This is, of course, an unsubtilised outright statement of romantic æstheticism. Mr. Spingarn was positive that the critic’s essential response to a work of art must be æsthetic, but he has always withheld what exactly he means by the æsthetic emotion or response or judgment. (It _is_ hard to make concrete statements about the so-called æsthetic emotion.) But that did not in the least militate against the “æsthetic response” being used as a campaign catchword. For Mr. Spingarn had written the proclamations for a new generation of American writers. This is the curious phenomenon I spoke of. One is astonished not just at the slight quantity of Mr. Spingarn’s writing in proportion to his reputation, but more astonished at the complete lack of originality in the documents of this apostle for originality. He added nothing to the Crocean doctrine: he clarified nothing or modified nothing in it. He did not even apply it, abstaining, then and since, from concrete criticism of individual works. He merely proclaimed it. And a widespread revolt against standards followed in American criticism. So hearty, and eventually so wilful and silly, was the revolt that in 1922 its opponents were entertained by the issuance from Mr. Spingarn of a restraining manifesto entitled _The Younger Generation_. This time, recoiling from the destructiveness of the young men, Mr. Spingarn would herd them back into an idealistic fold, back to “discipline, character, morals, imagination, beauty, freedom.” Very often before, romantic expansiveness has run its course into disillusion: it is a soberer Crocean who said, “I, who once called upon young men for rebellion and doubt, now call upon them for thought and faith.” It is not Mr. J. E. Spingarn, enthusiastic amateur of letters, trained scholar, man of feeling, who can detain us, for there is literally nothing in his writing for the mind to work on: as a thinker, he is thoroughly derivative and weak on definitions. But what Mr. Spingarn stands for, the theory of self-expression, still needs a scotching.