Third Section: Unity and Truth in Beauty

Chapter 21: Artistic Freedom and Necessity

a) Freedom and arbitrariness

Artistic freedom carries its dark side and its dangers in itself: arbitrariness. This notion concerns primarily the representational arts, for arbitrariness can set in where the foundation of an art is imitation, and what is creative in the representational artist tempts him to make things better than nature and life do. That temptation is always close by, for nature and life are also creative, and produce forms, figures, and destinies, which they offer to our eyes. Life informs us of them and we are used to looking at the world as a “creation”; but rarely do we become aware of the analogy between these two kinds of creativity.

It is not necessary for the assertion of creativity in nature to place at its roots a theistic world order. What is productive in nature is just as much a scientific concept – especially since the metaphysics of substantial form has been abandoned and replaced by the thought of a continuous evolutionary creation (descent) of organic forms. Organic nature is eminently creative – although it is not “development,” for that precisely would remove the element of creativity. And human life is even more creative; its figures and destinies are far more numerous and diverse.

From these domains, however – inorganic nature plays only a small role here – the arts derive their “material.” That means that the “materials” of the representational arts already contain elements of form that have a creative process behind them, and are derived from a production behind which stand generative forces that are quite comparable to those of artistic production, and are surely superior in many respects.

It is after all no accident that it is precisely these ontological domains in which, apart from all art, are found the beauty of the real world, natural beauty, (274) and human beauty. One is therefore correct to say that in the fine arts, “nature and morality [Sittlichkeit]” become the “material” upon which further elements of form are bestowed. “Morality” is no doubt too narrow a concept here; we should say, “nature and human life,” for human life is not coextensive with an ethos. Otherwise, the thesis is correct.

Where there are productive forces that shape structures, there is also an achievement of high levels of unity and wholeness of form, plentitude, and also structures done poorly, missed possibilities, forms burst asunder. These are facts that we know sufficiently from the circle of problems concerning natural beauty. Consequently, representational art can also either succeed or fail in its efforts to depict the successful and, in their own way, unsurpassable creations of nature or of the human form. In other words, it can be “true” or “untrue.”

And this is the place at which the freedom of art can become a danger; it can turn into arbitrariness and in that way fail in respect to the “unity and wholeness” of form that has already been built in nature. Then it sinks beneath the level at which it should begin as one of its foundations – even if only to make tangible the beauty that nature had created. We are in no way criticizing representational art for including in its material what is ugly, that is, misbegotten; rather that it can fail in this task also, for it is not falsely pretending what it has created is beautiful.

But can something seduce the artist into falsifying experienced reality? To this we may answer: he can arrive at such falsification for three reasons:

1. Out of impotence, lacking depth in imitation;
2. Out of idealism, because his imagination creates the illusion of something that seems “yet more beautiful” to him;
3. Out of moral compunctions, i.e., considerations not of an aesthetical kind, e.g., pedagogical.

The first of these is extremely common: not only notorious bunglers, even many serious artists “misdraw” figures they have in mind or encounter in reality, because their vision and understanding is one-sided, or because their technique of representation is inadequate to what is seen and understood.

These are two quite different cases, and both are found in all of the representational arts. At the start of a great artistic movement, when it is beginning to spread but has not yet matured, both may almost become the general rule. In such times, it is precisely the bold avant-garde that falls into such one-sidedness. Think, for example, of the unnaturally thin architecture of the Quattrocento artist who painted cityscapes, or of the period’s artificially selected and exaggerated landscape-motifs, in both cases present only in the background but still thematic. If we look back upon the fully matured art of later masters, we see what is positive about their achievement, but also the limits of their vision. (275)

The situation is similar with literary figures and their conflicts on the threshold of new writing: the domination of certain types in drama and in comedy (comedies of character), behind which the fullness of living vanishes. Even the early Schiller drew stock characters poorly (e.g., Karl and Franz Moor, Fiesco, Wurm …), and of course the works of second and third-class writers are filled with such, especially the dilettantish poetasters, who bring no genuine poetic standards to their work.

The second reason for bad writing and the exaggeration of what is given empirically out of a need for intensifying an ideal, is no less familiar. The tendency to begin with nature and life develops from the justifiable need to understand and to present the forms beheld with as much purity as is at all possible – precisely as ideal.

The Archaic Greek sculpture gave form to god-like figures in which all their musculature was exaggerated and all of the softer parts of the body were neglected and almost bypassed. These figures seem to us neither natural nor beautiful, but they once manifested an ideal of the human body that aimed at strength, tension, and high achievement. … Gothic sculpture gave form, without fear of the unnatural and the ugly, to faces whose expression was intended to manifest piety and an ethos of devotion. In the rich tradition of the Madonna in many epochs we find a large collection of ideal female beauty, none of which merely reproduces the ideal womanly type then current, but seeks to elevate it towards an imaginary ideality, and just in that way loses naturalness or falls into what is somehow unconvincing. For ideals are not only subject to time, but are also abandoned to the subjectivity of the artist. Classical tragedy – already in the time of Euripides, and even more marked in Corneille80 and Racine⁸¹ – is full of idealized and exaggerated figures. The sad thing is that the oversized standards make, in the long run, the human type seem slightly puny, because they measure only single sides of man that are exaggerated at the cost of others. But in that way the characters are deprived of life.

The third reason lies in motives external to aesthetics. Usually, what lies behind the effect aimed at is of a moral or pedagogical kind, but it can also be political or religious. Because literature has the specific capacity to affect and motivate us morally, it is easy for such purposes to mix themselves into the intentions of the writer. However, this does not happen only in works intended to educate, which of course is not a purely aesthetical genus, but is also found among very earnest representatives of pure poetry. We may think of the novels about the education and development of a character, such as the later parts of [Goethe’s] Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre or perhaps better [Wilhelm Meisters] Wanderjahre! Think also of [Schiller’s] Marquis de Posa [in the play Don Carlos].

The idea of an aesthetical education is old, and it has quite frequently influenced the fine arts, and not only literature. In Christian sacred painting, there is a certain unmistakable trace of it. Here, however, it is not (276) easy to distinguish pedagogical aims from pedagogical effect, for the latter can be unintentional, and can appear without any falsifying tendencies. This distinction must, however, be carefully maintained. Otherwise we will not do justice to art.

b) The formation of aesthetical ideals

Genuine artistic arbitrariness occurs only in the second and third cases. For the first one rests upon a modus deficiens, and cannot be included within the concept of artistic ability. We can also ignore the third case, the pedagogical one, because it depends upon the introduction of motives external to aesthetics. What remains important, therefore, is primarily the case of the elevation of natural objects by aesthetic idealism, i.e., the desire to surpass what is given in the real world.

It is not easy to discuss this case. For there is also a justifiable tendency in art to place vivid images before the eyes of men. And these must essentially be exaggerations of human reality. Even from a standpoint external to aesthetics it is clear that a form of art – especially a literature – of such kind must exist; for living without ideals is not good for a people, and ideals can be put vividly before its eyes only by art.

Similarly it cannot be denied that this connection between art and life is both natural to and necessary for art, to the point at which an art that loses sense of it loses also the very ground beneath its feet. Here we encounter the highest cultural undertaking that art must fulfill, with which it justifies its existence in the life of a people.

The ancients sensed this, and their ideals were doubtless as fruitful for art as for life. A prime example of this is the ideal of the youth as it was articulated in sculpture. It made men desire to emulate it, but did not harm the high art of sculpture. One may say similar things about the heroic figures in Homer, of which many are considerably exaggerated; no less is the figure of Socrates in the poetic Platonic dialogues. Similar things may also be said about the knightly heroes of the German epos (Parzival, Siegfried, Tristan); yes, even about the more simple figures of the Nordic sagas. Are matters any different today? Consider the case of Dostoyevsky’s82 “idiot” or of Alexei Karamazov? Of Wagner’s Hans Sachs [Meistersinger], of Hamsun’s Isak [in Growth of the Soil (1917)]?

The greatest difficulty is and remains only this: how are we to distinguish such fruitful and artistically justified ideal figures from the arbitrary and questionable ones? With reference to what qualities may we recognize them? To this we must respond clearly: for a later generation, the distinction is easily made with reference to the figures’ success; for contemporaries no given measure is possible, and the distinction can at best only be artificially divined. (277) However, divination is uncertain. The first part of this sentence asserts nothing but the old saying, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” That proves only that in the end the decision as to genuine and spurious is not an aesthetical one, but in some way determined practically.

And we must say to that: in this context the ideal figures are entirely moral, at least as far as their content is concerned, or at the very least they are closely related to moral ideas (as the Greek ideal of youth). It is an aesthetical ideal only with reference to form; for only art can bring ideals into our sphere of vision, whatever kinds of ideal they may be: art alone presents an ideal in the form of a figure filled with life.

If we are dealing with ideals whose content is of a moral nature, the answer is easy to give: those ideals are fruitful that (1) touch an actually existing realm of values, and (2) correspond to a real historical tendency in the moral life of a people. The latter is essential, for otherwise the sense of value of contemporaries will not be able to direct itself towards the ideals that have been presented to them. The poet who touches such a tendency and, like a visionary, grasps the values that all are seeking, will become the bearer of ideas for his times. But that, too, is a criterion that we can only apply in retrospect.

However, the two conditions of fruitfulness that we have named still do not suffice. An ideal may be true to its values and its historical moment, but that concerns only its content, that is, its moral aspect. It still also possesses an aesthetical aspect, and that too is a genuine condition of its fruitfulness. This aesthetical aspect is its concreteness, figurativeness, and clarity – its stepping into the realm of visibility to the senses. For only as an ideal that has become concrete, that is, as a living figure, can it win over our hearts.

It is easier to judge upon this aesthetical condition of fruitfulness, even for contemporaries. For it is precisely as a contemporary that one can experience its effect on oneself, that is, whether one is convinced by the manifest ideal or not. Objectively, this condition depends entirely upon the ability of the artist: whether the ideal he has seen has been understood in a genuinely concrete way, whether he understood how to behold, as a visionary does, just how a figure of some longed-for type must move and present himself. That can be achieved only with the highest powers of intuition, because the art of beholding in such cases must be creative.

Art has not always been successful in bringing its ethical ideal to complete and concrete expression in a figure. Medieval sculpture succeeded only very conditionally. It lacked a natural feeling for this living human body, and, when in the early Renaissance the needed forms were found, especially in painting, the medieval ideal of the human being was no longer of concern. There is a false tendency in the history of art, and even more in aesthetics, to justify all of the ideals that appear in history – usually by appealing to their relativity to the sensibility of their times. Rather, this sensibility consists itself in the domination of certain ideals, and it is at least determined by them. Such relativity (278) does exist, no doubt, but its existence has reasons, and the reasons lie initially with the formation of ideals, or in some cases by the lack of them.

One notes that here the problem of freedom and arbitrariness in art returns. Apparently it functions everywhere that art aims to create objects that reach beyond what is empirically given, i.e., beyond mere imitation. If one thinks of the examples of randomness, which were given above, and compares them to the legitimate ideal objects in art, one cannot dismiss the thought that there must be an artistic necessity that opposes arbitrariness. This precisely is its difference from arbitrariness – in practical matters also – that freedom is not a shot in the dark that meets with no resistance; it has to deal with a very definite condition, i.e., it must take steps to raise itself up and over them.

This appears to contradict the above definition of aesthetical freedom, which expressed a freedom of possibility (without necessity and “from” it). For in the arts we are concerned not with the realization of what has been beheld, but only with letting-appear. Nonetheless, in artistic consciousness – and in aesthetics –there remains the unmovable idea of an inner necessity that governs within the work of art and touches its concrete figurative nature. With this necessity no ethical task at all is suggested, no Ought, not even a practical requirement, but a genuine aesthetical necessity that is present throughout the work like a kind of lawfulness, and that organizes it as a unity.

c) Artistic necessity and unity

We would perhaps have by now abandoned everything to arbitrariness if artistic form did not have laws of its own. By this we do not mean a law that one could or must dictate, but on the contrary one that form dictates to the creative and to the beholding consciousness. Moreover, it is not a universal law; it is nothing more than the law of the individual work of art. Yet it is a law that holds the parts of the whole together, and prohibits substituting one for the other; an inner necessity that ties the members together in such wise that the one draws the other along with it.

Is there really such a thing in artistic form? No doubt there is: every formed object has its inner logic. To put it crudely: try to exchange the members of two sculptured figures (taking care to fill in all ruptures)! Only nonsense could come out of it. That is precisely the mystery of the torso: it seems to us to be a whole, because through its whole and partial forms the position of the arms and legs become implicit. That is clear, inner necessity, and in fact a purely aesthetical one. A special kind of charm is simply given off by the torso – for the observer – to intuit as he looks upon the whole work. This charm does not depend upon actually supplementing the form; it is restricted to (279) a synthetic play of fantasy, but it must be taken very seriously, for it offers strict rules to guide the given object. That would not be possible if there were not a tight inner correlation among the parts that extends as a form of necessity to the missing members.

We find the same aesthetical necessity in numerous other phenomena. So, for example, in the poetic structure of a human character. There are examples of characters that seem to lack unity, who seem not just to express a real disunity of mind, as existing persons may do, but are illogically composed and represented. This disunity we experience as a poetic fault – and then our aesthetical feeling rejects the work. Similarly, we may see a lack of unity in an entire poetic work, a drama, etc., when it “breaks apart” within itself, as it were, or “loses a clear development.” This phenomenon appears frequently where the author loses himself in a multiplicity of details – especially in the middle strata where the composition of the material must take place.

