water, instead of tasting the juice of the grape. It is pouring from a pail, instead of opening a vial of sweet odors. This broadcast and easy approval lacks that very honesty which, in the absence of fineness, is the single grace by which it could be sanctified.

The same vice affects more public concerns. Of what sheer hypocrisy eulogistic resolutions upon officers leaving their posts in Church or State are too frequently composed! The men who are tired and want to get rid of their Representative or minister are so overjoyed at losing sight of him, that they can set no bounds to their thankful exaltation of his name! Truly they speed the parting guest, wish well to the traveller from their latitude, and launch with shouts the ship of his fortunes from their ways! They recommend him as a paragon of genius and learning to all communities or societies who want a service in his kind. How happy both sides to this transaction are expected to feel, and how willing people are sometimes to add to the soft words a solid testimonial of gold, if only thus a dismissal can be effected! But are not the reports of the committees and the votes of the meetings false coin, nowhere current in the kingdom of God, circulate as they may in this realm of earth? Nay, does not everybody, save the one that receives the somewhat insincere and left-handed blessing, read the formal and solemn record with a disposition to ridicule or a pitying smile?

How well it is understood that we are not to speak the truth, but only good, of the dead! How melancholy it is, that lying has come to be so common an epithet for the gravestones we set over their dust! How few obituaries characterize those for whom they are written, or are distinguishable from each other in the terms of their funeral celebrations of departed virtue! How refreshing, as rare, is any of the veritable description which implies real lamentation! But what a suspicion falls on the mourning in whose loquacity we cannot detect one natural tone! As if that last messenger, who strips off all delusions and appearances, should be pursued and affronted with the mockery of our pretence, and we could circumvent the angel of judgment with the sentence of our fond wishes and the affectation of our groundless claims! As if the disembodied, in the light of truth, by which they are surrounded and pierced, could be pleased with our make-believe, or tolerate the folly of our factitious phrase! With what sadness their purged eyes must follow the pens inditing their epitaphs, and the sculptors' chisels making the commonplaces of fulsome commendation permanent on their tombs! What vanity to their nicer ears must be the sonorous and declamatory orator's breath! Let us not offend them so. They will take it for the insult of perfunctory honor, not for the sympathy it assumes to be. Nothing but good of the dead, do you say? Nothing but truth of the dead, we answer. Do not disturb their bones; let them rest easy at last, is the commentary on all keen criticism of those who have played important parts in life, and whose influence has perhaps been a curse. No, we reply, their bones will rest easier, and their benedictions come to us surer, for our unaffected plain-dealing. The trick of flattery may succeed with the living. Those still in this world of shadows, cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in our hands. But they who have laid down all the shows of things with their own superficial countenances and mortal frames cannot be imposed upon by the faces of adulation we make up. They who listen to that other speech, whose tones are the literally translated truth, cannot be patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language. Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before whom the meaning of all things is unveiled!

