Each man should learn what is within him,
that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him,
that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell him
the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his
theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all
facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a
fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he
should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a
world made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win his
way to shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul to tell
what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.
The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody was
wanting, for one man's meat is another man's poison, and I have
known a person who was cheered by the perusal of Candide. Every
fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together; and none
that comes directly in a writer's path but has some nice relations,
unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subject
under hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more
necessary than others, and it is with these that literature must
first bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature once
more easily leading us; for the necessary, because the efficacious,
facts are those which are most interesting to the natural mind of
man.
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