Part 25

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep; Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast,⸺’

_Lady M._ What do you mean?

_Macb._ Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murder’d sleep; and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!’”

How sleeps Lady Macbeth after that night? Ask her physician and waiting-woman, and watch with them the sleep-walking scene. “To bed, to bed, to bed.” But what avails _that_ to the somnambulist, ever in semblance washing her hands, and complaining of the smell of blood upon them still, and that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten them? Now and then one meets with a sceptic as to lost sleep being the inevitable sequent upon crime; and no doubt there are exceptions. Mr. G. Wingrove Cooke, in his letters from Chinese waters, thus describes the captive Mandarin, Yeh, whose fellow-passenger to Calcutta he was: “He goes to bed at eight o’clock, and while we are reading or writing or playing chess, he sleeps the sleep of infancy—an unbroken slumber, apparently undisturbed by visions of widowed women and wailing orphans. This man-killer, after slaying his hundred thousand human beings, enjoys sweeter sleep than an innocent London alderman after a turtle dinner.” Perhaps that is not saying much,—considering what a turtle dinner comprehends and superinduces. But the next sentence says a good deal; it is to be hoped, a great deal too much: “So false are traditions; so false are the remorseful scenes of Greek and English tragedies.” One would be sorry, for the dignity of human nature, to believe that all is fiction the poets tell us of cases in which _non avium citharæque cantus_, or any other aids and appliances, _somnum reducent_. “Wherefore to me,” asks Clytemnestra,—

... “is solacing sleep denied? And honourable rest, the right of all? So that no medicine of the slumbrous shell, Brimmed with divinest draughts of melody, Nor silence under dreamful canopies, Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch, May lull this fever for a little while.”

Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more.” Her spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to that sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in one of Landor’s fragments,—

“It wakes me many mornings, many nights, And fields of poppies could not quiet it.”

Modern fiction abounds with examples to the purpose. There is Colonel Whyte Melville’s remorseful woman of the world bidding her young friend good night, and meaning it all the more because her own good nights are dead and gone: “What would I give to yawn as honestly as you do, and to sleep sound once again, as I used to sleep when I was a girl!” There is Mr. Trollope’s Lady Mason, so wistfully, so vainly longing for rest—to be able to lay aside the terrible fatigue of being ever on the watch. From the burden of that necessity she has never been free since her crime was first committed. “She had never known true rest. She had not once trusted herself to sleep without the feeling that her first waking thought would be one of horror, as the remembrance of her position came upon her.” As with the royal lady pictured by the laureate,—

“Many a time for hours In the dead night, grim faces came and went Before her, or a vague spiritual fear— Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors, Heard by the watcher in a haunted house, That keeps the rust of murder on the walls— Held her awake. Or if she slept, she dream’d An awful dream ... ... and with a cry she woke. And all this trouble did not pass, but grew.”

There is Donatello, in Hawthorne’s “Transformation,” succumbing to a stupor, which he mistakes for such drowsiness as he has known in his innocent past life. There is Albert Maurice, in “Mary of Burgundy,” gazing on the Vert Gallant of Hannut as he lay in a deep, sweet sleep—so calm and tranquil, though within the walls of a prison, suffering from injuries, and exposed to constant danger; gazing with a sense of envy and regret, “which few, perhaps, can appreciate fully, who have not felt the sharp tooth of remorse begin its sleepless gnawings on the heart. He would not have disturbed such slumbers for the world; and, withdrawing again with a noiseless step, he retired to his own chamber, and cast himself down upon his bed, to snatch, at least, that heated and disturbed sleep, which was all the repose that he was ever more to know on earth.” To such as him can nothing bring back, in the hour and power of darkness, more than an embittered memory of times

“When that placid sleep came o’er him Which he ne’er can know again.”

An innocent comforter in a modern tragedy offers a disquieted spirit the assurance, as regards the object of his disquiet, that “’twill away in sleep.” But his answer is,—

“No, no! I dare not sleep—for well I know That then the knife will gleam, the blood will gush, The form will stiffen!”

From the night of the massacre of Glencoe, Glenlyon, as Macaulay tells us, was never again the man that he had been before that night. The form of his countenance was changed; and “in all places, at all hours, whether he waked or slept, Glencoe was for ever before him.” As with a distinguished foreigner of a later generation, _Depuis ce moment, point de sommeil, point de repos; il croyait toujours voir un glaive arrêté sur sa tête_. In such cases, the sleepers start from broken slumbers, as if starting back from the edge of a precipice; for,—

“Their whole tranquillity of heart is gone; The peace wherewith till now they have been blest Hath taken its departure. In the breast Fast following thoughts and busy fancies throng; Their sleep itself is feverish, and possest With dreams that to the wakeful mind belong.”

