ABSTRACT
The need to distinguish the proper boundaries of the arts is the subject of Irving Babbitt's book, The New Laokoon, from which this chapter is excerpted. Venerating the Dionysiac principle, romanticists and naturalists reduce beauty to impressionism, expressionism, and revery. Beauty is not only reduced to expression, but the expression itself is swallowed up in revery. Signor Croce reduces beauty to pure expression, not so much by eliminating form as by giving the word form a meaning of his own,—neither the Aristotelian and scholastic meaning, nor, again, that of common usage. The process by which the impressions one receives are transmuted and finally emerge as original expression, is purely intuitive and spontaneous, and beyond the control of the will. The conception of beauty as pure expression is really very modern. In order to maintain it, Signor Croce has to part company with Plato and Aristotle, and in general rule out the Greeks as incompetent in the theory of beauty.
