The Imagination: Its Functions and its Culture

[Footnote: 1867.]

Some think education means producing a certain repose by developing some faculties and depressing, if not eradicating, others. But if repose were the aim, the surest way would be to depress every faculty, provided the animal instincts were depressed too, or better, kept constantly satisfied. Happily, hunger alone saves the human race from that, more promptly than any wise handling of its faculties. For repose is not the end of education. Its end is a noble unrest: a constant awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past to interpret the future, an urging on of life’s motions, which had better be hurried into fever than slowed into lethargy.

For those who make balanced repose the end of culture, the imagination must be the first faculty to suppress. “Are there not facts?” they say. “Why leave them for fancies, or what can be known for inventions? What God hath made, into that let man inquire.”

We answer that inquiring into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. Facts arouse and feed it, and it seeks ever higher laws in them; but it refuses to make science the sole interpreter of nature or its laws the only region of discovery.

We must begin by defining the word imagination, or rather describing the faculty it names.

The word means an imaging, a making of likenesses. The imagination is the faculty that gives form to thought, a form that can be uttered in shape or sound or any way the senses can grasp. Being the faculty in man most like God’s prime operation, it has been called creative, and poet means maker. But between creator and poet lies the one unpassable gulf, which distinguishes (far be it from us to say divides) all that is God’s from all that is man’s. Teeming with revelations, it is a gulf no man can cross to find out God, though God need not cross it to find man: the gulf between what calls and what is called into being, between what makes in its own image and what is made in that image. So it is better to keep creation for God’s calling out of nothing, except as an occasional, daring symbol of the likeness of man’s work to his maker’s. For the necessary unlikeness of creator and created holds within it the necessary likeness of the made thing to its maker. To use imagination of God’s work while refusing creation to man’s dares nothing; it only gives man’s faculty’s name to the power it was fashioned after. Man’s imagination is made in the image of God’s, and everything of man was first of God. We will understand the imagination in man better if we first regard rightly the imagination of God, in which man’s lives and moves and has its being.

What thought is in God’s mind before it takes form, or what the form is to him before he utters it, we can say only that our consciousness in the resembling conditions must, afar off, resemble his. But in the acts that embody the Divine thought (if thought and act are not one with him), the difference is large. Where a man makes a machine, a picture, or a book, God makes the man who makes it. Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespere. Would he construct a drama more his own? He builds the stage itself, a universe of worlds, and makes actors who do not act but are their part, uttering them into the visible to work out their life, his drama. For an epic he sends a thinking hero into it, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet. Instead of writing lyrics he sets his birds and maidens singing. The processes of the ages are God’s science, the flow of history his poetry. His sculpture is in living, speaking forms, which pass away not to make room for others but to be perfected in a nobler studio. What he has done remains though it vanishes; he never forgets it nor does it again. As thoughts move in a man’s mind, so the worlds of men and women move in the mind of God without confusion, for there they were born. Man is but a thought of God.

In no primary sense is the so-called creative faculty in man creative. When a new thought arises in his mind, a man is rather being thought than thinking: he did not know it until he found it there, so could not have sent for it, and did not create it, or it would not have been such a surprise. Rarely he may foresee its coming and prepare the place, but that is the most his consciousness and will can do. And in the embodiment of thought, too, a man no more creates the forms that reveal his thoughts than he creates the thoughts.

The forms by which a man reveals his thoughts are those of nature. Though created in closest sympathy with them, he does not originate them; what springs in his mind is the perception that this or that form already expresses some phase of thought or feeling. The world around him is an outward figuration of his mind, an inexhaustible storehouse of crystal pitchers that protect his thought without needing to be broken for the light to break forth. The meanings are in the forms already, else they could be no garment of unveiling. God made the world to serve his creature so, developing in the service the imagination whose need it meets. The man only lights the lamp within the form: his imagination is the light, not the form. Straightway the thought makes the form visible and becomes visible through it. [Footnote: We do not say that the man works consciously even in this; often the vision arises in the mind, thought and form together.]

To illustrate, take a passage from the poet Shelley.

In Adonais, written on the death of Keats and representing death as the revealer of secrets, he says:—

This is certainly a new embodiment; whoever gains from it no loftier feeling about death must be dull of heart or understanding. But did Shelley create the figure, or only combine parts according to truths already embodied in each? He takes human inventions (glass, colour, dome) to show life as finite though elevated, and an analysis, though lovely. He presents eternity as the sky, the true symbol of eternity, domed above this dome, enriched with whiteness for unity and radiance. And he shows Death as the destroying revealer, walking aloft and trampling out this bubble of colours so that man may look beyond it and behold the true, the uncoloured, the all-coloured.

