Essays on Work and Culture — Chapters 21 and 22

The Imagination in Work The uses of the imagination are so little understood by the great majority of men, both trained and untrained, that it is practically ignored not only in the conduct of life, but of education.

It receives some incidental development as a result of educational processes, but the effort to reach and affect it as the faculties of observation, of reasoning, and of memory are made specific objects of training and unfolding, is rarely made.

It is relegated to the service of the poets and painters if it is recognised at all; and so far as they are concerned it is assumed that they will find their own way of educating this elusive faculty.

As for other men, dealing with life from the executive or practical sides, it is taken for granted that if they have imagination they can find no proper use for it.

Individual teachers have often understood the place and function of the imagination, and have sought to liberate and enrich it by intelligently planned study; but the schools of most, if not of all, times have treated it as a wayward and disorderly gift, not amenable to discipline and training, and of very doubtful value.

There has always been, in every highly civilised society, a good deal that has appealed to this divinest of all the gifts with which men have been endowed; there have been periods in which the imagination has been stirred to its depths by the force of human energy and the play and splendour of human experience and achievement; but there has never yet been adequate recognition of its place in the life of the individual and of society, nor intelligent provision for its education.

The movements of thought along educational lines in recent years show, however, a slow but steady drift toward a clearer conception of what the imagination may do for men, and of what education may do for the imagination.

So long as the uses of the imagination in creative work are so little comprehended by the great majority of men, it can hardly be expected that its practical uses will be understood.

There is a general if somewhat vague recognition of the force and beauty of its achievements as illustrated in the work of Dante, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Wagner; but very few people perceive the play of this supreme architectural and structural faculty in the great works of engineering, or in the sublime guesses at truth which science sometimes makes when she comes to the end of the solid road of fact along which she has travelled.

The scientist, the engineer, the constructive man in every department of work, use the imagination quite as much as the artist; for the imagination is not a decorator and embellisher, as so many appear to think; it is a creator and constructor.

Wherever work is done on great lines or life is lived in fields of constant fertility, the imagination is always the central and shaping power.

Burke lifted statesmanship to a lofty plane by the use of it;

Edison, Tesla, and Roebling in their various ways have shown its magical quality; and more than one man of fortune owes his success more to his imagination than to that practical sagacity which is commonly supposed to be the conjurer which turns all baser metals into gold.

That splendour of the spirit which shines in the great art of the world shines also in all lesser work that is genuine and sincere; for the higher genius of man, which is the heritage of all who make themselves ready to receive it, is present in all places where honest men work, and moulds all materials which honest men handle.

Indeed the most convincing evidence of the activity of this supreme faculty is to be found, not in the works of men of exceptional gift, but in the work of the obscure and undistinguished.

It is impossible to energise the imagination among the workers without energising it among the artists; and artists never appear in great numbers unless there is in the common work of common men a touch of vitality and freshness.

A real movement of the imagination is never confined to a class; it is always shared by the community.

It does not come in like a group of unrelated rivulets fed by separate fountains; it comes like a tide, slowly or swiftly rising until it enfolds a wide reach of territory.

The presence of a true art spirit shows itself not so conclusively in a few noble works as in the touch of originality and beauty on common articles in common use; on furniture, and domestic pottery, and in the love of flowers.

The genius of a race works from below upward, as the seed sends its shoot out of the hidden place where it is buried; and when it becomes luminous in books, painting, and architecture, it grows also in out-of-the-way places and in things of humble use.

The instinct for beauty, which is more pronounced and fruitful among the Japanese than among any other modern people, shows itself most convincingly in the originality, variety, and charm of the shapes which household pottery takes on, and in the quiet but deep enjoyment of the blossoming apple or cherry, the blooming vine or the fragrant rose.

It is the presence of beauty diffused through the life of a people in habit, taste, pleasure, and daily use which makes the concentration of beauty in great and enduring works not only possible but inevitable; for if a people really care for beauty they will never lack artists to give enduring expression to that craving which, among men of lesser gift, shows itself in a constant endeavour to bring material surroundings into harmony with spiritual aspirations.

