ABSTRACT
This lightening of emotions which is somehow connected with the expression of them has a certain resemblance to the 'catharsis' by which emotions are earthed through being discharged into a make-believe situation; but the two things are not the same. Expressing an emotion is not the same thing as describing it. The reason why description, so far from helping expression, actually damages it is that description generalizes. To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes. The characteristic mark of expression proper is lucidity or intelligibility; a person who expresses something thereby becomes conscious of what it is that he is expressing, and enables others to become conscious of it in himself and in them. Confusion between these two senses of the word 'expression' may easily lead to false critical estimates, and so to false aesthetic theory.
