Note † — Chapter XXXIV · The Two Uses of Language

2. The most usual other sense is that of acceptability. The ‘Truth’ of Robinson Crusoe is the acceptability of the things we are told, their acceptability in the interests of the effects of the narrative, not their correspondence with any actual facts involving Alexander Selkirk or another. Similarly the falsity of happy endings to Lear or to Don Quixote, is their failure to be acceptable to those who have fully responded to the rest of the work. It is in this sense that ‘Truth’ is equivalent to ‘internal necessity’ or rightness. That is ‘true’ or ‘internally necessary’ which completes or accords with the rest of the experience, which co-operates to arouse our ordered response, whether the response of Beauty or another. “What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth”, said Keats, using this sense of ‘Truth’, though not without confusion. Sometimes it is held that whatever is redundant or otiose, whatever is not required, although not obstructive or disruptive, is also false. “Surplusage!” said Pater, “the artist will dread that, as the runner on his muscles†” himself perhaps in this instance sweating his sentence down too finely. But this is to make excessive demands upon the artist. It is to apply the axe of retrenchment in the wrong place. Superabundance is a common characteristic of great art, much less dangerous than the preciousness that too contrived an economy tends to produce. The essential point is whether what is unnecessary interferes or not with the rest of the response. If it does not, the whole thing is all the better probably for the extra solidity which it thereby gains.