“I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag;”
slightly varied, for the other occasion, into--
“I heard the water lapping on the crag,
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.”
But, as to this matter of _creation_, is there, after all, I ask yet,
any genuine sense in which a man may be said to create his own
thought-forms? Allowing that a new combination of forms already existing
might be called creation, is the man, after all, the author of this new
combination? Did he, with his will and his knowledge, proceed wittingly,
consciously, to construct a form which should embody his thought? Or did
this form arise within him without will or effort of his--vivid if not
clear--certain if not outlined? Ruskin (and better authority we do not
know) will assert the latter, and we think he is right: though perhaps
he would insist more upon the absolute perfection of the vision than we
are quite prepared to do. Such embodiments are not the result of the
man’s intention, or of the operation of his conscious nature. His
feeling is that they are given to him; that from the vast unknown, where
time and space are not, they suddenly appear in luminous writing upon
the wall of his consciousness. Can it be correct, then, to say that he
created them? Nothing less so, as it seems to us. But can we not say
that they are the creation of the unconscious portion of his nature?
Yes, provided we can understand that that which is the individual, the
man, can know, and not know that it knows, can create and yet be
ignorant that virtue has gone out of it. From that unknown region we
grant they come, but not by its own blind working. Nor, even were it so,
could any amount of such production, where no will was concerned, be
dignified with the name of creation. But God sits in that chamber of our
being in which the candle of our consciousness goes out in darkness, and
sends forth from thence wonderful gifts into the light of that
understanding which is His candle. Our hope lies in no most perfect
mechanism even of the spirit, but in the wisdom wherein we live and move
and have our being. Thence we hope for endless forms of beauty informed
of truth. If the dark portion of our own being were the origin of our
imaginations, we might well fear the apparition of such monsters as
would be generated in the sickness of a decay which could never
feel--only declare--a slow return towards primeval chaos. But the Maker
is our Light.
One word more, ere we turn to consider the culture of this noblest
faculty, which we might well call the creative, did we not see a
something in God for which we would humbly keep our mighty word:--the
fact that there is always more in a work of art--which is the highest
human result of the embodying imagination--than the producer himself
perceived while he produced it, seems to us a strong reason for
attributing to it a larger origin than the man alone--for saying at the
last, that the inspiration of the Almighty shaped its ends.
We return now to the class which, from the first, we supposed hostile to
the imagination and its functions generally. Those belonging to it will
now say: “It was to no imagination such as you have been setting forth
that we were opposed, but to those wild fancies and vague reveries in
which young people indulge, to the damage and loss of the real in the
world around them.”
“And,” we insist, “you would rectify the matter by smothering the young
monster at once--because he has wings, and, young to their use, flutters
them about in a way discomposing to your nerves, and destructive to
those notions of propriety of which this creature--you stop not to
inquire whether angel or pterodactyle--has not yet learned even the
existence. Or, if it is only the creature’s vagaries of which you
disapprove, why speak of them as _the_ exercise of the imagination? As
well speak of religion as the mother of cruelty because religion has
given more occasion of cruelty, as of all dishonesty and devilry, than
any other object of human interest. Are we not to worship, because our
forefathers burned and stabbed for religion? It is more religion we
want. It is more imagination we need. Be assured that these are but the
first vital motions of that whose results, at least in the region of
science, you are more than willing to accept.” That evil may spring from
the imagination, as from everything except the perfect love of God,
cannot be denied. But infinitely worse evils would be the result of its
absence. Selfishness, avarice, sensuality, cruelty, would flourish
tenfold; and the power of Satan would be well established ere some
children had begun to choose. Those who would quell the apparently
lawless tossing of the spirit, called the youthful imagination, would
suppress all that is to grow out of it. They fear the enthusiasm they
never felt; and instead of cherishing this divine thing, instead of
giving it room and air for healthful growth, they would crush
and confine it--with but one result of their victorious
endeavours--imposthume, fever, and corruption. And the disastrous
consequences would soon appear in the intellect likewise which they
worship. Kill that whence spring the crude fancies and wild 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 that works in
them all, must remain undiscovered. Whoever would have his children
avoid this arid region will do well to allow no teacher to approach
them--not even of mathematics--who has no 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 such is the duty of the wise servant of Him who made the
imagination.