Though the human imagination must use forms already prepared, its operation is the same as the divine in putting thought into form. If it is to man what creation is to God, we must expect it to work in every sphere of human activity, as it does, far more than is commonly supposed.

No one now questions the imagination’s sovereignty over poetry, but not everyone will accept that it has had nearly as much to do with making our language as with “Macbeth” or “Paradise Lost.” Half our language is its work.

How shall two people agree on a name for a thought or feeling? How shall one show the other the invisible? The face, that ever-changing symbol God hung before the unseen spirit, can unveil the mind’s construction, but without words it reaches only present feeling. Used alone to convey the intellectual or historical it would mislead, and even feeling would be misread, especially as to cause and object: dumb show would be worse than dumb.

But let a man become aware of some new movement within him. Loneliness comes, for he would share his mind with his friend and cannot; he is shut in speechlessness. Thus

or the first moment of his perplexity may be his release. Looking about in pain, he suddenly sees the material form of his immaterial condition. There stands his thought! God thought it before him and put its picture there ready. More prosaically, he cannot look around long without perceiving some form or movement of nature, or relation among forms or between them and himself, that resembles the state within him. He seizes it as the garment of his invisible thought, shows it to his friend, and is understood. Every word so used with a new meaning is henceforth born of the spirit and not the flesh, of the imagination and not the understanding, and is submitted to new laws of growth.

Carlyle asks in “Past and Present” whether we suppose there were no poets till Dan Chaucer: no heart burning with a thought it had no word for, needing to coin one, what we call a metaphor. Every word we have had such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing metaphor of questionable originality. Does ATTENTION not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO? Fancy the moment when this new poet first felt driven to name that act of mind which all felt and none had named. His metaphor was found adoptable and intelligible, and remains our name for it.

All words belonging to the mind’s inner world are therefore of the imagination, originally poetic. But the better such a word fits humanity’s needs, the sooner common use strips it of its poetic aspect: it ceases to be heard as a symbol and appears only as a sign, and thousands of words born of the imagination lose their vitality and harden into mummies of prose. Poetry comes first not merely in literature; it is the source of all language for the inner world, passion and metaphysics, psychology and aspiration alike. No poetry comes by elevating prose, but half of prose comes by the “massing into the common clay” of winged words, from which, like lovely shells of bygone ages, one is occasionally dug up by some lover of speech and held to the light to show its play of colour.

For the world is, to use a homely figure, the human being turned inside out: all that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, more philosophically and no less poetically, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, an inexhaustible wardrobe for human thought. Take any word for emotion, even emotion itself, and its primary meaning belongs to the outer world: in the swaying of woods and the unrest of the “wavy plain,” the imagination saw a picture of a familiar condition of the human mind. [Footnote: This only repeats what Carlyle says far better above, but it was written before we had read (if reviewers may confess such ignorance) the book it comes from.]

But beyond this divine function of putting thought into form, man’s imagination has a paramount duty altogether human, springing from his immediate relation to the Father: to follow and find out the divine imagination in whose image it was made. He must watch its signs and contemplate what the Hebrew poets call the works of His hands.

“But to follow those is the province of the intellect, not of the imagination.” We leave aside the poetic interpretation of nature, where the intellect has almost no part and the imagination almost all. There is no need to insist that a flower’s higher being depends for its reception on the human imagination: science may pull the snowdrop to shreds but cannot find the idea of suffering hope and pale confident submission for which God’s heart sends that darling of spring to look on us, his wiser and more sinful children. Whoever admits any truth there admits it belongs to the imagination. We confine ourselves to the questioning of God’s works called science.

“Shall the human intellect,” we ask, “come into readier contact with the divine imagination than the human imagination?” The work of the Higher must be found by a lower faculty similar in kind. We do not exclude the intellect from any highest office; man is not divided when his life’s manifestations are distinguished, and the intellect “is all in every part.” There would be no imagination without intellect, however it may seem that intellect can exist without imagination. We insist only that in finding out God’s works the Intellect must labour, workman-like, under the architect, Imagination. We hope also to show how large a share the imagination has in human endeavour.

“But how can the imagination have anything to do with science, a region governed by fixed laws?”

