on plays
a great part; for culture, it cannot too often be said, is knowledge,
observation, and experience incorporate into personality and become
part of the very nature of the individual. The man of culture is
pre-eminently a man of imagination; lacking this quality, he may
become learned by force of industry, or a scholar by virtue of a
trained intelligence, but the ripeness, the balance, the peculiar
richness of fibre which characterise the man of culture will be denied
him. The man of culture, it is true, is not always a man of creative
power; but he is never devoid of that kind of creative quality which
transforms everything he receives into something personal and
individual. And the more deeply one studies the work of the great
artists, the more distinctly does he see the immense place which
culture in the vital, as contrasted with the academic, sense held in
their lives, and the great part it played in their productive
activity. Dante, Goethe, Tennyson, Browning, Lowell, were men
possessed in rare degree of culture of both kinds; but Shakespeare and
Burns were equally men of culture. They shared in the possession of
this faculty of making all they saw and knew a part of themselves.
Between culture of this quality and the creative power there is
something more than complete unity; there is almost identity, for they
seem to be two forms of activity of the same power rather than
distinct faculties. Culture enables us to receive the world into
ourselves, not in the reflection of a magic mirror, but in the depths
of a living soul; to receive that world in such a way that we possess
it; it ceases to be outside us and becomes part of our very nature.
The creative power enables us to refashion that world and to put it
forth again out of ourselves, as it was originally put forth out of
the life of the divine artist. The creative process is, therefore, a
double process, and culture and genius stand in indissoluble union.

The development of the imagination, upon the power of which both
absorption of knowledge and creative capacity depend, is, therefore, a
matter of supreme importance. To this necessity educators will some
day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform;
meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work. Knowledge,
discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on
every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these
in the highest form of activity