THE TEDIUM OF TRUTHFULNESS.
AMONG the many make-believes of our civilised society, we know of none more hollow than the theory that every decent person speaks the truth. We are not obliged, in any other direction, to pretend to believe in the faultlessness of our friends. We may suppose it possible that they should some- times fail in kindness, in generosity, even in justice, without insulting them, without necessarily offending them, if they have any sense ; everything depends upon the manner in which a hint at any failure of this nature is expressed. But in the case of truth it is the suspicion itself that is unpardonable. The only case in which we know of a hero of fiction being allowed to express such a doubt occurs in the novel in which a heroine of George Sand captivates, among her other lovers, no less a personage than Frederick the Great, and is asked by him, after a statement which fully justifies the query, and with a frank- ness no doubt authenticated by plenty of historic precedent, —" Est-ce vrai, ce que vows avez dit ?" Why may ordinary mortals never imitate him P They may ask, without offending any one but a fool,—Is that just? Why may they never say,— Is that true ? There is an obvious reason for the difference. We must not have two grades of truth in social, as there is in civil intercourse ; we must not (it seems to us a misfortune that we have done so anywhere), by fencing-off a certain domain in which lying is heinous, provide a territory on which it becomes venial. This is a very good reason for avoiding an appeal to any one to certify the truth of his own words. But so far as it becomes an assumption that the assertions of ordinary, respect- able people are habitually true, it is a misfortune, for it con- ceals the difficulty, and lowers the standard of truth.
For as we assume that it is an insult to suppose any one has said what is not true, we must suppose the ordinary intercourse of respectable mankind is truthful, and then we are obliged to allow that all sorts of statements wholly at variance with fact are not untruthful. There are certain directions in which we all recognise that others have a right to correct information, and give it them, just as we pay our debts; but this is a question of honesty, not of truth. A great Pro- testant teacher was indignant with a great Catholic teacher for reporting on the title-page of his reply the Protestant's assertion that Catholics were indifferent to truth, without his qualification, "for the sake of truth ;" and if the charge itself had not been repeatedly quoted, worl for word, in the reply, we should certainly have felt some sympathy with Mr. Kingsley in regarding the distinction as an important one. But if he means that truth for truth's sake is a common ideal anywhere, we do not agree with him. We need not go among Catholics for instances of a false impression conveyed with a good con- science ; anybody may observe the phenomenon, who will ask his neighbour certain questions which people do ask each other surprisingly often. The ordinary standard justifies an answer conveying a false impression when the inquirer has no right to a true impression, and when a refusal to answer would convey, and often exaggerate, the very facts which it is desirable to con- ceal. It is not a lie, people think, to say something untrue, when you are asked an impertinent question, which a refusal to answer would practically answer. Very well, then, find some other name for a justifiable untruth, and let us give up pretending that we condemn all untruth. The refusal to call any statement false unless it is also treacherous or dishonest has blurred our moral vision, in leading us to con- found two qualities which are perfectly distinct ; and whether it be right always to tell the truth or not, we are quite sure that every one should know when he is telling an untruth. The most disastrous falsehoods are those of which the speaker is unconscious, and there is at least one person to whom each of no should be careful to be absolutely sincere,—himself.
One of the disadvantages of this pretence that truth is com- mon, is that it hides from us the reality that truth is difficult. It is allowed by every one to be difficult for " the lower orders." People do not expect it to be very accurate, when they come to deal with maids-of-all-work, small shopkeepers, and the like; but they are apt to suppose that the difficulty diminishes with every rise in life, and vanishes when we lose sight of its struggles and sordid miseries. But we avow our own strong suspicion that even the Peerage itself does not remove men and women from the sphere of this difficulty. "I suppose anybody would tell a lie to save a noise," said a gamekeeper once, we hope with some exaggeration of the general objection to what he meant by a " noise," but with substantial accuracy as to the range of the temptation to escape many words about a vexed ques- tion by some brief, convenient fiction. Truth on any matter in which measurement of time and space is inapplicable, and in which the issue could not be put into a ques- tion answerable by " Yes " or " No," is distinguished by a lamentable want of simplicity, which the artistic mind uncon- sciously corrects as it goes along. Indeed, even the inartistic mind is driven to feel that life is not long enough for unadulter- ated truth. This is one of the allurements to lying that moralists have failed to notice ; they have remarked on the danger, the unpopularity, the general expensiveness of truth, but it has, we flatter ourselves, been left to us to point out that one of the greatest difficulties in the path of one who makes it his habitual aim is that it is so extremely tedious.