This is also true of the non-representational arts, of music and architecture. In both there may be compositions without organic structure, of whose lack of logic one becomes sensible even without analyzing the works. This inner logic is felt most strongly in great musical works. Their greatness consists, after all, precisely in the inner necessity by which unfolds the whole of a theme, a phrase, a movement, an opus in several movements. The unity and wholeness of a composition rests upon this necessity, and on this again depends the appearance of psychic movement in the inner strata.

Naturally every art possesses its peculiar kind of necessity, one that cannot be transferred to another. Moreover, the situation is different in the representational arts from that in the non-representational ones; in the latter cases, a unity of form governs in every stratum. But that changes nothing regarding the law of inner necessity that exists throughout.

The necessity is “inner” provided that it depends on no external conditions, but rather – like “immanent truth” – refers to the harmony of the entire construct in itself, in such wise, specifically, that when some members of the whole are given, the others are co-determined, and cannot be eliminated at random. More correctly: it is not that everything about the other members is thereby determined, but that something in them is determined essentially. Necessity of this kind thus touches parts or members of the whole, with reference specifically to each other and to the whole. Whether one calls this lawfulness or not – since it is different in each work – may be just a matter of taste.

But in contrast, making this clear is important for the question concerning artistic “freedom.” This freedom initially stands opposed as an antinomy to the necessity within the work of art. Freedom concerns precisely the play with form, the bestowing of form beyond the empirical, the process of selection and omission, etc. This antinomy is insoluble as long as we (280) understand aesthetical freedom as arbitrariness, that is, as permission to manipulate form in any way at all. But it is an error to understand freedom in this way.

Freedom here, as everywhere it appears, is not a negative, but a positive. It means neither lawlessness nor a lack of determination, but rather the beginning of its own autonomous determination and lawfulness. To express the idea with greater definition: in the domain of the creative bestowal of form there exist unique principles of unity and wholeness that do not occur elsewhere; these exercise a strict necessity in the work of art, but they are not for their part dependent upon other principles, whether those of being or of the ought-to-be. They themselves thus constitute the freedom of the creative spirit. And because it is not a question here of making real, but rather of its contrary, subtracting reality and creating mere appearance, these principles come in no conflict with any other principles. For that reason moral freedom is a great metaphysical puzzle, but aesthetical freedom is in no way one: nothing opposes it. And therefore with regard to content it is identical with aesthetical necessity. For the creative person aesthetical freedom may well be “the freedom to set forth wherever he will”;83 but he can wish only for what has unity and necessity.

d) The unity of the work and the freedom of creation

If one accepts this inner necessity as part of artistic freedom, it will be easy to distinguish freedom and arbitrariness: arbitrariness lacks inner necessity, there is no law and no principle of unity in it, on the basis of which images can be shaped. If we could always recognize at first sight whether law and a principle of unity were present, arbitrariness could have little latitude in the arts, and creations by people with inferior skills would immediately reveal themselves as such to everyone. But that is not the case in the world of art.

Experience teaches us, from the little light we can shine into the creative act, that in most cases the creator finds himself searching tentatively and with great labor after the convincing unity that hovers before his mind; he searches in many different ways, he sketches, he draws, tosses them out, and tries ever again. And it is frequently the case that only the agreement of the viewer convinces him. His test bases itself on the example of someone being convinced by the work. But even this is no certain test: for even though the creator of the work may be unable to find the criterion of his success by himself, how much more must such an incapacity be true of a viewer whose judgment might well be backward, or inadequate in some other way! If he lacks all access to a special kind of beholding, he will misunderstand the work. Even entire groups of the artist’s contemporaries may fail when faced with a new form of art. For the genius and his work stand isolated in their times, and it is the crucial test of his ability – better, of his belief in his ability – to hold fast to what he has beheld and feels to be inwardly necessary. If he does not pass (281) the test, he will lose confidence in his undertaking. The fate of a man unrecognized in his own times is tragic.

The same is true in reverse order. An art-going public can be gripped by the external effects of some novelty and be swept along by a work possessing no inner necessity at all. In such cases we have the pseudo-artist who causes a sensation, but whose fame is ephemeral. This is much like the historical phenomenon of “fashion,” which is, in the end, artistic arbitrariness. It is not always easy even for a connoisseur to see through such a thing correctly and reject it at its very inception. This is a familiar phenomenon in times of limited originality.

Aesthetics does not have the task of finding applicable practical criteria. In this area, it must rather confine itself to the determination that such criteria are unavailable and cannot be found even in theory. That the systematic study of art may result in dogmatic judgments should not be allowed to lead aesthetics astray. That rests upon nearby border-crossings, toward which the desire for novelty or the subjective engagement with movements propels the individual artist. The individual is historically subject to suggestions conditioned by his epoch.

Even without the ambition to make decisions, aesthetics has an important task in this context, viz., to determine by analysis what in fact should be understood by the unity of a work of art, so far as it rests upon inner necessity and yet gives latitude to creative freedom. This question is an old one. Once, at the very origins of aesthetics, it was a living question in the dramatic arts and produced the doctrine of the “three unities,” that of place, of time, and of action. That is viewed quite narrowly and to an extent also externally, but it is nevertheless a beginning of and an attempt at an answer.

Of these, only the unity of action is really central. It is quite essential, and in fact precisely with respect to the inner structure. However, it is not sufficient. For it affects only one stratum in the structure of the literary work. What we need, however, is a unity that encompasses all the strata. If we confine our study entirely to the middle strata, we must find, on this side of the unity of action, a unity of movement and gesture that perhaps also must include the mode of speech; it has to be something like the unity of lifestyle of the characters presented.

Similarly, on the far side of the unity of action there must be a unity of the characters: the preservation of the identical psychic form. And, even further beyond this: the unity of human destiny – which of course does not coincide with that of the situations and action. Only when one holds these unities, which belong to separate strata, together in a hierarchical series, does one approach the unity of the entire work. This too is itself hierarchical; it is a complex, many-dimensional unity.

But it is still a question whether even this much suffices. For obviously the unities of the individual strata of appearance are not (282) simply arranged alongside of each other, they are also dependent upon each other. This is apparent, because the rearmost stratum must always appear in the forms bestowed upon the ones before it. This uniform preservation of the style of the performance of the characters is the condition of the appearing of the unity of situation and action. Then too, a departure from the style deprives them of their integrity. This is the same for the final condition of the appearing of unified characters; and this again for the emergence of the unity of destiny, etc.

This relation of dependency in the hierarchical gradations clearly plays the role of a general law, and is also constitutive in all other arts for the occurrence of inner necessity and unity. In painting, the entire relationship of unity might be shifted more towards the outer strata. In architecture it is palpable in the interrelation of the composition of aim, space, and dynamics, and these three clearly make up a unity of mutuality by conditioning each other.

Perhaps the unity is most profoundly felt in music. Here it builds itself up in steps from relatively small elements into the great unity of a movement or of a work in several movements. Here we find also the inner necessity of the whole marked in the most plastic manner, because such logic is the condition of a unified effect. That is especially instructive, for music is the freest of all arts. It is free in two ways: from the “material” and from the aim. But it is just this most free of all arts that has the most finished type of inner necessity and unity. It cannot be more clearly demonstrated that the unity of the work and the freedom of creation are compatible with each other.

In addition, one can produce a comparative categorial analysis of unity. And since in art we have the complete unity of a created object that evidently has the character of a structure, it must in all essentials amount to a variation of the general category of structure. This variation is presented in the Aufbau der realen Welt,84 Chaps. 33b–d. But by no means were all possible structural types enumerated there, e.g., in particular, not the structure of the work of art. Its analysis is made difficult by the fact that it does not have a uniform nature. But if one ignores that, one may at least venture that this structure possesses an especially strict composition, that is, it is held together by an especially rigorous inner necessity.

Recall that even in the foreground, a selection takes place that leaves detail to the very minimum – often with great economy – in contrast to real objects of a corresponding type, but what the relation of appearance communicates in this way can have a richness that is easily superior to the reality. From this it becomes clear that, in the act of beholding, a totality is constituted that is determined by the uniformity characterizing the structure. It is the same in literature with regard to the lifelike character of the figures, so in painting with regard to the psychic reality of the expressions of face and figure, so also (283) in a musical piece with regard to the superabundance of motion, suspension, and rapture.

One should recall that no general laws, rules, or principles are found here, as are found in structures of other kinds, e.g., with dynamic or organic structures, or with the fabric of families or of communities. For every work of art is strictly individual and what is typical about it is merely secondary.

The fact that the artist is not tied down to rules or models, but can create only in freedom, is tied to the individual structural character of art. This thesis, too, must be correctly understood. It does not mean that the creative artist stands in no tradition, or that he cannot learn from models. It means only that the tradition of his art does not consist of rules that he must carefully learn and use to direct his own procedures – that is what the dilettante always tries to do; and the model does not become a fetter when he manages somehow to go beyond it.

To create in freedom – that does not mean a random process of hit or miss, or the frantic search for novelty; it means rather the grasping intuitively of the inner unity and necessity of an entire construct – not that in one stratum, but a preparatory mental penetration of all of them – and then finding the external, sensible elements for bestowing form on one’s material, that is, the words, the sounds, the colors, or the stones – finding them, so that from this point forward the series of forms bestowed on the background strata becomes transparent. We call “free” a creation of this kind, in the sense that it discovers and assesses a new possibility for letting something appear that was hidden in the background.

Chapter 22: The Claim of Literature to Truth

a) The false claim to truth

We must distinguish sharply the question of inner necessity and unity from the claim to truth that appears in the representational arts. This claim is not simply one of logical consistency, unity, and wholeness, and also not one intended as an analogy to the “immanent truth” of theoretical science, but rather much more as an analogy to transcendental truth. With this, we approach again the circle of problems that forms about “imitation and the act of creating” (Chap. 20a), but approached now from the perspective of the obligations of art to extant nature and actual human life.

The flourishing of “aestheticism” at the beginning of our twentieth century took this obligation very lightly: in the end, could not any inaccurate rendering of the real be valid as creative originality? Of course no one would dare to challenge entirely the autonomy of the artist’s – even of the representational artist’s –imagination. Imitation is opposed to transformation, and the artist has a right to the latter, otherwise he could not make appear (284) to others what actual life reveals only to him, the clear-sighted artist, in his interweaving of events, but is concealed from the masses.

Given this, how is art’s claim to truth to be maintained, and, even more, an obligation to truth? One thinks again immediately of the binding of art through the givenness of things and through experience, and something is correct about this, only it must not be understood in the sense of theoretical truth, that is, the bare correspondence to real being.

But how should the thesis be understood positively? The problem is not to be solved with the principle of form-bestowal, although naturally we are concerned precisely with form in this context, the bestowal of form both upon matter and upon material, for the two are tied together, as has already been shown, such that the bestowal of form upon material always takes place “in” some form of matter. It will be useful to limit the questions initially – to one single representational art. Literature offers itself for this purpose, because without a doubt the claim to truth is made by it in the most principled way. “Poets lie too much,” said Nietzsche.85 He was referring to the effects that disorient, are too embellished, and impair our sense of life. We may set aside the question. That poetry courts this danger, however, must be admitted.

We begin here immediately with the main issue. It is not a question of any sort of limitation of our “joy in pretending.” Imagination is and remains the ultimate source of poetic creation. And whoever wishes to understand its claim to truth in opposition to imagination would misunderstand that claim from the outset. That can be proven a thousand times over.

For an example, take the ancient popular literary form called the fairy-tale. Founded in many kinds of beliefs and superstitions, the fairy-tale is full of wonderful, supernatural things. It is no matter if people once really believed in these things or not, for even today people gladly engage lovingly with fairies and giants, princes under a spell and animals that talk. It does not occur to them to connect these things to an inappropriate claim to truth. It is sufficient that people could believe in them at all and enjoy them. It is the same with legends and myths, with the popular epic poem, and even, to a great extent, with the high epic poems.

But even if we disregard such “tales of wonder,” the material of a poem does not pretend, even within the limits of the natural world, to a truth in the sense of the real existence of its characters and the real happening of the events it describes. Neither Schiller’s nor Shaw’s86 Joan of Arc corresponds to the historical figure. Yet both are extraordinarily effective dramatically. Only children read a story with the idea of its reality; an adult understands the unreality of what is narrated, or, perhaps better: he understands the indifference of poetry to reality and unreality. This is true for the novel and for the drama – even when real persons and (285) events, for example, historical ones, make up the material. The latter may have its limits where well-known persons are represented. But this limit is easy to get around in the selection of the material.

In all these matters, the poet has the greatest freedom. We may also express this in the following way: nowhere in the broad arena of the composition of material does the poet meet with serious limits to its free shaping, nowhere do we expect that people will hold him pedantically to correspondence with reality, and of course they do not hold him to it. It is sufficient if, when he is dealing with historical material, he has respect for the still living sympathies of his public. And it is easy to see that in lyric poetry this freedom is extended even further. Whether the poet, in speaking of the sorrows of love, refers to his own, or whether he speaks out of simple feeling for another’s sensibilities, his verses, their beauty and their ability to touch our emotions deeply are not affected at all. Thus it is with all poetic expression of the emotions.