“But will most girls, for instance, rise to those useful uses of the
imagination? Are they not more likely to exercise it in building castles
in the air to the neglect of houses on the earth? And as the world
affords such poor scope for the ideal, will not this habit breed vain
desires and vain regrets? Is it not better, therefore, to keep to that
which is known, and leave the rest?”
“Is the world so poor?” we ask in return. The less reason, then, to be
satisfied with it; the more reason to rise above it, into the region of
the true, of the eternal, of things as God thinks them. This outward
world is but a passing vision of the persistent true. We shall not live
in it always. We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are
in vain, if only they be large enough. Not even in this world do all
disappointments breed only vain regrets. [Footnote:
“We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which, having been, must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”]
And as to keeping to that which is known and leaving the rest--how many
affairs of this world are so well-defined, so capable of being clearly
understood, as not to leave large spaces of uncertainty, whose very
correlate faculty is the imagination? Indeed it must, in most things,
work after some fashion, filling the gaps after some possible plan,
before action can even begin. In very truth, a wise imagination, which
is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or
woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that
influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of
something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have
far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things
may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not
the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by
faith, and not by sight. Put the question to our mathematicians--only be
sure the question reaches them--whether they would part with the
well-defined perfection of their diagrams, or the dim, strange, possibly
half-obliterated characters woven in the web of their being; their
science, in short, or their poetry; their certainties, or their hopes;
their consciousness of knowledge, or their vague sense of that which
cannot be known absolutely: will they hold by their craft or by their
inspirations, by their intellects or their imaginations? If they say the
former in each alternative, I shall yet doubt whether the objects of the
choice are actually before them, and with equal presentation.
What can be known must be known severely; but is there, therefore, no
faculty for those infinite lands of uncertainty lying all about the
sphere hollowed out of the dark by the glimmering lamp of our knowledge?
Are they not the natural property of the imagination? there, _for_ it,
that it may have room to grow? there, that the man may learn to imagine
greatly like God who made him, himself discovering their mysteries, in
virtue of his following and worshipping imagination?
All that has been said, then, tends to enforce the culture of the
imagination. But the strongest argument of all remains behind. For, if
the whole power of pedantry should rise against her, the imagination
will yet work; and if not for good, then for evil; if not for truth,
then for falsehood; if not for life, then for death; the evil
alternative becoming the more likely from the unnatural treatment she
has experienced from those who ought to have fostered her. The power
that might have gone forth in conceiving the noblest forms of action, in
realizing the lives of the true-hearted, the self-forgetting, will go
forth in building airy castles of vain ambition, of boundless riches, of
unearned admiration. The imagination that might be devising how to make
home blessed or to help the poor neighbour, will be absorbed in the
invention of the new dress, or worse, in devising the means of procuring
it. For, if she be not occupied with the beautiful, she will be occupied
by the pleasant; that which goes not out to worship, will remain at home
to be sensual. Cultivate the mere intellect as you may, it will never
reduce the passions: the imagination, seeking the ideal in everything,
will elevate them to their true and noble service. Seek not that your
sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams;
seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble
dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and
will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible
inculcations of morality. Nor can religion herself ever rise up into her
own calm home, her crystal shrine, when one of her wings, one of the
twain with which she flies, is thus broken or paralyzed.
“The universe is infinitely wide,
And conquering Reason, if self-glorified,
Can nowhere move uncrossed by some new wall
Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone,
Imaginative Faith! canst overleap,
In progress towards the fount of love.”
The danger that lies in the repression of the imagination may be well
illustrated from the play of “Macbeth.” The imagination of the hero (in
him a powerful faculty), representing how the deed would appear to
others, and so representing its true nature to himself, was his great
impediment on the path to crime. Nor would he have succeeded in reaching
it, had he not gone to his wife for help--sought refuge from his
troublesome imagination with her. She, possessing far less of the
faculty, and having dealt more destructively with what she had, took his
hand, and led him to the deed. From her imagination, again, she for her
part takes refuge in unbelief and denial, declaring to herself and her
husband that there is no reality in its representations; that there is
no reality in anything beyond the present effect it produces on the mind
upon which it operates; that intellect and courage are equal to any,
even an evil emergency; and that no harm will come to those who can rule
themselves according to their own will. Still, however, finding her
imagination, and yet more that of her husband, troublesome, she effects
a marvellous combination of materialism and idealism, and asserts that
things are not, cannot be, and shall not be more or other than people
choose to think them. She says,--
“These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”
“The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures.”
