Essay on the Creative Imagination Part 14

Finally, let us note that the h.e.l.lenic imagination realized its G.o.ds through anthropomorphism--they are the ideal forms of human attributes[90]--majesty, beauty, power, wisdom, etc. The Hindoo imagination proceeds through symbolism: its divinities have several heads, several arms, several legs, to symbolize limitless intelligence, power, etc.; or better still, animal forms, as e.g., Ganesa, the G.o.d of wisdom, with the head of the elephant, reputed the wisest of animals.

(5) It would be easy to show by the history of literature and the fine arts that the vague forms have been preferred according to peoples, times, and places. Let us limit ourselves to a single contemporary example that is complete and systematically created--the art of the "symbolists." It is not here a question of criticism, of praise, or even of appreciation, but merely of a consideration of it as a psychological fact likely to instruct us in regard to the nature of the diffluent imagination.

This form of art despises the clear and exact representation of the outer world: it replaces it by a sort of music that aspires to express the changing and fleeting inwardness of the human soul. It is the school of the subject "who wants to know only mental states." To that end, it makes use of a natural or artificial lack of precision: everything floats in a dream, men as well as things, often without mark in time and s.p.a.ce. Something happens, one knows not where or when; it belongs to no country, is of no period in time: it is _the_ forest, _the_ traveler, _the_ city, _the_ knight, _the_ wood; less frequently, even _He_, _She_, _It_. In short, all the vague and unstable characters of the pure, content-less affective state. This process of "suggestion" sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails.

The word is the sign _par excellence_. As, according to the symbolists, it should give us emotions rather than representations, it is necessary that it lose, partially, its intellectual function and undergo a new adaptation.

A princ.i.p.al process consists of employing usual words and changing their ordinary acceptation, or rather, a.s.sociating them in such a way that they lose their precise meaning, and appear vague and mysterious: these are the words "written in the depths." The writers do not name--they leave it for us to infer. "They banish commonplaces through lack of precision, and leave to things only the power of moving." A rose is not described by the particular sensations that it causes, but by the general condition that it excites.

Another method is the employment of new words or words that have fallen into disuse. Ordinary words retain, in spite of everything, somewhat of their customary meaning, a.s.sociations and thoughts condensed in them through long habit; words forgotten during four or five centuries escape this condition--they are coins without fixed value.

Lastly, a still more radical method is the attempt to give to words an exclusively emotional valuation. Unconsciously or as the result of reflection some symbolists have come to this extreme trial, which the logic of events imposed upon them. Ordinarily, thought expresses itself in words; feeling, in gestures, cries, interjections, change of tone: it finds its complete and cla.s.sic expression in music. The symbolists want to transfer the role of sound to words, to make of them the instrument for translating and suggesting emotion through sound alone: words have to act not as signs but as sounds: they are "musical notes in the service of an impa.s.sioned psychology."

All this, indeed, concerns only imagination expressing itself in words; but we know that the symbolic school has applied itself to the plastic arts, to treat them in its own way. The difference, however, is in the vesture that the esthetic ideal a.s.sumes. The pre-Raphaelites have attempted, by effacing forms, outlines, semblances, colors, "to cause things to appear as mere sources of emotion," in a word, to _paint_ emotions.

To sum up--In this form of the diffluent imagination the emotional factor exercises supreme authority.

May the type of imagination, the chief manifestations of which we have just enumerated, be considered as identical with the idealistic imagination? This question is similar to that asked in the preceding chapter, and permits the same answer. In idealistic art, doubtless, the material element furnished in perception (form, color, touch, effort) is minimized, subtilized, sublimated, refined, so as to approach as nearly as possible to a purely internal state. By the nature of its favorite images, by its preference for vague a.s.sociations and uncertain relations, it presents all the characteristics of diffluent imagination; but the latter covers a much broader field: it is the genus of which the other is a species. Thus, it would be erroneous to regard the fantastic imagination as idealistic; it has no claim to the term: on the contrary, it believes itself adapted for practical work and acts in that direction.

