But if such a theory of art would seem to be buzzing in a metaphysical vacuum, it is not without its very practical aspect, whether as cause or effect. “The artist,” says Signor Croce, coming down abruptly to earth, “is always above blame morally and above censure philosophically.” There you have it, the claim to irresponsibility, so dear to our militant gentlemen of the press, vested in the authority of an awesome name. I do not suppose many of our emancipated writers are deeply versed in the thin dialectic of æsthetics, but they understand pretty well what is meant when they are told that in their work as creative artists they need not concern themselves with the ethical laws supposed to govern life or with the dull maxims of truth. It may be a question, as I have said, whether the great Neapolitan has risen from the popular lust of irresponsibility to his theory of independent art or has condescended to the lower level from the heights of abstract reasoning. In either case the next step, from a definition by negation to a definition by affirmation, carries him into an altitude beyond the reach of any earthly telescope. Art, he has shown, is absolutely not pleasure or morals or philosophy; it just absolutely _is_--but is what? In the answer to this question I seem to hear no human voice but the very diction of the Demon. Otherwise I cannot understand whence the avowed foe of Kantian and Hegelian abstractions has derived his positive definition of art, which of all abstractions is the most abstract and of all absolutes the most absolute. “Art is intuition,” he says, that and nothing else; not the vision of something, mind you, but pure vision. Or, if you desire more words in your definition, you may have it thus: “An aspiration inclosed in the circle of a representation, that is art; and in it the aspiration exists solely by the representation, and the representation solely by the aspiration.” Which words, if they mean anything, signify, I suppose, that art is of the spirit of pure creativeness, a reaching out towards a goal which is non-existent until visualised by the very act of reaching out. Such a definition may engage the attention of metaphysicians; in my common-place mind, frankly, it draws blank. I do not comprehend what is meant by aspiring towards that which is non-existent until we visualise it by aspiring.