But she had over-estimated the power of her will, and under-estimated
that of her imagination. Her will was the one thing in her that was bad,
without root or support in the universe, while her imagination was the
voice of God himself out of her own unknown being. The choice of no man
or woman can long determine how or what he or she shall think of things.
Lady Macbeth’s imagination would not be repressed beyond its appointed
period--a time determined by laws of her being over which she had no
control. It arose, at length, as from the dead, overshadowing her with
all the blackness of her crime. The woman who drank strong drink that
she might murder, dared not sleep without a light by her bed; rose and
walked in the night, a sleepless spirit in a sleeping body, rubbing the
spotted hand of her dreams, which, often as water had cleared it of the
deed, yet smelt so in her sleeping nostrils, that all the perfumes of
Arabia would not sweeten it. Thus her long down-trodden imagination rose
and took vengeance, even through those senses which she had thought to
subordinate to her wicked will.
But all this is of the imagination itself, and fitter, therefore, for
illustration than for argument. Let us come to facts.--Dr. Pritchard,
lately executed for murder, had no lack of that invention, which is, as
it were, the intellect of the imagination--its lowest form. One of the
clergymen who, at his own request, attended the prisoner, went through
indescribable horrors in the vain endeavour to induce the man simply to
cease from lying: one invention after another followed the most earnest
asseverations of truth. The effect produced upon us by this clergyman’s
report of his experience was a moral dismay, such as we had never felt
with regard to human being, and drew from us 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,
therefore, for inventions, he had left his imagination all undeveloped,
and when it represented his own inner condition to him, had repressed it
until it was nearly destroyed, and what remained of it was set on fire
of hell. [Footnote: One of the best weekly papers in London, evidently
as much in ignorance of the man as of the facts of the case, spoke of
Dr. MacLeod as having been engaged in “white-washing the murderer for
heaven.” So far is this from a true representation, that Dr. MacLeod
actually 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.
Therefore the chief scope of his imagination, next to God who made him,
will he the world in relation to his own life therein. Will he do better
or worse in it if this imagination, touched to fine issues and having
free scope, present him with noble pictures of relationship and duty, of
possible elevation of character and attainable justice of behaviour, of
friendship and of love; and, above all, of all these in that life to
understand which as a whole, must ever be the loftiest aspiration of
this noblest power of humanity? Will a woman lead a more or a less
troubled life that the sights and sounds of nature break through the
crust of gathering anxiety, and remind her of the peace of the lilies
and the well-being of the birds of the air? Or will life be less
interesting to her, that the lives of her neighbours, instead of passing
like shadows upon a wall, assume a consistent wholeness, forming
themselves into stories and phases of life? Will she not hereby love
more and talk less? Or will she be more unlikely to make a good
match----? But here we arrest ourselves in bewilderment over the word
_good_, and seek to re-arrange our thoughts. If what mothers mean by a
_good_ match, is the alliance of a man of position and means--or let
them throw intellect, manners, and personal advantages into the same
scale--if this be all, then we grant the daughter of cultivated
imagination may not be manageable, will probably be obstinate. “We hope
she will be obstinate enough. [Footnote: Let women who feel the wrongs
of their kind teach women to be high-minded in their relation to men,
and they will do more for the social elevation of women, and the
establishment of their rights, whatever those rights may be, than by any
amount of intellectual development or assertion of equality. Nor, if
they are other than mere partisans, will they refuse the attempt because
in its success men will, after all, be equal, if not greater gainers, if
only thereby they should be “feelingly persuaded” what they are.] But
will the girl be less likely to marry a _gentleman_, in the grand old
meaning of the sixteenth century? when it was no irreverence to call our
Lord
“The first true gentleman that ever breathed;”
or in that of the fourteenth?--when Chaucer teaching “whom is worthy to
be called gentill,” writes thus:--
“The first stocke was full of rightwisnes,
Trewe of his worde, sober, pitous and free,
Clene of his goste, and loved besinesse,
Against the vice of slouth in honeste;
And but his heire love vertue as did he,
He is not gentill though he rich seme,
All weare he miter, crowne, or diademe.”