“True,” we answer, “but how much do we know of these laws? How much of science belongs to the ascertained, conquered by the intellect? We will not dispute your keeping the ascertained free of the imagination, but we claim all the undiscovered and unexplored.” “There it can do little harm. Let it run riot if you will.” “No. Licence is not what we claim for the duty of following and finding out the work God maketh. Her part is to understand God before she tries to utter man. There is no room for being fanciful or riotous; only the ill-bred, uncultivated imagination amuses itself where it ought to worship and work.”

“But the facts of Nature are to be discovered only by observation and experiment.” True. But how does the scientist come to think of his experiments? Does observation reach the non-present, the possible, the unconceived? Even if it showed the experiments that ought to be made, would it reveal those that might be made, and which holds the secret of the law you seek? We yield you the facts; the laws we claim for the prophetic imagination. “He hath set the world in man’s heart,” not his understanding, and the heart must open the door to the understanding. The far-seeing imagination sees what might be the form of things and tells the intellect to try whether it is; it invents a harmonious relation of parts and sends the intellect to see whether it is the one, the law of the phenomenon. The poetic relations in a phenomenon may themselves suggest its scientific law. More: we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination such inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it has insight into the very nature of things.

Lord Bacon says a prudent question is half of knowledge. It comes, we answer, from the imagination, which suggests the direction of a new inquiry, a step toward final discovery even if it sheds no immediate light. Every experiment begins in hypothesis; without that scaffolding the house of science could not rise, and constructing any hypothesis is the imagination’s work. The man who cannot invent will never discover. The imagination often glimpses the law itself long before it can be ascertained as a law. [Footnote: When this paper was written, a mathematical friend, a university lecturer, gave us a corroborating instance. He had guessed that a certain algebraic process could be shortened enormously if the method his imagination suggested were a true algebraic law. He tested it, giving the verification to his intellect, and found it true. The Royal Society has since accepted it.

A noteworthy illustration appears in the record of an Edinburgh detective, an Irishman named McLevy. We could adduce many proofs that he knows what the imagination does in solving his profession’s problems. He recognizes its function in constructing the theory that unites hints into an organic whole, and expressly states the need of a theory before facts can serve:—

“I would wait for my ‘idea’.… I never did any good without mine.… Chance never smiled on me unless I poked her some way; so my ‘notion,’ after all, has been my own work in the getting, only perfected by a higher hand.”

“On leaving the shop I went direct to Prince’s Street with an idea in my mind; I have always been content with one idea when I couldn’t get another, since sticking by one means the others don’t jostle it and turn you in a circle.” (Footnote: The book referred to has since been found unworthy of confidence; let it stand as illustration where it cannot be proof.)]

The region of the pure intellect is narrow, and the imagination labours to extend it, sweeping across the borders to find new lands where she may guide her plodding brother. She is the light that redeems from darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, “The imagination is the stuff of the intellect,” the material it works on. Bacon, in his “Advancement of Learning,” recognizes this office, matching God’s foresight in beholding afar off: “Imagination is much akin to miracle-working faith.” [Footnote: We cannot verify this quotation, for which we thank Mr. Oldbuck the Antiquary in the novel of that ilk, but there is little room for doubt that it is sufficiently correct.]

In the scientific region of her duty the Imagination cannot do her perfect work, which belongs to a higher sphere than intellectual truth, that of full-globed humanity, where she gives birth to poetry, truth in beauty. But her function in our whole nature will influence her more limited work in science. Coleridge says only a poet will make any further great discoveries in mathematics, and Bacon calls “wonder,” the faculty attendant on the child-like imagination, “the seed of knowledge.” The poetic influence on the scientific imagination shows especially in building an invisible whole from the hints of a visible part, where the part’s needs, uselessness, and broken relations are the only guide to the whole’s multiplex harmony and end. From a little bone, worn by ages of death, the scientific imagination dashed with the poetic calls up the form, size, habits, and periods of an animal never seen by human eyes, even its mingled scales and wings, feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination we look back into ancient times so dreadful in their incompleteness that it may have taken seraphic faith as well as cherubic imagination to see in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth God’s quiet, age-long labour preparing the world for his unborn Man. And the poet’s imagination, dashed with the scientist’s, showed Goethe the prophecy of the flower in the leaf, though only an artistic imagination fulfilled of science could discover that the leaf is the imperfect flower.