This play of the imagination over the whole landscape of life gives it perennial charm, because it perpetually re-forms and re-arranges it; and the free movement of the imagination in all occupations and tasks not only makes work a delight, but gives it a significance and adequacy, which make it the fit expression, not of a mere skill, but of an immortal spirit.

The work from which this quality is absent may be honest and sincere, but it cannot be liberalising, joyful, and contagious; it cannot give the nature free play; it cannot express the man.

Patience, persistence, fidelity are fundamental but not creative qualities; the true worker must possess and practise them; but he must go far beyond them if he is to put himself into his work, and bring his work into harmony with those spiritual conditions and aims which are the invisible but final standards and patterns of all works and tasks.

One may always get out of hard work the satisfaction which comes from the consciousness of an honest endeavour to do an honest piece of work; but the work which inspires rather than exhausts, and the doing of which gives the hand more freedom and power for the next tasks must be penetrated, suffused, and shaped by the imagination.

The great lawyer, physician, electrician, teacher, and builder must give his work largeness, completeness, and nobility of structure by the use of the imagination in as real and true a sense as the great poet or painter.

Without it all work is hard, detached, mechanical; with it all work is vital, co-ordinated, original.

It must shape, illumine, and adorn; it must build the house, light the lamp within its walls, and impart to it that touch of beauty which invests wood and stone with the lightness, the grace, and the loveliness of spirit itself.

We begin with the imagination; it holds its light over the play of childhood; it is the master of the revels, the enchantments, and the dreams of youth; it must be also the inspiration of all toil and the shaping genius of all work.

Chapter XXII

The Play of the Imagination It is interesting to study the personality of a man whose work is invested with freshness, charm, and individuality, because such a study invariably makes us aware of that subtle and elusive skill in the use of all materials which is not technical but vital.

That skill is impossible without special training, but it is not the product of training; it is not dexterity; it is not facility; it has the ease and grace of a harmonious expression of all that is distinctive and original in the man.

No one thinks of technical skill in that moment of revelation which comes when one stands for the first time in the presence of a noble work; later one may study at length and with delight the perfection of workmanship disclosed in solidity of structure and in harmony of detail; but in the moment of revelation it is the essential and interior truth and beauty, which shine from form and colour and texture as the soul shines in a human face, which evoke a thrill of recognition in us.

Now, this higher skill which dominates and subordinates the technical skill, this skill of the spirit which commands and uses the skill of the body, is born in the soul of the worker and is the ultimate evidence and fruit of his mastership.

It is conditioned on the free play of the imagination through all the material which the worker uses.

It involves that fusion of knowledge, intelligence, facility, and insight which can be effected only by the constant use of the imagination.

In statesmanship Burke and Webster are examples of this highest type of worker; men who not only command the facts with which they are called upon to deal, but who so organise and vitalise those facts that, in their final presentation, they possess the force of irresistible argument, and are illumined and clothed with perennial beauty as works of art.

In like manner, in the pulpit, Chrysostom, Fenelon, Newman, and Brooks not only set religious truth in impressive order, but gave it the appealing power of a noble and enduring beauty.

It is impossible to do a great piece of work unless one can form an image of it in advance, unless one can see it as it will finally appear.

If one were limited in vision to the detail actually in hand, the whole would never be completed; that which makes the perfection of the whole possible is the ability of the worker to keep that whole before him while he deals with the detached parts.

Without that power the worker is a mechanical drudge, whose work has no quality save that of dogged fidelity to the task.

Now, this power of keeping the whole before the mind while dealing with the parts, of seeing the completed machine while shaping a pin or a cog, of getting the complete effect of the argument while elaborating a minor point, resides in the imagination.

It is the light which must shine upon all toil that has in it intelligence, prevision, and freshness; and its glow is as essential in mechanical as in purely artistic work.

