THE DIFFLUENT IMAGINATION
I
The diffluent imagination is another general form, but one that is
completely opposed to the foregoing. It consists of vaguely-outlined,
indistinct images that are evoked and joined according to the least
rigorous modes of association. It presents, then, two things for our
consideration--the nature of the images and of their associations.
(1) It employs neither the clear-cut, concrete, reality-penetrated
images of the plastic imagination, nor the semi-schematic
representations of the rational imagination, but those midway in that
ascending and descending scale extending from perception to conception.
This determination, however, is insufficient, and we can make it more
precise. Analysis, indeed, discovers a certain class of ill-understood
images, which I call emotional abstractions, and which are the proper
material for the diffluent imagination. These images are reduced to
certain qualities or attributes of things, taking the place of the
whole, and chosen from among the others for various reasons, the origin
of which is affective. We shall comprehend their nature better through
the following comparison:
Intellectual or rational abstraction results from the choice of a
fundamental, or at least principal, character, which becomes the
substitute for all the rest that is omitted. Thus, extension,
resistance, or impenetrability, come to represent, through
simplification and abbreviation, what we call "matter."
Emotional abstraction, on the other hand, results from the permanent or
temporary predominance of an emotional state. Some aspect of a thing,
essential or not, comes into relief, solely because it is in direct
relation to the disposition of our sensibility, with no other
preoccupation; a quality, an attribute is spontaneously, arbitrarily
selected because it impresses us at the given instant--in the final
analysis, because it somehow pleases or displeases us. The images of
this class have an "impressionist" mark. They are abstractions in the
strict sense--i.e., extracts from and simplifications of the sensory
data. They act less through a direct influence than by evoking,
suggesting, whispering; they permit a glance, a passing glimpse: we may
justly call them crepuscular or twilight ideas.
(2) As for the forms of association, the relations linking these images,
they do not depend so much on the order and connections of things as on
the changing dispositions of the mind. They have a very marked subjective
character. Some depend on the intellectual factor; the most usual are
based on chance, on distant and vacillating analogies--further down, even
on assonance and alliteration. Others depend on the affective factor and
are ruled by the disposition of the moment: association by contrast,
especially those alike in emotional basis, which have been previously
studied. (First Part, Chapter II.)
Thus the diffluent imagination is, trait for trait, the opposite of the
plastic imagination. It has a general character of inwardness because it
arises less from sensation than from feeling, often from a simple and
fugitive impression. Its creations have not the organic character of the
other, lacking a stable center of attraction; but they act by diffusion
and inclusion.
II
By its very nature it is _de jure_, if not _de facto_, excluded from
certain territories--if it ventures therein it produces only abortions.
This is true of the practical sphere, which permits neither vague images
nor approximate constructions; and of the scientific world, where the
imagination may be used only to create a theory or invent processes of
discovery (experiments, schemes of reasoning). Even with these
exceptions there is still left for it a very wide range.
Let us rapidly pass over some very frequent, very well-known
manifestations of the diffluent imagination--those obliterated forms in
which it does not reach complete development and cannot give the full
measure of its power.
(1) Revery and related states. This is perhaps the purest specimen of
the kind, but it remains embryonic.
(2) The romantic turn of mind. This is seen in those who, confronted by
any event whatever or an unknown person, make up, spontaneously,
involuntarily, in spite of themselves, a story out of whole cloth. I
shall later give examples of it according to the written testimony of
several people.[86] In whatever concerns themselves or others they
create an imagined world, which they substitute for the real.
(3) The fantastic mind. Here we come away from the vague forms; the
diffluent imagination becomes substantial and asserts itself through its
permanence. At bottom this fantastic form is the romantic spirit tending
toward objectification. The invention, which was at first only a
thoroughly internal construction and recognized as such, aspires to
become external, to become realized, and when it ventures into a world
other than its own, one requiring the rigorous conditions of the
practical imagination, it is wrecked, or succeeds only through chance,
and that very rarely. To this class belong those inventors, known to
everyone, who are fertile in methods of enriching themselves or their
country by means of agricultural, mining, industrial or commercial
enterprises; the makers of the utopias of finance, politics, society,
etc. It is a form of imagination unnaturally oriented toward the
practical.[87]
(4) The list increases with myths and religious conceptions; the
imagination in its diffuse form here finds itself on its own ground.
Depending on linguistics, it has recently been maintained that, among
the Aryans at least, the imagination created at first only momentary
gods (_Augenblicksgoetter_).[88] Every time that primitive man, in the
presence of a phenomenon, experienced a perceptible emotion, he
translated it by a name, the manifestation of what was imagined the
divine part in the emotion felt. "Every religious emotion gives rise to
a new name--i.e., a new divinity. But the religious imagination is
never identical with itself; though produced by the same phenomenon, it
translates itself, at two different moments, by two different words." As
a consequence, "during the early periods of the human race, religious
names must have been applied not to _classes_ of beings or events but to
_individual_ beings or events. Before worshipping the comet or the
fig-tree, men must have worshiped each one of the comets they beheld
crossing the sky, every one of the fig-trees that their eyes saw."
Later, with advancing capacity for generalization, these "instantaneous"
divinities would be condensed into more consistent gods. If this
hypothesis, which has aroused many criticisms, be sound--if this state
were met with--it would be the ideal type of imaginative instability in
the religious order.
Nearer to us, authentic evidence shows that certain peoples, at given
stages of their history, have created such vague, fluid myths, that we
cannot succeed in delimiting them. Every god can change himself into
another, different, or even opposite, one. The Semitic religions might
furnish examples of this. There has been established the identity of
Istar, Astarte, Tanit, Baalath, Derketo, Mylitta, Aschera, and still
others. But it is in the early religion of the Hindoos that we perceive
best this kaleidoscopic process applied to divine beings. In the vedic
hymns not only are the clouds now serpents, now cows and later
fortresses (the retreats of dark Asuras), but we see Agni (fire)
becoming Kama (desire or love), and Indra becoming Varuna, and so on.