It is another question whether the poet can express convincingly what he has himself not experienced. This question has been variously answered. Perhaps it cannot be answered with any generality, because the gift of placing oneself into a situation and shaping it from an alien sensibility is divided among men in extraordinarily different ways. One may say at least that a poet who has had a rich experience has access to much more of what is human, and he offers the far greater likelihood of giving convincing shape to that experience than does one with a more limited personal experience.

Here we can make several more demands of the poet that are well justified. So for example, that he possess knowledge of life and knowledge of man – which are quite different from the richness of his own experience. The knowledge of humankind consists in the ability to see through what men hide; and to that belongs the gift of penetration, the critical eye. The satiric poet and the writer of comedies have great need for these gifts. But we do not ever say that their characters, just because they are taken from life, must really have been “so.” There exists also a kind of mockery and scorn that is very unfair and untrue. Think of the treatment of Socrates in the [The Clouds] of Aristophanes. Even the accent placed on specific values still has generally free latitude with respect to what is real.

Finally, we must not forget that we also expect just as surely a certain idealism from the poet: he should not give prominence only to weaknesses and other failings of human nature, but also recognize what is noble in them and separate that out from the dregs. But both of these matters concern the ethos of literature more than its claim to truth.

b) The requirement to be true to life

For the present, we have learned from this analysis only what the requirement of truth in literature is not. But we have not yet learned what it is in an affirmative sense. This must now be discussed. Here precisely we must try to be clear. (286) For we can look for the meaning of this requirement in the direction of an unrestrained realism or we can understand it in a quite different way.

To say it all in a word: what we seek in literature and demand of it is not factual truth but a truth that is faithful to life. What that word [Lebenswahrheit] means, however, it not easy to say, although we all understand it, up to a point. Even the witch in the fairy-story seems true to life when she is crafty and malicious, but her craftiness is set a certain limit; even Cinderella’s helpful doves seem true to life, because they are reciprocating the love they received from her. The anecdote that people tell about some famous man may seem true to life, not as though “it really was that way,” but rather because it characterizes him as he was, or as his acquaintances knew him. The ancients had a large literature of anecdotes – and these went quite logically into their historical writing, yet, on the other hand, they always remained related to poetry. An anecdote fails to be true to life when it lacks the image of the person, or in itself misrepresents or confuses that image.

Why do characters in novels, such as in those by Felix Dahn87, Georg Eber⁸⁸, or Gustaf Freytag⁸⁹, not seem true to life – although they have been drawn correctly and clearly? Because they have been constructed within a set of features that have drunk from the well of opinion of the nineteenth century. These writers are scholars and have, in the end, no vivid ideas taken from the life they are trying to describe. For that reason, the characters, the situations, and the activities, even the destinies of men, do not turn out to be true to life. It is quite otherwise when the writer takes the historical material only as an occasion, and does not pretend beyond that to be drawing a picture of times foreign to his own. Thus, for example, Shakespeare’s Caesar, Antony, Coriolanus, Henry IV, or even Macbeth. He draws from all life, from his vision of the life going on around him, and the characters and destinies seem true to life.

One may glean from this an approximation of how it stands with the difference between true-to-life and factual truth: the former, too, consists of a very definite correlation with real life, but not in singular and unique (individual) facts, but with what is fundamental and essentially human; yes, even beyond that, with what is humanly typical in diverse things – not with what all men have in common, but only with men of a certain stamp. And this means at the same time that because a type of human being is in itself a uniform whole, the requirement of truth demanded of literature becomes attached to the requirements, discussed above, of unity and inner necessity; indeed the first flows directly into the second. Such characters seem untrue that are not bound by an inner necessity to unity.

We may pursue this postulate of truth one step further into what is individual. For literature in its concreteness does not deal with types, but with highly individualized single characters. (287) Hamlet and Lear, Wallenstein, Tasso and Mephistopheles can neither be assimilated to a formula, nor even to an ideal type after which they are constructed; certainly such characters as Glahn [in Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novel Pan] and [Dostoyevsky’s] Myshkin [in The Idiot] do not, and also not Gabler and Rosmer [in Ibsen’s plays Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm]. But the same conditions are valid for the unity of the individual character in its uniqueness. As to the type: it too possesses an inner law – however, the law of the latter is far more difficult to give than the former; it is too complicated. Nevertheless, we can sense whether the unity is maintained throughout the representation or not. Accordingly, the character seems to us true or untrue to life, it will seem complete in itself or disintegrated, something pasted together. That is something for which there is no criterion, but it is of great importance for every literary work.

Additionally, what is merely general about humankind and typical of men cannot achieve a fully perspicuous effect. At bottom, both are lifeless in their effects – for the simple reason that in life itself there are no pure types. Thus any mere stock figures seem untrue to life in the end. Comedies of the older sort, which relied on such types, even if they were much beloved in their own times, had finally to learn that fact: they outlived themselves as soon as their initial effects had been wrung dry, and they seemed to the next generation to be ossified and artificial, that is, untrue to life.

In the classicistic tragedy a similar process was played out, and only the element of high pathos could for a while conceal its slow downfall. The king, the court-intriguers, the hero, the fool, the pure maiden, the crafty servant et al., or other fixed types, dominated the entire literary form as though it were possible to create something only within its forms. In its greatest representatives, the early modern drama raised itself beyond those forms, but not without the example of Shakespeare, who still had these types in hand but knows how to fill them with a living individuality. What is significant in his achievement has not been well understood by many critics and literary historians. If they saw no stock characters that they could easily classify, they practically blamed the poet for their absence. But they were wrong to do so. Only what in a human character grows beyond the type is filled with life and true to it.

But the requirement of being true-to-life extends far beyond this. It refers in fact not only to persons, types, and characters, but just as surely to the situations, conflicts, and resolutions, the interweaving of kinds of behavior, the outcomes and surprises, the role of chance, good and bad luck. All that must be true to life. And not only that: it applies even to the entire milieu in which the action takes place, to the coloring, the background mood, and the style of life of the characters that make up the foreground, that is, to the style of life held in common in those days.

How seriously we must take this requirement can be demonstrated by the negative example of the “deus ex machina.” This appears when the writer can find no natural way to untie the knots that have been wound by some high authority and to lead everyone to a happy ending. Even the men of old laughed (288) at such devices and at their overthrowing of the living truth – its implausibility was apparent even to the simple-minded. But up to and including literature today we find the deus ex machina, perhaps in the form of a chance event that saves everything; and one cannot deny that it serves to relieve the seriousness of the situation, that it has a comedic effect: yet, foolishly, what is comedic does not lie among the lesser characters, but precisely among the powerful, who are supposed to rule over the comedy and to determine the fates of others. Here the requirement that poets be true to life is lacking on the level of fate and chance.

Only a bit more ridiculous is the vulgar “happy ending” that we know in a thousand variations from the cinema: the outcome attached inorganically to the series of events, an outcome that is not given by the development of these situations. It is rather simply patched on for the sake of feeling good.

c) The question of strata in the claim to truth

We see just from these extreme examples how much broader the problem of the true-to-life becomes, and how it eventually extends to everything contained in the bestowal of form upon material in a literary work. For if the characters are not alone in being affected by this requirement, then there are no limits to where the requirement must stop. It affects the whole of the composition of the material – in the saga and in the drama, in the novel and mutatis mutandis in the lyric poem (although there only intimations of it are found).

These matters will not be pursued in detail for the various species of literature, if only because they repeat themselves in them and, as a common feature, vary only in grade. In contrast, a new and more fundamental question now appears, which in a similar way relates to all species of literature. Upon what stratum of the literary work does the requirement of being true to life come into question?

After our initial reflections, it appeared as though the requirement of truth concerned only one middle stratum, that of the bestowal of form upon psychic material and upon the characters. This limitation has already shown itself to be untenable: characters are not indifferent to or isolated from the conditions of life in which they give themselves form; they therefore must be understood on the background of those conditions. And, conversely, the conditions of life are given form also by the characters.

This changes the situation fundamentally. One may now answer that out of the strata of a literary work at least the four middle ones stand under the requirement of being true to life. In just these strata – movement and gesture, situation and action, psychic development, destiny – lies the entire form-bestowed material; and our problem concerns the quality of true-to-life in the shaping of the material. If one looks a bit more closely, one finds that this response also does not yet suffice. Rather the foreground, with its ordered words, is also drawn under the requirement, for not every style of language seems “true” for the treatment of some specific material. Similarly, both (289) of the inner middle strata are drawn under it too. For there are ideal qualities that express themselves in the order of events, and may then be either true to life or not.

The final background strata can be left out of the picture, because they bear the ideal elements (the individual ideals and the universal ideal). But for the remaining strata it is essential to be convinced that they all stand under the aesthetical requirement of being true to life, and that they are in fact only aesthetically effective when they fulfill that requirement with a certain adequacy.

For example, in the stratum of movement, speech, and gesture, every step, every pose, every remark that falls outside the intended and portrayed style of life destroys or at least does injury to the picture of the character as integrated within a time and an environment. And the injury can be of such moment that the later strata, that of the plot, for example, are no longer able to appear correctly. Appearance is highly conditioned by the form bestowed upon what appears. In this stratum we may point to the characters in the novels by Eber, Dahn, and Freytag as seeming especially untrue to life. A notable example is the first appearance of Britannus in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Britannus speaks and acts as if he were quite the Englishman of our times, even down to his opinions. It seems as if all the characters of the drama had been drawn into the present and deprived of their seriousness, because what sounds modern works destructively upon the intended style of life. Within that style, it is untrue.

This fact is demonstrated even more clearly by the stratum of situation and action. Perhaps we reflect insufficiently upon how superficially identical situations are in fact not identical for a man of a different nature, who is the child of a different milieu; correspondingly, even the action in which a man reacts to a situation cannot be the same action, even if the character was the same.

One might perhaps say that great writers have always placed special value upon the plasticity with which form is bestowed in this stratum – knowing well that, for the most part, it is upon the clear understanding of situations that all else depends. There are novels in which most of the narrative must be dedicated to the unfolding of situations in life, such that, in comparison, the events that actually take place in them vanish. Long passages in Balzac90 are to be understood in this way, as also many in Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann⁹¹, Galsworthy⁹² and Hamsun. …

Plays must be more sparing in this respect, for they are strictly limited. They cannot draw out their descriptions at length; instead, they can work with the occasions offered by the course of events, as life itself does. What we mean by the development of a dramatic scene is a compact series of situations in which each is immediately comprehensible on the basis of those prior to it. On the other hand, the behaviors represented (more accurately, their proper motives) are only comprehensible on the basis of the situation. However, guilt, merit, responsibility, etc. depend upon these behaviors, just as the weighty decisions of a character do. (290)

This connection is evident in itself. And there is hardly a writer that does not understand it and has not operated according to its laws. For that reason, it is very difficult to give a negative example of it. Errors in the portrayal of a situation exist when it is not possible to understand, on the basis of the account, why one person behaves in such a way and not otherwise, where we can assume that his character has been stable throughout.

As for the stratum in which destiny takes shape, the requirement to be true to life has special importance: the writer who gives shape to some human destiny approaches astonishingly close to the role that divinity plays in the minds of believers. And when the poet comes close to the role and pretends to be a kind of amateurish god, what he produces is simply a perversion.

For such matters we have the examples, introduced above, of an almost ghostly sort: the deus ex machina and the happy end. They are gross examples, of course. What is characteristic is precisely that a fate, which is generally seen and presented quite realistically, is at some point turned toward something improbable or unnatural, for example, the conclusion of Zola’s⁹³ Rome, where the intended effect was that the two lovers (the nephew and niece of the cardinal) die together, and the girl then really does die later than the beloved (of a “natural” death!).

This is bungling in the matter of destiny: we see clearly how the writer, relying on some favored idea, twists fated events unnaturally into unnatural shape. The literature of all epochs is full of such falsification; usually we do not notice them, because we are used to being indulgent to writers. Often the trouble is in the way the figures themselves act to determine their fate. We think to find the crucial point in the character of a figure; but if his character has been described as harmonious and wise, and nevertheless there suddenly appears stubbornness in him that fixes his destiny, then his destiny has been poorly drawn. Wiechert⁹⁴ (The Simple Life) [Das einfache Leben, 1939] allows his Orla to fail at the last moment to rush to meet the new life that is opening up before her –despite her wisdom and clear understanding – for the sake of a tragic and inauthentic idea of renunciation. This is the reversal of the happy end.

In the face of this, one may ask: what leads the writer so easily astray that he falsifies on the level of destiny? There is a clear answer that touches upon the following points. 1. Man is, in life, powerless in the face of destiny, for it consists of elements in his life that are dependent in no way upon him, his knowledge, or his desires. In literature, a writer has an opportunity to give shape to destiny; he grasps hold of it, and wants to show what he would do in place of Providence. This motive we can call the presumptuous consciousness. 2. A second motive is found in the aversion to chance and to the absurdity of events. Man tends to understand all human destinies as the real “transmission” of some providential power. We can call this the metaphysical-teleological motive. 3. A third motive consists in the tendency to see the transmission as aimed at some individual (291) into which the writer’s own tendencies insinuate themselves. These tendencies are usually of a moral kind, or at least felt as moral: the wicked man should quickly meet his fate, the hero his reward. In tragedies, the situation is reversed. We can call this motive simply that of the moral “tendency” as such.