Whenever, in any kind of work dealing with any kind of material, there is any constructive quality, any fitting of part with part, any adjustment of means to ends, there must be imagination.

Work which is done without imagination is so rudimentary that, at the best, its highest use is to save some one else a little drudgery.

This elementary kind of work is often done by those students of literature who confuse the study of grammatical construction with style, and those students of the Bible who think they are illustrating the truths of religion by purely textual study.

Theology has suffered many things at the hands of those who have attempted to explain the divine mysteries without the light which alone penetrates these mysteries.

To do the commonest work with sincerity and force; to understand the simplest character; to perform the simplest services of friendship; to enter into another's trial and to give the balm of sympathy to one who is smitten and bruised; to conduct a campaign by foreseeing the movements of an adversary, or to carry on successfully a great enterprise by forecasting its probable development;

to make any invention or discovery; to be a really great preacher, physician, lawyer, teacher, mechanic;--to do any of these things one must have and one must use the imagination.

The charm with which the imagination invests childhood is due to its habitual and unconscious use by children, and is suggestive of the methods by which this faculty may be made the inspirer of all tasks and toil.

The child makes vivid images of the ideas which appeal to it; it gives reality to those ideas by identifying them with the objective world; it clothes all things with which it plays with life.

In his autobiography Goethe describes the door in the wall of a certain garden in Frankfort within which many marvellous things happened; a true romance of incident and adventure which became as real to the romancer as to his eager and credulous listeners.

De Quincey created an imaginary kingdom, peopled with imaginary beings whom he ruled with benignant wisdom, amid universal prosperity and peace, until, in an unlucky hour, he admitted his brother into a partnership of authority; and that brother, unable to withstand the temptation of absolute power, became a remorseless tyrant.

And De Quincey feelingly describes the reality of his anguish when, to protect his innocent subjects from a tyrant's rapacity, he was compelled to destroy his imaginary kingdom.

The imaginative boy turns a vacant lot into an African jungle, and hunts wild beasts in constant peril of his life; the imaginative girl carries on social intercourse with her dolls as seriously as with her most intimate playmates.

Everything is real and alive to a child, and the world of ideas has as much substance as the world of matter.

These characteristics of a child in its play throw clear light on the true methods of the man in his work; for the play of childhood is prophetic of the work of maturity; it is the prelude in which all the great motives are distinctly audible.

The man who gives his work completeness and charm must conceive of that work, not as a detached and isolated activity, but as part of the great order of life; a product of the vital forces as truly as the flower which has its roots in the earth.

To the growth of the flower everything contributes; it is not limited to the tiny plot in which it is planted: the vast chemistry of nature in soil, atmosphere, and sky nourish it.

In like manner a man must habitually think of his work, not as a mere putting forth of his technical skill, but as the vital product of all the forces which sustain him.

A real poem grows out of all that is deepest in a man's nature; to its making in spiritual conception, structure, form, and style his body, his mind, and his soul contribute; its metre adjusting itself to his breathing, its ideas taking direction and significance from his thought, and its elusive suggestiveness and beauty conveying something of his mysterious personality.

A true sermon is never what is sometimes called a pulpit effort; it is always the product of the preacher's experience; he does not and cannot make it; it must grow within him.

A

great oration has the same vital relationship with the orator, the occasion, the theme, and human experience.

It is never a bit of detached brilliancy; it is always, like Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, the summing up and expression of a vast and deep movement of the human spirit.

In its form it reveals the man who makes it; in its content it is seen to be inevitable.

It lies in the consciousness of a race before it rises into the consciousness of the orator and takes flight on the wings of immortal speech.

To think habitually of one's work as a growth and not a thing made out of hand, as a product of all the forces of one's nature and not a bit of skill, as alive in the sense in which all things are alive in which spirit and life express themselves,--to conceive of one's work in this large and vital way is to keep the imagination playing through and inspiring it.

Chapter XXIII