Dorothy L. Sayers
Gaudy Night
London 1990.
"Shake hands," said Wimsey. "Now we have found common ground to stand on. Establish the facts, no matter what comes of it."
"To suppress a fact is to publish a falsehood."
"You see how easy it is, when you stick to the rules," said Wimsey. "Miss Vane feels no compunction. She wipes me out with a firm hand, rather than damage my reputation. But the question isn't always so simple. How about the artist of genius who has to choose between letting his family starve and painting pot-boilers to keep them?"
"He's no business to have a wife and family," said Miss Hillyard.
"Poor devil! Then he has the further interesting choice beween repressions and immorality. Mrs. Goodwin, I gather, would object to the repressions and some people might object to the immorality."
"That doesn't matter," said Miss Pyke. "You have hypothesised a wife and family. Well - he could stop painting. That, if he really is a genius, would be a loss to the world. But he mustn't paint bad pictures – that would be really immoral."
"Why?" asked Miss Edwards. "What do a few bad pictures matter, more or less?"
"Of course they matter," said Miss Shaw. She knew a good deal about painting. "A bad picture by a good painter is a betrayal of truth – his own truth."
"That's only a relative kind of truth," objected Miss Edwards.
The Dean and Miss Burrows fell headlong upon this remark, and Harriet, seeing the argument in danger of getting out of hand, thought it time to retrieve the ball and send it back. She knew now what was wanted, though not why it was wanted.
"If you can't agree about painters, make it someone else. Make it a scientist."
"I've no objection to scientific pot-boilers," said Miss Edwards. "I mean, a popular book isn't necessarily unscientific."
"So long," said Wimsey, "as it doesn't falsify the facts. But it might be a different kind of thing. To take a concrete instance – somebody wrote a novel called The Search –"
"C.P. Snow," said Miss Burrows. "It's funny you should mention that. It was the book that the –"
"I know," said Peter. "That's possibly why it was in my mind."
"I never read the book," said the Warden.
"Oh, I did," said the Dean. "It's about a man who starts out to be a scientist and gets on very well till, just as he's going to be apointed to an important executive post, he finds he's made a careless error in a scientific paper. He didn't check his assistant's results, or something. Somebody finds out, and he doesn't get the job. So he decides he doesn't really care about science after all."
"Obviously not," said Miss Edwards. "He only cared about the post."
"But," said Miss Chilperic, "if it was only a mistake –"
"The point about it," said Wimsey, "is what an elderly scientist says to him. He tells him: 'The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.' Words to that effect. I may not be quoting quite correctly."
"Well, that's true, of course. Nothing could possibly excuse deliberate falsification."
"There's no sense in deliberate falsification, anyhow," said the Bursar. "What could anybody gain by it?"
"It has been done," said Miss Hillyard, "frequently. To get the better of an argument. Or out of ambition."
"Ambition to be what?" cried Miss Lydgate. "What satisfaction could one possibly get out of a reputation one knew one didn't deserve? It would be horrible."
Her innocent indignation upset everybody's gravity.
"How about the Forged Credentials... Chatterton... Ossian... Henry Ireland... those Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets the other day...?"
"I know," said Miss Lydgate, perplexed. "I know people do it. But why? They must be mad."
"In the same novel," said the Dean, "somebody deliberately falsifies a result – later on, I mean – in order to get a job. And the man who made the original mistake finds it out. But he says nothing, because the other man is very badly off and has a wife and family to keep."
"These wives and families!" said Peter.
"Does the author approve?" inquired the Warden.
"Well," said the Dean, "the book ends there, so I suppose he does."
"But does anybody here approve? A false statement is published and the man who could correct it lets it go, out of charitable considerations. Would anybody here do that? There's your test case, Miss Barton, with no personalities attached."
"Of course one couldn't do that," said Miss Barton. "Not for ten wives and fifty children."
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| Dorothy L. Sayers, Hochzeit kommt vor dem Fall. | Dorothy L. Sayers, Aufruhr in Oxford. | Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night. BBC Audiobook |