VITAL LIES.

By CLERICUS.

Violet Paget, who is generally known by her nom de plume of Verona Lee, has been before the reading public now for thirty years. She began as a writer on aesthetics, a student of the renaissance a successor of Pater and Symonds. Then, like most writers on art who are gifted with sincerity, she developed out of her special subject a whole philosophy of life— ethical, philosophical, and religious. And now, when she is near sixty years of age, she comes out of her purely aesthetic seclusion, and publishes fulminations against the popular fallacies of the day. There are one or two things that are interesting about her personality. She has lived for all these years a life of such seclusion that no hint of her character, appearance, habits, or personal history has become public property. She lives in Italy, and is known by her writings, and by these alone. Then she has slowly worked out for herself and by herself a definite theory of life, which may, perhaps be summed up in George Eliot's words, "I have learned to live without opium." Vernon Lee never was any kind of mental or spiritual opium. She is a staunch rationalist, a devotee of logic and reason, a truth seeker and a truth teller, a user of the intellect and of that alone, a thinker of the old school of Huxley and Clifford.

Another most interesting trait in her writings is the restrained and continuous irony of her style.This is most seen in her latest work, "Vital Lies," where her grim irony and her scathing humour delight the reader throughout the two small octavo volumes. She reminds of Matthew Arnold, and yet with a difference. There was ever a lordly condescension about Arnold which nothing could ruffle. Arnold "kept a smile of heart broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school." Vernon Lee also is some what like a school-marm, a little acrid, perhaps, and fond of boxing the children's ears. She has caught Arnold's trick of repetition, his habit of slow, exact, and maddening analysis, his air of serenity and detachment; but she is feminine. In all her grace there is something old-maidish, and in all her robust intelligence there is something shrewish. Like Arnold also in her method of production, many, if not most, of her writings have been essays contributed to magazines, and then afterwards collected into books. She has now twenty-five volumes to her credit, and the latest of them is probably the strongest and most characteristic.

In 1908 she published a volume of essays, called "Gospels of Anarchy." Therein she examined and treated to a kind of preliminary spanking, such popular heroes as Emerson, Whitman, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Tolstoi, James and Wells. That was, however, merely a trial run. In "Vital Lies" she puts forth all her strength, and she certainly does make a masterly attack on the popular philosophy of today. The title "vital lie" is taken from Ibsen, who, in his play "The Wild Duck," makes one character say :— "Yes, I said vital lie, for illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle." Now this principle of illusion, of necessary illusion, of vital lies, is the dominant philosophy of the day; and so against it Vernon Lee rides out to battle. A mother wishes to stop her boy from some mischief, and says "Go to the backdoor and you will see the milkman filling his cans." that speech is a double mistake. It does not appeal to the child's imagination; and then, if the child happened to go to the back door, and found the mother had been deceiving him, he would never trust her again. What the mother should have said—and does generally say—is this, "Walk to the end of the rainbow and you will find a pot of gold." That appeals to the boy's imagination; and, besides, the mother can never be proved to be wrong. Such are the stimulating vital lies by which men have been moved, and nowadays it is the custom to defend them. But Vernon Lee will have none of them, and she maintains that, for every vital lie by which the human race has been moved, they have had to pay a penalty afterwards.

Her book, then, is in examination of some of the "vital lies" which have helped to make history, but first of all she attacks the popular philosophy called "Pragmatism." The original pragmatism—that of Peirce—had been a hard, distinct, severing of truth from opinion. But the modern sort —that of James and Schiller—regards truth and "vital lies" as the same thing, differing perhaps a little in degree, but not in kind. It is this more recent pragmatism which has captured men's minds today, and this means that many of our intellectual, ethical, and philosophical leaders have lost touch with the vast and ultimate distinction between truth and falsehood. A "vital lie" is a useful lie, a lie that is useful for life. There are and have been many such, and, of course, they have had power, because, and only because, men believed them to be true. All would admit that. But the quarrel with the pragmatist comes in when he maintains that such vital lies are all we can know of truth—are, in fact truth itself. So that the only real difference between truth and falsehood is in their respective degrees of usefulness. There are many lies going about, some are more "useful for life" than others, and the most useful ones are all we can mean by the word "truth." In the name of Locke, and Hume, and Mill, in the name of Huxley and Clifford, in the name and by the method of Peirce himself, the authoress does battle with this dragon of falsehood.

But to the enumeration of these vital lies. It must be remembered that Vernon Lee is a staunch rationalist, not only in Philosophy, but in religion. Well, the first great illusion is that which underlay the spread of Christianity, and that was the Messianic hope and the belief in the coming of the kingdom of God. Next she might have mentioned the crusades and their dominant illusion, but she passes over them. Then comes Protestantism and the Reformation, produced and led on by the illusion that the Bible is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then the French Revolution, with its inspiring illusion of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Then in an obscure way she hints that the new Italy—the Italy of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour—is the result of the obsession of the people by some illusion. But the most interesting in her budget of paradoxes are the quite recent ones. There is the "vital lie" of modernism, which holds that some how the skin, the husk, the shell of Catholicism can survive while the dogmatic life within is removed. A mere ritual, a mere ethos, a mere feeling can live and grow and hold men, while the essential truth and fact are seen to be no longer truth and fact at all. There is also the Protestant version of modernism viz., the "vital lie" of Tolstoiism; that men can separate the teaching of Jesus from His divinity, and can then find happiness in manual labour and religious emotions, thus preserving the ethos of Protestantism, without its essential fact and principle.

The "vital lie" of Nietzsche consists in men being encouraged to guide themselves by their natural unregenerate love of power, distinction, mastery; while they are being told all the time that this natural appetite is the only truth, virtue, happiness, and religion within their grasp. The "vital lie" of syndicalism is shown to be the hope that the rank and file of the industrial army can capture all industry—and yet remain merely a rank and file, merely an agglomerate of manual workers. The "vital lie" of mysticism is found in the elevation of pathological states of the organism above normal states; the elevation of the sub-conscious above the conscious; and of the instinctive and vital above the intelligible and the rational. Allied to this is the Bergsonian "vital lie" which puts reason and the intellectual power into the background, and would apparently regard the human being as fundamentally inferior to the worm; saying to the worm not only "Thou are my mother," but also "Thou are my superior, my guide, and my goal." These and many other "vital lies" are all of one kind. They are useful illusions, myths which have influenced men, dreams which have stimulated to movement. These myths or illusions have helped to overcome the natural inertia of our race ; and they have done this only because they have been believed to be true. When men see through the myth they are no longer moved by it. A bona-fide self deception is of the essence of the contract. So men move towards truth through falsehood, shredding one myth after another. But say the pragmatist and the popular teacher of to-day, all these things really are and have been, part of truth; it was truth all the time; the myth or vital lie is all the truth we ever have; we shall never reach anything higher. No, say Peirce and Vernon Lee and the rationalists, these useful myths have always been merely illusions, merely untruths as men work up their way through them they will gradually get to truth itself, and, in the meantime, every myth exacts a penalty. Many truths—perhaps most truths are useful; but certainly not all useful ideas are true.

The Argus 16 August 1913,