It sets up our ideals and pictures us in the acts of achieving them. It enables us to
live our joys and our sorrows, our victories and our defeats before we reach
them. It looks into the past and allows us to live with the kings and seers of old,
or it goes back to the beginning and we see things in the process of the making.
It comes into our present and plays a part in every act from the simplest to the
most complex. It is to the mental stream what the light is to the traveler who
carries it as he passes through the darkness, while it casts its beams in all
directions around him, lighting up what otherwise would be intolerable gloom.
Imagination in the Interpretation of History, Literature, and Art.—Let us
see some of the most common uses of the imagination. Suppose I describe to
you the battle of the Marne. Unless you can take the images which my words
suggest and build them into struggling, shouting, bleeding soldiers; into forts and
entanglements and breastworks; into roaring cannon and whistling bullet and
screaming shell—unless you can take all these separate images and out of them
get one great unified complex, then my description will be to you only so many
words largely without content, and you will lack the power to comprehend the
historical event in any complete way. Unless you can read the poem, and out of
the images suggested by the words reconstruct the picture which was in the mind
of the author as he wrote "The Village Blacksmith" or "Snowbound," the
significance will have dropped out, and the throbbing scenes of life and action
become only so many dead words, like the shell of the chrysalis after the
butterfly has left its shroud. Without the power of imagination, the history of
Washington's winter at Valley Forge becomes a mere formal recital, and you can
never get a view of the snow-covered tents, the wind-swept landscape, the tracks
in the snow marked by the telltale drops of blood, or the form of the heartbroken
commander as he kneels in the silent wood to pray for his army. Without the
power to construct this picture as you read, you may commit the words, and be
able to recite them, and to pass examination upon them, but the living reality of
it will forever escape you.
Your power of imagination determines your ability to interpret literature of all
kinds; for the interpretation of literature is nothing, after all, but the
reconstruction on our part of the pictures with their meanings which were in the
mind of the writer as he penned the words, and the experiencing of the emotions
which moved him as he wrote. Small use indeed to read the history of the
centuries unless we can see in it living, acting people, and real events occurring
in actual environments. Small use to read the world's great books unless their
characters are to us real men and women—our brothers and sisters, interpreted to