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Updated: May 24, 2025
It would be well if you were to look over, with respect to this matter, the end of the second, and what interests you of the third, book of Plato's Republic; noting therein these two principal things, of which I have to speak in this and my next lecture: first, the power which Plato so frankly, and quite justly, attributes to art, of falsifying our conceptions of Deity: which power he by fatal error partly implies may be used wisely for good, and that the feigning is only wrong when it is of evil, "+ean tis mê kalôs pseudêtai+;" and you may trace through all that follows the beginning of the change of Greek ideal art into a beautiful expediency, instead of what it was in the days of Pindar, the statement of what "could not be otherwise than so."
By the law of France no man under twenty-five could be captain of a ship, but when Girard was twenty-two we find a shipowner falsifying the record and putting the boy down as twenty-five, on the obliging oath of the boy's father, who we hope was duly paid for his pains. At twenty-four, Captain Stephen Girard sailed his sloop, "L'Amiable Louise," around Sandy Hook and up New York Bay.
It is only when we have to contemplate a broken faith that we doubt God! For a broken faith is an abnormal prodigy in the natural scheme of the universe a discord in the eternal music of the stars! There are no treacheries, no falsifying of accounts, in the Divine order of the Law.
It is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old church and see none in the ruins of a man. Mr. Baildon might as well say that Dr. Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr. Clark Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr. Wilkie Collins thought that one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones and falsifying marriage registers.
And there in Boston the falsifying old headstones still stand, fixed in new places, but marking no coffins or honored bones beneath; the only true words of their inscriptions being the opening ones "Here lies," and the motto that they repeat derisively to each other "As you are now so once was I."
Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been induced to enter it by falsifying his books. Yet these were mere business matters, without standing in the present court. "The evidence isn't all one-sided," he asserted. "If you were a man, I could convince you in two minutes that both of the Farleys are rascals and hypocrites."
To do this, he worked in perfect accordance with artistic law, falsifying no line of the original forms. It was the suffering, rather than his pencil, that wrought the change. The latter was the willing instrument to record what the imagination conceived with a cruelty composed enough to be correct.
As to falsifying to a sick or dying man, he says, "we overestimate the value of human life, and, besides, we in a measure usurp the place of Providence, when we believe we may save it by committing sin." In other words, Dorner counts falsifying with the intention of deceiving, even with the best of motives, a lie, and therefore a sin never justifiable.
Then came the unhappy moment when a scattering of small grimy paws was timidly put up, and their falsifying owners confessed that they had fibbed more than once during the year. These tearful fibbers were also counted, and sent from the room, while the non-fibbers chose their reward, which was to sail around the Bass Rock and the Isle of May in a steam tug.
"Still it has compensations that one might not think of. A new world to explore, new experiences, new powers awakening; strange new perceptions; life in the fourth dimension. But why do you beg my pardon, Louis?" "I am an ex-solicitor, struck off in connexion with the falsifying of a trust account, Mr. Carrados," replied Carlyle, rising. "Sit down, Louis," said Carrados suavely.
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