It is a nice question to ask whether belief in the absolute irresponsibility of the artistic temperament has engendered the modern ideal of absolute art, or the contrary. Which is first, the complacency of conceit or of theory? For myself I am willing to leave the solution of such a problem to the Demon himself, who alone knoweth his own mind; but from the _Æsthetic_[19] of Signor Croce, the most epoptic hierophant of the demonic mysteries in these days, I can see how nearly the two absolutes are related, and can get some glimpse of the procedure of the metaphysical mind at its highest point of activity. Now Signor Croce, though really himself a child of Hegel, makes good sport of the theoretical æstheticians in the train of Kant and Hegel who define art as pure hedonism, or pure moralism, or pure conceptualism; and so far he does well. You might suppose he was taking the ordinary and sensible point of view, viz., that art must of course give pleasure, and must be psychologically moral (not pedantically so), and must contain ideas, but that it is a false sort of simplification to define art itself therefore _as_ pleasure, or _as_ morals, or _as_ ideas. If such were the motive behind Croce’s antipathy to the Teutonic æsthetics of the last century, he would seem, as I say, to be pleading for the liberty of common sense against the absolutism of the Demon; but he too quickly dispels any such illusion. “Art,” he declares, “which _depends_ on morals or pleasure or philosophy _is_ morals or pleasure or philosophy, and not art at all.” Now what kind of logic is this that argues: Because art is not pure pleasure, therefore pure art is absolved from the need of giving pleasure; because art is not pure morals, therefore pure art is absolved from any concern with morals? One might as well say, e.g., that cookery which is relished for the pleasure it gives _is_ pleasure, and not cookery at all; therefore cookery has nothing to do with pleasure. It is the old story of Luther’s drunken man on horseback: prop him up on one side and over he flops on the other. Because one absolute is not true, therefore the contrary absolute must be true; because art which gives pleasure is not definable simply as pleasure, therefore art is a hieratic abstraction entirely independent of pleasure.