The problem, then, of the genius or the artist versus the philistine has persisted without essential modification from the eighteenth century to the present day--from the suicide of Chatterton, let us say, to the suicide of John Davidson. The man of imagination spurns in the name of his “ideal” the limits imposed upon it by a dull respectability, and then his ideal turns out only too often to lack positive content and to amount in practice to the expansion of infinite indeterminate desire. What the idealist opposes to the real is not only something that does not exist, but something that never can exist. The Arcadian revery which should be allowed at most as an occasional solace from the serious business of living is set up as a substitute for living. The imaginative and emotional dalliance of the Rousseauistic romanticist may assume a bewildering variety of forms. We have already seen in the case of Hölderlin how easily Rousseau’s dream of a state of nature passes over--and that in spite of Rousseau’s attacks on the arts--into the dream of a paradise of pure beauty. The momentous matter is not that a man’s imagination and emotions go out towards this or that particular haven of refuge in the future or in the past, in the East or in the West, but that his primary demand on life is for some haven of refuge; that he longs to be away from the here and now and their positive demands on his character and will. Poe may sing of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” but he is not therefore a classicist. With the same wistfulness innumerable romanticists have looked towards the Middle Ages. So C. E. Norton says that Ruskin was a white-winged anachronism,[60] that he should have been born in the thirteenth century. But one may surmise that a man with Ruskin’s special quality of imagination would have failed to adjust himself to the actual life of the thirteenth or any other century. Those who put their Arcadia in the Middle Ages or some other period of the past have at least this advantage over those who put it in the present, they are better protected against disillusion. The man whose Arcadia is distant from him merely in space may decide to go and see for himself, and the results of this overtaking of one’s dream are somewhat uncertain. The Austrian poet Lenau, for example, actually took a trip to his primitive paradise that he had imagined somewhere in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Perhaps it is not surprising that he finally died mad. The disenchantment of Chateaubriand in his quest for a Rousseauistic Arcadia in America and for Arcadian savages I describe later. In his journey into the wilderness Chateaubriand reveals himself as a spiritual lotos-eater no less surely than the man who takes flight into what is superficially most remote from the virgin forest--into some palace of art. His attitude towards America does not differ psychically from that of many early romanticists towards Italy.