Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

by Richard Le Gallienne

A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft. Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and death upon the neighbours or their cattle.

You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of the malignant gossip.

In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever individuals are originally responsible, society at large is all too culpably particeps criminis in this phenomenon under consideration. If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the evil seed of slander, the human soil is all too evilly ready to receive it, to give it nurture, and to reproduce it in crops persistent as the wild carrot and flamboyant as the wild mustard.

There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another. In all times it has been in this field of inter-racial and international prejudice that the gossip has found the widest scope for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful cause of wars, insuperable barriers to progress, fabulous growths which the enlightenment of the world painfully labours to weed out, but will perhaps never entirely eradicate.

Race-hatred is undoubtedly nine-tenths the heritage of ancient gossip. Think of the generations of ill-feeling that kept England and France, though divided but by a narrow strait, "natural enemies" and misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship of England and America has been retarded by international gossips on both sides. And as for races and nations more widely separated by distance or customs, no lies have been bad enough for them to believe about one another.

It is only of late years that Europe has come to regard the peoples of the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunderstanding has largely been the work of gossip acting upon ignorance.

It is easy to see how in the days of difficult communication, before nations were able to get about in really representative numbers to make mutual acquaintance, they were completely at the mercy of a few irresponsible travellers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted in each nation believing that it was superior to all others, and that the natives of other countries were invariably hopelessly dirty and immoral, to say the least. Such reports the traveller was expected to bring home with him, and such he seldom failed to bring.

Even at the present time, when intercourse is so cosmopolitan, and some approach to a sense of human brotherhood has been arrived at, the old misconceptions die hard. Nations need still to be constantly on their guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages for cosmopolitan rapprochements, is not invariably employed in the interests of truth, and newspaper correspondents, if not watched, are liable to be an even more dangerous form of international gossip than the more leisurely fabulist of ancient time.

When we come to consider the operation of gossip in the lives of individuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting rumour is pitifully conspicuous. We know Hamlet's opinion on the matter: