Part 2 (1/2)

It is a high boast, but it is true But what have we done to fire the ireat and ancient nation, now struggling for its existence? What have we taught them of Shakespeare and Milton, of Elizabeth and Croton? Have we ever tried to make them understand that they are called to be the telorious traditions, and the trustees of a spiritual wealth coold mines of the Rand are but dross? Do we even teach thee which has been slowly perfected for centuries, and which is now being used up and debased by the rubbishy newspapers which for of the majority? We have marvelled at the slowness hich the er, and at the stubbornness hich so to their sectional interests and aland was at stake In France the whole people saw at once as upon theh to unite them in a common enthusiasood judges think that but for the ”Lusitania” outrage and the Zeppelins, part of the population would have been half-hearted about the war, and we should have failed to give adequate support to our allies The cause is not selfishness but ignorance and want of iination; and what have we done to tap the sources of an intelligent patriotis saved not by the reasoned conviction of the populace, but by its native pugnacity and bull-dog courage This is not the place to go into details about English studies; but can anyone doubt that they could be ive in our schools? We have especially to relish past

Scientific studies include the earlier phases of the earth, but not the past of the human race and the British people Christianity has been a valuable educator in this way, especially when it includes an intelligent knowledge the Bible But the secular education of the masses is now so much severed from the stream of tradition and sentiment which unites us with the older civilisations, that the very language of the Churches is becoanised religion touches only a dwindling minority

And yet the past lives in us all; lives inevitably in its dangers, which the accuhtly by us on its spiritual side, can alone help us to surmount A nation like an individual, must ”wish his days to be bound each to each by natural piety” It too reen, to remember the days of old and the years that are past The Jews have always had, in their sacred books, a nificent embodiment of the spirit of their race; and who can say how much of their incomparable tenacity and ineradicable hopefulness has been due to the education thus ilish race, which shall be hardly less sacred to each succeeding generation of young Britons than the Old Testaht to be, and may be, the spiritual hoes after our task as a world-power shall have been brought to a successful issue, and after we in this little island have accepted the position of land's future is precious only to those to who that the history and literatures of other countries should be neglected, or that foreign languages should forood Englishlorious national tradition To do this, we ination, which Wordsworth has boldly called ”reason in hera little poetry and romance into the monotonous lives of our hand-workers It may well be that their discontent hasof 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 htly ”Happiness, or well-being, is an activity of the soul directed towards excellence, in an unha; the activityas a person; it must be directed towards excellence--not exclusively moral virtue, but the best work that we can do, of whatever kind; and itthe best that is in us to do To awaken the soul; to hold up before it the is are true, lovely, noble, pure, and of good report; and to remove the obstacles which stunt and cripple theof the Reason

III

THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION

BY A C BENSON

Master of Magdalene College, Caht 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 iination, 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 iination must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised ive for the use of that particular faculty The old the decorous centos culled from the works of classical rhetoricians and poets No boy, at least in ed to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely across country in pursuit of ies 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 poeinations; and even now there are plenty of educational critics ould 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 ination, pure and sih faculty; not perhaps the creative iination which can array scenes of life, construct roinary characters in draination which takes pleasure in recalling pastevents The boy eary 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 iination plays an im that, whenever we take refuge fro 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 i 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 then and fortify the body, we go on to spending h its paces, and in developing the reason and the intelligence; we pass on fro the character and the will; we try to make vice detestable and virtue desirable But ? It subery imposed upon it, it accommodates itself more or less to the conditions of its life; it learns a certain conduct and deht of the boy is running backwards and forwards in secrecy, considering the memories of its experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and co little plans for the future I re days, and the hours I spent with a class of boys sitting in front of me; how constantly one saw boys in the e 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 ht was a distant or an exalted one--probably it was some entirely trivial re aerate when I say that probably the greater part of a hu's unoccupied hours, and probably a considerable part of the hours supposed to be occupied, are spent in soination What a confirmation of this is to be found in the phenomena of sleep and drea 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 hu upon what has been, what ht be, and, alas, in our worst ht 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 kneere under the impression that they were hated and envied, the other half that they were adinative 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 ular that this deep and persistent elearded, 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 so his hts; 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 knohat havoc suspense or disappointment or anxiety or sensuality or unpopularity can ht not to leave all this without guidance or direction, but to make a frontal attack upon it I do not ination, but I believe that the subject should be frankly spoken about, and suggestions et 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 unwholeso of a wholesome one The best of all cures is to provide every boy with sooodto theames are a matter of routine rather than of active pleasure Indeed it ames in which they see no possibility of any personal distinction It is therefore of great importance that every boy whose chances of successful perfored to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the ht supplies the food for the restless iination, which hts of baser pleasure A school a strict tiht to be uid 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 adest But I believe that good teachers ought to go much further, and speak quite plainly to boys, fro 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 threethey pleased, and added that he would then have soht have an ad the their fancies had been; or again hethe--to iine themselves in a wood, or by the sea, or in a che them to put down on paper a list of definite objects which they had iined The process could be infinitely extended; but if it were done with soularity, it would certainly b possible to train boys to concentrate theain a quality enerosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an iinary 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 siical accuracy, but to strengthen that great faculty which we loosely call ies, and offrom 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 atte the will to bear upon what e undercurrent of thought which is so ilected which throws up on its banks, without any apparent purpose or aies which lurk within it I do not say that such a training would iive self-control, but s are caused by what is called ”having so on their mind”; and yet, so far as I know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever iser victor, or to help iht at arth, or to train the a current of es The subconsciousbeyond control, and yet the pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like a seed in the ht to show us that we have within our reach an extraordinarily potent psychological iative side I have indicatedbelief 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 dorenerations come to survey our ard with deep bewilder to other faculties, and yet left so helplessly alone the training of the iinative 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 ere yet overshadoith dreary thoughts; or again times when in discoic moments, we have had an unreasonable alertness and cheerfulness All that is due to the subconsciousit obey us better

I now pass on to consider a further possibility, and that is of training and developing a higher sort of creative iination It is all in reality part of the same subject, because it sees suffer by the suppression or the dor faculties It is here, I believe, that much of our intellectual education fails, froical and reasoning faculties, and to the resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment I used to try many experi a slow and unintelligent class into so 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; h, description as brief and vivid as I could ible incidents But the silence, the luxurious abandonination, the dancing light in open eyes, did really giveLatin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence

I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in h few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the stories

Noe have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which is consistently neglected and even despised It is regarded as agy the pleasure of personal perfore what old Hawtrey used so beautifully to call ”the sweet pride of authorshi+p”? The worst of it all is that we look so ible results I do not mean that we must try to develop Shakespeares, Shelleys, Thackerays; such airy creatures have a way of catering for theeneration of third-rate writing amateurs Butto iine, 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 theood many shy boys, ill not venture to inative 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 e boys are capable of in both English poetry and English prose

One of the best points of such a system of literary coives ato the creative faculties of boys, whose minds, if stifled and compressed, aredirections

My suggestion then becoer plea, the plea for more direct cultivation of enjoyment in education Some of our worstit upon the actual needs and faculties of human nature, but upon the supposed constitution of a child constructed by the starved iination of pedants and moralists and practicalintellectual and artistic pleasure is to build up taste out of the actual perceptions of the child That is a factor which has been arded in education Develops; 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 siest radation 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 iht appeal to inquisitive and inexperienced minds, such as Homer or the _Anabasis_ of Xenophon, aresuch short snippets, and insisting on what used to be called thorough parsing Even _Alice in Wonderland_, letbook, 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 soive soe 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 ued that boys would try to re thein in fact Boys used not to be encouraged to guess at words, but to be punished for shi+rking work if they had not looked thelish 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 cray, derivation, illustration As a , even to small minds, in the connection and derivation of words, if briskly com 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 e boys of attee at a tiuages, 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 so 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 ithin 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 rhyain if thealoud should form a part of every school lesson a daily hour for all younger boys, so as to foriven to English, and three to French, for in French there is a wide range both of simple narrative stories and historical romances

The ai that interest, amusement and emotion can be derived froher 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 e, the sudden realisation, that is, that books and authors are not lonely and isolated pheno tree, all connected and intertwined, and that the books of a race e out of which they sprang What e by the reader of why the author was at the trouble of expressing himself in that particular way at that particular tienesis was obscure to uely that it reeable to the author to write it as it was for rasped 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