Will she be less likely to marry one who honours women, and for their
sakes, as well as his own, honours himself? Or to speak from what many
would regard as the mother’s side of the question--will the girl be more
likely, because of such a culture of her imagination, to refuse the
wise, true-hearted, generous rich man, and fall in love with the
talking, verse-making fool, _because_ he is poor, as if that were a
virtue for which he had striven? The highest imagination and the
lowliest common sense are always on one side.
For the end of imagination is _harmony_. A right imagination, being the
reflex of the creation, will fall in with the divine order of things as
the highest form of its own operation; “will tune its instrument here at
the door” to the divine harmonies within; will be content alone with
growth towards the divine idea, which includes all that is beautiful in
the imperfect imaginations of men; will know that every deviation from
that growth is downward; and will therefore send the man forth from its
loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome
calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right
imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to
the rightness that is in it, will tend. The reveries even of the wise
man will make him stronger for his work; his dreaming as well as his
thinking will render him sorry for past failure, and hopeful of future
success.
To come now to the culture of the imagination. Its development is one of
the main ends of the divine education of life with all its efforts and
experiences. Therefore the first and essential means for its culture
must be an ordering of our life towards harmony with its ideal in the
mind of God. As he that is willing to do the will of the Father, shall
know of the doctrine, so, we doubt not, he that will do the will of THE
POET, shall behold the Beautiful. For all is God’s; and the man who is
growing into harmony with His will, is growing into harmony with
himself; all the hidden glories of his being are coming out into the
light of humble consciousness; so that at the last he shall be a pure
microcosm, faithfully reflecting, after his manner, the mighty
macrocosm. We believe, therefore, that nothing will do so much for the
intellect or the imagination as _being good_--we do not mean after any
formula or any creed, but simply after the faith of Him who did the will
of his Father in heaven.
But if we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the
whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise. If you want strong
arms, take animal food, and row. Feed your imagination with food
convenient for it, and exercise it, not in the contortions of the
acrobat, but in the movements of the gymnast. And first for the food.
Goethe has told us that the way to develop the aesthetic faculty is to
have constantly before our eyes, that is, in the room we most frequent,
some work of the best attainable art. This will teach us to refuse the
evil and choose the good. It will plant itself in our minds and become
our counsellor. Involuntarily, unconsciously, we shall compare with its
perfection everything that comes before us for judgment. Now, although
no better advice could be given, it involves one danger, that of
narrowness. And not easily, in dread of this danger, would one change
his tutor, and so procure variety of instruction. But in the culture of
the imagination, books, although not the only, are the readiest means of
supplying the food convenient for it, and a hundred books may be had
where even one work of art of the right sort is unattainable, seeing
such must be of some size as well as of thorough excellence. And in
variety alone is safety from the danger of the convenient food becoming
the inconvenient model.
Let us suppose, then, that one who himself justly estimates the
imagination is anxious to develop its operation in his child. No doubt
the best beginning, especially if the child be young, is an acquaintance
with nature, in which let him be encouraged to observe vital phenomena,
to put things together, to speculate from what he sees to what he does
not see. But let earnest care be taken that upon no matter shall he go
on talking foolishly. Let him be as fanciful as he may, but let him not,
even in his fancy, sin against fancy’s sense; for fancy has its laws as
certainly as the most ordinary business of life. When he is silly, let
him know it and be ashamed.
But where this association with nature is but occasionally possible,
recourse must be had to literature. In books, we not only have store of
all results of the imagination, but in them, as in her workshop, we may
behold her embodying before our very eyes, in music of speech, in wonder
of words, till her work, like a golden dish set with shining jewels, and
adorned by the hands of the cunning workmen, stands finished before us.
In this kind, then, the best must be set before the learner, that he may
eat and not be satisfied; for the finest products of the imagination are
of the best nourishment for the beginnings of that imagination. And the
mind of the teacher must mediate between the work of art and the mind of
the pupil, bringing them together in the vital contact of intelligence;
directing the observation to the lines of expression, the points of
force; and helping the mind to repose upon the whole, so that no
separable beauties shall lead to a neglect of the scope--that is the
shape or form complete. And ever he must seek to _show_ excellence
rather than talk about it, giving the thing itself, that it may grow
into the mind, and not a eulogy of his own upon the thing; isolating the
point worthy of remark rather than making many remarks upon the point.
