The Washington herald. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1906-1939, 1915-10-31
Imagination.

Purest of all the elements in the alloy of human
happiness mans of the beautiful and his
imagination. Yet the first named attribute of the
soul has alone received the kindly attention oil
the upward strivers in the scramble of the CEN
turtles We have cultivated our sense of the beau
tiful at the expense of our imaginations, much
so that of the two words at our disposal for the
conveyance of the latter idea one-"romance"-
has been endowed with purely Paphian sgnif-
cance while the -"imagination"-has been
used to express the narrow margin by which the
minds eye in its appreciation of the beautiful
passes beyond the mere standards set by use.
Imagination, in its larger significance is some
thing far different from these. Analytically it is
Hardly susceptible of definition since it embodies
the very of spiritual evolution, the souls
inherent capacity for seeing things as they are
not. In many respects the two things, mans sense
of beauty and his romantic sense, antithetical
The former is purely objective. To the thing
beautiful no mental associations need attach. Its
modification of form alone is pleasing to the eye
and mind. Romance on the other hand is subjec-
tive. Neither the suggestive object the vision
conjured up by its contemplation need necessarily
appeal to the aesthetic Beauty they may
have of kind, but it is more than that which
appertains all objects whose existence has been
more or less continually connected with occasions
Of happiness If the mental picture is aesthetically
beautiful the probability is that it is recollectve
rather than truly imaginative. For one man the
Sailors melancholy chant
AS ships go gliding out to sea;
The upon their sterns aslant;
Sails furled and pennants floating free. :"
may conjure up than beautiful sea-
scape dreams OF light and shadow, the artistic
delight of massed sepia and purple-f1ecked mists
and the high lights of a wintry sunset, all per-
i Il t.
golden optimism OF a Turner would have loved
and fingered over by the fog-bound Hudson or
wind-fretted More. Blest surely is the soul en-
dowed with this aesthetic receptivity. Yet it is
not romantic or imaginative Beauty is achron-
istic Romance is essentially progressive. 1t has
ceased to traffic in cloth-yard shafts or the ring
of honor defending steel, long ceased to trifle
with bay-compelling strophes and the drone OF
the reed pipe at where the cool streams pat
ter beneath the apple boughs in the warm heart
of some Cycladean isle. Romance breathes the
spirit of the age-and the spirit of age is
Trade.
Our Romance-n the words of the greatest
romantic of the age-"brings up the Nine fifteen"
and the clang of piston and hiss of steam
have ceased to sound in the the mind has
flung the bands of shining steel over painted
desert and snow bound pass, has pucked the
felled redwoods from the mills of California,
the garnered wheat from the wide plains of
Athabasca, the forged steel from the Tyneside
rolling mills, has glanced Argus-eyed into the
counting houses of Yokohama and Antwerp
thumbing a hundred ledgers, honoring a thousand
drafts, has pitted cunning against cunning in the
bazaars of Damascus, bluff against bluff in the
wheat pit of Chicago. To its far ranging vision
the corded bales are pregnant with hundred
bluff bowed argosics of steam and CRIME, laden
with the spoils of the Hang Chow looms, furs
of the Aleut, oil and spices of the Ivory Coast
Untramellcd by considerations of space and time
it hurries to the worlds ends the bright wings
of exuItant promise, of all compelling, all desir-
ing Youth. For romance is peculiarly the prov
ince of youth just it triumphed most glorious
" when the world young. In this respect,
too, it differs from the sense of beauty, for the
latter increases with years and experience, ma
lures with every excursion into the Temple of
Art, with every effort to improve upon what has
been said or sung or pictured approved before.
With romance it is otherwise. Experience
knowledge and the passing of years, the tedium
of human intercourse, the harshness and drudg-
cry of the struggle to survive all materialize and
tougher the soul fiber. harden its surface once
sensitive to the fine of suggestion, of magi-
nation, of romance. Old age and progressive age
are alike too practeal,> too self-centered ito be
susceptible to so delicate influence The eyes of
civilization are cast upon the ground seeking the
minutiae of existence. seeking with myopie pur-