BY A. C. BENSON

Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge


It might 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 imagination, 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 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