In America, as elsewhere, Chateaubriand’s chief concern is not with any outer fact or activity, but with his own emotions and the enhancement of these emotions by his imagination. In him as in many other romanticists the different elements of Rousseauism--Arcadian longing, the pursuit of the dream woman, the aspiration towards the “infinite” (often identified with God)--appear at times more or less separately and then again almost inextricably blended with one another and with the cult of nature. It may be well to consider more in detail these various elements of Rousseauism and their relation to nature in about the order I have mentioned. The association of Arcadian longing with nature is in part an outcome of the conflict between the ideal and the real. The romantic idealist finds that men do not understand him: his “vision” is mocked and his “genius” is unrecognized. The result is the type of sentimental misanthropy of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter. He feels, as Lamartine says, that there is nothing in common between the world and him. Lamartine adds, however, “But nature is there who invites you and loves you.” You will find in her the comprehension and companionship that you have failed to find in society. And nature will seem a perfect companion to the Rousseauist in direct proportion as she is uncontaminated by the presence of man. Wordsworth has described the misanthropy that supervened in many people on the collapse of the revolutionary idealism. He himself overcame it, though there is more than a suggestion in the manner of his own retirement into the hills of a man who retreats into an Arcadian dream from actual defeat. The suggestion of defeat is much stronger in Ruskin’s similar retirement. Ruskin doubtless felt in later life, like Rousseau, that if he had failed to get on with men “it was less his fault than theirs.”[204] Perhaps emotional misanthropy and the worship of wild nature are nowhere more fully combined than in Byron. He gives magnificent expression to the most untenable of paradoxes--that one escapes from solitude by eschewing human haunts in favor of some wilderness.[205] In these haunts, he says, he became like a “falcon with clipped wing,” but found in nature the kindest of mothers. Oh! she is fairest in her features wild, Where nothing polished dare pollute her path: To me by day or night she ever smiled Though I have marked her when none other hath And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath.[206] He not only finds companionship in nature but at the same time partakes of her infinitude--an infinitude, one should note, of feeling: I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture.[207]