TO DEVELOP IMAGINATIVE VIGOR
In one of the great manufacturing towns of the Northwest there are some twenty-five thousand girls employed in factories. The city permits conditions of work hostile to the physical life of these girls. Civic reform is trying to control these conditions. In time it doubtless will succeed in doing so; meanwhile it makes efforts in other directions. It establishes working girls' clubs. A class in literature in one of these clubs enlisted the services of a comprehending young teacher, who kept the girls interested for more than two years. A little girl from a bag factory entered this class. She came to every meeting of the first year. She did not join in the discussions nor ask questions nor evince unusual intelligence or enjoyment, but she came every night. The class began its second year. The little girl from the bag factory was the first to enroll. The teacher could not cover the surprise in her question, "Are you coming into the class again?" The girl's breathless "Oh yes" sent her to investigate the case. She went to the factory. She found the child standing at a bench folding bags. Eight hours a day she folded bags. A swing back on her right foot with the stuff of which the bag was made grasped in her hands—a swing forward, and her hands brought the edges of the stuff together evenly. Over and over a thousand times the single motion repeated made up the girl's day. "It used to make me tired," she said, simply. "But it doesn't any more?" "No, because now I forget what I am doing sometimes. I have my book, you see. They let me fasten it here." There it was—a paper copy of Shelley's poems. The print was good; the teacher had seen to that. She had observed that factory girls' eyes are not always very strong. The book was fastened to the front of the desk. The child could catch a line from time to time without interrupting her bag-folding. "But I know most of the poems we have studied in class by heart." So she had to recall but a line, and then off she would go through the windows of the stifling factory into the open fields on the wings of her imagination. She was a swift, sure, little workman; her eye watched the stuff before her and measured it truly; her hands obeyed her eye, did her work efficiently, and "kept her job." But the eye of her imagination had been opened in the literature class and kept her soul alive in spite "of her job." This is a true story. It has significance for you and me.
If through the use of her imagination a little factory girl can escape from the monotony of bag-folding, and find freedom and joy in the lyric world Shelley has created, what limit need be set to our emancipation through the development of this faculty?
But emancipation is but one result of such development. Listen to David as he stands with his harp before the King in Browning's story of Saul. Already his song has released the monarch from the depths of his great despair, but now comes the boy's cry:
What spell or what charm
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should I urge
To sustain him where song had restored him?...
Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence—above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky:
And I laughed—"Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks,
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know!
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains,
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for."
And now those old trains
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the string
Of my harp made response to my spirit....
So the imagination of the young shepherd boy had not only disregarded the limits of his actual environment and escaped in fancy to the great world beyond, but so vividly had he realized that world through his imagination that his sympathies had been made broad to comprehend a monarch's need and his song potent to meet it. Experience alone gives comprehension. We are prone to think that experience is limited by our actual horizon. We need to know that experience has no limit save that which is set by the limit of our imaginative insight. No door of life is closed to the imaginative mind and heart. The world is its playground to wander in at will. Experience, and thorough experience, comprehension of life is at the command of imagination.
Life can be intelligently apprehended on the material plane through trained senses. Life can be vividly realized on the spirit's plane only through a trained imagination. It is only vivid realization of life at every point which makes it worth living. You may see the lark long after he is lost to my duller eye in our common sky, you may hear the song when my less keen ear no longer catches a faintest thread of melody; but unless the eye and ear of your imagination match mine you shall not vividly realize flight or song, and so I shall follow both long after they are lost to you. Your skylark will pass with the moment of his rapturous song-flight, while mine shall remain forever a spirit of joy to be recalled at will for my spirit's refreshing.
Looking then upon imagination as a key to that comprehension of life which clarifies and constitutes its worth, let us eagerly enter upon the cultivation of such power. We have left this question of imaginative development as a definite exercise to a fifth place in our interpretative study, not because it is less vital to effective expression than the first four subjects we have considered, but because balanced expression is our aim, and imagination once given free play may easily impair that harmonious development of all our faculties which makes for balance in expression. Of course there is no phase of the study of interpretation which, when rightly conducted, does not indirectly or directly involve the training of the imagination. On the other hand, training of the imagination wisely conducted may comprehend and carry on development along all other lines of evolution in expression. A sensitive imagination trained and controlled to its highest power of apprehension must make for sympathy and intelligence in thought and feeling, keep humor sane, and give direction to purpose. But imaginative vigor set free to the uses of thought and emotion already disciplined, to conscious purpose and to good humor, becomes a safe master of expressive living.
The material through which we are to exercise the imagination and develop imaginative vigor is the narrative form of discourse. Narration is successful when it records or has the effect of recording actual experience. A story (according to the authority we so often invoke,—Mr. Gardiner), "whether it be as simple as those of the Book of Genesis or as complex as Mr. James or Mr. Meredith, must carry the effect of the concreteness, and, as it were, the solidity of life." The plot, the characters, the setting of a story which is to live, must have the vividness of real experience. This does not mean that the creator of the story must have actually experienced the plot, the people, and the pictures which together make up his tale—they may be the product of actual experience or of imagination—but it does mean that while he is putting these elements together and creating his narrative he must realize as though it were actual experience the incident of his plot with the characters and in the atmosphere of his creation. Such realization can only come through vivid imagination.
Exactly the same demand is made upon the imagination of the interpreter. When you retell the tale of a master creator of stories your interpretation will be convincing, exactly as was his creation,—through the lucid play of a vivid imagination. You must make me feel that I am in the presence of incidents, characters, pictures which you yourself have experienced. Nay, more, you must make me feel that I myself am actually meeting these people, seeing these pictures, taking part in these incidents, as you relive for me in imagination at the moment of your interpretation the tale you are retelling to me.