The elements of character

by Mary G. Ware

Whatever is to be done, from the discovery of a continent to the making of a shoe or a loaf, can be done well only by a person of Imagination. Go to a shoemaker and tell him exactly what you wish for a shoe, and it is your imagination that gives you the power of telling him so that he can understand your wishes. Every one can think, "I want a pair of shoes," but one must have Imagination to know what kind of shoe one wants, and a clear, distinct Imagination to be able to describe it intelligibly to another. Suppose you have this, and have told the shoemaker what you desire. Now, whether the man sends home to you a pair of misfits, quite different from those you ordered, or a pair just such as you want, depends in no small degree on his powers of Imagination. Any man can think enough to fasten materials together into the form of a shoe, and to make them vary in size according to a regular gradation of numbers; but this is all he can do unless he exercises his Imagination. Unless the image of a shoe, as you hold it in your Imagination, was transferred distinctly to the Imagination of the other, you will look in vain to find it translated into a material reality. So it is with your cook. She cannot make a nice loaf of bread, or prepare a dinner properly, by merely thinking as she works. The idea of a light loaf or of a well-cooked dinner must be distinctly in her mind, or you will eat with a disappointed palate.

It is needless to multiply examples here. We have but to look around us and see them everywhere.

Works of Imagination, of course, come in for their share of opprobium from those who, instead of striving to regenerate all the universal characteristics of humanity, would cut off and cast from it all those traits with which they least sympathize. In spite of their opposition, the mountain of fiction grows higher and higher every day, and the multitude throng its pathways to gather that food for the Imagination that is rarely given it in other compositions. Let the moralist talk and write against this as he may, it will be of no use, for the mass of human minds will never take an interest in any book that does not address itself to the Imagination. From the beginning of the world until now, no teacher and no writer was ever popular unless he addressed himself, in part at least, to the Imagination of the world.

When the Father of History read his nine books before the Greeks at the Olympic Games, and the people hung hour after hour and day after day upon his words, it was not merely because he glorified their victories that they listened with delight, but because he told the story with such vividness that every hearer beheld the on-goings of the tale pictured in his own Imagination. It was no dull recital of dry facts, the mere bone and muscle of History that he offered them, but the living story, the warm blood pulsating through it all, and every nerve instinct with life, In our own day, if the historian would forget the so-called dignity of History, which is but another name for lifelessness, and after having filled his mind with a clear, bright image of what he would relate, would present his story vividly to the Imagination of the reader, we should have no more complaints of the dulness of History. Who ever found Irving or Prescott dull? and yet they are accurate and faithful as the most stately and oracular. The carping critic may sneer at them because they are not philosophical and profound; but to have been read with delight by thousands who would never have reached a second chapter had they been other than they are, may well satisfy their ambition, and make them careless of the opinion of the critic. Such writers belong to the Republic of letters, not to that literary Oligarchy which insists that books should be written according to certain conventional rules which have been manufactured in the closet, instead of looking at the wants of the human mind, and then addressing themselves to those wants.

The class of minds that crave instruction for its own sake must always be very small; and it is this class alone that will read books in spite of their lack of imaginative power. Authors have no right to complain that their wise books lie unread by the multitude, if they persist in overlooking the nature of the human mind, and addressing themselves to what they think it ought to be instead of what it really is. They expatiate admiringly upon the simplicity and vividness of the style of Herodotus, and upon the classic taste of the Athenian public in appreciating him; and then, forgetting that the public of our own day are quick to admire the same traits, turn to their desks and write their histories as unlike as possible to him whom they have been praising.

The same repulsive want of Imagination too often characterizes Theology and Metaphysics, and prevents mankind from receiving the instruction from works on these topics that they need. In the early days of man's history, Religion and Philosophy addressed themselves to the Imagination, and then the people listened to their teachings; but gradually these heaven-born teachers turned more and more away from Imagination and towards Thought,—lost themselves in abstractions, dried up, withered, and changed into Theology and Metaphysics; and then the people turned wearily away from their words; and were they to blame? They wanted bread, and only stones were given to them. The multitude would not have followed the Lord, and listened with admiring wonder to his instructions, had they not been addressed to the Imagination. Infinite Wisdom clothed itself in parables, that the people might be instructed, and the people thronged to hear. The truths of Philosophy and Religion are of an interest more universal to humanity than the truths of all other science, for the first is to know one's self, and the second to know one's God; and yet the majority of teachers cover them with such a body of technicalities and abstractions, that it is vain for the mass of mankind to endeavor to penetrate to the soul within.

If the clergy of the Protestant Church would spend more strength in illustrating the Infinite Wisdom contained in the parables of the Lord, and less in amplifying the abstractions of St. Paul, they would gather around them bands of listeners far more numerous and more devout than those that now attend their ministrations. It was one of the grand mistakes of that Church, at its first separation from the Romish, that, in its terror of the worship of material images, it passed into the opposite extreme of the worship of abstractions. This is one reason why Protestantism has made no advance in Europe since the death of the first Reformers, and why there is so little vital religion among the races by whom it was adopted.

Much has been done of late to render the natural sciences familiar and attractive to the popular mind, by lectures and books that bring them within the comprehension of all: and it is to be hoped, that, beginning thus with the material parts of the universe, mankind may be gradually led from matter to mind, from science to religion. The forms of external things are easily reproduced in the mind as images, and this is why natural science addresses itself more readily to the mind than any other branch of learning. When men learn to look within, and perceive that the things of the mind are as genuine realities as the objects of the external world, Philosophy will become attractive; and when the preacher warms Theology into Religion by abandoning the technicalities of abstractions for the living realities of piety towards God and charity towards the neighbor, he will rejoice in a listening audience.

The amount and the quality of that which we call originality, creative power, or genius, is entirely dependent upon the activity, force, and integrity of the Imagination. Talent belongs to Thought, and works only with facts and ideas as others have done before. It may be skilful, sensible, and faithful, but it can walk only in the old, beaten tracks. It can classify and arrange, but it can never discover or invent. Talent can understand and admire the mechanical powers; Genius puts them in harness, and makes them traverse land and sea to do his bidding. Talent loves to gaze on the fair forms of nature, and depicts them upon canvas with skill and truth, neither adding to nor subtracting from its model. Genius seizes upon the hints that nature gives, and without being false to her, makes use only of that which helps to make up the beautiful, the sublime, or the terrible; showing the power that is within nature rather than nature herself. Talent sees life as it is, and so describes it, if it ventures into the domain of literature. Genius sees life as it is capable of being, and hence comes poetry and romance, depicting heroes and heroines, monsters and fiends, types rather than representatives of the human race. Talent perceives only the actualities of things, Genius their possibilities. Talent is content with things as they are, while Genius is ever striving to bring out latent capacities in whatever it deals with. If true to its higher impulses, Genius is ever striving to come nearer "the first good, first perfect, and first fair"; if false, it degrades and deforms everything it touches.

Mankind differ from each other in degree, but not in kind. By his power of thinking, a man has talent; by his power of imagining, genius. Quick-wittedness is genius in its lowest form,—genius applied to material life in its daily ongoings. The power for resource in emergencies is genius in a higher form. Invention—the putting together with an adequate purpose two things or ideas that never went together before—is genius in another form.