Playful lying should be mentioned along with other forms of exaggeration. Children’s lies have been studied carefully of late years, and the conclusion is general that they are usually playful. Untruthfulness must be playful when it is indulged in merely to tease others or to get amusement from their credulity, or to heighten the recounter’s sense of the marvellous.[307] Only such examples are useful for our purpose as find their chief incentive in the enjoyment of invention. Compayré rightly calls this experimentation, and says that children play with words as they do with sand or blocks.[308] The real stimulus which lying affords to imaginative activity is best demonstrated in the progressive lie: “I have thirty marbles; no, fifty; no, a hundred; no, a thousand!” or “Je viens de voir un papillon grand comme le chat, grand comme la maison.”[309] One of my nephews, Heinrich, was a great romancer, and the same peculiar, almost divergent fixing of his eyes characterized him then as when listening to a marvellous tale. At three and a half years north Berlin was the scene[310] of his inventions, a name which the little Stuttgarter had in some way picked up. There he had seen fish resembling sharks with boots on their feet. On one occasion he related the following: “In north Berlin hares and hounds are on the roofs; they climb up on ladders and play together, and then—and then—comes a telephone, a long wire, you know, and on that they come to Stuttgart. That’s the way they get here.”[311] It is easy to see the connection between this and rudimentary artistic production. Guyan says:[312] “The lying of children is usually the first exercise of their imagination, the first evidence of the germ of art.” Such playful experimentation is, of course, quite different from actual deception. Perhaps nowhere is finer discrimination in this direction shown than in Goethe’s remarks on his boyish story-telling: “It greatly rejoiced the other children when I was the hero of my own story. They were delighted to know that such wonderful things could befall one of their playfellows, and yet they did not seem to marvel that I could play such tricks with time and space as these adventures implied, for they were well aware of my goings and comings and how I was occupied all day long. None the less I must choose the scenes of these adventures, if not in another world, at least in a distant place, and yet tell all as having taken place to-day or yesterday. They therefore made for themselves greater illusions than any I could have palmed off on them. If I had not gradually learned from my natural bent to work up these visions and conceits into artistic forms, such a vainglorious beginning could not have been without injurious consequences to me.” Even when the playful lie becomes artistic production there is always a leaning toward genuine deception. Goethe says: “I took good care not to alter the circumstances much, and by the uniformity of my narrative I converted