But our chief disablement for high creative work,—and one that is particularly noticeable at this immediate period of our history, is, as I have said, the “vanishing of the gift”—the lack of Imagination. To be wanting in this, is to be wanting in the first element of artistic greatness. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, or the musician must be able to make a world of his own and live in it, before he can make one for others. When he has evolved such a world out of his individual consciousness, and has peopled it with the creations of his fancy, he can turn its “airy substance” into reality for all time. For the things we call “imaginative” are often far more real than what we call “realism.” All that we touch, taste and see, we call “real.” Now we cannot touch, taste or see Honour—but surely it is real! We cannot weigh out Courage in a solidified parcel—yet it is an actual thing. So with Imagination—it shows us what we may, if we choose, consider “the baseless fabric of a vision”—but which often proves as real and practical in its results as Honour and Courage. Shakespeare’s world is real;—so real that there are not wanting certain literary imposters who grudge him its reality and strive to dispossess him of his own. Walter Scott’s world is real—so real, that a shrine has been built for him in Edinburgh, crowded with sculptured figures of men and women, most of whom never existed, save in his teeming fancy. What a tribute to the power of Imagination is the beautiful monument in the centre of Princes Street, with all the forms evoked from one great mind, lifted high above us, who consider ourselves “real” people! And now the lesser world of thought is waiting for the discovery of a Cryptogram in the Waverley Novels, which shall prove that King George the Fourth wrote them with the assistance of Scott’s game-keeper, Tom Purdie,—and that his Majesty gave Scott a baronetcy on condition that he should never divulge the true authorship! For, according to the narrow material limits of some latter-day minds, no one man could possibly have written Shakespeare’s Plays. Therefore it may be equally argued that, as there is as much actual work, and quite as many characters in the Waverley Novels as in the plays of Shakespeare, they could not all have emanated from the one brain of Sir Walter Scott. Come forward then with a “Waverley cryptogram,” little mean starvelings of literature who would fain attempt to prove a man’s work is not his own! There are sure to be some envious fools always ready to believe that the great are not so great,—the heroic not so heroic, and that after all, they, the fools, may be wiser than the wisest men!
In very truth, one of the worst signs of the vanishing of the gift of Imagination in these days is the utter inability of the majority of modern folk to understand its value. The creative ease and exquisite happiness of an imaginative soul which builds up grand ideals of life and love and immortality with less effort than is required for the act of breathing, seems to be quite beyond their comprehension. And so—unfortunately it often follows that what is above them they try to pull down,—and what is too large for them to grasp, they endeavour to bind within their own narrow ring of experience. The attempt is of course useless. We cannot get the planet Venus to serve us as a lamp on our dinner table. We cannot fit the eagle into a sparrow’s nest. But some people are always trying to do this sort of thing. And when they find they cannot succeed, they fall into a fit of the spleen, and revile what they cannot emulate. There is no surer sign of mental and moral decadence than this grudging envy of a great fame. For the healthy mind rejoices in the recognition of genius wherever or whenever it may be discovered, and has a keen sense of personal delight in giving to merit all its due. Hero-worship is a much finer and more invigorating emotion than hero-slander. The insatiate desire which is shown by certain writers nowadays, to pull down the great reputations of the past, destroy old traditions, and cheapen noble attainment, resembles a sudden outbreak of insane persons who strive to smash everything within their reach. It is in its way a form of Imagination,—but Imagination diseased and demoralized. For Imagination, like all other faculties of the brain, can become sickly and perverted. When it is about to die it shows—in common with everything else in that condition,—signs of its dissolution. Such signs of feebleness and decay are everywhere visible in the world at the present time. They are shown in the constant output of decadent and atheistical literature—in the decline of music and the drama from noble and classic forms to the repulsive “problem” play and the comic opera—in the splashy daubing of good canvas called “impressionist” painting—in the acceptance, or passive toleration, of the vilest doggerel verse as “poetry”—and in the wretched return to the lowest forms of ignorance displayed in the “fashionable” craze for palmistry, clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, and sundry other quite contemptible evidences of foolish credulity concerning the grave issues of life and death,—combined with a most sorrowful, most deplorable indifference to the simple and pure teachings of the Christian Faith. Even in the Christian Faith itself, its chosen ministers seem unable to serve their Divine Master without quarrelling over trifles,—which is surely no part of their calling and election.
Everywhere there is a lack of high ideals,—and all the arts suffer severely in consequence. Modern education itself checks and cramps the growth of imaginative originality. The general tendency is unhappily towards the basest forms of materialism, and a large majority of people appear to be smitten with a paralysing apathy concerning everything but the making of money. That art is pursued with a horrible avidity, to the exclusion of every higher and nobler pursuit. Yet it needs very little “imagination” to prophesy what the end of a nation is bound to be when the unbridled fever of avarice once sets in. History has chronicled the ruin of empires from this one cause over and over again for our warning; and as Carlyle said in his stern and strenuous way—“One thing I do know: Never on this earth was the relation of man to man long carried on by cash payment alone. If at any time a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and-Demand start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end.”
Perhaps some will say that Imagination is not a “vanishing gift”—and that Idealism and Romance still exist, at any rate among the Celtic races, and in countries such as Scotland, for instance, the home of so much noble tradition, song and story. I wish I could believe this. But unhappily the proofs are all against it. If the Imaginative Spirit were not decaying in Scotland as elsewhere, should we have seen the wanton and wicked destruction of one of its fairest scenes of natural beauty—the Glen and Fall of Foyers? There, where once the clear beautiful cascade whose praises were sung by Robert Burns, dashed down in its thundering glory among the heather and bracken, there are now felled trees, sorrowful blackened stumps, withering ferns and trampled flowers, dirty car-tracks, and all the indescribable muck which follows in the wake of the merely money-grubbing human microbe. And where once the pulse was quickened to a sane and healthy delight in the grandeur of unspoilt Nature, and the mind was uplifted from sordid cares to high contemplation, we are now asked to buy an aluminium paper-knife for a shilling! Human absurdity can no further go than this. There can be little imagination left in the minds that could have tolerated the building of aluminium works where Foyers once poured music through the glen. And it is instructive to recall the action taken by the Belgian people—who are generally supposed to be very prosaic,—when some of their beautiful scenery on the river Amblève, was threatened with similar destruction. Mustering together, three to four thousand strong, they took a reduced model of the intended factory, burnt it on the spot, and threw its ashes into the river; performing such a terror-striking “carmagnole” of revolt, that the authorities were compelled to prohibit the erection of the proposed works, for fear of a general rising throughout the country. Would that such a protest had been offered by the people of Scotland against the destruction of Foyers!
And what of the pitiful ruin of Loch Katrine?—once an unspoilt gem of Highland scenery, doubly beloved for the sake of Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake”? What of the submerging of “Ellen’s Isle”?—the ruthless uprooting of that “entangled wood”—
Where Nature scattered, free and wild.
Each plant or flower, the mountain’s child,—
Here eglantine embalmed the air,
Heather and hazel mingled there.
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