Chapter 4

I am not suggesting that the history and literatures of other countries should be neglected, or that foreign languages should form no part of education. But the main object is to turn out good Englishmen, who may continue worthily and even develop further a glorious national tradition. To do this, we must appeal constantly to the imagination, which Wordsworth has boldly called "reason in her most exalted mood." We may thus bring a little poetry and romance into the monotonous lives of our hand-workers. It may well be that their discontent has more to do with the starving of their spiritual nature than we suppose. For the intellectual life, like divine philosophy, is not dull and crabbed, as fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute.

Can we end with a definition of the happiness and well-being, which is the goal of education, as of all else that we try to do? Probably we cannot do better than accept the famous definition of Aristotle, which however we must be careful to translate rightly. "Happiness, or well-being, is an activity of the soul directed towards excellence, in an unhampered life." Happiness consists in doing rather than being; the activity must be that of the soul--the whole man acting as a person; it must be directed towards excellence--not exclusively moral virtue, but the best work that we can do, of whatever kind; and it must be unhampered--we must be given the opportunity of doing the best that is in us to do. To awaken the soul; to hold up before it the images of whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, pure, and of good report; and to remove the obstacles which stunt and cripple the mind; this is the work which we have called the Training of the Reason.

III

THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION

BY A. C. BENSON

Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

It might be hastily assumed by a reader bent on critical 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.