a romantic genius in the fullest sense he must, it should seem, repudiate even the discipline of technique as well as the discipline of culture in favor of an artless spontaneity. For after all the genius is only the man who retains the virtues of the child, and technical proficiency is scarcely to be numbered among these virtues. The German romanticists already prefer the early Italian painters because of their naïveté and divine awkwardness to the later artists who had a more conscious mastery of their material. The whole Pre-Raphaelite movement is therefore only one aspect of Rousseau's return to nature. To later primitivists the early Italians themselves seem far too deliberate. They would recover the spontaneity displayed in the markings on Alaskan totem poles or in the scratchings of the caveman on the flint. A prerequisite to pure genius, if we are to judge by their own productions, is an inability to draw. The futurists in their endeavor to convey symbolically their own "soul" or "vision"— a vision be it noted of pure flux and motion-deny the very conditions of time and space that determine the special technique of painting; and inasmuch as to express one's "soul" means for these moderns, as it did for the "genius" of the eighteenth century, to express the ineffable difference between themselves and others, the symbolizing of this soul to which they have sacrificed both culture and technique remains a dark mystery.

An eccentricity so extreme as to be almost or quite indistinguishable from madness is then the final outcome of the revolt of the original genius from the regularity of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century had, one must confess, become too much like the Happy

Valley from which Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, sought an egress. It was fair to the eye and satisfied all man's ordinary needs, but it seemed at the same time to hem him in oppressively, and limit unduly his horizons. For the modern man, as for the prince in Johnson's tale, a regular round of assured felicities has counted for nought as compared with the passion for the open; though now that he has tasted strange adventures, the modern man will scarcely decide at the end, like the prince, to "return to Abyssinia." I have already spoken of the rationalistic and pseudo-classic elements in the eighteenth century that the romantic rebels found so intolerable. It is impossible to follow "reason," they said in substance, and also to slake one's thirst for the "infinite"; it is impossible to conform and imitate and at the same time to be free and original and spontaneous. Above all it is impossible to submit to the yoke of either reason or imitation and at the same time to be imaginative. This last assertion will always be the main point at issue in any genuine debate between classicist and romanticist. The supreme thing in life, the romanticist declares, is the creative imagination, and it can be restored to its rights only by repudiating imitation. The imagination is supreme the classicist grants but adds that to imitate rightly is to make the highest use of the imagination. To understand all that is implied in this central divergence between classicist and romanticist we shall need to study in more detail the kind of imaginative activity that has been encouraged in the whole movement extending from the rise of the original genius in the eighteenth century to the present day.

CHAPTER III

ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

I HAVE already spoken of the contrast established by the theorists of original genius in the eighteenth century between the different types of imagination-especially between the literary and the scientific imagination. According to these theorists, it will be remembered, the scientific imagination should be strictly subordinated to judgment, whereas the literary imagination, freed from the shackles of imitation, should be at liberty to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras, or, at all events, should be far less sharply checked by judgment. It is easy to follow the extension of these English views of genius and imagination into the France of Rousseau and Diderot, and then the elaboration of these same views, under the combined influence of both France and England, in Germany. I have tried to show that Kant, especially in his "Critique of Judgment," and Schiller in his "Esthetic Letters" (1796) prepare the way for the conception of the creative imagination that is at the very heart of the romantic movement. According to this romantic conception, as we have seen, the imagination is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from all constraint whatever. This extreme romantic emancipation of the imagination was accompanied by an equally extreme emancipation of the emotions. Both kinds of emancipation are, as I have tried to show, a recoil partly from neo-classical judgment - a type of judgment

which seemed to oppress all that is creative and spontaneous in man under a weight of outer convention; partly, from the reason of the Enlightenment, a type of reason that was so logical and abstract that it seemed to mechanize the human spirit, and to be a denial of all that is immediate and intuitive. The neo-classical judgment, with its undue unfriendliness to the imagination, is itself a recoil, let us remember, from the imaginative extravagance of the "metaphysicals," the intellectual romanticists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also, if we take a sufficiently wide view, from the Quixotic type of romanticism, the romanticism of action, that we associate with the Middle Ages.

Now not only are men governed by their imaginations (the imagination, as Pascal says, disposes of everything), but the type of imagination by which most men are governed may be defined in the widest sense of the word as romantic. Nearly every man cherishes his dream, his conceit of himself as he would like to be, a sort of "ideal" projection of his own desires, in comparison with which his actual life seems a hard and cramping routine. "Man must conceive himself what he is not," as Dr. Johnson says, "for who is pleased with what he is?" The ample habitation that a man rears for his fictitious or "ideal" self often has some slight foundation in fact, but the higher he rears it the more insecure it becomes, until finally, like Perrette in the fable, he brings the whole structure down about his ears by the very gesture of his dream. "We all of us," La Fontaine concludes in perhaps the most delightful account of the romantic imagination in literature, "wise as well as foolish, indulge in daydreams. There is nothing sweeter. A flattering illusion

carries away our spirits. All the wealth in the world is ours, all honors and all women," etc. When Johnson descants on the "dangerous prevalence of imagination," and warns us to stick to "sober probability," what he means is the dangerous prevalence of day-dreaming. The retreat of the Rousseauist into some "land of chimeras" or tower of ivory assumes forms almost incredibly complex and subtle, but at bottom the ivory tower is only × one form of man's ineradicable longing to escape from the oppression of the actual into some land of heart's desire, some golden age of fancy. As a matter of fact, Rousseau's imaginative activity often approaches very closely to the delights of day-dreaming as described by La Fontaine. He was never more imaginative, he tells us, than when on a walking-trip- especially when the trip had no definite goal, or at least when he could take his time in reaching it. The Wanderlust of body and spirit could then be satisfied together. Actual vagabondage seemed to be an aid to the imagination in its escape from verisimilitude. One should note especially Rousseau's account of his early wandering from Lyons to Paris and

1 Quel esprit ne bat la campagne?
Qui ne fait châteaux en Espagne?
Picrochole, Pyrrhus, la laitière, enfin tous,

Autant les sages que les fous

Chacun songe en veillant; il n'est rien de plus doux.
Une flatteuse erreur emporte alors nos âmes;

Tout le bien du monde est à nous,

Tous les honneurs, toutes les femmes.

Quand je suis seul, je fais au plus brave un défi,

Je m'écarte, je vais détrôner le sophi;

On m'élit roi, mon peuple m'aime;

Les diadèmes vont sur ma tête pleuvant:

Quelque accident fait-il que je rentre en moi-même,
Je suis gros Jean comme devant.

Rasselas, ch. XLIV.