consideration, that the subject of my essay had a certain levity or
fancifulness about it. Works of imagination, as by a curious
juxtaposition they are called, are apt to lie under an indefinable
suspicion, as including unbusinesslike and romantic fictions, of which
the clear-cut and well-balanced mind must beware, except for the sake,
perhaps, of the frankest and least serious kind of recreation.
Considering the part which the best and noblest works of imagination
must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised me to
reflect how little scope ordinary literary exercises give for the use
of that particular faculty. The old themes and verses aimed at
producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical
rhetoricians and poets. No boy, at least in my day, was ever
encouraged to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely across
country in pursuit of imagined adventures. Even English teaching in
its earlier stages seldom aimed at more than transcriptions of actual
experience, a day spent in the country, or a walk beside the sea.
Only quite recently have boys and girls been encouraged to write poems
and stories out of their own imaginations; and even now there are
plenty of educational critics who would consider such exercises as
dilettante things lacking in practical solidity.
But I desire in this essay to go further back into the roots of the
subject, and my first position is plainly this; that imagination, pure
and simple, is a common enough faculty; not perhaps the creative
imagination which can array scenes of life, construct romantic
experiences, and embody imaginary characters in dramatic situations,
but the much simpler sort of imagination which takes pleasure in
recalling past memories, and in forecasting and anticipating
interesting events. The boy who, weary of the school-term, considers
what he will do on the first day of the holidays, or who anxiously
forebodes paternal displeasure, is exercising his imagination; and the
truth is that the faculty of imagination plays an immense part in all
human happiness and unhappiness, considering that, whenever we take
refuge from the present in memories or in anticipations, we are using
it. The first point then that I shall consider is whether this
restless and influential faculty ought not in any case to be
_trained_, so that it may not either be atrophied or become
over-dominant; and the second point will be the further consideration
as to whether the faculty of creative imagination is a thing which
should be deliberately developed.
In the first place then, it seems to me simply extraordinary that so
little heed is paid in education to the using and controlling of what
is one of the most potent instinctive forces of the mind. We take
careful thought how to strengthen and fortify the body, we go on to
spending many hours upon putting memory through its paces, and in
developing the reason and the intelligence; we pass on from that to
exercising and purifying the character and the will; we try to make
vice detestable and virtue desirable. But meanwhile, what is the
little mind doing? It submits to the drudgery imposed upon it, it
accommodates itself more or less to the conditions of its life; it
learns a certain conduct and demeanour for use in public. Yet all the
time the thought of the boy is running backwards and forwards in
secrecy, considering the memories of its experience, pleasant or
unpleasant, and comforting itself in tedious hours by framing little
plans for the future. I remember my old schoolmastering days, and the
hours I spent with a class of boys sitting in front of me; how
constantly one saw boys in the midst of their work, with pen suspended
and page unturned, look up with that expression denoting that some
vision had passed before the inward eye--which, as Wordsworth justly
observes, constitutes "the bliss of solitude"--obliterating for a
moment the surrounding scene. I do not mean that the thought was a
distant or an exalted one--probably it was some entirely trivial
reminiscence, or the anticipation of some coming amusement. But I do
not think I exaggerate when I say that probably the greater part of a
human being's unoccupied hours, and probably a considerable part of
the hours supposed to be occupied, are spent in some similar exercise
of the imagination. What a confirmation of this is to be found in the
phenomena of sleep and dreams! Then the instinct is steadily at work,
neither remembering nor anticipating, but weaving together the results
of experience into a self-taught tale.
And then if one considers later life, it is no exaggeration to say
that the greater part of human happiness and unhappiness consists in
the dwelling upon what has been, what may be, what might be, and,
alas, in our worst moments, upon what might have been "My unhappiest
experiences," said Lord Beaconsfield, "have been those which never
happened"; and again the same acute critic of life said that half the
clever people he knew were under the impression that they were hated
and envied, the other half that they were admired and loved;--and that
neither were right!
