But if the relation between desire and action be the ultimate reason for the distinction between art and history, and this distinction be the theoretical reflection of that real relation, the conception of art as representation of volitional facts, taken in their quite general and indeterminate nature, in which desire is as action and action as desire, reveals why art affirms itself as _representation of feeling,_ and why a work of art does not seem to possess and does not possess value, save from its _lyrical_ character and from the imprint of the artist's personality. The work of art that reasons or instructs as to things that have happened, and finds a substitute for intimate and lyrical connections in historical reasonings and connections, is justly and universally condemned as cold and ineffectual. We do not ask the artist for a philosophical system nor for a relation of facts (if all this is to be found in his work it is _per accidens),_ but for a dream of his own, for nothing but the expression of a world desired or abhorred, or partly desired and partly abhorred. If he make us live again in this dream the rapture of joy or the incubus of terror, in solemnity or in humility, in tragedy or in laughter, that suffices. Facts and concepts, and the question as to the metaphysical constitution of reality and how it has been developed in time, are all things that we shall ask of others. [Sidenote: _Identity of ingenuous reality and feeling._] It may seem that in this way the field of art has been much restricted and the ingenuous representation of the real excluded from it. But this ingenuous representation is just the representation of reality as dream. For reality is nothing (as we henceforth know) than becoming, possibility that passes into actuality, desire that becomes action, from which desire springs forth again unsatiated. The artist who represents it ingenuously, produces the lyric for this very reason. For him there is no necessity to reach it from without, as a new element: if he do this, he is a bad artist, and will be blamed as a hunter of emotions, emphatic, convulsive, wearisomely sentimental, forcedly jocose, an introducer of his own caprice into the coherence of the work, a confounder of his empirical with his artistic personality, which exists in the empirical individual, but is not equivalent to it. The feeling that the true artist portrays is that of things, _lacrymae rerum_; and by the identity of feeling and volition, of volition and reality already demonstrated in the Philosophy of the practical, things are themselves that feeling. The characteristic that Schelling and Schopenhauer noted in music, of reproducing, not indeed the ideas, but the ideal rhythm of the universe, and of objectifying the will itself, belongs equally to all the other forms of art, because it is the essence itself of Art, or of pure intuition. [Sidenote: _Artists and the will._]