I say that these sticklers for the little facts have no sense of art. They appear to think that we distort their trumpery figures or enlarge a statement here and there, for no purpose whatever, but from sheer carelessness, lack of memory, or a mischievous love of lying. They are wrong and it is easy to see why. Such quibblers do not understand the working of the imagination; they have yet to learn that good talk is a form of art, and that exaggeration is one of art’s great devices, a worthy part of its process of selection and emphasis, by which any number of petty details are brought into unity and made to serve great purposes. When we are surrounded by good listeners and in the heat of narration, that swift creative power, the imagination, ransacking heaven and earth for its own ends, takes the reins, and we find ourselves changing the mere facts so that they will produce, at second-hand, the very feelings we experienced at first-hand. Because we are only in talk and make use of the device, clumsily maybe, it is called exaggeration and sneered at by some few, and sometimes even gives rise to charges of open lying; yet this very practice of making the outward show conform to the inward and real truth consumes fully one half the time and energy of every artist, or we are mightily deceived. We have Walter Pater on our side, for did he not write very wisely, in the Essay on Style, of the ‘writer’s transcript of his sense of fact,’ and what is this practice that pedants condemn but an attempt to reproduce ‘the sense of fact’? Nor can it be urged that Pater was prejudiced, for he was the very prince of your scraping, paring, meticulous fellows, and would have scaled greater heights had he had a few pulls at the Falstaffian brew. Why this ‘sense of fact’ should be approved as fine art in writing, and yet solemnly condemned as a wanton meddling with the truth in conversation, is a mystery. If a child catches sight of a very tall man, about seven foot or so, and rushes home screaming that he has met a giant at least four yards high, he will probably be spanked for letting his idle fancies make such a commotion; yet he will be justified by all the canons of good art and talk, for while seven feet sounds to be nothing out of the way, only a few inches above the ordinary run of men, a man actually seven foot tall does look four yards high, and it is only some such figure that will reproduce something like the original experience to persons who were not present.