Then again there is old Caleb Balderstone, querulous at being what he calls “forced” to imperil his soul “wi’ telling ae lee after another faster than I can count them,”—and elsewhere at the “cost” of “telling twenty daily lees to a wheen idle chaps and queans, and, what’s waur, without gaining credence.”
And for another instance we have the titular Earl of Etherington, in “St. Ronan’s Well,” in the position as of a spider when he perceives that his deceitful web is threatened with danger, and sits balanced in the centre, watching every point, and uncertain which he may be called upon first to defend. “Such is one part, and not the slightest part, of the penance which never fails to wait on those, who, abandoning the ‘fair play of the world,’ endeavour to work out their purposes by a process of deception and intrigue.”
In one of Mr. Disraeli’s earlier fictions, there is a young man whose frankness is proverbial, but who finds himself involved in a course of prevarication—due effect being given to its preliminary process, though “only the commencement of the system of degrading deception which awaited him.”
But perhaps the most direct and forcible illustration of the subject in modern fiction, is to be found in the “White Lies” of Mr. Charles Reade, a work the title of which declares its didactic scope. Rose Beaurépaire in an unguarded moment equivocates, or tells a white lie, and thereby hangs the tale. Soon we have her bitterly bewailing the imbroglio in which she has involved herself and others, and the necessity of fresh fibs to maintain the meaning and credit of the first. “There is no end to it,” she sobs despairingly. “It is like a spider’s web: every struggle to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to bind me.” In the next chapter a significant paragraph intimates, “This was the last lie the poor entangled wretch had to tell that morning.” And the penultimate chapter opens with a notice anew of the “fatal entanglement” into which two high-minded sisters had been led, through yielding to a natural foible: the desire, namely, to hide everything painful from those they loved, even at the expense of truth. The author lays stress on the inextricable complications due to their “amiable dishonesty,” and he importunes the reader to take notice that after the first White Lie or two, circumstances overpowered them, and drove them on against their will. It was no small part, he insists, of all their misery, that they longed to get back to truth and could not.
[35] In apposition, or opposition, to which, note the bidding and the demur in Talfourd’s tragedy of “Ion”:—
“Adrastus. No; strike at once; my hour is come: in thee
I recognise the minister of Jove,
And, kneeling thus, submit me to his power.
Ion. Avert thy face.
Adras. No; let me meet thy gaze,” etc.