In addition, it must be recognized that were we to make a complete review of all the forms of esthetic creation, we should frequently be embarra.s.sed to cla.s.sify them, because there are among them, as in the case of characters, mixed or composite forms. Here, for example, are two kinds seemingly belonging to the diffluent imagination which, however, do not permit it to completely include them.

(a) The "wonder" cla.s.s (fairy-tales, the Thousand and One Nights, romances of chivalry, Ariosto's poem, etc.) is a survival of the mythic epoch, when the imagination is given free play without control or check; whereas, in the course of centuries, art--and especially literary creation--becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the external world, nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism, but _remaking_ the universe to suit oneself, without taking into account natural laws, and despising the impossible: it is a liberated realism.

Often, in an environment of pure fancy, where only caprice reigns, the characters appear clear, well-fas.h.i.+oned, living. The "wonder" cla.s.s belongs, then, to the vague as well as to the plastic imagination; more or less to one or to the other, according to the temperament of the creator.

(b) The fantastic cla.s.s develops under the same conditions. Its chiefs (Hoffmann, Poe, _et al._) are cla.s.sed by critics as realists. They are such by virtue of their vision, intensified to hallucination, the precision in details, the rigorous logic of characters and events: they rationalize the improbable.[91] On the other hand, the environment is strange, shrouded in mystery: men and things move in an unreal atmosphere, where one feels rather than perceives. It is thus proper to remark that this cla.s.s easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible, terrifying, nightmare-producing, "satanic literature;" Goya's paintings of robbers and thieves being garroted; Wiertz, a genius bizarre to the point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of guillotined criminals.

Religious conceptions could also furnish a fine lot of examples: Dante's _Inferno_, the twenty-eight h.e.l.ls of Buddhism, which are perhaps the masterpieces of this cla.s.s, etc. But all this belongs to another division of our subject, one that I have expressly eliminated from this essay--the pathology of the creative imagination.

III

There yet remains for us to study two important varieties that I connect with the diffluent imagination.

NUMERICAL IMAGINATION

Under this head I designate the imagination that takes pleasure in the unlimited--in infinity of time and s.p.a.ce--under the form of number. It seems at first that these two terms--imagination and number--must be mutually exclusive. Every number is precise, rigorously determined, since we can always reduce it to a relation with unity; it owes nothing to fancy. But the _series_ of numbers is unlimited in two directions: starting from any term in the series, we may go on ever increasingly or ever decreasingly. The working of the mind gives rise to a possible infinity that is limitless: it thus traces a route for the movement of the imagination. The number, or rather the series of numbers, is less an object than a vehicle.

This form of imagination is produced in two princ.i.p.al ways--in religious conceptions and cosmogonies, and in science.

(1) Numerical imagination has nowhere been more exuberant than among the peoples of the Orient. They have played with number with magnificent audacity and prodigality. Chaldean cosmogony relates that _Oannes_, the Fish-G.o.d, devoted 259,200 years to the education of mankind, then came a period of 432,000 years taken up with the reigns of mythical personages, and at the end of these 691,000 years, the deluge renewed the face of the earth. The Egyptians, also, were liberal with millions of years, and in the face of the brief and limited chronology of the Greeks (another kind of imagination) were wont to exclaim, "You, O Greeks, you are only children!" But the Hindoos have done better than all that. They have invented enormous units to serve as basis and content for their numerical fancies: the _Koti_, equivalent to ten millions; the _Kalpa_ (or the age of the world between two destructions), 4,328,000,000 years. Each _Kalpa_ is merely one of 365 days of divine life: I leave to the reader, if he is so inclined, the work of calculating this appalling number. The Djanas divide time into two periods, one ascending, the other descending: each is of fabulous duration, 2,000,000,000,000,000 oceans of years; each ocean being itself equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000 years. "If there were a lofty rock, sixteen miles in each dimension, and one touched it once in a hundred years with a bit of the finest Benares linen, it would be reduced to the size of a w.a.n.go-stone before a fourth of one of these _Kalpas_ had rolled by." In the sacred books of Buddhism, poor, dry, colorless, as they ordinarily are, imagination in its numerical forms is triumphant. The _Lalitavistara_ is full of nomenclatures and enumerations of fatiguing monotony: Buddha is seated on a rock shaded by 100,000 parasols, surrounded by minor G.o.ds forming an a.s.semblage of 68,000 _Kotis_ (i.e., 680,000,000 persons), and--this surpa.s.ses all the rest--"he had experienced many vicissitudes during 10,100,000,000 _Kalpas_." This makes one dizzy.

