This is the process in intuitive minds. Such seems to have been the case of Mozart, Poe, etc. Without attempting what would be a tedious enumeration of examples, we may say that this form of creation comprises two classes—those coming to maturity through an internal impulse, a sudden stroke of inspiration, and those who are suddenly illumined by chance. The two processes differ superficially rather than essentially. Let us briefly compare them.
With some, the first phase is long and fully conscious; in others it seems negligible, equal to zero—there is nothing of it because there exists a natural or acquired tendency toward equilibrium. "For a long time," says Schumann, "I had the habit of racking my brain, and now I scarcely need to scratch my forehead. Everything runs naturally."[74]
The second phase is almost the same in both cases: it is only an instant, but it is essential—it is the moment of imaginative synthesis.
Lastly, the third phase is very short for some, because the main labor is already done, and there remains only the finishing touch or the verification. It is long for others, because they must pass from the perceived idea to complete realization, and because the preparatory work is faulty; so that for these the second creative process is shortened in appearance only.
Such seem to me the two principal forms of the mechanism of creation. These are genera; they include species and varieties that a patient and minute study of the processes peculiar to various inventors would reveal to us. We must bear in mind that this work makes no claim of being a monograph on invention, but merely a sketch.[75]
The two processes above described seem to correspond on the whole to the oft-made distinction between the intuitive or spontaneous, and the combining or reflective imagination.
The intuitive, essentially synthetic form, is found principally in the purely imaginative types, children and savages. The mind proceeds from the whole to details. The generative idea resembles those concepts which, in the sciences, are of wide range because they condense a generalization rich in consequences. The subject is at first comprehended as a whole; development is organic, and we may compare it to the embryological process that causes a living being to arise from the fertilized ovum, analogous to an immanent logic. As a type of this creative form there has often been given a letter wherein Mozart explains his mode of conception. Recently (and that is why I do not reprint it here) it has been suspected of being apocryphal. I regret this—it was worthy of being authentic. According to Goethe, Shakespeare's Hamlet could have been created only through an intuitive process, etc.
The combining, discursive imagination proceeds from details to the vaguely-perceived unity. It starts from a fragment that serves as a matrix, and becomes completed little by little. An adventure, an anecdote, a scene, a rapid glance, a detail, suggests a literary or artistic creation; but the organic form does not appear in a trice. In science, Kepler furnishes a good example of this combining imagination. It is known that he devoted a part of his life trying strange hypotheses, until the day when, having discovered the elliptical orbit of Mars, all his former work took shape and became an organized system. Did we want to make use once more of an embryological comparison, it would be necessary to look for it in the strange conceptions of ancient cosmogonies: they believed that from an earthly slime arose parts of bodies and separate organs which through a mysterious attraction and happy chance ended by sticking together, and forming living bodies.[76]
It is an accepted view that of these two modes, one, the abridged or intuitive process, is superior to the other. I confess to having held this prejudice. On examination, I find it doubtful, even false. There is a difference, not any "higher" and "lower."
First of all, both these forms of creation are necessary. The intuitive process can suffice for an invention of short duration: a rhyme, a story, a profile, a motif, an ornamental stroke, a little mechanical contrivance, etc. But as soon as the work requires time and development the discursive process becomes absolutely necessary: with many inventors one easily perceives the change from one form to the other. We have seen that in the case of Chopin, "creation was spontaneous, miraculous," coming complete and sudden. But George Sand adds: "The crisis over, then commenced the most heartrending labor at which I have ever been present," and she pictures him to us agonized, for days and weeks, running after the bits of lost inspiration. Goethe, likewise, in a letter to Humboldt regarding his Faust, which occupied him for sixty years, full of interruptions and gaps: "The difficulty has been to get through strength of will what is really to be gotten only by a spontaneous act of nature." Zola, according to his biographer, Toulouse, "imagines a novel, always starting out with a general idea that dominates the work; then, from induction to induction, he draws out of it the characters and all the story."