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FEW experiences are more distressing to me than being present when a person is checked at the very climax of a tale because of some paltry exaggeration that he or she has made in the heat of the moment. Husbands and wives are always at such tricks, for it very often happens that a genial, expansive, imaginative person is united to one who is somewhat cold, literal-minded, devoid of fancy. A lady, finishing a tale and warming to the task, will cry: ‘No sooner had I opened the door than about fifteen people rushed out—.’ ‘No, my dear, you exaggerate,’ her husband will interrupt, ‘there were only three people there; I counted them.’ And if they are among friends, he will probably turn round and add: ‘Mary will exaggerate, you know; it’s quite a habit of hers.’ The tale then comes to a lame finish, and is indeed quite spoilt. We have been led, as it were, to expect fifteen people; the whole progress of the narrative demanded them; and then at the very moment that we are gratified by their appearance on the scene, four-fifths of them are whisked away and we have to be content with a paltry three merely to satisfy some busybody’s illtimed demand for accuracy. Accuracy, exact statements, hard facts, are very well; they have their uses in the world; but a man must not allow his passion for them to carry him to dangerous lengths, or he will not only give himself a creeping style but will try to spoil every tale that comes his way; such a one will soon be unfit for decent society and will have to take to writing to the newspapers—a vile end. Such literal-minded fellows, without imagination, without any sense of art, are the ruin of good talk; let them do the world’s work in laboratories and counting-houses, but when they are abroad let them keep quiet, or some of us will put them into monstrously exaggerated, scandalous tales, which will be doubly vexatious to them.

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.

Even when there is no interference with the fine flushed narration of others, this cheeseparing habit in talk is detestable. There are some men who will handle words and images in their talk as if they were making miniature watches instead of re-creating a world. Give me a man like Carlyle, who roared for the truth night and morning, and yet did not hesitate to juggle with the universe, to cut and carve it and parcel it out afresh, for his own good purposes. Where there is such divine bounty, to cut the fashion of one’s speech like some pitiful little tailor snipping his own cloth is the very height of meanness. It is base ingratitude, an affront to the maker of the stars, which are themselves numberless and born of a stupendous prodigality. Nature herself, the mother of us all, has a most queenly and delectable passion for hyperboles; the shadows of her monstrous exaggerations sprawl across the world, trumpeting through the forest as the elephant and floundering in the water as Leviathan. If it is Madame Nature who gives us the truth, who sets up the standard by which our talk must be judged, then there is hardly room in this universe for bold lying and no man should be accused of it.

The great poets follow Nature as closely in this love of the hyperbole as they do in other matters. It is your little poets, your timid versifiers, who write in fear of the raised eyebrows of the pedant and the guffaw of the unimaginative, and keep their images down to the level of coffee-room gossip. It is true that a man may rant it and roar it with the best, may try to scale Parnassus as the Titans did Olympus and pile up gigantic image upon image, and yet be no poet; but it is equally true to say that all great poets have shown the same love of amazing hyperboles. Those extraordinary persons who hate a swelling image, a genial exaggeration, who distrust the hyperbole, may read their Shakespeare (though I doubt it) but they cannot read him with constant pleasure. Most of his best things are either the most audacious yet triumphant specimens of the hyperbole to be found in literature or they are pieces of sheer nonsense. And with the poet’s own creatures we may note differences in the manner of their talk that are significant, some characters contenting themselves with merely taking hold of stubborn fact, and others fashioning the whole world to suit their particular moods. But all the great characters, the poet’s own darlings, whose speech and gestures linger in the memory, are lovers of hyperbolism and talk greatly. Dismissing Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Mercutio, Imogen, Perdita, and a host of other fine figures, we have only to examine the four that are considered his most perfect creations, Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, and Iago, to discover the truth of this. Iago has the trait in a less marked degree than the others; his talk keeps a closer hold upon circumstance; but then he is a deep rogue and has to act an unimaginative part. When he is left to himself and talking for his own satisfaction, we soon discover what manner of man he is, for then his fancy begins to boil and we hear muttered talk of Hell and Night, of poppy and mandragora. As for Hamlet and Cleopatra, they often seem to destroy the world and recreate it again in a single casual sentence; only the most towering images are allowed to wait upon their gigantic moods. And Falstaff—what of him? There are persons who disapprove of Falstaff; probably they are the very same people who will not tolerate any sort of exaggeration, who sniff at hyperboles, who dislike a thousand other fine things. We who love the hyperbolical both in literature and talk will take our stand on Falstaff, a sufficient bulwark against legions of such sticklers and quibblers. Small pedants thrive and statisticians creep on like an army of ants; the fiery nimble spirits that can turn mere words into so many soaring coloured balloons are departing from the world; if it were not for the poets, the Sporting Press and Mrs. What’s-her-name’s publishers, the hyperbole would be almost unknown to our generation. In a world of calipers, ammeters, burettes, speedometers, calculating machines, card index cabinets, and blue books, where the fact is everything and its significance nothing, fortified by the great rampart of Falstaff, we will see to it that the hyperbole does not perish. Standing in that vast shadow, I for one am prepared to defend to the death even the story of the eleven men in buckram.