The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1902-03-15
ON THE WORST DISADVANTAGE OF LYING
as A FINE ART.


Not very long ago, when St.
Louis Desdemona who had run awav
from home to get married, told the
clerk in the license office that she was
lover eighteen it appeared subse-
quently that, in order to do it con-
scientiously she had written the fig
ures "I8" on two separate slips of
paper which she had put inside her
shoes. AS suppose she took great
pains to keep the slips between the
bottom of her stockings and the in
soles of her shoes, so that the tender
ness of her I7-year-old conscience
might be respected, have no inten-
ton whatever of making conduct a
text for discourse on the disadvan-
tages of lying. Her Othello has per-
fectly straight hair and there is no
indication of burnt cork in his COM
plexion. If Desdemona goes on as
conscientiously as she has begun, the
worst that can be said of her is that
she will become "a very honest wo-
man, but something given to lie, as
woman should not do but in the way
of her honesty" So, instead of say
ing to her Othel1o:
Look to her, Moor; have quick eye to see;
She has deceived her father and may theel-
am rather inclined to warn him to
be cautious in the way he handles the
mattress and the pillows in express
ing his own ideas of veracity.
Altogether aside from her case,
however, there are certain inevitable
consequences of unveracity in all its
forms, the worst of which is general
ly lost sight of. When man who
begins lying for what he considers a
worthy object, finds that "a lie we'll
stuck to is as good as the truth for
his immediate purposes, he hastensto
conclude that it is better for all pur-
poses, and hence sticks to it and to as
many more of the same kind as he
can conveniently invent without
straining his intellect. The inevita-
bic result of this, if he sticks to it, is
that he will acquire the habit of be-
lieving his own lie, at first with diff
Guilty, but finally with the most in
credible facility.
1 have seen but one exception to
this rule, and / am not yet convinced
that it was real exception. have
known of one man, and only one, in
whom the currents of veracity and
unveracity seemed to run PARALLEL to
each other without mingling. In
everything that belonged to his busi-
ness, he was exact, careful, methodi-
cal, accurate to the last degree. Any
thing he said or wrote on matter of
business was matter of fact, with not
word or suggestion beyond the facts.
But on anything outside of business
or everything which belonged to his
own personal experience, he was so
wholly unaware of what ought to be
the necessary connection between fact
and statement, that though at last
he came to believe everything he said,
no one else believed him at all. It
was found by tabulating the putative
dates of the personal experiences he
had related that he would have ex-
ceeded more than two of the longest
lifetimes. Hence at last no one who
knew him ever thought of suggesting
any difficulty in the way of accepting
his stories. He was so thoroughly
convinced of them himself, to all ap-
pearances, that it gave him pain to
have them suspected of even trihing
inaccuracy. The only theory which
explained him was that he had mis-
applied great gift Of constructive
imagination which, if rightly applied,
might have made him immortal as a
dramatist or a novelist. The wholly
extraordinary feature of his extraor-
binary unveracity was that he was
never known to attempt to put it to
merely commercial uses. cart for
arts sake" was evidently his rule
from the beginning, until his art had
become a second nature. That he
did not attempt to use the art of
which he had become master in TAX
ing advantage of any one in any bus
mess dealings with his fellow-man he
was painfully matter-of-fact, is the
unaccountable feature of his unac-
countable case.
As genuine lie is intended to de-
ceive not only for the sake of art,
but of taking advantage of the per-
son deceived, perhaps he was not,
strictly speaking, liar at all, but
merely a romancer. The result was
the same, however, as far as it went,
for the art he had mastered, mastered
him at last. This must happen in
the art of lying as in every other art.
At last, when he has mastered it, the
artist and the art are completely at
one with each other; all that was at
first repugnant between them has
wholly disappeared. Hence a man
who has really become an artistic liar,
must inevitably lose all repugnance to
his own lies and regard them with all
the fondness he might have felt for
the most sublime truth If he had CIV
en- it the devotion of lifetime. The
result of this is twofold. In the first
place, he does not know when he is
telling the truth himself, and in the
second lie does not and can not know
when any one else is telling it.-LGy
Pyeache, in 81. Louis Globe-Dem0cyat.
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