Rousseau and his early followers--especially perhaps his early French followers--were very much preoccupied with the problem of happiness. Now in a sense all men--even those who renounce the world and mortify the flesh--aim at happiness. The important point to determine is what any particular person means by happiness and how he hopes to attain it. It should be plain from all that has been said that the Rousseauist seeks happiness in the free play of the emotions. The “Influence of the Passions on Happiness” is the significant title of one of Madame de Staël’s early treatises. The happiness that the Rousseauist seeks involves not merely a free play of feeling but--what is even more important--a free play of the imagination. Feeling acquires a sort of infinitude as a result of this coöperation of the imagination, and so the romanticist goes, as we have seen, in quest of the thrill superlative, as appears so clearly in his nympholepsy, his pursuit of the “impossible she.” But the more imaginative this quest for emotional happiness grows the more it tends to become a mere nostalgia. Happiness is achieved so far as it is achieved at all in dreamland. Rousseau says of himself: _Mon plus constant bonheur fut en songe_. Every finite satisfaction by the very fact that it is finite leaves him unsatisfied. René says that he had exhausted solitude as he had exhausted society: they had both failed to satisfy his insatiable desires. René plainly takes his insatiableness to be the badge of his spiritual distinction. To submit to any circumscribing of one’s desires is to show that one has no sense of infinitude and so to sink to the level of the philistine. But does one become happy by being nostalgic and hyperæsthetic, by burning with infinite indeterminate desire? We have here perhaps the chief irony and contradiction in the whole movement. The Rousseauist seeks happiness and yet on his own showing, his mode of seeking it results, not in happiness but in wretchedness. One finds indeed figures in the nineteenth century, a Browning, for example, who see in life first of all an emotional adventure and then carry this adventure through to the end with an apparently unflagging gusto. One may affirm nevertheless that a movement which began by asserting the goodness of man and the loveliness of nature ended by producing the greatest literature of despair the world has ever seen. No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom.[227] Infections of unutterable sadness, Infections of incalculable madness, Infections of incurable despair.