But, once again, the importance of the suggested statements, even when they are true, in no way shows that they must be accepted as true by readers if they are to value them as works of art. Are sincere Roman Catholics who find Dante’s worldview congenial and Lucretius’s repellent committed to saying that Dante’s is the better poem? If so, they may be accused of confusing his moral and theological judgments with his aesthetic ones. Still, it should be noted that there are some critics who believe that if two works of literature are both equal in excellence on all counts yet one presents a true view of reality and the other fails to, the one presenting a true view is better—better even as a work of art—than is the other one.
There is, however, another way of talking about truth in literature that is not or is not as obviously connected to propositions. A characterization in a novel or drama is spoken of as being true to human nature, true to the way people actually speak or behave or feel. No matter that Becky Sharp—in the English novelist William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48)—is a fictional character, it would be said, as long as she is depicted as a person of a certain type would behave, she is being depicted truly; truth in fiction does not mean truth of the statements (for the statements in Thackeray’s novel describing her are false) but truth to human nature.
But what exactly does “truth to human nature” mean? The criterion is as old as Aristotle, who wrote that poetry is more true than history because it presents universal truths whereas history gives only particular truths and that poetry (dramatic fiction) shows how a person of this or that kind probably or necessarily would behave (or think, or feel). This criterion, however, is too vague as it stands: what is probable or plausible behaviour in one person is not in another, and what is probable in one set of circumstances is not so in another. The test of truth to human nature would be roughly as follows: Would a person such as has been described thus far (in the novel or drama) behave (or think or feel or be motivated) in the way that the author depicts this character as behaving in the circumstances described? It is often very difficult to decide this question, because knowledge of human beings is insufficient or because the dramatist has not provided enough clues. Still, once readers or critics are convinced that the character described would not have behaved as depicted by the novelist, they may criticize the characterization (at least with regard to this bit of behaviour or motivation) as implausible. If a character who has been described as spending years working toward a certain goal is represented by the novelist as abandoning it once it is within sight, the reader will have considerable reservations about this delineation unless the author has depicted the character as being unstable or masochistic or in some way as being the kind of person who might in these circumstances do this kind of thing. It is true that there are people in the world who abandon their goals within sight of them after years of labour, but the conviction must be implanted that the character already presented by the novelist belongs to this classification or the behaviour will seem reasonless and unmotivated.
Is truth to human nature aesthetically relevant? That is, when present does it make the work of literature better and when absent or flawed does it make the work worse as literature? Here again there would be some difference of opinion, but a very large number of critics and aestheticians, in the tradition of Aristotle, would say that it matters aesthetically a great deal. Novelists do not have to be true to geography or history or astronomy, but they must be, as the 19th-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne said of all literary artists, true to the human heart. A literary artist may tamper with all the other truths with impunity but not this one: the characters the artist creates must be convincing, and they will not be convincing if they are not depicted as having anger, love, jealousy, and other human emotions that real people have and in pretty much the contexts in which real people have them. If a novelist’s characters are not motivated in much the way that human beings are motivated, the reader will not even be able to understand them—they will be alien and unintelligible. Even when a writer—such as the British author Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) in The Wind in the Willows (1908)—depicts animals as central characters in novels, however much they may differ from human beings in external appearance, they must psychologically be presented as human beings—how else and in what other terms could their behaviour and their motivation be understood? Such, then, are the reasons for saying that whatever else literary artists do, their depictions must be truthful to human nature.
Can works of art other than literature possess truth to human nature? It would seem that in a limited degree they can. Motion pictures and operas and other mixed arts clearly can, but they employ words, and literature is a principal ingredient in them. But what of arts that employ no words at all? Painting and sculpture, not being temporal arts, cannot depict action, and action is all-important in the representation of human character. These arts, as noted earlier, contain depictions of persons (real or imaginary) only on a knife-edge of time. Still, sometimes something may be inferred even from a knife-edge. The late self-portraits of the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt do seem to reveal an agonized yet sometimes serene inner spirit, suggesting that there are flashes of human insight to be found in depictions of human beings in visual art. As for musical art (music without the accompaniment of words), it contains nothing that could be called depiction, not even depiction on a knife-edge of time, and, if this is so, there can be no such thing here as true depiction or false depiction. Music may be expressive of human feelings, in the sense already described, but this is a far cry from saying that it contains depictions that are true to human nature.
Even if truth to human nature in the depiction of character is aesthetically relevant (which many would question), to say this is still far from saying that it is the only criterion for excellence in works of art, or even that this is the principal thing that art gives or its main excuse for being. To go so far would be to discount colour and form and expressiveness as criteria for excellence in art, and this virtually no one is willing to do. It would seem, then, that in no case is truth (even truth to human nature) necessary in works of art, seeing that entire genres of art, such as music, exist without it and that, even when it is present and when its presence increases the merit of a work of art (which again many would deny), it is only one virtue among many. Thus, the view that the purpose or function of art is to provide truth is quite surely mistaken; perhaps the person who wants truth and is indifferent to the presence of anything else had better turn to science or philosophy rather than to the arts. Art as a means to moral improvement
To say that a work of art is aesthetically good or has aesthetic value is one thing. To say that it is morally good or has a capacity to influence people so as to make them morally better is another. Yet, though the two kinds of judgments differ from one another, they are not entirely unrelated. Three views on the relation of art to morality can be distinguished: Moralism
According to this view, the primary or exclusive function of art is as a handmaiden to morality—which means, usually, whatever system of morality is adhered to by the theorist in question. Art that does not promote moral influence of the desired kind is viewed by the moralist with suspicion and sometimes with grudging tolerance of its existence. For art implants in people unorthodox ideas; it breaks the molds of provincialism in which people have been brought up; it disturbs and disquiets, since it tends to emphasize individuality rather than conformity; and works of art are often created out of rebellion or disenchantment with the established order. Thus, art may undermine beliefs and attitudes on which, it is thought, the welfare of society rests and so may be viewed with suspicion by the guardians of custom. When art does not affect people morally one way or the other (for example, much nonrepresentational painting), it is considered a harmless pleasure that can be tolerated if it does not take up too much of the viewer’s time. But when it promotes questioning and defies established attitudes, it is viewed by the moralist as insidious and subversive. It is viewed with approval only if it promotes or reinforces the moral beliefs and attitudes adhered to by the moralist.