especially irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of
nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already
developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emancipation from the parental
roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life
must wander far and long enough to find the best habitat in which to set up for
himself. This is the spring season of emigration; and it should be an
indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settlement, to travel far
and wide, if resources and inclination permit. But this stage should end in wisely
chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that
with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely
chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed
to develop the reductives of this normal stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that not only does
falsehood facilitate it, but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it.
The beginning of wisdom in treatment is to discriminate between good and bad
lies. My own study[10] of the lies of 300 normal children, by a method carefully
devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested
the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the
young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objective
counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxication when some absurd
and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break
with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the
imagination. More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of
its charm to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors,
ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealising
temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four suddenly to assert that
they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry tree, and other Munchausen
wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental
combination independently of experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost
visualisation and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever
yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all
mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its
control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of crass facts is what should be
sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought
as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature.
The life of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many illustrations. He
fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would burst out in a certain field
and flow between populous banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and