Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/89

Rh stimuli, they are set in motion. Mists, echoes, clouds, moonlight, shadows and reflections play a great role in poetic art. A faint perfume or the sound of a distant bell may bring a scene before the imagination with almost hallucinatory vividness. A slight sensory hint like the song of a bird heard in the heart of London may have such reminiscent power as to kindle the feelings and imagination so as to transform the dust into mist, the street into a stream, and the buildings into hills and mountains. That poets are especially subject to these illusory influences the investigations of Professor Dilthey serve to demonstrate.

It is the vague and indefinite in nature that calls forth the feelings and affords scope for the exercise of the imagination. Similarly it is the suggestive power, the alluring ambiguity, of poetry that constitutes its great charm. Not clearness, but obscurity, is the supreme virtue of the poetic style. Our study, then, of the creative imagination confirms the view, arrived at in the first part of the discussion, that economy of the mental sensibilities is frequently at the expense of the economy of the mental energies. To get the greatest possible emotional and imaginative effect the understanding must in literature, as it is in music, be held largely in abeyance.

Besides this general question of the theory of style, which lies at. the basis of literary criticism, many others of course call for psychological treatment. The psychiatrist already speaks with authority in reference to the portrayal of abnormal characters in literature—cases of congenital paresis, senile dementia or folie du doute; the psychologist should speak no less decisively in reference to types of normal character and their development. In fine, hardly a question raised by literary criticism would fail to be elucidated and advanced by expert psychological investigation. Certainly, if criticism is to be rescued from its present state of mere impressionism and placed on a scientific basis, the psychologist must share in the task.