(2) Numerical imagination in the sciences does not take on these delirious forms; it has the advantage of resting on an objective basis: it is the subst.i.tute of an unrepresentable reality. Scientific culture, which people often accuse of stifling imagination, on the contrary opens to it a field much vaster than esthetics. Astronomy delights in infinitudes of time and s.p.a.ce: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with the feeble light of a nebular ma.s.s, glow like suns, become chilled, covered with spots, and then become condensed. Geology follows the development of our earth through upheavals and cataclysms: it foresees a distant future when our globe, deprived of the atmospheric vapors that protect it, will perish of cold. The hypotheses of physics and chemistry in regard to atoms and molecules are not less reckless than the speculations of the Hindoo imagination. "Physicists have determined the volume of a molecule, and referring to the numbers that they give, we find that a cube, a millimeter each way (scarcely the volume of a silkworm's egg), would contain a number of molecules at least equal to the cube of 10,000,000--i.e., unity followed by twenty-one zeros. One scientist has calculated that if one had to count them and could separate in thought a million per second, it would take more than 250,000,000 years: the being who commenced the task at the time that our solar system could have been no more than a formless nebula, would not yet have reached the end."[92] Biology, with its protoplasmic elements, its plastids, gemmules, hypotheses on hereditary transmission by means of infinitesimal subdivisions; the theory of evolution, which speaks off-hand of periods of a hundred thousand years; and many other scientific theses that I omit, offer fine material for the numerical imagination.

More than one scientist has even made use of this form of imagination for the pleasure of developing a purely fanciful notion. Thus Von Baer, supposing that we might perceive the portions of duration in another way, imagines the changes that would result therefrom in our outlook on nature: "Suppose we were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1,000 times as short. We should live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one 1,000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1,000 times as long.

Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannonb.a.l.l.s; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc."[93]

The psychologic conditions of this variety of the creative imagination are, then, these: Absence of limitation in time and s.p.a.ce, whence the possibility of an endless movement in all directions, and the possibility of filling either with a myriad of dimly-perceived events.

These events not being susceptible of clear representation as to their nature and quant.i.ty, escaping even a schematic representation, the imagination makes its constructions with subst.i.tutes that are, in this case, numbers.

IV

MUSICAL IMAGINATION

Musical imagination deserves a separate monograph. As the task requires, in addition to psychological capacity, a profound knowledge of musical history and technique, it cannot be undertaken here. I purpose only one thing, namely, to show that it has its own individual mark--that it is the type of affective imagination.

I have elsewhere[94] attempted to prove that, contrary to the general opinion of psychologists, there exists, in many men at least, an affective memory; that is, a memory of emotions strictly so called, and not merely of the intellectual conditions that caused and accompanied them. I hold that there exists also a form of the creative imagination that is purely emotional--the contents of which are wholly made up of states of mind, dispositions, wants, aspirations, feelings, and emotions of all kinds, and that it is the characteristic of the composer of genius, of the born musician.

The musician sees in the world what concerns him. "He carries in his head a coherent system of tone-images, in which every element has its place and value; he perceives delicate differences of sound, of _timbre_; he succeeds, through exercise, in penetrating into their most varied combinations, and the knowledge of harmonious relations is for him what design and the knowledge of color are for the painter: intervals and harmony, rhythm and tone-qualities are, as it were, standards to which he relates his present perceptions and which he causes to enter into the marvelous constructions of his fancy."[95]

