But if it chance that both sensory and affective elements are equal in power; if there is at the same time intense vision adequate to reality, and profound emotion, violent shock, then there arise extraordinary imaginative personages, like Shakespeare, Carlyle, Michelet. It is needless to describe this form of imagination, excellent pen-pictures of which have been given by the critics;[79] let us merely note that its psychology reduces itself to an alternately ascending and descending movement between the two limiting points of perception and idea. The ascending process assigns to inanimate objects life, desires and feelings. Thus Michelet: "The great streams of the Netherlands, tired with their very long course, perish as though from weariness in the unfeeling ocean."[80] Elsewhere, the great folio begets the octavo, "which becomes the parent of the small volume, of booklets, of ephemeral pamphlets, invisible spirits flying in the night, creating under the very eyes of tyrants the circulation of liberty." The descending process materializes abstractions, gives them body, makes them flesh and bone; the Middle Ages become "a poor child, torn from the bowels of Christianity, born amidst tears, grown up in prayer and revery, in anguish of heart, dying without achieving anything." In this dazzle of images there is a momentary return to primitive animism.
II
In order to more fully understand the plastic imagination, let us take up its principal manifestations.
1. First, the arts dealing with form, where its necessity is evident. The sculptor, painter, architect, must have visual and tactile-motor images; it is the material in which their creations are wrapped up. Even leaving out the striking acts requiring such a sure and tenacious external vision (portraits executed from memory, exact remembrance of faces at the end of twenty years, as in the case of Gavarni, etc.[81]), and limiting ourselves merely to the usual, the plastic arts demand an observant imagination. For the majority of men the concrete image of a face, a form, a color, usually remains vague and fleeting; "red, blue, black, white, tree, animal, head, mouth, arm, etc., are scarcely more than words, symbols expressing a rough synthesis. For the painter, on the other hand, images have a very high precision of details, and what he sees beneath the words or in real objects are analyzed facts, positive elements of perception and movement."[82]
The rôle of tactile-motor images is not insignificant. There has often been cited the instance of sculptors who, becoming blind, have nevertheless been able to fashion busts of close resemblance to the original. This is memory of touch and of the muscular sense, entirely equivalent to the visual memory of the portrait painters mentioned above. Practical knowledge of design and modeling—i.e., of contour and relief—though resulting from natural or acquired disposition, depends on cerebral conditions, the development of definite sensory-motor regions and their connections; and on psychological conditions—the acquisition and organization of appropriate images. "We learn to paint and carve," wrote a contemporary painter, "as we do sewing, embroidery, sawing, filing and turning." In short, like all manual labor requiring associated and combined acts.
2. Another form of plastic imagination uses words as means for evoking vivid and clear impressions of sight, touch, movement; it is the poetic or literary form. Of it we find in Victor Hugo a finished type. As all know, we need only open his works at hazard to find a stream of glittering images. But what is their nature? His recent biographers, guided by contemporary psychology, have well shown that they always paint scenes or movements. It is unnecessary to give proofs. Some facts have a broader range and throw light upon his psychology. Thus we are told that "he never dictates or rhymes from memory and composes only in writing, for he believes that writing has its own features, and he wants to see the words. Théophile Gautier, who knows and understands him so well, says: 'I also believe that in the sentence we need most of all an ocular rhythm. A book is made to be read, not to be spoken aloud.'" It is added that "Victor Hugo never spoke his verses but wrote them out and would often illustrate them on the margin, as if he needed to fixate the image in order to find the appropriate word."[83]
After visual representations come those of movement: the steeple pierces the horizon, the mountain rends the cloud, the mountain raises himself and looks about, "the cold caverns open their mouths drowsily," the wind lashes the rock into tears with the waterfall, the thorn is an enraged plant, and so on indefinitely.
A more curious fact is the transposition of sonorous sensations or images of sound, and like them without form or figure, into visual and motor images: "The ruffles of sound that the fifer cuts out; the flute goes up to alto like a frail capital on a column." This thoroughly plastic imagination remains identical with itself while reducing everything spontaneously, unconsciously, to spatial terms.
In literature this altogether foreign mode of creative activity has found its most complete expression among the Parnassiens and their congeners, whose creed is summed up in the formula, faultless form and impassiveness. Théophile Gautier claims that "a poet, no matter what may be said of him, is a workman; it is not necessary that he have more intelligence than a laborer and have knowledge of a state other than his own, without which he does badly. I regard as perfectly absurd the mania that people have of hoisting them (the poets) up onto an ideal pedestal; nothing is less ideal than a poet. For him words have in themselves and outside the meaning they express, their own beauty and value, just like precious stones not yet cut and mounted in bracelets, necklaces and rings; they charm the understanding that looks at them and takes them from the finger to the little pile where they are put aside for future use." If this statement, whether sincere or not, is taken literally, I see no longer any difference, save as regards the materials employed, between the imagination of poets and the imagination active in the mechanical arts. For the usefulness of the one and the "uselessness" of the other is a characteristic foreign to invention itself.