In history we find probably the greatest sphere for the intellectuo-constructive imagination. Its province is to discover history’s laws and the cycles in which events return, and why, recognizing them despite metamorphosis; to perceive the vital motions of this spiritual body of mankind and learn from its facts the rule of God; to build from broken indications a whole accordant with human nature; to approach a scheme of the forces at work (passions overwhelming, aspirations raising up, selfishnesses debasing) in their vital interworking; and to illuminate all from analogy with individual life and the predominant characters taken as the people’s mind. Without her no recording of events becomes a history; one might as well call a description of a volcano one that traces only the shapes of its smoke. What history becomes under her full sway is seen in Thomas Carlyle’s “History of the French Revolution,” at once a true picture, a philosophical revelation, a noble poem.

A wonderful passage about Time in Shakespere’s “Rape of Lucrece” shows how he understood history. It is really about history, not time, which does nothing, not even “blot old books and alter their contents”; the forces at work in time produce all changes, and they are history. We quote it chiefly for one line.

To wrong the wronger till he render right. Here is a historical cycle worthy of Shakespere’s imagination, indeed of the creative imagination of our God, who made Shakespere with the imagination and evolved the history from laws that imagination followed and found out.

For full instances we refer readers to Shakespere’s historical plays, and to his repeatedly showing his greatest characters at the point of death relieving their overcharged minds by prophecy: imagination’s light, cleared of distorting dimness by the vanishing of earthly hopes, cast on the facts of experience. This is the perfect working of the historical imagination.

The same principles hold in interpreting individual life, and the imagination can be nowhere more healthily and rewardingly occupied than in constructing an individual’s life from the fragments that reach us even of the noblest of our race. How this applies to the gospel story we leave to our readers’ earnest thought.

We now pass to one more sphere in which the student imagination works in glad freedom, the one understood to belong more immediately to the poet.

We have said that the forms of Nature (by forms we mean any conditions of Nature that affect man’s senses) are approximate representations of the mental conditions of humanity. The outward, commonly called the material, is informed by the inward, the thought. They represent human thought because they embody God’s, and so can be read and used to any depth. Men of all ages have found in them the means of expression, and those ahead of us on every path must find such means there, unfolding with their needs. The man who, in harmony with nature, seeks more of her meanings is searching out the things of God. The deepest are far too simple for us to understand yet. But let our interpretive imagination reveal one severed significance of one of her parts, and such is the harmony of the whole that all Nature is open to us henceforth, in time and not without labour. On the man who can understand the human meaning of the snowdrop, primrose, or daisy, the life of the earth blossoming into the cosmical flower of a perfect moment will one day seize, with prophetic hope, rousing his conscience with the vision of the “rest that remaineth” and stirring his aspiration to enter it:

Even the careless curve of a frozen cloud across the blue will calm troubled thoughts and may slay selfish ones. And what of such shows as scarlet poppies in the green corn, nearest to the lilies of the field that spoke to the Saviour himself of God’s care and rejoiced his eyes? From such visions the imagination reaps the best fruits of the earth, for which all the science involved in its construction is the inferior, yet willing and beautiful, support.

From all this, does not the name given by our Norman ancestors fit the man who moves in these regions better than the Greeks’ name? Is Poet, the Maker, not less suitable than Trouvère, the Finder? At least, must not the faculty that finds precede the faculty that utters?

But has the imagination no creative faculty, no originating power? Is there nothing to say from the Greek side?

It would be a poor description of the Imagination that omitted the element present to the mind that invented the word Poet. It can present new thought-forms, new as revelations of thought. It creates none of their material and works on no raw material, but takes existing forms and gathers them about a thought so much higher than they that it can group, subordinate, and harmonize them into a whole that unveils that thought. [Footnote: So Spenser describes the embodiment of a human soul in his Platonic “Hymn in Honour of Beauty.”

We illustrate this process with the well-known Bugle Song in Tennyson’s “Princess.”

First there is the song’s new music, which reminds one of no other. Its rhythm, rhyme, melody, and harmony embody in sound, as distinct from words, the poem’s feeling, which goes before and tunes the heart to receive the thought that follows. Then comes the new arrangement of thought and figure presenting the meaning as never before. We give a paraphrastical synopsis, which, partly because it is disagreeable, will send lovers of the song back to it with more pleasure.

The glory of midsummer mid-day on mountain, lake, and ruin. Give nature a voice for her gladness. Blow, bugle.

Nature answers with dying echoes, sinking in the midst of her splendour into sad silence.

Not so human nature: the echoes of the word of truth gather volume and richness from every soul that re-echoes it to other souls.