The imaginative faculty then is a species of self-representation, the
power of considering our own life and position as from the outside;
from it arise both the cheerful hopes and schemes of the sound mind,
and the shadowy anxieties and fears of the mind which lacks
robustness. It certainly does seem singular that this deep and
persistent element in human life is left so untrained and unregarded,
to range at will, to feed upon itself. All that the teacher does is to
insist as far as possible on a certain concentration of the mind on
business at particular times, and if he has ethical purposes at
heart, he may sometimes speak to a boy on the advisability of not
allowing his mind to dwell upon base or sensual thoughts; but how
little attempt is ever made to train the mind in deliberate and
continuous self-control!
The latest school of pathologists, in the treatment of obsessed or
insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their
dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression
by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. I am
inclined to think that the educators of the future must somehow
contrive to do more--indeed they cannot well do less than is actually
done--in teaching the control of that secret undercurrent of thought
in which happiness and unhappiness really reside. Those who have lived
much with boys will know what havoc suspense or disappointment or
anxiety or sensuality or unpopularity can make in an immature
character. It seems to me that we ought not to leave all this without
guidance or direction, but to make a frontal attack upon it. I do not
mean that it is necessary to probe too deeply into the imagination,
but I believe that the subject should be frankly spoken about, and
suggestions made. The point is to get the will to work, and to induce
the mind, in the first place, to realise and practise its power of
self-command; and in the second place, to show that it is possible to
evict an unwholesome thought by the deliberate welcoming and
entertaining of a wholesome one. The best of all cures is to provide
every boy with some occupation which he indubitably loves. There are
a good many boys whose work is not interesting to them, and a certain
number to whom the prescribed games are a matter of routine rather
than of active pleasure. Indeed it may be said that hardly any boys
enjoy either work or games in which they see no possibility of any
personal distinction. It is therefore of great importance that every
boy whose chances of successful performance are small should be
encouraged to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the mind
can remember with pleasure and anticipate with delight supplies the
food for the restless imagination, which may otherwise become dreary
from inaction, or tainted by thoughts of baser pleasure. A
schoolmaster only salves his conscience by supplying a strict
time-table and regular games. A house master ought to be most careful
in the case of boys whose work is languid and proficiency in games
small, to find out what the boy really likes and enjoys, and to
encourage it by every means in his power. That is the best corrective,
to administer wholesome food for the mind to digest. But I believe
that good teachers ought to go much further, and speak quite plainly
to boys, from time to time, on the necessity of practising control of
thought. My own experience is that boys were always interested in any
talk, call it ethical or religious, which based itself directly upon
their own actual experience. I can conceive that a teacher who told a
class to sit still for three minutes and think about anything they
pleased, and added that he would then have something to tell them,
might have an admirable object-lesson in getting them to consider how
swift and far-ranging their fancies had been; or again he might
practise them in concentration of thought by asking them to think for
five minutes on a perfectly definite thing--to imagine themselves in a
wood, or by the sea, or in a chemist's shop, let us say, and then
getting them to put down on paper a list of definite objects which
they had imagined. The process could be infinitely extended; but if it
were done with some regularity, it would certainly b possible to train
boys to concentrate themselves in reflection and recollected
observation. Or again a quality might be propounded, such as
generosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an
imaginary anecdote of the simplest kind to illustrate it. This would
have the effect of training the mind at all events to focus itself,
and this is just what drudgery pure and simple will not do. The aim is
not to train mere memory or logical accuracy, but to strengthen that
great faculty which we loosely call imagination, which is the power of
evoking mental images, and of migrating from the present into the past
or the future.
I believe it to be a very notable lack in our theory of education that
so little attempt is made to bring the will to bear upon what may be
called the subconscious mind. It is that strange undercurrent of
thought which is so imprudently neglected which throws up on its
banks, without any apparent purpose or aim, the ideas and images which
lurk within it. I do not say that such a training would immediately
give self-control, but most peoples' worst sufferings are caused by
what is called "having something on their mind"; and yet, so far as I
know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever is made, except
quite incidentally, to dispossess the strong man armed by the stronger
victor, or to help immature minds to hold an unpleasant or a pleasant
thought at arm's length, or to train them in the power of resolutely
substituting a current of more wholesome images. The subconscious mind
is too often treated as a thing beyond control, and yet the
pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like
a seed in the mind, which presently appears to be rooted and
flowering, ought to show us that we have within our reach an
extraordinarily potent psychological implement.