These sound-elements and their combinations are the words of a special language that is very clear for some, impenetrable for others. People have spoken to a tiresome extent of the vagueness of musical expression; some have been pleased to hold that every one may interpret it in his own way. We must surely recognize that emotional language does not possess the precision of intellectual language; but in music it is the same as in any other idiom: there are those who do not understand at all; those who half understand and consequently always give wrong renderings; and those who understand well--and in this last category there are grades as varying as the apt.i.tude for perceiving the delicate and subtle shades of speech.[96]

The materials necessary for this form of imaginative construction are gathered slowly. Many centuries pa.s.sed between the early ages when man's voice and the simple instruments imitating it translated simple emotions, to the period when the efforts of antiquity and of the middle ages finally furnished the musical imagination with the means of expressing itself completely, and allowed complex and difficult constructions in sound. The development of music--slow and belated as compared to the other arts--has perhaps been due, in part at least, to the fact that the affective imagination, its chief province (imitative, descriptive, picturesque music being only an episode and accessory), being made up, contrary to sensorial imagination, of tenuous, subtle, fugitive states, has been long in seeking its methods of a.n.a.lysis and of expression. However it be, Bach and the contrapuntists, by their treatment in an independent manner of the different voices const.i.tuting harmony, have opened a new path. Henceforth melody will be able to develop and give rise to the richest combinations. We shall be able to a.s.sociate various melodies, sing them at the same time, or in alternation, a.s.sign them to various instruments, vary indefinitely the pitch of singing and concerted voices. The boundless realm of musical combinations is open; it has been worth while to take the trouble to invent. Modern polyphony with its power of expressing at the same time different, even opposing, feelings is a marvelous instrument for a form of imagination which, alien to the forms clear-cut in s.p.a.ce, moves only in time.

What furnishes us the best entrance into the psychology of this form of imagination is the natural transposition operative in musicians. It consists in this: An external or internal impression, any occurrence whatever, even a metaphysical idea, undergoes change of a certain kind, which the following examples will make better understood than any amount of commentary.

Beethoven said of Klopstock's _Messiah_, "always _maestoso_, written in _D flat major_." In his fourth symphony he expressed musically the destiny of Napoleon; in the ninth symphony he tries to give a proof of the existence of G.o.d. By the side of a dead friend, in a room draped in black, he improvises the _adagio_ of the sonata in _C sharp minor_. The biographers of Mendelssohn relate a.n.a.logous instances of transposition under musical form. During a storm that almost engulfed George Sand, Chopin, alone in the house, under the influence of his agony, and half unconsciously, composed one of his _Preludes_. The case of Schumann is perhaps the most curious of all: "From the age of eight, he would amuse himself with sketching what might be called musical portraits, drawing by means of various turns of song and varied rhythms the shades of character, and even the physical peculiarities, of his young comrades.

He sometimes succeeded in making such striking resemblances that all would recognize, with no further designation, the figure indicated by the skillful fingers that genius was already guiding." He said later: "I feel myself affected by all that goes on in the world--men, politics, literature; I reflect on all that in my own way and it issues outwards in the form of music. That is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand: they relate to events of distant interest, though important; but everything remarkable that is furnished me by the period I must express musically." Let us recall again that Weber interpreted in one of the finest scenes of his _Freyschutz_ (the bullet-casting scene) "a landscape that he had seen near the falls of Geroldsau, at the hour when the moon's rays cause the basin in which the water rushes and boils to glisten like silver."[97] In short, the events go into the composer's brain, mix there, and come out changed into a musical structure.

The plastic imagination furnishes us a counter-proof: it transposes inversely. The musical impression traverses the brain, sets it in turmoil, but comes out transformed into visual images. We have already cited examples from Victor Hugo (ch. I); Goethe, we know, had poor musical gifts. After having the young Mendelssohn render an overture from Bach, he exclaimed, "How pompous and grand that is! It seems to me like a procession of grand personages, in gala attire, descending the steps of a gigantic staircase."

We might generalize the question and ask whether or no there exists a natural antagonism between true musical imagination and plastic imagination. An answer in the affirmative seems scarcely liable to be challenged. I had undertaken an investigation which, at the outset, made for a different goal. It happens that it answered clearly enough the question propounded above: the conclusion has arisen of itself, unsought; which fact saves me from any charge of a preconceived opinion.