But private conversation is the great sphere of sympathetic lying. Our antipathies doubtless often tempt to falsify. We stretch the truth, trying, in private quarrels, to make out our case, or holding up our end in party-controversies. Anger, malice, envy, and revenge make us often break the ninth commandment. But concession, compromise, yielding to others' influence, and indisposition to contradict those whom we love or the world respects, generate more deceit than comes from all the evil passions, which, as Sterne said of lust, are too serious to be successful in cunning play. How it would mortify most persons to have brought back to them at night exact accounts of the divers opinions they have expressed to different persons, with facile conformity to the mood of each one during the course of a single day! How the members of any pleasant evening-company might astonish or amuse each other by narrating together the contradictory views the same voluble discourser has unfolded to them successively during the passage of one hour! so easily we bend and conform, and deny God and ourselves, to gratify the guest we converse with. On account of a few variations, scholars have composed what they call Harmonies of the Gospels; but how much harder it would be for any one of us to harmonize his talk on any subject moving the minds of men! Where strong self-interest acts, we can explain changes and inconsistencies in the great organs set up to operate on public sentiment. Such a paper as the London "Times," having nothing higher than avaricious commerce and national pride to consult, in a conspicuous centre of affairs has thus become the great weathercock of the world, splendidly gilded, lifted very high in the air, but, like some other stupid chanticleers, crowing at false signals of the dawn, and well called the "Times," as in its columns nothing eternal was ever evinced. Everywhere exist these agents of custom and convention, wielded by a power behind them, and holding long no one direction, but varying in every wind. Some breeze of general policy, however, prescribes the law of these alterations, while only a weak and brainless sensibility, blowing from every source, commonly occasions the continual veering of our private word. Through what manifold phases a good conversationist has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights that glance blue, silver, yellow, and green from the shifting angles of the gems that move with their wearers, or the confused motions of some of our inferior fellow-creatures that flutter from side to side of the road as intimidating objects fail on the eyes planted on opposite sides of their heads, feebly symbolize these human displays of unstable equilibrium. We must adapt our method to circumstances; but the apostolic rule, of "All things to all men," should not touch, as in Paul it never did, the fundamental consistency of principle which is the chief sign of spiritual life. The degree of elevation in the scale of being is marked by the approximation of the sight to a focus of unity. But, judging from the pictures they give us of their interior states, we might think many of our rational companions as myriad-eyed as naturalists tell us are some insects. Behold the wondrous transformation undergone by those very looks and features that give the natural language, as sentiments contrary to each other are successively presented, and Republican or Democrat, Pro-Slavery man or Abolitionist, walks up! In truth, a man at once kindly and ingenuous can hardly help in most assemblies coming continually to grief. He knows not what to do, to be at once frank and polite. The transverse beams of the cross on which he is crucified are made of the sincerity and amiability which in no company can he quite reconcile. Happy is he who has discovered beneath all pleasant humors the unity at bottom of candor with goodness, in an Apostle's clause, "speaking the truth in love"! No rare and beautiful monster could stir more surprise and curiosity. It is but shifting the scene from a domestic dwelling to a concert-hall to notice how much sympathetic lying is in all applause. We saw a young man vigorously clap the performance to which he had not listened, and, when the encore took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of music to accompany the somewhat famous lines known as "Napoleon's Midnight Review." The great artist, feeling the untruth to his genius of any such attempt at description in sound, with gentle energy declines the request. He affirms that music is a most sober thing in his thoughts, that notes have their veracity as well as words, and even a deeper relation to reality than any other tongue or dialect of province or people, and that acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie. Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, our common questions and answers more melodiously responsive than chants in great cathedrals, and our lowest whispers like tones caught from angelic harps. For truth and tenderness are not, after all, incompatible; but whoever is falsely fond alone proves himself in the end harsh and rough. The sympathetic lie is of all things most unsympathetic, smoothing and stroking the surface to haunt and kill at the very centre and core. The proclamation from the house-top of what is told in the ear in closets will give more pain than if it were fairly published at first. There is a distinction here to be noted. All truth, or rather all matter of fact, does not, of course, belong to everybody. There are private and domestic secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing, minding others' business, interfering with their relations, impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand, and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been scattered through the earth, though having less to do with truth than with the falsehood, to promulgate which artful and malicious combination of facts is one of the Devil's most skilful means, while truth is always no mere fact or circumstance, but a spirit. Sincerity consists in dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such discrete sentences—if we may use rhetorically a musical word—from your lips afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall kiss each other.

