the feelings receive a sort of infinitude from the coöperation of the
imagination; and this infinitude, this quest of something that must
ever elude one, is at the same time taken to be the measure of one’s
idealism. The symmetry and form that the classicist gains from working
within bounds are no doubt excellent, but then the willingness to work
within bounds betokens a lack of aspiration. If the primitivist is
ready, as some one has complained, to turn his back on the bright forms
of Olympus and return to the ancient gods of chaos and of night, the
explanation is to be sought in this idea of the infinite. It finally
becomes a sort of Moloch to which he is prepared to sacrifice most
of the values of civilized life. The chief fear of the classicist is
to be thought monstrous. The primitivist on the contrary is inclined
to see a proof of superior amplitude of spirit in mere grotesqueness
and disproportion. The creation of monsters is, as Hugo says, a
“satisfaction due to the infinite.”[65]
The breaking down by the emotional romanticist of the barriers that
separate not merely the different literary genres but the different
arts is only another aspect of his readiness to follow the lure
of the infinite. The title of a recent bit of French decadent
verse--“Nostalgia in Blue Minor”--would already have been perfectly
intelligible to a Tieck or a Novalis. The Rousseauist--and that from a
very early stage in the movement--does not hesitate to pursue his ever
receding dream across all frontiers, not merely those that separate art
from art, but those that divide flesh from spirit and even good from
evil, until finally he arrives like Blake at a sort of “Marriage of
Heaven and Hell.” When he is not breaking down barriers in the name of
the freedom of the imagination he is doing so in the name of what he is
pleased to term love.