It has been my endeavor throughout this book to show that classic and romantic art, though both at their best highly imaginative, differ in the quality of the imagination. I pointed out in my first chapter that in his recoil from the intellectual romanticism of the Renaissance and the mediæval romanticism of actual adventure the neo-classicist came to rest his literary faith on “reason” (by which he meant either ordinary good sense or abstract reasoning), and then opposed this reason or judgment to imagination. This supposed opposition between reason and imagination was accepted by the romantic rebels against neo-classicism and has been an endless source of confusion to the present day. Though both neo-classicists and romanticists achieved much admirable work, work which is likely to have a permanent appeal, it is surely no small matter that they both failed on the whole to deal adequately with the imagination and its rôle whether in literature or life. Thus Dryden attributes the immortality of the Æneid to its being “a well-weighed judicious poem. Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond; the more they are polished, the more lustre they receive.”[292] Read on and you will find that Dryden thus stresses judgment by way of protest against the Cavalier Marini and the imaginative unrestraint that he and other intellectual romanticists display. Dryden thus obscures the fact that what gives the immortalizing touch to the Æneid is not mere judgment but imagination--a certain quality of imagination. Even the reader who is to enter properly into the spirit of Virgil needs more than judgment--he needs to possess in some measure the same quality of imagination. The romantic answer to the neo-classic distrust of the imagination was the apotheosis of the imagination, but without sufficient discrimination as to its quality, and this led only too often to an anarchy of the imagination--an anarchy associated, as we have seen, in the case of the Rousseauist, with emotion rather than with thought or action.