Dante's descriptions of the Inferno and of the conversations between
him and its inhabitants without believing them to be reports of fact.
No one values the _Blue Bird_ the less because it is not an account
of an actual occurrence. Even with regard to the realistic novel and
drama, no one thinks of holding them to the standards of historical
or scientific accuracy. And, although we may demand of a landscape
painting plausibility of color and line, we certainly do not require
that it be a representation of any identifiable scene.

If by truth, therefore, be meant a description or image of matters of
fact, then surely it is not the purpose of art to give us this truth.
The artist, to be sure, may give this, as when the landscapist paints
some locality dear to his client or the portraitist paints the client
himself; but he does not need to do this, and the aesthetic value of
his work is independent of it; for the picture possesses its beauty
even when we know nothing of its model. In the language of current
philosophy, truth in the sense of the correspondence of a portrayal
to an object external to the portrayal, is not "artistic truth."

The partisans of the intellectualistic theory would, of course, deny
that they ever meant truth with this meaning. "We mean by truth," they
would say, "an embodiment in sensuous or imaginative form of some
universal principle of nature and life. The image may be entirely
fictitious or fanciful, but so long as the principle is illustrated,
essential truth, and that is beauty, is attained." But if this were
so, every work of art would be the statement of a universal truth, as
indeed philosophical adherents of this theory have always
maintained--witness Hegel. Yet what is the universal truth asserted
in one of Monet's pictures of a lily pond? There is, of course, an
observance of the general laws of color and space, but does the beauty