Poets have made a fashion of contrasting nature’s stability and rejuvenescence with humanity’s evanescence and unreturning decay:—

But our poet vindicates the eternal in humanity:—

Is this not a new form for the thought, one that makes us feel its truth afresh? Every new embodiment of a known truth is a wider revelation. No man sees the whole of any truth himself; he needs it echoed back from every soul in the universe, and its centre is still hid in the Father of Lights. In so far as form or thought is new, we may use the word Creation, modified as our definitions require.

This operation of the imagination in choosing, gathering, and vitally combining the material of a new revelation is well illustrated by something our greatest poets have delighted in. Seeing truth half hidden and half revealed in the stammering speech of those before them, they have completed the unfinished form, rescuing the soul of meaning from its prison of crude formlessness, where it sat like the Prince in the “Arabian Nights,” half man, half marble, and setting it free in a shape it could “through every part impress.” Shakespere suggested many such rescues from the tomb of drearily told tales that none would read now but for the glorified form he gave their contents. From Tennyson we can give one specimen small enough for our use, a chip from the great marble re-embodying the legend of Arthur’s death, which may, like the hand of Achilles holding his spear in the crowded picture,

In the “History of Prince Arthur,” when Sir Bedivere returns after hiding Excalibur the first time, the king asks what he saw, and he answers—

The second time, to the same question, he answers—

[Footnote 1: Wap is plain enough; wan we cannot settle. Wan, meaning dark, gloomy, turbid, is a common adjective for a river in the old Scotch ballad, and might be one here, but that is unlikely, since it is joined with the verb wap. The Anglo-Saxon wanian, to decrease, might be the root (as to ebb) if this water were the sea and not a lake. Possibly the meaning is “I heard the water whoop or wail aloud” (from Wópan) and “the waves whine or bewail” (from Wánian, to lament), though even then the verbs seem to belong to transposed subjects.]

This answer Tennyson has expanded into the well-known lines—

slightly varied, for the other occasion, into—

But as to creation, I ask once more: in what genuine sense does a man create his own thought-forms? Granting that a new combination of existing forms might be called creation, is the man its author? Did he, with will and knowledge, construct a form to embody his thought, or did it arise within him without will or effort, vivid if not clear, certain if not outlined? Ruskin (we know no better authority) asserts the latter, and we think he is right, though perhaps he would insist more than we quite will on the vision’s absolute perfection. The man feels such embodiments are given, appearing suddenly in luminous writing on the wall of his consciousness from the vast unknown where time and space are not. Can he be said to have created them? Nothing less so, we think. Are they then the creation of the unconscious part of his nature? Yes, if we understand that the man himself can know without knowing that he knows, and create yet be ignorant that virtue has gone out of him. They come from that unknown region, but not by its own blind working, and no amount of willless production could be called creation. God sits in that chamber of our being where the candle of our consciousness goes out, and sends wonderful gifts from it into the light of the understanding, which is His candle. Our hope lies not in any perfect mechanism even of the spirit but in the wisdom in which we live and move and have our being. If the dark part of ourselves were the origin of our imaginations, we might fear monsters generated by a decay that could never feel, only declare, a slow return to primeval chaos. But the Maker is our Light.

One word more before we turn to the culture of this noblest faculty. We might call it creative, did we not see something in God for which we humbly keep the word. A work of art, the highest human product of the embodying imagination, always holds more than its producer perceived, which seems a strong reason to attribute it to a larger origin than the man alone, and to say finally that the Almighty’s inspiration shaped its ends.

We return to the class we supposed hostile to the imagination from the first. They will say: “We opposed not the imagination you have set forth but those wild fancies and vague reveries that young people indulge in, to the loss of the real world around them.”

“And,” we insist, “you would set this right by smothering the young monster at once, because his wings flutter in ways that rattle your nerves and offend notions of propriety this creature (you don’t ask whether angel or pterodactyl) has not yet learned. If you object only to his vagaries, why call them the exercise of the imagination? One might as well call religion the mother of cruelty because it has occasioned more cruelty and devilry than anything else. Are we not to worship because our forefathers burned and stabbed for religion? We want more religion, we need more imagination; these are only the first vital motions of that whose results, at least in science, you gladly accept.” Evil may spring from the imagination, as from everything except the perfect love of God; but its absence would bring infinitely worse. Selfishness, avarice, sensuality, and cruelty would flourish tenfold, and Satan’s power be established before some children had begun to choose. Those who would quell the youthful imagination suppress all that is to grow from it. They fear the enthusiasm they never felt, and instead of giving this divine thing room and air, crush it into imposthume, fever, and corruption. The intellect they worship would suffer too: kill what produces the day-dreams of the young and you will never lead them beyond dull facts, dull because their relations to each other and the one life in them remain undiscovered. Whoever wants his children to escape this arid region should let no teacher near them, even of mathematics, who lacks imagination.

