[WANTED: A LITTLE MORE IMAGINATION.]
By JAMES and NANETTE MASON.
Do you think we are going to advocate that all of us should retire to dreamland to pass a drowsy existence there with the creations of our fancy? Who thinks that is mistaken. It is not possible to put everything in the title, otherwise we might have made this one run, “Wanted: a little more imagination for those who, at the right times, have not enough, and a little less for those who, on all possible occasions, have too much.” But it is the “too little” which is of most importance for the purposes of ordinary life, and that is why the title stands above as it does. Our first business is to be practical and to speak of imagination as an aid in the work and conduct and duty of every day.
Of all powers possessed by our minds this is perhaps the most wonderful—the power of making pictures inside our heads, seeing there what eyes know nothing of and what outside ourselves has really no existence. It gives an importance—a glory even—to the most obscure and solitary lives. Possessed of a vivid and healthy imagination, a girl may live very much alone and yet be full of company, entertaining a ghostly good society that in some respects is even an improvement on that frequented by her less isolated friends.
Everything is the better for being shone on by its magic light—even love. Imagination, someone says, is to love what gas is to the balloon—that which raises it from the earth! It is, as we all know, the test of genius; but it is found, too, in ordinary people as a useful servant. Indeed, take imagination altogether out of our inner life and we would be very poor creatures.
However, as we have said, we have sometimes not enough. This happens, for example, when we fail to look at things in a spirit of kindliness, and give utterance to criticism on other folk, hard, harsh, and unreasonable.
Matter-of-fact minds usually fail to realise that all are not alike and that allowance—and a wide allowance too—should be made for differences both in thought and action. For this reason we find them often wanting in sympathy and sometimes even cruel.
This the imaginative seldom are. “Put yourself in her place” is their golden rule—the best rule that was ever devised for enabling us to go through the world adding daily to the happiness of it.
Only have a little more imagination and you will be tolerant and kindly and ready to make excuses not only for those you love, which is easy, but for those you dislike, which, as everyone knows, is a much harder matter. The “little more” will make Kate shut her mouth again the next time it flies open to let out a rude, abrupt, or unreasonable word. It will make Eliza pay that little account she has been owing for the last six months without a thought in all that time of the dressmaker needing the money. It will make Maggie give up grumbling that Beatrice writes to her so seldom, as if Beatrice has the leisure,—she the eldest of a great bunch of sisters and her mother an invalid. It will make Eva cut her visit short next time she calls on Alice, so leaving hard-worked Alice to get through her school tasks for the morrow without sitting up to all hours of the night. In fact, what will it not do in the way of giving smoothness to the wheels of life?
Imagination is a first-rate faculty by which to obtain a look at ourselves, and when we get a little more of it, it is like turning up the gas to get a clearer view. We see ourselves then as others see us, and a pretty exhibition it sometimes is. If a girl is vain, frivolous, whimsical, selfish, vulgar, mean, she in this way gets to know it. There is thus always hope for the imaginative—they can realise what they are, and, without self-knowledge, what chance of reformation is there for anybody?