A fertile source of childish "untruth," which may be more true than untrue in the sense of expressing the conviction of the moment, is the wish to please. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for his mother gushes out, "You're the best mother in the whole world!" may be hardly conscious of any exaggeration. There is more of artfulness in the flatteries which appear to involve a calculating intention to say the nice agreeable thing. Some children, especially little girls, are, I believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong and dominant are perhaps those who in later years make the good society actors. Yet if there is a measure of untruth in such pretty flatteries, one needs to be superhuman in order to condemn them harshly.
The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and this, I suspect, may point to a more intentional and conscious kind of untruth. If, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say "Yes" makes it very hard to say "No". Mrs. Burnett gives us a reminiscence of this early experience. When she was less than three, she writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that the baby newly added to the family was called Edith, remarked to her: "That's a pretty name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn't that a pretty name?" On being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not like the sound of "Eleanor," and yet feared to be rude and say so. She got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as "Edith".
In such cases as this the fear to give offence may be reinforced by the mastering force of "suggestion". Just as the hypnotiser "suggests" to his subject the idea that he is ill, that the dirty water in this glass is wine, and so forth, compelling him to accept and act out the idea, so we all exercise a kind of suggestive sway over children's minds. Our leading questions, as when we say, "Isn't this pretty?" may for a moment set up a half belief that the thing must be so. Thus in a double fashion do our words control children's thoughts, driving them now into contradiction, drawing them at other times and in other moods into submissive assent. Wordsworth has illustrated how an unwise and importunate demand for a reason from a child may drive him into invention.[9]
I do not say that these are the only impulses which prompt to this early fibbing. From some records of the first years I learn that a child may drift into something like a lie under the pressure of fear, more especially fear of being scolded. One little fellow, more than once instanced in this work, a single child brought up wholly by his mother, perpetrated his first fib when he was about twenty-two months old. He went, it seems, and threw his doll down stairs in one of those capricious outbursts towards favourites which children share with certain sovereigns, then went to his mother and making great pretence of grief said, "Poor dolly tumbled". If this had stood alone I should have been ready to look on it as a little childish comedy; but the same child a month or two afterwards would invent a fib when he wanted his mother to do something. For example, he was one morning lying in bed with his mother and wanted much to get up. His mother told him to look for the watch and see what time it was. He felt under the pillow pretending to find and consult the time-teller, saying: "Time to get up". Here it was clearly the force of the young will resisting an unpleasant check which excited the sober faculties to something like deception.
To say that our moral discipline with its injunctions, its corrections, is a great promoter of childish untruth may sound shocking, but it is I think an indisputable truth. We can see how this begins to work in the first years. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper called her mother "monkey," and being questioned as to what she had said, replied: "I said I was a monkey". A child is often driven into such ruses by the instinct of self-protection.
Our system of discipline may develop untruth in other ways too. When, for example, punishment has been inflicted and its inflicter, relenting, asks: "Are you sorry?" or "Aren't you sorry?" the answer is exceedingly likely to be "No," even though this may at the moment be half felt to be untrue. From such partial untruths the way is easy to complete ones, as when a naughty little boy who is shut up in his room and kept without food, is asked: "Are you hungry?" and with the hardihood of a confirmed sinner answers "No," even though the low and dismal tone of the word shows how much the untruth goes against the grain.
I think there is no doubt, then, that at a certain age children may, more especially under a severe home authority, develop, apart from contagion, a tendency to falsehood. Some may see in this, as in childish fears and cruelties, rudiments of characteristics which belonged to remote uncivilised ancestors. However this be, it is hard to say that these fibs have that clear intention to deceive which constitutes a complete lie.
There are curious points in the manner of childish fibbing. A good many children seem to be like savages in distinguishing those to whom one is bound to speak the truth. The "bad form" of telling a lie to the head-master is a later illustration of the same thing. On the other hand it seems to be thought that there are people who are specially fitted to be the victims of untruth. Even young children soon find out who it is among the servants that being credulous supplies the best listener to their amazing inventions.
Another interesting point is the way in which the perfectly baseless fictions of children are apt to grow into permanent "stories". In the nursery and in the playground there are wont to be developed myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded, and may be handed down to successors. In all such cases of propagated untruths the impulse of imitation and the tendency of the child's mind to accept statements uncritically are of course at work. The "lie" propagated by this influence of contagion very soon ceases to be a lie.