So far then on the more negative side. I have indicated my strong
belief that much may be done to train the mind in self-control. Indeed
our whole education is built upon the faith that we can, perhaps not
implant new faculties, but develop dormant ones; and I am persuaded
that when future generations come to survey our methods and processes
of education, they will regard with deep bewilderment the amazing fact
that we applied so careful a training to other faculties, and yet left
so helplessly alone the training of the imaginative faculty, upon
which, as I have said, our happiness and unhappiness mainly depend. We
must, all of us be aware of the fact that there have been times in our
lives when all was prosperous, and when we were yet overshadowed with
dreary thoughts; or again times when in discomfort, or under the
shadow of failure, or at critical or tragic moments, we have had an
unreasonable alertness and cheerfulness. All that is due to the
subconscious mind, and we ought at least to try experiments in making
it obey us better.
I now pass on to consider a further possibility, and that is of
training and developing a higher sort of creative imagination. It is
all in reality part of the same subject, because it seems to be
certain that most human beings suffer by the suppression or the
dormancy of existing faculties. It is here, I believe, that much of
our intellectual education fails, from the tendency to direct so much
attention to purely logical and reasoning faculties, and to the
resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment. I
used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and I remember at one
time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of
concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes
at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily
mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was
simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and
brisk tangible incidents. But the silence, the luxurious abandonment
of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing
light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which
I never had in teaching Latin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence.
I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in my
house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are
remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the
stories.
Now we have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which
is consistently neglected and even despised. It is regarded as a mere
luxury; but we do not make the mistake of substituting gymnastics for
games, and removing the pleasure of personal performance. Why can we
not also do something to encourage what old Hawtrey used so
beautifully to call "the sweet pride of authorship"? The worst of it
all is that we look so much to tangible results. I do not mean that we
must try to develop Shakespeares, Shelleys, Thackerays; such airy
creatures have a way of catering for themselves! I do riot at all want
to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs. But many boys
have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and
riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising
some little vision and creation of their own brains. Of course there
are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid
upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise. But there are also a good
many shy boys, who will not venture to make themselves conspicuous by
literary and imaginative feats, and who yet if it were a matter of
course and wont, would throw themselves with intense pleasure into
literary creation. The work done, for instance, at Shrewsbury, at the
Perse School, at Carlisle Grammar School, in this direction--I daresay
it is done elsewhere, but I have seen the work of these three schools
with my own eyes--show what quite average boys are capable of in both
English poetry and English prose.
One of the best points of such a system of literary composition is
that even if slower boys cannot effect much, it gives a most wholesome
opening to the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and
compressed, are most likely to work in unwholesome and tormenting
directions.
My suggestion then becomes part of a larger plea, the plea for more
direct cultivation of enjoyment in education. Some of our worst
mistakes in education arise from our not basing it upon the actual
needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed
constitution of a child constructed by the starved imagination of
pedants and moralists and practical men.
One of the first requisites in cultivating intellectual and artistic
pleasure is to build up taste out of the actual perceptions of the
child. That is a factor which has been most stubbornly and
unintelligently disregarded in education. Developments in character
are of the nature of living things; they cannot be superimposed they
must be rooted in the temperament and they must draw nurture and
sustenance out of the spirit, as the seed imbibes its substance from
the unseen soil and the hidden waters. But what has been constantly
done is to introduce the broadest effects and the simplest romance,
directly and suddenly to the biggest masterpieces. The absence of all
gradation and reconciliation has been characteristic of our literary
education. Of course there is an initial difficulty in the case of the
classics, that there is very little in either Greek or Latin which
really appeals to an immature taste at all; and such books as might
appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as Homer or the
_Anabasis_ of Xenophon, are made unattractive by the method of giving
such short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough
parsing. Even _Alice in Wonderland_, let me say, could only prove a
drearily bewildering book, if read at the rate of twenty lines a
lesson, and if the principal tenses of all the verbs had to be
repeated correctly. It is absolutely essential, if any love of