“But although good results may appear in a few from the indulgence of the imagination, how will it be with the many?”

We answer that the antidote to indulgence is development, not restraint, and that this is the duty of the wise servant of Him who made the imagination.

“But will most girls, for instance, rise to those useful uses? Are they not likelier to build castles in the air and neglect houses on earth? And since the world gives such poor scope to the ideal, will this habit not breed vain desires and regrets? Is it not better to keep to what is known and leave the rest?”

“Is the world so poor?” we answer. Then all the less reason to be content with it, and all the more to rise above it into the region of the true and eternal, of things as God thinks them. This outward world is only a passing vision of what truly lasts, and we will not live in it for ever. We live in a divine universe where no desire is in vain, if only it is large enough. Even in this world, not every disappointment breeds only empty regret. [Footnote:

And as to keeping to what is known: how many affairs of this world are so well defined as to leave no large spaces of uncertainty, whose very correlate faculty is the imagination? In most things it must work somehow, filling the gaps by some possible plan, before action can begin. A wise imagination, which is the presence of God’s spirit, is the best guide man or woman can have, for what influences us most is not what we see most clearly. Undefined, vivid visions of something beyond what eye has seen or ear heard move us far more than logical sequences demonstrating the same things to the intellect. The nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, decides its operation. We live by faith, not sight. Ask our mathematicians (only be sure the question reaches them) whether they would part with the perfection of their diagrams or the dim, half-obliterated characters woven in the web of their being; their science or poetry; their certainties or hopes. If they choose the former each time, I doubt that the objects of the choice are really before them, equally presented.

What can be known must be known severely, but is there no faculty for the infinite lands of uncertainty around the sphere the lamp of our knowledge hollows out of the dark? Are they not the imagination’s natural property, there for it to grow in, that man may learn to imagine greatly like the God who made him, discovering their mysteries by his following and worshipping imagination?

All this tends to enforce the culture of the imagination, but the strongest argument remains: even if all the power of pedantry rises against her, the imagination will work, if not for good then for evil, if not for truth then falsehood, if not for life then death, and the evil is likelier for the unnatural treatment she has had from those who should have fostered her. The power that might conceive the noblest forms of action and realize the lives of the true-hearted will build airy castles of vain ambition, riches, and unearned admiration. The imagination that might devise how to bless a home or help a poor neighbour will be absorbed in inventing the new dress or, worse, the means of procuring it. If she is not occupied with the beautiful she will be with the pleasant; what does not go out to worship stays home to be sensual. The mere intellect, however cultivated, will never reduce the passions; the imagination, seeking the ideal in everything, will raise them to their true service. Do not seek that your sons and daughters see no visions and dream no dreams; seek that they see true visions and dream noble dreams. Such going out of the imagination is one with aspiration, and lifts above the low and vile more than all inculcations of morality. Nor can religion rise into her calm home when one of her two wings is broken or paralyzed.

The danger of repressing the imagination can be seen in “Macbeth.” The hero’s powerful imagination, showing him how the deed would look to others and so its true nature, was his great impediment on the path to crime, and he would not have reached it without going to his wife for refuge from it. She, with far less of the faculty and a more destructive way with what she had, took his hand and led him to the deed. She herself takes refuge in unbelief and denial, declaring to herself and her husband that imagination’s representations are not real; that nothing is real beyond the present effect on the mind; that intellect and courage are equal to any emergency, even an evil one; that no harm will come to those who rule themselves by their own will. Still finding her imagination, and more her husband’s, troublesome, she combines materialism and idealism, asserting that things are not, cannot be, and shall not be more or other than people choose to think them. She says,—

But she over-estimated her will and under-estimated her imagination. Her will was the one bad thing in her, without root or support in the universe; her imagination was the voice of God himself out of her own unknown being. No one’s choice can long determine how he shall think of things. Hers would not be repressed beyond its appointed period, fixed by laws of her being she could not control, and at length it arose as from the dead, overshadowing her with the blackness of her crime. The woman who drank strong drink to murder dared not sleep without a light; she rose and walked in the night, a sleepless spirit in a sleeping body, rubbing the spotted hand of her dreams, which still smelt of the deed, however often water had cleared it, so that all the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten it. Her long down-trodden imagination took vengeance even through the senses she thought to subordinate to her will.

