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.