literature is to be superinduced, that something should be read fast
enough to give some sense of continuity and range and horizon. The
practice of dictionary-turning is sufficient by itself to destroy
intellectual pleasure, but it used to be defended as a base sort of
bribe to strengthen memory: it was argued that boys would try to
remember words to save themselves the trouble of looking them up. But
this has no origin in fact. Boys used not to be encouraged to guess at
words, but to be punished for shirking work if they had not looked
them out. It is to be hoped that English will be in the future
increasingly taught in schools; but even so there is the danger of
connecting it too much with erudition. The old _Clarendon Press
Shakespeare_ was an almost perfect example of how not to edit
Shakespeare for boys; the introductions were learned and scholarly,
the notes were crammed with philology, derivation, illustration. As a
matter of fact there is a good deal that is interesting, even to small
minds, in the connection and derivation of words, if briskly
communicated. Most boys are responsive to the pleasure of finding a
familiar word concealed under a variation of shape; but this should be
conveyed orally. What is really requisite is that boys should be
taught how to read a book intelligently. In dealing with classical
books, vocabulary must be always a difficulty, and I myself very much
doubt the advisability in the case of average boys of attempting to
teach more than one foreign language at a time, especially when in
dealing, say, with three kindred languages, such as Latin, French, and
English, the same word, such as _spiritus_, _esprit_, and _spirit_
bear very different significations. The great need is that there
should be some work going on in which the boys should not be conscious
of dragging an ever-increasing burden of memory. Let me take a
concrete case. A poem like the _Morte d'Arthur_, or _The Lay of the
Last Minstrel_, is well within the comprehension of quite small boys.
These could be read in a class, after an introductory lecture as to
date, scene, dramatis personae, with perfect ease, words explained as
they occurred, difficult passages paraphrased, and the whole action of
the story could pass rapidly before the eye. Most boys have a distinct
pleasure in rhyme and metre. Of course it is an immense gain if the
master can really read in a spirited and moving manner, and a training
in reading aloud should form a part of every schoolmaster's outfit. I
should wish to see this reading lesson a daily hour for all younger
boys, so as to form a real basis of education. Three of these hours
could be given to English, and three to French, for in French there is
a wide range both of simple narrative stories and historical romances.
The aim to be kept in view would be the very simple one of proving
that interest, amusement and emotion can be derived from books which,
unassisted, only boys of tougher intellectual fibre could be expected
to attack. The personalities of the authors of these books should be
carefully described, and the result of such reading, persevered in
steadily, would be, what is one of the most stimulating rewards of
wider knowledge, the sudden realisation, that is, that books and
authors are not lonely and isolated phenomena, but that the literature
of a nation is like a branching tree, all connected and intertwined,
and that the books of a race mirror faithfully and vividly the ideas
of the age out of which they sprang. What makes books dull is the
absence of any knowledge by the reader of why the author was at the
trouble of expressing himself in that particular way at that
particular time. When, as a small boy, I read a book of which the
whole genesis was obscure to me, it used to appear to me vaguely that
it must have been as disagreeable to the author to write it as it was
for me to read it. But if it can be once grasped that books are the
outcome of a writer's interest or sense of beauty or emotion or joy,
the whole matter wears a different aspect.
The same principle applies with just the same force to history and
geography; both of these studies can be made interesting, if they are
not regarded as isolated groups of phenomena, but are approached from
the boy's own experience as opening away and outwards from what is
going on about him. The object is or ought to be slowly to extend the
boy's horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of
the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about
him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical
conditions. The dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the
immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts
to be mastered without having any visible or tangible connection with
the boy's own experience. The aim should rather be to teach him to
look with zest and interest at what is going on outside his own narrow
circle, and to help him to move perceptively along the paths of time
and space which diverge in all directions from the scene where he
finds himself.
It may be indisputably stated that all connected knowledge is
stimulating, and that all unconnected knowledge is at best mechanical.
Perhaps one of the most fruitful of all subjects is vivid biography,
and no serious educator could perform a more valuable task than in
providing a series of biographies of great men, really intelligible to
youthful minds. As a rule, biographies of the first order require an
amount of detailed knowledge in the reader which puts them out of the
reach of ill-stored minds. But I have again and again found with boys
that simple biographical lectures are among the most attractive of all
lessons. At one time, with my private pupils, I would take a book at
random out of my shelves, read an interesting extract or two, and then
say that I would try to show why the author chose such a subject, why
he wrote as he did, and how it all sprang out of his life and
character and circumstances.