STRAIGHT SEEING AND THINKING 



the lives of our wild creatures. Neither Froude nor 

 Freeman wrote from observation or experience, as 

 our nature fakers claim to, but from the study of 

 past men and events as recorded by others. They 

 were interpreting the records, and their tempera- 

 ments and imaginations greatly modified the results. 

 But other things being equal, would we not prefer 

 the historian who kept closest to the record, to the 

 actual facts, of the case? Truthfulness is a merit, 

 imagination is a merit, and neither can take the 

 place of the other. When the two are combined, we 

 get the best results. 



Truth in natural history is much easier to reach 

 than truth in civil history. Civil history is vastly 

 more complex. Moreover, it is of the past in a sense 

 that the other is not, and the writers of it are rarely 

 the eye-witnesses of the events they describe; while 

 natural history is being daily and hourly enacted all 

 around us, and varies but little from year to year. 

 A truthful account of the life history of one animal 

 holds substantiaUy correct for all the rest of that 

 species in difPerent places and times. The animal is 

 a part of its environment, and has no independent 

 history in the sense that a man has. 



Certainly " the imagination may be used in inter- 

 preting and narrating facts " — must be used, if 

 anything of literary value is to be the outcome. But 

 it is one thing to treat your facts with imagination 

 and quite another to imagine your facts. So long 

 111 



