
OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 17 
tration than those of many past ages, but in some re- 
spects they are more mature than those of any past 
age, and one chief symptom of this maturity is the 
strict deference paid to facts. This marks the his- 
toric spirit as it marks the scientific spirit. In children 
the respect for facts is very imperfectly developed. 
The presence of wild exaggeration or deliberate fic- 
tion in children’s stories does not necessarily imply 
dishonesty or love of lying. The child’s world is not 
coldly realistic, it is full of make-believe; it has sub- 
jective needs that demand expression even if objective 
truthfulness gets somewhat slighted. The Italians 
have a pithy proverb, Sz zon e vero e ben, trovato, 
which defies literal translation into English, but which 
means, If it isn’t true, at all events, it hits the mark. 
In the childish type of a story, it is above all things 
desired to hit the mark, to produce the effect. Edifi- 
cation is the prime requisite; accuracy is subordinate. 
There never was an adult mind more scrupulously 
loyal to fact than that of Charles Darwin, but in a 
chapter of autobiography he says: “I may here con- 
fess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing 
deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the 
sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once 
gathered much valuable fruit from my father’s trees 
and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless 
haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard 
of stolen fruit.”' This kind of romancing is not 
peculiar to children, but continues to characterize the 
untrained adult mind, as in the yarns of old soldiers 
and sailors, and it is liable to persist wherever one’s 
professional pursuits call for intense devotion to some 
1 Darwin’s “ Life and Letters,” I., p. 28. 
