Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/123

Rh. This shows how unknown and mysterious are those associations with, which the creative activity of the imagination is fed, which a single word suffices to bring into play, and of which a notorious consequence is the well-known importance attached by novelists to the choice of names for their heroes.

The rapidity of the evocation of the images and their tenacity when they are once formed appear especially marked in the ideas M. F conceives of the characters in a book. From the first two or three lines relative to a character he sees him rise in his mental vision, often very different from the description given by the author. A person described as blond, for example, appears brown to him. The representation, however, persists firmly, and the reading of the story does not modify it. No matter if the little girl of the first pages does grow and change her character in the course of the volume—she always continues to him the little girl of the beginning. When he reads the book a second time, after the lapse of a few months, the identical personifications appear again unchanged. It is not so with the pictures of places, likewise arbitrary and inexplicable, which M. F associates spontaneously with every scene he reads about, and also, in a smaller degree, with stories told him. These pictures, which are usually recollections of childhood without connection with the subject of the reading—a description of a mountain, for instance, suggests the recollection of a plain—have some degree of permanence in that they do not vary from one day to another during the time he is occupied with the book; but when he takes up the volume again some time afterward he finds that they have changed. He remembers very well on every occasion the image of the place which he had before, and finds that the story now calls out another. This variability of local images, in opposition to the fixedness of personations proper, points to their greater immediate dependence upon the subjective dispositions of the movement.

These details seem to me, if not to exptain the inexhaustible phantasmagoria of M. F 's personifications, at least to illustrate the special kind of imagination under the dominance of which they spring forth. This imagination is characterized by the union of two properties akin to those of sealing wax: great docility in receiving an impression at the right moment, and—that moment once past—an equal rigidity which opposes itself to any further modification of the impression. Novelty, emotional excitement, or a happy concourse of circumstances, accomplishes