The primitivist then attacks sober discrimination as an obstacle both
to warm immediacy of feeling and to unity. He tends to associate the
emotional unity that he gains through intoxication with the unity of
instinct which he so admires in the world of the subrational. “The
romantic character,” says Ricarda Huch, “is more exposed to waste
itself in debaucheries than any other; for only in intoxication,
whether of love or wine, when the one half of its being, consciousness,
is lulled to sleep, can it enjoy the bliss for which it envies every
beast--the bliss of feeling itself one.”[114] The desires of the
animal, however, work within certain definite limits. They are not,
like those of the primitivist, inordinate, the explanation being that
they are less stimulated than the desires of the primitivist by the
imagination. Even if he gets rid of intellect and moral effort, the
primitivist cannot attain the unity of instinct because he remains too
imaginative; at the same time he proclaims and proclaims rightly that
the imagination is the great unifying power--the power that can alone
save us from viewing things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.”
We should attend carefully at this point for we are coming to the
heart of the great romantic sophism. The Rousseauist does not attain
to the unity of the man whose impulses and desires are controlled and
disciplined to some ethical centre. He does not, in spite of all his
praise of the unconscious and of the “sublime animals,” attain to the
unity of instinct. In what sense then may he be said to attain unity?
The obvious reply is that he attains unity only in dreamland. For
the nature to which he would return, one cannot repeat too often, is
nothing real, but a mere nostalgic straining of the imagination away
from the real. It is only in dreamland that one can rest unity on the
expansive forces of personality that actually divide not only one
individual from another but the same individual from himself. It is
only in dreamland that, in the absence of both inner and outer control,
“all things” will “flow to all, as rivers to the sea.” Such a unity
will be no more than a dream unity, even though one term it the ideal
and sophisticate in its favor all the traditional terms of religion and
morality. A question that forces itself at every stage upon the student
of this movement is: _What is the value of unity without reality?_
For two things are equally indubitable: first, that romanticism on
the philosophical side, is a protest in the name of unity against the
disintegrating analysis of the eighteenth-century rationalist; second,
that what the primitivist wants in exchange for analysis is not reality
but illusion. Rousseau who inclines like other æsthetes to identify the
true with the beautiful was, we are told, wont to exclaim: “There is
nothing beautiful save that which is not”; a saying to be matched with
that of “La Nouvelle Héloïse”: “The land of chimeras is alone worthy