The nobility of Schiller's intentions is beyond question. At the same time, by encouraging the notion that it is possible to escape from neo-classical didacticism only by eliminating masculine purpose from art, he opens the way for the worst perversions of the aesthete, above all for the divorce of art from ethical reality. In art, according to Schiller, both imagination and feeling should be free and spontaneous, and the result of all this freedom, as he sees it, will be perfectly "ideal." His suspicion of a purpose is invincible. As soon as anything has a purpose it ceases to be aesthetic and in the same measure suffers a loss of dignity. Thus the aesthetic moment of the lion, he says, is when he roars not with any definite design, but out of sheer lustiness, and for the pure pleasure of roaring.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism