Similarly, in the history of poetry or of art, the consideration of the logical and practical moments in the expression will help to define and isolate that which is purely æsthetic expression, that is, poetry and art. Croce's expressionistic theory, when thus understood, differs both from other expressionistic theories and from the narrow interpretations of Croce's own theory that have been given by some of his followers and by all his adversaries. It does not, in fact, attempt to give an æsthetic justification of art as the mere passive reception of the transient mood; it has no sympathy for that impressionism which transforms the artist into a reed shaken by all winds of circumstance, legitimizing every intrusion of the practical personality in the æsthetic production. It reduces this modern æsthetics of the immediate feeling to an expression, not of the true spirit of what art and poetry is being produced to-day, but of that disease, or passivity, of the times, the first solemn document of which can be traced in Rousseau's _Confessions_. Against it, Croce appeals to the example and the word of a Goethe or a Leopardi, who diagnosed the disease in its inception, and contrasted the classical naturalness and simplicity of the ancients with the affectation and tumidity of the moderns. But the classicism which Croce invokes is not a formal and literal ideal, limited to certain models or standards: it is that complete idealization, which the immediate practical data, in all times and climates, will undergo at the hands of the true poet and artist, whether he calls himself a romanticist or a classicist, an idealist or a realist.