Our moral discipline may develop untruth in another way. When the punishment has been inflicted and the governor, relenting from the brutal harshness, asks: ‘Are you sorry?’ or ‘Aren’t you sorry?’ the answer is exceedingly likely to be ‘No,’ even though this is in a sense untrue. More clearly is this lying of obstinacy seen where a child is shut up and kept without food. Asked: ‘Are you hungry?’ the hardy little sinner stifles his sensations and pluckily answers ‘No,’ even though the low and dismal character of the sound shows that the untruth is but a half-hearted affair.
I have tried to show how a child’s untruths may be more than half “playing,” how when they are serious assertions they may involve a measure of self-deception, and how even when consciously false they may have their origin in excusable circumstances and feelings. In urging all this I do not wish to deny the statement that children wall sometimes deliberately invent a lie from a base motive, as when a girl of three seeing her little brother caressed by her mother for some minutes and feeling herself neglected fabricated the story that ‘Henri’ had been cruel to the parrot.[[185]] Yet I am disposed to look on such mean falsehoods as exceptional if not abnormal.
There is much even yet to be done in clearing up the modus operandi of children’s lies. How quick, for example, is a child to find out the simple good-natured people, as the servant-maid, or gardener, who will listen to his romancing and flatter him by appearing to accept it all as gospel. More significant is the fact that intentional deception is apt to show itself towards certain people only. There is many a school-boy who would think it no dishonour to say what is untrue to those he dislikes, especially by way of getting them into hot water, though he would feel it mean and base to lie to his mother or his father, and bad form to lie to the head-master. Similar distinctions show themselves in earlier stages, and are another point of similarity between the child and the savage whose ideas of truthfulness seem to be truthfulness for my people only. This is a side of the subject which would repay fuller inquiry.
Another aspect of the subject which has been but little investigated is the influence of habit in the domain of lying, and the formation of persistent permanent lies. The impulse to stick to an untruth when once uttered is very human, and in the case of the child is enforced by the fear of discovery. This applies not only to falsehoods foisted on persons in authority, but to those by which clever boys and girls take pleasure in befooling the inferior wits of others. In this way there grow up in the nursery and in the playground traditional myths and legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded. Such invention is in part the outcome of the “pleasures of the imagination”. Yet it is probable that these are in all cases reinforced not only by the wish to produce an effect, but by the love of power which in the child not endowed with physical prowess is apt to show itself in hood-winking and practical joking.
Closely connected with the permanence of untruths is the contagiousness of lying. The propagation of falsehood is apt to be promoted by a certain tremulous admiration for the hardihood of the lie and by the impulses of the rebel which never quite slumber even in the case of fairly obedient children. I suspect, however, that it is in all cases largely due to the force of suggestion. The falsehood boldly announced is apt to captivate the mind and hold it under a kind of spell.
This effect of suggestion in generating falsehood is very marked in those pathological or semi-pathological cases where children have been led to give false testimony. It is now known that it is quite possible to provoke an illusion of memory in certain children between the ages of six and fifteen by simply affirming something in their hearing, whether they are in the waking or in the sleeping state, so that they are ready to state that they actually saw happen what was asserted.[[186]]
So much as to the several manners and circumstances of childish lying. In order to understand still better what it amounts to, how much of conscious falsehood enters into it, we must glance at another and closely related phenomenon, the pain which sometimes attends and follows it.
There is no doubt that a certain number of children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering a falsehood. This is evidenced in the well-known devices by which the intelligence of the child thinks to mitigate the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally, ‘I do not mean it,’ ‘in my mind,’ or some similar palliative.[[187]] Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.
The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie, which catches the conscience at its tenderest, has been remembered by many in later life. Here is a case. A lady friend remembers that when a child of four she had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking out with her mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but presently remembering the eyes, said: “Poor child, you could not see well”. She knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie. Miss Wiltshire, who tells the story of the mythical snake, gives another recollection which illustrates the keen suffering of a child when he becomes fully conscious of falsehood. She was as a small child very fond of babies, and had been permitted by her mother to go when invited by her aunt to nurse her baby cousin. One day wanting much to go when not invited, she boldly invented, saying that her aunt was busy and had asked her to spend an hour with the baby. ‘I went (she adds) not to the baby, but by a circuitous route to my father’s barn, crept behind one of the great doors, which I drew as close to me as I could, vainly wishing that the barn and the hay-stacks would cover me; then I cried and moaned I do not know how many hours, and when I went to bed I said my prayers between sobs, refusing to tell my mother why I wept.’[[188]]
Such examples of remorse are evidence of a child’s capability of knowingly stating what is false. This is strikingly shown in Miss Wiltshire’s two reminiscences; for she distinctly tells us that in the case of her confident assertion about the imaginary snake with ring and bell, she felt no remorse as she was not conscious of uttering a lie.[[189]] But these sufferings of conscience point to something else, a sense of awful wickedness, of having done violence to all that is right and holy. How, it may be asked, does it happen that children feel thus morally crushed after telling a lie?