M......, sixty years of age, artistic temperament. Because of the necessities of life, he has followed a profession entirely opposite to his bent. He has given me his "confession" in the form of fragmentary notes made day by day. Many are moral remarks on the subject of his imagination—I leave them out. I note especially the unconquerable tendency to make up little romances and some details in regard to visual representation, and a dislike for numbers.
"It happens that I experience sharp regret when I see the photograph of a monument, e.g., the Pantheon, the proportions of which I have constructed according to the descriptions of the monument and the idea that I had of the life of the Greeks. The photograph mars my dream.
"From the seen to the unknown. In the S. G. library. A slender young woman, smartly dressed—spotless black gloves—between her fingers a small pencil and a tiny note-book. What business has this affectation this morning in a classic and dull building, in a common environment of poor workmen? She is not a servant-maid, and not a teacher. Now for the solution of the unknown. I follow the woman to her family, into her home, and it is quite a task.
"In the same library. I want to get an address from the Almanach Bottin. A young man, perhaps a student, has borrowed the ridiculous volume. Bent over it, his hands in his hair, he turns the leaves with the sage leisure of a scholar looking for a commentary. From the empty dictionary he often draws out a letter. He must have received this letter this morning from the country. His family advises him to apply to so-and-so. It is a question of money and employment. He must locate the people who, provincial ignorance said, are near him. And so goes the wandering imagination.
"When I feel myself drawn to anyone, I prefer seeing images or portraits rather than the reality. That is how I avoid making unforeseen discoveries that would spoil my model.
"If I make numerical calculations, in the absence of concrete factors, the imagination goes afield, and the figures group themselves mechanically, harkening to an inner voice that arranges them in order to get the sense.
"There may be an imagination devoted to arithmetical calculations—forms, beings intrude, even the outline of the figure 3, for example; and then the addition or any other calculation is ruined.
"I revert to the impossibility of making an addition without a swerve of imagination, because plastic figures are always ready before the calculator. The man of imagination is always constructing by means of plastic images.[169] Life possesses him, intoxicates him, so he never gets tired."
THE END