I now pass on to consider a further possibility, and that is of training and developing a higher sort of creative imagination.  It is all in reality part of the same subject, because it seems to be certain that most human beings suffer by the suppression or the dormancy of existing faculties.  It is here, I believe, that much of our intellectual education fails, from the tendency to direct so much attention to purely logical and reasoning faculties, and to the resolute subtraction from education of pure and simple enjoyment.  I used to try many experiments as a schoolmaster, and I remember at one time bribing a slow and unintelligent class into some sort of concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily mastered.  It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and brisk tangible incidents.  But the silence, the luxurious abandonment of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which I never had in teaching Latin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence.  I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in my house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the stories.

Now we have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which is consistently neglected and even despised.  It is regarded as a mere luxury; but we do not make the mistake of substituting gymnastics for games, and removing the pleasure of personal performance.  Why can we not also do something to encourage what old Hawtrey used so beautifully to call “the sweet pride of authorship”?  The worst of it all is that we look so much to tangible results.  I do not mean that we must try to develop Shakespeares, Shelleys, Thackerays; such airy creatures have a way of catering for themselves!  I do riot at all want to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs.  But many boys have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising some little vision and creation of their own brains.  Of course there are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise.  But there are also a good many shy boys, who will not venture to make themselves conspicuous by literary and imaginative feats, and who yet if it were a matter of course and wont, would throw themselves with intense pleasure into literary creation.  The work done, for instance, at Shrewsbury, at the Perse School, at Carlisle Grammar School, in this direction—­I daresay it is done elsewhere, but I have seen the work of these three schools with my own eyes—­show what quite average boys are capable of in both English poetry and English prose.