land of chimeras is alone worthy of habitation." Similar
utterances might be multiplied from French, English, and
German romanticists. ¹ To be sure, the word "reality" is
perhaps the most slippery of all general terms. Certain
recent votaries of the god Whirl, notably Bergson, have
promised us that if we surrender to the flux we shall have
a "vision" not only of unity but also of reality; and so
they have transferred to the cult of their divinity all
the traditional language of religion.

We do not, however, need for the present to enter into
a discussion as to the nature of reality, but simply to stick
to strict psychological observation. From this point of
view it is not hard to see that the primitivist makes his
primary appeal not to man's need for unity and reality
but to a very different need. Byron has told us what this
need is in his tale ( "The Island") of a ship's crew that
overpowered its officers and then set sail for Otaheite;
what impelled these Arcadian mutineers was not the
desire for a genuine return to aboriginal life with its rigid
conventions, but

The wish -- which ages have not yet subdued
In man -- to have no master save his mood.

Now to have no master save one's mood is to be wholly
temperamental. In Arcadia -- the ideal of romantic mo-
rality -- those who are wholly temperamental unite in
sympathy and brotherly love. It remains to consider
more fully what this triumph of temperament means in
the real world.

-186-