Our discovery must not be attenuated to a mere assertion of the well-known fact that truth is prosaic. People should learn to bear what is prosaic. Novels are to be had in plenty at every book-stall, and nobody has any right to demand that we should tax on his behalf at once our imagi- nation and our conscience. Truth may be absolutely unin- teresting, but it is not necessary that the speaker should be anything else. But that he should be tedious, to the extent to which truthfulness is tedious, is an evil which we all naturally aim at avoiding, without perceiving that, as we succeed, truth is insensibly modulated into fiction. Omit everything that is tiresome from an anecdote, and you no longer tell it just as it happened. Some time ago, one of the readers of a popular biography confessed that its hero's character for truthfulness had sunk in his estimation, from the discovery that a trivial incident in which he had been a spectator, so that the details were fresh in his memory, was so narrated (inthe autobiographical form) as to put the narrator in a more creditable position than he had really occupied. There may have been mixed motives at work, but we have no doubt that the change was due mainly to the fact that the incident actually told in two lines would, if given exactly as it happened, have occupied five or six. The desire to narrate a trifling incident briefly is quite enough of an induce- ment to drop all those explanatory parentheses which make any fragment from history accurate, while the mere effort to give a central interest to any little incident in which one has been an actor insensibly tends to increase the import- ance of one's own part in it. If our conduct, as Fielding happily says, comes filtered from our own lips, our importance always comes from the same source slightly magnified ; and this instinct by which we avoid whatever dilutes and enfeebles interest, does no more than sweep a clear apace for the per- sonality—be it our own or another's—which we aim at bringing out in all its distinctness. All this is true of mere narrative, but when we come to the world of opinion, though on the one hand the temptations of egotism are less, the necessities of limitation are, on the other, very much greater. We might, perhaps, get a hearer to attend to what we have done, but where is one who will hear us out, if we attempt on any subject not perfectly simple to explain all we think P And so we choose, naturally and rightly, the part of opinion that our hearer will listen to, and express that, and nothing more. It is impossible to say that these fragments of our belief, as they are transferred to another mind, are either false or true. They certainly appear extremely inconsistent if two hearers compare them. Suppose, for instance, that two guests at a dinner party, one a Liberal and one a Conservative, con- secutively ask a third what he thinks of a speech just made by Mr. Gladstone. He tries to select from the complicated feelings with which he regards it some one with which, on each occasion, he knows his hearer is in sympathy—or possibly some one with which he knows him to be in strong antagonism, for sometimes we wish to wave our banner—but at any rate, some feeling which he knows will be speedily intelligible to his hearer. "I think it a very fine speech," he replies, let us say on the amiable theory, to the Liberal ; and on the same principle, when the Conservative repeats the question, he tries
to find something which may form the basis of a real discussion' and says that it did not appear to him very well adapted for its object." An interruption occurs, and these words remain as
a summary of his entire view in the mind of his hearer, who next day communicates it to the Liberal inquirer. " So your
warmest Liberals confess that Gladstone's speech was a very poor production," he exclaims, repeating, as he thinks, " X's " opinion with perfect accuracy. The indignant protest leads to a repetition of the little dialogue, and "R " being proved to have said to a Liberal that Mr. Gladstone has made a very fine speech, and to a Conservative that the same speech was very poor (and very likely his last hearer is ready to swear that that was the exact expression he used), is set down as a humbug, and if either of his hearers is a man of rank or position, as a snob into the bargain. Yet all the while he has expressed with perfect sincerity the only part of his opinion that he felt could be truly expressed to either hearer, without an amount of tedium that neither of them would have endured. If he had occupied the two hours of dinner with a delineation of his views as they abutted on Liberal territory, and taken up the
rest of the evening with the opposite facade, he might have combined the broken fragments of his opinion in a coherent whole, and escaped the suspicion of insincerity. But what mortal host would ever have made him welcome to his 'threshold again ? A man who gave his opinions like the American orator, with the proviso that " if you do not ap- prove of them, gentlemen, they can be changed," might contribute so much wit, or fancy, or good spirits, or social pleasantness of some kind to the banquet, that he should always find a place there ; but a speaker who poured forth his political views from the first spoonful of soup; to the last spoonful of Ice would not be redeemed from abhorrence, if his reasonings might be bound up with the speeches of Burke without our discovering the difference. And observe that this discrepancy .cannot be set down to a mere wish to be in sympathy with the person one is addressing. The principle on which one selects a fragment of one's opinion for expression is quite distinct from the fact that a small fragment has to be selected, and the moral of our fable would be just the same, if we suppose the speaker animated by antagonism, instead of by sympathy. if he felt himself, as many people do, a Conservative among Liberals, and a Liberal among Conservatives—or (to express our meaning in a form which itself becomes more tedious the moment it becomes more accurate) if he felt that the necessary truth for a Radical was that all harmless things should be preserved, so far as they were rooted in the past; and for a Conservative, that all harmful .things should be destroyed, although they were rooted in the past—he might be convicted of just as much insincerity, when the two came to compare his answers to the same question. It is the fact that truth is a relation between hearer and speaker, and not that that relation must be one of sympathy, which forces us, in speaking to different people, to use different language.