The second motive is the most innocent one. It is not without justice that destiny be presented as something that is “transmitted” to us, not because it is so in life, but because people think of it that way, and the characters in literature think it so also. In this sense, theology in the literary shaping of destiny is “true to life.” What is least in keeping with art is the third motive: the moral accent in the shaping of destiny. This is quite natural and often joyfully welcomed by the natural feelings of the reader: his sense of justice, so often frustrated, “finally” is satisfied. The first motive is the most important, just because the writer, even the great writer, seldom becomes conscious of it.

d) The true-to-life in the first and last strata

We can see clearly the outcome: that this literary requirement to be true to life is firmly tied to the middle strata of the literary work. The requirement is, to be sure, divided more or less evenly among them. But being true-to-life is especially threatened on the level where fate is shaped, and the threat comes from poetic license and rests upon a basis external to aesthetics, one that is, in the end, metaphysical in nature.

But the picture we have sketched over several pages must still be supplemented. It lacks an account of the remaining strata, provided that the requirement of being true-to-life extends to them. In the first place, we have the foreground stratum of the written word. It has already been noted that this stratum can hardly be indifferent to poetic “truth.” But how is its participation in such an ideal requirement to be understood?

The term “word” suggests more than its dictionary definition. It suggests, for example, the mood of the speaker, or perhaps even something of his attitude towards what he has said (perhaps a note of skepticism). One can speak of serious matters with seriousness, and one can also speak of them in jest; and, in certain circumstances, the contrast between them can have a especially resounding effect. That is true also to a great extent of the written word. For in writing, the possibility exists of adding nuances to dialogue and styles of writing that create the effect of the true-to-life – or of being false to it. This is by no means only a question of good taste in giving form to spoken expressions; it is just as much a question of giving the effect of truth.

He who affects the style of a fairy-tale in the middle of a contemporary novel will fail to convince. He who affects the tone of contemplation in some highly dramatic scene will not win over an audience. The word that fails to convince is the essence of the untrue-to-life. The layman says, “Such things (292) don’t happen.” And he is right. Just think of lyric poetry alone: one single inappropriate word can tear to shreds a piece of fine tissue that was woven transparently in the melodies of words. The art of the poet consists essentially in the perfect word flying to greet him at the perfect place for it – words fixed, naturally, in the depths of the background, which he thereby first made speak.

Another no less serious matter is the demand found in the last inner strata. We identified it above as those of the individual idea (of a single person) and that of the universal idea (viz., of the universally human). The first idea we see in the sudden appearance of the idea of personhood behind the acting and erring person; the second in the tendency of a play, or in the inner, unspoken moral tone of a novel.

Let us dwell for a moment upon the latter. A literary work of merit without something universally human – its idea – in the background strata is hardly thinkable. But a literary work that is tendentious is endangered. It can be derailed on two sides:

1. The moral tone, the idea, the philosophical presuppositions can themselves be erroneous, that is, be in conflict with our experience of life, and
2. They can be represented incorrectly – too obviously, too insistently, or even too darkly, too veiled, misleadingly, unclearly – and can then be repellent or even simply disappear.

In both cases the universal idea will lack the power to convince us effectively: thus neither be true to life, nor felt as true. And both still have little to do with objective “truth.”

The writer must allow his ideas – especially his moral beliefs – to speak only through the events, and to let them speak in the way life itself lets them speak, that is, as suggested by the destinies of the figures, but as always still needful of an interpretation. The poet must not give this interpretation: not only because to do so will seem prosaic, but also especially because then the interpretation does not seem true to life. For it then affects us as the interpretation of someone in particular. Such interpretations are subject to error. A moral or a philosophical vision that is expressed in words immediately loses its power, because it has not been exposed as a living truth by the narrative itself. No doubt a person who reads the work also wants to learn something, but he does not want to be instructed like a schoolboy; he wants to see for himself.

With the occasional appearance in literature of the individual idea the matter is easier. And this is because the writer’s task with it is more difficult from the very outset: more difficult in the beholding as in the presentation. For it appears to him only rarely, and always only as a vision, which may come upon him when he beholds an actual human being. Even more rarely does he find the means to achieve its realization. Here is the difference: philosophical and moral ideas can be conceived and grasped in the abstract. (293) The individual idea, however, cannot be made up or constructed.

There are, of course, characters in literature that are constructed according to a prefigured idea: think of those typical of classicism and of comedies of character. But it is not the individual ideal that has been prefigured, always a general idea, a type. We may ignore them here, for they do not concern our problem. Nonetheless, it is true that many creative writers think they have grasped the idea of an individual person, but have only a type in mind. That is, of course, simply illusion.

Where individual uniqueness in its idea is understood – as often occurs in the characters of great writers, for example, the idea of Socrates in Plato – it is beheld based on a deep individual experience of a real person. It is not beheld empirically, but lies, rather, like all things having the nature of ideas, beyond the empirical; yet always beheld with the contours of empirical things and, as it were, in the extended direction of the form that it possesses. That is the reason why, in this effort, the writer does not quickly fall into the danger of arbitrarily constructing his figures, but otherwise succumbs to it where he is working with what is ideal. But just for that reason there are so few cases in literature of such exaggeration of individual figures.

Chapter 23: The True-to-Life and Beauty

a) The disclosure of life in art

One is driven by such reflections to the borderline region where the truth of a work of literature coincides with its aesthetic value as such, and this becomes identical to its beauty. The matter cannot be easily dismissed, because we are dealing with “representational” art proper, and this must necessarily contain some element of imitation, however much it may be reconstructed. From this point, there is perhaps only a short step to their complete identification.

Other facts support this identification. Literature is intended to reveal a part of the world to the reader, or at least a part of human life. For it is the nature of man to live open to the world, but this openness is a task that each person must accomplish for himself. Even the experienced man tends to be open to the world only so far as his practical need for knowledge of life and human affairs require. Beyond that, the mind tends to be closed. At this point literature should step in, and reveal entire regions of life to which we had no access.

This is much in keeping with what was developed above: that the first function of the artist is “beholding,” upon which basis the function of pointing things out may follow. Teaching to see is the common task of all representational art. (294) Since literature has to do with the human being, should we draw the conclusion that it has the task of teaching us knowledge of man?

This cannot be the meaning of the requirement to be true to life that we place upon art. Not only because the tendency within it is understood too theoretically and is too much subordinated to practical ends. Why is this so? And what is the difference between the two requirements? What in fact should literature teach us, if not knowledge of man?

In order to answer these questions, we must clarify the nature of this knowledge of man, which, as such, does not belong to aesthetics. Knowledge of man is something that is quite prosaic and disenchanting. Its origin is not openness and penetration of mind, but rather distrust, which comes from painful experience. The man wise in human affairs tends to peer skeptically – perhaps even slightly pessimistically – upon the world. He surveys human life, but only with very specific things in mind: honesty, dependability, trustworthiness, all primarily in their negative forms. Knowledge of man is negatively oriented – and, to be sure, for practical reasons. For we always want to know what we can expect from others. What matters is orientation and practical vigilance, aimed at obtaining advance knowledge of how others will act at any given time and how they will react to our actions, in sum, how we must treat them with reference to our aims. To do that effectively, we must focus an unloving eye upon them.

Literature does not teach us such things. And when such knowledge comes out of it, that is merely incidental. Literature, as art in general, is oriented positively. It does not teach us to reject, but to appreciate, and to rest awhile lovingly while we gaze. Its way of looking is that of the searching, devoted, loving eye. It is the absorption in what others overlook. The eye of the poet is always aimed at hidden treasures.

What this eye discovers and teaches is, most properly, that treasures lie hidden everywhere beneath the debris of everydayness, and that it is worth our while to stop a moment to dwell among them for a while, to become absorbed in them. In this sense, literature is revelatory – it opens us to the world –; it reveals in its own way much more than the practical knowledge of human affairs, but it reveals something different for which, ordinarily, the man of the world never has use. The revelation of the values of things worthy of our love is, for the most part, irrelevant to practice, but it makes our vision of life rich, and enables us to partake of its fullness.

There is a further distinction to be made here. Knowledge of humanity is tied permanently to a certain universality of its insights. It does not aim strictly at the individuality of an individual, but only at the type. The individual for himself alone is not of interest to it apart from his relevance to some practical end. For such ends, it is best to ascertain general rules, and, even more, to have these rules at the ready. That is what (295) a man wise in human affairs does: he has the human type at the ready, and whatever falls under that type is thereby practical knowledge and done with.

The one genuinely wise about man is he who has at the ready a filing system of marked human types for sorting the persons who come his way, a system that has enough room to hold all the current cases. That is why his judgments are so superior, so quickly made, and so hard to deceive. Naturally, what lies beyond this system of types is given no attention. But that, precisely, is individuality. The good judge of man has no need for that, for he finds it an encumbrance, so he drops it, and considers it inessential. Such a judge of men is almost blind to human individuality. No doubt, his blindness is self-caused. We must recall that even the theory of personality extends only to types, and does not lead us to the real “person.”

In these matters also, the attitude of literature is the opposite: what is essential is precisely what is atypical, merely unique, the apparently “contingent” element that is met in the individual person. The individual man is, for literature, not the representative of a kind of human being, but is important for himself alone, that is, with his individual peculiarities, his specialness, and his difference from others. And this is certainly not because his peculiarities are especially grandiose, but rather simply because the concrete fullness of life in the personality lies within this uniqueness, its riches, its clarity.

Literature, with its double tendency – to seek out what is positive and what is individual in man – leads to an entirely different depth of beholding and of disclosing truths about life, and it can be the headmaster to the awakened eye in a quite different way than can the practical knowledge of human affairs, which is always a kind of misunderstanding. The eye of the knower of men is a prisoner to a schema of types of men, and is always superficial in its beholding; it fails completely before the more intimate inwardness of men. All partaking in another’s sorrows or joys or journeys is foreign to such a man. Fundamentally, he is cold. At precisely the place at which he leaves off or fails, the poetic eye begins its work – that is, by partaking in joys, etc. This eye is warm, searching, loving. Thus it is able also to penetrate the secrete depths of the human soul, which opens itself up only to a loving and searching eye. Upon this disclosure of man and of human life depends entirely both the richness of form of what is beheld, and the transparency of riches and depth of what appears before the beholding eye.

It becomes evident only from this perspective what the peculiar nature of the function of literature as revelatory is, and, at the same time, how the requirement of being true-to-life is related to artistic value (to beauty). Literature of course discloses both the nature of man and the profundity of life. But it does not do that the way knowledge does, and it is unlike knowledge in that it cannot be directed for practical purposes towards objects or aspects of them. The case is rather the reverse: literature, for its part, shows us what is important and deserving of reflection in life and in human life without consideration for other interests that might be brought into them. It shows also what (296) it beholds only to an eye that can behold along with it – in an image, in concreteness, without explanations, without speaking of the universal elements within, without whys and wherefores. It shows us things in their strangeness and mystery, and leaves them unmolested.

b) Realism and its limits

The person who wishes to learn from literature in the way a psychologist would has to draw his own conclusions. Literature will not do it for him. He will not draw much nourishment from it, because the information he receives does not lie in the direction of the questions he is asking. The writer does not “teach” in any other way than life teaches: through the events themselves. That there are no real events in literature does not make a difference in respect to the teaching. Only how events are drawn together, the selection from among them, the bestowal of form upon the material, makes the difference here, an immense one, but one that is quite different, and does not affect the general point.

Because of this, in literature – as also in painting and sculpture – we find an orientation towards realism. This means fundamentally nothing other than a requirement of being true to life that is distributed over many small individual characteristics: the narrated events and the narrated characters should, as far as possible, have the same effect upon us as real events and characters would have. Realism in literature, given this requirement, is a healthy tendency: in the novel, in the drama, even in the epic poem, it has been largely adhered to. But there are places where it reaches a limit.

Why is this so? Why must realism be limited, if realism is simply the correctly understood tendency to the true-to-life? Why does the dramatist use stylized language on stage – for example, verse? Why does the director soften the dynamics of rough encounters among the common people? Why does a self-controlled master storyteller dwell only upon sorrow and depravity? Why does the reader himself complain, when so much that is repugnant is placed before his eyes? Indeed, even when the milieu described in fact demands it? The time spent lingering among drunks in taverns and dives in some of Zola’s novels was felt in their day as too much of the real, as too much “truth.”

The meaning of art is not exhausted in instruction, in disclosing and making men wiser. Its original task is much simpler: to give pleasure. Otherwise, there would be no sense of speaking of “taking pleasure” or taking “delight” in art, and of “enjoying” it. The truth about human life can be quite unpleasant in given circumstances. It can even be oppressive and painful, can spoil one’s (297) love of life, not to speak of one’s love of a piece of literature that constantly leads the reader through unpleasantness and rubs his nose in everything shameful. It cannot be denied that there is a narrative strategy that does this with excessive devotion.

We can answer the above question summarily: the other requirement, which is opposed to that of the tendency towards being true-to-life, is the requirement of beauty. It should not be immediately objected that beauty need not lie in the “material” and that it ought not to lie there. For it is not a question at all of the material alone: the bestowal of form, the poetic presentation of the material is just what can overstep the limits of what is artistically tolerable. Realism in the arts is essentially a matter of form.

Here we come upon a very strange opposition. It now seems as though truth and beauty stood relative to each other as contrary value-claims directed at one and the same objects, such that the artist must, as it were, choose either the one of the other. This cannot be the final word in this matter. And yet something here cannot be simply dismissed: to find a correct middle way will always remain the task of the artist, as soon as he engages himself with material that is taken directly from the milieu of the common people and from human weakness.

However that may be, there are various matters to be considered in this context.

First, practical interests often are mixed in among the demands of literature, such as social conditions and political tendencies. Upheavals in moral values are always fermenting somewhere in our consciousness, and may commandeer literature for use as a weapon with which to carry on its struggles. To that end, literature must reveal stresses in the actual social conditions.

Second, different epochs are very different in their sense of this problem. An entire generation may be spent on one significant conflict. Our grandfathers put up with very little true-life material in a literary work; their senses were disturbed when something appeared in poetic material that was not in keeping with public morality and propriety, in conformity to which they lived their lives. That has all changed. We are more broad-minded. But we too close our minds to such unlimited realism – one perhaps become somewhat voluptuous – the borders have simply shifted.

Third, our tastes have developed from a kind of art that was, to a great extent, idealistic, and that stylized real life. Thus we have the high pathos of tragedy, the dominance of the heroic, the deep religious and chivalric mood of the older epics. Poverty and misery were quite muted in their effects. The capacity of the reader for realism has grown continuously since then. And it is hard to say how much further it may grow. But with it the capacity of literature itself for the hard facts of life has also grown. (298)

In this way we see that the limits of what one can expect of literature by way of realism are quite relative – to the artistic sensibilities of an epoch. For that reason we can establish no fixed norms.

People have argued over whether certain characters in Dostoyevsky are objectionable in a literary sense (Stavrogin [The Possessed], the elder Karamazov, or Golyadkin [The Double]). The imputation is well founded, but there are counter-values that balance the scale here. For there is greatness and beauty, moral elevation and the most tender blossoms of life that can be measured only from the lower depths out of which they grow. The writer cannot speak of them, cannot let them appear, without allowing the human swamp to appear also in the stratum before them. Under such conditions, it is a question of balancing-out of the two. Literature has the task of achieving a synthesis. A maximum of worldly truth, in the conditions its material requires, must be taken up in its appropriate forms, in order to allow the deeper element of meaning (values, etc.) to appear, but without destroying the artistic form.

To what extent this task can be achieved is demonstrated by the great realists among those authors who have uncompromisingly refused to engage in cheap idealization and prettifying: Dostoyevsky, Knut Hamsun. But this solution is the one achieved by art, and cannot be counterfeited on their model. But theory – in the sense of aesthetics – cannot in this way solve the problem.

c) On the dialectics of realistic representation

One should not forget that the literature of our time, wherever it may have achieved some degree of greatness, has just this realism to thank; but, on the other hand, literature is nonetheless mistrustful of it. The aims literature sets for itself becomes in this way higher: the greater the task, the higher the artistic aims. We may make this idea clear in the following way.

There is a tendency to tone down the impression of troublesome truths about life. For that, there are entirely external means to do so – careful selection, slight changes in color, and even giving shape to language. But all such means seem in the end to be falsifications, too; they prettify. As a rule, they disenchant even the naïve reader, for he notices that what is represented lacks seriousness, and if he does not notice it then he has been to some degree betrayed.

What can be demanded of an earnest and true-to-life literature is precisely the opposite: to find the form for all material, even the most unpleasant, through which the writer can present the affirmative value of that material. A compromise is not required – if we wish, we can call such measures a balancing of the books –what is required is rather a higher form that can take on the abhorrent and ugly and overcome it.

What does “overcoming” mean? It cannot mean simply letting something disappear, be destroyed, or denying it. One might think here instead (299) of a dialectical relation in the sense of Hegel: specifically, the “sublation” [Aufheben] of the thesis is negative only in the most superficial sense, in the antithesis it is rather a “preservation,” but in the synthesis, an “elevation over itself.” Beyond doubt, something like that takes place in literature. What first seems abhorrent is afterwards “taken up” in a whole to which it is indispensable as an element; and in the end it is elevated above itself, because it has shown itself to be an accessory to something far greater and far more meaningful. This is the dialectic of realism in literature. One can express this in a non-dialectical manner, as one can for every dialectic. But then one must begin from the other end, from that of the synthesis, thus, in this case, from the “elevation above itself.”

In what direction, then, can the writer elevate in this sense something that was beheld at first soberly and realistically? Surely only to a place that he beheld as an idea beforehand. He must, therefore, have the “idea” in advance. This need not be a Platonic or Hegelian “idea”; it can be any superempirical and large idea, any ethical or even religious ideal.

But here we need not reach out immediately to the highest things. Rather, such is the condition of human life that the form of a situation gives the impetus and the circumstances for action; the deeper the actual situation is rooted in our condition, the closer we will feel ourselves to the acting character. And, again, the greater the unpleasantness the agent has to struggle against in his situation, the higher are his chances of achieving through his actions a satisfactory solution to this problem. We see this in the fact that even when he loses and blunders, our sympathies are still with him.

These are facts that shine a unique light upon the question of the justification of the abhorrent and the ugly in literature. It is apparent that the radiance of the humanly beautiful, great, and meaningful burns brighter according to the measure of those dark depths; perhaps they can be seen only on such a background. Indeed the comparison says too little: one must have the entire depths of human misery clearly before one’s eyes in order to be able to see what is great and ideal in such small and quotidian human action, suffering, strife, and the like. But that brings us to a further result.

The ability to see what is great and ideal in what is small and quotidian is in fact the main function of art: the letting-appear. In this letting-appear we have the essential beauty of the work of art. If this is true, then we must also say: here beauty is conditioned precisely by the representation of what is ugly and abhorrent. Or, if one wishes to avoid the paradox, what remains is still rather peculiar: the demand both for something true-to-life and for beauty, which at first stand contrary to one another, seem to approach each other in such a manner that one might well almost think to equate them. (300)

But how? Has the difference between the relation of truth in literature and its literary quality been lost? One can perhaps respond: yes, the literary quality, its success as literature, is a question of form, but the true-to-life quality is a question of content! This observation is insufficient: literary form has a role in essentially determining the content; it is perhaps the most important element in it. Here we are dealing in fact with “inner form,” that is, the state of having been formed from within outward. This kind of form-bestowal is precisely what makes the “content,” (i.e., the material upon which form has been bestowed) true or false to life. It, the form, is what can be realistic in the content or simply an embellishment of it. It may therefore be that one and the same success with respect to artistic form can constitute the literary quality, the beauty of the object, and, at the same time, its true-to-life quality. We cannot rid ourselves so easily of the equivalence of truth and beauty.

One may ask the radical question: are there important literary works whose essential content, as chosen by their authors, passes reality entirely by, and is thus no more than sheer foolishness? Expressed a bit less starkly: is there such work whose essential content is insipid or superficial? We must answer: no! The lack of quality of the novels by Courths-Mahler95 does not stem from a lack of immanent adequacy between the strata, but from a lack of poetic truth. They lack real quality because their intended content, consistently worked over in the inner form, lays claim to having made clear some essential content regarding this world of men, and yet they are unable to justify that claim.

This proves the inseparability of literary quality and truth. But the inseparability need not mean that they are congruent. Poetry at times may well affect us powerfully and yet not be true to life; it would lack only that one last satisfaction. So it is too in life; I can “see” some event incorrectly, but still with the greatest detail – and just such detail can also confuse us – and the same is true the other way around.

If we are to solve this problem properly, we must travel a middle road, and seize upon what is affirmative on both sides, while omitting what is simply negative.

d) The true-to-life and essential truth

The results up to now seem to be these. Two kinds of poetic truth overlap each other. The one is inward agreement, unity, completeness, consistency in itself; the other is the true-to-life, which has one pole of its nature outside of poetry, in the real world transcendent of it – but nonetheless is true not at all among its details or in its facts, but rather in its essential characteristics. So far as poetic quality is conditioned by both requirements of truth, one may now say: truth, too, is a transcendental relation. Literature that is not true to life cannot convince us, that is, it is not literature at all. (301)

Nonetheless, what is true-to-life and what is literary quality can differ from each other in a considerable way. The requirement of truth, for example, can come off in a literary work much more poorly than the way inward form is expertly executed and its beauty in appearance, animation, detail, liveliness, and unity of form. We have examples of such in some of the characters in Hebbel96: in his Golo [in Genoveva, 1841], in Herod [in Herodes und Mariamne, 1848], in Candaules [in Gyges und sein Ring, 1854], and even in Wilde’s Dorian Gray. We find the reverse of this in the late Goethe (Faust II, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, etc.): there we have a surfeit of the wisdom of life and of the true-to-life, but at the expense of a clear sense of the fullness of life and even of formal literary unity. We know how strongly Goethe himself had a sense of this.

These examples show that both the quality of true-to-life and literary quality may well become even quite radically separated. But then literary works also suffer quite distinctly from the corresponding defects. If one lacks the quality of the true-to-life, it approaches prosaic, unpoetic thought; and only the strongest external means can cover over these defects, and even then only a bit. The close ties and the mutual conditions of the true-to-life and clear perfection of form (the poetic quality) must not be allowed to seduce us into thinking them identical, but also not into positing an all-too-great independence of the one and the other.

Something else may be seen from these reflections. Certainly Golo and Candaules, and similarly Dorian Gray, are hard to imagine with their aestheticizing unscrupulousness, founded upon no motive. But in the first two, do we not meet with something that may lie in the nature of a certain kind of love? And in Dorian Gray is there not something that could motivate this frivolous man of high talents, given a bit of direction by others?

This something, an essential form seen at its outer limits, may be distorted, but one can see clearly the direction in which it lies, even if it does not occur in reality. In Hebbel’s dramas, the wheels of dramatic form eventually spin idly – he does not succeed in giving form to what has been seen at its extremes, that is, in making the characters convincing. But are there not such extreme essential forms in man – of real men, though perhaps also of situations and destinies? But then there must be an essential truth as opposed to the true-to-life; and this might very well be contained in these characters of Hebbel.

If that is so, there must also surely be a requirement of truthfulness that is aimed precisely at this essential truth. And there may very well be an entire genus within literature that places this requirement – with the right to poetic license and bias – above all others. In this way, we can perhaps establish the success of dramas and short stories of this kind. We may think of the situation this way: a writer can represent a character whose forms are lifted up to a mythical dimension, and yet thereby enter an essential sphere, perhaps (302) even where it has the sense of a certain fanatical attachment to value, although what is true-to-life –human life as it is – is not attained by him in this way.

Such things must be possible for poets, because otherwise there could be in literature no higher escape from everydayness, no ideal types, no individuals elevated into an ideal realm. Ancient tragedy always had such larger-than-life characters; epic poetry had them perhaps first of all, and so too all literature whose material is drawn from myth. The requirement of truth does not in such cases correspond to nothing in real life, but rather to essential forms of real life that have been raised to the level of an idea. It follows clearly from this that essential truth is something different from the true-to-life, and therefore even in one and the same literary work the demand for one is not congruent with the demand for the other.

This can be expressed also in the following way. The writer can behold and shape faithfully certain essential possibilities of our peculiar human nature that are never realized in actual life. One may not draw from this the conclusion that every such transcending of the real is justified. Even the characters in Hebbel that have caused controversy show that to be true. But from where, then, shall we derive a criterion for what can be judged as essentially true and what is not, that is, is only constructed? Not every extreme can lay claim to being worthy of belief.

Perhaps one may respond in this way: criteria that one can place upon an object as one would a ruler do not exist in the entire realm of art and beauty. Therefore, we may not require any here. Yet the educated sensibility, possessing fine “taste” in art, is not for this reason entirely helpless before such a question. There are certain distinctive marks of it, but they cannot be articulated and taught like the rules of a game. Good taste can glimpse, for example, in the demand for a certain degree of essential truth the limits of realism in art and of the demand for the true-to-life in general. One will, perhaps, be happy to find in these requirements the counterpoise to realism’s requirement of truth, and for that reason, good taste – a thoroughgoing idealistic one – will approve this standpoint to a certain degree.

Yet essential truth must be so conceived that the extension beyond the true-to-life, and the “idea” that indicates its direction, is justified from within a whole, that is, its legitimacy is drawn from that to which it belongs, and it does not draw its effects out of something external to the whole. One may concede this point in the case of the characters in Hebbel and of Dorian Gray. We encounter such figures to a much greater, more fantastic degree, in Cervantes97: the idealism in Don Quixote’s tilting with windmills makes fun of the true-to-life, and seems ridiculous; but it lies consistently within the arena of blind chivalry that has been built for it. And even the complete unwillingness to see one’s true situation, which here takes on a mythical form, is still something essential to human life.

It was demonstrated above (Chaps. 22c, d) that the requirement to be true to life extends to all strata of literature, although it is peculiarly intense (303) in the middle strata. But how do things stand with reference to essential truth? It is clear that things are quite different here. As a requirement, essential truth is always tied in the first instance to a particular stratum, and only secondarily does it extend itself from that stratum to others. We do not mean by that that it must always be rooted in the rearmost stratum (that of the general ideas); that would be a mere tautology, for the requirement concerns the agreement with an idea. Rather the question is: in which of the middle strata does the determination by means of ideas assert itself directly and powerfully?

The answer can be given by reference to some very great examples. Take the first act of King Lear. Lear sets off the decisive conflict in the plot by asking how much his daughters love him. Here we have the key, not to Lear’s character, but to the entire situation through which the plot moves: not only Goneril and Regan, but Cordelia, too, express their love for Lear in the same unconditional way, the first two deceptively, the latter with exaggerated scrupulousness; thus Cordelia’s amazingly blunt answer. The play derives its inner necessity and its essential truth here. The true-to-life no doubt comes in a distant second; it appears in Lear more in the details, in the individual scenes.

But one thing is distinctly visible here: the essential truth is rooted unambiguously in a definite stratum – in Lear in that of the characters, in the character of a family, one may say. Only from there does the essential truth reach over to bestow form upon the situations and scenes on the one hand, and to give shape to destiny on the other. Shakespeare knew how to unite admirably all these things with the simplest true-to-life elements. In Lear, the entire essential content is presented in the situations, scenes, etc. With Hebbel’s characters, a similar main stratum is lacking that can carry the weight of all else.

Chapter 24: Truth in the Fine Arts

a) Criteria and standards

Apparently we must deal cautiously with essential truth. Presumably every literary work will contain some elements of it. But the true-to-life, and the touch of realism that it requires, cannot replace it, because the former moves in the opposite direction, drawing its elements from a decidedly idealistic realm. One asks oneself ever again: can there be an essentially truthful measure of life that is nonetheless unattached to life?

Put so bluntly, of course, there cannot. Yet to the contrary, the examples mentioned above demonstrate clearly that, within certain limits, such a thing exists. And where it does, it is artistically evident. But one must not take this to extremes. For example, it is not true that the artist could put individual essential human characteristics through a sieve and, as it were, have each do a solo. (304)

The isolation of a few essential characteristics of the Marquis Posa takes place so close to the limits of what is convincing that he no longer seems to belong entirely to the stage. Pseudo-classical evil men, who are nothing more than their own wickedness, may be necessary in certain dramas. But if they are supposed to affect us as living men and to address dramatically the situations that their actions have produced, their wickedness must appear as humanly justified – by their having a certain essential nature, by the circumstances, or by some other specific motivation.

This has been achieved perfectly in more recent literature – not first by Dostoyevsky (one thinks of the figure of Smerdyakov [in The Brothers Karamazov]) but even earlier by the German classics; it applies even to Mephistopheles. And, looking back even further – perhaps to Corneille – we have the sense that it was not at all difficult to meet this requirement.

Why, however, is it not difficult? For this reason, that only the types that are entirely constructed seem untrue when they are put upon the stage just to achieve some end within a given conflict. It is sufficient for bringing them to life that they appear to be necessary by reference to some essential relation to the situation, that is, the requirement of essential truth is sufficient here. The more difficult requirement of being true-to-life does not necessarily have to be met.

But it is irritating when the two kinds of truth are separated in some obvious way in a literary work. If, however, the true-to-life is supposed to agree with essential truth, then it would have to be primarily in life itself; what is real should agree with the ideal essence that approaches its type. That it does not do that lies in the essence of the real as such. The higher we are on the great chain of being, so much more are the two kinds of truth separated, and only with much greater difficulty can an artistic construct come to its perfection. Recall the law: the higher the construct, the more imperfect it is on average. Height and perfection are inversely proportional.

Literature has to do with the highest construct, man. Factual truth and ideal essence cannot come together in a man and his life. For that reason, when he is taken as a subject of literature, the true-to-life and the essential truth are separated by a large gap. Thus it is easy to conclude that it is precisely there that a considerable part of the conflicts are rooted, out of which are constituted the chief material of epic, dramatic, and novelistic literature.

Since we are dealing here with the relation between two kinds of truth that only together constitute literary truth, we may locate literary untruth in all places where 1. one of the two founding truths is false; and 2. the relation of the two to each other is false. The latter, for example, is seen in the case where no essential truth “appears” in the true-to-life, or where the latter is not referred back to or founded upon the former.

The measure of the true-to-life is for that matter surely not life itself, but rather life as it is seen and (305) understood by the world of its contemporaries, especially by the writer, and as it is communicated through the specific form of the work – its genre. The first we have established above; for we can of course make measurements only upon what we see. The second point, however, requires a further demonstration.

The classification of the forms of literature exercises a selection of possible “materials” – and within any given material there is another selection of motifs and of details. We know that from the general analysis of form. Such selection is based upon content, largely; not all materials are appropriate for a novella, not all for a drama, etc.; and even where a material is appropriate, not everything about it will be appropriate.

At this point, the decisive role of the category of form takes another step forward; the same is true also for essential truth, and its analysis could be carried out independently. This implies that even the measure of essential truth does not lie without question within the ideal essential natures of things (in the sense of the phenomenologists), as they are in themselves, but rather as they are seen and understood – by an historical period or by the poet himself – and, additionally, as they are communicated by the specific type of the category of form in literature. There too the first matter is immediately comprehensible. The second means, however, that such categories of form as lyric poetry, the epic, the novel, etc. bear within themselves their specific selections of ideal essential relations, those, that is, that are appropriate to them. In this way the Ideal in Kriemhild’s Revenge [1924 film by Fritz Lang] would not belong in a novella, and that Shakespeare’s “Prince Hal” would not belong in a novel.

We might add to this one further remark: the genera of the forms of literature make up the gross outlines of a typology. In reality, it is a question of much more nuanced distinctions among forms, and, corresponding to that, a very differentiated selection of materials and selections within materials may be drawn. The French classicist drama was not compatible with many kinds of materials that the Shakespearean drama could access with relative ease, and upon which it could bestow form. The dramas of Lessing98, Schiller, Kleist⁹⁹, and Hebbel – they all had not only choices of material peculiar to them; they also made corresponding selections within the themes.

With that we come to the special typical types of form in literature, which no longer belong to our circle of questions (those of general aesthetics). It is enough if we establish here that each of these very special types – differentiated even by the individual literary figures – have their own inner laws, according to which their forms stand or fall. But that is only an extension of the question of the differentiations within the arts. We will have to catch up with these later.

b) The true-to-life in painting

The inquiry made in the last few chapters remained fixed upon literature, because in it the claim to truth is most easily understood. But such a limited survey remains of course one-sided. We must therefore now (306) supplement it. To do that, we must move over to the territories of the other arts. How do things stand with them in respect to the claim to truth?

The immanent artistic truth may be kept out of consideration here: that is only the inner unity of form, and, as such, does not generate any contrast with the remaining problems of form (Cf. Chap. 21). Artistic necessity already contains everything significant about it. But things are different with the transcendental claim to truth, as we encountered it in the poetic arts, and, in their cases, on both sides: on the side of the true-to-life and on the side of essential truth. But both are of direct concern only for sculpture and painting. In the non-representational arts a transcendental counterpart is lacking with which some kind of agreement might be discovered.

In an extended sense, no doubt, one can speak of a true-to-life quality in music and even in architecture, for both express psychic realities. Yet that is a cura posterior [of later concern]. The two remaining representational arts, that is, the “fine arts,” as they have been called, have a greater urgency for us. With them matters are again very varied, because the circle of their themes is diverse. Sculpture is almost entirely tied to the human figure; painting extends itself to everything visible that can be captured in the form of a picture. Painting, therefore, offers richer possibilities for the problem of the claim to truth.

What do we mean by true-to-life in painting? One may almost wish to believe that its meaning must be identical with the beauty of appearance in the painting. “Let the creative art breathe life.”100 Thus, the more clearly the painting offers life as such to our vision, that much higher must be its artistic value. Does that mean, however: the more true-to-life, that much more beautiful?

Yet this is not quite true. If the thesis were unlimited in its applications, then, in general, paintings that depict their material the more realistically would be artistically the more impressive and the more perfect. But that is by no means the case, at least not to that extent; styles in painting are all essentially limitations of realism. They rest upon a selection from among the seen and given: not everything is placed in the painting that the eye may at best take in; rather only those things that the artist appraises as worthy. We must recall here what was said above about there being a certain degree of selective seeing as form is bestowed (Chap. 16c).

But so much is clear: all selection and all omission is, it must be granted, a kind of subtraction from the true-to-life. Much is in fact excluded from the reproduction and declared to be inessential. And yet the result need not appear to us as stunted – just because other details can thereby not only be brought forward, but can also be made to stand out more boldly.

The one replaces the other: the preferred element for that which had been excluded by the selection. But what gives the artist the right to such a rearrangement? How does he dare to change the place of accents (307) so willfully? Or is it not arbitrary? Might there be even here lawfulness and inner necessity?

Let us take a concrete case. Two artists are painting the same scene at the same time and from the same physical standpoint. A third artist passes from one to the other, making comparisons, and notes as the work continues that the two are painting different things. With the one, the shadows, the perspective, the ground configuration stand out. With the others, the dominant role belongs to colors, light, the brightness of the greenery and the fields, and the distant blue of the sky.

Who would maintain that one is “really” a picture of this scene, but the other is not? That would be possible only if the artist was a skilled painter but the other a rank amateur. But this was not considered here. Let us assume that both were “well” painted, and each convincing in its own way. But then we must seek a different answer to our question. What shall it be? Apparently, there must be a principle of selection that is sufficiently objective to lay claim to validity, and to justify the differing ways of seeing. Only then will the cuts in what is given not seem to be untrue to life and arbitrary.

Compare this with a much richer and well-known case: the portrait of the same man painted by different artists. There are many of this kind; they exist even today, and in each case, the extremely striking phenomenon of divergence is prominent: a divergence in the conception of the human, but also divergence in the painterly means and the selection of details (for example in the way contours are elaborated or veiled).

Nothing is more instructive than the extraordinary diversity of the ways of seeing, and the ways of accentuating what is essential. A portrait is a work of art with many strata, and upon every stratum, we see reference to this diversity. Here also one cannot easily maintain of the two portraits – even where the artists have comparable skill in execution –: this is really the person, that is not he. Rather one sees quite clearly that the one picture emphasizes different essential qualities than the other, indeed, that even in the sensible foreground it focuses upon other aspects of what is visible. The other essential qualities, for their part, may touch the physical details, the animation of the expression, or the play of color and light, the organization of space, etc.

But here, as with the landscape, there must be something that determines the diversity of ways of seeing the selections and omissions, etc. What is this determining element? It cannot lie in the sujet (the living person whose portrait it is) alone; also not in the artist alone, perhaps, that is, in his subjective attitude. If it were present in the first, then there could be only one justified way of painting; if in the second, the artist’s way of painting could not convince and sweep along any observer.

What determines the way of seeing must therefore lie in something else – in a third thing. And there can be no doubt what this third thing is: it must be an essential element that lies in the represented object itself, and the fidelity [308] of the representation of this element – in one or in several strata – must have the character of an essential truth.

We may, accordingly, limit the range of artistic freedom to the selection of the essential element. For none of them can be created at will. But since there are many such elements in the painted subject, he may choose. But once he chooses he must be faithful to the essential element he chose, and then select from the true-to-life only that which is relevant to it.

c) Essential truth in painting

The results of our inquiry up to this point are at any rate remarkable. No art is so close to the senses and is so sensual as is painting, none is so oriented to the imitation of the visible, everything in it depends upon the way of seeing and the kind of letting-be-seen; thus no art ought to be attached so unconditionally to the true-to-life as it is. Nevertheless, we have seen that in painting, standpoints govern selection and the determination of form. These standpoints have not been taken directly from life, but are derived from an act of essential intuition [Wesensschau]. These acts transcend the empirical, and they select, according to the judgment of the artist, in a generally free manner. Are these two compatible? How does it stand affirmatively with the relation of the true-to-life and the essential truth?

If the standpoints, from which selection is made and which determine form, are taken from the intuition of essences, the question naturally arises about the nature of this intuition of essence. It may be answered in the following way. On the one hand, the intuition concerns the selection of contents in the sujet, i.e., in the character of the person, so to speak; on the other hand it concerns the formal selection from what is visible – from those aspects of what is seen that appear “painterly essential.” To this latter are counted the choices of what in the landscape rivets our attention. As has been shown, neither the one nor the other is entirely necessary or entirely arbitrary.

The painter, just as the writer, can choose a collection of essential characteristics from which he makes further selections, but he can do that only from those that are really present in the object. He cannot freely invent and incorporate his inventions, for then he would produce something quite different from a portrait or a picture of a scene. So a person sketching in red ochre the face of his subject will choose those elements of the face that lend themselves only to outline, and choose only that play of light and shadow on the face that can be indicated with hatch-marks. Thus on the one hand the selection is made from what is purely visible, on the other hand from that which is given of the man: both occur within a range that has been determined by this selection. Only within this range – thus the range of the selected elements – can we have the true-to-life in the narrow sense.

That is important just because in painting even more than in literature the claim to be true-to-life requires a limitation. It needs one because the art of painting, right from the outset, is directed so entirely towards the “breath of life,” (309) thus apparently dependent on the most direct imitation possible. Wise selection first makes imitation possible, for otherwise all would be confounded in unlimited excess and the visual image would be flooded. This is a fact that only a person properly trained in painting can measure.

We must additionally make clear that we proceed in a similar manner in our everyday life in the simple act of visual perception. No one takes in absolutely everything that a physical face or a thing, or a scene, presents to one. Each of us takes in only what is practically important for him – all the more in the case of things and persons – and this importance is already determined by the essential standpoints that we bring to it. What interests us in men is their psychic life. Even facial characteristics are taken in only superficially. Otherwise, we would not know how to deal with them effectively, for our minds move along according to our habits entirely by abbreviating our perceptions, but those abbreviations are steered in a certain direction, and are entirely practical.

The painter produces something that corresponds to this by not painting everything he sees, but only a part of it. He selects also – but no longer from among essential standpoints of a practical sort, but among specifically painterly, artistic standpoints. That is what constitutes the limitation of the true-to-life and the necessary ingredients of essential truth in his creative work. Naturally, this work is not exhausted in the process of selection and omission, but is first realized in the positive accentuation, in the making salient, and in the occasional super-elevation of what has been selected.

The truth of this can be best seen in extreme cases, for example, in caricature, or also in a drawing that does not resort to caricature, but gives us by a few well-chosen lines entire interconnections of motion and scene. Caricature can make just one essential feature of a person appear as a “solo,” with very slight use of the means available to it. There is much about it that is not true to life; it exaggerates. But something in it is true-to-life even in all its exaggerations; it lies in that one essential feature, which had not just been called up arbitrarily, but was in fact found in the essence of the person – sought out there visually, as it were.

Here it is apparent how the true-to-life quality and the essential truth in “drawing” – and thus also in painting – are interpenetrated. For painting, it is not possible to be true-to-life, convincing, realistic, without establishing these upon an essential truth that selects and thereby also determines form. The most important thing, however, is that the activity of selecting and of determining form not be limited simply to the inner strata of the painting, but that it have an effect precisely upon the outer strata – up to the foreground, in which the physical techniques of painting play a role. These latter techniques can be seen in brushwork, in etching, etc., where movement immediately appears in the genial manipulation of line. One can see it in Goya’s blotchy scenes thrown onto the paper, where behind the movement he chose as his theme, almost everything else disappears (contours, figures …). (310)

That such may seem convincing, where the chosen essential characteristics are those of the object, that is, taken from real life, is, as was already noted, the condition of its justification. Moreover, here we come upon the reverse relationship of the two elements of artistic truth: at this point, the true-to-life is the condition of essential truth.

This may seem strange, because it is precisely the true-to-life that is supposed to be selected here, and that selection was to be carried out from the perspective of the essential truth. Yet the two do not contradict each other at all, but instead together make up a clearly judicious relationship of their mutual dependency.

The true-to-life – even as a mere claim – is not replaced in painting by essential truth, even less than in literature. It is rather merely limited and directed along specific avenues, which then function to determine form and style; essential truth, for its part, is not drawn from fantasy, but from the essential constituents of the object to be represented. Indeed, to the contrary, the measure of its essential truth is taken from these essential constituents. And that suggests immediately that the measure has a counterpart in the real world, and is thereby a matter of the true-to-life. We have here two opposed and independently varying essential elements. Obviously, both can function only together, not as isolated. There is nothing troubling in that.

When these essential standpoints are brought in arbitrarily, both the essential truth and the true-to-life quality of the picture break down, and from a style that determines form from within, an external and artificial fashion emerges, which causes the breakdown of appearance in the middle strata.

d) The claim to truth in sculpture

In concluding, we must add a word here about sculpture. It is easily predictable that we will find there that the true-to-life is so situated in it as in painting. However, that must still be shown, for the differences between these two fine arts are quite apparent. We must expect some deviations.

We must not forget that sculpture was once already quite developed in its capacities for grasping things in their essence and portraying them while painting was still laboring in its wretched infancy. One may think of the Old Egyptian portrait-heads and the contemporary decorations of walls and columns with conventional schematic figures, which, moreover, were worked up in the manner of a relief. What was the cause of sculpture’s head start?

The question takes on more weight when we consider what enormous progress painting has made in the intervening years – especially since the Greeks –how, in painting, one discovery leaped over the next, and only in the last five centuries have its great and most important developments come to pass, while the greatest achievements in sculpture did not extend very far beyond the creations of the Greeks in the fifth century BCE. What caused this relative stagnation? It is of course not a complete stagnation, but compared with the development of painting, it is remarkable. (311)

The answer must be: sculpture was the first to have discovered a fruitful essential standpoint for true-to-life representation, of a kind that was truly derived from the nature of its themes (objects), and yet left sufficient latitude to permit its creative development.

It is not at first a question of great ideas here, but rather of something quite simple: for a very general example, just the fruitful thought of representing a head or a human figure, purely from its most external features, i.e., the forms of its surface – leaving out everything that it might harbor within itself (life, strength, awareness) – while at the same time discovering that, within certain limits, this life within can “appear” on the simple spatial external form.

That sounds rather silly when, many centuries later, some pedant pronounces it soberly. However, what is silly or immediately obvious is no less fundamental and decisive as what is complicated. Without question, this was once the epoch-making idea behind the first stirrings of sculpture, which then took on immediately the form of an essential truth. It is not axiomatic in itself that an external appearance, grasped only spatially, could also be the adequate appearance of something inward. We can look upon the abstraction from color as a second element. Such abstraction is also not immediately obvious, and the ancients did not continuously value it. In any case, the idea asserted itself later, and, when it did, it accompanied the greatest developments of sculpture.

These are conceptual elements that nature does not itself thrust upon men; they must discover them themselves. Nonetheless, they are simple and close at hand if one compares them to what is foundational in painting. Painting begins precisely with the projection of what is seen in a thing upon a flat surface – a leap requiring a different kind of boldness. It implies the renunciation of the direct bestowal of spatial form, and replaces it by transposing it two-dimensionally –yet in such a way that depth reappears in it. This implies also the introduction of perspective; and so on with the “other” spatiality that appears in it, the apparent “light in the picture,” etc.

The basic idea of sculpture, in contrast to such bold essential elements, all of which work in the processes of selection and bestowing form, is in fact very simple: the basic idea is an essential truth that immediately has extremely drastic effects, because it excludes most objects as its theme, and in the end has almost nothing but the human body as its object. True, the sculpture of animals also has a long history (Egypt), and it has produced much of significance. However, in comparison to the sculpture of the human figure it did not play a leading role to the same degree. Moreover, we must recall that the latter represents in itself alone a region of great diversity.

This implies that even given all the differences between the two fine arts and given the clear superiority of painting, the fundamental condition of the true-to-life and the essential truth in them is nevertheless the same, and rests upon the same free choice of specific, limiting essential principles. These principles are simpler in the case of sculpture, however, and the process of selection is quite (312) different. Among the simpler essential truths of sculpture is that it is easier there to follow up the consequences of selection and bestowal of form. From this standpoint one can cast light on the entire history of sculpture: one will find many varying essential truths, but the foundational essential relationships remain the same. Under the spell of any of them, however, the orientation of the true-to-life takes its direction.

The degree to which one knows how to deal with motion even if only thematically, to say nothing of actually representing it, is extraordinarily diverse; and, according to that degree, the region is established into which the true-to-life is drawn. It is similar in dealing with and representing psychic content sculptu-rally, and entirely so with whole scenes. At the foundation of these phenomena lies limiting and form-determining essential truth. However, it varies.

It may also be established:

1. Truth in art is a making-visible (revealing) of essential relationships pertaining to human life, to the real life of man and to the merely “possible” (fictional).
2. It is carried by the artistic bestowal of form, which, for its part, forms a perspicuous structural whole in conformity with the nature of things and of life.
3. This whole must be visible not only in every strata of the work of art, but also be realized in the unity of the series of strata. Only in that way can the true-to-life and the essential truth be unified in the immanent truth of the inner unity of form.

Chapter 25: Truth in the Non-Representational Arts

a) Limits to the question of truth

Can one speak at all of “truth” in music and architecture? Or even of a claim to truth? Are they not both pure playing with form, in which nothing is represented that could be correct or incorrect? Is one a useless kind of playing, and another a useful one? From these questions, we take our present point of departure.

There is a sense of “truth” according to which we can in this context no longer raise meaningful “claims.” It is no longer said to be the case here of a “correspondence” to some real model. This fact constitutes a natural limit to the question of truth. However, it is primarily just a limit to the possibility of the true-to-life, not to the essential truth, or the latter only insofar as it limits the true-to-life in its process of selection.

But there is still another sense of truth. A city apartment house with many small apartments, narrow inner courts, a narrow and cheaply constructed staircase, may still have a façade like a palazzo and a correspondingly magnificent portico – such things seem to us to be untrue. The case is similar when the outer façades have been stylized with Gothic motifs, but the plan of (313) the inside rooms has nothing to do with them; or when a little tower is attached to a corner house that has no use for it, and the tower has nothing in common with the rest of the building. Why do all such things seem “untrue”? Because here something has pretensions to be what it is not in fact, and what the structure ought not to be: something far more powerful and lofty.

One may call these kinds of phenomena, of which our cities are full, straightforwardly “phony architecture.” But there is still the question whether this phenomenon can be generalized. Does music also contain phoniness of this kind? It cannot be of precisely the same kind, because music does not serve practical aims that it could, on the level of its external form, violate in a disharmonious manner. But, for this reason, there could still exist some inner discrepancy of a different kind: for example, when one sets a simple folk-song to music for a great orchestra and ends with a pompous finale, or when one sings it in the aesthetical style of the Italian bel canto. It is perhaps the same when one plays a piece for a solemn ceremony in a fast tempo that reduces its seriousness.

These examples are essentially lacking, in that the discrepancy appears between the composition and the performance. But there are also cases in which it appears from within the performance. The latter occurs in almost all performance by dilettantes, usually because what the performer can do and what he wants to happen do not correspond. But the former we find occurring in the compositions of talented imitators, in which much of the technique of construction of great masters is understood and imitated, but it is not filled with the corresponding psychic materials; or, also, when a genuinely original master with profound sensibility cannot find a means of construction that is adequate to his feelings, and helps himself along with a substitute. Such a happening is not as seldom as one should think.

What these examples have in common – those taken from architecture also –may be that the question of the genuine true-to-life does not occur in them. Their hold upon some existing state of affairs is lacking. But what then is in question when one still senses something untrue about these things, something that is not simply identical with the ugly or the disharmonious? Have we found here an absolute limit of “truth” in art, beyond which one can speak only in an analogous manner? Or is there an essential truth here that takes the place of the true-to-life?

The latter may not be impossible, although essential truth cannot mean the limiting of the true-to-life and setting it right; nor can it mean making a form of something alive or at all real in its ideal nature into a measure of what the artist is showing us. This is incorrect if only because the artist does not “show” anything but what is contained in the structure of his composition.

Given that, even essential truth would be left with just one inauthentic role –unless one draws it inward, and relates it to the artistic (314) form itself, to an “essence” of this inner form, which demands consistency, unity, and execution.

In fact, in the case of the representational arts, where the importance of the true-to-life was not lacking, we noticed a relationship between essential truth and specific forms of art, and, as it were, a relationship back from the latter, which itself had a decided influence upon selection. But at bottom, its effect upon selection is felt more by the essential truth itself, and the two could not therefore really be identical. Remember that the standpoint taken upon essence turned out to be relative to artistic form. From that fact, it becomes clear that here too we are not dealing with the essential truth in the work of art, but simply with the “immanent truth,” or, more correctly, a question about what corresponds here to the immanent truth, of which we are familiar upon the theoretical standpoint.

What in this context corresponds to immanent truth? We spoke of it sufficiently in Chapter 21: it is the inner necessity or the artistic unity of the constructed object. This may also be called its inherent lawfulness. There belongs to it the consistency of its execution, its unity, and its rigid consolidation as a structured whole. There is no possible doubt that this is a universal aesthetical demand – it is also evident that this immanent truth is especially dominant in the non-representational arts, for it stands there alone – without any foothold in requirements transcendent of itself. But can one for that reason call it a requirement of truth?

b) The untruth in deceptions of form and in indistinctness

One cannot call it such without further consideration any more than one can, from a theoretical standpoint, pretend that the mere inner “rightness” is truth. Nonetheless, there are two standpoints from which we can speak of truth, even in the case of the non-representational arts. The one lies in the realm of immanent agreement and unity, the other concerns the psychic content articulated in the inner strata of these arts. As such, this latter is not as such the work of art, but rather plays the role of some material, even when its expression remains indistinct. With reference to it, even the true-to-life is possible here.

As for the former standpoint, there exists in fact a deviation of the artist from a formal principle chosen by him earlier, which appears to the observer as “untruth,” or falsity; it is not an accident that the use of this expression has become current for designating it. The examples from architecture offered earlier shine a light on this phenomenon. For in those examples there really was a reference to a kind of feigning, or to a misleading of the observer.

But to be more accurate, one should not speak here of feigning [Vor-täuschung], but rather of feigning of form [Formtäuschung]. For the observer is deceived about the form itself, and indeed by means of form. The form of the whole is in fact not uniform in itself, and the external form placed over a building, a façade or a portico misleads us about the real inner form. That the (315) expression is rightly chosen is shown by the fact that the deception is seldom unconscious, and almost counts as fraud. Therefore, in this sense one may indeed speak of an inner “demand of truth” in the problematic of form in architecture. However, from that it does not follow that we can universalize this demand and extend it even to music.

For conditions in music are quite different. It is the only art that is free on both sides: it is tied neither to a purpose nor to a sujet (material). Architecture has at least the tie on the side of a practical purpose. However, in pure music, at least, form-bestowal hangs in the air as pure play. What could correspond in its case to “deception” on the level of form? In architecture, it served, obviously, to misguide people for the sake of some practical end. Can there be in good music a kind of “misguiding”?

Surely not one of the same kind as in architecture. But perhaps of a different kind? Or is it possible that a composer, seduced by the elevated feelings expressed by some great model, would attempt to make something of the same grandeur, and to that end, in certain passages, perhaps in the introduction, he likewise touches a sublime tone – perhaps in the theme and the first development – but then loses entirely the sense of this style, and falls into either sentimentality or, banality, or into virtuosity (the latter is found often in Liszt101).

Such a case is somewhat similar to the confusion caused by the banal apartment building with the façade of a palace! In the latter case, no higher kind of composition, neither of the space nor of the purpose behind it, stands behind the advertisement that first hits the eye, so in our musical example, no larger musical composition stands behind the pompous passages in the introduction. Music in the nineteenth century, especially the later period, contained a lot of compositional deception on the level of form. The newly developed harmonies allowed even less gifted spirits to produce on occasion music that was pretty and appealing; often it was based upon a sophisticated musical idea, but it lacked a more profound finish. By that, we mean it lacked genuine composition. An entire musical literature was built from once-beloved salon-pieces, and it ruined musical taste thoroughly for several decades.

That is musical untruth in one of its two senses: the first belongs on the list of immanent disharmonies and irregularities. The other sense concerns the psychic material that is stamped upon the inner strata of music and that appears there –the liveliness, the impulse, the rising and falling, the tension and resolution, the joyous flight, ecstasy and soft passing into silence.…

When it is in fact possible to capture these ineffable rhythms in the soul and to “let them appear” in the strains of music and in its sequences of tones, then it must also be possible to botch the process. That would mean that music would become untrue in its soul. Since the events and processes in the soul constitute the dimensions of real life, which alone can be expressed musically, one must therefore (316) conclude that we have to do here with the musically untrue-to-life.

If, however, there exists the musically untrue-to-life – in a sense comparable to that in the representational arts – then it would be logical that there is also the musically true-to-life. We would have to assume that there is a representational element that lies at the foundation of music: namely the representation of precisely these events and processes in the soul – those extending from simple excitement and relaxation to joyous flight and rapture. But then one can again doubt whether this assumption is justified. For even though a composition expresses such processes, and can make them very urgently, it is always questionable whether we can all this a kind of representation – in a sense comparable to the “material” of a piece of literature or of a painting.

There is a distinction here that refers to a dividing line that must be maintained in all circumstances. If one wishes the motions of the soul themselves to count as the “material” of music, one must still concede that music does not allow these motions to appear with the exactitude that are given to apperception.

In this case, the concept of “exactitude” [Bestimmtheit] is to be taken in a concrete sense: tender music with softly rising motifs can be understood as the expression of young love, but also as the expression of the dewy freshness of morning.… The precise content of shifting feelings is not to be heard. In this sense, music, even just as far as it really arouses and communicates the depths of the soul’s excitement, still floats upon an indistinct cloud. If the composer did not tell us in his title “what it is supposed to mean,” the music, for its part, will not tell us.

What it really tells us is something more general: just the dynamic aspects of the heart’s emotions, of the excitement, the fading away, the sweetness or the harshness, etc. It does not penetrate into more differentiated contents. Therefore, we must be cautious in accepting the assertion of theory that music “represents.” And so also one should not speak here of “representation.” One can bestow upon some stirring of feeling a dynamic expression without literally representing it.

c) Traces of the true-to-life in music

This does not prevent such giving of expression from being in fact correctly or incorrectly done; and that means only that it may seem to us, despite its inexactitude and generality, quite false to life. We can demonstrate this unambiguously by well-known examples from music. We must only not “force” these examples too much.

There are emotions of the soul that are too complicated to be made musically comprehensible without its thematic expression in words. The composer nonetheless attempts to express them musically – and the effect is that (317) the expression becomes untrue. Here the limits of exactitude in musical expression have been passed. That is always the case when the composer, “writes alongside” it what it is supposed to “be” by means of a title The listener, who hears the music and only afterwards reads the title, says, “Aha!”, and means thereby that the music, in any case, had not told him that.

There is also a more serious case in which the listener can hear distinctly in the music sounds resembling a certain emotion of the soul, but who is then disappointed, because the emotion is not continued and is not intended. One finds such things in large compositions, in symphonic music and chamber music, where the introduction promises greater development and intensification, but the promise is not kept by the development (Dvořák102).

One can of course say that this breach is more concerned with the inner unity and necessity of a piece. However, there is also in fact its inadequacy with respect to the felt emotions of the soul. This of course can never be demonstrated with any certainty, but one is not deceived; one can hear it aesthetically within the music. Otherwise, it would not be possible that in highly pretentious passages we could have the impression of emptiness or of deceit. That is a phenomenon that cannot be further analyzed, and we are forced to rely only upon our artistic sensibility.

Whoever has the capacity to make nuanced distinctions will be able to hear such untruth in the music. No doubt, music grasps in a unique way the activity of the ineffable human soul, turns it to the senses, and offers it to the sensibility we have in common with others, but it does this only through the mastery of the highest techniques of compositional structure. And that demands much.

We may characterize the nature of classical music (from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries) by its inclusion of relatively modest emotional expression in a rich compositional form, and by the imbalance of the formal over the emotional. Later this tendency toward imbalance turned in the other direction: the rich flowering of compositional form contracted, and the psychic elements that were to have been written to this form grew disproportionably large. The result was to overload musical form.

Such developments progress towards merely placing expressive tonal ideas alongside of each other: single harmonic series dominate; one looks for new kinds of harmonic structures, and thinks that in them alone one has already squeezed out and expressed the essential in music. That might be so if the emotions, in their nature, were incapable of reducing their response to music to a single striking moment instead of extending themselves in time, that is, running through musically an entire development. For that reason, structurally tight compositions are such superior expressions of what pertains to the soul.

From this perspective, one can obtain a deeper look into the essence of pure music. Here is the reason why pieces that are overburdened with feeling but relatively simple in their construction are not only of dubious quality but seem, in a direct manner, quite untrue. One who is musically adept hears the untruth in the music: the piece should, above all, affect us in a certain way – it is intended to be celebratory, uplifting, or devotional – and it is merely pressed into that service by certain external effects. Yet it cannot succeed (318) because the deeper regions of the soul’s emotions, which were to be feigned, are entirely lacking in it.

That is a familiar phenomenon, and one found not only in third-class compositions. It has nothing to do with lighter, superficial music; it would be very unjust to confuse these latter sensitive and nuanced works with the former. “Light music” does not pretend to any profundity of feeling; it does not wish to be anything but what it is, a comforting and harmless play.

We see from this clearly that we are dealing with a genuine trace of the true-to-life in pure music. No doubt it is considerably paler than in the representational arts; moreover, this element of the true-to-life stands close to the frontier of “immanent truth” – more correctly, on the borderline of what we call the unity and inner necessity of a work of music. For that reason it is so hard for aesthetical theory to make it stand out clearly. For we can depend even here only upon aesthetical pleasure and displeasure, and never upon some assignable criterion.

In this respect, it is easier in the case of architecture; there we have a counterpart given in the practical purpose it serves (which can also be an ideal purpose). For since the first thing that the master architect composes is the purpose of the composition, and everything else reflects back upon that, there results freely a condition of true-to-life or falsity, depending on whether the composition of the rooms and the dynamic composition conform to the compositional purpose, or instead turn to additions, ornaments, or deceptions of form that are not organically related to it.

One must not in any case forget that architecture has deeper inner strata, and in that regard, it corresponds to those in music. In addition, there are high intellectual contents, which, due to their intangibility, force their way to the foreground and attempt to enter the realm of appearance.

For that reason we find in architecture still another form of the true-to-life in addition to that which relates to the practical purpose of a building. It can hit the mark or fail to do so. And with this true-to-life quality there is again tied an essential truth of a peculiar nature, for in the psychic background of architectonic composition there usually stand high essential ideals, which in their turn function just as much in selection as in determining form affirmatively. Everything else that can be developed here is almost a mere repetition of what was said earlier. In this respect, architecture and music differ only in degrees from literature.

d) The situation in program music

It is easy to understand that the situation in program music is again different from that in pure music. Here we again have themes with a definite content whose nature is external to music. With that, all inexactitude and relative generality are excluded. True, they are no longer musical themes; music itself cannot (319) represent them either, but only frame them; it expresses precisely in all thematic materials only the accompanying psychic dynamics – and everything that it might wish to represent beyond these dynamics would be condemned to untruth.

Here we are given great latitude for the true-to-life and for the essentially true, and for their opposites: in the Lied, in choral works, in the opera, in oratorio and in all other art forms that combine words and poetry with music.

One can set to music, for example, some lyric poem – and do it “beautifully” or in a highly interesting way – and yet one may fail to capture the character of the poem. That is not a rare occurrence. One can fail to capture it according to the tastes of a certain epoch, while another epoch will sing its praises. This relativity of hitting and missing the mark corresponds very well to the “inexactitude” of all musical interpretation of same given objective material; one can even set to music the same poem in quite different ways. For that reason, none of the musical settings need be off the mark. Yet one of the other may seem to have failed given certain temporally conditioned essential standpoints.

From this, we may extract two points

1. Where an “essential element” is brought in as a necessary condition of true and false, we have the starting-point for essential truth in music written to a text.
2. Where a difference between true and apparent success and failure of the text through the music can be demonstrated, then if differences in the spirit of the times govern here – even under essential standpoints – then our sense of “truth” with respect to it is itself relative.

These two suggest themselves in this context and are easy to survey, and therefore we will not at this point follow up their implications. What is important in them for our problem is only the fundamental presupposition, i.e., that it is a question of truth and untruth at all when a text hits or misses a mark because of the music, for this is not immediately apparent. Such things could of course also be cases just of “good” and “bad” musical settings, or of successful and unsuccessful ones – in short, of grades and degrees of artistic quality.

Then we meet again what we learned above: that there is a peculiar strong convergence in the representational arts of the true-to-life and artistic quality. One might think that the fundamental presupposition presented here is a verification of a certain congruence of the two. However, that is not so. One concedes too easily such identifications because the inexactitude of musical expression gives it support. What is the situation in reality?

One must first become clear how much or little of a poetic text can in fact be expressed musically. That was formulated unambiguously above (Chap. 14d): only the psychic dynamics as such are expressible, thus excitement or rest; what cannot be expressed is (320) everything that concerns the “about what” and the “by means of what” of the excitement and the rest. That holds without exception and limitation.

However, this condition is liable to produce the greatest illusions. The composer, like the performers (especially the opera singers and their directors) attempt involuntarily to put more into music than it is able to bear.

In that way, something untrue enters music – essential untruth, because the essence of music, of song, of the accompaniment and the framing of feelings is injured. Indirectly, so is the untrue-to-life also. For music brings to the text what the text, of itself, cannot have – deep immediacy in its expression of feeling. There are texts that do not take to such expression, for they say things of relative indifference, and cannot make use at all of such expression of feeling.

That is true e.g., of numberless passages in operas, in which the action requires some merely indifferent words, whereas the principle behind opera requires musical adornment. The effect is notoriously untruthful, and in fact more untrue to life, such as the stage can hardly tolerate. Almost all of our operas suffer from this, even the oratorios (recitative). The cleverest efforts to gloss over this difficulty (Wagner, Strauss103) change nothing.

We see that this is not a matter of a lack of skill on the part of individual composers, but of a fundamental inadequacy, the consequence of which is the ease with which essential untruths and the untrue-to-life appear. The specific errors of the composers and the performing musicians (the latter e.g., in realistic singing) are the first ones to appear and they make the situation as bad as it can get – so that for one finely prepared, the unbearable can occur. These inadequacies do not happen in instrumental music, because the inner inadequacy is eliminated that arises from two arts with very different inner necessities being grafted upon each other.

The fundamental inadequacy is and remains the following:

1. On both sides there is an excess that the “other” art cannot take on: on the side of literature, the specific content; on the side of music, the direct profound expression of the soul; the literary arts can have these only in modest amounts and only indirectly;
2. A real meeting of the arts is therefore possible only along a narrow pathway, that is, along the path where the soul itself is stirred in its living nature. There we find a harmonious concord between them. Naturally this is possible only when the composer has the needed empathy for what the poet has in fact created. Any deviation from this line results in untruth, both the essential untruth and the untrue-to-life.
3. This does not mean, however, that in a mixed piece, i.e., music written to a text, the two arts have no latitude over against each other. To the contrary, they bring to their presentations quite different sides of the composition: poetry brings an entire situation, characters, drama; the (321) music brings the tremor of emotion, the sense of overflow, of melting away, etc. Those things do not oppose each other ever, so long as the two, artfully joined, supplement each other at every instant. However, the lightest encroachment, regardless from what side, will result in the composition becoming untrue.

In these three theses lie the reasons why in great music it is relatively so easy to produce a successful Lied or a choral work that affects us with its wonderful harmonies (perhaps interspersed with solos, duets, and the like), but it is so difficult to produce an entirely faultless opera. It is especially hard there to keep to the “narrow pathway,” upon which these heterogeneous arts should meet, just because the musical expression of feeling must accompany the drama of the performance. Yet the shifts in the dramatic situations do not allow any longish passages for the development of the music, as would be necessary for making greater profundities accessible. As a result, the older opera resolved itself into “numbers”: recitative, duets, arias, etc., and did not attempt complete dramatizations. Modern opera has not found, up to now, an equivalent compromise. (322)