The notion of producing a work of high imaginative power in a state of perfect cold blood is, as Plato long ago pointed out, absurd. Spiritual generation only takes place when the soul burns and throbs as with a fever. At the moment of productive inspiration the whole being is agitated to its depths, and the latent deposits of years of experience come to the surface. This full spring-tide of imagination, this cerebral turmoil and clash of currents, makes the severest demands on the controlling and guiding forces of volition. And it is only when the mind is capable of the highest effort of sustained concentration that the process of selecting and organizing can keep pace with the rapid inflow of material. Hence, though the excitement may in certain cases be intensely pleasurable, it is nearly always fatiguing and wearing.
But great artistic works are not always flashed into the world by this swift electric process. Some books that men will not let die have been the result of lengthened toil troubled by many a miserable check and delay. The record of Carlyle's experience sufficiently illustrates the truth that there is no necessary relation between rapidity of invention and execution and artistic value of result,[1] Much depends on the passing mood, more still on the temperament of the individual artist. There are others besides Carlyle to whom spiritual parturition has been largely an experience of suffering, the pangs being but rarely submerged in the large, joyous consciousness that a new idea is born into the world. And when this is so there is another kind of strain on the mental machine. The struggle with intellectual obstacle, the fierce passionate resolve to come in's Heine which every student experiences in a humble way, becomes something for the spectator to tremble at.
Is it surprising that such states of mental stress and storm should afterward leave the subject exhausted and prostrate? The wild excitement of production is apt to dull the sense still further to the prosaic enjoyments with which ordinary mortals have to content themselves. More than this, the long and intense preoccupation with the things of the imagination is apt to induce a certain lethargy and stupor of the senses, in which the sharp outlines of reality are effaced in a misty, dream-like phantasmagoria. The reader of Carlyle's "Memoirs" need not be reminded how plainly all this appears in his experience. Even the warm and gladdening ray of dawning prosperity failed to cheer him in these hours of spiritual collapse. And he exclaims in one place that there is no other pleasure and possession for him but that of feeling himself working and alive,[2]
- ↑ M. Joly illustrates the same fact by the experience of Voltaire, "Revue Philosophique," November, 1882, pp. 496, 497.
- ↑ "Thomas Carlyle," vol. ii, p. 129. Probably one reason why painters so rarely show morbid mental traits is that in their case the function of the senses can never be so completely overborne by the weight of imagination.
