Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of
intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusion
made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different
powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as they are not:
this I call the romantic imagination. The other is the power to imagine
things as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will call
the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war. One man
has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home, and of
flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges, and routed
enemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and the mischief it
does is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish expectations of
the impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment, sour grievance,
cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better a
hopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is not only a means
of pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairy
tales and fools' paradises (a quite defensible and delightful amusement
when you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts
begin), but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities
as yet unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability of
serious Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he
overlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous
blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means a
defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw material
which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for the
most part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraid
not to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor is
punishable by death in the military code.
A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous
power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination. For
the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories: he also
terrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He does not even picture what
these dangers are: he conceives the unknown as always dangerous. When
you say to a realist "You must do this" or "You must not do that," he
instantly asks what will happen to him if he does (or does not, as the
case may be). Failing an unromantic convincing answer, he does just as
he pleases unless he can find for himself a real reason for refraining.
In short, though you can intimidate him, you cannot bluff him. But
you can always bluff the romantic person: indeed his grasp of real
considerations is so feeble that you find it necessary to bluff him even
when you have solid considerations to offer him instead. The campaigns
of Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. In
the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals achieved miracles of bluff,
especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously outnumbered,
repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure
bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was why
he dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for sometimes the
bravest of the brave will achieve successes never attempted by the
cleverest of the clever. Wellington was a completer realist than
Napoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beaten
until he actually was beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had
understood the nature of Wellington's strength instead of returning
Wellington's snobbish contempt for him by an academic contempt for
Wellington, he would not have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and
D'Erlon, who, on that field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas
Wellington knew precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffable
would have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic
soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth)
with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original
soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with
still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin
red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never
hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.