White Lies

C >> Charles Reade >> White Lies


Camille and Josephine were blessed almost beyond the lot of humanity:
none can really appreciate sunshine but those who come out of the cold
dark. And so with happiness. For years they could hardly be said to live
like mortals: they basked in bliss. But it was a near thing; for they
but just scraped clear of life-long misery, and death's cold touch
grazed them both as they went.

Yet they had heroic virtues to balance White Lies in the great Judge's
eye.

A wholesome lesson, therefore, and a warning may be gathered from this
story: and I know many novelists who would have preached that lesson at
some length in every other chapter, and interrupted the sacred
narrative to do it. But when I read stories so mutilated, I think of a
circumstance related by Mr. Joseph Miller.

"An Englishman sojourning in some part of Scotland was afflicted with
many hairs in the butter, and remonstrated. He was told, in reply, that
the hairs and the butter came from one source--the cow; and that the
just and natural proportions hitherto observed, could not be deranged,
and bald butter invented--for ONE. 'So be it,' said the Englishman; 'but
let me have the butter in one plate, and the hairs in another.'"

Acting on this hint, I have reserved some admirable remarks,
reflections, discourses, and tirades, until the story should be ended,
and the other plate be ready for the subsidiary sermon.

And now that the proper time is come, that love of intruding one's own
wisdom in one's own person on the reader, which has marred so many works
of art, is in my case restrained--first, by pure fatigue; secondly,
because the moral of this particular story stands out so clear in the
narrative, that he who runs may read it without any sermon at all.

Those who will not take the trouble to gather my moral from the living
tree, would not lift it out of my dead basket: would not unlock their
jaw-bones to bite it, were I to thrust it into their very mouths.