IMAGINATION AND WAR

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6572, 5 February 1925, Page 2

IMAGINATION AND WAR

Sir H. Rider Haggard was the guest of the Delphian Coterie at a dinner at Cannon Street Hotel, London, recently. The Coterie seeks to inculcate and foster the sense of personal judgment and responsibility in public affairs. After dinner a discussion took place on “The Good and the Bad of Imagination.” Sir Rider Haggard, opening the discussion, said that imagination was first and foremost a gift, and secondly a quality of dealing with what was outside the common experience. It was also something that enabled them to appreciate more fully than was general the marvels of life. The best definition was really an unusual power of putting oneself into the place of others and of deducting the unknown from the known. Imagination was not what was called inspiration, although perhaps the two overlapped. Speaking generally we were not an imaginative I race. It would not be too much to say that the man in the street rather [disliked and distrusted imagination. ; That was most clearly shown in the positive refusal to be prepared for war. If our people had had the imagination to know what war meant they would have been preparel for it. It was not in the English nature. They were not, nor would they be again. Let them think what a man like Lord Roberts must have suffered, knowing what must come, trying to dritfe it home to the public mind and failing, and seeing the avalanche creeping nearer to the edge of the precipice. He often wondered how in the future, when mankind got more highly strung even than at present, people would face war. How brave they would have to be to stand it. He wondered very much whether the time would come when the thing would cure itself because men would refuse to face war, and war would perish' of its own horror.