VISIONS and VISIONARIES

White Ribbon, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 February 1948, Page 1

VISIONS and VISIONARIES

As a mere word, “vision” is lovely. Its sound is musical. It calls up immediate pictures of dreamlike charm. As children, we felt that the “transformation scene” at the Christmas pantomine vas the very embodiment of all the imagined enchantments in the special dream world inhabited by us alone. Veiled in mysterious, floating gossamer, exquisite beings appeared to float in a mist of shining, evanescent, trail colour dissolving and reforming before our entranced sight. So utterly beautiful did it all appear that speech failed; and only deep sighs expressed the almost too intense ectasy. It was not till later that we realised that the muslin and tinsel, the paint and cardboard, could not serve the deeper need growing up within that bung that was ourselves. But there had been a vision of something beyond the possibility of every day life, —something that held promise for the small mind, of worlds outside the ordinary; and life was enriched and beautified thereby.

But, “vision,” as we think of it in later days, implies the glory and thrill of the realised Ideal. All the dreams and longings, the hopes and desires by which the eager seeking heart is led on the way to its high development, have their culmination in that “vision splendid.” Like the towers of a distant city, set high up among the mists and mountain peaks, it is not always clear. Sometimes it seems to disappear altogether, till the sun shines again, the vapours drift away, and the inward eye secs once more.

But, if the vision is ever to become even a faint reality, there must be the will to do more than gaze on its beauty. He who is content to do this is merely a “visionary;”

that is, an ineffective dreamer. The world has seen many such as these. They are laughed to scorn. But, when the will to bring about the actual existence of the lovely dream is “translated into action,” as Madame Chiang Kai Shek says, there is respect and sometimes co-operation on the part of others. Even when there is not, because it is not everyone who secs the same vision; there is a firm foundation for the raising of the structure which began with a dream.

•Let us in our working, planning, and hoping, keep the vision undimmed. That it may never become reality does not greatly matter. The point is that we shall work, plan and hope so much more beautifully because of it. The cries of those who do not see it will not dismay us. We have seen a ray of the light that never was on sea or land; and though we may secin to those who have missed the lovely gleam, to be foolish followers of an unreal myth, we know that to be dreamers of dreams and seers of visions is the prerogative of those who will strive to win the glory of which the vision is only the faint foreshadowing.

♦ * * Dreams grow holy, put in action; Work grows fair through starry dreaming; But where eacli flows on unmingling Both arc fruitless, and in \ain. —A. A. F roc tor