I
The plain man is not always mature and successful, as I have hitherto
regarded him. He may be unsuccessful in a worldly sense; but from my
present point of view I do not much care whether he is unsuccessful in
that sense. I know that plain men are seldom failures; their very
plainness saves them from the alarming picturesqueness of the abject
failure. On the other hand, I care greatly whether the plain man is
mature or immature, old or young. I should prefer to catch him young.
But he is difficult to catch young. The fact is that, just as he is
seldom a failure, so he is seldom young. He becomes plain only with
years. In youth, even in the thirties, he has fanciful capricious
qualities which prevent him from being classed with the average
sagacious plain man. He slowly loses these inconvenient qualities, and
develops into part of the backbone of the nation. And then it is too
late to tell him that he is not perfect, simply because he has
forgotten to cultivate the master quality of all qualities--namely,
imagination. For imagination must be cultivated early, and it is just
the quality that these admirable plain men lack.
By imagination I mean the power to conceive oneself in a situation
which one is not actually in; for instance, in another person's place.
It is among the sardonic humours of destiny that imagination, while
positively dangerous in an ill-balanced mind and of the highest value
in a well-balanced mind, is to be found rather in the former than in
the latter. And anyhow, the quality is rare in Anglo-Saxon races,
which are indeed both afraid and ashamed of it.
And yet could the plain, the well-balanced Anglo-Saxon male acquire
it, what a grand world we should live in! The most important thing in
the world would be transformed. The most important thing in the world
is, ultimately, married life, and the chief practical use of the
quality of imagination is to ameliorate married life. But who in
England or America (or elsewhere) thinks of it in that connection? The
plain man considers that imagination is all very well for poets and
novelists. Blockhead! Yes, despite my high esteem for him, I will
apply to him the Johnsonian term of abuse. Blockhead! Imagination is
super-eminently for himself, and was beyond doubt invented by
Providence in order that the plain man might chiefly exercise it in
the plain, drudging dailiness of married life. The day cometh, if
tardily, when he will do so.