These things stand apart; they
are so formal as to be scarcely more reprehensible than the falsehood of
calling a correspondent "Dear," or asking a tiresome lady to whom one is
being kind and civil, for the pleasure of dancing with her. We ought to
do what we can to abolish these absurd barriers and petty falsehoods,
but we ought not to commit a social suicide against them.
That is how I think and feel in this matter, but if a man sees the
matter more gravely, if his conscience tells him relentlessly and
uncompromisingly, "this is a lie," then it is a lie and he must not be
guilty of it. But then I think it ill becomes him to be silently
excluded. His work is to clamour against the existence of the barrier
that wastes him.
I do not see that lying is a fundamental sin. In the first place some
lying, that is to say some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement, is
necessary to nearly everything we do, and the truest statement becomes
false if we forget or alter the angle at which it is made, the direction
in which it points. In the next the really fundamental and most
generalized sin is self-isolation.
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