Another form of sympathetic lying appears in a part of the social machinery whose morality has somehow been more strangely and unhappily overlooked,—we mean in letters of introduction. But the falsehood is only by perversion. The letter of introduction is an affair of noble design, to bring together parties really related, to give room for the elective affinities of friendship, to furnish occasion for the comparison of notes to the votaries of science, to extend the privilege of all liberal arts, and promote the offices of a common brotherhood. How much we owe to these little paper messengers for the new treasures of love and learning they have brought! It is hard to tell whose debt to them is greatest, that of the giver, the bearer, or the receiver, or whether, beyond all private benefit and pleasure, their chief result has not been the improvement and refinement of the human race. But, it must be confessed, the letter of introduction is too much fallen and degenerate. Convenience, depredation, the compassing of by-ends, rather than any loving communion, is too often its intent. It savors less of the paradise of affection than of the vulgar wilderness of the world. We are a little afraid of it, when it comes. A worthy man told me he knew not whether to be sorry or glad, when he found a letter addressed to him at the post-office. How does the balance incline, when a man or woman stands before us with a letter of introduction in hand? We eye it with a mistrust that it may turn out to be a tool of torture, serving us only for a sort of mental surgery. Frequently, it has been simply procured, and is but an impudent falsehood on its very face. The writer of it professes an admiration he does not feel for the person introduced, to whose own reading he leaves it magnificently open before its terms of exaggerated compliment can reach him to whom it is sent. What is the reason of this deceit? there is a ground for it, no doubt. "This effect defective comes by cause." The inditer has certainly some sympathy with the bearer he so amply commissions and wordily exalts. This bearer has some distress to be relieved, some faculty to exercise, some institution to recommend, or some ware to dispose of. He that forwards him to us very likely has first had him introduced to himself, has bestowed attention and hospitable fellowship upon him, and now, growing weary of the care and trouble and expense, is very happy to be rid of him at so small a cost as that of passing him on to a distant acquaintance by a letter of introduction, which the holder's business in life is to carry round from place to place through the world! Sometimes dear companions call on us to pay this tax; sometimes those who themselves have no claim on us. But, be it one class or the other, how little they may consider what they demand! Upon what a neglect or misappreciation of values the proceed! Verily we need a new Political Economy written, deeper than that of Malthus or Smith, to inform them. Our precious time, our cordial regards, the diversion of our mind from our regular duties, the neglect of already engrossing relations in our business or profession, the surrender of body and soul, they require for the prey of idlers and strangers! Had our correspondents drawn upon us for a sum of money, had a highwayman bid us stand and deliver our purse, we should not have been so much out of pocket. But we cannot help yielding; there is no excuse or escape. We are under the operation of that most delicate and resistless of powers no successor of Euclid ever explained the principle of, which may be called the social screw. We submit patiently, because we cannot endure to deny to the new-comer the assumed right of him who cruelly turns it, out of reach and out of sight. We know some men, of extraordinary strength of countenance themselves, who have been able to defend their door-stone against an impostor's brazen face. A good householder, when a stage-full of country-cousins came to his door, bade the driver take them to the hotel, and he would willingly pay the bills. But few have the courage thus to board out those who have a staff in their hands to knock at the very gate of their hearts. There would be satisfaction in the utmost amount of this labor and sacrifice, could we have any truth for its condition. But the falsehood has been written down by one whom we can nowise accuse. Alas! there is often as little truth in the entertainer. All together in the matter are walking in a vain show. We are at the mercy of a diviner's wand and a conjurer's spell. We have put on a foolish look of consent and compromise. We join with our new mate in extolling the wrong-doer who has inflicted him upon us. We dare not analyze the base alloy of the composition he conveys, which pretends to be pure gold. We must either act falsely ourselves, or charge falsehood upon others. We prefer the guilt to seeming unkindness; when, if we were perfectly good and wise, we should shake off the coil of deception, refuse insincere favors, and, however infinite and overflowing our benevolence, insist on doing, in any case, only willing and authentic good,—for affection is too noble to be feigned. "If," said Ole Bull, "I kiss my enemy, what have I left for my friend?" We must forgive and love our enemies and all men, and show our love by treating them without dissimulation, but a sublime openness, according to their needs and deserts.

The male or female adventurers, launching with their bag of letters for all their merchandise on the social sea, understand well the potent value, beyond bills of exchange, of the sheets they bear. They may have taken them as an equivalent for some service they have rendered, in discharge of some actual or apparent obligation in the great market limited to no quarter of our towns and no description of articles, but running through every section of human life. Our acceptance of these notes is a commercial transaction, not of the fairest sort. It belongs to a species of trade in which we are made to pay other people's debts, and our dear friends and intimate relations sell us for some song or other which has been melodiously chanted into their own ears. "A new way to pay old debts," indeed! Every part of the bargain or trick of the game is by the main operators well known and availed of for their own behoof. By letter, persons have been introduced into circles where they had no footing, posts for whose responsibilities they were utterly unfit, and trusts whose funds they showed more faculty to embezzle than apply. Such licentious proceedings have good-natured concessions to wrong requests multiplied to the hurt of the commonweal. Let us beware of this kind of sympathetic lie, which ends in robbery, and swindles thousands out of what is more important than material property, for the support of pretenders that are worse than thieves, who are bold enough, like drones, to break into the hive of the busy and eat the honey they never gathered, absorbing to themselves, as far as they can, the courtesy of the useful members of the community by the worst monopoly in the world.