“Something like a stupid sleep oppresses me,” writes one of Henry Mackenzie’s characters; “last night I could not sleep. Where are now those luxurious slumbers, those wandering dreams of future happiness? Never shall I know them again.” Falkland avows to Caleb Williams, the involuntary master of his master’s fatal secret, that “from the hour the crime was committed” he has not had an hour’s peace: “I became changed from the happiest into the most miserable being that lives; sleep has fled from my eyes.” And Caleb Williams himself testifies in an after chapter, “The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone. The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to ‘sleep no more.’” They that do murder, says Roscoe’s Violenzia,—

“Never sleep more, never more taste of peace, Quaff poison in their drink, see knives in the dark, And ever at their elbow horror walks, Shaking them like a palsy.”

The bitter contrast—ah, for the change ’twixt now and then!—is forcibly worded by Bosola in the “Duchess of Malfi”:—

“O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps On turtle’s feathers! whilst a guilty conscience Is a perspective that foreshows us hell.”

_ONCE DENIED, THRICE DENIED._

ST. MATTHEW xxvi, 69, _sq._

Lie engenders lie. Once committed, the liar has to go on in his course of lying. It is the penalty of his transgression, or one of the penalties. To the habitual liar, bronzed and hardened in the custom, till custom becomes second nature, the penalty may seem no very terrible price to pay. To him, on the other hand, who, without deliberate intent, and against his innermost will, is overtaken with such a fault, the generative power of a first lie to beget others, the necessity of supporting the first by a second and a third, is a retribution keenly to be felt, while penitently owned to be most just.

Though it was afar off that Peter followed his Master to the high-priest’s house, yet he did follow; and, we may be sure, with little thought, and still less intention, of denying Him even once. But as he sat by the fire and warmed himself, the identification of him by a certain maid as certainly a disciple of Christ was boldly met by the affirmation, or negation, “Woman, I know Him not.” The lie was uttered; the winged word of falsehood was on its way. And there an end, he perhaps hoped. But after a little while, another bystander recognised him, and asserted the damaging recognition, “Thou art also of them.” Another denial was the consequence: “Man, I am not.” An hour passed away, and Peter, in sullen misery and bewilderment, self-consciously an abject coward and confirmed liar, had to deny for the third time Him he had denied once and again. “Of a truth,” affirmed another of the mixed company, “this fellow also was with Him; for he is a Galilean.” And Peter said, “Man, I know not what thou sayest.” And then the cock crew. And then the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And at that look—so upbraidingly expressive, so pathetically recalling recent protestations of unfaltering allegiance, and the concurrent prediction of lapse and abandonment—what could Peter do, but with shame and confusion of face, and with a heart full to bursting, go out, and weep bitterly.

When he thought thereon, he wept: thought of the Master’s look, that recalled to him the vehement assurance of loyalty met by the foretelling of his fall. Thought, too, of the graduation of his denials; a first involving a second, and the second exacting yet a third. The third was the cost of the first. He had not counted the cost then. He had to pay it now.

It was part of the prophet’s burden of woes against the doomed city, that she had “wearied herself with lies.” Easily uttered, they may multiply at a rate to trouble the teller of them, and weary him, if only with the necessity of inventing new ones to back the old. He must ever be devising fresh vouchers for his impaired and imperilled credit. He must continually be endorsing his forged notes, and forging fresh ones that will stand inspection. _Fallacia alia aliam trudit._ And this is weary work.

“En quel gouffre de soins et de perplexité Nous jette une action faite sans equité.”

And as with actions, so with words. The same speaker of the foregoing couplet utters elsewhere the lament,—

“Ma fourbe est découverte. Oh! que la vérité Se peut cacher longtemps avec difficulté!”

So we read in Molière. And Corneille has a play (not original) entirely devoted to the illustration of this subject, showing _qu’il faut bonne mémoire acrès qu’on a menti_; the Menteur κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, being one who _entasse fourbe sur fourbe_, and is constrained by the law of his nature, at least of habit, which is second nature, to be ever adding to the heap of lies to which he has committed himself. A Spanish proverb—and _Le Menteur_ is from the Spanish—declares that “for an honest man half his wits is enough, while the whole are too little for a knave;” the ways, that is, as Archbishop Trench expounds the adage, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those who walk in them; whereas the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein—a truth often and wonderfully confirmed in the lives of evil men.

Among the aphorisms of Dean Swift we read: “He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.”