"We cannot imagine," says Taine, "such a great clearness. The myth here
is not a disguise, but an expression; no language is more true and more
supple. It permits a glimpse of, or rather, it causes us to discern the
forms of clouds, movements of the air, changes of seasons, all the
happenings of sky, fire, storm: external nature has never met a mind so
impressionable and pliant in which to mirror itself in all the
inexhaustible variety of its appearances. However changeable nature may
be, this imagination corresponds to it. It has no fixed gods; they are
changeable like the things themselves; they blend one into another.
Everyone of them is in turn the supreme deity; no one of them is a
distinct personality; everyone is only a moment of nature, able,
according to the apperception of the moment, to include its neighbor or
be included by it. In this fashion they swarm and teem. Every moment of
nature and every apperceptive moment may furnish one of them."[89] Let
us, indeed, note that, for the worshiper, the god to whom he addresses
himself and while he is praying, is always the greatest and most
powerful. The assignment of attributes passes suddenly from one to the
other, regardless of contradiction. In this versatility some writers
believe they have discovered a vague pantheistic conception. Nothing is
more questionable, fundamentally, than this interpretation. It is more
in harmony with the psychology of these naive minds to assume simply an
extreme state of "impressionism," explicable by the logic of feeling.
Thus, there is a complete antithesis between the imagination that has
created the clear-cut and definite polytheism of the Greeks and that
whence have issued those fluctuating divinities that allow the
presentation of the future doctrine of _Maya_, of universal
illusion--another more refined form of the diffluent imagination.
Finally, let us note that the Hellenic imagination realized its gods
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 god 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
space. 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 principal process consists of employing usual words and changing their
ordinary acceptation, or rather, associating 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, associations 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 classic 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 impassioned 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 assumes. 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 associations 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
embarrassed to classify 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" class (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-fashioned, living. The "wonder" class
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 class develops under the same conditions. Its chiefs
(Hoffmann, Poe, _et al._) are classed 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 class 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 hells of Buddhism, which are perhaps the
masterpieces of this class, 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 space--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 principal 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-god, 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 wango-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 gods forming an assemblage of 68,000 _Kotis_ (i.e.,
680,000,000 persons), and--this surpasses 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 substitute 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 space: it sees worlds arise, burn at first with
the feeble light of a nebular mass, 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
cannonballs; 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 space, 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 quantity, escaping even a schematic representation, the
imagination makes its constructions with substitutes 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 aptitude for perceiving the delicate
and subtle shades of speech.[96]
The materials necessary for this form of imaginative construction are
gathered slowly. Many centuries passed 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 analysis and of
expression. However it be, Bach and the contrapuntists, by their
treatment in an independent manner of the different voices constituting
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
associate various melodies, sing them at the same time, or in
alternation, assign 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 space, 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 God. 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 analogous 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 _Freyschuetz_ (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 passion 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 analyze 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 antithesis 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, _Goetternamen_, 1896.
[89] _Nouveaux Essais de critique_, p. 320.
[90] Or, as it has been expressed, "human qualities raised to their
highest power." (Tr.)
[91] The same statement holds good as regards the "Temptations of
Saint Anthony" and other analogous subjects that have often
attracted painters.
[92] R. Dubois, _Lecons de physiologie generale et comparee_, p.
286.
[93] Von Baer, in James, _Psychology_, I, 639.
[94] _Psychology of the Emotions_, Part I, Chapter IX.
[95] Arreat, _Memoire et Imagination_, p. 118.
[96] Mendelssohn wrote to an author who composed verses for his
_Lieder_: "Music is more definite than speech, and to want to
explain it by means of words is to make the meaning obscure. I do
not think that words suffice for that end, and were I persuaded to
the contrary, I would not compose music. There are people who accuse
music of being ambiguous, who allege that words are always
understood: for me it is just the other way; words seem to me vague,
ambiguous, unintelligible, if we compare them to the true music that
fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. What the
music that I like expresses to me seems to me too _definite_, rather
than too indefinite, for anyone to be able to match words to it."
[97] Oelzelt-Newin, _op. cit._, pp. 22-23. For analogous facts from
contemporary musicians, see Paulhan, _Rev. Phil._, 1898, pp. 234-35.
[98] For the sake of brevity and clearness I do not give here the
observations and evidence. They will be found at the end of this
work, as Appendix D.
Under the title "An experimental test of musical expressiveness,"
Gilman, in _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. IV, No. 4, and vol.
V, No. 1 (1892-3), has studied from another point of view the effect
of music on various listeners. Eleven selections were given; I note
that three or four at the most excited visual images--ten (perhaps
eleven), emotional states. More recently, the _Psychological Review_
(September, 1898, pp. 463 ff.) has published a personal observation of
Macdougal in which sight-images accompany the hearing of music only
exceptionally and under special conditions. The author characterizes
himself as a "poor visualizer;" he declares that music arouses in him
only very rarely visual representations; "even then they are
fragmentary, consisting of simple forms without bond between them,
appearing on a dark background, remaining visible for a moment or two,
and soon disappearing." But, having gone to the concert fatigued and
jaded, he sees nothing during the first number: the visions begin
during the _andante_ of the second, and accompany "in profusion" the
rendering of the third. (See Appendix D.) May we not assume that the
state of fatigue, by lowering the vital tone, which is the basis of
the emotional life, likewise diminishes the tendency of affective
dispositions to arise again under the form of memory? On the other
hand, sensory images remain without opposition and come to the front;
at least, unless they are reenforced by a state of semi-morbid
excitation.