The question asked orally of a large number of people was this: "Does hearing or even remembering a bit of _symphonic_ music excite visual images in you and of what kind are they?" For self evident reasons dramatic music was expressly excluded: the appearance of the theater, stage, and scenery impose on the observer visual perceptions that have a tendency to be repeated later in the form of memories.

The result of observation and of the collected answers are summed up as follows:

Those who possess great musical culture and--this is by far more important--taste or pa.s.sion for music, generally have no visual images.

If these arise, it is only momentarily, and by chance. I give a few of the answers: "I see absolutely nothing; I am occupied altogether with the pleasure of the music: I live entirely in a world of sound. In accordance with my knowledge of harmony, I a.n.a.lyze the harmonies but not for long. I follow the development of the phrasing." "I see nothing: I am given up wholly to my impressions. I believe that the chief effect of music is to heighten in everyone the predominating feelings."

Those who possess little musical culture, and especially those having little taste for music, have very clear visual representations. It must nevertheless be admitted that it is very hard to investigate these people. Because of their anti-musical natures, they avoid concerts, or at the most, resign themselves to sit through an opera. However, since the nature and quality of the music does not matter here, we may quote: "Hearing a Barbary organ in the street, I picture the instrument to myself. I see the man turning the crank. If military music sounds from afar, I _see_ a regiment marching." An excellent pianist plays for a friend Beethoven's sonata in C sharp minor, putting into its execution all the pathos of which he is capable. The other sees in it "the tumult and excitement of a fair." Here the musical rendering is misinterpreted through misapprehension. I have several times noted this--in people familiar with design or painting, music calls up pictures and various scenes; one of these persons says that he is "besieged by visual images." Here the hearing of music evidently acts as excitant.[98]

In a word, insofar as it is permissible in psychology to make use of general formulas--and with the proviso that they apply to most, not to all cases--we may say that during the working of the musical imagination the appearance of visual images is the exception; that when this form of imagination is weak, the appearance of images is the rule.

Furthermore, this result of observation is altogether in accord with logic. There is an irreducible ant.i.thesis between affective imagination, the characteristic of which is interiority, and visual imagination, basically objective. Intellectual language--speech--is an arrangement of words that stand for objects, qualities, relations, extracts of things: in order to be understood they must call up in consciousness the corresponding images. Emotional language--music--is an appropriate ordering of successive or simultaneous sounds, of melodies and harmonies that are signs of affective states: in order to be understood, they must call up in consciousness the corresponding affective modifications. But, in the non-musically inclined, the evocative power is small--sonorous combinations excite only superficial and unstable internal states. The exterior excitation, that of the sounds, follows the line of least resistance, and acting according to the psychic nature of the individual, tends to arouse objective images, pictures, visual representations, well or ill adapted.

To sum up: In contrast to sensorial imagination, which has its origin without, affective imagination begins within. The _stuff_ of its creation is found in the mental states enumerated above, and in their innumerable combinations, which it expresses and fixes in language peculiar to itself, of which it has been able to make wonderful use.

Taking it altogether, the only great division possible between the different types of imagination is perhaps reducible to this: To speak more exactly, there are exterior and interior imaginations. These two chapters have given a sketch of them. There now remains for us to study the less general forms of the creative power.

FOOTNOTES:

[86] See Appendix E.

[87] Let us cite merely the case of Balzac who, says one of his biographers, "was always odd." He buys a property, in order to start a dairy there with "the best cows in the world," from which he expects to receive a net income of 3,000 francs. In addition, high-grade vegetable gardens, same income; vineyard, with Malaga plants, which should bring about 2,000 fr. He has the commune of Sevres deed over to him a walnut tree, worth annually 2,000 francs to him, because all the townspeople dump their rubbish there. And so on, until at the end of four years he sees himself obliged to sell his domain for 3,000 francs, after spending on it thrice that sum.

[88] Usener, _Gotternamen_, 1896.

[89] _Nouveaux Essais de critique_, p. 320.