d, 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. Theophile 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.

3. In the teeming mass of myths and religious conceptions that the
nineteenth century has gathered with so much care we could establish
various classifications--according to race, content, intellectual level;
and, in a more artificia