ear-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 imagination
must always play in a literary education, it has often surprised me to
reflect how little scope ordinary literary exercises give for the use
of that particular faculty. The old themes and verses aimed at
producing decorous centos culled from the works of classical
rhetoricians and poets. No boy, at least in my day, was ever
encouraged to take a line of his own, and to strike out freely across
country in pursuit of imagined adventures. Even English teaching in
its earlier stages 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 poems
and stories out of their own imaginations; and even now there are
plenty of educational critics who would 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 my first position is plainly this; that imagination, pure
and simple, is a common enough faculty; not perhaps the creative
imagination which can array scenes of life, construct romantic
experiences, and embody imaginary characters in dramatic situations,
but the much simpler sort of imagination which takes pleasure in
recalling past memories, and in forecasting and anticipating
interesting events. The boy who, weary 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 imagination; and the
truth is that the faculty of imagination plays an immense part in all
human happiness and unhappiness, considering that, whenever we take
refuge from the present in memories or in anticipations, we are using
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 imagination is a thing 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