The Decay of Truthing

All the best novels I have read have had one thing in common - they are true, even more true perhaps than what is commonly accepted as 'true history'. What do I mean by this? Not that they are fitting allegories for this world—better that this world is a fitting allegory for them. I mean that the feelings expressed or evoked in them are not particular to them, but our fundamental to my nature, having awaited only such a summons. After all, how do you really know what is history and what is fiction? You take what someone tells you and judge it by comparing it with what other people have told you, and (more importantly) with what your own heart tells you. And these stories resonate within my soul more deeply than many superficially factual histories have done.

From this I derive four doctrines of aesthetics:
1. Good art never focuses on itself, but expresses universal truths.
2. Bad art comes from abstracting art, and elevating it into an ideal.
3. Art imitates Life far more than Life imitates Art.
4. Truthing, the telling of beautiful true things, is the proper aim of Art.


Edit:
After I wrote this I found this quote by Thornton Wilder:

The response we make when we 'believe' a work of the imagination is that of saying: "This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play of novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it." It is this form of knowledge which Plato called 'recollection'. We have all murdered, in thought; and been murdered. We have all seen the ridiculous in estimable persons and in ourselves. We have all know terror as well as enchantment. Imaginative literature has nothing to say to those who to not recognize—who cannot be reminded—of such conditions.

And this by G.K. Chesterton, in Twelve Types:

'Jane Eyre' is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum.