rt, on the difference which I find between Truth in art
and the True in fact.
Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our
minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling
which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy? We shall
find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem
at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source--the love
of the true, and the love of the fabulous.
On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example
of good or of evil? But the examples which the slow train of events
presents to us are scattered and incomplete. They lack always a tangible
and visible coherence leading straight on to a moral conclusion. The
acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent
unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only
to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the
last man. All systems of philosophy have sought in vain to explain it,
ceaselessly rolling up their rock, which, never reaching the top, falls
back upon them--each raising its frail structure on the ruins of the
others, only to see it fall in its turn.
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for
facts, wanted something fuller--some grouping, some adaptation to his
capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events
which his sight could not take in. Thus he hoped to find in the historic
recital examples which might support the moral truths of which he was
conscious. Few single careers could satisfy this longing, being only
incomplete parts of the elusive whole of the history of the world; one
was a quarter, as it were, the other a half of the proof; imagination
did the rest and completed them. From this, without doubt, sprang the
fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more
than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true
with a truth all its own.
This Truth, so beautiful, so intellectual, which I feel, I see, and long
to define, the name of which I here venture to distinguish from that of
the True, that I may the better make myself understood, is the soul of
all the arts. It is the selection of the characteristic token in all the
beauties and the grandeurs of the visible True; but it is not the
thing itself
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