Especially must he endeavour to show the spiritual scaffolding or
skeleton of any work of art; those main ideas upon which the shape is
constructed, and around which the rest group as ministering
dependencies.
But he will not, therefore, pass over that intellectual structure
without which the other could not be manifested. He will not forget the
builder while he admires the architect. While he dwells with delight on
the relation of the peculiar arch to the meaning of the whole cathedral,
he will not think it needless to explain the principles on which it is
constructed, or even how those principles are carried out in actual
process. Neither yet will the tracery of its windows, the foliage of its
crockets, or the fretting of its mouldings be forgotten. Every beauty
will have its word, only all beauties will be subordinated to the final
beauty--that is, the unity of the whole.
Thus doing, he shall perform the true office of friendship. He will
introduce his pupil into the society which he himself prizes most,
surrounding him with the genial presence of the high-minded, that this
good company may work its own kind in him who frequents it.
But he will likewise seek to turn him aside from such company, whether
of books or of men, as might tend to lower his reverence, his choice, or
his standard. He will, therefore, discourage indiscriminate reading, and
that worse than waste which consists in skimming the books of a
circulating library. He knows that if a book is worth reading at all, it
is worth reading well; and that, if it is not worth reading, it is only
to the most accomplished reader that it _can_ be worth skimming. He will
seek to make him discern, not merely between the good and the evil, but
between the good and the not so good. And this not for the sake of
sharpening the intellect, still less of generating that
self-satisfaction which is the closest attendant upon criticism, but for
the sake of choosing the best path and the best companions upon it. A
spirit of criticism for the sake of distinguishing only, or, far worse,
for the sake of having one’s opinion ready upon demand, is not merely
repulsive to all true thinkers, but is, in itself, destructive of all
thinking. A spirit of criticism for the sake of the truth--a spirit that
does not start from its chamber at every noise, but waits till its
presence is desired--cannot, indeed, garnish the house, but can sweep it
clean. Were there enough of such wise criticism, there would be ten
times the study of the best writers of the past, and perhaps one-tenth
of the admiration for the ephemeral productions of the day. A gathered
mountain of misplaced worships would be swept into the sea by the study
of one good book; and while what was good in an inferior book would
still be admired, the relative position of the book would be altered and
its influence lessened.
Speaking 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 ill to
satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty,
slow to say, “Here I will dwell.”
But he will not confine his instructions to the region of art. He will
encourage him to read history with an eye eager for the dawning figure
of the past. He will especially show him that a great part of the Bible
is only thus to be understood; and that the constant and consistent way
of God, to be discovered in it, is in fact the key to all history.
In the history of individuals, as well, he will try to show him how to
put sign and token together, constructing not indeed a whole, but a
probable suggestion of the whole.
And, again, while showing him the reflex of nature in the poets, he will
not be satisfied without sending him to Nature herself; urging him in
country rambles to keep open eyes for the sweet fashionings and
blendings of her operation around him; and in city walks to watch the
“human face divine.”
Once more: he will point out to him the essential difference between
reverie and thought; between dreaming and imagining. He will teach him
not to mistake fancy, either in himself or in others for imagination,
and to beware of hunting after resemblances that carry with them no
interpretation.
Such training is not solely fitted for the possible development of
artistic faculty. Few, in this world, will ever be able to utter what
they feel. Fewer still will be able to utter it in forms of their own.
Nor is it necessary that there should be many such. But it is necessary
that all should feel. It is necessary that all should understand and
imagine the good; that all should begin, at least, to follow and find
out God.
“The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to
find it out,” says Solomon. “As if,” remarks Bacon on the passage,
“according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took
delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if
kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s playfellows in
that game.”
One more quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes, setting forth both the
necessity we are under to imagine, and the comfort that our imagining
cannot outstrip God’s making.
“I have seen the travail which God hath given to the sons of men to be
exercised in it. He hath made everything beautiful in his time; also he
hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work
that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”
Thus to be playfellows with God in this game, the little ones may gather
their daisies and follow their painted moths; the child of the kingdom
may pore upon the lilies of the field, and gather faith as the birds of
the air their food from the leafless hawthorn, ruddy with the stores God
has laid up for them; and the man of science
“May sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth shew,
And every herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.”