It has been called the severe, but appropriate, punishment of historians who desert the paths of truth for those of paradox, to be compelled to defend the falsehood to which they have committed themselves against the ever-accumulating evidences of the truth. Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, feelingly sketches the case of one who, being unprepared and accosted suddenly, says hastily that which is irreconcileable with strict truth; then to substantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents or invents something else; and so has woven round himself a mesh which will entangle his conscience through many a weary day and many a sleepless night.[31] One burden laid on fault, he goes on to show, is that chain of entanglement which seems to drag down to fresh sins. “One step necessitates many others. One fault leads to another, and crime to crime. The soul gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound knowledge which prophetically refused to limit Peter’s sin to once. ‘Verily I say unto thee ... thou shalt deny me thrice.’”

Mr. Froude shows us Queen Elizabeth stooping to “a deliberate lie.” At times, he says, writing of her embarrassed policy in 1565, she “seemed to struggle with her ignominy, but it was only to flounder deeper into distraction and dishonour.” In October of that year she publicly denied that she had encouraged the rebellion in Scotland. In November, we read, “Never had Elizabeth been in greater danger; and the worst features of the peril were the creations of her own untruths.” Again, in May, 1566: “Meanwhile Elizabeth was reaping a harvest of inconveniences for her exaggerated demonstrations of friendliness” to the Queen of Scots. Mary taking her at her word, “Vainly Elizabeth struggled to extricate herself from her dilemma; resentment was still pursuing her for her treachery in the past autumn.... She could but shuffle and equivocate in a manner which had become too characteristic.”[32] She was but paying the price of lies—the being constrained to go on lying still. It is certain, affirms a popular essayist, that nobody yet ever did anything wrong in this world without having to tell one or more falsehoods to begin with: the embryo murderer has to tell a lie about the pistol or dagger, the would-be suicide about the poison he purchases; and in fine, “the ways down which the bad ship Wickedness slides to a shoreless ocean must be greased with lies.”[33]

English reviewers not long since were prompt to recognise in Balzac’s “La Marâtre,” as revived to Parisian popularity, what they rightly accounted wonderful, a moral immaculate and beyond reproach. And what is that moral? “The necessity of a life of lying as a punishment for the one great lie of a mercenary marriage.” One great lie is put out to interest, and the interest is compound. One great lie involves a ramification of others, great or small, if there be comparatives of magnitude in such matters; and memory, if not conscience, is for ever on the stretch. The sad expedient of renewed issues is a necessity. As with the involved victim in one of Crabbe’s Tales:—

“Such is his pain, who, by his debt oppress’d, Seeks by new bonds a temporary rest.”

To another section, and with another starting-point from Holy Writ, may be referred some remaining illustrations of the subject.

_LINKED LIES._

GENESIS xxvii. 19-24.

Jacob in Esau’s goodly raiment, and his smooth skin overlaid with goatskins, was duly prepared for a consistent course of deception. But the lie upon lie he had to tell before his end was gained, must have sorely tried what of conscience he then had. The primary falsehood,—distinctly enounced in answer to his blind sire’s “Who art thou?” “I am Esau, thy firstborn,” come back from the chase with the venison Isaac had desired of his firstborn,—this initial lie had immediately to be backed by another. How had he found it so quickly? There is something revolting in the style of the unfaltering fabrication at once ready to hand, “Because the Lord thy God brought it to me.” Then ensued that solution of the old man’s misgivings by a manual examination of the disguised pretender; it was Esau’s hirsute skin, sure enough, though the voice was Jacob’s. But the blessing was given. And even after that eventful benediction, the patriarch, with a yet lingering apprehension, renewed the pointed question, in its directest form, “Art thou my very son Esau?” And Jacob said, “I am.” Lie linked to lie, in a concatenation accordingly.

_Solent mendaces luere pœnas malefici_, says Phædrus: liars usually pay the penalty of their guilt. And Mrs. Browning vigorously states one distinctive penalty, where she speaks of those who—

... “Pay the price Of lies, by being constrained to lie on still.”