Our treatment of the subject would be partial, if we did not emphasize the advantage of a right use, of this introductory prerogative. What more delightful to remember than that we brought together those who were each other's counterparts? What more beautiful than to have put the deserving in the way of the philanthropic, and illustrated the old law, that, grateful as it is to have our wants supplied, a lofty soul always finds it more blessed to give than to receive, and a boon infinitely greater to exercise beneficent affection than even to be its object? It ill becomes us who write on this theme to put down one unfair or churlish period. We too well remember our own experience in circumstances wherein our only merit was to be innocent recipients of abundant tokens of good-will; and perhaps the familiar instance may have pardon for its recital, in illustration of the mercy which the letter-bearer may not seldom find. An epistle from a mutual acquaintance was our opportunity of intercourse with a venerable bachelor residing in the city of Antwerp. It was so urged upon us, that the least we could do was to present it, expecting only a few minutes' agreeable conversation. Shall we ever forget the instant welcome that beamed from his benignant face, or how he honored the draft upon him by immediately calling upon all the members of our travelling-party? how literally, against all our expostulations, he gave himself up to us, attending us to picture-galleries and zoological gardens, insisting on disbursing the entrance-fee for us all, with our unavoidable allowance at the moment, and, on our exaction of a just reckoning with him at last, declining to name the sum, on the unanswerable plea of an old man's poor and failing memory! "Does the old man still live?" Surely he does the better life in heaven, if his gray locks on earth are under the sod, and it is too late for these poor lines to reach his eyes, for our sole repayment. Without note, but only chance introduction, a similar case of disinterested bounty in Liverpool from one of goodness undiscriminating as the Divine, which gives the sun and rain to all, stood in strange contrast with the reception of a Manchester manufacturer, almost whose only manifestation in reply to the document we tendered was a sort of growl that we could see mills in Lowell like those under his own control. Perhaps, from his shrewd old head, as he kept his seat at his desk, like a sharp-shooter on the watch and wary for the foe, he only covered us with the surly weapon of his tongue in the equitable way for which we have here been contending ourselves! Certainly we were quite satisfied, if the Englishman was.

But printed lies, as well as written, are largely sympathetic. We are bitter against the press; and surely it needs a greater Luther for its reformer. But its follies are ours; its corruptions belong to its patrons. The editor of a paper edits the mind of those that take it. He cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we all are, while he is one, and must not be blamed on his own score alone. The London "Times," already mentioned, is called the Thunderer; but, like the man behind the scenes at the theatre with his machinery, it thunders as it is told. How sympathetic are the countless brood of falsehoods respecting our country in foreign publications is evident from the cases, too few, of periodicals which, with the same means of information, rise to a noble accuracy and justice. While the more virulent, like the "Saturday Review," servile to its peculiar customers, make a show of holding out against the ever more manifest truth, others, among which is even the "Times" itself, learn the prudence of an altered style. When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of public opinion. "Stop my paper" is a cry whose real meaning is for the constituency which the paper represents.

It is a more shameful illustration of the same weakness, when the pens of literary men, not dependent on local support, are subsidized by the prejudice or sold to the pride and wealth of the society in which they live. "I believe in testifying," once said a great man; and we have, among the philosophic and learned, noble witnesses for the equity of our national case. But what a spectacle of degraded functions, when poets, historians, and religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name, whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of making of themselves a public shame. The great revenge of years will turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed, and a hearty love of truth, while every covering of lies shall be torn away. They who have despised our free institutions, and prophesied our downfall, and gloated by anticipation over the destruction of our country, to get the lease of a hundred years more to their own lordship of Church and State, and have put their faith in the oppressive Rebels trying to build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other elevations than of the surface of the globe, in this hemisphere, the Transatlantics may yet behold.