And if we feel this necessity in matters which, like political questions, are regarded by a great number of people from the same point of view, however unintelligible is that point of view to others, we shall feel it much more pressingly in matters of personal interest and difficulty. It is true that these are, for the most part, subjects on which nobody has any right .to ask questions ; but it is surprising how often they sin in this way, and even when there is very little temptation. The .most impertinent questions are asked every day, by people who are not the least impertinent, and who care extremely little about the answers. Most of our readers, we should imagine, had been asked some time or other how some marriage in their immediate connection was liked, and had not the .slightest compunction in answering untruly. After all, what they avoid in amiable fiction merely has its place supplied by =amiable fiction. Suppose the hearer is informed of the fact that the marriage has been opposed as long as possible, he would often go away with an even more fallacious impression of the real state of the case between the two families about to .be connected. Perhaps the best punishment for asking im- pertinent questions would be, in many cases, the extreme tedium of listening to their answers, only that the school. master's commonplace, "It hurts me more than it hurts you," would be bras of the person obliged to inflict it. To have to listen, with such an appearance of decent interest as could hardly be withheld, to the mixed feelings which are occasioned by a marriage, to be obliged to understand the proportion of regret in a feeling that we may truly describe as satisfaction, of heartfelt joy in a feeling that we are obliged to avow as regret,
might perhaps make an impertinent questioner think twice before he dropped out his vapid queries again. But more valuable things than his patience would have to be sacrificed, and these sinners, we fear, must be left unpunished, if the only resources in the hand of justice consist of the tediousness of truth.
It is not only in answer to a question, however, that we are from this reason forced into untruth. Even the forms in which we are obliged to express our most spontaneous feelings are sometimes untruthful, unless they are intolerably lengthy. " I envy you your happiness," we exclaim ; and nothing is more unlike envy
than the feeling with which we regard the relation or possession. Now, try to translate the feeling which we thus shortly express into something that is not misleading. "The sight of your happiness brings vividly before me an appreciation of the im- portance and value of those circumstances on which it depends, and a wish to partake in them, if it were possible without diminishing your share in them." We beg our reader's pardon for illustrating our theme so forcibly ; but let him try his hand, if he is dissatisfied with our attempt. He will find that there is no short way of suggesting this truth, but by saying what is false. And in this case, the falsehood seems to us particularly unfortunate. Our words react on our feelings, and it is a moral disaster to bring the tainting word envy so near the purest emotions of our nature. The sight of the blessings which we do not share may raise the purest or the most ignoble feelings in our heart; the tediousness of truth, or the poverty of lan- guage, forces us to use one expression for both, and so, to some extent, actually to confuse them.
It may be objected to the above remarks that falsehood may be very tedious, as well as truth. It cannot be asserted, indeed, that any form of error is secured from tedium. The most hetero- dox doctrine, the most untrustworthy history, even the most insincere statement about the speaker, may all be made extremely wearisome ; we may yawn over the most inaccurate information, and under the most unsound theology. But the union of error and tedium is the result of mere superfluity of naughtiness. The fair virgin Truth is wooed assiduously by this worthy bore ; go where she may, he is not far off, those who seek her must perforce put up with at least a sight of him. But that flaunting damsel Error, if she appears in his company, must seek him out ; he never forces himself upon her, has, in fact, no lurking tenderness for her whatever. Error may be tedious, but truth must be. At least, it can only escape the danger on one of two conditions ; it must con- cern matters of actual measurement and physical obser- vation, or it must be spoken by a man of genius. It may be conveyed in a compendious form, we presume, to the mathematician, the physicist, the statistician ; but the moment you try to tell truths that are interesting to human beings as such, the moment you aim at truth about character, you enter on ground where truth without tedium is the privilege of genius. We have no intention of apologising for the falsehoods of those gifted beings who can put the truth in a small compass. We should have as little mercy for a man of distinguished literary power who left a false impression on his hearers, as for a great general who fought a duel. Literary fame is as much a guarantee of the power of conveying one's meaning as military fame is of courage ; the possessor of the first is as guilty if he fails to use his power, as is the second if he make use of such an opportunity as a challenge to assert it. But the rank and file of humanity have the choice, in almost all the occurrences of life where truth is tho least difficult, of such tedium as we have—not, we fear, without an appreciable amount of practical illustration—suggested to the reader, or of falsehood. Which alternative a rigid standard of rightness would sanction, we have not attempted to decide; we merely record our own belief that, as a matter of fact, it is impossible to combine both.
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