The author of “Romola” powerfully illustrates in that remarkable book the embarrassments involved in one cowardly departure from truth. In the chapter headed “Tito’s Dilemma,” the occasion arises for Tito to fabricate an ingenious lie; an occasion “which circumstance never fails to beget on tacit falsity.” Many chapters farther on we find him experiencing the inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character; and it becomes a question whether all the resources of lying will save him from being crushed by the consequences of his habitual choice. At another juncture we read: “Tito felt more and more confidence as he went on; the lie was not so difficult when it was once begun; and as the words fell easily from his lips, they gave him a sense of power such as men feel when they have begun a muscular feat successfully.” The penalty is enforced a few pages later. “But he had borrowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had mounted and mounted with the years, till he belonged to the usurer, body and soul.” Again: “To-night he had paid a heavier price than ever to make himself safe.”[34]

In the American story of “The Gayworthys,” the like moral attaches to the course of one unhappy woman who lets herself slide, half involuntarily, into deeper wrong: she holds her peace; she makes herself passive. “Her very soul lied to itself in its false, bewildered reasonings; that is the inherent retribution of false souls.” There are some acts of folly, remarks the most popular, probably, of contemporary English penwomen, which carry falsehood and dissimulation at their heels as certainly as the shadows which follow us when we walk towards the evening sun; and we very rarely swerve from the severe boundary-line of right without being dragged ever so much farther than we calculated upon across the border.

Corneille’s celebrated play, “Le Menteur,”—but for reading which Molière asserts his belief that he would never have written a comedy himself,—is “conveyed” from a Spanish original, and has itself been Englished by Fielding; the ingenuity of the piece consisting in the manner in which one lie is made to call for another, until their wholesale employer is inextricably caught in the toils.

“This is the curse of every evil deed,— That, propagating still, it brings forth evil,”

laments the elder Piccolomini, in Schiller’s trilogy. The commission of one wrong, says Owen Feltham, puts a man upon a thousand wrongs, perhaps, to maintain that one: injury, with injury is defended; and we commit a greater, to maintain a less. “A lie begets a lie, till generations succeed.” Mr. Carlyle sternly moralises on the growth of accumulated falsities,—“sad opulence descending by inheritance, always at compound interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on such immensity of standing capital.” One lie, says Owen, must be thatched with another, or it will soon rain through.

Benvenuto Cellini records in his autobiography, the bitter experiences he endured in being tempted to lie to the duke, his patron, lest he should forfeit the favour of the duchess—he who “was always a lover of truth and an enemy to falsehood, being then under a necessity of telling lies.” “As I had begun to tell lies, I plunged deeper and deeper into the mire,”—till a very Slough of Despond it became to him.

Fool that he was, exclaims Mr. Trollope, of one of his characters in “Framley Parsonage:” “A man can always do right, even though he has done wrong before. But the previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.” Mr. Thackeray sermonises to the same effect: “And so, my dear sir, seeing that after committing any infraction of the moral laws, you must tell lies in order to back yourself out of your scrape, let me ask you whether you had not better forego the crime, so as to avoid the unavoidable, and unpleasant, and daily-recurring necessity of the subsequent perjury?” And the cleverest character this master of social satire ever drew, confesses how it jarred on her to begin telling lies to a confiding, simple friend: “But that is the misfortune of beginning with this kind of forgery. When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.”

Jeremy Taylor quaintly says of the devil in the ancient oracles, “When he was put to it at his oracles, and durst not tell a downright lie, and yet knew not what was truth, many times he was put to the most pitiful shifts, and trifling equivocations, and acts of knavery, which, when they were discovered, ... it made him much more contemptible and ridiculous than if he had said nothing or confessed his ignorance.”

A lie has been called a two-edged sword without a hilt, which is sure to slip and cut the hand that holds it. “After telling one lie, we are sure to tell another; and usually, after spinning a silly, very complicated, and disgusting web, which entangles and chokes us, we find out that if we had told the truth, it would have been much the easier and better plan.” Lying is likened, again, to borrowing of money-lenders; for the credit which we get by it we have always to pay heavily for; and at last we find that the interest by far exceeds the principal, and we get so inextricably involved that we never fully recover. “He who tells a lie,” says Pope, “is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.” Johnson observes that nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity are very lightly uttered, and when once uttered are sullenly supported. He reminds us that Boileau, who desired to be thought a rigorous and steady moralist, having told a petty lie to Lewis the Fourteenth, continued it afterwards by false dates, thinking himself obliged in honour to maintain what, when he said it, was so well received. Pope himself is taxed with similar mendacity by Mr. de Quincey, who charges him, on a certain literary question, with knowingly “preparing for himself a dire necessity of falsehood.... Once launched upon such a course, he became pledged and committed to all the difficulties which it might impose. Desperate necessities would arise, from which nothing but desperate lying and hard swearing could extricate him.” And at a subsequent stage in the _facilis descensus_ he is described, rather imaginatively, as feeling, and groaning as he felt, that fresh falsehoods were in peremptory demand. “This comes of telling lies,” is supposed to be his bitter reflection: “one lie makes a necessity for another.”

The Leucippus of Beaumont and Fletcher thus admonishes an intimate:—