[Sidenote: _Use of these categories as synonyms of the æsthetic fact._]
The terms above mentioned would never have gone beyond the schools, where we all of us learned them (only we never found an opportunity of using them in strictly æsthetic discussions, or at most of doing so jocosely and with a comic intention), were it not that they can sometimes be employed in one of the following significations: as _verbal variants_ of the æsthetic concept; as indications of the _anti-æsthetic,_ or, finally (and this is their most important use), no longer in the service of art and æsthetic, but of _science_ and _logic._
[Sidenote: _Empirical sense of the rhetorical categories._]
_First._ Expressions considered directly or positively are not divisible into classes, but some are successful, others half-successful, others failures. There are perfect and imperfect, successful and unsuccessful expressions. The words recorded, and others of the same sort, may therefore sometimes indicate the successful expression, and the various forms of the failures. But they do this in the most inconstant and capricious manner, so much so that the same word serves sometimes to proclaim the perfect, sometimes to condemn the imperfect.
For example, some will say of two pictures--one without inspiration, in which the author has copied natural objects without intelligence; the other inspired, but without close relation to existing objects--that the first is _realistic,_ the second _symbolic._ Others, on the contrary, utter the word _realistic_ before a picture strongly felt representing a scene of ordinary life, while they apply that of _symbolic_ to another picture that is but a cold allegory. It is evident that in the first case symbolic means artistic and realistic inartistic, while in the second, realistic is synonymous with artistic and symbolic with inartistic. What wonder, then, that some hotly maintain the true art form is the symbolic, and that the realistic is inartistic; others, that the realistic is artistic and the symbolic inartistic? We cannot but grant that both are right, since each uses the same words in such a different sense.
The great disputes about _classicism_ and _romanticism_ were frequently based upon such equivocations. Sometimes the former was understood as the artistically perfect, and the second as lacking balance and imperfect; at others "classic" meant cold and artificial, "romantic" pure, warm, powerful, truly expressive. Thus it was always possible reasonably to take the side of the classic against the romantic, or of the romantic against the classic.