ABSTRACT
Sometimes the aesthetic reproduction of historical reality has been imposed upon art. The human mind can pass from the aesthetic to the logical, just because the former is a first step in respect to the latter. In aesthetic analysis it is impossible to separate subjective from objective, lyric from epic, the image of feeling from that of things. Verism and naturalism also have afforded the spectacle of a confusion of the aesthetic fact with the processes of the natural sciences, by aiming at some sort of experimental drama or romance. But the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error lies in the theory of artistic and literary kinds, which still has vogue in literary treatises and disturbs the critics and the historians of art. It has been said with reason that even fairies and sprites must have probability, that is to say, be really sprites and fairies, coherent artistic intuitions.