But all this is of the imagination itself and fitter for illustration than argument. Let us come to facts. Dr. Pritchard, lately executed for murder, had no lack of invention, the intellect of the imagination, its lowest form. A clergyman who attended him at his own request went through indescribable horrors trying in vain to get him simply to stop lying: invention after invention followed the most earnest asseverations of truth. His report caused in us a moral dismay we had never felt about any human being, and drew the exclamation, “The man could have had no imagination.” The reply was, “None whatever.” Never seeking true or high things, caring only for appearances and so for inventions, he had left his imagination undeveloped, and when it showed him his own inner condition had repressed it until it was nearly destroyed, and what remained was set on fire of hell. [Footnote: One of the best weekly papers in London, ignorant of the man and the facts, said Dr. MacLeod was “white-washing the murderer for heaven.” In fact he refused to pray with him, telling him that if there was a hell to go to, he must go to it.]

Man is “the roof and crown of things.” He is the world, and more. So next to God, the chief scope of his imagination will be the world in relation to his own life in it. Will he do better or worse if this imagination, given free scope, shows him noble pictures of relationship and duty, of possible elevation of character and attainable justice of behaviour, of friendship and love, and above all of these in the life whose understanding as a whole is the loftiest aspiration of man’s noblest power? Will a woman live a more or less troubled life if nature’s sights and sounds break through the crust of gathering anxiety and remind her of the peace of the lilies and the birds’ well-being? Will life interest her less if her neighbours’ lives, instead of passing like shadows on a wall, take consistent wholeness as stories? Will she not love more and talk less? Will she be less likely to make a good match——? But here we stop, bewildered by the word good. If mothers mean by it the alliance of a man of position and means (let them add intellect, manners, and personal advantages), then the daughter of cultivated imagination may not be manageable and will probably be obstinate. We hope she will be obstinate enough. [Footnote: Women who feel the wrongs of their kind will do more for women’s elevation and rights, whatever those are, by teaching women to be high-minded toward men than by intellectual development or asserting equality; and men, “feelingly persuaded” what they are, would gain equally.] But will the girl be less likely to marry a gentleman, in the grand old sixteenth-century meaning, when it was no irreverence to call our Lord

or in that of the fourteenth?—when Chaucer, teaching “whom is worthy to be called gentill,” writes thus:—

Will she be less likely to marry one who honours women, and for their sakes as well as his own honours himself? Or, from the mother’s side: will culture of her imagination make her likelier to refuse the wise, generous, true-hearted rich man for the talking, verse-making fool because he is poor, as if poverty were a virtue he had striven for? The highest imagination and the lowliest common sense are always on one side.

For the end of imagination is harmony. A right imagination, the reflex of creation, falls in with the divine order of things as the highest form of its own operation; “tunes its instrument here at the door” to the divine harmonies within; is content only with growth toward the divine idea, which includes all that is beautiful in men’s imperfect imaginations; knows every deviation from it is downward; and so sends a man from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling with a hearty, hopeful spirit. Every imagination, in proportion to its rightness, tends to this. Even the wise man’s reveries strengthen him for his work, making him sorry for past failure and hopeful of future success.

To come to the culture of the imagination: its development is one of the main ends of life’s divine education. So the first means is ordering our life toward harmony with its ideal in the mind of God. As he who is willing to do the Father’s will shall know of the doctrine, so, we doubt not, he who will do the will of THE POET shall behold the Beautiful. For all is God’s, and the man growing into harmony with His will is growing into harmony with himself, his hidden glories coming into humble consciousness, till at last he is a pure microcosm faithfully reflecting the mighty macrocosm. So nothing, we believe, does so much for the intellect or imagination as being good, not after any formula or creed but after the faith of Him who did the will of his Father in heaven.

As to direct means for culturing the imagination, the whole is two words: food and exercise. For strong arms, eat meat and row. Feed your imagination with convenient food, and exercise it not in the acrobat’s contortions but the gymnast’s movements. First, the food.

Goethe says the way to develop the aesthetic faculty is to keep before our eyes, in the room we most frequent, some work of the best attainable art. It will teach us to refuse the evil and choose the good, plant itself in our minds as counsellor, and become the unconscious standard for judging everything. No better advice could be given, but it risks narrowness, and we would hardly change our tutor to gain variety. For culturing the imagination, books, though not the only means, are the readiest food, and a hundred may be had where one work of art of the right sort is unattainable, since it must be of some size as well as thorough excellence. Only variety guards against the convenient food becoming the inconvenient model.

Suppose someone who values the imagination wants to develop it in his child. The best start, especially for a young child, is acquaintance with nature: let him observe vital phenomena, put things together, and speculate from what he sees to what he does not. But take care that he never talks foolishly about anything. Let him be as fanciful as he likes, but not sin against fancy’s own sense, for fancy has laws as surely as ordinary business. When he is silly, let him know it and be ashamed.

Where nature is only occasionally available, we must turn to literature. In books we have not only a store of the imagination’s results but can watch her at work as in her workshop, embodying before our eyes, in music of speech and wonder of words, till her work, like a golden dish set with jewels by cunning workmen, stands finished. The best must be set before the learner, that he may eat and not be satisfied, for the finest products of imagination best nourish its beginnings. The teacher’s mind must mediate between the art and the pupil’s mind, bringing them into vital contact, directing observation to lines of expression and points of force, and helping the mind rest on the whole, so that no separable beauties lead to neglect of the complete shape. He must seek to show excellence rather than talk about it, giving the thing itself to grow into the mind rather than his own eulogy, isolating the point worth remarking rather than making many remarks on it.

Above all he must show a work’s spiritual scaffolding or skeleton: the main ideas on which its shape is built, around which the rest group as ministering dependencies.

Yet he will not pass over the intellectual structure without which the other could not be manifested. He will not forget the builder while admiring the architect. While delighting in how the peculiar arch relates to the meaning of the whole cathedral, he will explain the principles it is built on and how they were carried out. Every beauty, down to tracery, crockets, and mouldings, will have its word, but all will be subordinated to the final beauty, the unity of the whole.

In this he performs the true office of friendship, introducing his pupil to the society he prizes most, surrounding him with the high-minded, that good company may work its own kind in him.

But he will also try to turn him from company, of books or men, that might lower his reverence, choice, or standard. He will discourage indiscriminate reading and the worse-than-waste skimming of circulating-library books. He knows a book worth reading is worth reading well, and one not worth reading is worth skimming only for the most accomplished reader. He will teach him to discern not only good from evil but good from not so good, not to sharpen the intellect, still less to breed the self-satisfaction closest to criticism, but to choose the best path and companions. A spirit of criticism that only distinguishes, or worse, aims at having one’s opinion ready on demand, is repulsive to true thinkers and destructive of all thinking. A spirit of criticism for the truth’s sake, one that waits to be wanted rather than starting from its chamber at every noise, cannot garnish the house but can sweep it clean. With enough such wise criticism, the best writers of the past would be studied ten times as much and the ephemeral productions of the day admired a tenth as much. The study of one good book would sweep a mountain of misplaced worship into the sea; the good in an inferior book would still be admired, but its relative position would change and its influence lessen.

Of true learning Lord Bacon says: “It taketh away vain admiration of anything, which is the root of all weakness.”

The right teacher would have his pupil easy to please but hard to satisfy: ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to find beauty, slow to say, “Here I will dwell.”

He will not confine his teaching to art. He will encourage him to read history with an eye eager for the dawning figure of the past, showing him that much of the Bible can only be so understood and that God’s constant, consistent way, discoverable in it, is the key to all history.

In individual lives too he will show him how to put sign and token together, building not a whole but a probable suggestion of it.

While showing him nature’s reflex in the poets, he will send him to Nature herself, urging him on country rambles to keep his eyes open for the sweet fashionings and blendings around him, and on city walks to watch the “human face divine.”

He will also point out the essential difference between reverie and thought, dreaming and imagining; teach him not to mistake fancy for imagination, in himself or others; and warn him against hunting resemblances that carry no interpretation.

Such training is not meant only for developing artistic faculty. Few in this world will be able to utter what they feel, fewer in forms of their own, and there is no need for many. But all must feel; all must understand and imagine the good; all must at least begin to follow and find out God.

Solomon says it is the glory of God to conceal a thing and of the king to find it out. Bacon remarks that it is as if, in the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty delighted to hide his works to have them found, and kings could win no greater honour than to be God’s playfellows in that game.

One more quotation, from Ecclesiastes, shows both the necessity of our imagining and the comfort that our imagining cannot outstrip God’s making.

“I have seen the travail God has given the sons of men to be exercised in. He has made everything beautiful in its time, and set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work God makes from beginning to end.”

So, to be playfellows with God in this game, the little ones may gather daisies and follow painted moths; the child of the kingdom may pore over the lilies of the field and gather faith as the birds gather food from the leafless hawthorn, ruddy with God’s stored provision; and the man of science