We shall reduce to three the characters ordinarily met in most great inventors. No one of them is without exception.
1. Precocity, which is reducible to innateness. The natural bent becomes manifest as soon as circumstances allow—it is the sign of the true vocation. The story is the same in all cases: at one moment the flash occurs; but this is not as frequent as is supposed. False vocations abound. If we deduct those attracted through imitation, environmental influence, exhortations and advice, chance, the attraction of immediate gain, aversion to a career imposed from without which they shun and adoption of an opposite one, will there remain many natural and irresistible vocations?
We have seen above that[65] the passage from reproductive to constructive imagination takes place toward the end of the third year. According to some authors, this initial period should be followed by a depression about the fifth year; thenceforward the upward progress is continuous. But the creative faculty, from its nature and content, develops in a very clear, chronological order. Music, plastic arts, poetry, mechanical invention, scientific imagination—such is the usual order of appearance.
In music, with the exception of a few child-prodigies, we hardly find personal creation before the age of twelve or thirteen. As examples of precocity may be cited: Mozart, at the age of three; Mendelssohn, five; Haydn, four; Handel, twelve; Weber, twelve; Schubert, eleven; Cherubini, thirteen; and many others. Those late in developing—Beethoven, Wagner, etc.—are fewer by far.[66]
In the plastic arts, vocation and creative aptitude are shown perceptibly later, on the average about the fourteenth year: Giotto, at ten; Van Dyck, ten; Raphael, eight; Guerchin, eight; Greuze, eight; Michaelangelo, thirteen; Albrecht Dürer, fifteen; Bernini, twelve; Rubens and Jordaens being also precocious.
In poetry we find no work having any individual character before sixteen. Chatterton died at that age, perhaps the only example of so young a poet leaving any reputation. Schiller and Byron also began at sixteen. Besides this, we know that the talent for versification, at least as imitation, is very early in developing.
In mechanical arts children have early a remarkable capacity for understanding and imitating. At nine, Poncelet bought a watch that was out of order in order to study it, then took it apart and put it together correctly. Arago tells that at the same age Fresnel was called by his comrades a "man of genius," because he had determined by correct experiments "the length and caliber of children's elder-wood toy cannon giving the longest range; also, which green or dry woods used in the manufacture of bows have most strength and lasting power." In general, the average of mechanical invention is later, and scarcely comes earlier than that of scientific discovery.
The form of abstract imagination requisite for invention in the sciences has no great personal value before the twentieth year: there are a goodly number, however, who have given proof of it before that age—Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Auguste Comte, etc. Almost all are mathematicians.
These chronological variations result not from chance, but from psychological conditions necessary for the development of each form of imagination. We know that the acquisition of musical sounds is prior to speech: many children can repeat a scale correctly before they are able to talk. On the other hand, as dissolution follows evolution in inverse order,[67] aphasic patients lacking the most common words, can nevertheless sing. Sound-images are thus organized before all others, and the creative power when acting in this direction finds very early material for its use. For the plastic arts a longer apprenticeship is necessary for the education of the senses and movements. To acquire manual dexterity one must become skilled in observing form, combinations of lines and colors, and apt at reproducing them. Poetry and first attempts at novel-writing presuppose some experience of the passions of human life and a certain reflection of which the child is incapable. Invention in the mechanic arts, as in the plastic arts, requires the education of the senses and movements; and, further, calculation, rational combination of means, rigorous adaptation to practical necessities. Lastly, scientific imagination is nothing without a high development of the capacity for abstraction, which is a matter of slow growth. Mathematicians are the most precocious because their material is the most simple; they have no need, as in the case of the experimental sciences, of an extended knowledge of facts, which is acquired only with time.
At this period of its development the imagination is in large part imitation. We must explain this paradox. The creator begins by imitating: this is such a well-known fact that it is needless to give proof of it, and it is subject to few exceptions. The most original mind is, at first, consciously or unconsciously somebody's disciple. It is necessarily so. Nature gives only one thing, "the creative instinct;" that is, the need of producing in a determined line. This internal factor alone is insufficient. Aside from the fact that the imagination at first has at its disposal only a very limited material, it lacks technique, the processes indispensable for realizing itself. As long as the creator has not found the suitable form into which to cast his creation he must indeed borrow it from another; his ideas must suffer the necessity of a provisional shelter. This explains how it is that later the inventor, reaching full consciousness of himself, in order to complete mastery of his methods, often breaks with his models, and burns what he at first adorned.