s! The dread irrationality of the whole
affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. "Oh, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can we not
all be happy and devote ourselves to play?" And when children do
philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these considerations:
that whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not
be any peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain
show, and among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and
unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly
learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach
them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is
inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we charge
him with incompetence and not with dishonesty. And why not extend the
same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid
about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we
excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched,
human entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified
town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes
three-fourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open
self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as
a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less
than decent. You do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift
he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he
cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread
dragoon.

I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very inquiring as to the
precise truth of stories. But indeed this is a very different matter,
and one bound up with the subject of play, and the precise amount of
playfulness, or playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such
burning questions must arise in the course of nursery education. Among
the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the pretty soldier and
the terrifying Irish beggar-man, is, or is not, the child to expect a
Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out for magicians,
kindly and potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast
away upon a desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that
he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery,